If you feel that Britain has perceptively changed since the referendum, you might not be alone. There is plenty of evidence that the "change" is deliberate.
What does it mean to be "British"? This is one of the cultural questions that the referendum campaign inevitably raised. Also inevitably, your answer depends very much on your background and worldview.
According to research, the thing that Britons are most proud of is the NHS. What's telling about this is that, compared to other values and older institutions (e.g. the monarchy), this is a relatively recent addition to British life; even though it is clearly taken as an integral part of British life, the NHS was only created thanks to a "socialist" government after the Second World War.
What this also tells us, and what the EU referendum told us, is that there are two distinct forms of British identity: one might be called the "communitarian" world-view (i.e. seeing the world as a community), and the other the "individualistic", which sees it through the lens of individual actions and individual moral responsibility. This mirrors the "open" and "closed" views reflected in the "remain" versus "leave" camps, also referred to as the "Anywhere" versus "Somewhere" culture wars.
In understanding where people's value for the NHS comes from, it's also important to remember that "charity" was something almost unheard of until Victorian times. In fact, it was government "moral aversion" to help the starving that led to the Irish Potato Famine; the government didn't want to encourage the idea of "something for nothing", and was largely indifferent to the fate of the starving millions across the Irish Sea. This government culture of indifference to the suffering it has created (and a scepticism towards "need" in general) is one that the current Conservative government has restored in all its inhumane glory, when you look at the wider effects of austerity and the "hostile environment".
Thus, the idea of good-natured "British values" is not something that was innate, but was created over time, relatively recently. Before the Victorian sea-change in the moral attitude towards charity, those in need were left to fend for themselves in a "sink or swim" society that Ayn Rand and her Libertarian fans in the current UK government would recognise. This is, in large part, the society that still exists in the modern-day USA, in spite of their high levels of taxation (which do not pay towards people's health and well-being!). The modern idea of British values of compassion towards the worse-off and vulnerable in society is exactly that: a modern construct, largely non-existent before the 20th century, and only made large progress forward thanks to the "socialist" Attlee government after the Second World War. The Conservative Party's embrace of those same postwar values was what allowed them to return to government.
It was only the complex challenges of the 1970s that allowed the Libertarians like Margaret Thatcher a chance to get into power. This enabled them to gradually reverse many of the "socialist" strategies that had been used up till that point since the war. The author has explained elsewhere how this small group of ideological extremists were able to take control of the Conservative Party, taking it in a direction that many of the traditionalists were initially highly-uncomfortable with. In short, it was about turning Britain, step-by-step, into a small-scale clone of the USA, parked next to the European continent.
This is where we see how Libertarians are, in many ways, trying to turn Britain into a foreign country. The progress that had been made in making Britain more egalitarian, more compassionate towards the needy and vulnerable, was quickly undone by Thatcher and her successors (even, to an extent, during the Labour years in office). While the Labour government did make some modest progress in reversing some of Thatcher's inequality, it followed other areas of her economic strategy almost without a second thought, leaving some parts of the country with chronic levels of deprivation, while London grew ever wealthier.
The financial crisis was a direct product of that short-sighted economic strategy, with a new generation of Libertarians, thirty years on from Thatcher, reaping the electoral benefits of Labour's misguided desire to ingratiate themselves with "The City". The austerity strategy was the Conservatives new method to strip back the role of government in people's lives, to a form of "small government" that even Thatcher was too wary to attempt.
Manipulating reality
Throughout this period - the thirty-year era from Thatcher's rise to power to the effects of the financial crisis - the print media played an integral role. Newspapers like the Sun, Daily Mail and Express account for the bulk of Britain's readership, and they claim to "speak for Britain". The reality is, not surprisingly, very different. There is plentiful evidence that they speak to Britain, and are able to manipulate their readers' perception of reality. This will explained about more a little later.
