Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Global cities
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter
  • Membership

UK: From Nasty Party To Nasty Country

Mark Leonard 3rd November 2016

Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard

British Prime Minister Theresa May once warned her fellow Conservatives of the perils of being known as the “nasty party.” But after 100 days in office, she is in danger of going further, turning the United Kingdom into the nasty country.

In just a few months, May has launched attacks on “international elites” and decided to prioritize immigration controls over single-market access in negotiating the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. At one point recently, companies faced the threat of being compelled to furnish a list of their foreign workers. And the 3.5 million European citizens who are settled in the UK were left to worry about whether May’s government would guarantee their residence rights.

It did not take long for the normalization of nationalist rhetoric to affect the daily lives of Britain’s immigrant population. Indeed, hate crimes began to proliferate almost immediately after June’s Brexit referendum – even before May took power. Her government’s attitude seems to be a symptom, rather than a cause, of a broader nativist revival in Britain.

This revival has come on fairly quickly. As recently as the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the UK was showing a very different face to the world: welcoming, connected, and self-confident in its diversity. The current surge in identity politics seems to reflect a backlash against all that openness. In fact, Britain seems to be oscillating between inclusion and exclusion – and has been for four decades.

When Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister in the 1980s, she promoted exclusion, defining British identity with reference to its enemies – and not just external foes, like the Soviet Union or the European Commission. There was no shortage of domestic villains: trade unions, miners, teachers, doctors, the BBC, ethnic minorities, the Scots, the Welsh, and Irish Catholics.

By the time John Major took over the premiership in 1990, there was a sense of national malaise, fueled by anguish about Europe and frustration with the declining prestige of British institutions. In 1995, opinion polls showed that only a minority of the country felt “British,” while many groups – namely young people, ethnic minorities, Londoners, Scots, and Welsh – felt poorly represented.

It was around that time that I, a precocious 23-year-old, became embroiled in the debate about national identity. In 1997, a few months after the election of Tony Blair and a few days after the death of Princess Diana, I wrote a report arguing that, instead of mourning the death of the old narratives, we should celebrate the birth of new ones, reflecting pride in our past successes, while touting our creativity, diversity, and openness to business.

The point of my report, which was credited with spawning the political and media effort to rebrand the UK known as Cool Britannia, was to recognize Britain as a “silent revolutionary” that constantly renews itself, rather than basking in tradition. I was advocating a kind of progressive patriotism – one that was soon embraced by Britain’s political class, beginning with Blair himself.

To my surprise, when the Conservative Party started to renew itself under May’s predecessor, David Cameron, it focused on celebrating an inclusive national identity. Cameron and former London Mayor Boris Johnson, who now serves as foreign secretary, represented the modern, outward-looking, multiracial, multi-ethnic Britain that was broadcast to the world in the electrifying Olympic opening ceremony in 2012.

To be sure, within a couple of years, Cameron was calling for the Brexit referendum in a bid for votes, and Johnson was stepping up as a leader of the “Leave” campaign. Nonetheless, they did not unravel the progress of the previous years.

A major opinion poll recently showed that almost a third of England’s people feel “very positive towards our multicultural society,” up from 24% in 2011. Meanwhile, the proportion of Britons who are most strongly hostile to immigration and a multicultural society has declined, from 13% to 8%. As The Economist’s Jeremy Cliffe argued in a 2015 paper, factors like rising racial diversity, a more educated citizenry, urbanization, and increased variety in family structure seems to be giving rise to “an emerging cosmopolitan majority” in the UK.

As with any major social shift, diversity has its detractors. White, English, working-class men over the age of 55 feel particularly excluded from the progressive version of patriotism, and fear becoming a minority in their “own” country. (According to data cited by Cliffe, the majority of the UK’s population will be non-white by 2070.) So they are revolting against cosmopolitanism – and May is playing to the crowd.

