We’re often told that Brexit has transformed Britain from a pragmatic country to one where ideologues rule the roost. At first glance, this narrative seems to have substance. The governments of both Tony Blair and David Cameron prided themselves on being guided by “what works” rather than “ideological zeal”. In contrast, the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, has spoken of delivering Brexit “come what may”. Yet a closer look suggests this narrative is flawed. Key policies of the Blair-Cameron era – the Iraq War, austerity, and changes to immigration – were based less on practical considerations and more on abstract ideals. This excess of ideology helped drive a wedge between political elites and the British public, contributing to the populist revolt and paralysis we’ve seen in Britain over the last few years.
The Iraq War
Britain invaded Iraq in March 2003 as part of a US-led international coalition. The government’s decision to go to war was shaped by geostrategic factors such as oil and maintaining a ‘special relationship’ with America, but prime minister Blair’s Manichean worldview also played a role.
Blair expressed this Manichean worldview in his 1999 ‘Chicago Speech’. In it, the prime minister paraphrased Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, arguing that communism’s defeat in the Cold War showed that the “massive ideological battleground” of the past was “over” and that spreading liberal democracy was in humanity’s best interest. Blair further commented that, in the post-Cold War environment, this universal ideal was being blocked by “dangerous and ruthless men”, by the likes of “Saddam Hussein”, the Iraqi leader. In Blair’s logic, then, if these ‘bad guys’ were removed, good would inevitably follow.
A meeting Blair held with a group of Middle East experts in November 2002 shows that this logic informed Britain’s invasion of Iraq. These academics had come to Downing Street to discuss the consequences of removing Saddam from power. They issued a stark warning: Iraqi society was fraught with national and religious divisions and toppling Saddam risked precipitating violence. The essence of Blair’s response was that “Saddam is evil”, indicating that in his mind, eliminating the Iraqi leader could only have beneficial results.
Blair’s Manichean outlook influenced his behaviour at the domestic level too. It disposed him to believe that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), even though UK intelligence reports on this were far from conclusive. In turn, this belief led Blair to make the case for war by stressing Saddam’s threat to British security. Notoriously, the prime minister told us that Iraq’s WMD could be deployed within 45 minutes, a message that helped the government win parliamentary approval for military action.
Blair should have been guided more by the realities of Iraq and less by his moral convictions. While the war brought Saddam’s end, it didn’t prompt a shift to liberal democracy. Instead, Iraq descended into a Hobbesian nightmare where sectarian violence was the main organising principle. At least half a million Iraqis lost their lives and so far over $200 billion has been spent on reconstructing the country. It turned out, moreover, that Iraq didn’t possess WMD.
This foreign policy disaster had a profound impact on British politics. Iraq’s devastation and the fact that there was no WMD led many people to doubt the competence and motives of political elites. According to one poll, the Iraq War resulted in 60% of Britons losing trust in ministers and 65% losing trust in parliamentarians. The less trust we have in our political leaders the less likely we are to defer to their judgement. We saw this in the Brexit vote; while elites overwhelmingly favoured remaining in the EU, the majority of Britons backed leave. By basing his Iraq policy on moral convictions rather than actual circumstances, Blair contributed to this divide between elites and the people.
Austerity
The central policy during Cameron’s time as prime minister was austerity. This was launched in 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and it involved deep cuts to public spending. The official goal of this policy was to eliminate the budget deficit, which ballooned following the 2008 financial crash. George Osborne, then chancellor of the exchequer, said this was necessary for two reasons: one, to stimulate economic growth after the 2008-2009 recession; and two, to avoid a sovereign default. Neither of these reasons bear scrutiny.
As various economists have shown, high levels of public debt can act as a drag on economic growth. Businesses, for instance, often perceive large deficits as harbingers of higher taxes and interest rates, which can discourage them from expanding. A programme of deficit reduction may therefore be a sensible course of action for policymakers to take.
Yet the manner in which the British government sought to shrink its deficit suggests that stimulating economic growth wasn’t its guiding principle. The sheer scale and pace of its cuts – which have seen public spending decline from 44.44 percent of GDP in 2011 to 38.51 percent in 2019 – could only suppress demand and keep the UK in the economic doldrums. Britain’s recovery from the recession has been painfully slow by historic standards and, according to some analysts, British households would have been up to £13,000 better off if Osborne hadn’t wielded his axe.
