Is Britain Becoming a Fascist Society?
Why Brexit Britain is Imploding into Rage, Hate and Stupidity
I read a strange and shocking article recently — an exposé. It revealed that Britain is treating European visitors — to put it bluntly — scandalously. Europeans with partners or spouses living in the UK come over, for job interviews, or visits — and are put in “detention” and then deported.
Take for example the story of a Spanish woman, who came to the UK for a job interview — which isn’t illegal, by the way — and wasn’t allowed to enter the country. When she said, basically, OK, I’ll get on the next flight to Barcelona…she was put into a “detention center,” or in plainer English, a concentration camp, for days anyways.
All of this raises a simple but difficult question. Is Britain becoming a fascist society?
Let me give you some context first, to explain why I ask.
Since 2015 or so, Britain’s been in the grip of a kind of fervid, rabid nationalism. Not just the “good” nationalism — though has there ever been such a thing? — of people merely proud of their country. But the darker — and dumber — underbelly of Brexit.
What was Brexit about? Scapegoating people for the woes of the average Brit. Which people? Funnily, strangely, stupidly enough, Europeans. I say “stupid” because if you were going to scapegoat anyone in the world, surely Europeans would be your last choice. By and large, they’re gentle, warm, civilized, and friendly people. It’s a little like saying that the Teletubbies are Public Enemy Number One.
It’s hard to overstate how badly Europeans — and immigrants and foreigners and refugees — are stigmatised in Britain today. They are at the receiving end of what’s essentially been a cultural war, a sociopolitical campaign of persecution. The stories of Europeans who were forced to leave — we’re talking even successful ones, like academics and professionals — are legion. But so too are the stories of Europeans — along with others not seen as “really” British — being harassed and demeaned and attacked, in school, at work, at the office, in public.
Why was the average Brit dumb enough — and dumb is precisely the right word — to fall for this persecution campaign? To ask that another way, whose fault was it that the average Brit’s life fell apart? Fall apart it did, by the way. The last decade or so has been a time of shocking decline for Britain. Incomes, savings, happiness, trust, life expectancy — pick whatever social indicator you want. They’ve all fallen off a cliff. Why?
The reason was the stupidity of the average Brit, and again, stupidity is exactly the right word. Brits these days vote ultra conservative. But voting ultra conservative is precisely what has wrecked and ravaged their living standards. And yet they go on voting ultra conservative. There’s no other word for that, really, but stupidity.
Take a few examples, if you don’t buy it. The fisherman who angrily demanded a hard Brexit — and now finds himself unemployed, because of Brexit…and yet still votes ultra conservative. The farmer who angrily blamed Europeans, and wanted Brexit…who’s now going bankrupt, since exports to the EU have basically come to a screeching halt…and still votes ultra conservative. The middle class professional, who finds herself paying steep bills, now, for education, healthcare, childcare, as the NHS and every other kind of public institution is shattered…and yet still votes ultra conservative.
Why do these people do it? What spell have the conservatives of Britain cast on the working and middle class? What trickery is it that makes an entire society of people vote against their own living standards rising, ever again, over and over again?
The spell that British conservatives have cast is the black magic of hate. The average Brit I’ve described above has had his or her life absolutely wrecked by a decade of conservative “policy.” I put it in quotes because there is no policy, really — it’s chaos at the top, and whatever enriches today’s cronies goes. The Health Secretary…while busy dismantling the NHS…handed a multi-million dollar Covid contract to the guy that ran his pub. And the average Brit didn’t care. They go on believing the by now obvious lie that conservatives are interested in them at all, except as commodities or pawns or things to be milked for profit and power.
Why does the average Brit go on believing all that? Because the conservatives offer him or her something genuinely seductive. Hate. You see, at this juncture in history, Brits have two choices. One, admit they were wrong, and badly wrong, and elected a string of the worst governments since the Weimar Republic. David Cameron’s feckless technocracy. Theresa May’s robotic ideologuery. Boris Johnson’s clownish Putin-esque oligarchy. Each worse than the last, more malign, indifferent, bilious, cowardly, incompetent. Is this a modern society? Are these people morons? No, not anymore and yes, they are.
Why is hate so seductive — to Brits at this juncture in history, especially? The only other developed society as tempted by it, of course, was America — but even Americans elected Biden after four years of Trump. The conservatives in Britain will have been in power for fifteen years at the end of Boris’s current term — and they show no signs of losing even then. Fifteen years is an eternity in politics. And the conservatives in Britain have gotten there by casting the spell of hate on a whole society, weakened enough, morally, mentally, socially, emotionally, to believe it.
What do I mean by that? Just fifteen years or so ago, Britain was the envy of the world. It had the world’s best healthcare system — the NHS. The BBC, the finest public broadcaster on earth. I could go on listing all of Britain’s great and grand and historic public institutions. Today, they are all in the process of being totally destroyed — for good. The BBC is in the hands of a…property developer. That’s not irony, that’s what it is to conservatives — a property to be flipped. Walk through central London, and my friends tell me that American healthcare companies are buying up whole blocks — because the NHS is already being privatized.
