Ideology: from Karl Marx to Brexit

An ideology is a useful recruiting sergeant. It offers a moral or political anchor in a complex and bewildering world. But as a problem-solver it sucks. It tends to inhibit reason. It’s something you believe because you believe it. It almost invariably leads to a dead end.

At its most corrosive, ideology becomes (or stems from) a source of identity. Nationalism, for example, or economic liberalism. Karl Marx defined ideology as deceptive ideas designed by an elite to keep the rest of us in our place. As the father of Soviet totalitarianism he certainly knew what he was talking about.

In contrast to much of Europe, Britain’s jerky progress since the end of World War II has been defined and hobbled in equal measure by competing ideologies, more honoured in the breach than the observance. Boom and bust; great wealth and even greater poverty; offshore millionaire empires and sink estates in cities bursting at the seams.

Left and Right each have their version of ideological divinities. When summoned these conjure up panaceas to the challenges of a modern state. At its most basic these come down to tax and redistribute versus tax cuts tout court. But, as we are reminded time and again, it’s not that simple.

The most recent and consequential example of an ideology that held false promise is Brexit. Its force lay in the seductive idea that by leaving the European Union Britain would, with one bound, regain its honour and its rightful place as a great power and as a result thrive, shackle-free. Take back control became the vessel for 17 million hopes in search of something better.

Boris Johnson’s ultra-hard, no-surrender Brexit put paid to that. It was governed by the simple notion which he has assiduously cultivated as the springboard of his ambitions: Europe bad; Britain good.

Max Weber, the German sociologist and political thinker, observed that good politics takes passion (plenty of that among Leavers), but that it also takes perspective (not so much). A hard Brexit has proved to be a flawed ideology without context.

Mind you, as a dialectic it’s not dissimilar to the belief that a state that controls the commanding heights of the economy is necessarily stronger. Or that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Absolutism and wishful thinking are a heady combination.

Unsurprisingly, Brexit’s imagined benefits have proved illusory: what Marxists describe as “false consciousness”. A feel-good dogma with plenty of feeling but without the good.

The most paradoxical example of Brexit’s unintended consequences is the small boats crisis, the lodestar of Rishi Sunak’s faltering strategy to recover in the opinion polls ahead of next year’s general election.

Consider this: in 2022, according to the Migration Observatory, over 45,000 asylum seekers crossed the Channel to England. The figure for 2021 was 25,000; for 2020: 8000; for 2019: 1800; for 2018: 299. And in 2017 the number was: nil.

Brexit created the small boats crisis, just as Brexit conjured up queues at Dover, the shortfall in inward investment and trade and the London Stock Exchange’s diminishing international stature. Before Brexit all EU countries had what is known as a return agreement with each other: under this agreement unauthorised immigrants could be returned to the first safe country they had entered.

Leaving the EU kiboshed this arrangement and opened the door to people-smuggling gangs. It’s the best kind of business model — a monopoly. The traffickers who profit from the misery of migrants trying (and dying) to sneak into Britain have Brexit to thank. Nobody, it seems, understood this.

That’s another thing about an ideology. It becomes in some mystical way identified with “the truth”. Believers are virtuous. Doubters are immoral cretins.

Rejoining the European Horizon scientific programme is hammered by Brexiteers not because it’s a bad idea (which it plainly isn’t) but because it’s European. Remainers are accused of being enemies of democracy, as if democracy happened once — in June 2016.

Liz Truss’s car crash budget was a perfect example of how ideology can lead politicians astray. It bombed, not because tax cuts are a bad idea and certainly not because the Treasury and the bond markets were out to get her. It bombed because she didn’t do her homework.

The omerta surrounding Brexit, like a Dartmoor fog, is slowly lifting — as it should. The most consequential decision this country has taken since World War II cannot, like an official secret, remain off-limits for the next 50 years. But it has left a bitter aftertaste and a powerful sense of tribalism that colours many other issues that urgently need tackling.

Yet Brexit is far from the only ideology elevated to the status of a religion that brooks no argument. The NHS is one. Believers who suggest reform are heretics. Or Palestine: supporters of a just resolution to the plight of the Palestinians who also believe unwaveringly in Israel’s right to exist betray the cause.

That’s the thing about ideology.  Like religion it leaves no room for nuance. Or hard thinking. Having cleansed the Tory party of people willing to do the dull but necessary slog of running the country, Johnson and Truss spun ideological fairy tales.

If this sounds like centrism, I guess you could call it that. But centrism is not without values or idealism. You can foreswear ideology and still have a belief system. Theresa May’s citizens of everywhere can be utterly devoted to their country. Patriotism comes in many flavours.

Britain finds itself yet again spinning its wheels: failing public services, pay packets barely keeping pace with rampant inflation, rickety infrastructure, at the margins of international affairs. Above all a deep, sense of gloom at our political system’s ability to fix things.

Shortly before Johnson was packed off in disgrace, I asked my local (Tory) MP what kind of world he wanted for his kids. He replied that he wanted a world where the state is as small as possible, and which is free of “wokery”. These are ideologies, slogans. They are not a programme for government. But this is the new Tory party.

When, as seems increasingly likely, Starmer wins the next election, he could do worse than choose as his overriding objective making government respectable (even boring) again. This will require more listening, less preaching, developing a more broadly-based political class, fewer one-size-fits-all, top-down edicts and greater trust in local solutions.

He should start by prohibiting anything that smacks of ideology.