by Nick Corble
To return to our propensity to take comfort in the past, this may, in part, be another response to the pace of technological change and the frightening (to some) prospects it offers, it’s impossible to know for sure. England has always revelled in its heritage, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but harking back to some golden past can be taken to an extreme.
The nearest rival to the summer of 2018 in terms of weather during my lifetime was 1976. During that summer, people stood at standpipes to get water. Forty plus years on, after privatised water companies had provided the investment in infrastructure the government was unable to find, there was only the slightest hint of restrictions. Despite this, the official Opposition’s policy was to renationalise the water companies, along with other once-public services. If a return to British Rail is being taken seriously as a viable response to problems with the rail network – a service which has grown exponentially since my last trip through England – then we are definitely in trouble!
The English (at a push, the British) seem to persist in a belief that they have the best of everything in the world. This belief persists whatever evidence is put forward to challenge it. For some, this has produced what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’: when people feel discomfort when their beliefs and values are challenged and, instead of bending with the evidence, dig their heels in deeper, seeking fresh evidence to shore up their beliefs.
The narrative persists that we have the best health system, the best education system, the best army, the best TV, the most innovative and creative people, the best comedians, the best political system (the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’), the best judicial system, wigs and all, and so on. This constant reiteration must surely have helped contribute to the sense that we are capable of standing alone – despite all the evidence showing the world has become an increasingly interconnected and global place.
A refrain heard during my walk was ‘we got through the war, we can get through this’, suggesting Brexit could be made to work, it might just take a bit of time. Certainly, no one could accuse the Brexit cheerleader Jacob Rees-Mogg of lacking vision when he claimed during the summer that the benefits of Brexit may take fifty years to come through. Not bad when most of his colleagues were struggling to know what would be going on the following Tuesday teatime. Perhaps it’s worth remembering his other moniker, that as the Hon Member for the Eighteenth Century. Maybe this was his plan all along. Maybe in his eyes the European Union was merely a historical aberration concocted after the war, and that the future lay with a return to nation states. Because that had worked out really well, hadn’t it?
During my walk, the NHS was celebrating its seventieth anniversary, so let’s use our health system to test this hypothesis. Whilst not decrying the efforts of the individuals involved in delivering the service, let’s stand above it and look at it as a system, and a tax-funded system at that. Shortly after completing the third leg of my walk, the Prime Minister announced a financial sticking plaster to apply to the existential problems facing the NHS. This figure was actually less than the average increase in funding historically, and still below what had been suggested as necessary just to keep it on track. Not so much a birthday present as an IOU.
This wasted opportunity for a fundamental rethink on how we fund and operate a fit-for-purpose health service was a classic ‘old school’ response to an ongoing problem. It supposed the only problem facing the NHS is funding, when there are clearly much deeper issues than that. The Prime Minister wasn’t the only guilty party here, of course. The Leave campaign’s now notorious claim that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS was another version of the same problem. Both were examples of binary thinking: Problem? Money!
Those with a more nuanced understanding of our health system might say, ‘We have an opportunity to do something really exciting here, to harness technology and gene therapy, to individualise care, to rethink how and where we deliver care and to co-ordinate health and social care.’ The NHS, the world’s biggest user of fax machines, is in a desperate race to become fit for the times.
What response do they get from politicians? ‘Sch, sch, go away, I have more important issues on my mind right now. Can’t you see I’m busy? Here’s a fiver. Go to the pictures or something.’
Yes, the NHS may need more money, but there’s little point in using it to paper over cracks, when what’s really needed is investment. Papering over the cracks might be okay if the wall behind was otherwise solid. But, as an independent report for the BBC33 produced to coincide with the seventieth anniversary concluded, the NHS is a ‘below-average performer’ compared to other countries’ systems when it comes to treating fundamental conditions such as preventing deaths from heart attacks, strokes and cancer. This same report described the NHS as ‘a perfectly ordinary service’ produced for a ‘middling level of cost’. Critically, and this is the point, it suggested that the poor performance was only partially attributable to funding.
So, two lessons. First, the NHS is not the best health system in the world, and to keep pretending it is avoids having a more fundamental discussion; and second, just throwing more money at it isn’t necessarily the answer.
Another irony of the Prime Minister’s focus on the ‘Just About Managing’, was that practically all our public services as a whole themselves fall into that category. Northamptonshire on my walk was struggling to pay for the most basic of services. It wasn’t alone. Just like the NHS, local authorities across the country were struggling. A welfare state designed in the twentieth century was no longer fit for purpose in a deindustrialised, digitised, dispossessed world. As I’d seen on my walk, local government, like the NHS and too many other manifestations of what the state exists to provide (prisons, schools, libraries, even footpaths), was broken.
Two contradictory dialogues seemed to be going on. One set of voices was saying our institutions and public services were the best in the world, whilst another was saying they were third world. To make things worse, these two dialogues often took place in peoples’ brains at the same time. No wonder they were confused. Whilst it might be comforting to square this circle by suggesting there was nothing wrong with the institutions, they just needed to be properly funded, deeper analysis suggested this was too simplistic. More sophisticated thinking was required. However, largely because of Brexit, no one had the headspace to engage with the problem, even if we had a system of political discourse capable of doing so.
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During the first twenty years of the new millennium, the economy has undergone a fundamental shift, and this became apparent to me during my walk. Wealth creation is concentrated in the hands of a relative few, while those without skills, or whose skills are no longer in demand, have found their incomes stagnate. The economy has been subject to centrifugal forces. The high streets have become magnets for consumption for its own sake (how else to explain the explosion of tattoo parlours?), rather than adding value.
People are being replaced by robots, not just in factories, but in offices and soon even in operating theatres (get used to it). In return, people are being kept busy, often, but not always, just off the breadline. Or they are being given some kind of limited self-worth or status through what a recent book by David Graeber, an anthropologist, succinctly calls ‘Bullshit Jobs’.34 These are jobs that are so pointless that even the employee cannot justify their existence. Many of these are what used to be called ‘white collar jobs’, and most of them are probably doomed.
This shift can work for us, or against us. Left unattended to, it has the potential to split the nation. In many senses this is already happening. Whilst absolutely not saying everyone who voted for Brexit was stupid, let’s take educational attainment as a proxy, not least because these days gaining a degree involves a significant financial investment – a massive barrier if you come from a family relying on food banks (and if you come from one of those families, is it any wonder that you also
struggle at school?). The numbers35 show that 75 per cent of those with no educational qualifications voted for Brexit, whilst a similar proportion of those with university degrees voted to remain.
This is a volatile time. The Brexit referendum couldn’t have come at a worst moment: an older generation venerating the past, the JAMs looking for a way to vent their frustrations, the elites sensing an opportunity to feather their nest even deeper. Add to the mix the ugly use of posters of Syrian refugees to exploit a wider uneasiness about too many foreigners, and the dark clouds began to gather.
But there was more. A festering sense of resentment against continuing austerity. All too visible evidence to suggest that the line between failing to just about manage and being thrown onto the streets might be a thin one. Public services in ruins. A belief that the young were being left behind. A growing sense of ‘us and them’ – as befits the times, not just a binary ‘rich and poor’, but also ‘young and old’ and not so much ‘north and south’ but ‘London and the rest’. Combine these together and those dark clouds became a perfect storm.
This storm operated in a climate defined by black-and-white thinking, one clouded by powerful slogans that summed up how people felt, but didn’t really say anything meaningful. The Remain campaign had no powerful response to either ‘I want my country back’ or ‘Project Fear’, the irony of the latter slogan being it was those on the Leave side who were more motivated by fear – fear of what their lives had become or might become, or of outsiders coming in and undermining their already precarious living standards.
Before leaving this subject, a brief word about nationalism. The summer of 2018 was an interesting one on this front. At the beginning of the summer, the English football team jetted off to Russia with barely a fanfare, our low expectations of their chances tucked in the inside pockets of their new M&S suits. By the end of the summer, as they approached the closing stages of the tournament, the St George’s flags were out in force: in flower pots, covering up windows, on umbrellas (needed as protection from the sun rather than rain), and even occasionally flying from flagpoles.
Once again, research36 suggests a generational divide on this issue, with the young less likely to feel pride in being English than the old. That same research highlighted that qualities of humour, tradition and good manners are the characteristics most associated with being English. How terribly reassuring. We are an odd lot at times. If our pride in being English is fickle, it’s probably fair to say our pride in being European is almost non-existent. In my conclusion to Walking on Water I made the point that you could go to almost any small town in Europe and you’d see the European flag fluttering over public buildings. This wasn’t the case in England twenty years ago, and little appeared to have changed in the interim. If anything, it had gone backwards.
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By the end of my walk, while I sensed people were more confused than ever about Brexit, it was possible to discern three broad camps. The first of these didn’t know what was the right thing to do but just wanted to rip the plaster off. They didn’t really understand it, but felt we should just get on with it. Their view seemed to be that we’d survived other crises and we’d survive this one. The second group was comprised of Remainers who felt the battle hadn’t been lost yet. They believed the referendum was the result of an unscrupulous and illegal campaign and, driven by a burning sense of natural injustice and logic, felt there should be a second referendum, cunningly disguised as a People’s Vote rather than a referendum, to counter those who said we’d had the referendum. Then there was the third group. They believed that a decision had been made, and that it was the right decision. That we should cut our losses and go, deal or no deal, and genuinely felt that the country would be better off on its own, even if it might take a few years for this hypothesis to be proven.
The call for a People’s Vote was an interesting one, challenging to those in the Leave camp, as it made their claim to be protecting democracy a fragile one by denying the same thing. That democracy was a one-time thing. Whilst it offered a way of stopping Brexit for those who wanted it stopped, it carried its own issues. To work, the call for it needed to be overwhelming, and any subsequent vote would need to be equally conclusive. A narrow win would not hack it. It looked like a huge gamble, especially when any evidence of a marked shift in views was missing.
