Author - Discover Society

Les Back

What kind of public need is there for sociology today? In the political sphere, the Conservative government under Boris Johnson’s leadership is unguardedly hostile to social science. Ten years ago Johnson spoke disparagingly of what he called ‘sociological justifications’ in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots. As prime minister he was consistently flippant. The Spectator reported in 2020 that his cabinet committee on crime chaired by himself with Priti Patel as his deputy would root out ‘lefty criminologists’.

Thatcher’s ghostly shadow has become political common sense

Thinking about society is reduced to bleating or offering excuses and social ills are ultimately understood as the responsibility of individuals. Margaret Thatcher’s famous pronouncement in the pages Women’s Own Magazine in 1987 that there is ‘…no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.” Thatcher’s ghostly shadow has become political common sense. Society is not something to be discovered because for her disciples it simply does not exist.

For all of our radical affectations and promises, a close look at the public portrayals of sociology have been bent towards self-justification. The bluntest examples of this are the demand to prove social ‘impact’, that we are contributing to political solutions. The UK university sector is holding its breath for the outcomes of the latest Research Assessment Exercise that will be announced in April next year. This kind of reformist approach to the value of knowledge puts us on the side of the political elite, Ministers of State, JobCentre Managers, Immigration Officers, and the apparatchiks of prevailing government policy. Looking closely at the submissions of the last exercise in 2014, I was clear that this way of approaching public value puts academic sociology on the side of the powerful. In the current political climate where information is managed and reduced cynically to public relations, do the powerful even care that we are siding with them? I think the short answer, is no! They don’t care and they have another kind of political project.

… we have seen the drawing of people of colour into the machinery of government to be the spokespeople for an increasingly draconian and nationalist post-Brexit conservatism

This late Thatcherite brand of conservativism conceives the polity in ways that are incommensurable with the forms of knowledge created in the social sciences. This is not just a matter of Conservative ideology. The New Labour of governments of the nineties viewed social science to problem solve policy and develop pragmatic social engineering. What is distinctive about late Thatcherite conservatism is that they have no shared sense of society or social imaginary. What we have also seen is the drawing of people of colour into the machinery of government to be the spokespeople for an increasingly draconian and nationalist post-Brexit conservatism. This brand of conservatism has taken on a postcolonial mask in ways that the great anti-colonial theorist Franz Fanon anticipated. Through figures like Home Secretary Priti Patel or Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, government takes on the appearance of diversity. While at this same time this form of diversity conservatism is presiding over an openly anti-immigrant border policy and resisting broader pressures to address racism domestically and globally.

In our present moment, hostility to teaching ‘critical race theory’ or ‘gender identity’ is the way diversity conservatism expresses its ire for sociological ideas. Kemi Badenoch, Minister for Equalities, who was born in London of Nigerian heritage, commented that teachers who presented the idea of white privilege as a fact to their students were breaking the law and she described critical race theory as ‘an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression.’ Diversity conservatism is also producing forms of knowledge fit for its own interests and commitments. This is itself nothing new and the right has always had its own intellectuals and ideologues. What is distinctive in our moment is the way intellectuals of colour are in the foreground of this process.

The findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED), part of the Race Disparity Unit of the Cabinet Office, is a good example. Commission members were chosen by political adviser Munira Mirza and included black educationalist Tony Sewell, space scientist and science educator Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Aftab Chughtai, former police officer and chair of the Youth Justice Board Keith Fraser, and global economist and author Dambisa Moyo. Prior to the commission, Munira Mirza was on record as denying the existence of structural and institutional racism.

The commission published its report in March 2021, the content of which caused considerable controversy. The report concluded that the “claim the country is still institutionally racist is not borne out by the evidence”. It also emphasised ‘immigrant optimism’ in entrepreneurship and celebrated immigrant social mobility and success while stressing that “family is also the foundation stone of success for many ethnic minorities.” Here we see the legacy of Thatcherite logic in which societal and structural inequalities are disavowed while emphasis is placed on individual responsibility and valuing conventional (two parents heterosexual) model of family life.

… diversity is foregrounded ideologically as a vehicle to reinforce the free-market individualism

In 2020 Conservative Minister Liz Truss said in a speech entitled The Fight for Fairness, citing her own experience growing up in the 1980s that her peers in Leeds were taught about racism and sexism, before basic forms of literacy. “These ideas,” she said, “have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.” It is not just that Conservative politicians dismiss and discredit sociological ideas. Rather, diversity is foregrounded ideologically as a vehicle to reinforce the free-market individualism within a political morality centered around family values and national loyalty.

This challenges the legitimacy of academic sociology but begs the question of the kinds of audiences we are trying to engage with. Ben Baumberg Geiger recently published in the journal Sociology a fascinating study of how leading sociologists present themselves publicly. Here sociologists perform ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘credibility’ through ‘non-partisanship’ and ‘dispassionate advocacy’ rather than traditional ideas of scientific objectivity. The question that remains is with whom are we trying to be credible? I think we might seek a different kind of public role amid the grim political scenario I have sketched. Shamser Sinha and I have called this a sociable sociology.

Our book Migrant City is an attempt to realise a different form of knowledge production. It took us ten years to research and write. It is the story of London told from the vantage point of young migrants living in the capital through the torrid anti-immigrant decades of the early 21st century. We started research in 2008 and it was completed in 2018. The book is also an experiment with researching in a more sociable ongoing way so that the participants can also become authors and commentators that are also acknowledged and credited explicitly.

We wanted to create vivid insights generated out of the everyday experience of living in the migrant city

We have repeatedly circled back, arranged more meetings in café and informal urban spaces to pick up the conversation. For some, it has also been part of their journey to becoming observers and chroniclers of the city be it through storytelling, painting, and poetry. In writing the book we wanted to portray the participants who taught us so much as rounded human beings and not disembodied interview experts. If we reduce a person to a condensed quotation, then we reduce their life in human terms too. Unfolding complex life is transcribed and squashed into a flat transcription. We aimed for something else. We wanted to create vivid insights generated out of the everyday experience of living in the migrant city.

In summer 2021 the book was translated for publication in Japan. The years that have followed the book’s publication in 2018 have been no less dramatic and difficult to interpret. The Covid 19 global pandemic has added new dimensions to the experience of migration and city life. In the spirit of our way of doing research, we have returned to some of the key voices in this book to try and fill the gap between where our story ended and now.

For the author participants being involved in the writing of Migrant City has brought them into the sociological conversation as active knowledge producers. Some like Charlynne Bryan who you’ll hear from shortly have become published authors. Their lives were not merely used as evidence to be presented through sociological ventriloquism. Through the process of dialogue, it made them active readers, interpreters, and contributors to theory construction too.

For Charlynne, one of the deep lessons of the pandemic is how to live in the face of possible infection and premature death

We met Charlynne again in the summer of 2021 at Westfield Shopping Centre in East London, a regular place for us to catch up over Costa coffee and cake. For Charlynne, one of the deep lessons of the pandemic is how to live in the face of possible infection and premature death. She explained: “And everybody knew that they could die from it. And that’s all they focused on the death… COVID kind of brought that to the forefront of our mind that we’re not going to live forever, that there is an end. And we don’t know when that end is; it could be any minute.” This, for Charlynne, poses moral or philosophical questions about how to live in the face of this. For many, it brought out the worst fears and phobias about others. She explained: “And so the reaction wasn’t a reaction of “Oh my goodness, I’m going to do my best and live the best life that I can”. It was an “I’m going to be suspicious of everybody that can threaten that life that I’m living now and potentially bring about my end quicker”.

Covid 19 has exacerbated the fear of the stranger. Charlynne described an experience that showed how the pandemic has thrown the way people interact in the city: “I was walking through Mile End station once going to work, and I coughed, and it was at the beginning of the pandemic, nobody was wearing masks as yet and all of that, but there was one man who covered his face and started running on the platform because I coughed.” The idea that the pandemic is a consequence of immigration amplifies the ‘hostile environment’ that migrants experienced in London before it.

For Charlynne, there is another impulse and that is to live a better more open-hearted life. Charlynne wrote poems as part of her contribution to the research which was published in Migrant City. She published a collection of poems during the pandemic entitled Letters to My Soul. Throughout the pandemic, Charlynne continued with her poetry group that is based in East London. “And so my poetry group moved online and so all of the Colombian people, and you know the Jamaican people and the Trinidadian people, all of us were coming together and the Bangladeshi people as well and sharing our poetry and talking about what COVID did to us and how we were affected by it and what we would prefer instead and whether or not this was normal that we were going to be subjected to for the rest of our lives. And it was really nice to see that even within that where there was so much isolation, and there was still so much community.” So, in the face of death during the pandemic, Charlynne points to how to refuse isolation and fear and choose connection and community as a better way to live.

… this pandemic has definitely proven that, though as migrants we are ostracized in so many ways, we’re needed in so many ways that we can make it in so many ways

Living in the migrant city through this pandemic for Charlynne has left her with a deep sense of pride. “I generally don’t like to generalise, but when I think of my people, and… I’m using my people as a general term to talk about migrants, be it migrants, from the Caribbean, or migrants from Europe or migrants from Africa. And my people know how to make things work when things aren’t working. And that’s one of the things that’s always struck me about migrant communities is that they… you put them in a situation where they have nothing, and they will magic, something out of nothing, you put them in a situation where they’re illegal, and they can’t work to get money, but they will find some way to make it work for their family, you put them in a situation where it’s hard, and there’s a pandemic, and they will find a way to make something out of that so that it doesn’t become something that destroys them. You know, and this pandemic has definitely proven that, that even though as migrants we are ostracized in so many ways, that we’re needed in so many ways that we can make it in so many ways. And that’s been the beautiful thing for me… I’m kind of proud of my people, you know, really proud of my people for that.”

We asked Charlynne what message she would send to Japanese readers. She thought for a moment, “You know, so I would say to Japanese readers… read the book, and read what’s being said, by the real people that are involved in Migrant City, London, and try to understand, from their point of view, what being a migrant really is, instead of hearing it from somebody else.” The reason for offering the research fable is that, for us, this is the ultimate measure of credibility: firstly, the people with whom we have collaborated with recognise themselves on the pages of this book; secondly, that this mode of sociable sociology offers participants to be the authors of their own lives.

It is pointless to seek to influence government or powerful institutions in the current climate. Diversity conservatives have closed their ears to sociology. The great folly of the ‘impact agenda’ is the idea that structures of power and influence are open or even amenable to being changed through knowledge. Why would they be? Power and privilege always hold shape and refuse to be impacted upon unless it is forced to do so. Academic journal articles and reports of the like submitted to the 2021 Research Assessment are not going to change that.

We need to find alternative ways to do our craft in more sociably public ways. This opens up wider involvement in knowledge-making but also the opportunity for us as researchers to be part of a public conversation about the key issues of our time with greater humility and deeper engagement with the people most affected by them.

Les Back is a sociologist working at Goldsmiths, University of London. His main fields of interest are the sociology of racism, migration, popular culture and city life.  In 2018 with Shamser Sinha he published Migrant City (Routledge) a book that attempted to re-design social observation so that participants not only observe their own lives but also become credited authors too.

Header image credit: Charlynne reading

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Back, Les 2021. ‘Diversity Conservatism and Sociable Sociology’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (3):

Reiner Grundmann

There are still many unknowns about the virus and its diffusion. No matter how developed the scientific knowledge base is, there is a political imperative to take decisions. While science provides knowledge about facts, experts make judgements about what to do. They do this in the face of scientific uncertainty. Unlike scientists who strive to reduce uncertainty, experts try to answer the question of what we should do, given the knowns and unknowns.

In the UK, and many other countries, governments have set up advisory bodies to address the pandemic. Their advice was sought as the virus was new and little was known. The advice has been used to justify policy interventions designed to steer the country out of the crisis. These bodies are usually composed of scientists from a relatively narrow disciplinary range. Epidemiology is the leading discipline. It provides the epistemic core, the logic and rationale for decision-making. This choice is seen as proper and adequate by most commentators, given the nature of the problem.

Because the problem has already been framed in epidemiological terms, we do not question the central role of epidemiology itself

But the choice has deep consequences in terms of framing the problem. Framing is here understood to comprise defining a problem, attributing causality and blame, and identifying remedial action (Entman 1993). Because the problem has already been framed in epidemiological terms, we do not question the central role of epidemiology itself. Even the appointment of experts for advisory bodies is not seen as a choice, where another choice could have led to other courses of action. It is seen as a ‘natural’ reflection of the problem.

This is not to say that epidemiology is not important. Of course it is, and it was most instrumental to alert politicians to the exponential nature of the pandemic in early 2020. However, it is time to recognize the consequences that arise from its privileged position in the process of producing and delivering expertise for what is necessarily political decision-making, and what other perspectives could be useful that have been pushed into the background.

Not only has a particular academic discipline been privileged, but academic research as such. But expertise is far broader than science based. As I will argue below, there are important sources of expertise in civil society, and in the professions. These sources need to contribute more vigorously to a debate about how we should deal with the pandemic, what principles should guide us, and what society we want to build.

Hulme et al. (2020) cogently argue that “because decisions with far-reaching consequences are being made now, it is precisely the right time to call for a greater plurality of knowledge. This entails bringing in broader sources of knowledge to the decision-making process, promoting more transparent decision-making processes and dismantling unhelpful ‘hierarchies of knowledge’. In these ‘hierarchies’, certain forms of knowledge (e.g., certain disciplines within natural sciences) are seen as inherently superior, rather than as complementary. Such a diversification of knowledge would benefit both the effectiveness of decisions made, as well as the legitimacy of those decisions among publics.” (Hulme et al. 2020).

The necessary but insufficient role of epidemiology

My argument is that Covid-19 has been framed as a problem by, and for epidemiology. Several countries have seen epidemiological knowledge as the only legitimate and relevant knowledge when it comes to making decisions. Other forms of scientific knowledge, and other forms of expertise, have been marginalised.

The dominant, epidemiology-based approach has three salient elements (which were developing over time, with overlaps). First, it emphasized the crucial role of diffusion of infections, measured by the reproduction rate R, and the need to reduce this via non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Social distancing, hand hygiene, mask wearing, and isolation were the tools for the job. Then pharmaceutical treatment options were discussed, and recommendations about effective medicines were made. However, the main method to eradicate the disease was the development of an effective vaccine. This would be the game changer in the pandemic, allowing us all to return to social life as we knew it. Research and investment in effective treatment has paled in comparison.

Waves of new infections are recurring, even in countries with high rates of vaccination

Surprisingly, vaccines became quickly available, if extremely uneven across the globe. But they did not prove the game changer they were expected to be, and it is an open question if they ever can be. To avoid misunderstanding, all of the above measures have contributed to a significant amelioration, but the trend of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths has not been uniformly downward. Waves of new infections are recurring, even in countries with high rates of vaccination. This indicates that we need to talk about the limits of the epistemic model which provides the foundation for these strategies and hopes.

It is no surprise that the epidemiological model has come under pressure from its nemesis, vaccine critical voices. They represent different social groups, and it is tempting but futile to dismiss them as irrational and irresponsible. To be sure, higher vaccination rates lead to fewer infections, severe cases, and deaths. But based on current evidence, the vaccines will not lead to an eradication of Covid-19. There are several reasons for this. The virus has become endemic, and it is present in several animal species. There are new variants against which existing vaccines may be much less effective.

The virus, and its ever-evolving mutations, is present in all countries and can move from a high incidence country to a low incidence country. Medical researchers from the USA put it this way: “Rather than die out, the virus will likely ping-pong back and forth across the globe for years to come. Some of yesterday’s success stories are now vulnerable to serious outbreaks. Many of these are places that kept the pandemic at bay through tight border controls and excellent testing, tracing, and isolation but have been unable to acquire good vaccines. … But even countries that have vaccinated large proportions of their populations will be vulnerable to outbreaks caused by certain variants. That is what appears to have happened in several hot spots in Chile, Mongolia, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom.” (Brilliant et al. 2021).

The authors make the perhaps provocative statement: “The virus is here to stay. The question is, What do we need to do to ensure that we are, too?”

… what makes Covid-19 so difficult to combat is that it is an airborne illness with so much asymptomatic transmission

Their answer is informed by the epidemiological model, too. The main recommendation is to vaccinate in, and around hotspots of infections, something practiced in the 1970s smallpox outbreak in African countries and India. Such ‘ring vaccinations’ would solve the problem of shortages of vaccine supply. The authors acknowledge the challenge to their approach but remain optimistic: “Of course, it was a different disease, a different vaccine, and a different time. Part of what makes Covid-19 so difficult to combat is that it is an airborne illness with so much asymptomatic transmission. Today, however, epidemiologists have the added benefit of powerful new tools for detecting outbreaks and developing vaccines. They can use these innovations to build a twenty-first century version of surveillance and containment for the battle against this pandemic.”

Asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 is what makes the virus so persistent. While this was known early on, the fact that it was also airborne came as a later insight. Both elements combine to make existing models of prevention so fragile. This would also be the case with ring-vaccinations. Even vaccinated people can become infected and transmit the virus without showing symptoms. As we have also learned, electronic surveillance systems have not delivered what they were hoped to do.

