It was said that after the referendum to leave the EU, one of the most asked questions on the internet in the UK was "What is the EU?".
One of the things that Britain has always been famous for across the world (and indeed prides itself on) is its education system. This is a system, epitomized by "Oxbridge" and the Russell Group of universities, that is among the best in the world, at least on paper. But the last part of that sentence is key: on paper, Britain has a great education system; but as the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding.
One thing that socially separates Britain from the rest of Europe is the very high levels of social and economic inequality (and very low levels of "social mobility"); in fact, it is this inequality that makes Britain more akin to the USA than Europe, and not in a good way. "Inequality" permeates through almost every segment of life in the UK, especially in its provision of public services like health and education. This is something that Europeans find disorienting when they experience British society firsthand: that on the one hand British people appear so polite and civilized towards each other in many ways, but on the other hand this can hide a more unpleasant inner truth, which is only revealed afterwards.
The "unpleasant truth" is that Britain's high levels of inequality have a cascade effect on various other social problems that Britain has much more of than other parts of Europe: violent crime, alcohol and substance abuse, family breakdown and so on. There is also the highly-visible rise in homelessness that is something that is not seen in other European countries with supposedly high levels of GDP. The link between poverty, inequality and crime is also well-established.
On top of this is the low level of social mobility mentioned which has created an education system and society that is very highly stratified. While the social division might not seem obvious to the outsider (and explains the admiration foreigners have for British education), those who experience it first hand know it all too well. There is a reason why so few people from the North East of England (for example) go to "Oxbridge": being massively poorer than those London and the South East, they cannot pay for a private education that will help to get them the grades and social training (e.g. "interview technique") necessary to be accepted at these institutions. Thus those parts of the country already behind the dominant London-centric universe fall even further behind, with places like "Oxbridge" seeming like an alien civilization, incomprehensible and always out of reach. There is a good reason why people from those under-privileged backgrounds think "Oxbridge" and places like that are "not for the likes of us"; the barriers to entry are sometimes invisible, and sometimes cloaked in a garb of polite officialdom, but they are there to protect the interests of the elite. When people from outside of that privileged sphere enter into their orbit, they are innately made to feel as though they are aliens. Thus those lower down in the social pecking order get the message.
Apart from the education system, the political system is the offspring of that same, socially-exclusive mentality. With many of the governing party's MPs going to the same private schools and colleges in "Oxbridge", they have no incentive to change the system. The governing party's MPs often have little direct experience and understanding of the real problems that afflict people's lives, creating an emotional disconnect and lack of empathy. This also explains why they represent the wealthiest parts of the country; to this set of politicians, poverty is something they hear about in the news that happens "somewhere else", so why should they care about it?
The country's electoral system also entrenches those social divisions, with a FPTP system that means that vast portions of the electorates votes are "wasted" when living in "safe" constituencies controlled by the other party. The same system also skews the system heavily in favour of the established parties, of which the Tories are the oldest, historically representing the landed gentry (which in today's terms, means that most Tory MPs are landlords!). And that's before we even talk about the House Of Lords: Britain being one of the few countries in the world which still has an entirely un-elected upper chamber, paid for out of public taxation, and which the Prime Minister can add members to when the political necessity demands, provided it is masked in a veneer of impartiality. In these terms, Britain's legislative machinery is a democratic farce.
The high standing of Britain's education and parliamentary system is thus based on a willful distortion, happily preached to the outside world. As once said elsewhere, Britain has one of the best education systems for rich people in the world. Looked at more generally, the high levels of inequality in the country (and the government's utterly chaotic schooling strategy) create a system that provides many school-leavers with poor abilities to deal with the challenges of the modern world. It is no wonder that the workforce is so low-skilled, ill-informed and unproductive, when the government is only interested in training children how to pass exams that have little connection to the real world. They are being led to think that "education" is useless, boring, stressful and expensive...but somehow "essential".