There was a time when the Sun was a Labour-supporting newspaper, but by the time the Libertarian Margaret Thatcher had succeeded Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader, that was no longer really true. Newspaper editors could see ways that they could get rich from a Thatcher government, and so did their best to create an impression of a country that was falling apart under Labour. At times this wasn't difficult, given the challenges that government all across the world were facing then. Her intent to radically reduce the influence of the unions was manna from heaven as far as they were concerned as, from their own point of view, it meant newspapers could then more easily lay off staff and reduce their overheads. Meanwhile, loosening other regulations meant they could more easily expand their profits and buy out smaller competitors.
When Thatcher did get into office, this also meant that inconvenient truths could be ignored. In her first few years in office, unemployment tripled to levels far higher than they had ever been under the previous Labour government. However, it was more common to see stories about crime, race riots and union unrest in the news; these stories fit into a "moral narrative" that fit the agenda. Rather than rising crime and unrest being down to social and economic factors brought on by government policy (i.e. the millions of unemployed), it was explained (and implied) that it was down to individual choices. Whereas before Thatcher crime and unrest was the result of the Labour government's weaknesses, under the the Thatcher government crime and unrest was now the result of weaknesses in society that were being manipulated by immoral individuals.
This common theme ties back to what was said about individualism and British values. Media barons were more equating British values with "individual responsibility" than compassion for the worse-off. This also explains how news stories can easily manipulate their readers' perceptions of reality.
If a newspaper editor decides that the paper needs a "campaign" on an issue, the newspaper then becomes disproportionately saturated with stories related to the campaign. Usually, this is over some form of "moral panic". Thus the newspaper creates an artificial environment for the reader where they think that this issue has become one of national importance, rather than (in reality) an agenda of the editor.
By the 1980s, stories in the three newspapers mentioned that related to the then EEC projected almost universal negativity towards Brussels, and this has remained unchanged ever since. Thus the reader got the consistent impression that Brussels is bad, for one reason or another. Again, this links back to the editors' Libertarian "agenda": they are against any form of regulation that impinges on their lives, and as the EU (the EEC's successor) wanted to increase regulation, they were against Brussels.
Meanwhile, the Libertarian agenda saw London (the home of Fleet Street) boom. After the financial crisis, the austerity agenda resulted in a reduction in state spending unprecedented in modern Britain. As the editors had done with the difficult early years of Thatcher, they did the same with Cameron. They instead attacked the Labour Party's record, while making stories like the 2010 student protests, the 2011 riots and the crippling social effects of government policy all a matter of the failings of individual moral responsibility. The plethora of stories about benefit "scroungers", disability fraud and so on are all supplied to provide moral ammunition for the government's austerity agenda and the destruction of Britain's social cohesion.
Thus "British values" had become further skewed towards the "individual" and away from the wider community. When it came to immigration, the agenda set by the editors was to entrench the fear that economic migrants were taking other people's jobs and destroying Britain's sense of identity, regardless of the reality. In this way, while the reader was informed that their "community" was being eradicated, they were also being instigated into animosity towards other ("foreign") parts of their community. Thus communities were being culturally divided by the anti-immigration agenda; society was becoming further and further atomized, split between socially-open and socially-closed communities.
All these themes had a part to play in the "Brexit Agenda". Like the Thatcherites in the Conservative government and the Thatcherite media barons, these are people who are Libertarians at heart. They do not really believe in community or society, but in individual actions. They do not truly believe in "charity" in the traditional sense, and are callous towards the suffering of others. As their ideal is to convert Britain into a state like Singapore, can they even truly be said to be "British", from a cultural or social point of view? Are they, in fact, the real "enemies of the people"?
Along with the special interest groups like Legatum, the IEA, and the ERG group in parliament itself, we see an agenda that has very little of "British values" in the modern understanding of the term. The agenda is about socially turning back the clock well over a hundred years, to a time when Britain had few regulations, little in the way of a safety net, and far fewer human rights. The only countries in the modern world that are comparable with this state of affairs are third world countries or corrupt dictatorships.
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