Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 9

Eight miles from where Peel stands outside Bury Parish Church is one of Britain’s most important democratic sites. St Peter’s Field is the location of the Peterloo massacre of 1819, the occasion when the authorities reacted to the popular demand for parliamentary representation and better living standards by sending in the militia. It then became the place where Richard Cobden built the Free Trade Hall to commemorate the radical liberal victory over the Corn Laws that caused Peel to fracture the Conservative party.

This was where Michael Young, the chief author of the 1945 Labour party manifesto, chose to set his fictional dystopia The Rise of the Meritocracy. Young does not coin the term meritocracy as a compliment. His book is a warning about what can happen when a smug elite starts to believe that its good fortune is merited. The story ends, in the far distant year of 2033, with the death of the narrator at the hands of the revolting plebeians. The historical journey of St Peter’s Field begins with a protest to demand popular sovereignty and cheaper bread and ends in a civil war of the people against the elite.

Britain is today divided old against young, class against class, region against region, nativist against cosmopolitan, rich against poor, and London against the rest. It is a country divided by generation, by level of education, by place and by attitude. The referendum on British membership of the EU in June 2016 exposed, though it did not create, these rifts in British life. Seventy-one per cent of voters under the age of twenty-four wanted to stay in. Sixty-four per cent of voters over the age of sixty-five wanted to leave. People in the professions voted to stay; unskilled workers voted to leave. People who cite inequality as a major preoccupation were for in; those who said immigration counted most were for out. London, Manchester and Liverpool voted to stay and so did most of Scotland. Every other region, the towns and villages of England, fell the other way.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England, launched into the tempest of the Corn Law dispute in 1845, the Manchester mill-owner Friedrich Engels argued that the Industrial Revolution, which had enriched the owners of capital, had done nothing for the people who lived and worked in the industrial cities. In Sybil, the novel he wrote in response to Engels, Disraeli coined the phrase ‘two nations’ to describe the division between the rich and the poor. The very message that Engels telegraphed first time around is now coming back again from the post-industrial revolution. It is a big question: the condition of England question or, rather, the condition of Britain question, and today there is not just one of them but ten.

We will come, in the chapters that follow, to the principles, methods and policies that could start to furnish answers but we need, before that, to state the problems baldly. These are the problems that every political party will face whether it has answers or not. The price of having nothing to say is that the country carries on drifting, with no direction, endlessly, to nowhere in particular.