While the above-mentioned approach recognizes the challenge, and is cognizant of many social variables that are important to consider (including the need to build effective international institutions to deal with this, and other pandemics), it still is heavily influenced by the epidemiological paradigm.

The role of science, expertise and decision-making

Above I have pointed out that science scientific advisors in the pandemic tend to be epidemiologists. Other forms of expertise need to be identified. I specifically draw attention to commentators, professional specialists, and lay experts (Grundmann 2017, 2018, 2022). They all bridge the gap between knowledge and decision-making, but do this in different ways. While policy advisors are usually working behind the scenes, in close proximity to government, other scientists are speaking up as commentators in public debate, communicating their views of the problem, sometimes suggesting solutions. Professionals have specialist knowledge of relevant technical aspects or social practices, and the scope for intervention. Lay experts offer views from civil society based on experience, and reflecting social concerns. It should be noted that the WHO advocates the inclusion of communities; they should have a voice, be informed and engaged, and participate (Habersaat et al. 2020; Marston, Renedo, and Miles 2020; WHO 2020).

Governments have pursued different policies in the their fight against Covid-19 (Stevens 2020). Where we see relative success, this does not seem to be due to better scientific understanding, but due to preparedness in public health administrations, especially via functioning test and trace and systems, vaccination programmes, adherence to distancing rules, and hospital treatment. It is still unclear how close the link is between government regulations and success in fighting the disease.

A commentator in the Financial Times wrote, “a few countries, it is true, have almost unambiguously good stories to tell. But it is some feat to spot the values and institutions that link Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Mongolia. As if to tease us, when a theme does emerge — the heedless ‘neoliberalism’ of Anglo-America — it wilts on further evidence. That is, we have learnt less and less over time. The past 18 months are so haunting in part because they lack all pattern and meaning.” Even this assessment looks doubtful one month after publication (I am writing this on 31 August).

The dominance of epidemiology has led to a focus on eradication of the Covid-19 virus

The dominance of epidemiology has led to a focus on eradication of the Covid-19 virus. This seemed plausible with the unexpectedly fast development of vaccines. A technical solution seemed in sight which would allow societies to return to normality in the course of months.

However, the vaccines have their own problems, they are not 100% safe, nor effective. As with all vaccines they come with side-effects. They also lose effectiveness after months, and are perhaps not effective against mutations of the virus. Pharmaceutical companies are going to benefit from booster vaccinations, maybe for years to come. At the same time they reject all liability for side-effects, pushing it onto the purchasing countries, as leaked documents show. Their rent-seeking strategy has been rewarded with vast sums of government money, which overall reduces the appetite to spend on other forms of treatment.

Such news gives further support to vaccine critical groups which, in turn, poses a serious problem to the epidemiological paradigm, as a certain percentage of immunity needs to be achieved in order for the epidemic to recede. Statisticians Spiegelhalter and Masters reckon this to be around 86% of the population.

Some authors argue that the problem is lack of information, and the pernicious effect of disinformation campaigns. For example,  Baldwin & Lenton (2020) emphasize the eminent role of scientific consensus v disinformation. As several studies have shown, vaccine hesitancy is a more complex phenomenon (Hobson-West 2003; Reicher and Stott 2020). Issues of trust vis-à-vis the government and its public health institutions are crucial in this respect. Information campaigns will change very little, especially if they are ‘talking down’ to those who are not convinced.

National responses

The spread of the virus is uneven across the world. No matter how much progress one country makes with vaccination programmes, new variants can appear in other countries and spread across the globe. The is no global governance institution to co-ordinate the response measures. The powers of the World Health Organization (WHO) are limited and its advice to governments has been disregarded in the past. Attempts at international co-ordination and co-operation are minimal (Brown and Susskind 2020; Buck et al. 2020; Grundmann 2021), although some collaboration has been underway in the search for a vaccine (Kupferschmidt 2020).

… rich countries have secured the lion share of vaccines, leaving large parts of the rest of the world without

National responses have been the standard mode of operating, and this will continue to be the case. Vaccine nationalism has been evident in the procurement and distribution of vaccines, and in the politics of recognizing vaccination certificates across borders. Most importantly, rich countries have secured the lion share of vaccines, leaving large parts of the rest of the world without. Ethical debates have emerged about the prospect of having booster jabs or vaccinations for children in rich countries while the poor go without.

All this points to the question of how we, as a society, and as an international community, could deal with the challenge. What is our aim? What is the strategy? As soon as we pose these simple questions, we realize that the answers are far from clear.

Sometimes some governments have stated the eradication of the virus as their goal (‘zero-Covid’). More modest goals are: contain the spread of the disease, reduce hospitalizations and severe cases, or keep the health system going. Others argue that ‘living with Covid’ is the only realistic option as the problem will not go away any time soon (Brilliant et al. 2021). This requires several measures, like continuing with social distancing, mask wearing, and providing effective treatment in severe cases. For some, disrupting social life is not legitimate, especially when the number of severe cases and deaths reaches low levels comparable to other diseases.

Wicked problems

‘Wicked problems’ only can be managed better or worse, not be solved once and for all (Grundmann 2016; Rayner 2006; Rittel and Webber 1973). The verdict is still out if Covid-19 falls into this category of social problem. The quick development of vaccines has given hope that successful vaccines will solve the problem. Initial enthusiasm has given way to a more sober assessment as the virus has shown several mutations which may hinder the vaccine effectiveness (Vogel and Kupferschmidt 2021).

Nevertheless, the availability of vaccines could be seen as a ‘technological core’ which can be refined over time (Sarewitz and Nelson 2008) so that herd immunity can be achieved. Cheap vaccines that can be easily stored and administered would help. However, as the above has shown there is not enough supply of vaccines across the world, new variants are likely to emerge, and vaccine hesitancy may be a force that could limit such efforts. Wicked problems have no stopping rules; if zero Covid is not a realistic prospect we will see different definitions of success come and go.

Given these parameters I am convinced that the involvement of all forms of expertise will be required so we can discover ways that work to keep the problem at bay. A broad range of expertise is required, from advisors, professionals, commentators, and civil society. This will help to develop and support social practices that are embedded in our daily lives. We already have become frustrated by the on-off logic of large lockdowns that are based on territories and industries. Engineers may develop standards for well-ventilated rooms in which it is safe to congregate for prolonged periods of time. Community leaders may develop early warning systems that allow for timely interventions. Policy-makers need to find solutions to the competing jurisdictions between private and public bodies, and between different levels of government. They also need to incentivise efforts to find effective treatments. Health professionals may develop testing regimes that are quick and reliable and allow targeted responses. Global institutions need to ensure that resources to fight the pandemic are distributed fairly among countries. Pressure groups could campaign against the rent-seeking behaviour of big pharma. In sum, the governance of Covid-19 is something that needs to be established as a problem. Only when it is recognized as such will we be able to get away from an important but overly narrow definition of the problem, and open new avenues for intervention.

References:

Baldwin, Mark P. and Timothy M. Lenton. 2020. “Solving the Climate Crisis: Lessons from Ozone Depletion and COVID-19.” Global Sustainability 1–6. DOI: 

Brilliant, Larry et al. 2021. “The Forever Virus. A Strategy for the Long Fight Against COVID-19.” Foreign Affairs.

Brown, Gordon and Daniel Susskind. 2020. “International Cooperation during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 36:S64–76. DOI:

Buck, Holly, Oliver Geden, Masahiro Sugiyama, and Olaf Corry. 2020. “Pandemic Politics—Lessons for Solar Geoengineering.” Communications Earth & Environment 1(1):16. DOI

Entman, R. M. 1993. “Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 43(4):51–58. DOI:

Grundmann, Reiner. 2016. “Climate Change as a Wicked Social Problem.” Nature Geosciences 9:562–63. DOI:

Grundmann, Reiner. 2017. “The Problem of Expertise in Knowledge Societies.” Minerva 55(1):25–48. DOI:

Grundmann, Reiner. 2018. “The Rightful Place of Expertise.” Social Epistemology 32(6):372–86. DOI:

Grundmann, Reiner. 2021. “COVID and Climate: Similarities and Differences.” WIREs Climate Change (e737). DOI:

Grundmann, Reiner. 2022. Making Sense of Expertise. New York, NY: Routledge.

Habersaat, Katrine et al. 2020. “Ten Considerations for Effectively Managing the COVID-19 Transition.” Nature Human Behaviour 4(7):677–87. DOI:

Hobson-West, Pru. 2003. “Understanding Vaccination Resistance: Moving beyond Risk.” Health, Risk & Society 5(3):273–83. DOI:

Hulme, Mike, Rolf Lidskog, James M. White, and Adam Standring. 2020. “Social Scientific Knowledge in Times of Crisis: What Climate Change Can Learn from Coronavirus (and Vice Versa).” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 11(4):1–5.

Kupferschmidt, Kai. 2020. “Global Plan Seeks to Promote Vaccine Equity, Spread Risks.” Science 369(6503):489–90. DOI: 10.1126/science.369.6503.489

Marston, Cicely, Alicia Renedo, and Sam Miles. 2020. “Community Participation Is Crucial in a Pandemic.” The Lancet (20). DOI: (20)31054-0

Rayner, Steve. 2006. “Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions- Diagnoses and Prescriptions for Environmental Ills.” Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment (July):1–12.

Reicher, Stephen and Clifford Stott. 2020. “On Order and Disorder during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” British Journal of Social Psychology 59(3):694–702. DOI:

Rittel, Horst and Melvin M. Webber. 1973. “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.” Policy Sciences 4:155–69. DOI:

Sarewitz, Daniel and Richard Nelson. 2008. “Three Rules for Technological Fixes.” Nature 456(7224):871–72. DOI:

Stevens, Alex. 2020. “Governments Cannot Just ‘follow the Science’ on COVID-19.” Nature Human Behaviour 4(6):560. DOI:

Vogel, Gretchen and Kai Kupferschmidt. 2021. “‘It’s a Very Special Picture.’ Why Vaccine Safety Experts Put the Brakes on AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” Science (17 March).

WHO. 2020. Strengthening and Adjusting Public Health Measures throughout the COVID-19 Transition Phases Policy Considerations for the WHO European Region.

Reiner Grundmann is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK). He holds a first degree in Sociology (FU Berlin), a PhD in Social and Political Sciences (EUI Florence), and a Habilitation from Bielefeld University. He has a long-standing interest in social theory, sustainability issues and global environmental problems. His current focus is the relation between knowledge and decision making. He has published on the nature of expertise in contemporary societies in various journal articles, and this is also the topic of his forthcoming book, Making Sense of Expertise. For Frontiers in Climate, he is chief editor of the special section Climate and Decision Making.

Header image credit: Pixabay

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Mark Harvey

The pandemic has stimulated many political leaders to benignly pronounce that ‘no nation is safe unless all nations are safe’, while notably pursuing national self-protection at the expense of international collaboration. The meagre achievements and funding of Covax illustrate how vaccination of the domestic nation has taken overriding priority, everywhere, as have the use of vaccines as instruments of national soft-diplomacy.

Climate change has become the climate emergency because, likewise, but with a far greater and more complex challenge, political institutions and, in particular, the institution of the sovereign nation state as underpinned by the United Nations, have failed to meet it adequately or rapidly enough. As we approach COP26, the political process of negotiation and deal-making appears to be stuck in the rut of institutions misfit-for-purpose, unable to challenge the rights of nations to exploit their resource environments, especially of fossil fuels and land. As a consequence, there is little prospect of addressing the inequalities within and between nations that are driving the generation of greenhouse gases.

No nation is safe unless all are safe

As political scientists have noted, climate change poses ‘the wickedest of problems’ of creating a planetary common good in the face of the pursuit of national self-interest, notably for economic growth and development (Coen, et al. 2020). No nation is safe unless all are safe, but the huge inequalities between and within nations for generating climate change pit national economic self-interest against environmental common interest.

Climate change also requires a change in optic for the social sciences. We now need to consider how different societies, in different historical epochs, are instituted in the resource environments over which they have control. Much of the discipline of economics treats the economy as if it existed outside nature. There is a whole sociological literature on varieties of capitalism without any recognition of the importance of differences arising from nations’ control over environmental resources (oil, coal, land, etc). Aside from the changing cultures of food we eat, almost every social practice is now energised by electricity, gas or oil: cooking, washing, heating, moving, refrigerating, communicating, entertaining. Yet, these social practices have been treated as if they were abstracted from interactions with the resource environments on which they depend.  Societies have to be re-planted in the resource environments within which they grow. We urgently need a concept of the sociogenesis of climate change to complement the natural science concept of anthropogenesis (Harvey, 2021).

Climate Inequalities, present and historical

Social scientific accounts of climate change demonstrate that wealth inequalities between and within nations are dynamically related to the unequal generation of climate changing greenhouse gases, whether from industry or agriculture, or indeed, their combination. Economic inequalities, too simplistically caricatured as between developed and developing countries, are widely recognised as having impeded international agreement under UN auspices.

There is a second dimension of inequality, equally important to the climate emergency challenge, namely the unequal distribution between nations of environmental resources – coal, oil, fertile land, water, sun, minerals, etc. Nations control and interact with different resource environments, especially within their own national territories, or through colonisation or trading power.

In September 2021, scientists revised their estimation of how much of existing economically viable fossil energy reserves must remain unextracted if goals on reducing global warming are to be met: 58% of oil, 59% of fossil methane gas, and 89% of coal (Welsby et al., 2021). As natural scientists they could not be expected to say how this is to be achieved, politically, economically and socially. And nor did they. But this presents perhaps the most fundamental challenge to what has been the dominant paradigm of economic growth for all countries for the past century or more: the sovereign right of a nation to exploit its own territorial environmental resources.

… unextractable reserves are unequally distributed between nations

These unextractable reserves are unequally distributed between nations, as a source of wealth, but now also recognised as a source of imperilment of the planet. Above all, it is therefore a challenge to the political institutions, international and national as established since the Second World War. The United Nations enshrines this principle of national sovereignty, and no nation appears ready to relinquish its determining rights over national territorial resources. And that is by no means the end of it. What applies to fossil energy also applies to land and water resources. The rain forests of Amazonia, Indonesia, or Africa have to be preserved from further deforestation and agricultural extensification to meet the 1.5C target. That is equally a challenge to national sovereign rights.

This second dimension of inequalities is intimately connected with the first, characterising different historical trajectories of growth. Societies differ dramatically in how they generate climate change as a consequence of differences between their exploitation of resource environments. So, quite apart from the challenge to the political institution of the nation state, the climate emergency is also a challenge to social scientific understanding.

Historical pathways to climate change

Before turning to an analysis of international and national institutional ‘misfit-for-purpose’, a brief cameo to demonstrate the dynamic connection between inequalities of wealth, environmental resource inequalities, and climate change. Reviewing the histories that condition the present requires a different optic. The ‘great divergence’ that resulted in an historically novel level of wealth inequalities between nations was spearheaded by the United Kingdom’s industrial revolution. And it was that process of unequal wealth creation that also marked the rapid acceleration of climate change. The UK led the world in the shift to burning its coal for energy, first for domestic heating then for industrialisation, of which the steam powered textile factories were iconic exemplars. By the mid-19th century the UK was burning three times more coal than Germany, Belgium and France combined, which still relied on wood, charcoal and peat.

Britain’s industrialisation depended substantially on the colonisation of the New World

Although much emphasis has been placed on coal-burning Britain, its industrialisation depended substantially on the colonisation of the New World, first with its own slave plantation economies producing sugar as an increasingly important source of calories for the industrial proletariat, and then, above all for the cotton supplying the textile industry. The UK commanded the expansion of slavery into the Deep South of North America, from the late eighteenth century through to the Civil War. Through its mercantile and financial capital, by mid-nineteenth century UK textiles captured 70% of the US slave cotton crop, which supplied 88% of all cotton textiles produced in the UK. The UK economy was more dependent on the three million enslaved in the US after emancipating its own enslaved than it ever had been from its own Caribbean plantations.  Industrialisation in the metropolis thus combined with land conversion and extensification in the New World, both climate changing forcers.

Indeed, the expansion of territorial control through settler colonisation and slave plantations in the United States gives the American historical climate changing trajectory its distinctive character. Cosmologists have argued that, from 3000 BC, the spread of agriculturalism through hybridisation of crops and livestock, deforestation and ploughing up land, was a slow burning climate changing phenomenon over centuries prior to industrialisation. That same process in the US was accelerated over a matter of decades, with the genocides and ethnic cleansing of subsistence agriculture and hunter-gatherer Native Americans. It was primarily a crime against humanity, but also a climate changing appropriation and conversion of environmental land resources on a continental scale.

Commercial capitalist agriculture of plantations and cattle ranching swept across the continent, celebrated in the Western film genre. This was the formation of a distinctive meat-eating culture: Texas, a slave state, fed its cattle into Chicago, to be then transported as beef in chilled railway carriages (iron and steam), to East Coast cities and the world. Chicago boasted to be the ‘bovine capital of the world’, and today the US eats more meat per capita than any country in the world.