Where, after walking amongst the people of England, did I stand on this? I started this walk as an angry Remainer. Not, I stress, a ‘remoaner’ (another brilliant example of the Leave campaign’s facility for pithy slogans; somehow ‘Exit from Brexit’ isn’t in the same league). After all, I had embarked on a 400-plus-mile hike to engage. I was, however, frustrated, not just with the result, but with the process, how it had been handled and the paucity of real debate.
By the end of the walk I had become more reconciled: still in favour of remaining in the EU, more accepting that leaving was probably what was going to happen, but perhaps hoping still for some last-minute Damascene conversion to common sense. Throughout my walk, I came across an England that was resourceful, friendly, diverse, tolerant, resilient. This has given me reassurance that we will muddle through, like we always have done in the past when confronted with crises, whether self-inflicted (as I believe Brexit is) or inflicted upon us. We have always been a stoic lot, but this is going to test us to the max.
History abounds with examples of decisions, economic, political, or driven by global affairs, that many saw as fundamental disasters at the time but eventually became just that, history. The Repeal of the Corn Laws, coming off the Gold Standard, Suez – Brexit is but the latest in a long conveyor belt, only with the added complication of being economic, foreign affairs and political rolled into one. The trajectory of history isn’t measured, its messy, as any student of the subject will attest.
Maybe it will all work out for the best? Maybe our countryside will flourish freed from the demands of the Common Agricultural Policy. Maybe our businesses will have to find ways of improving productivity once deprived of cheap foreign labour. Maybe the rest of the world will flock to us to secure trade deals. Maybe I should just learn to ‘believe in Britain’ (whatever that means). That’s a lot of ‘maybes’.
Whatever happens, though, there will be a cost, and that cost will come as a shock to those who least expected it. For some it will be tangible: the loss of a job, rising prices, a downturn in the housing market. But at least as significant will be the intangible losses, and these will be harder to identify and quantify. Our standing in the world for one (and yes, isn’t that an irony?), lost or never made friendships, the opportunities to understand others, to get the viewpoints of others, to enrich the gene pool of decision-making. To work collaboratively and cooperatively, to give and take. To admit you don’t have a monopoly on wisdom. These were driven home to me during my discussion with the Irish businesswoman Siobhán in the car park of our hotel in Toddington. All of these will be impossible to replace, and as a result, we will be the worse off for it. Respect for others will be less strong. Outward foci will be lost. We will stagnate, whilst others integrate. We will lose relevance.
Yes, we will regain an outward sense of national identity, or at least those who wanted it will. Sovereignty, whatever that is worth in an inter-connected world, will be regained. We will ‘get our country back’. However, whether the gaining of a blue passport and a (largely illusory) level of control over our borders, and the ability in theory (if less so in practice) to strike trade deals with others to whom we are largely irrelevant and who need our goods less than we need theirs, will be worth it, only history will be able to judge. I think I can make a stab at a verdict, though. Maybe Brexit is something I’m destined never to understand – like tattoos, it is the triumph of the superficial rather than the considered (sorry to go on about tattoos, but seriously?)
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If you’ve got this far in this section, it will come as no surprise to learn that in my opinion
the greatest tragedy is that this is happening at a time of unprecedented opportunity. Although it may surprise some readers, when I think back to the question posed on the wall of Liverpool University: ‘Are You Optimistic About The Future?’, my answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’
However, I believe we are better placed to face the challenges of artificial intelligence, social change, an aging population, advances in healthcare, the reordering of society, affordable housing, more productive relationships with the wider world, climate change, international terrorism, migration from Africa, managing the immigration we will continue to need to rebalance our workforce, responding to wider humanitarian crises – as part of a collaborative bloc, however imperfect, rather than as a single country. It is that inestimable opportunity cost I shall grieve over.
By the time you read this, it’s possible that the fog will have cleared a little. But it’s equally possible that it will have set in for the duration. ‘Fog in the Channel – Continent Cut Off’.37 Maybe it just suddenly lifted, dispersed by an outbreak of common sense. Well, I did say I was an optimist. Maybe the long hot summer of 2018 was the eye of the storm? Maybe it was the calm before it. Or maybe it turned out talk of a storm was over-exaggerated – those damned weather forecasters again.
Writing at the conclusion of that summer, we seem to be walking a washing line. Not a tightrope, as at least that has some tension, but a wobbly, unstable washing line. Maybe there will have been a second referendum, or People’s Vote. It’s possible, if still an outside bet at the time of writing. Whatever happens, hard or soft Brexit, no-deal Brexit, Blind Brexit, Botched Brexit, Barking Brexit,38 second vote, as I type these words it appears that the best we can aspire to is the least-worst outcome. Whatever happens, there will be ill-feeling, broken trust and almost certainly anger. Attention will again divert away from ‘what we can do’ towards ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’.
