The state can do things when it wants to

It is hard to create a narrative of contemporary Britain without slipping into a script that reads like a caricature of an Adam Curtis film. We are constantly told one thing by politicians and the media, but then look around to see a reality that is not just slightly different, but its complete opposite. 

No one really believes the stories we are told, no one believes that the country’s trajectory is a positive one, but no one in charge seems to have any idea on how to course-correct.

We are repeatedly told, for example, that there is no money left, that we must accept deteriorating public infrastructure and could never possibly find the money for investment and that spending has already been cut to its bare bones. But then the benefit bill goes up year after year, and the state keeps on adopting duties for which it must pay — yet no one in charge has any plan to stop this endless welfare growth.

For decades, we were told that immigration was going to be our economic jet fuel; all the experts agreed, and well-credentialed people from serious sounding, acronym-named institutions assured us it was true. Yet after the biggest wave of immigration in this country’s history, that economic boom never came, and instead living standards have visibly deteriorated. It seems clear to anyone daring enough to look that the great majority of the millions who came are not the budding doctors and engineers we were promised.

Then we were told that net zero was to be our next great hope, allowing us to hit two birds with one stone — simultaneously reducing our emissions as well as turbocharging the “green industrial revolution” and its plentiful well-paid jobs. But those plentiful “green jobs” never came, and instead we got rising fuel and electricity prices, and global emissions that continue to rise, no matter how many of our power plants we blow up.

Which brings us to last week, and the most mind-bending narrative inversion of all. Successive prime ministers have assured us that they “understand” public anger about the small boats, that they too wish to see an end to their arrival, and are working tirelessly to that end. But then when groups of British citizens take it upon themselves to expedite this process and stop the boats we all agree must no longer reach these shores, the British state mobilises resources it had told us had been cut out of existence to lockdown the entire town of Gosport. The full force of the state was used to ensure that those migrants politicians told us they absolutely want to stop entering the country can land hassle-free, going as far as to give them police motorcades fit for a visiting dignitary. Despite this unprecedented use of state power, the national broadcaster reports with indifference about arrests at the “protest”, as if this were all normal. 

It is tempting to reach for conspiracies amidst this rather discombobulating state of affairs. Has a foreign power infiltrated our government? Are all our politicians being blackmailed? Is there some shadowy organisation with a plan to exact revenge on the British people really running the show? The truth is perhaps more worrying.

There is no plan. When politicians bovinely repeated platitudes about immigration being great for the economy, or net zero creating a boom in new jobs, or that benefits are only going to those truly in need, they are not doing so to trick the public whilst they have a clearer-eyed view of the issues: they really believe it. Politicians of all stripes really do want the small boats to stop arriving, even those on the open borders end of the spectrum who wish migrants would arrive by safer and more regular means. But they are stuck clinging to the dogmas crafted before they were born, and due to a lack of imagination and courage, are unable to move beyond those dogmas to a political order befitting this political age.

They have inherited a set of institutions, welfare commitments and international treaties forged in the post-war era that are manifestly unsuitable for our current era, yet the task of moving beyond them and creating something new is proving too great. The task, after all, is a great one: to reimagine what the British state’s duties are, and to whom it has duties; to navigate a new international order that no longer functions through clear rules and institutions; to create a new economic model that no longer runs on seemingly cheap but ultimately deeply costly foreign labour; to define new national identities, and decide which of those the British state is in service to.

And who does this task fall to? As Dominic Cummings amusingly remarked, there is no crack team of ninjas really running the show that can take care of these things. Instead, it falls to the likes of Andy Burnham — a politician so unimpressive that even during their electoral slump, the Labour membership repeatedly sent him packing when he sought to become leader. This is a man who, upon occupying the most important political office in the country, busied himself with tampering with airline booking conditions and local bus fares.

Burnham and the political class to which he belongs are hapless in the face of this changing world, and so instead of rising to the moment, retreat into reaction, vainly hoping to turn the clock back to the New Labour days in which they were made where we could believe that History had ended, the major questions of political economy solved, and the public endeared to their politicians based on their tea and biscuit preferences. 

But that world is gone. Large, unregulated migration flows are here to stay. The myth that immigration will turbocharge the economy is no longer believed. A population with internalised ideals of fairness too proud to milk the welfare state for every last penny is not coming back. Naïve beliefs about becoming the Saudi Arabia of wind power have already been tested to failure. 

Increasingly extreme actions will be taken by the British state as it tries to drag this outdated dogma on beyond its sell-by date

And so we end up with the incredible scenes in Gosport, with half a dozen police forces mobilised to lock down an entire town in order to facilitate the arrival of illegal immigrants everyone agrees must stop coming. The tangle of international treaties and domestic laws that have led to this point are too sacred for Burnham to touch, scared as he is to abandon any of the outdated dogma about their necessity in stopping a phantom political force that has been dead for the best part of eighty years. The balaclava-clad men demanding a politics fit to face our era of mass human movement must be suppressed, the old order restored, and the public reassured that every arm of the British state working in lockstep to facilitate illegal migration is the only sensible course of action, that no better alternative is possible. 

Increasingly extreme actions will be taken by the British state as it tries to drag this outdated dogma on beyond its sell-by date, suppressing those who demand progress and the establishment of a new political order. Burnham will soon find out, like Starmer before him, that the British public is tired of being governed by reactionaries and their increasingly repressive means, and that not even chummy TikToks will save him from the crushing unpopularity that awaits for those who stand in the way of progress.