Although here is not the place for detail, the next two major waves of climate changing economic development, the electrification of societies and the motorisation of spatial mobility, were equally marked by major societal differences. The development of electricity grids and motorways were conditioned by available national spatial and environmental resources. As Green New Deals are now much discussed, exemplary in this respect is the Tennessee Valley Authority, the totemic project of New Deal. Initially, if unintentionally, it was characterised by the massive dam systems of ‘green’ hydropower. But this was rapidly overtaken by the exploitation of its proximate environmental resource of the Appalachian coal fields. By the mid-1970s the Philadelphia Power Company was using five times more energy from coal than from hydro-power, and became the largest coal consumer in the world. Successive waves of accelerated climate change were driven by such interactions between societies and their resource environments, at the core of the concept of sociogenesis (Harvey, 2021).

These historical glimpses show how the great divergence in wealth inequalities between nations and the exploitation of resource environments have been responsible for successive waves of acceleration in the societal dynamics of climate change. As a consequence, the close linear relationship between per capita Gross National Product and climate change is hardly surprising. As the wealthiest society in the world, the US stands almost in a league of its own.

As a consequence of near energy self-sufficiency, the luxury of space, and strategic investments in the Interstate Highway system, the average American consumes between 4 and 5 times more petrol than the average European. The average weight of an American car is 30% higher than a German one, and a massive 55% more than a Japanese one. As an indicator of electricity consumption, the size of US refrigerators is on average double that of Japanese or European ones, and 90% of American households have air-conditioning units, as against 10% in Europe, or 60% in China.

… the richest within the richest countries are the primary forcers of climate change

Not all societies, or those within societies, are equally electrified. So, the richest within the richest countries are the primary forcers of climate change. The top 10% income group in the US produce 24 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per capita per year, compared with 14 and 13 tonnes by the top 10% in Germany and France respectively. The threshold of purchasing power for the top 10% in England is $71,000 compared with $155,105 in the USA, and purchasing power translates into the command over environmental resources generating climate change. The majority of the world’s population produce less greenhouse gases per capita than is required to meet the 1.5C global warming target (Oxfam, 2021).

International and national political institutions: misfit for purpose

These are just some of the stark statistics of the links between unequal wealth creation and greenhouse gas generation, linking production with consumption. That climate change has become a climate emergency is in significant part a consequence of the misfit between international and national political institutions and these dynamics of climate change. The United Nations was born out of the world-shattering shocks of two world wars, designed in significant part to preserve peace between sovereign nations and promote de-colonisation. So constructed, it enshrines the principle of national territorial sovereignty.

It was never designed, even with Millennium Development Goals, to confront the sovereign rights of nations to generate wealth in their own national self-interest, exploiting their own national territorial resources. Where there are international ‘common goods’, such as the regulation of international waters under the Law of the Sea Convention (1982), it at the same time confirmed national sovereignty over territorial waters. Cod wars are now followed, post-Brexit, with migrant wars.

One case of the UN establishing some supra-national authority, the Responsibility to Protect (2005) when a nation threatened a part of its population with genocide or ethnic cleansing, has been exposed for its limitations, whether in Rwanda or Myanmar. These examples of the limitations of United Nations powers to override national sovereignty, for all their complex political reasons and internal institutional obstacles, only serve to highlight how the United Nations is misfit for purpose when it comes to climate change.

Three major phases of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confirm this misfit: the Kyoto Protocol (1997), the Copenhagen Accord (2009) and the Paris Agreement (2015).  The Kyoto Protocol, following success in dealing with the ozone layer, adopted a ‘top-down’ approach of legally mandatory carbon reduction targets, with provisions for enforcement.  However, enforcement was never credible. States like Canada pulled out when not meeting their target, major countries (China, India, Brazil) were excluded – and finally the United States refused to ratify. Copenhagen proved to be more discord than Accord, and already marked a retreat from supra-national global mandates.  So this governance model was abandoned for a ‘bottom-up’ approach, in which each sovereign nation state independently set its own commitments, subject to monitoring and review. As a reflection of national sovereignty, these commitments were called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

… there is no global solution achieved by the sum of all national solutions

The Paris Agreement established these NDCs under international treaty, signed by 179 countries. It has been heralded as ‘the most important treaty to be reached by the global community’ in relation to climate change (Held, 2018). Undoubtedly, it was a step forward from the preceding failures, but, given the continuing rise of global GHG emissions from almost every country in the world, its promise now rings hollow. And that was before Trump and Bolsonaro had pulled out. In particular, by conforming and reinforcing the principles of national sovereignty, it directly obstructs any attempt to significantly address the inequalities of responsibilities for climate change between countries noted above. It is every nation addressing its own problem, where there is no global solution achieved by the sum of all national solutions.

The Agreement has signally failed to raise anything approaching significant financial flows to support green transitions of developing countries, to even begin to modify wealth inequalities and command over resources. By only treating nations as producers of GHG, it evades entirely the interdependencies of trade between countries arising from inequalities of environmental resources, whether for food or energy. So, Japan’s increasing reliance on Australian coal for energy, or Europe and China’s dependence on Brazil for soyabeans for animal feed, or the US importing Chinese manufactures, escape its remit. One nation’s production side is disconnected from another nation’s consumption side. And the World Trade Organisation resists all attempts to regulate international trade for environmental sustainability. And finally, there is no supranational legally binding process of enforcement (Bodansky, et al. 2017). The Paris Agreement is indeed the product of Nations United by their independent sovereign nationhood.

At the national level, the alternative prospects of Green New Deals are still largely bounded by every-nation-for-themselves politics, and, so far, however laudable, they are political projects confined to the wealthiest countries. Most ravaged by world wars, the European Green New Deal stands out as the only global example of transnational policy. But it too is confined to a limited set of wealthy, advanced economies, failing to address the inequalities across the nations of the world. Moreover, with Nord Stream 2 and new coal-fired power stations in Germany, and increasing European reliance on energy from Russia and Kazakhstan, Europe is continuing to travel in the wrong direction. Neither Poland nor Russia appears remotely committed to reducing their extraction of fossil fuels, as required to meet 1.5C.

Questions  

If it took the shock of two world wars to lead to the establishment of the United Nations, how extreme and how many climate change shocks will it take to induce a shift out of the paradigm of national sovereignty over the exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources?

And will it take a climate catastrophe to shake disciplinary boundedness and nation-parochialisms, and stimulate a reconfiguration of social science?

References

Bodansky, D., Brunnée, J. and Rajamani, L., 2017. International climate change law. Oxford University Press.

Coen, D., Kreienkamp, J. and Pegram, T., 2020. Global Climate Governance. Cambridge University Press.

Held, D. and Roger, C., 2018. Three models of global climate governance: From Kyoto to Paris and beyond. Global Policy, 9(4), pp.527-537.

Harvey, M. 2021. Climate Emergency. How societies create the crisis. Emerald.

Oxfam, 2021 Confronting Carbon Inequality.

Welsby, D., Price, J., Pye, S. and Ekins, P., 2021. Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5° C world. Nature, 597(7875), pp.230-234.

Mark Harvey is emeritus professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. He joined the department in September 2007, following a decade at the ESRC Centre for Research in Innovation and Competition (CRIC) at the University of Manchester, as a Senior Research Fellow and Professorial Research Fellow.

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Layla Aitlhadj and John Holmwood

In 2011, the Home Office undertook an internal review of its Prevent strategy. It was extended to include measures directed against non-violent extremism; that is, against “organisations that oppose our values of human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in our society” (2011: 1). The measures were further extended in 2015 with the introduction of safeguarding duties on schools, further and higher education institutions, health services, prisons and other providers of public services to protect children and other vulnerable individuals from ‘radicalisation’ under the influence of extremist ideologies. This included (published in the previous year) a statutory duty on schools to promote ‘fundamental British values’, now codified as commitments to the rule of law, democracy, individual liberty, and tolerance of different views (religious and non-religious).

Many civil society groups saw the measures as being themselves a threat to civil liberties, especially those associated with free speech; they as also viewed them as contributing to the idea of British Muslims as a ‘suspect’ community. The latter charge was countered by the claim that the measures were also directed against  threats other than possible terrorism conducted in the name of Islam, such as the potential violence of the ‘far right’. At the same time Muslim advocacy groups that opposed Prevent were represented as ‘extremist’, both by government and by right wing think tanks such as the Henry Jackson Society and Policy Exchange.

… none of these extensions of Prevent place a specific community under suspicion

As feared by civil rights groups, the government has recently given indications (for example, in the new guidance to schools about curriculum material) that it seeks to include other forms of ‘extremism’ under the lens of Prevent, such as that associated with environmental activism, Black Lives Matter protests and ‘far left’ groups. Unlike the focus on Islamic extremism, however, none of these extensions of Prevent place a specific community under suspicion.

The 2011 Home Office Review occurred at the same time that the then prime minister, David Cameron, made a speech at the Munich Security Conference repudiating ‘state multiculturalism’, by arguing that, “we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream…  We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values”. The claim was problematic even in its own terms. Human rights involve respect for difference and, thus, for multiculturalism – in Britain, within a liberal framework – as was set out in 2000 in the Parekh Report and the Runnymede Trusts Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain.

… the government’s aim was to promote an assimilationist idea of ‘collective identity’

Instead, the government’s aim was to promote an assimilationist idea of ‘collective identity’, but it sought to do so without addressing British Muslims and their legitimate criticisms of the inequalities and discrimination they faced. Indeed, sociological research has consistently shown a high level of commitment to the values identified by the government (Karlsen and Nazroo 2015). At the same time, the government has resisted the adoption of a formal definition of Islamophobia (once again supported by the Henry Jackson Society, Policy Exchange, and the British Secular Society).

Indeed, most government policy developments are accompanied by the trumpeting of Britain as one of the ‘most successful multi-ethnic societies’ in the world. This is alongside appointments of commissioners across a range of supposedly independent bodies who have repudiated the idea of ‘institutional racism’ (as set out in the MacPherson Report), or with a record of hostility toward British Muslims centred on the view that the latter have failed to integrate.

In February 2019, the government finally conceded an Independent Review of Prevent (to be completed within 18 months) at the tail end of Theresa May’s minority government. It was part of a ‘deal’ necessary to pass a new Counter Terrorism and Border Security Bill. The latter introduced  ‘stop and search’ measures at UK borders, and it removed the requirement that there should be reasonable suspicion, as well as restrictions on the posting and accessing of images (for example, of flags and clothing) that might indicate support for terrorist groups. Notwithstanding their concerns about these measures, the announcement of an independent review of Prevent was welcomed by the human rights and civil liberties groups that criticised the new act.

Ben Wallace, the Security Minister, announced the review with a challenge to critics of Prevent to provide solid evidence, accusing them otherwise of ‘spin and distortion’. It was left to his successor, Brandon Lewis, to announce the appointment of the reviewer, Lord Carlile. The latter was hardly independent; he had, in fact, endorsed the 2011 Prevent Strategy that was at issue.

Following the threat of a legal challenge by Rights Watch, Lord Carlile stepped down. The review fell into abeyance, until, finally, William Shawcross was appointed by the new government of Boris Johnson in January 2021. Shawcross had been a Director at the Henry Jackson Society, a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and was Chair of the Charity Commission between 2012 and 2018 when it carried out investigations of Muslim charities (Scott-Baumann and Perfect 2021).

… ‘spin and distortion’ would certainly seem to be the approach of government, not that of its critics

The immediate response by Muslim organisations and civil society advocacy groups, alike – for example, MEND, CAGE, Rights Watch, Liberty and Amnesty International – was to call for a boycott of the review. Seventeen organisations signed up, which has now grown to 500 organisations and individuals. Other reviews have been criticised for their partisan character and the selective use of evidence – for example, the recent Commission on Racial Disparities review was the most egregious. It has been widely criticised, including by the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, as well as by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission in a dossier of critical comments prior to its publication, notwithstanding that the EHRC welcomed it on publication. Taking all of this into account, ‘spin and distortion’ would certainly seem to be the approach of government, not that of its critics.

Of course, it is possible that some ‘independent’ evidence will be supplied to the current ongoing review of Prevent chaired by William Shawcross, specifically from academic researchers. Policy Lab – a policy design group within government – put out a call for evidence on UPEN (the Universities Policy and Exchange Network). The latter is a collaboration across universities to increase the impact of academic research and provide ‘a dedicated contact point for policymakers, and a collective response to requests for evidence’.

… government policy generates its own self-justifying knowledge base

This is in the context where public-funded research is assessed for its contribution to users, with status and revenue deriving from that contribution. Despite claims for academic independence and objectivity, academic research is shaped toward providing policy-based evidence by the nature of how impact is measured and rewarded. This is especially so with regard to research relating to national security, as has been argued by Mills, Massoumi and Miller. This means that government policy generates its own self-justifying knowledge base.

It is ironic that much of the government’s promotion of the Prevent strategy mobilises human rights against those who threaten ‘our values’. The policy that schools should promote ‘fundamental British values’, for example, is based on a misconception. The ‘rule of law’, for example, is not primarily a constraint upon the public, no matter that any breaches of the law will give rise to sanctions upon them. Properly understood, it is a constraint upon government in the exercise of its authority.

Equally, the Equalities Act 2010 which sets out protected characteristics (including, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disability, and religious belief), and which must be respected, is a requirement on the provider of services; its primary purpose is to ensure they do not discriminate. It is not a set of ‘values’ that must be inculcated, notwithstanding its incorporation in some schools into their ‘whole school’ curriculum for promoting fundamental British values.

As Massoumi (2021) has argued, an inversion in the relation of government and publics and in the role of civil society groups is a central part of the Prevent strategy. The dominant understanding of civil society is that it is a domain of social movements that express social solidarities and seek to influence government policies from outside institutionalised arrangements. Under Prevent, the government has set up, or funded, civil society organisations within communities in order to promote its policies; that is, it establishes quasi-social movements as an expression of state policy, rather than as a challenge to it.

This strategy was set out in the Conservative Party Manifesto for the 2017 election, where it was stated that, “extremism, especially Islamist extremism, strips some British people, especially women, of the freedoms they should enjoy, undermines the cohesion of our society and can fuel violence. To defeat extremism, we need to learn from how civil society and the state took on racism in the twentieth century… We will support the public sector and civil society in identifying extremists, countering their messages and promoting pluralistic, British values.” (page 55).

The strategy has involved the setting up of the Commission for Countering Extremism, as well the placement of commissioners favourable to government on a series of independent bodies otherwise intended to monitor its actions. In the context of challenges to the idea of institutional racism, for example, the policy is breath-taking. After all, that was precisely one of the successes of civil society in the 1970s directed against the Conservative governments of the day.

How should civil society today address an increasingly draconian government, one that already has a record of misrepresenting and distorting any evidence presented to it that challenges its intentions? A boycott of the Shawcross Review of Prevent was necessary to communicate the deeply dysfunctional nature of reviews, consultations and other checks on government policy. However, the Shawcross Review is also charged with making recommendations to which the government must respond. It is unlikely that it will recommend anything different to what the government seeks to implement. It is important that those concerned about civil liberties be in a position to respond, and to respond with evidence.

… we propose to ‘learn from how civil society took on racism’ in the 1970s

In this context, we propose to ‘learn from how civil society took on racism’ in the 1970s and apply it to the government’s Prevent strategy. In April 1979, there were serious disturbances in Southall, West London, following a National Front meeting at the Town Hall. These involved a violent response by police to demonstrations against the meeting in which Blair Peach died (another young man, Gurdip Singh Chaggar had been killed three years earlier in a racist attack). In the face of official indifference to the need for an inquiry, an Unofficial Committee of Enquiry was set up under the direction of Sir Michael Dummett, QC. Its report was published by the National Council for Civil Liberties (1980).

To this end we have established the People’s Review of Prevent, which will gather evidence and publish a report for dissemination to the public, media, and civil society groups. Details of the People’s Review are on the website. It is an opportunity for the presentation of arguments and evidence that challenge the policies of an increasingly authoritarian government that scapegoats ethnic minority citizens and those professing minority religious beliefs.

References:

Massoumi, Narzanin (2021) ‘The role of civil Society in political repression: the UK Prevent counter-terrorism programme’, Sociology, Online first. DOI:

National Council of Civil Liberties (1980) Southall 23 April 1979: The Report of the Unofficial Committee of Inquiry, Nottingham: NCCL.

Karlsen, Saffron and Nazroo, James Y.  (2015) ‘Ethnic and religious differences in the attitudes of people towards being “British”’, Sociological Review, 63(4). DOI:

Scott-Baumann, Alison and Perfect, Simon (2021) Freedom of Speech in Universities Islam, Charities and Counter-Terrorism, London: Routledge.

Dr Layla Aitlhadj and Professor John Holmwood are Co-Chairs of the People’s Review of Prevent. Those wishing to submit evidence should do so by September 30th to preventreview<at>gmail.com. Where possible please do so accompanied by a one to two page summary.

Layla Aitlhadj is the director of Prevent Watch, a charity that supports people who have been directly impacted by the government’s Prevent strategy.

John Holmwood is emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham . He is the author (with Therese O’Toole) of Countering Extremism in British Schools: The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press 2018) and (with Gurminder K. Bhambra) Colonialsm and Modern Social Theory (Polity 2021).

