The Search for Truly New Directions
and the collapse of the UK government in the summer of 2022
The collapse of the British government in the summmer of 2022– with more than 50 resignations in the three days between 5th and 7th July – was spectacular. The more so considering that Boris Johnson had come to power with an 80 seat majority, and pulled voters from across the political divide on an unprecedented scale to do so.
The reason he was able to do that has to do with the 'P word': Populism. Populism not in the sense of playing to people's lesser impulses, but in the sense of ordinary people feeling that they should no longer be treated as irrelevant. Populism in the sense of people feeling that in the 21st century they should be having more input to what is happening, not less. That is what drove the 2016 vote to separate from the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, and it was what drove Johnson's landslide cross-party victory in 2019 – as well as numerous other events, in other places, over the same period.
Looked at that way, the sudden cataclysmic change of fortune might seem to indicate populism being on it's way out, and that the old-school centrist establishment will soon be back to ' business as usual'. But that is way too simplistic a narrative. It makes much more sense to see what happened as part of an ongoing shift that is going to deeply change politics and society forever. And to see it, in that sense, as another sign that we are involved in the biggest cultural shift in 500 years. Let's take a broader look:
2014 marked, apparently, the beginning of the end of two party politics: The elections for the European Parliament in that year saw parties other than the established duopoly win the biggest share of the vote in Britain (UKIP), Denmark (DPP), Spain (Podemos) and France (National Front). In Britain´s case it was the first time the country´s history that a party other than ´the big two´ had won the majority of the vote in any major election. Non-mainstream parties were also making their presence felt strongly in Germany, Italy, Holland and elsewhere. There were other signs too that change was afoot with regard to traditional two-party politics: New parties were everywhere emerging. The right and left, sometimes even far right and far left, were forming coalitions with each other, against bigger issues on which they both wanted to fight. In Greece they joined forces against the EU´s wish to dictate policy for the country. In Catalonia, Spain, they joined forces to challenge the central government in Madrid over the issue of independence. And a little later (2018) in Italy a coalition of the left and right took power with, again, a shared agenda of contesting the EU. Together with a long-constellating loss of faith in political process in general, these intimations of the end of the tired old two party game, point toward major change - one that possibly has more to do with 'populism vs the old guard' than it does with 'left vs right'.
In 2016, populism was rising everywhere. And again from both sides of the divide. Just for example, it was surging from the right via Orban in Hungary, Trump in the USA, and Le Pen in France, and from the left via Tsipras and Varoufakis in Greece, Iglesias in Spain and Corbyn in the UK.
Meanwhile the response to 'establishment Biden' in the USA was, among other things, the rise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has been described as 'Trump but more competent'.
Back to 2022: Just two months before Boris Johnson's 'Waterloo', the two biggest traditional parties in France managed to pull only about 8% of the vote between them. True enough, Macron won the presidency, and true enough that seemed to confirm the centrist establishment. Yet that establishment had scarcely finished its sigh of relief when Marine Le Pen won big in the legislative elections - by far the biggest win she and her party have ever had.
Two days after Johnson announcing that he would stand down once a new party leader was found, Unherd TV hosted an insightful debate1 (in which participated Freddie Sayers, Aris Roussinos, Claire Fox and Will Lloyd) which sought to better understand 'the writing on the wall'. Many of the points which were made in the debate reinforced the view that what is happening is something very much bigger and which very likely is still yet in early stages. It touched on the following themes:
Public dissatisfaction is everywhere massive, and the populist impulse is not going to go away. Johnson, even if there is a more immediate swing to 'the establishment', might in the longer term turn out to be just the forerunner of a more effective UK populist. The collapse of big parties, if it continues, could herald an exciting moment of creative change. At the same time, the negative cynicism and anger bound up with that could lead to it becoming very destructive. (To which I'd like to add that if the establishment don't like that destructive anger, they should stop causing it - unlikely to happen of course). There was pretty much a consensus that the shift which is happening will take considerable time to fully play out.
We come to the bigger observations: Fox suggested that while she may not be alive to see the disappearance of the big parties, it is already the case that they can no longer 'hold it together'. Lloyd noted that in 2014 a prominent politician2 had asserted that 'the secret of modern Britain is that there is no power anywhere'. Roussinos echoed that comment, proposing that the state, due to circumstance of our times, is losing its hold on power, with the result that the only way it can survive at all is by seizing at every opportunity for new powers that it can. For me this parallels what is happening with the 'fourth estate': As the traditional media powers have begun to 'lose control of the narrative', they have begun in quite extreme ways to suppress the emerging voices which have been empowered by the internet. The implications of both are uncomfortable. But so is the degree of that potential loss of control: Fox pointed out that the UK civil service is now at times simply refusing to carry out government instructions. To which I would add that something similar is happening in the USA, where some states now feel that they can ignore certain rulings of the Supreme Court if they don't like them.
Sayers suggested that the resolution of, on one side, populations losing agency rather than gaining it, and on the other, the inevitability of the state seizing new powers in a bid to survive, we might aspire to a powerful state which focuses its power on increasing the agency of the population. (My disagreement with the idea that this could happen is encapsulated in my last article, in which I argued how cultural awakening always precedes government reform, and never the other way around). Roussinos suggested, disturbingly, but I think entirely realistically, that we have entered a period of turbulence which is going to last for decades.
Fox recognised that the state is indeed everywhere seizing new powers, and asserted that they have everywhere used the pandemic to experiment with that. But she suggested that the real point is to consider what the challenge to that should look like. The real challenge, she said, is how we all stop 'thinking like the past' and build new arguments and visions. And with regard to the way that dissent is increasingly suppressed, she noted that this only drives it underground, where it intensifies and re-emerges in completely unpredictable forms. Thus it in the long term only increases volatility.
In conclusion, the collapse of Johnson's government was, in all its dimensions, not about whether he lied once too often, nor about whether or not he failed to deliver on Brexit, nor about the quite real possibility that his government was sabotaged by those who still want to reverse Brexit. It is just a cameo in a much bigger and longer term contest between old power structures seeking to take their power to greater heights (and thereby survive), and the eventual emergence of new forms of society. The power grab by state legislatures, everywhere, which do not want to face a genuinely progressive world, is a reality. So is the rapidly escalating dissent in populations around the world. None of us knows where this will take us next, but I suggest that the short term answer is likely different to the long term one.
As Fox insisted at the close of the 'Unherd' debate, pretty much all of our political options are awful, and what is needed is much more open debate and discussion about truly new directions.
‘What Boris Johnson's resignation really means’ Unherd TV, 9th July 2022,
Rory Stewart, who at the time was chair of the UK Defense Select Committee