High levels of public debt can also lead some countries to default. Specifically, they can bring about a situation where governments cannot refinance their existing debt because markets will no longer lend to them. Countries without their own central bank are certainly vulnerable in this respect, as they lack their own ‘lender of last resort’. This was the case with Greece and Spain when the eurozone debt crisis hit in 2010. They had to look to the European Central Bank to play this ‘last resort’ role, which it did in 2012, but only after a period of intense uncertainty in which sovereign defaults looked likely. In the UK, the Bank of England can be relied upon to buy “any debt the government cannot refinance through markets”. Osborne was therefore wrong to say that, without austerity, Britain risked becoming “like Greece”.
But if austerity wasn’t about economic growth and sovereign default, what was it about? Some say class war is the answer. In this view, austerity was designed to spread economic insecurity, making workers kowtowed and willing to accept whatever bosses have to offer. There may be some truth to this, as average real wages remain lower than they were before the financial crash, while profits have risen. The £30 billion of welfare cuts since 2010 also fits this explanation, as less redistribution means more money to the well-off. Yet, it seems too crude to say that austerity was simply about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. This approach disregards the role of ideas and, in particular, neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is a label we often give to a certain set of policies – market deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts, and welfare retrenchment. But as the sociologist Stephanie Mudge points out, neoliberalism is best understood as a moral project: its adherents want to scale back the state because they see the market as the fount of human freedom. The welfare state is a particular bugbear from this point of view as it is considered doubly oppressive: it takes people out of the market and makes them dependent on public largess; and through taxation, it forces those who remain in the market to be responsible for those taken out of it.
This ideological standpoint was a potent source of inspiration for the British government’s austerity agenda. Leading ministers at the time said that deep cuts to public welfare will give its recipients a “pathway to work … and independence” and will give taxpayers more choice over “how to spend their money”. That the government attempted to portray austerity as a matter of expediency rather than morality shows that it didn’t think its approach to freedom would be a vote winner. That it pursued this policy nonetheless shows the strength of its neoliberal conviction – its belief that it knew what was best for the British people.
The great Max Weber remarked that ideologues tend to presuppose our “goodness and perfection” and deny our “average deficiencies”. Austerity may have expanded freedom in the sense of lowering taxes, but overall, it made people’s lives more constrained, as shown by the rise of in-work poverty, household debt, the use of foodbanks, and homelessness.
Politically, austerity has fed the view that the ruling elite either doesn’t care about ordinary people or is intent on destroying the “whole fabric of society”. It helped foster a deep sense of alienation from mainstream politics among large sections of the British public, which in turn contributed to a diffuse anti-establishment sentiment and a yearning for change. In the early 2010s, UKIP became aware of this growing popular disaffection with political elites and, with some considerable success, worked to channel it in a hardline Eurosceptic direction. In other words, the Cameron governments’ idealised view of markets fed into the Brexit revolt and the ensuing parliamentary deadlock.
Changes to Immigration
Immigration is another policy area that has been subject to a surfeit of ideology. Up until 1997, the cross-party consensus in the UK was that immigration had to be carefully controlled to ensure “successful integration”. This changed when Blair became prime minister. A more liberal regime was established that saw annual net migration rise from an average of 40,000 people between 1990-1996, to an average of 214,000 people between 1997-2010. This fivefold increase transformed Britain, says the political scientist Erica Consterdine, “forging it into a truly multicultural state”. Since 2010, annual net migration has continued to be high by historic standards.
A key reason for this dramatic rise in immigration was Blair’s decision to immediately open Britain’s labour market to the ten eastern and southern European countries that joined the EU in 2004. Most other existing EU member states did not do this; Germany, for example, only opened its market to workers from eastern and southern Europe in 2011. The British government estimated that, at most, 13,000 people annually would come to the UK from these countries. By 2008 the number of arrivals stood at one million, close to twenty-times the government’s original calculation. As Consterdine comments, this decision more than any other turned Britain into a “migration state”, a country with consistently high inflows of people.
It wasn’t in response to public sentiment that Blair’s governments made these changes to immigration. His Labour party didn’t even seek a democratic mandate for the liberalisation it carried out. Yet if the impetus for a more open immigration policy didn’t come from the electorate, where did it come from?