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Kat Smith

One of the many consequences of COVID-19 has been a renewed emphasis on the role of scientific experts in policymaking. For those of us committed to improving the use of evidence in policymaking, it is tempting to hope that we may be achieving a substantive step forward with efforts to ensure policy decisions are, if not evidence-based, then at least evidence-informed. When it comes to the visibility of scientific expertise, it certainly feels like we are in a very different era to the UK of 2016, when Conservative minister Michael Gove famously responded to an interview question by saying that he thought people in Britain had ‘had enough of experts’.

… we need to do much more to promote a democratically grounded approach to evidence use, in ways that make better use of a wider range of expertise

Yet pandemic-provoked government commitments to ‘follow the science’ are no guarantee that we are entering a golden era of evidence-informed policymaking. Indeed, the approach that policymakers in the UK have taken to scientific evidence, and scientific experts, during the pandemic may not even be desirable. Here, I outline four reasons to be hopeful, and four reasons be cautious, for those seeking to improve the use of evidence and expertise in policy. I close by reflecting on some of the opportunities there are to learn from the unique experiences of this pandemic, arguing that we need to do much more to promote a democratically grounded approach to evidence use, in ways that make better use of a wider range of expertise.

Four reasons to be hopeful

The high policy profile of scientific evidence: The value of scientific research has rarely been more obvious to policymakers than it has in the past 18 months. Research has played a crucial role in helping UK policymakers respond to COVID-19, helping them to understand: how the virus spreads; the health, economic and social consequences of the virus and of policy response; and how it can be treated, tracked and potentially prevented. The value of scientific advice for pandemic policymaking was almost immediately apparent. Just a few weeks into the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson described policy responses to COVID-19 as ‘guided by the science’. A few months later, an Institute of Government report reflected that Ministers were consistently keen to emphasise that they were ‘following the science’. These claims have persisted, despite mixed assessments of the extent to which the UK government has drawn on science and expertise, and public trust in science appears to remain relatively high in the UK, despite high infection and mortality rates. All this suggests we have strong foundations on which to build a better long-term relationship between evidence and policy.The high public profile of (some) experts: The crucial role of scientific research during the pandemic has contributed to the emergence of some high profile scientific experts who are skilled at translating the constantly evolving evidence-base for policy, media and public audiences. From those holding high profile government roles, such as Chief Medical Officers and Chief Scientific Advisers, to the senior academic experts who have taken on advisory roles, such as Linda Bauld, John Edmunds, Neil Ferguson, Susan Michie, David Spiegelhalter and Devi Sridhar, to those who have opted to provide more arms-length advice via Independent SAGE, the media and Twitter, such as Anthony Costello, Trish Greenhalgh and Christina Pagel. Being able to explain the societal and policy implications of emerging data and evidence for audiences who do not all have postgraduate scientific or statistical training is a distinct skill from being able to use this training to gather and interpret data. The current pandemic has provided a platform for individuals who have the relatively rare ability to do both and, in so doing, seems likely to be raising the societal profile and accessibility of scientific evidence and expertise. If we want to maintain this interest, and counter misinformation, then this genre of scientific capability is likely to be essential.A renewed spotlight on social and economic inequalities: The unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of the virus itself and the various policy responses, have brought a renewed media and public interest in social and economic inequalities. As well as shouldering a higher burden of death and illness, many of those in positions of financial precarity have been pushed to the brink and beyond. Meanwhile, a wealthy elite has accumulated shockingly high increases in wealth by betting on the recovery of particular firms, while a broader set of households with high levels of disposable incomes have managed to increase their savings during the lockdowns, having had fewer options for spending their disposable income.There is growing evidence that the British population are unhappy with these inequalities. The simultaneous emergence of a UK arm of the Black Lives Matters movement with evidence that black and minority ethnic groups have experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infection and relatively worse health outcomes has, at the same time, shone a spotlight on Britain’s ethnic inequalities. All of this presents an opportunity for evidence and expertise concerning inequalities to gain public and policy traction.The potential to discuss previously ‘off the table’ policies: During the course of research exploring the impact of evidence about health inequalities on UK policy over the past 15 years, I consistently found that macro-level, structural policy responses (e.g. using policy levers to achieve more egalitarian distribution of wealth) were deemed so unpalatable (to policymakers and publics) that even researchers and policy actors who favoured them often saw little point in advocating their uptake. Consequently, even though many of the researchers and policymakers I spoke to were persuaded that there were structural causes to Britain’s health inequalities, they often put forward proposals that helped sustain ‘a ‘cargo cult’ of health behaviourism’. The dominance of this behavioural, individualised way of responding to health inequalities did not always appear to be grounded in empirical assessments of public views. However, the roots of this way of thinking can be traced back to the policy paradigm firmly embedded by the Thatcher-led governments of 1979-1990, in which the role of government policy in tackling many social and economic issues was limited to issuing guidance and pushing individuals to achieve behavioural changes. In the New Labour era (1997-2010), the state’s role shifted into setting targets and mechanisms for performance assessment but, still, the idea that governments might need to take more substantive policy action to tackle and prevent social problems remained unpopular. Since 2010, the creation of the ‘nudge’ unit within the UK government (under the Cameron-led Coalition government) further cemented the policy influence of behavioural science.

… the policy responses to COVID-19 could create spaces in which we can have evidence-informed conversations about policy interventions that were, until recently, ‘off the table’

In the face of a global pandemic, however, we have witnessed the structural power that still resides with policymakers working at the national level. All of the national level governments in the UK have introduced measures to tackle the pandemic that were previously deemed unimaginable. This opens up the potential to ask questions about why similar interventions are routinely ruled out in ‘normal’ times, given that inequalities are responsible for even greater – more sustained – levels of death and illness. In the UK (and other countries such as New Zealand and Finland), the Wellbeing Economy Alliance are framing the pandemic as ‘an opportunity to transform economies and societies in radically positive directions’, noting the lack of popular support for a ‘return to the way things were’. In the face of growing inequalities and a climate emergency, the policy responses to COVID-19 could create spaces in which we can have evidence-informed conversations about policy interventions that were, until recently, ‘off the table’.

Four reasons to be cautious

The narrowness of scientific expertise gaining public and policy traction: Much of the expertise, and many of the experts, gaining public and policy traction over the past 18 months have emanated from biomedical and statistical disciplines and from scientific advisers inside the policy process. Although social scientists are better represented on some of advisory groups than others, the continuing supremacy of behavioural thinking is unmistakeable (e.g. a key advisory group is the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, dominated by psychologists and behavioural experts). Advisors bringing more societal and structural perspectives (including, perhaps surprisingly, public health experts) are, while not completely absent, vastly outnumbered on these advisory groups. Appearances also suggest many of these experts share a relatively narrow cultural and demographic background. Put bluntly, although substantive in number, Britain’s current scientific superstars appear to be predominantly well-off, white scientists from high-income Anglophone settings who have trained in disciplines that promote broadly positivist or behavioural epistemologies.Beyond this, the more influential advisers appear to be those who understand, and are willing to follow, ‘the rules of the game’ (i.e. those working as policy insiders who are willing to limit criticism, at least in public). As Cairney reflects, in the UK context, ‘guided by ‘the science’ means ‘our scientists,’ and usually a small group of government scientific advisors.’ This relatively narrow set of experts almost inevitably results in a relatively narrow set of scientific advice, which has been a key criticism of the UK’s approach. Missing from this (or, at least, much less well featured) are social science voices that bring societal and structural perspectives to understanding the pandemic and policy responses. This is an importance gap given, as Pickersgill and Smith argue: ‘Many of the questions that policymakers […] are dealing with in relation to COVID-19 have significant social, economic, and ethical dimensions’.The problems caused by drawing on a narrow set of expertise are significant. Ensuring front-line workers had access to PPE – an area in which the UK did not perform well – immediately required advisors who understood procurement, supply chain management and logistics, and voices who recognised that ‘front-line’ workers were not only doctors and nurses working in hospitals but also care home staff, retailers, cleaners, porters, social workers, food processing staff, teachers, midwives, delivery drivers and so on. To avoid substantial increases in social and education inequalities and worsening mental health among children and young people – an other area with a concerning prognosis – policy decisions around school closures needed to be informed by a broad array of expertise (e.g. social workers, child psychologists, childhood behavioural experts, ethicists, teachers, sociologists of education, families and intersectional inequalities) as well as by those trying to model and understand the impact of school closures on viral transmission and hospital admissions.To be well-positioned to overcome the unequal impacts of COVID-19, including the wealth of misinformation about COVID-19 and available vaccines – yet another area in which the UK is struggling – scientific experts in the UK needed to represent (or at least to be drawing on) a much more diverse demographic spectrum. Instead, we saw 10 Black academics calling for a review of the UKRI’s systems and processes ‘after it emerged that none of the principal investigators on Covid-19 grants awarded for research into death rates among people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds were Black’ and claims that working class voices were being routinely side-lined.A lack of democratic engagement: While scientific advice can help decision-makers working to tackle major societal problems, such as pandemics and climate change, to identify potentially effective policy proposals, they also need to attain sufficient democratic legitimacy for proposals to be viable. Here, the UK’s current approach seems especially wanting; although there have been multiple efforts, for more than two decades, to promote the use of evidence in policymaking (on the assumption evidence-based policies are more effective), and multiple initiatives to promote stakeholder/public engagement (on the assumption engagement enhances democratic legitimacy), surprisingly little work considers how evidence, publics and policies interact.The importance of this gap was evident from the early stages of the UK’s pandemic policy response when early modelling of COVID-19 reportedly excluded policy responses that were later pursued because they were not initially deemed publicly acceptable. The need to understand (and listen to) public beliefs, experiences and preferences, and to consider how these are shaped by (and have the potential to shape) research and policy should come as no surprise since this kind of intelligence has been previously identified as important in efforts to tackle infectious disease outbreaks. As Rubin and colleagues note, ‘The public’s compliance is essential for response efficacy, as well as enhancing the democratic legitimacy of the pandemic response’.Yet, reflecting the narrowness of the scientific expertise on show in the UK, policymakers have often seemed surprisingly unwilling to consider what they might learn from publics or from other contexts. Without this kind of insight, policymakers inevitably struggle to understand or respond to the public pushbacks against COVID-19 prevention efforts. Moreover, and especially in the context of the narrow social backgrounds of the UK’s ruling elites, without democratic engagement in discussions around evidence and policy, the unequal impacts of the pandemic are unlikely to be mitigated and inequalities will continue to worsen.Confusion surrounding the boundary between science and politics: Although claims to be ‘guidance by the science’ may sound reassuring, such accounts of policymaking risk muddying the distinction between the decision-making responsibilities of elected governments and the scientific advice of independent experts. As Max Weber famously reflected in Science as a Vocation, the role of science is not to tell us (or our political leaders) what we (or they) should do, or how we should live, but rather to make more meaningful choices possible. Yet, faced with pressure to make unpopular decisions, obscuring this distinction may be strategically and symbolically useful to decision-makers but potentially damaging to the credibility of science. For if policies ‘based on science’ are unpopular, or if they turn out to be ineffective or to have unintended consequences (here, Rubin et al remind us that experts are notoriously bad at forecasting), the public pushback may focus on scientists rather than decision-makers, eroding the authority of science.This explains both why some of the most high profile scientific advisors have sought to emphasise the distinction between providing scientific advice and making policy decisions. Longer-term efforts to strengthen and improve the use of evidence in policy depend on the ability of scientists and other academic experts to maintain public credibility and authority, even where this expertise has informed potentially unpopular or unsuccessful policy decisions. This, in turn, requires efforts to ensure that academic work is sufficiently independent of government policy not to cast scientists as decision-makers or to result in academics self-censoring and telling policymakers what they think they want to hear. Yet, as the UK’s research funding landscape increasingly prioritises research that is responsive to policy needs, we are witnessing an ever-smaller gap between the expertise of those working at universities and those based at think tanks and private consultancies.The ‘emergency’ framing of the pandemic policy response: While pandemic policymaking has certainly enabled policies (such as the furlough scheme) that were previously unimaginable in contemporary Britain, these efforts have consistently been framed as one-off policy responses to an unprecedented emergency. If unchallenged, this framing may quickly shut down opportunities to seriously consider the kinds of transformative policy proposals that evidence on tackling inequalities and climate change suggests are required.

What might a more democratically-engaged approach to supporting evidence and expertise in policymaking look like?

It would be unreasonable to assume that the higher profile of scientific expertise during the COVID-19 pandemic will last beyond the immediate pandemic crisis. Indeed, the narrow profile of scientific expertise at play, the fallibility of scientific evidence and the limited democratic engagement all mean that sustaining this approach is unlikely to be desirable. Yet, this experience does offer opportunities to learn and to reflect on the kinds of evidence and expertise policymaking might benefit from. Pre-pandemic research on evidence use was often constrained by a focus on particular areas of policy, or specific contexts, stymying efforts to understand, and learn from, different ‘cultures of evidence’.

Both the devolved nature of policymaking in the UK and the global character of the pandemic offer opportunities for insightful comparative analysis. Given the complexity and seriousness of the challenges currently facing humans, we need to examine how different governments approached and drew on the complex array of potentially relevant evidence and expertise and how these decisions shaped policy outcomes. The inevitable uncertainty and fallibility of scientific evidence means we also need to explore how different governments sought to frame the role of science and expertise in policymaking and to understand how this, in turn, shapes public trust in science. Finally, if we can use the experience of pandemic policymaking to identify means of enhancing democratic engagement in conversations about evidence-informed policy options to address major societal challenges (recognising that publics are multiple and unequal), we will be contributing to addressing a much longer-standing impasse between ‘science’ and ‘politics’.

Kat Smith is Professor of Public Health Policy in the School of Social Work & Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. Her main research interests are the dynamics of policy change and the relationships between evidence, expertise, policy and practice, particularly for issues relating to public health and inequalities. She held the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2014.

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Sivamohan Valluvan

Much has already been said about what made Brexit Britain possible. For some, Brexit was a ‘death-drive’ poetics of nationalism amidst the rupturing of 20th century social contracts, political ideologies and Establishment authority. For others, it revealed a postcolonial melancholia but also hubris, interacting in contradictory ways. For Brexit apologists, it represented a cultural backlash in the English provinces against shifting mores and demographics. More centrist-minded nostalgics framed Brexit as the consequence of a digital media era which finds it profitable to cynically amplify a politics of ressentiment. Finally, more economistic arguments saw Brexit simply as an attempt to reach for the ostensible certainties of nation amidst the wider dissipation of Western capitalism’s privileges as occasioned by the rise of China but hastened domestically by decades of market-economics evangelism.

However, whatever the key drivers, it remains commonplace to note that the resultant nationalist politics traded primarily in a register of demagoguery about those who do not belong. This involved multiple external objects of loathing, harm and corrosion against which English victimhood and identity could be staged. The cast here is broad, including of course the EU, the alleged liberal-internationalism of metropolitan cosmopolitans, the increasingly confident voice of Scottish distinctiveness, and, of late, the power of China and other 21st century arrivistes.

But it was still, as ever, the overlapping figure of the migrant/refugee, the Muslim, and racialised minorities and ‘multiculturalism’ more broadly, for which Brexit conservatism reserved its primary animus. Brexit acted as a proxy referendum on immigration and it accordingly won itself, in Priti Patel, a Home Secretary equal to the anti-immigration demands it championed. And yet, in spite of a political terrain consistently congenial to the political Right, we continue to hear in Britain calls for a left nationalism, elsewhere presented as a progressive patriotism or left-populism.  

Painting Nationalism Red

It is important not to bundle all prevailing left nationalist invitations into one entity. There are competing reasons why a popular left politics might be tempted today by nationalism. These range from perceived electoral pragmatism and expediency; to pseudo-Marxist readings of immigration and ‘multiculturalism’ as neoliberal; to a melancholic fetishization of the working class as exclusively white and as modelled in a post-war glow; and finally, leftist understandings of today’s nationalism as misdirected anti-capitalist desires which require careful harnessing.

And though such diverse leftist plays to nationalism might be exasperating for many, it is scarcely surprising that a left sensibility might be seduced by the nationalist wager. After all, as Benedict Anderson famously explained, it is nationalism that stages for modernity a sense of political community, a sense of collective identity that sits in an uneasy dialectical tension with the abstract and cold individualism of commercial modernity. As many contemporary observers of fascism dolefully observed, the awkward truth is that it was nationalism that popularly recalled, albeit in reactionary form, assorted pre-, or non-, economistic sentiments nominally antagonistic to capitalist alienation. Similarly, it was nationalism that cultivated what Anderson again calls a sensation of ‘deep horizontal comradeship’.

Nationalism … can create an intoxicating impression that we are united in our equal standing

Nationalism, then, can create an intoxicating impression that we are united in our equal standing, and even endow this common unity with a sacredness befitting an otherwise secular age. When seen like this, this sacralised sense of solidaristic sameness is, of course, vying for a similar sense of solidarity as the left. After all, does not any self-respecting left-wing orator also posit a horizontal comradeship. Do they not also speak in the idioms of collectives, the people, and solidarity.

