To the victors the (historical) spoils?

History, we are often told, is written by the victors. How, then, will events since the referendum of 2016, and especially in the astonishing year 2019, be depicted by historians?

We can expect disagreement. Conservative historians may argue that the 2019 result showed that socialism was finally dead, that the people were at last emancipated to vote for their country’s future, and that identity politics had replaced the politics echoing (though in an increasingly weak sense) Karl Marx (d. 1883). As Boris Johnson might say, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis — times change and we are changed with them.

But this analysis seems to be an exaggeration, true in part but that part made to stand for the whole by the first past the post system. Large areas of the North East, Yorkshire and the North West are still red on the map. Class politics — or tribalism — seems dead inside the M25 more than it does further up the A1. Without new policies, the final disappearance of class is likely to be some decades off.

Labour historians will make some options clearer, but with more disagreement among themselves. The party’s ability in the next few years to prove that the Conservatives have over-promised and under-delivered may be handicapped by the civil war developing within the left. One group will insist that their front bench’s inclination to remain in the EU was just right, but that the party’s liberally-minded working class constituency would never accept the authoritarian implications of the Marxist manifesto. What was therefore needed was a return to Blairite social democracy.

The other faction will urge that it was Remain that would never play with the traditional, patriotic working class, but that the agenda of public provision, state ownership and taxing the rich was just fine.

As with many such binary choices, the emerging answer is likely to be “neither”: Labour will need to find a new overarching narrative in identity politics before it can frame more widely acceptable redistributionist policies. But this is an intellectual challenge to which Labour historians seem, at present, unable to rise.

Liberal Democrat historians may put forward a more intelligent but less timely argument. Although a new identity politics is developing, its rise, too, has been exaggerated. It is not too hard to interpret the world; the problem, perhaps an insoluble problem, is to get one’s timing right. The Conservatives owe their victory to the decision of the Lib Dems to agree to a general election, a decision that made it politically impossible for Labour to resist one. This may be depicted by the victors as one of the major unforced errors of modern politics, but behind it may have stood an informed calculation.

Since the 1920s, when the Labour Party rose to eclipse the Liberals, the assumption had taken deep root in historiography, political science and popular attitudes that this eclipse was inevitable: that liberalism was an outdated philosophy of the nineteenth century; that the future lay with a politics that drew on the supposedly undeniable reality and dynamic of class.

But there were many recent symptoms of the decline of that class ideology, especially among the university educated. Why should Liberal Democrats not seize this moment, agree to a general election, and seek in turn to replace Labour as the vehicle of a redefined modernity?

As we know, things turned out very differently at the polls. But a contrarian would even now be betting that such a vision might in future be turned into a reality by a politician of genius. What if the Lib Dems were to accept the democratic verdict of the electorate on Brexit, argue further that an enhanced but limited and moderate use be made of referendums, and show confidence that a public so empowered would side with many Liberal causes? But here is their problem: this idea sounds like populism.

In 2019, the Conservative Party was most often stigmatised as “populist”. But it tended to do everything it could to avoid that label, as the instant sacking of Sir Roger Scruton by James Brokenshire and Theresa May reminded us. His vindication, and their discrediting, was a symbolic moment in national affairs. Indeed the Conservative Party had been slow to understand and exploit the new politics of identity. The party that brilliantly did just that was the most successful National Populist party in western Europe, the SNP, the extent of its populism disguised by the fig leaf of victimhood.

But nationalism is a dangerous thing. In politics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A successful SNP might in future provoke something in English opinion that would be very much not in Scotland’s interest.

The worst-case scenario for the Johnson ministry might be that it delivers on its promise to “Get Brexit Done” not as Brexit but as Brino (Brexit in name only), and loses Scotland and Northern Ireland. The best case scenario would be that a real Brexit is made the irreversible context for a new, populist, libertarian politics that delivers “one nation” not in the old terms of class or race but in terms of respect for many heritages.

It would systematically counter the new woke fashions, and therefore capture the politics of identity. It would also restore annual growth of GNP from Philip Hammond’s lacklustre 1.5 per cent to a recently attainable 3 per cent, or perhaps a little more: not quickly transformative, but enough to make a difference to the “left behind” regions.

Or it may be that the issue of Brexit and the person of Jeremy Corbyn gave the Conservative Party an exceptional advantage, but only a temporary one. More permanent gains would depend on its ability to compete in the new arena of identity politics. But will the Johnson government formulate such policies? It was so good at scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the boat that it is open to argument how much of a boat was left. Certainly, the party has an overarching vision in an undeniably large issue — Brexit. But the detailed policy implications of that master narrative remain unclear, as they were when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979.

Policies might address a new analysis of social trends, especially the increasingly participatory and democratic practices of the internet world. Just as Conservative governments in the 1950s and early 60s were far more effective than a Labour government might have been in winding up the empire, so a Conservative government may prove to be the one able to reform the new, democratically unaccountable establishment: the Supreme Court, the House of Lords, the BBC, the universities.

Ironically, the UK is leaving the EU but does so saddled with its own politicised Supreme Court on the EU model. This is a leading legacy of Prime Minister Blair’s back-of-an-envelope planning, combining outdated orthodoxies about the division of powers with the ideology of universal human rights that has proliferated since the 1990s. This Blairite innovation might be judged to be ripe for careful reconsideration.

So too is the House of Lords. It had worked out a valuable role for itself from the 1950s as a revising chamber, but the Brexit saga in 2019 showed the House’s new self. Of 661 life peers reportedly eligible to sit on 21 June 2019, 357 had been created by Tony Blair and 243 by David Cameron. To this remarkable total of 600, Theresa May added 44 more.

Some of their choices were admirable. Many proved to be identikit exponents of metropolitan social-democrat assumptions, continuing the party-political battle of the House of Commons in the upper House. Instead of crony capitalism, the UK found itself with a crony legislature. A Johnson ministry might conclude that it cannot continue in its present form.

The BBC maintained a fair degree of impartiality during the referendum of 2016, but has since shown a very different face, as quantifying studies have revealed. There has been no conspiracy here, but none was necessary: instead, there was a high-minded, idealistic expression of group assumptions far removed from those of the wider public. Unhappily for this urge to preach, technological change creates many other feasible models for hitherto unaccountable public service broadcasting.

A similar phenomenon gives concern to democrats. The Conservative Party, true, has won a larger slice of the northern working class, but it has lost a large slice of the educational establishment and of the 18-24 age group: these two losses are unlikely to be unrelated. The individuals who staff the university sector, the jewel in the crown of the UK’s knowledge-based economy, have been shown to incline in just one political direction in the proportion of about nine to one.

If universities are not a one-party state, they are close to being a one-party estate of the realm. They, too, are democratically unaccountable, even to their academics, for since the 1990s they have fallen into the hands of an ever-expanding class of astonishingly highly rewarded administrators. In their hands, universities are more often in the news for their woke virtue-signalling than for their fearlessly independent scholarship.

It is open to question whether either situation, in the BBC or the universities, would be ratified by a referendum among the taxpaying electorate as a whole, let alone the good people of Workington or Bolsover. Changes in all these areas might amount to a significant response to the new politics of identity, and in a democratic direction.

Yet none of these projections have historical authority: all are extrapolations of contested present-day historical analysis, and all of them can be, and will be, disputed by future historians. Nothing could, therefore, be more untrue than to say that history is written by the victors. Rather, history’s rival interpretations emerge within a dissonant debate between the victors who eventually lose, the losers who eventually win, and those who can never accept what the question was. How will things develop? Watch an empty, but inviting, space.