A Level Economics: Can you change a Brexit state of mind?

If departing the EU has failed to deliver, why is the UK still so divided? Seven years on, we ask behavioural psychologists if cognitive dissonance can be overcome> Tim Adams in The Guardian


One of the most significant political events of the past few months, it has seemed to me, wasn’t strictly a bit of politics at all, but an emotional catch and quaver in the voice of a politician. The politician was the Conservative MP Steve Baker and the sudden sob in his throat came about during a TV interview about the efforts to resolve the Northern Ireland protocol.

Baker, you will recall, was one of the most strident voices in the Brexit argument, a leader of the Tory European Research group, the ERG, which frustrated Theresa May’s efforts to find a compromise deal with the EU. The sob in his voice and the tears in his eyes prefaced a short, heartfelt confession about the extreme private stress that those Brexit machinations – and subsequent arguments over Covid lockdown – had caused him. Speaking subsequently to the Times, Baker expanded on that state of mind. “I felt absolutely worthless,” he said. “I felt repugnant, hateful, to blame for all of the troubles that we had, absolutely without any joy, constantly worried about everything to the point of mental torment. A constant state of panic attacks and anxiety. It’s not a state anyone should live in.”

Matters came to a head in November 2021 at a weekly prayer group that Baker, a Christian, attended in Westminster. “I suddenly just started crying,” he recalled. “I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t speak. I was just clutching myself, sobbing my heart out.” One of the reasons that he was opening up about that now, he said, was that “I’m very conscious there’s lots of people out there who blame me for their misery. But it’s an unfortunate thing on this question of leave and remain that leaving has caused a great deal of anxiety and anger and depression for a lot of people. But being in the EU has caused a lot of anxiety and anger and depression for people…” 

Baker’s courageous candour was significant in our national conversation, it seemed to me, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, that outpouring was, to my knowledge, the only public occasion on which a leading Brexiter had owned up to the pain of doubt and anguish that the referendum had occasioned. It was, also, a very telling illustration of a truism about the whole ongoing cataclysm: that, though the vote obviously had fundamental real-world consequences for our economy and our politics, it was arguably best understood as a psychological rather a political moment.

From the outset, headline writers recognised and amplified the internalised crises behind the politics in references to “Brexhaustion”, “Strexit”, “Branxiety” and “Brexistential crisis”. The referendum result, then and now, was (for remainers) an act of visceral “self-harm”. In the days after the result, the Guardian reported that “therapists everywhere” were experiencing “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair”, with mental health referrals “[starting] to mushroom”. There was a clear spike in the prescription of antidepressants. By January 2019, a YouGov survey found that two-thirds of British adults were either “fairly unhappy” or “very unhappy” because of Brexit; one-third of leave voters were in that latter category.
 
Seven years is sometimes thought of as a moment of settled change. It is understood, not quite exactly, as the period of time in which nearly all the cells in our bodies have been replaced. The Brexit-made divisions of 2016 persist, however. Though there is some anecdotal and polling evidence that there has been a shift in sentiment, and that remain might now prevail, the same polls show very little appetite to reopen the question. When the BBC did an anniversary Question Time in June, only one half of the divided nation was even allowed in the studio – the audience was made up entirely of those who voted leave, presumably to ensure the debate would not simply descend into an all-too familiar slanging match. (It was as if the marriage guidance counsellor had been forced to separate the warring parties outside.) If there is one certainty about the coming political conference season it is that considered arguments for and against Brexit will not be aired. The Tories will crow about Brexit being done. The Labour frontbench will solemnly observe that past tense, and avoid the B-word, as if it is a triggering trauma for the party and the country, best left undisturbed.

If the language of psychology and identity was always the lexicon with which we understood Brexit, the denialism of our current politics insists that it remains so. With this in mind, in the course of the past week, I have been speaking to some of the behavioural psychologists who initially examined some of the choices of the referendum, to see if they now saw any way out of current entrenched divisions. (One of the triggers for this inquiry in my own mind was reading a new book called The Art of the Impossible, the inside story of Nigel Farage’s short-lived Brexit party. Revisiting the ingrained anxieties of that period was a version of the addictive chest-tightening outrage that comes from a daily scroll through the culture war of my Twitter feed.)

One of the key mechanisms that all psychologists agree has defined the binary choice of the referendum is cognitive dissonance. That is the powerful internal mechanism in each of us that demands consistency in our understanding of the world, and which desperately looks for ways to correct or manage information that contradicts understanding. The term was coined by a young behaviouralist in the 1950s, Leon Festinger, who came to it after studying a religious doomsday cult that saw its date for apocalypse come and go. Cognitive dissonance described the jarring pain of cultists seeing prophecy unfulfilled and the immediate strategies to explain it away.
 

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger wrote. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. But suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting other people to his view.” Welcome to Brexit.

The American social psychologist Carol Tavris has spent her academic career partly developing Festinger’s work. That wisdom is distilled in her book (co-written with Elliot Aronson) called, perfectly, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). At the time of the Brexit referendum seven years ago, Tavris noted that “once we have made a decision, our mental doors tend to close… it is always easier to continue to justify a belief than to change it.” As a result, she suggested, Britain – like America under Trump – tribally divided, faced with all sorts of evidence that campaign promises were utter falsehoods, was “awash in dissonance”.

Little of that, Tavris suggested to me last week, has gone away. “Most of us tend to hold the belief that we are essentially good and moral and competent,” she says. “And if I fear I did something bad, foolish or wrong, that fear challenges that belief we hold about ourselves. Then I have a choice: either I can accept this new information and say, ‘I guess I really screwed up here’, or I can say, ‘Sod off with your stupid evidence’.” This latter response, she suggests, is the default. 

Her book uses a metaphor she calls the pyramid of choice. At the top of the pyramid, before a choice has been made, an individual is at his or her most open-minded. But as soon as you step off the top in a particular direction, efforts will already be being made to justify that decision. “By the time you’ve made five, or six or seven steps down that pyramid, renewing your commitment to that decision, rehearsing that decision, the harder it will be for anyone to go back up to the top.”

She points to lots of evidence that shows that even if people – judges for example - are given a face-saving way to declare they have got something wrong, they are still unlikely to accept or declare it.

So what kind of conversation helps people move past that dissonance and accept the evidence of reality (that, say, £350m won’t be given to the health service and there won’t be an easy trade deal with the US – or that Brexit is not to blame for every aspect of the cost of living crisis)?

“When we argue with somebody about their beliefs,” Tavris says, “the absolute crucial thing to avoid is making them feel foolish. If you say something like, ‘How could you be so stupid?’, that will almost always make your listener become even more committed to their belief. If you say instead, ‘Well, many of my own expectations turned out not to be the case too’, that might be a place to start.”

Psychologists are, of course, not immune to the biases they identify. How does she maintain doubt in her own beliefs? Well, she says, “it’s that old idea of being open-minded, but not so open that your brains fall out. You want to have ideas you live by and feel passionately about. But the goal is to hold them lightly enough so that [if the evidence changes] you can also let them go.”

The more I read into the science of psychological polarisation, the more often ideas of “neuropolitics” crop up. This is the fairly new science that examines – with the help of fMRI brain scans – questions of political allegiance in the context of brain structure and activity. Perhaps the leading researcher in this area in the UK is Darren Schreiber, at Essex University, author of the Your Brain Is Built for Politics. I call to ask him if the differences between “leaver” and “remainer” responses to the world are so baked in as to be visible in brain activity?

Schreiber is circumspect about the current reach of his discipline, beyond broad observations. “If you’re a conservative, or if you’re a liberal, there are consistent patterns that emerge,” he says. Different experiments in brain imaging “can classify political affiliation with about 70%-plus accuracy based on brain structure, and with brain activity at an even higher rate, 80%-plus”. In very simplified terms, the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and threat, appears more sensitive to certain stimuli in republican or conservative brains.

Probably more significant, Schreiber suggests, is the fact that our brains are hardwired to be excited by politics in general.
Even raising the issue seems provocative. We just can’t talk about [Brexit] any moreNick Chater, behavioural scientist

“Though we all have these underlying predispositions at the genetic level, to be a little bit more conservative or a little bit more liberal, these can be altered by environmental circumstances. And by far the most important environmental circumstances, if you’re a human, is your social milieu. If you’re an ant you can tell who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ with a very quick sniff. If you are a human it is more complex, and we put lot of work into that.”

That mental effort is subject to Hebb’s law, which holds that “neurons that fire together wire together”, that is to say, the brain itself starts to be shaped in tiny pathways by the associations it is most often exposed to, a sort of internal echo chamber.

How easy is it to change that wiring?

“It’s really hard,” Schreiber says. “We see tremendous stability over very long periods of time.” A choice like Brexit provides endless stimuli to feed that brain activity. “It’s coalitions within coalitions within coalitions…” Schreiber says.

Nick Chater, professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School, approaches those stubborn social networks from a different perspective. In the aftermath of the referendum, he led a discussion on Radio 4’s The Human Zoo into the psychological fallout of Brexit, the hardening of decision into identity. He laughs a little when I ask him if there is any kind of time limit on cognitive dissonance.

“Behavioural psychology very rarely looks at the long term,” he says. “So I think actually, psychologists have fairly little idea how long these things tend to last.”

What he finds striking about the current situation is the almost total absence of debate about the effect of the decision itself. “It’s become so divisive, that even raising the issue seems almost a provocative act. There’s a sense that we just can’t talk about this at all any more.”

Does he see a strategy that would allow that to change?

“One of the things might change is if one could get to a point where we can reframe the debate. Say if the EU clearly broke into a two-speed Europe where there was a central core engaging in really deep integration and an outer rim more loosely connected…”

And what about the kind of language that might prompt a rethink?

“The most useful language would recognise that politics is inherently uncertain,” he says. “So: ‘We thought it would be a bad idea; you thought it would be better; but nobody really knew for sure. Now we know a bit more, and perhaps it’s time to rethink…’”

Does he hear much evidence of that?

“Not a great deal…”

Perhaps the most extensive examination of the referendum in these terms came in a book called The Psychology of Brexit, written by Brian Hughes, a specialist in stress psychophysiology and a professor of psychology at the University of Galway, Ireland. “Brexit,” Hughes argued, “emerged from psychological impulses, was determined by psychological choices, is construed in terms of psychological perceptions, and will leave a lasting psychological imprint.”

At the heart of the choice, Hughes suggested, were two persistent fallacies. First, the notion that people ever approach political questions with clear-headed reason. Second, the idea that your opponents have cornered the market in irrationality. “Remain did not have a monopoly on reason. This is because remainers are human beings.”
When you pathologise the other side, there’s no point in reaching out to themBrian Hughes, psychologist

Hughes’s book came out in 2019 at the height of “no deal is better than a bad deal” insanity. If he were to add to it now, he suggests, it would be as a textbook case of “polarisation theory” and the ways in which the three-word sloganeering of “Brexit means Brexit” and “get Brexit done” has been repurposed to provide the illusion of simplicity to other very complex issues – “stop the boats” etc. The primary division of Brexit has extended into “clusters of interwoven views” on the climate crisis, vaccination and immigration, feeding everything into the same blunt binary.

One result of that, he suggests, is that Brexit has become a classic example of toxicity. “If there is something especially scandalous in our own lives or traumatic, we will try not to mention it. It just brings too much up. People talk about the ‘Ming vase strategy’ for Labour and Brexit [the idea that they must not smash their precious majority]. The political logic is that this event was still so painful for people that you could lose half the electorate as a result of one soundbite.”

If there is a way through this, he suggests, it is to break down the myths of us and them. “Brexit was obviously never the single will of the people, but also the will of leavers and the will of remainers are very far from homogenous. Politicians need to find ways of foregrounding the diversity of views that people had and have, even if some of them might be very ugly. They need to show the illusion of simple polarisation.”

Preventing this, he says, is the fact that Brexit has brought into the political mainstream “all the reasoning errors that people make”. Polarity acts against nuance, and undermines the middle ground. “Both sides start to look at the other as somehow irretrievably deranged. And when you pathologise the other side, there’s no point in reaching out to them.” As a result, he suggests, “People who have the opportunity to address political challenges are no longer seeking to control the divisions in society, they are trying to maximise them for their own ends.”

Does he see an end to that polarity?

“It would require politicians and commentators to take some of the heat out of the arguments,” he says. “That might take a generation, or it might be one of these cyclical trends.” For the time being, our Brexity brains are it seems here to stay.

A Level Economics: Practice Questions on The European Union

1. What distinguishes the European Union (EU) as a political union? a) The EU has a strong central government with absolute decision-making power. b) The EU aims to create a framework for cooperation among its member states on political matters. c) The EU consists of individual states with complete sovereignty and no shared policies. d) The EU's political institutions are controlled by a single leader elected by member states.

Answer: b) The EU aims to create a framework for cooperation among its member states on political matters.

2. Which of the following is NOT one of the EU's political institutions? a) European Commission b) European Parliament c) European Council d) European Central Bank

Answer: d) European Central Bank

3. How does the decision-making process within the EU often work? a) The EU's political institutions make decisions independently without consulting member states. b) Member states rarely need to negotiate or compromise on issues due to their shared interests. c) Complex negotiations and compromises are common among member states to accommodate diverse interests. d) The EU has a single leader who makes all decisions without the input of member states.

Answer: c) Complex negotiations and compromises are common among member states to accommodate diverse interests.

4. How does the EU's single market promote economic integration? a) It allows member states to close their borders and restrict the movement of goods and services. b) It facilitates the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor among member states. c) It only applies to countries within the Eurozone, allowing them to share a common currency. d) It imposes tariffs and trade barriers between member states to protect local industries.

Answer: b) It facilitates the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor among member states.

5. Which of the following is NOT a benefit of EU membership related to the economy? a) Access to a large market with over 500 million consumers. b) The adoption of a common currency known as the euro. c) Attracting higher levels of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) due to regulatory stability. d) Limited control over national monetary policy for Eurozone countries.

Answer: d) Limited control over national monetary policy for Eurozone countries.

6. What is the main advantage of having a common currency (euro) within the Eurozone? a) It allows for easier trade and financial transactions within the Eurozone. b) It eliminates the need for the EU's political institutions to make economic decisions. c) It reduces the economic influence of larger member states within the Eurozone. d) It prevents member states from trading with countries outside the EU.

Answer: a) It allows for easier trade and financial transactions within the Eurozone.

7. Which of the following countries operates as a unitary state with a strong central government? a) The United States b) India c) China d) The European Union

Answer: c) China

8. What is the primary objective of the European Central Bank (ECB) within the Eurozone? a) Maintaining price stability and supporting sustainable economic growth. b) Setting interest rates for individual member states. c) Controlling fiscal policies of member countries. d) Influencing foreign affairs and trade policies.

Answer: a) Maintaining price stability and supporting sustainable economic growth.

9. How does the European Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) impact the Eurozone member countries? a) It sets rules and guidelines for fiscal discipline within the Eurozone. b) It allows member countries to maintain unlimited budget deficits. c) It requires all Eurozone countries to adopt a single fiscal policy. d) It encourages member countries to keep their budget deficits above 3% of GDP.

Answer: a) It sets rules and guidelines for fiscal discipline within the Eurozone.

10. What is one of the challenges of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)? a) Divergent economic structures and levels of development among member states. b) A unified monetary policy that adapts easily to the needs of all member states. c) Limited need for fiscal coordination among member states. d) All member states must adopt the same currency, which limits economic growth.

Answer: a) Divergent economic structures and levels of development among member states.

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Long Answer Questions

1. How does the European Union's political structure differ from that of the United States and China, and how does this affect decision-making processes within the EU?

2. 
   

3. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of EU membership, considering factors such as economic benefits, loss of sovereignty, and bureaucratic complexities.

4. 
   

5. Analyze the impact of the Eurozone's common currency, the euro, on economic integration and trade efficiency among member states.

6. 
   

7. Assess the challenges faced by new prospective members seeking to join the EU, including the adoption of Acquis Communautaire and financial obligations.

8. 
   

9. Critically examine the benefits and challenges of the continuous expansion of the EU, taking into account the effects on existing member states, new members, and the overall geopolitical landscape in Europe.

Freedom of Speech in the UK: Nigel Farage Cancelled by a Bank

 

Britain embraces trivia because it is stuck on the big issues

The fuss over Gary Lineker distracts a nation with no good choices on Brexit, growth and other important questions writes Janan Ganesh in The FT

To south-east Asia, with its EU-dwarfing population, its aspirations beyond middle-income, its clout as a hinge region in the tussle between the US and China. How to explain to someone here the almost subatomic littleness of the main story in the UK? 

You see, we have this sports presenter. And he tweeted something noble but hyperbolic. And the response was even less measured. And the fuss consumed MPs and the national broadcaster. Yes, for a week. No, we don’t have 5 per cent growth and industrial peace. We aren’t immersed in this trivia because the big things are going too well. 

In fact, perhaps the opposite is true. It just takes a bit of geographic distance to appreciate it. Britain, I suggest, is a nation that gets lost in froth and frivolity because, on the serious stuff, it is stuck. 

Let us count the different kinds of deadlock in the kingdom. Britain knows that Brexit was a mistake. It also knows that revising the decision would open the gates of domestic political hell. And so the governing class prefers a conspiracy of, if not quite silence, then awkward terseness on the subject. 

Britain knows what can spur economic growth: housebuilding, a shift in taxation from the young to the asset-owning old. It also knows that Nimbies and pensioners slap anyone who fiddles with the existing settlement. And so the opposition Labour party does not propose to do much more than the ruling Conservatives to displease them. 

Britain knows that its public services could do with more cash. It also knows that its tax burden is nearing longtime highs. Even the state of the union is a kind of impasse. Scotland’s place in it is contested enough to bring constant stress but not so contested as to force a clarifying referendum in the medium term. 

This is a stalemate society. All the energy that would ordinarily go into the debating and doing of meaningful change now finds an outlet in proxy wars about petty things. The Gary Lineker affair (though not the refugee crisis about which he tweeted) is one such trifle. The rolling melodrama of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is another. 

To be clear, there are worse things than stalemate. Britain isn’t a disaster zone. It might avoid a recession. It has broken a run of inadequate prime ministers. One outcome of always skirting hard questions is relative civic peace. (Britain is easier to inhabit now than it was when Brexit was a big subject.) Nor does net annual immigration of more than half a million suggest a country on which the world has given up. Bangkok, Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City are permeated with some of Britain’s abiding assets: the English language, the inescapable Premier League, the elites who choose the UK for part of their education (or property holdings). 

But to plateau at a high altitude is still to plateau. With no movement on the big questions, no projects to be getting on with, expect Britain to throw itself into ever more sagas about nothing. Consider these low-stakes simulations of the debates it should be having. At least France goes direct. At least it is ripping itself apart over something important. Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms entail vast public sums and the very contract between citizen and state. I had to be reminded, in the age of on-demand goals highlights, that Match of the Day still exists. 

The problem isn’t, or isn’t just, an unserious political class. Or an electorate in love with circuses. It is the insolubility of the UK’s problems. Brexit is as grim as the reopening of it would be. Fraying public services bother millions, but so would a net increase in taxation. The problem underlying everything, low growth, has cures that are as politically incendiary as the sickness itself. For Britain, on issue after momentous issue, there are no chess moves available that don’t hurt its position elsewhere on the board. 

One recent prime minister wasn’t so defeatist. She defined herself against the stalemate culture. She abhorred the polite ducking of hard choices. But Liz Truss will spend the rest of her life as a punch line. No wonder Britain thinks avoidance isn’t so bad after all. If the price is the diversion of national energies into such small potatoes as Lineker-gate, well, worse fates can befall a people. 

A phrase sticks in the mind from a different drama in a different country over a decade ago. “We do not have time for this silliness,” said Barack Obama as he released paperwork to confirm his American birth. Well, Britain has all the time in the world for silliness. What else is there to do?

Bernie Sanders talks Corbyn, strikes and the NHS

 

How to fix the British economy

 Tim Harford in The FT

I recently argued that the UK’s economic performance has been disastrous for 15 years. The consequences are plain to see: people are struggling to make ends meet; taxes are high, yet public services are overloaded; fights over a shrinking economic pie are leading to widespread strikes. All this is taking place at a time of low unemployment, so we cannot simply wait for the business cycle to rescue us. 

If we could somehow improve the UK’s productivity growth rate, all of these problems would become easier to solve, and we could return to the business-as-usual of each generation being able to earn more than their parents, while working less and enjoying better conditions. 

But how? 

Start with a diagnosis of what ails the UK economy. The view from the right is that the UK is suffering from excessive taxes and red tape. This seems implausible. Taxes are certainly high by historical standards, but they have only recently spiked, yet productivity and growth have been disappointing since 2007. And there are plenty of richer economies with higher taxes. 

Nor is red tape to blame. According to the OECD, UK product market regulations are among the most competitive. 

The critique from the left focuses on inequality, but this is an old and mostly separate problem. Like any mixed-market economy, the UK is an unequal society, but income inequality in the UK is slightly lower now than at the time of the financial crisis and has barely changed over the past 20 years. A more relevant manifestation of inequality is the one between global titan London and regional capitals such as Manchester, which remain far behind in terms of value added per worker. 

Then there’s the centrist critique: blame Brexit. Now I am as prone to highlight the idiocies of Brexit as anyone, but unless Nigel Farage has discovered a time machine, a referendum decision in 2016 cannot be blamed for poor productivity performance starting around 2007. Brexit has solved nothing, and by creating barriers to trade with our most important trading partners, along with endless uncertainty, it is demonstrably making the situation worse. But the UK’s economic problems became apparent long before the referendum. 

The slightly tedious truth is that taxes, regulation, inequality and Brexit can all take a little bit of blame, alongside a gaggle of other culprits. (Professor Diane Coyle of Cambridge university has memorably likened the case to an Agatha Christie mystery: everybody did it.) 

To pick a few of these culprits at random, the quality of management in British companies is the worst in the G7, according to research by economists Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen. The country skimps on investment; total investment was the lowest in the G7 over the four decades preceding the pandemic. As a result, energy and transport infrastructure is run down. The Transpennine railway project is a case in point: a decade of dithering, nearly £200mn wasted and a project which was supposed to have opened in 2019 still exists largely in the imagination. Why? Politicians were more interested in announcing plans than in planning. 

Low investment from the private sector is now a more acute problem than in the public sector. Is this managerial incompetence? A lack of business finance from a too-concentrated retail banking sector? A logical response to the chronic political uncertainties of the past 15 years? 

Then there is the education system. It works well at the top, where British universities are still magnets for talent, but schooling is patchy and many young people, especially from deprived backgrounds, are poorly served. 

Kate Bingham, who chaired the UK’s Covid vaccine development programme, recently wrote in the FT that “short-term pressures are crowding out long-term solutions”. She was pleading the case for the UK’s life-science industry, but she could easily have been describing the British condition. Short-termism is now ubiquitous. For such a venerable polity, we have developed a shocking inability to think beyond the next few weeks. 

The few examples of policy excellence in the past 15 years have been times where our politicians or civil servants have risen to the challenge in a moment of crisis: I would suggest the Brown-Darling plan to prevent the banking system collapsing in 2008, the Johnson administration’s vaccine task force in 2020 and Johnson’s full-throated early support for Ukraine in 2022. Even when the UK government excels, it is not thanks to patient long-term reform and investment. 

It is easy to produce a list of sensible ways forward: modernise taxes to raise more revenue with fewer distortions; improve relations with the EU and streamline UK-EU trade, especially in services; liberalise planning rules to create jobs and cheaper, better homes. But all policy wonks and most politicians know this; nothing ever happens. 

It is sobering to re-read the LSE’s Growth Commission report of 2017. Many of its proposals were not policy proposals, but institutional reforms to keep the politicians away from policy proposals: Bank of England independence, but for everything. Contemplate the recent accomplishments of Whitehall and Westminster, and you see where the Growth Commission was coming from. 

While researching this column, I found a video of the commission’s co-chair, John Van Reenen, in which he described “what we need to do over the next 50 years”. It seemed an impossibly daunting timescale. Then I realised the video had been posted almost exactly 10 years ago. We could have started then. We didn’t, and we’ve gone backwards. We could at least start now.

The Difference between Bullshit and Lying

We have suffered both. Some never speak the truth because they don’t know or care about it. Others know the truth but lie anyway wrires Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

I

llustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian 

 
Sometimes it falls to an old book to tell us what’s new, to a white-bearded philosopher based far from Westminster or Washington to clarify the shifts in our sharp-suited politics. So spare yourself the annual round-ups in the newspapers or the boy-scout enthusiasm of podcasters. To understand the great political shift of this year, the work you need is a piece of philosophy called ­– what else? – On Bullshit.

I offer it to you this Christmas because surely no reader of mine can resist an essay that begins: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” Statements like that made it a bestseller upon re-publication in 2005 and turned its then-75-year-old author, Harry Frankfurt, from a distinguished moral philosopher at Yale and Princeton into a chatshow guest.

But to open the book now is to get a blast of something quite different, in a climate that just didn’t exist two decades ago. Read today, On Bullshit taxonomises an entire style of government. It foretells the age of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

The task Frankfurt sets himself is to define bullshit. What it is not, he argues, is lying. Both misrepresent the truth, but with entirely different intentions. The liar is “someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood”. He or she knows the truth or could lay hands on it – but they certainly aren’t giving it to you. The bullshitter, on the other hand, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshitters couldn’t give two hoots about the truth. They just want a story.

In that distinction lies an explanation for this era of politics. Commentators have struggled for years to coin the phrase for now. “Populist” doesn’t work. Too often, it merely denotes what the author and their friends dislike, throwing together clowns such as Beppe Grillo with social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn. A similar problem bedevils “strongman”, a label stuck on Xi Jinping and Jair Bolsonaro alike. But “bullshitter” – that sums up just how different Trump and Johnson are from their predecessors.

‘Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Some enterprising future editor of a dictionary of political terms will carry the word “bullshit” and cite as examples: writing two opposing columns on Brexit, claiming the NHS will be £350m a week better off and affecting a hurt expression when asked the whereabouts of your promised 40 new hospitals. Come on! Those little-doggy eyes beseech the hard-faced TV interviewer. Didn’t everyone know that was bullshit?

Socially, there is little to distinguish Johnson from David Cameron: both are Bullingdon boys manufactured at Eton. In policy, too, there is a fair carryover between George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” and Johnson’s “levelling up”, or between Cameron’s vow to get net immigration down to the tens of thousands and the pledges made by Johnson’s home secretary, Priti Patel. The great divide is in rhetoric: how Johnson talked to voters and the promises he made us. They were never meant to be taken at face value.

Among the media class’s artisanal industries of the past few years has been trying to find a thread that runs through Johnson the journalist, the globalist mayor of London and the Brexit prime minister. Frankfurt furnishes that link: it is bullshit.

Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames meet promises of an “oven-ready” Brexit deal. They are electioneering fables rather than manifesto commitments, grand gestures over small print, cheerful dishonesty in place of lawyered mendacity. In other words, they are all just careerist bullshit.

Much the same goes for Liz Truss, although she was clearly not as good at it. Looking back, this summer’s Tory leadership contest can be seen as a final hurrah for the “anything goes” era. And it certainly applies to Trump. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” Bullshit. “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.” Bullshit. A “sea of love” at his inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Frankfurt’s book offers a theory of a generation of politicians who now appear to be leaving the stage.

‘A ‘sea of love’ at Donald Trump’s inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/EPA

Lies can be shown up: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But there is no point factchecking bullshit, as parts of the British media still do over Brexit or the New York Times did with Trump. For a bullshitter, facts are beside the point – the real aim is to produce a story that erases the line between truth and falsehood. It’s why the philosopher concludes: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

We all lie sometimes, and around millions of tables there will be much bullshit spoken over the Christmas turkey. In British politics, the era of bullshit followed on naturally from a long spell of lies. Before Johnson, the most effective Tory of the post-Thatcher era was Osborne.

He blamed Labour and Gordon Brown for the banking crash, only later admitting that was untrue. He declared Labour’s 2008 package to bail out the banks would spark a run on the pound, before confessing: “Broadly speaking, the government did what was necessary.”

Most of all, he claimed that slashing benefits was essential to bring down borrowing and was being done fairly. Remember “we are all in this together”? Except a study at the end of the coalition by the late John Hills, of the LSE, alongside other leading academics, showed that the coalition’s tax and benefit changes had “a net fiscal cost” – which meant they increased the deficit. Not only that, but “the poorest 30% [of Britons] lost or broke even on average and the top half gained”. Heading the Treasury, Osborne was in charge of a machine that could calculate the effects of his policies. He would have or should have known the truth as he laid out each budget. And yet voters were fed something entirely different.

One might see these as common or garden political lies – falsehoods that could be checked and that aimed at nothing more than establishing a poll lead for Osborne’s team. They were not the alternative reality of Vote Leave. But if the currency of truth is sufficiently debased, voters may eventually choose the altogether more entertaining humbugger. In that lies a warning for both Rishi Sunak, the down-to-earth multimillionaire, and Keir Starmer, the man who said he was Corbyn before revealing himself to be Tony Blair meets Gordon Brittas, the TV sitcom manager whose words never match results or deeds.

One topic Frankfurt doesn’t address is the audience for bullshit. Why do people buy it? To which we might add another question. Why have swathes of the political establishment and the press spent the past few years claiming Brexit is a success or that levelling up is serious or that any alternative to the most venal dishonesty is just impossible? Answers would be welcome but were we to press for any, I suspect we’d be told to drop the bullshit.

The strange case of Britain’s demise

A country that prided itself on stability has seemed to be in free-fall. Whodunnit? asks The Economist

Dec 12th 2022 | GRANTHAM

The driveway dips as you approach Belton House, the gold-hued façade rising before you as the road tilts up again. Passing through a marble-floored hall to the ornate saloon, early visitors would have admired a portrait of the original master’s daughter with a black attendant. For a while, says Fiona Hall of the National Trust, a heritage charity that these days owns the property, servants came and went from the kitchen wing through a discreet tunnel. A magnificent staircase led finally to a rooftop cupola, and views of an estate that stretched beyond the horizon.

Built in the 1680s, the idyllic mansion embodies a costume-drama view of Britain’s past that is widely cherished at home and abroad. Its location in Lincolnshire makes it emblematic in another way: in the heart of England, in a region that in 2016 voted decisively for Brexit, and on the outskirts of Grantham, a typical market town that was the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher, the country’s most important post-war prime minister. Previously the venue for a murder-mystery evening featuring suspects in period dress, this history-laden spot is an apt place to ponder a different sort of mystery. Who nobbled Britain?

Alas, the victim is in a parlous state. A country that likes to think of itself as a model of phlegmatic common sense and good-humoured stability has become an international laughing stock: three prime ministers in as many months, four chancellors of the exchequer and a carousel of resigning ministers, some of them repeat offenders. “The programme of the Conservative Party,” declared Benjamin Disraeli in 1872, “is to maintain the constitution of the country.” The latest bunch of party leaders have broken their own laws, sidelined official watchdogs, disrespected Parliament and dishonoured treaties.

Not just a party, or a government, but Britain itself can seem to be kaput. England’s union with Scotland, cemented not long after Belton House was built, is fraying. Real incomes have flatlined since the crash of 2008, with more years of stagnation to come as the economy limps behind those of most other rich countries. The reckless tax-slashing mini-budget in September threatened to deliver the coup de grâce. The pound tanked, markets applied a “moron premium” to British sovereign debt and the Bank of England stepped in to save the government from itself.

Today the economy is entering recession, inflation is rampant and pay strikes are disrupting railways, schools and even hospitals. The National Health Service (nhs), the country’s most cherished institution, is buckling. Millions of people are waiting for treatment in hospitals. Ambulances are perilously scarce.

In Grantham, a town of neat red-brick terraced houses, half-timbered pubs and 45,000 residents, the malaise shows up in a penumbra of hardship. Amid staff shortages in the nhs—and an uproar—the local emergency-care service has been cut back. Immured in stacks of nappies and cornflakes at the food bank he runs, Brian Hanbury says demand is up by 50% on last year, and is set to rocket as heating bills bite. Rachel Duffey of PayPlan, a debt-solutions firm that is one of the biggest local employers, predicts that need for help with debts is “about to explode” nationwide, as people already feeling the pinch come to the end of fixed-rate mortgage deals. As for the mini-budget: “It was a shambles,” laments Jonathan Cammack, steward of Grantham Conservative Club.

Natural causes

Whodunnit? A rich cast of suspects is implicated in the debacle. Some are obvious, others lurk in the shadows of history, seeping poison rather than dealing sudden blows. A few are outsiders, but as in many of the spookiest mysteries, most come from inside the house.

To begin with, Britons with long memories may detect a familiar condition: a government that has reached decrepit old age. A parliamentary remark in October about soon-to-quit Liz Truss—“the prime minister is not under a desk”—brought to mind immortal lines from the death-spiral of the Labour administration that lasted from 1997 to 2010. Then the chancellor referred to the prime minister’s henchmen as “the forces of hell”; “Home secretary’s husband put porn on expenses”, newspapers reported. In the mid-1990s, at the fag-end of Tory rule that began in 1979, a run of mps were caught with their pants down or their fingers in the till in another relay of shame.

Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power. Eventually routed at the polls, it then takes the guilty parties several parliamentary terms to recover. In opposition, both Labour and the Tories have determinedly learned the wrong lessons from defeat before alighting on the right ones. In a system with two big parties, for either to lose its mind is dangerous. For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.

“A family with the wrong members in control,” George Orwell wrote of the English. Yet a repeating cycle of senile governments does not, by itself, explain the national plight. Those previous administrations never plumbed the depth of disarray the current lot has reached. Something else has struck a country that has spewed out ruinous policies and a sequence of leaders resembling a reverse ascent of man: from plausible but glib David Cameron, to out-of-her-depths Theresa May, disgraceful Boris Johnson and then Ms Truss, probably the worst premier in modern history. Philip Cowley of Queen Mary University of London says that, in bygone days, Rishi Sunak would at this stage of his career have been a junior Treasury minister, rather than the latest prime minister.

Violence has been inflicted on the body politic—most brazenly, by Brexit, in the referendum, with 52%. Parties in power for over a decade are bound to scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. In this case, much of the Tory barrel was poured down the drain when support for Brexit became a prerequisite for office. The outcome has been rule by chancers and cranks. Mr Johnson’s Brexit machinations put him in Downing Street; the tribalism that the campaign fostered kept him there for much longer than he deserved. Brexit has wrecked the Tory party—and yet it is, broadly speaking, the side that won.

Brexit has also institutionalised lying in British politics, as the dishonesty of Brexiteer promises segued into the pretence that they are being fulfilled. They are not. “Nothing much has changed,” says Mr Cammack in Grantham. “Life just keeps going on.” But some things have changed for the worse. Investment is down and inflation higher than it would have been inside the European Union. Labour, skilled and otherwise, is scarce. Farmers are losing crops for want of workers. In Lincolnshire, says Johanna Musson of the National Farmers Union, tulip-growers are especially fretful. The county’s exports have fallen as, across Britain, Brexit-induced red tape leads some businesses to give up on European markets altogether.

In 1975, during an earlier strike-hit era, Britain held another referendum on its relationship with Europe. Roy Jenkins, a pro-Europe statesman, predicted that, if it left, it would wind up in “an old people’s home for faded nations”. Give or take a detour to the lunatic asylum, that judgment looks prescient. The economy is floundering and the country’s international prestige is plummeting: precisely the future Brexit was meant to avoid.

Still, as any murder-mystery aficionado knows, the obvious suspect is rarely the right one. In the curious case of Britain’s decline, Brexit is as much a weapon as the ultimate culprit.

The hand of history

Many of the factors behind the decision to leave have roughed up other countries, too. Lots of people on both sides of the Atlantic crave simple answers to complex questions, and populists have provided them. Faith in mainstream parties has waned, even as expectations of government have risen. The line between politics and entertainment has blurred, aggravating, in Britain, an old reluctance to take things too seriously, and a weakness for wits and eccentrics who cock a snook at convention. That is less damaging when there is substance behind their insouciance and discipline beneath the panache.

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes Britain’s predicament seem less an inside job than part of a wider takedown of democracy.

But other likely suspects lurk in the attic of British history. One grew up down the road from Belton House. The grocer’s shop in Grantham above which Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, was born is now a chiropractor and beautician. A statue of her put up earlier this year was quickly egged and defaced (she endured worse in real life). Her legend still looms over the country—particularly her Conservative Party.

Thatcher’s 11-year rule was an amalgam of caution, patience, luck and boldness. But among some Tories it is often misremembered as a prolonged ecstasy of tax-cutting, fight-picking, union-bashing and shouting “No, no, no” at Brussels. The rows over Europe that erupted on her watch rumbled on till the referendum of 2016. For some, she bequeathed a hunch that if economic policy doesn’t hurt, it isn’t working. Her ousting nurtured a lasting taste for party bloodletting. To court Tory members, Ms Truss even seemed to mimic Thatcher’s wardrobe. (It took just 81,326 of them to put her in Downing Street.)

Peer deeper into the past and more evidence comes to light. Recall, for instance, that painting in the saloon at Belton House, of the girl and her black attendant, possibly a slave. Her family, the Brownlows, had links to both Caribbean plantations and the East India Company, which helps explain the house’s splendid collection of Asian porcelain. The wider legacy of Britain’s former empire, runs a plausible theory, is a gnawing sense of unmet expectations and a fatal delusion of grandeur over the country’s place in the world.

For Sathnam Sanghera, author of “Empireland”, a powerful book about the largely unspoken effects of imperialism, “the original sin behind Brexit is empire.” The circumstances in which that empire was lost may have redoubled the psychic blow: in the wake of the second world war, during which, at least in the popular memory, Britain stood nobly alone against the Nazi onslaught. Afterwards it found itself diminished, broke and outdone by erstwhile foes, nurturing entwined feelings of greatness and grievance and haunted by phantom invasions. As the Irish author Fintan O’Toole has quipped, “England never got over winning the war.” In his view, Brexit was “imperial England’s last last stand”.

Perhaps not quite the last. Even now you can hear an echo of imperial hubris in the tendency of some British politicians to talk to eu negotiators, or the international bond markets, as if they were waiters in a Mediterranean bistro, liable to comply if only you repeat yourself loudly enough. It resounds in hollow boasts about having the best health care or army (or football team) in the world, in the yen to “punch above our weight”, and in the pursuit of a pure sort of sovereignty which, in an age of climate change, pandemics and imported gas, no longer exists.

“Until we face up to our history,” thinks Mr Sanghera, “we’re just going to carry on being dysfunctional.” On this analysis, the unravelling of Britain is a kind of karma.

In the 18th century, with a shrug

Maybe. Yet imperialism, greatness and all that have always been more an elite preoccupation than a popular one. In his enlightening new book, “The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain”, Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London cites a survey of Britons conducted in 1951, when the loss of empire ought to have been most raw. Half of respondents couldn’t name a single colony (one suggested Lincolnshire). Odd as it is to say of a country that for centuries ruled swathes of the world, it may not be ruptures like the end of empire or Brexit that have done in modern Britain, but, less dramatically, a kind of long-term drift; not violence, in other words, but neglect.

Think back to the era in which Belton House was built. After the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the short-lived English Commonwealth, the monarchy had been restored. Compared with other European nations, the English got their big revolution done early—but then thought better of it, afterwards nudging forwards to constitutional monarchy and democracy. This piecemeal approach has characterised the country’s political evolution ever since. Walter Bagehot, a great Victorian editor of The Economist, noted the habit of compromising on thorny constitutional issues—or ducking them. “The hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit,” he wrote of such botches, and “succeeding generations fought elsewhere.”

Booby traps were often left behind. One lies in the fuzzy and weak restraints on the British executive. As Lord Hailsham, a Tory grandee, warned in 1976, a government with a secure majority in the House of Commons has an inbuilt tendency towards “elective dictatorship”. The House of Lords, which is meant to scrutinise legislation, is the fudge par excellence. In an absurd backroom deal of 1999, the hereditary peers who once dominated it were ejected—except for 92 of them. They are still there; when one dies, another is elected to replace him. Those are the only elections to Parliament’s upper chamber.

It is hard to see many other countries tolerating such a farrago. Meanwhile, a gentlemanly understanding that leaders would regulate their personal behaviour, once known as the “good chaps” theory of government, did not survive contact with Mr Johnson. As when a mob realises the rule of law is a confidence trick, it turned out that a few good shoves could dispense with much of the flimflam of oversight.

Or consider the myopic attitudes of successive governments to devolution. When it created the Scottish Parliament, Sir Tony Blair’s Labour administration did not fully anticipate the subsequent surge in English nationalism. Nor did it foresee how, after taking office in Edinburgh, the canny, pro-independence Scottish National Party (snp) would enjoy both the dignity of power and the sheen of opposition to Westminster. Now Brexit is inflicting more casual vandalism on the union, undermining support for it in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which both voted to remain in the eu.

Whereas once Scottish independence was an in-or-out proposition, says Sir John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, it has become a choice between competing unions, British and European. As the snp vows to rejoin the eu, some Scottish Remainers who had rejected independence are embracing the idea. For some in Northern Ireland, explains Katy Hayward of Queen’s University Belfast, the mere fact of Brexit made a united Ireland more desirable; the region’s awkward post-Brexit position has led still more to think unification is likelier than it was before. Across Britain, a majority thinks the union will fall apart. It is not on the cards yet, but one day Britain may dissolve itself by accident.

Drift and neglect have undermined more than the constitution and the union. David Kynaston, the pre-eminent historian of 20th-century England, invokes Sir Siegmund Warburg, a German-born banker who helped shake up the City (on the slide as an equity market in the aftermath of Brexit). Warburg detested the British fondness for the phrase, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” As Mr Kynaston observes, Britain is not a place that is “good at grasping the nettle”.

With some glaring, uncharacteristic exceptions—Thatcher’s battle with the coal miners, the bust-up over Brexit—Britain tends to dislike confrontation, especially the ideological kind, perhaps a legacy of the civil war. It prefers irony to ideas and douses plain-speaking in good manners; its people have a quaint instinct to apologise when a stranger steps on their foot. Alongside this squeamishness, says Mr Kynaston, runs a “deep-dyed anti-intellectual empiricism”, and an inclination to tackle problems “pragmatically, as and when they arise, not looking for trouble in advance”.

This reticence has costs, not least through its complicity in the underpowered economy. Consider the glacial planning regime, or—an even more venerable problem—the skewed education system. It produces a narrow elite, dominated for too long by the alumni of a few private schools: Brexit and the mini-budget can both be traced to the playing fields of Eton, attended by Mr Johnson, Mr Cameron, who botched the referendum, and Kwasi Kwarteng, very briefly the chancellor. Less conspicuous, but at least as damaging, is the country’s long educational tail.

It has recently made some progress in international education rankings, but a stubborn quarter or so of 11-year-olds in England are unable to read at the expected level. A higher share of teenage boys are not in work, education or training than in most other rich countries. As for those who stay in the classroom: the “greater part of what is taught in schools and universities…does not seem to be the most proper preparation” for “the business which is to employ [students] during the remainder of their days.” That was Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, published in 1776. Employers make similar complaints in 2022.

In a post-imperial, post-industrial, ever-more competitive world, all that contributes to a skills shortage and a long-term productivity gap with other advanced economies. The fat years under Sir Tony and Gordon Brown disguised these shortcomings—until the crash, when it became clear that the boom they oversaw was over-reliant on financial services and public and private debt. Using the fruits of Thatcherite economics to fund a more generous state had seemed a political elixir; it turned out to be a fair-weather formula. In the kindest of circumstances, New Labour left some of the hardest problems unsolved. Most new jobs went to foreign-born workers. The number of working-age adults receiving welfare benefits barely shifted.

The cradle of the Industrial Revolution has not yet found a secure niche in the 21st-century economy. Nor has it figured out how to pay sustainably for the sort of public services that Britons expect. If, in the matter of Britain’s meltdown, Thatcher is an accessory before the fact, so is Sir Tony.

The country-house red herring

In the upstairs-downstairs, country-house vision of Britain, the country is a museum of class, with overlords surveying their lands and minions scurrying below stairs as they once did at Belton House. Famously, Disraeli wrote of “two nations”, the rich and the poor, as distinct as “inhabitants of different planets”. England, especially, is indeed a class-ridden place, whose denizens still make snap judgments about each other’s backgrounds based on accents, shoes and haircuts. Too many at the bottom of the ladder cannot see a way up it. Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference. Politicians often share this binary outlook, thinking the business of government is to squeeze the rich and comfort the poor, or vice versa.

But Disraeli’s formulation is too crude for 21st-century Britain. After generations of muddling through, it is in large part a country of people who are not exactly poor but are by no means rich. Instead they are “just about managing”, as Mrs May, the last prime minister but two, described them.

Take Grantham, a constituency in which the average income in 2020 was £25,600 ($32,900), just below the national median. (This year, Britain’s gdp per person will be more than 25% lower than America’s, measured at purchasing-power parity.) Amid the cost-of-living squeeze, says Mr Hanbury at the food bank, not only households that rely on welfare benefits but nurses and teachers are coming unstuck: “People live so close to the edge.”

It is only a 70-minute train ride to London, but power in Westminster seems remote, reflects Father Stuart Cradduck of St Wulfram’s, a lovely medieval church behind Grantham’s low-slung high street. Lincolnshire, he says, feels like a “forgotten county”. Kelham Cooke, the leader of the local council, says young people who leave for university often don’t come back. Regional inequality is another old, hard problem that successive British governments have only desultorily tackled, watching on as London sucked in talent and capital and other places fell behind.

There is something to be said for drift; or, to put it another way, gradualism. A “highly original quality of the English”, Orwell wrote in 1947, “is their habit of not killing one another.” By slowly expanding the franchise and incorporating the labour movement into democratic politics, Britain avoided continental-style extremism in the 19th and 20th centuries. When liberalism perished elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s, observes Mr Bogdanor, it survived in Britain. Compared with places such as France or Italy, where the far right is resurgent—or with ultrapolarised America—it is healthy in Britain still. Ms Truss’s stint in Downing Street was inglorious, but, Mr Bogdanor notes, she was removed quietly and efficiently, without riots or fuss. The flawed parliamentary system worked.

So drift can be benign. But it can also take you into a cul-de-sac—or off a cliff. In Britain it has led to economic mediocrity and disgruntlement, which in turn contributed to the yelp of Brexit and the desperate magical thinking of the mini-budget. Senile governments, self-inflicted wounds, the blowback of empire, corrosive global trends, the spectres of bygone leaders: they are all accomplices. But the main cause of Britain’s woe belongs less at a crime scene than in a school report. In the end, it didn’t try hard enough.