However, that nationalism is, at best, only partially amendable to a leftist or Marxist appropriation is also well-understood. Nationalism ultimately reconciles the polity to class stratification and exploitation – where the realities of domestic class conflict are subsumed by the falsely unifying ethnic ecology of nation. Similarly, even if a nationalist orientation engages in some variation of capitalist reform, it is still easily critiqued for its intrinsic exclusions, not least on racialised terms – its scope of welfarist amelioration being indexed to a grid of national belonging and entitlement.

But it is also the case that the exclusionary limits of nationalism are not themselves fatal to it as a political project.  Whilst it fails to satisfy a more humanist conception of justice that many of us cleave towards, it might still appeal to others who are willing to sacrifice one expansive sense of justice in the interests of a more contained political possibility. After all, for a majority to stake a principle of belonging, sovereignty and perhaps even some putative material gain to an assertion of national identity will appeal to those ‘natives’ in whose image the nation is ostensibly forged.

Incidentally, a common habit of nationalists the world over is not to deride their critics as ipso facto villainous or wrong but as simply naïve and idealistic. It is argued here that critics fail to see that the nation, and the territorialised state it encompasses, is the only conduit via which a sense of political community, order and democratic justice can be realised.  Nationalism can seem, then, a rather grounded project and its intrinsic logic of exclusion, as regards citizenship and the cultivation of a common national identity, an acceptable and necessary price.

Nationalism and postcolonial lessons

It is in postcolonial theory, however, that we find the more enduring critiques of nationalism. Its broad archive has consistently shown that nationalism is not problematic simply because it is exclusionary, intolerant or violent. Though it is problematic for those reasons, too. It is also problematic because it is essentially de-politicising. As Paul Gilroy once framed it, nationalism is a politics that stalls at a level of ‘prepolitical uniformity’.[1] Specifically, the assertion of national identity becomes the primary locus of political desire itself.

Politics becomes overdetermined by an endless sequence of increasingly fervent assertions about ethnic and cultural integrity

Politics becomes overdetermined by an endless sequence of increasingly fervent assertions about ethnic and cultural integrity; about majoritarian entitlement or priority; about the symbolic flagging of the nation and its ethically consecrated history; and of course, various agonised laments about the presence of those who don’t belong. In other words, an endless impugning of minorities, migrant interlopers, and neighbouring countries to whom primary culpability for assorted hardships can be ascribed.

There is also often a preoccupation with those excessively cosmopolitan or leftist dissenters who require patriotic disciplining. As regards the latter, it is sobering that in today’s Hindutva India the principal political slur is that of being ‘anti-national’.  Whilst in China, bourgeoning netizen parlance has coined a wildly popular ‘baizuo’ neologism – which nominally reads as ‘white left’ but also speaks much more generically to the foolish idealism of those in China who advocate for both equality and compassion for the outsider. This is a foolishness that overrides the immutable truths of civilizational vitality and the necessity of tightly bound national collectives.

Amidst this context of nationalism’s destructive insularity, it was Frantz Fanon who presciently cautioned, though he is sometimes read otherwise, that the overriding risk for the original decolonial moment was that the new nation, in trying to stake a sense of national authenticity and historic entitlement, itself becomes committed to its own ‘ultra-nationalisms, chauvinisms, and racisms.’[2] Fanon becomes here, in Mahmood Mamdani’s insightful phrasing, both the ‘first prophet of decolonization’ but ‘also its first critic’.[3] And whilst such exclusionary animus, with all its visceral dehumanization, is already unconscionable from the perspective of those who are its object, it is also apparent that the political discourse of those who otherwise belong as the normative majority is also diminished.

the assertion of national identity, itself, becomes the political wager, the principal attachment of the state

Much postcolonial critique, working from this Fanonian impulse, has made it evident that nationalism is not just some instrumental premise, not just an expedient vehicle for some wider political principle or goal, as is often assumed. Rather, the assertion of national identity, itself, becomes the political wager, the principal attachment of the state. Or as Nandita Sharma recently argued, in her broad scan of the former colonized world,[4] much politics collapses into the rehearsal of the ‘ethnic question’ and little else – i.e. who belongs, who doesn’t, who is authentic, who isn’t, who is native and who is a guest. And so forth.

Of course, in the heady ferment of the initial decolonial era, this drive was tempered by the competing imperatives of the communist wager so central to the mid 20th century, alongside a ‘worldmaking’ sense of anticolonial global humanism.  Today, however, the nationalist compulsion acts with full autonomous abandon. Indeed, as regards China and to a lesser extent India, we see that these ‘civilizationist’ nationalisms have also found an elective affinity with what some call the state-managed or ‘authoritarian’ capitalism that has obtained particularly strong grounding.

Accordingly, whilst the earlier communist hypothesis represented a mitigating bulwark against the nationalisms of the postcolonial moment, we now see that the state capitalist imperatives of the contemporary period align particularly well with the nationalist terms of today’s hegemonic claims. And though this concept of state capitalism is subject to intense debate, there is a clear case to be explored about how and why do capitalist imperatives now draw such an easy affinity with nationalist-populism – an affinity that should give pause to those who continue to insist that the politics of nation is still available for a progressive form.

England, Scotland and the husk of Britain

Of course, it is still possible to ascribe distinctly progressive content to the nation in its more embryonic, resistant form, when it is yet to become a nation-state construed by majoritarian authority. From a British perspective, it is Tom Nairn who proves particularly relevant here.

Long deserving of his status as the public intellectual of Scottish independence, Nairn always understood the aforementioned predicaments of nationalism. His advocacy of a Scottish independence cautioned against romanticist ethnic claims, favouring instead a civic, left-modernist and international sensibility. Indeed, Nairn’s advocacy of EEC membership, unusual at the time for Left luminaries, puts his nationalism in a particularly complex light. A scenario where potential independence would actually see Scotland willingly pool its new-found sovereignty in the collaborative interests of a confederal EU project. The fact that Britain’s exit from Europe renders the cause of Scottish independence (and perhaps Irish unification too) even more attractive speaks to that distinctly open and pragmatic vision of a Scottish future that Nairn was envisaging.

Nairn was prefiguring – indeed, helping to bring it into being – Nicola Sturgeon’s later claim that theirs was a cause of independence tied to ‘social justice and democracy’, as opposed to nationalism per se. Or, to quote from the precocious SNP MP Mhairi Black, ‘nationalism [has] nothing to do with what’s happened in Scotland’.[5] And even if Brexiters or Trumpists also often disavow nationalism, in favour of motifs of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘control’, it is of course true that much of what is presented as regional separatism is routinely allied to a distinctly progressive ambition. (As is also partially evident in the not entirely quixotic arrival in English politics of the Northern Independence Party, who seem to be pressing an open if mischievous left-populist narration of their separatist ambitions.)

‘the very idea that one’s own nation has transcended nationalism is itself a kind of nationalism’

But if the very underlying imprimatur of that future is still the idea of nation, it is also easy to see that it might, in time, override any competing logic of state formation, once and if consolidated as an independent entity. Indeed, as was once noted in a different debate about civic nationalism, ‘the very idea that one’s own nation has transcended nationalism is itself a kind of nationalism’.[6] To acknowledge this, as Nairn himself does, is not to begrudge those who wish to escape, to realise an independence from all that is drab, boorish and ‘Blue Rinse’ reactionary. It is only to note that the authorising alibi of nation is no benign instrument, but sets in play a variety of future political moorings once one is fortunate enough to self-describe as a majority vis-à-vis the nation-state one wished into being. And particularly so when one encounters new stresses, often internal, to the democratic, welfarist and forward-looking aims first championed as the horizon of independence. In other words, in the wake of such separatist battles, it is not the cause of social democracy or some suitable equivalent that triumphs, but the nation. And it remains the case that the cause of nation appropriates, simultaneously, any number of wholly contradictory political stripes as convenient – a ragtag ideological cacophony that only coheres, as an active political demand, around the idea of nationhood itself. 

The wider British context of Nairn’s arguments opens up, however, other considerations regarding nationalism’s allegedly more protean possibilities. Decisive for Nairn was his understanding that the British state is in its very design pathological, forged as it was in the interests of an imperial project. The United Kingdom remains, in turn, irredeemably anachronistic to the possibility of a 21st century politics that reckons openly and fairly with the global at the same time as it roots itself in textures of local democracy.

a liberated Scotland would inadvertently liberate England too

A powerful plea is at work here, where Nairn spies the possibility amidst the dissolution of the Kingdom for its new nations to reconcile themselves to a humbled understanding of their place in the world. In other words, a political temperament that inveighs against denialist ‘world-beating’ hubris, trademarked today by Boris Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’ jocularity, and instead, seeks out international collaboration from a healthy position of acknowledged modesty and cooperative sovereignty. Nairn’s parallel intimation is that a liberated Scotland would inadvertently liberate England too, where finally an English politics too might emerge that is free of the destructive imperial worldview that endures when England is still seen as a metonym of (Great) Britain.

I wonder however – as enchanting as the possibility of a humbled, contemplative and constitutionally reformed England otherwise is – if a more global critical lens is still required, lest we unduly provincialize its current problems. In other words, just as Brexit boosters are wont to exceptionalist cheerleading, so too its critics might be prone to an inverted exceptionalisation of the Anglo-British nationalist malaise. The very fact that jingoistic nationalisms abound all around us and across very different historical contexts, be it Italy and Hungary or Russia and Turkey, it seems instructive then to indict nationalism more expansively – as opposed to identifying only the England-as-Britain malaise as being chronically compromised.

It is another decolonial irony as regards Global South nationalisms that is again telling here. As the political theorist Chenchen Zhang captures so forensically [7], much of contemporary right-populist discourse in China is increasingly referencing the West as a cautionary tale about an allegedly excess liberalism; an allegedly excess tolerance of minorities, immigration and Muslims via which the West is perceived as undergoing a naïve and self-willed implosion from within. Zhang excerpts here a dizzying online discourse, culminating in one commentator’s claim that ‘It’s about the instinct of survival. The West has lost this instinct, but China has it’, whilst another observes that ‘Nothing can save Europe when she’s digging herself a grave through self-deception and giving up on cultural assimilation.’

the West no longer features as some sort of Eurocentric beacon of modernization

Whilst the context here is China, we could without much difficulty also extend such political trends to other less world-historical settings such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In turn, from a contemporary postcolonial perspective, it becomes possible to note how the West no longer features as some sort of Eurocentric beacon of modernization that many early postcolonial nation-making leaders were reluctantly obliged to reference; and nor does it act as a reference of violent and hypocritical reaction against which postcolonial progressive politics might be pursued in contradistinction. But instead, in a sort of macabre decolonial reversal, the West is increasingly invoked as a salutary tale about the dangers of being inadequately nationalist, inadequately assertive about one’s cultural cohesion and ethnic integrity, inadequately anti-immigration and/or inadequately assimilationist.

And notwithstanding the ironies of Europe being construed here as insufficiently nationalist – doubly ironic for someone who has staked an entire book on saying otherwise – other instructive questions also arise then about nationalism’s sui generis limits. If the very countries that were once subjected to colonial domination can today assert themselves with such chauvinistic belligerence, it is no longer self-evident that the former colonizer’s attempt to fashion a postimperial, post United Kingdom nation-state design will summarily allow for a healthier orientation towards nationhood. I would instead venture that there seems to be something much more corrosively immanent about how modernity helps fix sovereignty and political community to a sense of national identity and belonging and the distinctly nationalist framings of political problems, anxiety and resolution that flow out of that very premise.

This is not to deny that other much more inviting political possibilities are also available to the new set of nation-states that might succeed any mooted break-up of the Union. In Scotland certainly, but also England, whole generations are taking shape that are much more assertive about a post-neoliberal political possibility – an economic sensibility that is also finding some diluted traction in the early months of Joe Biden’s U.S. administration. This is also a generational ethos that is being re-aligned to the more internationalist scale of their cultural imagination and as a practical necessity. This being a realism more open to a pooled sense of sovereignty and post-imperial global collaboration and accountability when contending with the planetary immanence of climate change, the fleet-footed global mobility of a predatory capitalism, and also just the borderless vectors of pandemics.

What Nairn calls the ‘maelstrom’ of generatively unknown possibility that awaits us amidst the dissolution of the United Kingdom is accordingly very inviting, given the impasse of a present political and electoral culture where the UK is staring toward a future of oligarchic one-party rule. I only note that much of this energy is likely to be frustrated if we continue to tie our demands to an underlying attachment to nationhood and national identity. This is a nationalist attachment that consistently bends politics towards its own autonomous imperatives as opposed to it bending towards politics.

Notes:

[1] Gilroy, P. (2004[2000]) Between Camps, Abingdon: Routledge, p.8. 

[2] Fanon, F. (2001[1961]) The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Books, p.125.

[3] Mamdani, M. (2002) ‘Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa’, Identity, Culture and Politics, 3(2), p.5.

[4] Sharma, N. (2020) Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

[5]  These quotes as well as some of the wider context about Nairn are sourced from Anthony Barnett’s Introduction (‘Tom Nairn is the One’) to the recent reissue of Nairn’s defining classic. Nairn, T. (2021[1977]) The Break-Up of Britain, London: Verso. See also James Foley’s (2021) recent ‘Scotland After Covid-19’.

[6] Read, J. (2004) ‘Writing in the Conjuncture’, Borderlands, 3(1), p.6.

[7] Zhang, C. (2019) ‘Right-wing Populism with Chinese Characteristics’, European Journal of International Relations, 26(1), 88-115.

Sivamohan Valluvan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Clamour of Nationalism (Manchester University Press) and has written widely on debates of race and racism, nationalism and multiculture, as well as postcolonial and social theory more broadly. He has also contributed to Salvage, Red Pepper, Renewal, Juncture, Guardian, and Fabian Review. 

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Manuela Boatcă

In a recent policy paper, ambitiously titled “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, the British government states that, “as an open economy and a maritime trading nation with a large diaspora”, the UK is “a European country with global interests”. In the very next sentence, it posits that the country’s “future prosperity will be enhanced by our economic connections with dynamic parts of the world […] as well as trade with Europe” (UK Government 2021: 14). The geopolitically Freudian slip of identifying as a European country while professing a will to trade with Europe is revealing of more than one unwarranted shorthand in Brexit discourse and policy.

First, there is the conflation of Europe with the European Union. To be fair, using the former to refer to the latter is, in itself, not particular to Brexit discourse. Yet the monopoly that the economic and political project of the European Union has acquired over the historical and present meanings of “Europe” has gradually narrowed attention to, and awareness of, European affairs down to European Union member states. At the same time, candidate countries – from the ten Eastern European members that joined in 2004 to Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, which joined in 2007 and 2014, respectively – were told to “Europeanize”; or were told off, as in the case of Turkey, which had first applied for EU accession in 1987. Framing Brexit, from the referendum to its current implications, in binary terms that pit “European membership” against a “Global Britain”, leaves out the UK’s manifold European ties – until they surface as tautological references to a Europe-not-in- Europe, as above. Not least, such framing (purposefully?) downplays European global ambitions and long-standing global entanglements.

This brings me to a second leap in meaning, constantly reproduced in Brexit discourse and beyond. Even when not directed specifically at the European Union, references to “Europe” in the singular obscure the multiplicity of unequal Europes resulting from the different roles that regions of Europe played in the global colonial enterprise (incidentally, at least as much of a “Competitive Age” as the one in which the “Global Britain” agenda is currently placed). What informed the reigning notion of “Europe” – and its corresponding claims to civilization, modernity, and development – was defined one-sidedly from positions of power mainly associated with colonial and imperial rule.

France and England, the rising colonial powers of the eighteenth century, self-described as the producers of modernity’s main revolutions –  the French Revolution and the industrial revolution –  and claimed the status of a “heroic Europe” as the norm. This self-serving narrative accordingly relegated the early colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, to a lesser, “decadent” Europe, while large parts of the European East, which had lost out of colonial possessions overseas during that particular competitive age, became the “epigonal Europe” perpetually trying to catch up (Boatcă 2021).

what does the UK look like when viewed from some of these other Europes?

Even more important for today’s definitions of Europe, however, is the fact that the colonial possessions, which were economically indispensable for these achievements and administratively integral parts of Western European states, played no part in the definition of Europe or its claims to modernity. To this day, many of these areas, which official language labels “overseas countries and territories” and “outermost regions”, are under the control of European states – from the Dutch Caribbean to the French Antilles and the British Virgin Islands. They are “forgotten” Europes: the geopolitically and discursively least visible group among the multiple Europes resulted from power shifts within and beyond the continent during the past five centuries. UK’s overseas territories, whose populations were unable to vote in the Brexit referendum and whose future status was largely neglected during Brexit negotiations, are themselves such forgotten Europes – and one of the reasons why the (Dis)United Kingdom has long been both European and global. So what does the UK look like when viewed from some of these other Europes?