There’s a big difference between Americans and Brits. Americans have higher — much higher — incomes. It doesn’t matter in the end, though, because the prices Americans pay for things like healthcare and retirement are so astronomical, so ludicrous, that they live and die in perpetual debt, whether “medical debt” or “student debt” or credit card debt. But what is the average Brit, whose income is maybe half of what Americans’ is, going to do when he or she’s hit with American-sized healthcare bills? Feel a chill running down your spine, if you’re British?
But all that begins to explain why hate is so seductive, such an effective form of black magic. A decade and more of conservatism has left Brits weakened, in every way. Their social bonds have been torn apart — trust and faith and optimism in each other are gone. It’s a nation where depression and suicide are on the rise — an emotionally distraught place. Incomes and savings have cratered — Brits have been left economically weak, too. And all of that weakness leads people to a dark, dark place.
They grow anxious, fearful, worried. All that anxiety becomes anger, which boils over into rage. Rage seeks a target. And soon enough, along comes a demagogue — someone proficient in the art of offering mentally, morally, emotionally, socially weakened people a scapegoat. Someone to blame all their woes and misfortunes on.
The game is doubly effective when a peoples’ woes are, as in Britain, nobody’s fault but their own. Because then a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in, at a social scale. Nobody wants to admit they were wrong — and when a whole society’s been wrong, as in the case of Britain, all that much more inertia is created.
Bang. Scapegoating and demonisation win the day. A society — even once a place as gentle and intelligent and kind as Britain, not so long ago — regresses, devolves, unravels. Into cruelty, spite, venom, bile, ignorance, malice, stupidity. The demagogues laugh. They feed the masses their daily two minutes hate — Orwell knew this story all too well — and the masses lap it up. Someone else must be to blame for their miseries. Not themselves, not their poor choices, and not their great and noble leaders. Why, their country is infallible. It’s always been the best. It was a ruler of the world, once. It must be the fault of those dirty, strange, filthy others.
That is how a society ends up seduced by hate. First, you weaken the people. You take away, one step at a time, everything from them. Community. Opportunity. Money. Friendship. All these things become luxuries, as life becomes — as it has in America — a desperate, bitter, endless battle for self-preservation. That way, neighbours who once used to be friends are now rivals, for a set of limited resources. Jobs, housing, healthcare, medicine, retirement, just a daily morsel of bread to live on. And once you’ve gotten that far — -bang! — that’s when you cast the spell. You tell these people, weakened, broken inside, ruined economically, destroyed socially, unmoored emotionally, not thinking straight anymore, just tunnel-vision focused on survival…that the hated enemy who’s responsible for their misfortunes is this group. What a coincidence, it’s a powerless group, who’s always been at the margins.
Logically, the powerless have no ability to change a society whatsoever — just as Europeans had no power to ruin Brits’ lives. But weakened people can’t think, reason, feel anything but rage and anger, see straight. Ruin them, then give them a scapegoat — and you can control them for life.
It’s an old, old recipe, demagoguery. Even Athens fell to it, in the paranoia of war and conflict.
Recently, over the last decade or so, the world has seen a Great Resurgence of demagogues. Duterte, whose death squads roam the Phillippines. Modi, whose triumphant chest-beating has caused a Covid disaster in India. Trump, who still hypnotises half of America. But Britain is a leader in this dismal regard: it’s had long, long string of demagogues by now, Cameron, May, Johnson, each with mini-demagogues of their own.
The story of Britain’s implosion into a failed state will be told like this. Cameron’s indifference, his venality and greed and cruelty, led to May’s nationalism, her banal, Brexity android-like imperialism-lite, which led, in turn, to Boris Johnson’s…what, exactly?
Here we must pause a moment to answer the difficult question. Cameron’s austerity paved the road for May’s triumphant Brexiteering — people reduced to poverty and despair need a scapegoat, after all. But that was yesterday. What comes after nationalism?
The answer to that is an ugly one. Fascism does.It’s probably too soon to say that this is fascism the way Brits think of it — shirtless English Front hooligans beating minorities after football matches. No, it’s not that. It’s worse. The thugs and hooligans are in charge of the country. They put Europeans in concentration camps, for no reason at all, except spite.
Why would you put a Spanish lady in a concentration camp, after all? She’s hardly a war criminal, or even breaking the law at all. Well, the grim answer goes like this. You want to give your base, your society, a license to hate. You know you can not just get away with it, but be adored for it. You’ve produced what Orwell so presciently called the two-minutes hate, the daily fix of rage and venom and bile, that allows the weakened masses to get it out of their system, to vent their spleen at a scapegoat. So that afterwards, they’re not just placid and meek and obedient — they’re all that and they thank you for giving them someone to hate, while not noticing you’re really the one that ripped their lives apart.
Does all that sound like fascism to you? The way that we tell the story of Orwell’s 1984, in Anglo culture, goes like this. It was a denunciation of communism. Alas, this is wrong. Orwell was a die-hard socialist. It was a denunciation of fascism. Big Brother is the Fuhrer. What is really not allowed isn’t just free speech and so forth, but love, gentleness, kindness, which is why, when Winston Smith meets Julia, it’s so dislocating for him, because he is falling in love. 1984 is the story of a society which is not allowed to love, because it’s been seduced by hate.
Orwell cut to the truth of what fascism really is. We have yet, even now, to understand it as well as he did. A society seduced and stupefied — literally made stupid, made a fool of — by the black magic of hate. Is Britain becoming a fascist society? You will have to tell me.
Umair
May 2021