Recently, I visited a friend and noted that his road and surrounding area was festooned with St George’s flags. Knowing him to be an avowed Marxist, I quipped that he had obviously been busy during the night. Of course, what passes for the left and the working class have gone their separate ways over the past generation, but he did acknowledge the irony in my remark. As most readers will know, the present spate of flag-waving, adorning and flying is unconnected with any sporting event or royal occasion; it is rather, depending on one’s political stance, either an outbreak of far right xenophobia and racism or an act of rebellion against a perceived unfairness by this government in the treatment of the indigenous white population in favour of minorities and immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants. While there may be partial justification to the former claim, it is such an uncritically overused accusation that it has little remaining analytical interest. By contrast, there is a lot to unpack in the latter claim, which will involve a consideration of the nature of this rebellion, rebellion in general and whether it is ever justified.
The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke, one of the founding thinkers of classical liberalism and an important intellectual contributor to the American and French revolutions and, therefore, all modern democracies, claimed that there was an unwritten social contract between a government and its people. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), he asserted the existence of what he called “natural rights”, that belonged to all people (in principle, if not in fact), that were bequeathed by God and not by any earthly king or government: these were the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to ownership of property. The role of government essentially, he claimed, was to protect these rights and in return receive the consent of the people to be governed.
For at least two centuries this claim has been considered so unremarkable that we easily forget how radical it was in its day. Locke lived through the period of the English Civil War and being of Puritan stock was culturally anti-monarchist, particularly against the idea of the divine right of kings. This liberalism and belief in the inherent reason of humans found in his writings can be understood as a riposte to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) that an absolute state and suppression of natural freedom was the only guarantor of peace, given the debased character of humans in the state of nature. It is worth remembering that the rights we have come to enjoy, at least in the West, and take for granted are not in fact ‘natural’ – Jeremy Bentham, referred to that conceptualisation as “nonsense on stilts” – but a form of belief, one of the many useful myths that sustain our civilisation.
The corollary of Locke’s assertion of our natural rights and of the social contract by which those rights were upheld by government, was the right of the people to rebel and remove any government that failed to uphold those rights. This is what happened in the aforementioned American and French revolutions, which resulted in the abolition of monarchy in those states and the establishment of republican government. However, the rebellion against and overthrow of governments has not had a happy history, in terms of outcome for the peoples of nations generally, and Locke’s principle of rebellion and removal has rather more successfully been instituted through constitutional reforms and, above all, by the gradual adoption of universal adult suffrage, by which governments can be removed non-violently through general elections.
This brings me to the characteristics, motivation and legitimacy of what is being called by some a rebellion of the indigenous white population. Like any social phenomenon, when an attempt is made to view it dispassionately, from a non-partisan perspective, it proves to be more complex than it seems. While it is too immediate for serious academic research to have been done, there are a number of factors which are already well established, beyond the known recent triggers.
The claim that this phenomenon is an expression of the sentiment of the white working class is difficult to calculate statistically. Although ethnic whites make up about 80% of the population of the UK, according to the Great British Class Survey of 2013 the traditional working class comprise only 13%. However, up to half of the population consider themselves to be working class and given the widespread support for the populist Reform party, currently at 34% (Ipsos), and their unequivocal stance on immigration it is a fair assumption that a large proportion of the white population does feel that this protest represents them and their interests.
But even given the complexity of defining what and who this represents, that this is an expression of an underlying anomie is without doubt, as economic, political, cultural and social patterns have shifted over the past two or three generations. Three factors stand out to me. One is the loss of the traditional economic opportunities, such as relatively well-paid factory jobs and mining, which largely disappeared in the 1980s and 90s and left large swathes of the former industrial heartlands of the Midlands and North without work for a third successive generation. The second, from around 2000 onwards, is the unprecedented scale of migration to the UK, most troublingly from poor, unstable parts of the world, failed states with inter-ethnic conflict, and countries with values incompatible with British culture. Third, the shift of the left away from the working class and towards the professional classes, the support for policies such as EDI and multiculturalism, and the advocacy of the presumptive victims of capitalism, Christianity and colonialism, in the process directly or indirectly demonising the white working class, and anyone who opposes their ideology, as inherently stupid, racist and xenophobic.