Fig. 1. Map of the British Isles, as well as the various British Overseas TerritoriesImage Credit: MrPenguin20 Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Britain controls fourteen overseas territories with different forms of statehood and degrees of self-determination in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific oceans, and in continental Europe (see figure 1). Before Brexit, the UK was the EU state controlling the most overseas territories – a total of thirteen that counted as overseas countries and territories (OCTs) within the EU framework – plus continental Gibraltar, by definition not “overseas”. The remaining twenty-two OCTs of the European Union are the result of the colonial involvement of five EU member states: Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Of these, nine are part of France, Portugal, and Spain and thus fully-fledged EU members; they are considered outermost regions (ORs) of the European Union and are subject to EU legislation.

According to official language, the remaining thirteen “are not sovereign countries but depend to varying degrees on the 3 Member countries with which they maintain special links” (European Commission 2020). These Danish, Dutch, and French colonies are not part of the single market, yet their nationals are EU citizens. In contrast, most citizens of British Overseas Territories before Brexit were British nationals holding British passports and subject to British sovereignty, but not full British citizens. They were also, therefore, not EU citizens with freedom of movement in other EU countries. Yet they were, and continued to be, exempt from obtaining a visa when traveling within the Schengen Area and had the right to apply for full British citizenship. After the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the thirteen British Overseas Territories no longer form part of the European Union’s OCTs. The consequences of this decision for individual territories not only differ widely, but have in the most cases not even been addressed in post-Brexit regulations and negotiations.

The programmatic forgetting of Britain’s other Europes was already apparent as Brexit negotiations at home vied with the urgent need for disaster relief overseas in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, which had incurred considerable damage in Anguilla, Montserrat and the British Virgin Islands in 2017. While France and the Netherlands quickly dispatched taskforces and military personnel to the equally affected French and Dutch Caribbean territories, Britain’s slow response, described as “appalling” by the British nationals affected by the hurricane, prompted even conservative media to insist that “Britain must care for all its citizens” (The Telegraph 2017).

Although media and local overseas governments’ warnings and pleas have since increased exponentially, Britain had yet to systematically heed them. In the British government’s framework document on Brexit, released in 2018, references to the overseas territories are both scarce and vague. They range from “seeking specific arrangements for the Crown Dependencies, Gibraltar and the other Overseas Territories” through “ensuring an appropriate and beneficial future relationship across the UK family” and up to “upholding their British sovereignty” (UK Parliament 2018). They remain as vague as to only commit to “meeting the needs of the wider UK family, including the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories”.

a solution for avoiding a hard border with the EU was negotiated only for Gibraltar

Crucially, the framework document makes no mention of their maritime borders with EU territories in the Caribbean – even as they are placed next to concrete plans regarding EU borders on the mainland, such as the plan to “protect the union, avoiding the need for any hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland” (UK Parliament 2018). After the last-minute Brexit deal, a solution for avoiding a hard border with the EU was negotiated only for Gibraltar (the only overseas territory located in continental Europe and the only full EU member among them): joining the Schengen zone. While ratifying this preliminary agreement as a treaty detailing the consequences for free movement, border control, and fishing rights is expected to take months, no such hope is in sight for the remaining overseas territories (Müller 2021).

Among them, Anguilla, the oldest British colony and a British territory since 1650, offers a striking mirror image of Britain’s political borders in the Caribbean. Just like Britain, Anguilla shares a maritime border with France through its own “English Channel” – the Anguilla channel – which separates it from the French “overseas collectivity” of St. Martin. Yet unlike Britain, Anguilla also borders the Netherlands to the south through Sint Maarten, a “constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands” on the same island as the French St. Martin. Anguilla is dependent upon both for trade and transportation: planes bound to Anguilla can only land on the Dutch part, Sint Maarten, while the only cargo port, through which Anguilla receives most goods, is located in the French part of the island, St. Martin. It has no access to postal services, fuel, basic medical services and educational special needs other than through the facilities located in the Dutch and French territories.

Anguilla still faces the prospect of harboring an instant refugee – or illegalized – population of British People of Colour

While Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU were ongoing, the Government of Anguilla published two reports signaling the urgency and importance of these issues, detailing Brexit risks and drafting possible avenues to prevent a mirror Brexit border in the Caribbean, such as a regional customs union and common travel area with the island of Saint Martin (Government of Anguilla 2017; 2018). At the time of writing this text, Anguilla still faces the prospect of harboring an instant refugee – or illegalized – population of British People of Colour in this forgotten Europe. In the meantime, Anguilla’s population decreased from almost 17,000 people in 2016 to 13,500 in 2018 as people migrated in search of a less risky future. Population numbers did rise again in 2020, yet this was mainly due to the worldwide restrictions on emigration during the pandemic.

An aspect that received little media and policy attention is that Brexit not only resulted in the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, but also of its Overseas Territories Association (UKOTA) from the rest of the Overseas Countries and Territories Association, the organization that regulates cooperation between the EU and the overseas dependencies of its member states (Grass 2021). The imposition of high tariffs on the squid and fish exported to the EU from the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that was explicitly excluded from the UK/EU Brexit accord, or on the honey produced only on the Pitcairn Islands, have received only scant attention despite the likelihood of momentous impact.

The Falkland Islands economy relies heavily on fish, of which up to 90 percent is exported to the EU. The Pitcairn Islands, Britain’s smallest and most remote overseas territory, exports one-third of its honey to the EU and had so far received around 2.4 million euros from the European Development Fund towards several building projects, including a school and a harbour (Connelly 2019). Post-Brexit concerns in both territories, which are of strategic economic importance to other EU countries, have prompted questions whether the Falkland Islands might ask for Spain’s intervention on the issue of the EU-imposed tariffs on squid exports and whether Pitcairn, currently facing depopulation, might soon be for sale – much to the interest of France.

Yet the most affected remains Anguilla, the island most dependent on the relationship with the European Union among the UK’s overseas territories. As an “internally self-governing British territory”, as the official language has it, Anguilla is ineligible for most British development aid. Yet before Brexit, in which Anguilla’s citizens didn’t have a vote, the European Union was the island’s main source of funding, especially for reconstruction projects after the hurricanes of the past several years. In the absence of clear post-Brexit provisions, it is likely that EU funding will be cut off. Blondel Cluff, until recently Anguilla’s representative in London, hinted at Anguilla’s location being a mirror image of Britain’s borders when stating: “Saint Martin is our backyard, and we are theirs. Everyone has family there too. If that border becomes like Dover and Calais, that’s going to make life very difficult for Anguilla” (quoted in Connelly 2019).

Anguilla is the only British colony that ever fought to remain British

Quite unlike other dependent territories across the world today, Anguilla is the only British colony that ever fought to remain British – rather than belong to an independent island federation together with St. Kitts and Nevis. The long-drawn process, known on the island as the Anguilla revolution, included a declaration of independence from St. Kitts and Nevis in 1967, two referenda in 1967 and 1969, in which over 99.7 percent of the population voted for secession from the then state of St. Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla. An infamous invasion of the island by Britain’s metropolitan police in 1969 was met with peaceful demonstrations by unarmed locals and ridiculed in the press of the time as the “Bay of Piglets” (Hannan 2019). Anguilla formally seceded from St. Kitts and Nevis in 1980 in order to remain a British colony.

Such decisions for a formal colonial status can be of strategic self-interest. They result from weighing the risks posed by political upheaval, the small size of island economies, and the additional management capacity necessary after independence against the advantages that the maintenance of colonial ties offers, and that in most cases include economic assistance, welfare provisions, as well as access to the citizenship of a EU member and the mobility benefits it guarantees. In view of the fact that none of several EU overseas territories with good prospects for independence at the end of the twentieth century have since chosen sovereignty, the authors of “The Ends of Empire. The Last Colonies Revisited” conclude that “Opposition to independence is not illogical. Brexit has shown how issues initially considered of no obvious relevance to OTs, and determined without reference to them can have powerful repercussions, ironically pointing to the virtues of an externally guaranteed security” (Connell and Aldrich 2020: 104).  

Despite the imperial rhetoric of global reach, the resulting picture is one of a fragmented, disunited Kingdom that has yet to take accountability for its imperial present

In a section titled “Our interests and our values: the glue that binds the Union”, the UK government’s policy paper on Global Britain indeed lists sovereignty, security and prosperity as “the shared interests [that] bind together the citizens of the United Kingdom” (UK Government 2021: 13). Yet, in claiming that, “it is as the United Kingdom that we boast armed forces with global reach”, in proceeding to advocate for “the” UK border as “the most effective in the world” by 2025 – “the gateway to Global Britain”, and in presenting the UK Global Tariff as a tool to maintain “an open and competitive UK market in the interests of UK consumers”, it systematically leaves out the concerns of its overseas citizens and other nationals from every single one of these shared interests. This is so, from Anguila’s EU border with St. Martin to the newly imposed tariffs for the Falkland Islands and Pitcairn and the renewed talk of sovereignty both in the overseas territories and in the British Isles themselves. Despite the imperial rhetoric of global reach, the resulting picture is one of a fragmented, disunited Kingdom that has yet to take accountability for its imperial present.

Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She has published widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is author of Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism, Routledge 2016 and of Laboratoare ale modernității. Europa de Est și America Latină în (co)relație, IDEA 2020, as well as co-editor (with A. Amelina, A. Weiß, and G. Bongaerts) of “Theorizing Society Across Borders: Globality, Transnationality, Postcoloniality”, Current Sociology special issue 2021. Her co-authored book Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires (with Anca Parvulescu) is forthcoming in English, German, and Romanian in 2022.

Header image credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office – Flickr

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Boatcă, Manuela 2021. ‘(Dis)United Kingdom: The View from the other Europes’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (2)

Desmond King

The situation in Northern Ireland is deeply uncertain, as the quotation in my title indicates – it is from David Campbell, chair of the Loyalist Communities Council speaking in Parliament to the NI Select Committee. Unionism has mobilized against the Brexit NI Protocol, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has unexpectedly changed leadership to restore its conservative roots, various brands of politicians warn of imminent violence on the streets, relations with the Republic of Ireland – already poor – are deteriorating, and the United States recently elected president, Joe Biden, celebrates his Irish identity in his interest in Northern Ireland. In its briefings about the Protocol the UK government swings from stinging denouncements of EU intransigence to claiming signs of progress.

In some ways, of course, Northern Ireland is always in a state of uncertainty, its future haunted by its origin and history. A teleological perspective is dangerous for either unionists or nationalists. Its trajectory resembles a train journey with many stations to stop at, but whose final destination is undetermined.

For observers of Brexit, Northern Ireland is a vivid example of a wider clash between reality and rhetoric. The Protocol required contradicting all the statements and positions of the Tory government elected in December 2019 to ‘get Brexit done.’ In agreeing to these final terms with the EU, the Johnson government accepted the requirements of Brussels (deriving from its own treaty obligations to the Anglo-Irish agreement and its fellow member state, Ireland) and threw aside its own promises to Northern Irish unionists.

‘Getting so much better all the time. It’s getting better all the time.’ Isn’t it?

History, expressed in an obdurate and all defining sectarian division, dominates Northern Ireland in the hundredth year of its existence, as a self-contained unit constitutionally defined by the United Kingdom,[1] whose own conception of union is increasingly debated and queried.[2] The pace of Brexit and sectarian driven conflict, post-Brexit self-righteousness, and unionist and republican anxieties and calculations means NI now ensnares UK politics. Noise and petulance, however, does not necessarily mean change.

When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, his team were stunned to discover how much time NI and its politicians had consumed in the prime ministerial diary. No one had warned them!

Northern Ireland has never respected parliamentary niceties

That surprise is reverberating again in Downing Street. Johnson sits on an impregnable Conservative Party majority in Parliament and can be callously indifferent to or merely neglectful of events in the six counties. But Northern Ireland has never respected parliamentary niceties and the combination of an inherited dysfunctionality and Brexit has guaranteed its significance. It is un-ignorable.

Yet, the recent dark clouds are mildly unexpected. After the bloody wars of three decades costing three and a half thousand lives, the tense forging of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998 offered optimism. This Agreement – initially opposed by the DUP (more of whom below) – was bolstered in the St Andrews Agreement in October 2006 when the governing Northern Ireland Executive was put in place. The fervent enemies – Free Presbyterian Dr Ian Paisley and armed struggle Republican Martin McGuinness – formed a shared administration and remarkably appeared publicly together in congenial manner dubbed the ‘Chuckle Brothers’.

The Republic of Ireland dropped, by referendum, its long-standing constitutional claim that Ireland was a 32-county entity over which it claimed complete sovereignty. Elections ensued. Facilitated by common membership in the EU, the border faded as a physical infrastructure offering seamless passage North and South. Access to Irish or UK passports or both became the norm in Northern Ireland opening up identities.

The Queen as UK head of state made an official visit to the Republic, greeted warmly by all and sundry, and uttered a greeting in flawless Gaelic. But, most significantly, sectarian killing vanished.  

“Brexit means Brexit”

Brexit has of course destroyed these good times and fanned discord, or, at least brought to the surface, pre-existing bad tempered conflicts – for example, about the Irish language, how to deal with legacies of the killing years and more.

From the moment the long forgotten Brexiter Tory Northern Ireland Secretary in David Cameron’s government, Theresa Villiers, declared during the 2016 referendum campaign, there would be no need for a border with the Republic as an EU member if Brexit occurred, to PM Boris Johnson’s contradiction in January 2021 of his own Protocol agreement – dismissing the NI-UK mainland border checks as non-existent – so Brexit has not only not shifted but has in practice locked-in NI’s political, religious, identity and ideological fissures into a new phase.   Both sides have ratcheted up tensions: the mass attendance at the Sinn Fein Bobby Storey funeral prompted tough exchanges with the party’s DUP co-executive partners and unionist criticisms of the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

But the Brexit fallout is even more significant. The Protocol has intensified the feeling of betrayal amongst unionists and intensified the will of loyalists to defend the promised ‘unfettered’ trade across the Irish Sea, liberated from forms, checks or barriers. It is now the most important priority for Unionists. The requirement of customs declarations on parcels from Britain to NI is a daily reminder of inequality of citizenship for NI unionists within the nominally co-equal UK.

In Northern Ireland Brexit support and its fallout falls unfailingly along sectarian lines

In Northern Ireland Brexit support and its fallout falls unfailingly along sectarian lines. The Unionist parties, including the UUP, DUP and TUV, each campaigned for Brexit as an eagerly grasped opportunity to deepen integration into the UK and to weaken the fragile ties with the Republic of Ireland, ties represented by the absence of a hard North-South border with checks and a North-South ministerial council put in place by the Good Friday Agreement; these ties were already weakened by the periodic collapse of the Northern Ireland executive.

Nationalist parties – Sinn Fein and the SDLP joined by the ever hopeful Alliance Party – opposed Brexit for the opposite reasons: Brexit would weaken North-South ties, probably result in a hard border and remove the extra-national state forum for civil exchanges offered by the European Union’s institutions in Brussels and Strasburg.   It would place their community at the mercy of a populist Brexit Conservative party led by Boris Johnson. A clear majority voted to Remain in the 2016 referendum.

The intention to get a border reinstated between the Republic of Ireland and the six county NI state was made explicit by the ousted DUP leader, Arlene Foster, in a genial ‘lunch with’ interview in the Financial Times at the end of May. Munching through their fish delicacies, Foster retrospectively berated to her host that the then PM, Theresa May failed to impose this agenda on the EU: “Foster exhales, and blames May for accepting there could be no Irish border checks. ‘All of the reasons I voted for Brexit are still good reasons. The difficulty has been the way in which the protocol has been worked through. And I think the Irish government has a lot to answer for.’”

By this stage on her way out of office, Foster took the opportunity to promote the anti-Republic of Ireland narrative as the source of the hated NI Protocol. Her successor to the leadership of the DUP – Edwin Poots – immediately declared upon election, that relations with the Republic had never been worse. Prime Minister Johnson’s promise of ‘unfettered’ trade across the Irish Sea within the UK is the goal of unionist antipathy to the Protocol.

As in Scotland, the majority of Northern Irish voters voted against the UK’s departure from the EU. The aggregate UK vote favoured leaving. Brexit first empowered the DUP into an agreeable alliance to prop up Theresa May’s no-majority Tory government, extracting funding for Northern Ireland and apparent vindication of their dismissal of the backstop treaty arrangement.

But the Tories’ whopping majority under Johnson in December 2019 eliminated the DUP’s political clout and influence. Johnson kept up his rhetorical fantasies denouncing the prospect of a border in the Irish Sea (most vociferously when addressing the DUP’s own national conference where the delegates credulously embraced him) – but, guess what? In practice, he did the opposite, agreeing to the very hated border checks as part of the withdrawal agreement, embodied in the Protocol Agreement. Northern Ireland is in practice remote from English electoral and day-to-day politics so interest in this new trade border is minute. Having expected Brexit to deliver closer ties to the UK, in practice it has done the opposite, delineating it from the Union more crisply and in ways which have no parallels in Wales or Scotland.

“The times are [not] a changing”

The discreet notice from Loyalist paramilitary groups issued through the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC) – the hard men with access to violent means –  that the Good Friday Agreement is suspended, and the dangerous threats to workers at Larne port, should send a shiver down the spine of No 10’s Brexit visionaries. It is an unflinching message.  The DUP’s new leader, Edwin Poots, intones that relations with the Republic of Ireland have ‘never been worse’, and he apportions principal blame for the Brexit Protocol set of border checks across the NI-UK sea equally on the Irish government and the EU, not the UK government which negotiated and accepted the arrangement. The disdain is palpable and deep.

