The Story of the UK General Election is not Brexit, it's the Coming Breakup
of Britain
December 15, 2019
John Wight analyzes the now-shaken British national identity.
By John Wight
in Edinburgh, Scotland
Medium
To grasp the real meaning of the Dec. 12 U.K. general election result is to
understand the history of a state born in mercantilism and sustained by
centuries of empire and colonialism.
Allow me to explain.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give the U.K.
its Sunday name, is the epitome of an artificial state. It was and remains
the product of the grafting together of divergent cultures, histories and
national identities. At inception, this grafting together was undertaken not
in the interests of its peoples but in the interests of national elites
eager to take advantage of the commercial opportunities of a unified polity
with added manpower and resources in an age of empire.
The venality, greed and corruption of the Scottish ruling and political
class in the late 17th- early 18th century delivered the Scottish people
into the arms of the union with England without their support, establishing
thereby the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was reflected in the social
unrest and riots that ensued in Scottish towns and cities both during the
negotiations that brought into being the 1707 Act of Union, and upon its
passage.
For the ruling elites of both Scotland and England the union of both
parliaments into one had demonstrable commercial and strategic benefits. The
former had been left bankrupt after Scotland's failed attempt at
establishing its own overseas colony in Darien (modern day Panama in Central
America) in the late 17th century. In order to forestall national
immiseration the need to gain access to England's overseas colonies was
thereafter considered essential.
Meanwhile the English were eager to prevent the possibility of Scotland
being used as a staging ground for an invasion from the north by the French
in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession that raged between 1701
and 1714.
Wales, the third nation that makes up the U.K., had already been merged with
England in 1536. Ireland on the other hand was a subjugated English
(latterly British) colony, and was officially brought into the orbit of what
would then be known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in
1801.
In 1922, after a prolonged national liberation struggle in Ireland, the 26
counties that make up today's Republic of Ireland achieved dominion status
before winning full independence in 1948, while the remaining six counties
that make up the rest of the island of Ireland were partitioned to become
what is now Northern Ireland: hence the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland of today.
This necessary historical detour out of the way, here is where things start
to bear relevance to Brexit.
Leave supporter near the Houses of Parliament, London, Jan. 29,
2019.(ChiralJon/Fllickr)
An unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution, one that allowed
Britain to go on and establish an empire which, at its height, covered a
quarter of the globe, was the forging of a united working class whose unity
was able to transcend national, cultural and regional differences. This
working-class unity mirrored the unity of the U.K.'s ruling elites around
the various semi-feudal institutions that underpin the British state -
namely the monarchy, House of Lords, and a network of private schools that
have reared and churned out succeeding generations of the country's ruling
class.
British working-class unity, meanwhile, was the product of the country's
heavy industries - coal mining, steel, shipbuilding, etc. - and was
expressed in common economic interests and struggles against a common enemy,
the bosses and owners of those industries, in the context of the trade union
movement. It also began to manifest politically with the formation of the
Labour Party at the start of the 20th century.
National Identity Nourished by Wars
In tandem, forged over time, was a British national identity that was
nourished by the countless wars the state's ruling elite unleashed and waged
over the centuries of an empire that existed not to spread civilization and
modernity to the "dark peoples" of the planet, as its proponents and
apologists have always claimed, but as a juggernaut of exploitation,
subjugation and oppression.
In those countless colonial wars working class men were used as cannon
fodder in a dynamic that has continued to the present day.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher began the destruction of this material base
of working-class unity across the U.K. in the 1980s. Her free-market
revolution and its de-industrialization of the nation's economy turned
Britain into what it is today - a service economy underpinned by
financialized capital.
Today, now, in consequence, the country's trade union movement, which once
wielded considerable economic and political clout, is but a shadow of its
former self. The Labour Party, meanwhile, struggled even under Jeremy
Corbyn's leadership to make a full return to the party's founding principles
after Prime Minister Tony Blair and his centrist crew in the 1990s and on
into the first decade of the noughties had gutted them in favor of an
embrace with the City of London and big business.
Scottish independence rally, May 5, 2018. (Azerifactory via Wikimedia
Commons)
The remnants of this Blairite crew within Labour bear much responsibility
for the party's disastrous showing in the election, having acted as an
anti-Corbyn fifth column, determined in alignment with the country's Tory
ruling media, political, and security establishment to prevent Corbyn
entering Downing Street at all cost.
In so doing, they have only succeeded in ensuring that the breakup of the
U.K. is now well-nigh inevitable, what with the SNP receiving a thumping
mandate in Scotland and nationalism in the North of Ireland now a majority
political current over unionism. In poetic irony, it was only Corbyn's
socialist program, offering economic and social transformation, massive
investment in the de-industrialized Brexit regions of South Wales and the
North and Midlands of England, as well as Scotland, that provided any hope
of repairing the regional, national and cultural fault lines that correspond
to the breakdown of the 2016 EU referendum vote.
The post-industrial North and Midlands of England, parts of the country
virtually untouched by investment and left without hope after being
decimated by Thatcher, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016 in a
veritable scream from the bowels of austerity Britain. Every one of
Scotland's 32 local authorities, meanwhile, voted to Remain.
Both did so again in the 2019 general election, with Corbyn's message of
social and economic justice failing to penetrate the fog of emotion, rooted
not in class but national and cultural identity, surrounding the
Brexit-Remain divide.
The result of the election, which Corbyn fought in the teeth of an
unprecedented assault by the British ruling establishment, confirms that
what was once the United Kingdom is now the dis-United Kingdom, with those
previously mentioned national and regional differences informing its
peoples' identities and worldview over the identity of class to an extent
previously unseen.
Karl Marx reminds us that: "To call upon people to give up their illusions
about their condition, is to call upon them to give up a condition that
requires illusions."
The illusion that Brexit is actually relevant to the needs of those who've
seen their lives devoured by the beast of neoliberalism and bludgeoned by
austerity must soon give way to the unvarnished truth that the UK as we know
it is past its sell-by date.
"A reactionary," the great postwar Labour left icon Nye Bevan once said, "is
a man walking backwards with his face to the future." Surveying a political
class presently engaged in ripping itself apart over Brexit, who could argue
otherwise?
John Wight is an independent journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
This article was first published on Medium.