The use of flags as a symbol of rebellion is certainly not new and flags have been used by armies for a long time. However, as much as the populist right seek to own this phenomenon of “raising the colours” as a positive expression of British culture in revolt, ostensibly in response to the ubiquity of Palestinian flags or Pride flags, this is not something we have seen in England before, to my recollection. The historian David Starkey, in a recent interview, provides some insight on this. According to Starkey, the British, unlike some other nationalities (for example, the Americans), are not everyday flag hoisters, but tend to reserve their patriotic expression for moments of state importance or when national pride is at stake, such as international sporting events. The reason for this reticence lies in the constitutional settlement of monarchy, parliament and church, and the role of the various organs of the state, such as the education and health systems, police and the judiciary, to represent and serve the people of the country, institutions in which the British have traditionally had a quiet trust and pride, a population for whom displays of vexillological fervour have always been seen as eccentric or suspect.
Starkey, while clearly sympathetic to the underlying frustration being expressed, and arguing that national symbols should indeed take precedence, implies that its root cause is a breakdown in the ‘social contract’ of this constitutional settlement. More worryingly, the outbreak of ethnic nationalism that it expresses risks taking Britain further towards the prospect of balkanisation in the reaction to the reaction which must inevitably follow, for if there are any such things that can be called laws of history, they are the ineluctability of identity formation and the reaction to events.
I think Locke was wrong about natural rights, even though it is a beautiful fiction and one that has sustained the culture of the West for the past 350 years. It is not the things that Locke argued we had a right to that are wrong, it is the language of rights itself, which cannot be natural but bequeathed by power (and can thus be withheld or removed by power). What we have are natural desires. By that I mean desires that transcend passing preferences for one particular thing or another and lie in the very nature of what it is to be human. It is such desires and the fulfilment thereof that create an underlying social ‘attractor’ that drives social evolution, and cultural change over time. This upends the eschatological views of Christians and Marxists alike – the belief in a utopian end to history. There can only be a process by which the forms of society and culture align more or less with such desires, a process which can never terminate.
At the most abstract level they are the desires for freedom and for belonging, which are rooted in our being both bodily individual and psychologically collective, that is, social beings. But I find it most useful to go one step down from such abstraction to see how those desires manifest at the level of our lives in the world, the phenomenological sense of human self-understanding as Being-in-the-world. Here, four clear desires can be identified: the desire for a place to call home; the desire for people to love and be loved by; the desire to do something worthwhile that contributes to the greater good and by which one is recognised; and the desire to hold beliefs that make sense of the world. These desires I believe are transnational and transhistorical; however, they manifest differently for each individual, each culture and each age.
If this is correct, what it suggests is that the quid pro quo of the social contract – to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist – is the creation by government of the conditions under which those desires of the people can best be fulfilled. To take just the first of these – the desire for a place to call home; while there are individual, familial and local aspects and their attendant responsibilities to take into account, the role of government in this respect is to ensure the safety of the people from foreign invasion, the establishment of an orderly and peaceful society, and the creation of opportunities for people to work and have a place to live where they can thrive and raise a family. These things are so fundamental that every government promises them, though few in government, I suspect, consider the full implications from the viewpoint of individual value and potential.
From this perspective, it seems clear that neither this government nor the previous few governments have been meeting their end of the (unwritten) bargain. This is not necessarily cynicism; in a democracy the elected government has some obligation to meet the promises they make to the majority of voters who get them elected, and the consequences – intended or unintended – of those policies may not be felt for several election cycles, or even decades. Moreover, in attempting to address one set of issues, this can give rise to other problems. But, of course, there is also the issue of competence: whether a government’s policies are based on the weight of established evidence, driven by ideology or being in hock to special interests can itself ameliorate or worsen problems.
Whether the present protests turn out to be merely a flash in the pan or whether they are sustained and build up momentum into a popular resistance, they are indicative of something that has seriously gone wrong in the constitutional settlement, which met for a considerable period at least some of the basic expectations and aspirations of the British people. A growing number of people clearly now feel disenfranchised, that their vote counts for little, that their freedom to express themselves is being restricted, that the future holds little hope of improvement, that they feel there are few avenues to express their grievance, and that defying authority and convention by flying the national flag is one way of rebelling against a political class that has given up on them and their legitimate desires.
The prospects of this rebellion overturning the government before the next election is due in 2029 are zero. However, sustained and intelligent resistance can still achieve reforms, and this is something that Britain has historically been good at, or just lucky. Resistance is sometimes the only way that issues can be brought into public consciousness, something that the left has understood for a long time but which the right is only beginning to implement now. However, it can only be effective if there is an adaptive process, a means by which the causes of protest can be properly understood, legitimate and illegitimate claims distinguished – by empirical measures rather than by ideology – and addressed in ways that bring lasting benefit to society more generally, not simply by pandering to the aggrieved who shout loudest. Whether the social and intellectual capital still exists in Western democracies such as the UK for that to happen will become apparent over the next few years.