For the unionist community securing closer ties with the UK and limiting relations with the Republic of Ireland is elemental. A nineteen-year old LCC delegate told a subdued Northern Ireland Select Committee hearing that such was the level of anger about the NI Protocol that violence could result: “I am not sure if and when violence will be the answer. I am saying that I would not rule it off the table.”

The sentiment is unremarkable. What is disconcerting is the threat to the twenty-three years of peaceful co-existence achieved in NI since the Good Friday Agreement, and just how fragile that peace may be. Brexit has had a profound effect.

DUP reshaped

Turmoil in the DUP has thrown up Edwin Poots as the news DUP leader, after the un-ceremonial and brutal pushing aside of the ‘moderate’ Arlene Foster (who has promised to leave Northern Ireland were it to be unified with the Republic and has quit the DUP, the party she only joined after quitting the Ulster Unionists in 1998). The meeting on 27 May at which Poots’ narrow victory over Sir Jeffrey Donaldson was confirmed proved a bruising event with charges of intimidation of the failed candidate reported to the police.

Poots is cut from an altogether different cloth to the cosmopolitan Foster. Strengthened by his religious conviction, Poots’ unionism is indivisible. The DUP, recall, opposed the Good Friday Agreement forged by the Ulster Unionist Leader David Trimble, an opposition which meant they could welcome in Jeffrey Donaldson and Arlene Foster as new converts. The DUP’s opposition also paid handsome electoral dividends as their apparently deeper loyalism made them the largest unionist party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, dispatching 8 of the province’s 18 MPs to Westminster in the 2019 election based on 44% of the turnout. (Among the nationalist vote Sinn Fein – 7 MPs (38%) squeezed the SDLP to 2 MPs (11%), but their MPs abstain from Parliament; there is 1 Alliance MP (5%)).  But the pressure of the Protocol has now disrupted this largest unionist party. 

After watching how badly Foster has been bruised by the perfidious Johnson, Poots is unlikely to be assuaged by senior Tory claims, such as that from Jacob Rees-Mogg that the DUP are “the guardians of the union of the United Kingdom.” Poots does not want rhetoric, but measurable dismantling and elimination of Protocol checks. He is not an MP but can see in Lord Frost an ally willing to pull the lever down on Article 16 of the UK-EU exit treaty, not just to defuse but to blow up the Protocol.  Contradicting the longstanding position of the British government, articulated by the then NI Secretary of State Peter Brooke in 1990, Rees-Mogg recently suggested the UK had a strategic and selfish interest in Northern Ireland.

The unionist narrative, shared with Lord frost, cleverly reverses the previous understanding of the Protocol and argues that it undercuts the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (a position which David Trimble also promotes). The main constraint on a radical British unilateral initiative is the Biden presidency: Brexit politicians need a trade deal with the US and the president has repeatedly underlined his support of the Good Friday Agreement and warned against government actions disrupting it. He may appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland.

Governing without agreement

The broader context is the history of the Northern Ireland state since 1921. Violence had declined dramatically, but sectarian division is higher than it has been for over three decades. Half of the 20 miles of peace walls separating nationalist from unionist communities in Northern Ireland have been built since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. These are 25 feet high and, in some places, three miles long. The gates in these walls – which are opened apprehensively – featured as focal points in the riots in Belfast and in Derry in April. The mass killings of the Troubles have ended, but the ease with which violence can spread in the streets was once again on display .  Whether unionist opposition to the Protocol can go beyond this is unclear: the type of protests – mass strikes by unionists – used to scuttle the Sunningdale Agreement (1973) and to oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) are no longer viable.

The early stages of the Troubles involved the enforced relocation of perhaps as many as 15,000 families in Belfast

Close to 95% of children in Northern Ireland attend religiously segregated schools, catholic or protestant; a fraction attend multi-denominational schools. Churches, political leaders and parents collude willingly in this apartheid education system. It is not consociationalism.[3]  Sectarian embeddedness is visible elsewhere. The historian, Marianne Eliot, originally from North Belfast, describes the erosion of the sort of neighbourhood in which she grew up: “the kind of mixed-religion housing estate on which we lived is no more. The early stages of the Troubles involved the enforced relocation of perhaps as many as 15,000 families in Belfast. Those mixed estates were re-sorted into single-identity ones, as people were forced out. They have never returned.”  Divisions have hardened in many ways in the twenty-first century. One party – the Alliance – tries to bridge these divisions and increasing numbers of younger votes declare weaker allegiance for pure nationalism or unionism.

“A risky game”

The Unionists, as Jonathan Powell has argued, are playing a risky game. The pandemic has obscured the economic cost of Brexit and, therefore, a hard Brexit is now politically manageable: this will mean ditching the Protocol dramatically by exercising Article 16.  In any case, while the conflicts about the Protocol include economic dimensions, they are fundamentally political and more about identity. Division reproduces the conventional sectarian divide. One opinion poll reports that when asked about how they will vote in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, 47% of respondents will only vote for those parties promising to uphold the Protocol while 42% of respondents will restrict their votes to candidates opposed to the Protocol.

Brexit and the Protocol layer onto the existing divisions and inter-community hatreds of the province. But there is a sting in the tail: the new DUP leadership, with support from other unionist parties, will present a tougher front against the Protocol and translate this into a withdrawal from power sharing and from North-South political relations. Where such intensification will lead is unclear. The TVU – which never accepted the Good Friday Agreement – might gain. Its leader Jim Allister left the DUP in 2007 when it agreed to work with Sinn Fein in the power-sharing executive.

The perennial question of whether unification of Norther Ireland and the Republic of Ireland may occur in the forseeable future seems misplaced and only dimly on the horizon in the current political context. A referendum on this subject is an option, which can be activated by the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, under the Good Friday Agreement. When and how this would occur is at the discretion of the Secretary of State, though scholars have given the issue serious attention.

there is a majority on both sides of the border – 70% – for setting a date within 5 years for a referendum

As Arlene Foster’s oft cited decision that she would emigrate were unification to occur reveals, this possibility of unification is anathema to the vast majority of the unionist community. Many commentators miss or underestimate this depth of resistance, a depth as strong in 1921 when NI was created, as it is in May 2021. A recent opinion poll found that a two-thirds majority of voters in the Republic of Ireland support a united Ireland, but there is no majority to pay any additional cost for unification. In NI the responses in favour of unification polled 35% with 44% opposed. But interestingly there is a majority on both sides of the border – 70% – for setting a date within 5 years for a referendum.  These findings are consistent with other polls.

The Census 2021 is eagerly awaited by both communities in NI. It is widely speculated that a catholic majority will be counted in the state’s 1.9 million residents. But demography won’t produce immediate changes. The short-term agenda will be dominated by unionist opposition to the Protocol, and the destabilizing effects of this stance on already frosty relations with its power-sharing partner – Sinn Fein. Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions are inherently fragile and their suspension could recur. 

We end where we started, and where Northern Ireland most commonly rests – at an un-named train station. Brexit has stirred up division and political instability in quite dangerous ways.  Will the Brexit waving Conservative government get away with both defying the EU by overriding the Protocol and the associated economic costs of its hard Brexit? Or will the government respect the legally binding Protocol and test the resolve of the unionist community?  It is hard to find an easy solution to the dangers Brexit poses for Northern Ireland. It is easier to imagine greater instability and conflict. The pursuit of an ‘English’ sentimental attachment to sovereignty is, in Northern Ireland, indeed a ‘risky game.’

Notes:

[1] Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland: 3 volumes. Oxford University Press, 2020.

[2] Michael Keating, The Fragmented Union: State and Nation in the United Kingdom OUP 2021.

[3] Donald Horowitz, “Explaining the Northern Ireland Agreement: the sources of an unlikely constitutional consensus.” British Journal of Political Science 2002 32: 193-220.

Desmond King is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of Government at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books including, Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Harvard 2000), The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (Oxford, 2005), Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (Oxford 1995/2007),  Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in the Obama Era with Rogers M Smith (Princeton, 2011), Sterilized by the State with Randall Hansen (Cambridge, 2013), Fed Power: How Finance Wins with Lawrence Jacaobs (Oxford, 2016/2021) and Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive with Stephen Skowronek and John Dearborn (Oxford 2021).

Header image credit: ‘Belfast Peace Wall’ Jennifer Boyer

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Richard Wyn Jones & Jac Larner

Since the results of the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union were declared, the fact that a narrow majority of the Welsh electorate voted alongside a similarly narrow majority of English voters to Leave (Table 1) seems to have provided succour to those who would reject the notion that Brexit was driven by English nationalism. Now that detailed statistical analysis has confirmed that English national sentiment was indeed very strongly aligned with Eurosceptic sentiment (see Henderson et al. 2017, 2020; Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021), this view is no longer tenable. English nationalism clearly was one of the key drivers of Brexit. This, however, leaves open the question: what about Wales? How do we explain the Brexit result in Wales? Moreover, in a context in which Brexit is clearly acting as a major centrifugal force within the UK, leading to renewed calls for Scottish independence and Irish unity, what is its impact of Brexit on Wales’ relationship with the Union?

 EnglandWalesNorthern IrelandScotlandLeave53.452.544.238.0Remain46.647.555.862.0Turnout73.071.762.767.2Table 1: 2016 Brexit referendum results by constituent territory of the UK (%)

To answer these questions, we will proceed in two steps. First, we focus on the Brexit result in Wales and, in particular, the way that it reflected the particularly heterogeneous nature of national identities in Wales. While, in the aggregate, opinion across the country was evenly divided, individual level data demonstrates the existence of very significant differences in attitudes within Wales towards the European project that were closely tied to different senses of national identity. Secondly, in the aftermath of Brexit, we examine the attitudes of these national identity groups to the constitutional future of Wales.

Brexit has … been accompanied by an increase in support for devolution across the Welsh population as a whole

Our argument is that Brexit has, unexpectedly perhaps, been accompanied by an increase in support for devolution across the Welsh population as a whole. But among that part of the population that was already most committed to autonomy, namely that group that in national identity terms regards itself as Welsh only, support for devolution has now tipped over into significant support for independence. Thus, even while the devolved election in May 2021 reaffirmed Welsh Labour’s very long-standing dominance of the country’s political landscape, even in Wales we find that, under the surface, the tectonic plates of the Union are shifting.

National identity and Brexit in Wales

The fact that Wales voted to leave the European Union despite being a net beneficiary from EU funding (Ifan et al. 2016) and being so dependent on the European single market appears to have come as a shock to many. But in Wales, as elsewhere across the state, the costs and benefits of European membership appear to have been viewed through the prism of national identity (see, for example, Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021: 80-102). What renders Wales distinct is that it is home to three different sense of national identity that, either singularly or in combination, play a significant role in shaping perceptions: Welshness, Britishness and Englishness.

Table 2 is based on individual level data from the British Election Survey and notes both the proportion of the overall electorate holding a strong sense of a particular national identity or identities (Welsh, Welsh and British, etc.), as well as the proportion of that group that voted Leave. With regards the former, what is immediately apparent is that no group is dominant. This contrasts sharply with both England where the English British (i.e. those who feel both strongly English and strongly British) make up 50% of the electorate, or Scotland where the Scottish only make up 44% of the electorate.

 Leave (%)% of Welsh electorateWelsh only2924Welsh British5827British only (not Welsh)626English only712English British6016British only (not English)449Other/None2116Table 2: 2016 Referendum Vote in Wales: Leave by Strong National Identity Data taken from British Election Study Internet Panel (Fieldhouse et al, 2020)

Also noteworthy is that only just shy of 1 in 5 of the Welsh electorate feel a strong sense of English national identity (be that English British or strongly English only), reflecting the large-scale population movement into Wales from England that has taken place in recent decades. Again, this contrasts with Scotland where the proportion of the electorate regarding themselves as feeling strongly English (in combination with Britishness or not) is around 5%. In England, the proportion of the electorate feeling either strongly Scottish or strongly Welsh is negligible.[1]

Turning to vote choice in the referendum, it is clear that those who felt strongly Welsh, but without feeling the same attachment to Britishness voted, heavily to Remain in the EU. At the other end of the spectrum, the substantial minority in Wales who feel both strongly English and strongly British (the English British) or strongly English only tended to vote to Leave. That is, they voted in the same way and in similar proportions to their equivalents in England itself. Another group that voted heavily Leave were the Welsh British – those who feel both strongly Welsh and strongly British. This underlines the fact that, on international matters at least, many of the same attitudes that align with Englishness in England (and indeed Wales) also align with Britishness in Wales and Scotland (as demonstrated in detail in Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021: 135-67)

Two other national identity groups require our attention. The first is that group of people with a strong claim to Welsh national identity but who nonetheless identify as strongly British only (as a proxy, the table includes those born in Wales who identify as strongly British only.) This group tends to be geographically concentrated in part of Wales such as south Pembrokeshire and parts of Monmouthshire as well as the old borough towns. Again, space precludes fuller consideration.

From the perspective of the current discussion, the point is that this group voted heavily to Leave. In complete contrast, we find a group with a strong claim to English identity but who nonetheless choose to identify as strongly British only (as a proxy here, we use those born in England who identify as strongly British only.) Like those in England who identify as British only, they also tended to vote Remain. In this way, Wales’ English minority is large enough to allow us to see the national identity patterns and attendant political differences that characterise English society being reproduced west of the border too.

What makes Wales different, is that the pattern of national identities found there are particularly complex and heterogeneous

In summary, therefore, as was the case in Scotland and England, voting behaviour in the Brexit referendum in Wales was also closely and significantly related to senses of national identity (for formal confirmation see Henderson et al. 2020). What makes Wales different, is that the pattern of national identities found there are particularly complex and heterogeneous.[2] This in turn clearly raises the possibility of very different responses among these national identity groups to the implications of Brexit, especially as it cannot be assumed that the views of these different groups align in the same ways on issues other than that of the UK’s membership of the UK.

National Identity and the Constitutional Future of Wales

The period since the 2016 referendum has been a time of almost unparalleled tumult in modern UK politics; with that tumult seemingly set to continue despite the Conservative party’s convincing victory (in England only, of course) in the 2019 general election and the UK’s exit both from the EU and subsequent transitional arrangements. Relationships between the UK’s constituent units has been and remains a central point at issue. In Scotland, supporters of independence have argued that the decision to leave the EU against the manifest wishes of the Scottish electorate provides grounds for a second independence referendum.

As predicted by Remainers, Northern Ireland’s relationship with both Great Britain and the rest of the island of Ireland has become an open sore. Meanwhile, intergovernmental relations between central and devolved governments within the UK have plumbed new depths with even the unionist Welsh Government warning that what is regards as Whitehall’s high-handed attitude is imperilling the Union.

The Welsh Government’s increasingly dire warnings are in part no doubt a response to the remarkable growth of the grassroots ‘Yes Cymru’ independence which, at over 18,000 members, is now second only to the Labour Party itself as Wales’ largest political movement. Given that recent opinion polls suggest that around half of Labour voters in Wales would vote for independence if a referendum were to be called, it is hardly surprising that the party is concerned. But the growing salience of and support for independence (the same polling suggests that around one third of the electorate would vote Yes if a referendum were to be called) is only one manifestation of the impact of Brexit on the constitutional debate in Wales.

So far as the UK government has been concerned, it is increasingly obvious that Brexit is viewed as a rationale or pretext (depending on one’s viewpoint) for recentralising power. This is perhaps most obvious in the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 through which the government has given itself the power to spend in areas that were previously considered the preserve of devolved governments. But from a Welsh perspective, it is also striking to note the extent to which the post-Brexit successors for EU structural funds (from which Wales was a major beneficiary) exclude devolved government from any meaningful involvement, all in the name of strengthening the Union. Indeed, it would appear that the Conservative government now regards devolution itself as a threat to the territorial integrity of the state rather than as a means of managing differences within it.

Figure 1: Change in constitutional preferences by national identity 2016-2021 Data taken from 2021 Welsh Election Study (Wyn Jones et al, 2021)

From the perspective of Brexit ideologues this may well make perfect sense. Devolution is clearly (almost) as offensive to the sensibilities of those who would champion untrammelled Westminster parliamentary sovereignty as was membership of the EU. It is also the case that, in England, Euroscepticism is closely tied not only to English national identity but also, relatedly, to a sense of what has been termed ‘devoanxiety’; that is a sense that devolution has left the Celtic periphery of the state in general, and Scotland in particular, unfairly privileged at the expense of England (see Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021: 103-23). But in Wales itself, things look rather different. As Figure 1 makes clear, the period since 2016 has in fact seen an overall increase in support for devolution across most identity groups – including some of those most supportive of Brexit.

Figure 2: Should Wales be an independent country (%)Data taken from 2021 Welsh Election Study (Wyn Jones et al, 2021)

As the same Table also makes clear, however, this overall shift in support for (more) devolution is from very different starting points. Attitudes to Welsh devolution have always been related to national identity (Wyn Jones and Trystan 1999). Indeed, what is striking is the extent to which that proportion of the population that has long been most supportive of home rule, that is the Welsh only, has now shifted decisively to supporting independence. This is demonstrated in Figure 2, which shows the response by national identity group to straightforward yes/no question on independence. It should also be stressed, of course, that the continuing overwhelming opposition to independence among other identity groups is a stark reminder of the scale of the challenge facing Yes Cymru and its supporters.