The credo of the Labour party at this time was the so-called ‘third-way’. This says that the modern world is defined by globalisation as a process of economic and cultural integration and this process is both inevitable and intrinsically positive. More tangibly, this means that labour markets should be open and flexible to boost competitiveness and prosperity, and “custom and practice” should give way to flux and diversity. With the third-way as their lodestar, it follows that Blair’s governments saw “immigration as an inherently good thing”. That’s why they proceeded to liberalise Britain’s immigration policy.
This worldview, however, didn’t map on to reality. While Blair wanted Britons to be “prepared constantly to change”, many people remained committed to parochial attachments. The nation, for instance, continued to be a powerful source of identity at this time, especially among the elderly, those without a degree, and the working classes. These groups tended to say they were “fiercely proud” of their national identity.
The nation was not only widely valued during the Blair era, it was also considered by a majority of Britons (59 percent) as having both civic and ethnic elements. That is to say, national membership was seen as being determined partly by citizenship and partly by ancestry, culture and language. This is important: the more national ‘insiders’ see the border between themselves and ‘outsiders’ in ethnic terms, the more difficult it is for that border to be traversed. Put differently, when perceived in ethnic terms, the nation will be valued by its members as a relatively homogenous, exclusive and stable community. And anything that disrupts this is likely to be viewed negatively.
Given these realities, it seems almost inevitable that many British people would experience mass immigration as a threat to their national community. And they did, as shown by the growth in negative attitudes towards immigration during this period. Before Blair took office, 39 percent of the populace wanted large reductions in immigration. By 2013, this figure had risen to 56 percent. In 2002, 33 percent of the public thought immigration was undermining British culture. By 2011, 48 percent of people thought this. In 2013, the proportion of Britons who regarded national membership as being based on civic and ethnic criteria had increased to 63 percent, implying a feedback loop whereby insecurity about mass immigration prompts a more exclusive national identity which in turn heightens fear of mass immigration.
And, of course, the political impact of these negative attitudes has been significant. As the political scientist Lauren McLaren has shown, consistently high levels of immigration helped open up a chasm between the political elite and ordinary citizens. At best, it fostered the view that Britain’s leaders were either unable or unwilling to protect the national community. At worse, it has led many citizens to conclude that the ruling class is actively hostile to their national group. Unsurprisingly, this bred a considerable degree of popular contempt for mainstream politics and a desire for far-reaching change. Cameron may have arrested this development if he kept his 2010 general election promise to reduce annual net migration to the “tens of thousands”. But he didn’t – mainly due to EU rules on free movement of people – and so compounded the cultural insecurity, distrust of politics, and craving for more control that many people felt. As is well known, these factors were central to the Brexit vote. Yet, if Blair’s immigration policy had been less ideological and more attuned to public sentiment, it is likely that they wouldn’t have been so potent.
The Need for Pragmatism
The Brexit vote undoubtedly marked a turning point in British politics. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, this transition hasn’t been one in which pragmatists have lost out to ideologues. Many Brexiteers have indeed been dogmatic in their demand for Britain to have a clean break from the EU. But their predecessors during the Blair-Cameron era were often just as ideologically zealous, as shown by the Iraq War, austerity, and the liberalisation of immigration. The Brexit transition, then, is best understood as the decline of one set of ideologues and the rise of another.
The excess of ideology under Blair and Cameron has been highly damaging to British politics. By taking their cue from abstract formulas rather than real conditions and public sentiment, Britain’s rulers helped drive a wedge between themselves and many British people. This resulted in a popular backlash against mainstream politics, a cleavage reflected in the Brexit vote and parliament’s refusal to endorse any form of withdrawal from the EU. Boris Johnson’s emphatic victory in the recent general election has brought this paralysis to a close and Brexit will now happen. The key lesson of the Blair-Cameron era and the three and a half years that have elapsed since the Brexit vote is that British politics needs to be more pragmatic. Immediately after his election triumph, Johnson reached out to remainers and spoke of “healing” the country. This is a welcome sign, suggesting that his new administration would be less ideologically rigid. But it is early days and it remains to be seen whether or not the myth of pragmatism becomes a reality.