Some fear that this is the new normal. When May’s government first threatened to force companies to list foreign workers, I was dining with tech entrepreneurs from other EU countries who are settled in the UK. They joked darkly about being forced to wear blue stars on their clothes, speculating that the 1990s could one day be seen as an Anglo-Saxon version of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar period. That may be a stretch, but concerns that May’s decision to vacate the political center could represent a long-term reversal of Britain’s political moderation are very real.

Fortunately, however, the long-term trend seems to be toward inclusion, even if the UK takes a couple of steps backward today. Even May herself, in her recent attack on cosmopolitanism, inadvertently celebrated Britain for precisely the achievements that its cosmopolitanism has enabled, from its outsize share of Nobel Prizes to the City of London’s financial clout.

Nonetheless, as the Brexit vote highlighted, Britain’s success is fragile. And the surge in hate crimes shows that the emerging cosmopolitan majority cannot simply sit back and wait for history to do its work. It must offer a new kind of politics that places a wedge between genuine fears and isolationism. It must show how Britain can reinvent its economy and state to deliver equitable growth, thereby regaining its agency in the world. And it must offer new ways to build solidarity and advance inclusion. Britain must not be allowed to become the nasty country.

Copyright: Project Syndicate 2016 Theresa May’s Nasty Britain

Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard is Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

You are here: Home / Politics / UK: From Nasty Party To Nasty Country

Most Popular Posts

Russia,information war Russia is winning the information warAiste Merfeldaite
Nanterre,police Nanterre and the suburbs: the lid comes offJoseph Downing
Russia,nuclear Russia’s dangerous nuclear consensusAna Palacio
Belarus,Lithuania A tale of two countries: Belarus and LithuaniaThorvaldur Gylfason and Eduard Hochreiter
retirement,Finland,ageing,pension,reform Late retirement: possible for many, not for allKati Kuitto

Most Recent Posts

European Health Data Space,EHDS,Big Tech Fostering public research or boosting Big Tech?Philip Freeman and Jan Willem Goudriaan
migrant workers,non-EU Non-EU migrant workers—the ties that bindLilana Keith
ECB,European Central Bank,deposit facility How the ECB’s ‘deposit facility’ subsidises banksDavid Hollanders
migrant,Europe,workers All work and low pay—Europe’s migrant workforceAnkita Anand
art,European,prize The case for a European prize for artNed Hercock

Other Social Europe Publications

strategic autonomy Strategic autonomy
Bildschirmfoto 2023 05 08 um 21.36.25 scaled 1 RE No. 13: Failed Market Approaches to Long-Term Care
front cover Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound Talks: housing

In this episode of the Eurofound Talks podcast, Mary McCaughey speaks with Eurofound’s senior research manager, Hans Dubois, about the issues that feed into housing insecurity in Europe and the actions that need to be taken to address them. Together, they analyse findings from Eurofound’s recent Unaffordable and inadequate housing in Europe report, which presents data from Eurofound’s Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey, European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and input from the Network of Eurofound Correspondents on various indicators of housing security and living conditions.


LISTEN HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The summer issue of the Progressive Post magazine by FEPS is out!

The Special Coverage of this new edition is dedicated to the importance of biodiversity, not only as a good in itself but also for the very existence of humankind. We need a paradigm change in the mostly utilitarian relation humans have with nature.

In this issue, we also look at the hazards of unregulated artificial intelligence, explore the shortcomings of the EU's approach to migration and asylum management, and analyse the social downside of the EU's current ethnically-focused Roma policy.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

WSI European Collective Bargaining Report 2022 / 2023

With real wages falling by 4 per cent in 2022, workers in the European Union suffered an unprecedented loss in purchasing power. The reason for this was the rapid increase in consumer prices, behind which nominal wage growth fell significantly. Meanwhile, inflation is no longer driven by energy import prices, but by domestic factors. The increased profit margins of companies are a major reason for persistent inflation. In this difficult environment, trade unions are faced with the challenge of securing real wages—and companies have the responsibility of making their contribution to returning to the path of political stability by reducing excess profits.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube