UK elections have been wondrously difficult things to predict in the last two decades. There was a time when we knew we would get either a Labour or Conservative government and that this would take place because of a relatively even swing across ‘marginal seats’ - i.e. those seats which had returned an MP of any allegiance with a margin of less than 5000. Seats that returned someone with a majority of less than 2,000 were red hot and we could guarantee parties would concentrate their firepower on those constituencies. There were whole swathes of the country who could be guaranteed to vote one way no matter what. The shires tended to be Tory, while the cities tended to be Labour. The South West tended to be Liberal, with a few ‘market and spire ’ bases scattered elsewhere. Labour tended to win most Welsh and Northern Irish seats and whereas Scotland has always refused to follow regular patterns, all three parties won swathes depending on - unsurprisingly perhaps - their tribal situation as industrial, lowland or highland, island or mainland. The Tories still won significant numbers of seats in Scotland! There were always ‘renegade’ performances outside of the usual pattern all over the UK, but these were often because of burning local issues.
How things have changed! The latter pattern supported the orthodox view of British politics, which was that to form a government you had to win the middle ground. The voters would not support extremes of any politics, and even if they did, the parties knew they could not win unless they could appeal to the moderates at the same time. Thus, the two major parties were ‘broad church’ in their appeal because they had to be, if they were seriously interested in winning. It was this which created Britain’s reputation as an extremely enviably stable democracy. Tony Blair was the last Prime Minister who argued in this way, and won three elections in a row, seeming to confirm the ‘broad church’ bible of politicians.
How things have changed! With the change in the class base of society - and I know this is arguable - came a gradual undermining of the class basis of politics. ‘Workers’ as a category were a less obvious grouping. Once, they worked in the key industrial bases of the country, in iron and steel, coal mining, docks (trade), manufacturing, construction, textiles. We based our economy on energy for centuries, of which we were a net exporter. This was because we had great natural resources (at the time) in oil, gas, coal and atomic power. You don’t have to be an economist to see how much this has changed. The sectors that now contribute most to the U.K.'s GDP are services, manufacturing, construction, and tourism! Tourism, begorrah! Who would have thought that one of the world’s leading economies would boil down one day to tourism and services, with a bit of building thrown in?
But this sea change has reduced our sense of the class base of our society and done it quite rapidly. Margaret Thatcher encouraged this switch in the belief that economic change was inevitable, and if we did not grasp it, we would end up with few industries left to base our economy on. She did not foresee that this change would also change voting patterns markedly. Some argue that she did - and believed no-one would vote Labour once they got out of the clutches of the unions! This has turned out to be an incorrect assumption. No self-respecting miner then would vote Tory; mine workers ended up in one of the major political left-right battles of the previous century. But who knows how the ‘workers’ will vote today? We cannot predict any more whether a hotel manager, a travel agent or even a bricklayer would see him or herself as a natural Labour supporter.
Other factors have come into greater consideration with our greater sense of entitlement as citizens - whether there is available decent housing, good employment prospects, manageable taxation policies, whether children can be guaranteed a good education and the health and social services will be there for them when they need it. These values are largely shared by incomers who came in waves prior to our EU membership, often because of disastrous conditions at home, such as the Windrush generation, refugees from the Idi Amin years in Uganda, and those Pakistanis who fled from the aftermath of partition in India. In such cases Britain felt an obligation arising from past Commonwealth commitments, and those generations were absorbed , not without dissent or conflict, and not without racist experience, but with a basic sense that these incomers were contributing to the state. Their natural home was the Labour Party, but many also brought conservative values from their home country experience, which the Conservative Party has benefited from . Recruitment to the NHS followed from the 1960s onwards, where again there were few value clashes. And a new value element has crept in also, in recent years, which we have learned to call ‘identity’, shared to a surprising degree by all communities in the UK. But meanwhile the industrial base on which all the associated values of ‘identity’ rested has been gradually eroded . Perhaps with the gradual decline of the old industrial base, we felt our sense of identity as a country slipping away? It accustomed us to being rich and respectable among the rest of the world, as leaders in the industrial revolution. We could claim to be a role model in how to conduct modern democratic government, and we packed enough economic clout to be able to boast about it.
The EU and the changes it brought from 1973 onwards perhaps seemed like a good place to put the blame for this combination of troubles - economic change and decline, changes in identity, and the absorption of growing numbers of other races and cultures. It underlined the realisation that other people were feeding off our established entitlement to be rich and stable (and victorious in war, too)? Why should a Polish steel worker get a job in an industry here where jobs were not so easy to come by anymore? Someone was stealing our identity - our entitlement to be, if not top dog, then high up the ladder dog. I am struck by how often some campaigners in the EU Referendum still quote the idea that we are the ‘fifth richest economy in the world.’ This is identity, for them. It is however a questionable concept in itself, and more questionable whether we can build a national identity on being the fifth rich of the world. First, it is a generalisation. In terms of GDP, which includes the total value of everything that happens within a country’s economy—the goods and service made, and the money earned-we are the sixth- or ninth richest, depending on which measure you use. In terms of GDP per capita (our sense of personal wealth), Britain is the 20th- or 27th-richest. You would feel personally richer in any of 20-plus other countries! California is the fifth richest by some measures. And in terms of natural resources, places like Kuwait, with its oil, and Venezuela, with both massive gold and oil reserves, we are poor indeed. We have 14 million people living in poverty in the UK, but this is a fleabite compared with, say, China, which has a per head score of about ten dollars, four times less than ours. They however have a massive GDP compared with ours, and this is because they have a massively larger population. Perhaps, also, they do not feel obliged to spend their wealth on projects that will improve the lot of the average Chinese - just as the British empire at its height did not. So, we need to take all such statistics with a pinch of salt. Especially when quoted by politicians trying to get elected!
I wonder whether we have been passing through a period of national panic about something we could not pin down, except in terms of rough and rather unhelpful measures like GDP, or being a member of the EU? Neither of those factors, on the face of it , is a major source of disaster. Wealth garnered from trade with the EU has been a significant factor in enabling us to maintain a reasonable level of economic stability. Whether we are number six or sixteen in the world, we have a per capita income that many, many poorer countries still envy, otherwise we would not have immigrants galore desperate to get into our country. I wonder whether it is a more underlying uncertainty that has bred this panic. Generally , anxiety is about the ‘what ifs’ of life, rather than the obvious sources of fear. Fear is usually about what we know will happen - e.g. that a local exploding volcano will soon engulf us, if we can’t get out of the way. With anxiety, there is no exploding volcano - only a fear that one will suddenly erupt on our doorstep! But we can't see it and don't know where it is. We may define such fears as ‘irrational’ in some quarters. I am not in the rationality business - you might say that a psychotherapist is in the irrational business! i.e. expresses curiosity about those features of human psychology that do not seem on the face of it to be rational, but seem real and important to their clients!
Are we reassuring ourselves, amid panic, with these mantras about being 5th richest in the world? Reassuring ourselves about what, though, is my question. And equally, reassuring ourselves that if only we remain in the EU, or leave the EU pronto, everything will be ok! Except, will it? I have recently thought a lot about climate change anxiety in this same vein. Many respected friends and colleagues have the same panic state about change and extinction, and however else you choose to define the current concern about the state of the environment that sustains us. Strictly, we have always lived with a measure of uncertainty on this planet. Yes, I know how like a rationalisation this sounds! I don’t mean it that way, or to suggest that we should not take better care of our place of life. What I mean is, human life has always been uncertain. We build systems and places whose main purpose is to shield us from this uncertainty panic. We try to shield ourselves in every way possible from the ultimate fear - of being out of control, and therefore unable to achieve cast iron certainty about anything! But the truth surely is that we are always out of control, aren’t we? We have got better at kidding ourselves over the centuries, but truly, nature is a far greater power than we. And always will be, in my opinion. We’re like people living on a large fluffy duvet, and we keep rushing from place to place, squashing it down here, and squashing it down there, only to find that the part we squashed five minutes ago has popped up again.
We are anxious to the point of panic about our lack of control of the world we built with such pride and triumph in our achievement. That was what the British Empire brought us - for a time. For a time, we were top dog, and everyone else needed to fear us. We liked it that way! Until the Empire ceased to provide, like a mum that had grown too old to care for us anymore, and that we had to care for instead. We soon gave up this job - we couldn’t afford it, and anyway the children were growing up and wanted to build worlds of their own, and quite rightly. As the Empire gradually disappeared, Britain declined. This is an oversimplification, as economic historians will point out, but it is true. You could say that the home population was not specially aware of this decline, as we carried on living like one of the top dog nations of the world anyway. Then we joined the EU and our economic problems were further shelved for the time being. This too was concealed carefully by successive governments, who wanted to claim credit for the good times, naturally, and did little or nothing to point out the extent to which being a member of the EU made a great new difference to our GDP! We were now one of the top three in the EU, with Germany and France, and we could just about stomach that, even though Germany had already outstripped us economically, and France was not far behind: neither of whom needed a massive Empire to get to top dog status in the first place! They did it by good technical education systems, decent co-operative social and economic policies (letting the workers into the decision making, instead of excluding them), and probably the absence of a popular press run by proprietors who hated the EU and pointed out to us every glaring defect in the system at every opportunity.
It’s odd, if you think (really think!) about it with none of the political blarney that politicians have subjected us to in the last three or four years, that the EU has represented an easy place to make a buck! All you have to do is belong, and you get the GDP dividend for free! If there is a purely rational choice about what to do next, it is to remain! Since it involves us in no extra work, no further negotiations, and ‘gets the job done’ which is what most of the British public claim to want! This however is not a polemic on behalf of belonging to the EU, but rather an attempt to raise to the surface the more irrational nature of the national arguments we have been having.
What we are arguing about, I contend, is how to make our world more secure - more certain, more within our control. The weakness of being in the EU is that we do not feel in control that way. Which perhaps explains why the referendum slogan “Take back control” was so effective. It spoke directly to the real problem we had been having for some time as a nation. We were near to developing panic about not being in control. The parts of the planet we were once in control of were mostly gone , and this faced us with increasing numbers of aspiring nations who also wanted a piece of the economic pie. Having so many ‘foreigners’ about the place did nothing to quell our fears. It ratcheted them up, as we discovered to our shock and horror that ‘their’ workers were at least as well educated, skilled, qualified and capable as ours! In competition with them for houses, jobs, services, they sometimes won! (When you have to keep telling yourself how superior you are, you are usually feeling deeply inferior.)
