Decline is back. Commentators are noticing that the UK economy has not been doing well and is projected to stagnate. Other countries are doing better, in productivity, investment, research and skills. It really is deja vu all over again. But not quite. Only yesterday we were being told a different story – one of the fastest rates of growth in the OECD, of a new global, buccaneering Britain, a science superpower, an innovation hub, the fastest vaccine rollout… What is going on?
We have been living in an era of revivalism. At its core is an economic story which holds that Thatcherism had reversed the longstanding British economic decline, which had perhaps started in the 1870s, or perhaps in 1945. From being the sick man of Europe, the UK could stand proud again, and return to a global role. This view profoundly affected politics. New Labour, the party of post-decline cool Britannia, started to talk of British leadership, of global Britain, of a special internationalist destiny.
More recently, and more surprisingly, so did the Brexiters. They took from New Labour a whole revivalist discourse – around creativity, entrepreneurship and globality. The then prime minister Theresa May picked up on these themes, giving them a grounding in British history. Because the UK was once the global champion of free trade, it is so again. Because in the 17th century it was a key seat of the scientific revolution, and in the 18th century of the Industrial Revolution, it is in pole position to produce the innovations that will lead the world into the fourth industrial revolution.
Boris Johnson managed to stay stupefyingly high on his own supply of uppers. Much fun can be had at his expense for using the term “world-beating” for every tiny success. But this was no quirk of an aberrant prime minister; it was rather the ludicrous high point of a systematic, mendacious revivalism that was central to Brexit.
That Brexit was premised on revivalism rather than weaknesses in the economy is worth pondering. Brexiters could have made nationalist-declinist hay by pointing to the relative weakness of the British economy, its appallingly negative balance of trade with the EU, and claimed that EU membership was the cause of decline and the poverty of the people. But they said none of this – they focused on immigration, on sovereignty, on claiming we would be keeping the exact same trade relations. Brexiters were saying, in effect, that the EU did no damage to the UK economy, but merely restricted its potential. Indeed, they accused remainers of being gloomsters and doomsters talking the country down. Declinism became for the first time in British history a term of political abuse.
It would not have been hard to make a broader declinist case. Post Thatcher and into the present, rates of economic growth have remained lower than in the 1950s and 1960s, the supposed years of decline. The UK economy has not caught up in productivity with France or Germany. There was no great unleashing of British entrepreneurship creating new world-beating enterprises. Instead, more foreign businesses came to the UK. Inequality rose as the rich got richer not through entrepreneurship, but through effortlessly owning houses and shares. The particularities of what happened in London, the product very largely of foreign capital and foreign expertise, did not stand for a British success affecting the whole country.
But this case could not be made by Brexiters precisely because they believed the revivalist yarn and had no intention of doing anything real to transform the logic of the economy. Brexit was built on multiple lies and also on a very particular understanding of the British economy. However, the fact that the UK is not now in a good place economically, that its politics and public life are toxic, that the quality of the state and of much else has declined, is not an argument for resuscitating declinist theses. Remoaner declinism is not a truth to counter Brexiter revivalist lies.
The long-term British relative decline, which has undoubtedly happened, and continues, has been mostly due to the success of other countries, not British failure. Rather than accept this, declinists often explained things that did not happen, with explanations that did not work, based on bad history. Thus declinists insist that British R&D has always been low, the City always over-mighty, the country always in the grip of empire, the state under the imaginative control of classicists and historians rather than technocrats, that industry never stood a chance.
It is a grim catalogue, not of British failings, but of poor historical understanding, which has profoundly distorted the history of the nation.
Declinism, like revivalism, had its politics. Imperialism and a globalist orientation, so the story ran, explained the UK’s supposed hostility to national industrial development. Indeed, declinism was a core doctrine of postwar nationalist critics of Britain, not least those of the left such as Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson. But there have also been declinisms of the nationalist right, like that of Correlli Barnett.
But they have systematically effaced from British history the very real nationalism, technocratic hubris and industrial development of the UK. Margaret Thatcher had her own kind of anti-trade union and cultural declinism. Declinism also had its remainers and its leavers. Some of the most enthusiastic Europhiles of the 1960s and 1970s were declinists. On the other hand, the leftwing Brexiters of the 1970s and 1980s were declinists who believed EEC membership reinforced the decline.
The British economy and society of today is much more affected by recent than by ancient history. Increasing inequality, between people and between regions, the rentierisation of the economy, the stagnation in productivity, these are a recent development. It is not something eternal, it is something created. Neither the nostrums of revivalists (a deluded Brexit) or the declinists (more industry, R&D, technocracy) will return the UK even to where it was relatively in 1979.
For both declinism and revivalism are symptoms of a nation unable to come to grips with its place in the world. Both are stuck in nationalist insularity: one claims the nation is reborn, the other that it can be reborn, to take its proper high place in world affairs. But understanding that real place, and the real nature of capitalism in the UK, and crucially in the world as a whole, is central to any possibility of transformative politics, and that requires England in particular to be modest about a nation that has much to be modest about.
• David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and professor of modern British history at King’s College London
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