On the one had employers vent their frustration at the lack of highly-skilled "natives" resulting in the need to employ foreigners. On the other hand the vast majority of the jobs created now are so low-skilled that the expensive degrees deemed necessary by employers are becoming completely redundant. What we are left with is a generation of degree-educated, debt-ridden shop assistants, office interns and bar staff (!). No wonder if young people feel as though they were being taken for fools.
Dirty laundry
Brexit and the referendum fits into all this because the referendum gave those at the rough end of that inequality a once-in-a-lifetime vote that made a real tangible difference, even if they didn't know what the "difference" was that they were voting for. And that explains the reason for the seemingly-unfathomable (and incredible) internet search after the referendum. When many of those people voted to "leave", they weren't necessarily voting to leave "the EU" as such, but everything that it represented. To them, "the EU" represented the London-centric bubble, that alien civilization that ruled over them but apparently gave tonnes of money to an even more distant potentate, Brussels, across the sea.
To them, Brussels meant immigration and a distant polity, invisible but seemingly all-powerful. If London supported it, and London clearly didn't care about them, then why should they care about what London wanted? A vote to "leave" was a vote for something else than the lives they had had to put up with so far; it didn't matter that no-one really knew what that "something else" was, as long as it was something else than what existed now.
In this sense, the vote should be understood within the role of the social fabric of Britain. The rural and run-down regions of England voted to leave in proportions far higher than in Scotland and Northern Ireland as they (justifiably) felt ignored by London. The reasons for their being ignored may have been subtly different (as their problems were different), but it was the disconnect from the centre and a sense of powerlessness, that was arguably less of an issue in devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland, that was key to understanding where the resentment came from.
It could also be argued that from a Scottish and (Northern) Irish point of view, historical animosity towards "imperial" London flipped into positive attitudes towards Brussels, where their sense of nationality was as happily as European as it was Scottish or Irish; they saw Brussels not as a distant overbearing potentate (as many of the English seemed to), but rather as a useful political counter-balance that had a moderating influence on what they perceived as the malign behaviour of London. English identity, by comparison, was emotionally a much more "exclusive" idea, bound up in the myths of history, where it saw Europe as something alien and instinctively untrustworthy.
Brexit was, metaphorically, Britain putting out its dirty laundry for all the world to see. It was Cameron''s strategic misjudgment not to see how the unique nature of the referendum would be used by those with an axe to grind to present Brexit as the answer to all of the country's economic and social ills, which made it necessary for all those ills to be publicly revealed. His complacency and arrogance made him blind to the dangers in pandering to the dark forces that would be unleashed.
In Britain since the referendum, it is as though all the "burning injustices" that (ironically) Theresa May pretended to care about have now been even further fuelled, with her government lurching from scandal to scandal, from one crisis to another, almost every month.
The complex and far-reaching nature of the Brexit negotiations have also revealed for all the world to see the superficial and facile nature of Britain's political class, itself a product of its elitist education system. The negotiations with the EU are the ultimate "litmus test" of the quality of Britain's governing regime, and at every level and at every juncture they have failed abysmally. The paucity of talent produced by Britain's supposedly "world class" education system is shown up by the "amateur hour" nature of the quality of the personalities in charge.
The real problem is not that Britain's education system doesn't produce many people of talent (that is does is self-evident), but that not enough of them are brought into government. The many bright people in the civil service, for example, are now simply ignored by ministers if they don't tell them what they want to hear. So where is the incentive to give good advice? Likewise, those in industry who are rightly horrified by the lack of any plan by the government are simply making their own contingencies where possible. Those that progress into government do so through their connections and knowledge of the incestuous inner workings of the Westminster "bubble"; those who do not have the knowledge and connections simply are ignored. This way, ignorance is intensified as self-delusion is amplified. Voices outside the narrow confines of the government's ideological circles are derided as doing down the country, while any of the EU's concerns are instantly considered as "blackmail".
Brexit then has simply shown to the world how badly-governed Britain really is. For a long time the country showed itself to the world as an example for others to follow. Now it is showing itself to the world as an example of "how to humiliate yourself publicly".
No comments:
Post a Comment