This I think was the dagger in the heart of the people of the UK. We had not imagined in our worst nightmares that some other nations could match us, when the chips were down. ‘Entitlement’ became a frequent mantra since the election - it’s what you fall back on, when all other claims to greatness fail. We must be better than them, because we were born here! Yet our very entitlement, which was our last resort to prove our superiority, was slipping away regardless, under the influence of the 4 noble truths of the EU. And this discovery was the inevitable result of what was left into them for many years! We have been an elitist nation at heart, for more years than we can count. By this I mean that we have a deeply embedded belief that skill, knowledge and understanding are innate. If you believe this, then success and achievement are innate. By ‘innate’, I mean built -in at birth. Some are destined for good, achieving, well-to-do lives, and others are not. You can’t teach a dog how to play Beethoven, so why would you try?
Am I kidding you? No, not this time. Granted that the public rhetoric has always favoured ‘the aspirational classes’, the truth is we do not really believe that aspiration is enough to produce achievement and success. The amount of tinkering we have done with our education systems in the past twenty years should be evidence enough, if you do not believe me, with tinkerings that have been imbued with the same ideas that eventually dissed the work of Pavlov and his dogs! I cannot digress long enough to point out the shambles that has resulted from these tragic dives into unreconstructed behaviourism, but I could point out, in passing, that the German and French governments started improving on their education systems, especially the technical side, a hundred years ago! They looked at what Britain and the Empire had achieved, and drew the obvious conclusion that they had better get alongside, and started to build excellent technical education systems, that believed in the ability of all to learn if they were well taught and had the right equipment and goals. They were not so bothered about protecting a private education system that God clearly intended for those with innate ability! They wanted them all doing as well as they could, seeing how critical this educated and skilled population would be to build future secure economies.
I have no perfect answers. What I can say with some confidence, as a psychotherapist, is that whether we leave or remain, we will never take control back, because control doesn’t exist! This may be bad news, I know, for my readers. Control is a figment of our 21st century imaginations. If you had been born in the Palaeolithic, you would not for a second have believed you could control your raging, massive, unpredictable environment - in which you were one predator among many! Yet in our time we have built the illusion that we can control things, make them go our way, and we even think the measure of our anxiety about the state of our world is the measure of our weakness as a human being!
I see many people with anxiety, always of the ‘what if’ variety? How can I make my life secure and fear free is a common request? We build all lesser goals on these supposed foundations. ‘How can I get a better job’ ‘Why do you need one?’ ‘So I will earn more money’ ‘why more money? ’Because then I won’t have to worry about the future’. The trouble with being a psychotherapist is that we may ask you, the client, with good intentions, to tell us what you hope to gain from a period of psychotherapy, yet too often, what you hope to gain is impossible of achievement! And I already know that! I do not know of anyone who is anxiety free, including me. And those with rational fears are quite right to be afraid! I would be scared too, if there was a volcano on my doorstep about to engulf me! There is nothing pathological about fear. It is self-protection.
But anxiety is always about what ‘may happen’, isn’t it? Over which neither I nor the client has any control. And there is so much we don't have control over. I no longer spend a lot of time trying to teach 'control' to anxious people! What I try to do instead is to help the client learn to recognise and deal with his or her anxiety. Find out how anxiety occurs in you - how it manifests in your body, your behaviour, your emotional attitudes. This brings us a little nearer to a sense of control, I find - control over ourselves, which is the only place we have a hope of controlling. I can't make the rest of the world recycle its plastic - I can only recycle my own, and hope that this contribution, alongside that of many others, will make a difference. The external situation is the same, the environmental disaster is still looming, but I am doing all I can and that's all anybody can do.
I accept that I don’t know what will happen next, but I also recognise the nature of my resources to deal with it, which are considerable, though not infallible, and not guaranteed. What do we have to fall back on, beyond these convictions? We have some kind of faith or philosophy of life, in most cases, I suspect. Without which, as C G Jung pointed out, it is very difficult to remain free from neurosis. Life is just plain too scary to be lived on your own private resources alone. We need other people, a community of the like-minded, not a bunch of people seeking an impossible nirvana of control over the rest of the world, but a group of people willing to acknowledge how scary and uncontrolled life can be, and who understand the need to help each other if we are all to survive.
I think this is what the British need, as a nation, and it isn’t to be found in any Brexit deal, or a second referendum, or a general election, unless some remarkably wise politician emerges who can at last think beyond the surface and the shallow. I’d suggest meanwhile that we all begin by recognising the merit in each other whenever we can. Let's help others to recognise the resources they actually have now, which can make a difference. These are real and will not go away when the boom falls. Make a positive comment to someone today. Draw their attention to what they already have that makes a difference. There is far more at stake, I assure you, than pop psychology!