Conclusion

Five years on from the Brexit referendum, even if the question of the UK’s membership of the EU has been settled for at least the foreseeable future, it is surely undeniable that the Brexit has morphed into a wider state legitimacy crisis? While attitudes in England have been its motive force, it is a crisis manifested in the continuing strong support for secession in Scotland and the destablisation of the institutions established as a result of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Even if it is less dramatic, the story in Wales is nonetheless significant.

A majority of the Welsh electorate may have voted for Brexit, but there is no evidence that this was intended to take place at the expense of devolution. Yet that is precisely what has occurred as a result of the way that successive UK governments have chosen the interpret the referendum mandate. Their approach that has already inspired one of the unlikeliest unintended consequences of Brexit, namely the creation of powerful Welsh independence movement. While the country’s demographics significantly complicate the task facing those who would argue for greater autonomy up to and including independence, it would be unwise to assume that Wales will always be content to play the part of bystander.

Notes:

[1] To simplify our narrative, while we include data on the Other/None category in both Table 2 and Figure 1, we do not include them in our analysis. Suffice it to say that this group would appear to be composed of (in the main) two rather different kinds of people: (1) cosmopolitans who deliberately reject all national identity labels; and (2) the wholly apathetic.

[2] Again because of considerations of space, we have omitted consideration of the role of the Welsh language in shaping attitudes towards Brexit. It is worth noting, however, that fluent Welsh speakers tended to be particularly Europhile. Thus, British Election Survey data suggests that only 16% of fluent Welsh speakers who identify as strongly Welsh only voted to Leave the EU, making this perhaps the most pro-EU demographic group in Britain.

Bibliography:

Henderson, Ailsa, Charlie Jeffery, Dan Wincott and Richard Wyn Jones (2017), ‘How Brexit was made in England,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2017), pp. 1-16.

Henderson, Ailsa, Ed Gareth Poole, Richard Wyn Jones, Daniel Wincott, Jac Larner and Charlie Jeffery (2020), ‘Analysing vote choice in a multi-national state: National identity and territorial differentiation in the 2016 Brexit vote,’ Regional Studies DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2020.1813883

Henderson, Ailsa and Richard Wyn Jones (2021), Englishness: The political force transforming Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Ifan, Guto, Ed Gareth Poole and Richard Wyn Jones (2016), Wales and the EU Referendum: Estimating Wales’ Net Contribution to the European Union (Cardiff: Wales Governance Centre) Available at:

Wyn Jones, Richard and Dafydd Trystan (1999), ‘The Welsh Devolution Referendum’ in Bridget Taylor and Katarina Thomson (eds.), Scotland and Wales: Nations Again? (Cardiff: University of Wales Press) pp. 65-93.

Richard Wyn Jones is Director of Cardiff University’s Wales Governance and Dean of Public Affairs. He has written extensively on contemporary Welsh politics, devolved politics in the UK and nationalism and is considered to be one of the founders of Critical Security Studies. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and the Academy of the Social Sciences.

Jac Larner is Lecturer in Politics at Cardiff University. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, a leading centre for survey research. His research interests focus on elections, political psychology, voting behaviour, national identity, and survey methodology. He has expertise in Welsh and Scottish politics, and sub-state politics more broadly and is a member of the research teams carrying out the 2021 Welsh Election Study and Scottish Election Study: the two largest sub-state election studies ever carried out in the UK.

Header image credit: Jo Dainty

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

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Ben Jackson

While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’s, the explanation for this divergence is less straightforward. Social scientists have demonstrated that Scotland’s economy, social structure, and even underlying values are not in fact that different from England’s. To understand why Scottish electoral behaviour and public debate has followed a distinctive path, it is instead necessary to turn to the realms of politics and culture, where the same underlying socio-economic shifts that have transformed England’s political landscape over the last fifty years have been filtered in a different direction in Scotland.

As the leading sociologist of modern Scotland, David McCrone, has put this point, a distinctive Scottish ‘frame of reference’ became more prominent in Scottish public life from around the 1970s onwards. The rise of this framing was produced by, among other things, the paradox that the mid-twentieth century rise of a centralised UK state committed to promoting economic welfare also highlighted Scotland’s special status as a nation whose economy was managed quasi-autonomously by the Scottish Office, the arm of the state that had been established to govern Scotland in 1885. McCrone argues that the expansion of the Scottish mass media, notably the introduction of separate Scottish television news bulletins, popularised an understanding of Scotland both as a distinct economy and as a distinct polity gripped by its own particular political debates about how to address economic challenges (1).

The rise of this Scottish framing was deepened in the 1980s as deindustrialisation accelerated. A clear Scottish political identity emerged that focused on national autonomy and presented this objective as expressing left-wing opposition to the dominant Conservative government in London. Until the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, this leftist politics of national identity did not necessarily equate to support for the complete dissolution of the Anglo-Scottish Union. But, as I argue in my book, The Case for Scottish Independence, it is clear in retrospect that Scottish political discourse, as it developed across the 1980s and 1990s, had the effect of priming a large section of the Scottish electorate to support independence if faced with a choice between creating a new Scottish state and a Conservative government in London (2).

As the results of the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections show, Scotland is now a divided nation, with roughly half of its citizens supporting full independence and the other half in favour of the constitutional status quo of devolution. How did the rise of McCrone’s ‘Scottish frame of reference’ produce such a dramatic constitutional debate? (3)

the hegemonic view of the Union as a beneficial contractual arrangement was not placed under serious pressure until the late twentieth century

The durability of the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union derived in part from its legitimation within Scotland as a voluntary contract between sovereign states, a bargain that was said to have preserved for Scotland its distinctive national religious, legal and educational institutions in return for merging its parliament with that of England and Wales (and later Ireland). Although Scottish culture did feature a consistent wistful romantic criticism of the Union as a bargain orchestrated by England using economic and diplomatic coercion, the hegemonic view of the Union as a beneficial contractual arrangement was not placed under serious pressure until the late twentieth century.

Economically, Scotland participated fully in the UK’s development into the leading industrial and imperial power in the world in the nineteenth century. At a political level, Scotland was integrated into the British parliamentary system. While culturally Scotland remained a distinct nation, as Britain democratised during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries each of the two major party systems that evolved (Conservative and Liberal; Conservative and Labour) bridged national distinctions between England, Scotland and Wales (the case of Ireland, of course, was very different). Within these integrative political and economic structures, space was also available for significant amounts of Scottish autonomy, notably (as we have seen) with the creation of the Scottish Office, which pioneered a form of administrative devolution long before its parliamentary counterpart.

More generally, Scottish identity in this period remained nested within a wider British imperial consciousness that transcended the islands of Britain and Ireland and thought of Britain not as a conventional nation-state but as an empire that linked the ‘mother nations’ of the UK to colonies around the world. As David Edgerton has argued, there is a sense in which Britain as a modern nation was a mid-twentieth century artefact, produced by the retreat from empire and global trade to the more autarchic, industrially-focused UK state of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (4).

In these decades, a new form of British identity began to displace earlier connections forged around a shared Protestantism or imperialism as the main bulwark of the British union-state, namely an image of the UK as a social democratic state committed to economic planning and social welfare. The Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, was only a fringe presence in popular politics at this time, but styled itself as a libertarian defender of Scottish national interests against the rise of the large impersonal bureaucracies that now drove British industrial development and redistributed economic resources. It was not at all successful, but the mere fact that dedicated activists were able to keep the party alive as an organisation across many decades of electoral unpopularity ensured that it would remain a possible outlet for voters when external circumstances became more favourable to a distinctively Scottish political appeal.

in the 1970s, as an economic downturn and crisis-ridden Labour and Conservative governments drove voters to express their dissatisfaction via third party voting

Circumstances did change in the 1970s, as an economic downturn and crisis-ridden Labour and Conservative governments drove voters to express their dissatisfaction via third party voting. The SNP had by this time positioned itself as a modernising force that backed a more decentralised model of government in order to address Scotland’s economic challenges. Bolstered by the discovery of North Sea oil in Scottish waters, which significantly enhanced the economic credibility of an independent Scotland, the SNP soared to 30 per cent of the Scottish vote and 11 MPs in the October 1974 general election.

The rise in support for the SNP triggered a panicked attempt by Labour to introduce Scottish devolution, the first example of what has become a recurring pattern of the electoral threat posed by the SNP shifting the UK political elite (and in particular the Labour Party) towards supporting ever stronger forms of Scottish self-government. The attempt to introduce devolution failed in 1979, washed away in a referendum that stipulated that 40 per cent of the eligible electorate had to vote in favour for the measure to pass. This was a bar that campaigners for devolution could not clear in the face of internal divisions, an unpopular incumbent government, and a bleak economic landscape characterised by fractious industrial relations and high inflation (though of those who turned out to vote in the 1979 referendum a majority still voted in favour of devolution).

But the Thatcher and Major years forged a deeper political consensus within Scotland on the need for a Scottish Parliament. A crucial feature of this period was that voting in Scotland followed a markedly different pattern than in England, with Labour clearly winning in Scotland in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Since these were also the decades in which rapid deindustrialisation occurred – with accompanying increases in unemployment, poverty and income inequality – the startling social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s became understood in Scottish political culture as an undemocratic imposition from outside, visited on Scotland by an illegitimate government.

The SNP did not significantly increase its support, but this was in part because the Scottish Labour Party adopted a quasi-nationalist rhetoric. Labour argued that the UK government lacked a democratic mandate to rule Scotland and presented itself as the guardian of Scottish national interests, which Labour maintained could best be advanced by a devolved parliament within the UK. Labour also pursued open dialogue with other parties and civil society organisations about the character of such a parliament through the Scottish Constitutional Convention (which the SNP chose to absent itself from because the Convention would not consider independence as a serious political option). Once Labour returned to office in 1997, devolution was duly delivered, ratified whole-heartedly in a successful referendum, and a new era in Scottish politics began with the first sitting of a democratically elected Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Devolution … represented an important staging post on the road to the creation of a new Scottish state

One important feature of the new devolved political system was that the SNP had clearly established itself as the second largest party (after Labour) in the 1999 Scottish Parliament elections. Although the SNP had supported the creation of the parliament, the party’s leaders were committed to what had become known as the ‘gradualist’ strategy for Scottish independence. Devolution in their view represented an important staging post on the road to the creation of a new Scottish state, a project that they would seek to pursue if they ever entered government in Edinburgh.

The defenders of the devolutionary settlement, notably the Labour Party, did not take the presence of the SNP as a competitor for government office as seriously as they should have. Labour’s years in control of the Holyrood parliament in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (1999-2007) were marked by a hubristic assumption that there was no need to continue, let alone deepen, their careful positioning in the 1980s and 1990s as the party best suited to advance the Scottish national interest. Indeed, it is striking in retrospect how dismissive of the prospect of Scottish independence the wider British political system was throughout this period. This was, after all, the New Labour era, in which a centre-left government had seemingly bound together Britain with a hegemonic electoral coalition that put them in office in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Tensions between the nations of the UK seemed to have been dissolved by the application of asymmetric devolution and a booming economy that in turn enabled a significant increase in the level of public spending.

This illusion was dispelled after 2007 on two fronts. Locally, it was in 2007 that the SNP capitalised on growing disenchantment with Labour in the wake of the Iraq War to emerge narrowly as the largest party at Holyrood and take office as a minority Scottish government. The SNP was elected on an appeal relating to governmental competence, with the question of independence parked as one that could only be resolved via a referendum at a later date. Globally, the financial crisis of 2007-8 transformed the terms of economic debate and eventually brought into power in London a Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration committed to a strikingly unequal distribution of the burdens of austerity. This new UK government elected in 2010 held twelve of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, only one of those won by the Conservatives.

The SNP was able to capitalise on Scottish opposition to this coalition to win a majority in the Scottish Parliament elections of 2011, significantly aided by the absence of any strategic purpose or strong leadership in the Scottish Labour Party. Independence was at this stage still an unpopular position in Scottish public opinion, favoured by perhaps only around a third of the electorate. Lulled into a false sense of security by this opinion polling, the UK government accepted that the 2011 victory granted the SNP a mandate to hold a referendum on whether to create a new Scottish state. Although supporters of the Union were indeed victorious in the 2014 referendum, the level of support for independence dramatically increased during the campaign, eventually finishing at 45 per cent of the vote on an exceptionally high turnout of 85 per cent of the electorate.

The referendum proved to be a moment of structural realignment in Scottish politics

The framing of the referendum by the SNP as a choice between Scottish self-determination and the continuation of an unpopular Conservative government that lacked democratic legitimacy in Scotland was an artful one, which drew on the arguments about Scottish self-government first developed in the 1980s and won over many Scots previously hesitant about independence. The referendum proved to be a moment of structural realignment in Scottish politics: pro-independence voters, many of whom had previously been Labour supporters, subsequently voted SNP, giving the party comfortable victories at the 2015 general election and then the 2016 Scottish Parliament election.

However, it was ultimately the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU in 2016 that brought the debate about Scottish independence back to the forefront of political debate. A key argument of supporters of the Anglo-Scottish Union in 2014 had been that an independent Scotland’s prospects for membership of the EU were highly uncertain, so Scots might face exile from EU citizenship (even if only temporarily) if they voted to leave the UK. Of course, shortly afterwards the UK as a whole then voted to leave the EU, while Scotland registered a strong vote in favour of remaining (62 per cent voted for remain in Scotland as opposed to 48 per cent in the UK). The political significance of this vote was far wider than the specific issue of EU membership, since it provided another piece of evidence for supporters of independence that Scottish democratic preferences were doomed to be drowned out by a far larger English electorate.

In short, it provided a vivid illustration of the classic Scottish nationalist themes of the 1980s and 2010s, namely that the Anglo-Scottish Union was now a block on the democratic preferences of the Scottish people. The initial mobilisation of this argument by independence supporters was not as successful as they expected. Scots who voted for Brexit were still a large minority of the electorate, some of them SNP voters, and the 2017 UK general election in fact saw the SNP lose ground electorally. But support for the SNP was ultimately revitalised by the subsequent acrimonious debates over the details of Brexit, and then the high profile of the Scottish government during the pandemic, leaving the SNP unmatched as the dominant party in Scotland at the 2019 general election and the Scottish Parliament election in 2021.

Yet even then support for the SNP (or the SNP in combination with the pro-independence Greens) extends only to around one half of Scottish voters, with Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats splitting the other half between them. While Scotland is therefore now a nation broadly divided between two equally sized blocs of voters, recent opinion polling also suggests that some fluidity between the two positions is possible. In 2020, for example, there was a clear movement towards majority support for independence in the opinion polling, in reaction to the UK government’s initial maladroit response to the Covid pandemic, although this now seems to have unwound as vaccines are distributed and the economy reopens. But the very fact that public opinion can shift markedly in that direction indicates an underlying fragility to the Anglo-Scottish Union that was initially exposed in the 2014 referendum and has been exacerbated by subsequent events.

As long as Scottish nationalists can plausibly portray England as a conservative nation that thwarts the democratic will of the Scottish people, advocates of independence will have a resonant rhetorical frame at their disposal. They face from their opponents a barrage of detailed questions about the economics of independence and the transition to statehood, as well as a profound reluctance to entertain another referendum so soon after 2014. It seems likely that the next few years will become dominated by this latter, procedural question at the expense of the more substantive former ones. The danger for the advocates of the Union is that such a posture will merely strengthen support for Scottish independence.

The Anglo-Scottish Union has for centuries been legitimated as a voluntary contract. For the UK government to depart from that well-rehearsed line of argument by denying a referendum risks playing into the hands of Scottish nationalists, who have always suspected that behind the seemingly consensual façade of the Union lurks the coercive force of an undemocratic, quasi-imperial state. Scotland’s political future seems likely to hang in the balance unresolved for some time yet. But simply avoiding the argument altogether is a strategy that supporters of the Union will surely find has diminishing returns.

References:

(1) David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital in an Understated Nation: The Case of Scotland’, British Journal of Sociology, 56 (1), pp. 67-9, 76-9.

(2) Ben Jackson, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

(3) This article provides a concise outline of a complicated history. Readers interested in the full story will find the following excellent books helpful: Catriona MacDonald, Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotland’s Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, John Donald, 2009); James Mitchell, The Scottish Question (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014); Tom Devine, Independence or Union? Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Future (London, Penguin, 2016); David McCrone, The New Sociology of Scotland (London, Sage, 2017); Michael Keating, State and Nation in the United Kingdom: Fractured Union (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021).

(4) David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History (London, Penguin, 2018).

Ben Jackson is Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and the co-editor of Political Quarterly. He is the author of The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Header image credit: Study for ‘Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)’, William Crozier. Courtesy National Gallery of Scotland.

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Jackson, Ben 2021. ‘The Irresistible Rise of Scottish Independence? A Brief History of Scotland’s Constitutional Debate’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (2)