What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?
I’m a big fan of journalists explaining Britain to non-British readers because it gets me right out of our parochial bubbles of assumptions and prejudices and gives a new perspective on the absurd stuff I’ve gotten used to.
This is a loooong read from the New Yorker, so set aside some time, but it’s a good one. I particularly like how it’s written by someone who grew up in London as the son of a City banker, so they have access to the mindset of people like George Osborne and speak their language.
Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”
Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”
See also Politico’s more lighthearted American’s guide to the 2024 UK election.