Power, Language and the Quiet Surrender of a Nation

There was once a time when a government was expected to govern a country. This now sounds like an unnecessarily old-fashioned idea, rather like the belief that a policeman should catch criminals or that a school should teach children to read. Government has acquired more sophisticated purposes. It must manage narratives, balance sensitivities, redistribute opportunities, demonstrate virtue, consult stakeholders, protect feelings, monitor language and, above all, ensure that nobody is permitted to remember too clearly what the country was like before the present generation of administrators discovered it. The men and women who perform these duties sit in their chambers beneath portraits of dead statesmen and speak in the solemn language appropriate to people who have never had to wonder whether there will be enough money left at the end of the month. They have committees to investigate problems, working groups to discuss the findings of the committees and consultants to explain why the working groups have failed. The country may be sinking, but the paperwork is immaculate.
They are not kings, although they sometimes behave as though the country were their private estate. Nor are they statesmen in the older meaning of the word. They are managers of circumstances, brokers of competing interests and custodians of political fashion. Their great talent is not necessarily governing but surviving. They understand which faction must be placated, which newspaper must be courted, which pressure group must be consulted, which constituency must be subsidised and which inconvenient question must be postponed until everybody has forgotten why it was asked. They speak continually of the national interest, although the national interest has an extraordinary habit of coinciding with the interests of those who happen to be sitting in the room.
The machinery by which this is accomplished is deceptively respectable. There are departments, regulations, consultations, commissions, assessments, policy frameworks and equality impact statements. Everything has a proper name and therefore everything appears legitimate. An elderly citizen unable to heat his house becomes a "vulnerable stakeholder". A young person unable to afford a home becomes part of a "housing challenge". A public service unable to meet demand experiences "capacity pressure". A citizen who objects to government policy contributes to "polarisation", and one who continues to object may eventually be classified as extreme. The remarkable thing is that the argument itself need never be answered. Once the person making it has been assigned the correct administrative label, the substance of his complaint becomes almost irrelevant.
This is one of the oldest tricks in political language. If an argument cannot be defeated, redefine the person making it. The vocabulary changes, and once the vocabulary has changed, the boundaries of permissible thought change with it. Poverty becomes vulnerability, censorship becomes safeguarding, political favour becomes representation, unequal treatment becomes equity, obedience becomes inclusion and propaganda becomes information management. The words sound harmless because they have been carefully washed of their original meaning. Yet behind the clean language the old machinery remains, and it still possesses the same power to reward, punish, exclude and compel.
There is no shortage of compassion in modern government. Indeed, compassion has become one of the few commodities which the state can manufacture without having to pay for it directly. Politicians announce their compassion at conferences, in press releases, in parliamentary speeches and before television cameras. They are compassionate towards one group, empathetic towards another and deeply concerned about a third. The only people who seem to require no special declaration of compassion are the ordinary taxpayers who finance the entire performance. They are simply expected to endure. This may be the greatest achievement of modern politics: the conversion of endurance into a civic duty.
The citizen pays more tax because the government requires more money. He pays more for housing because housing is scarce. He pays more for energy because energy policy has become complicated. He pays more for public services because demand has increased. He watches the national debt grow because tomorrow's taxpayers are not yet present to object. Whenever he asks why this should continue, he is reminded that the alternative would be irresponsible. The government is always responsible; the citizen, curiously, is always selfish. A moral asymmetry has developed in which the state may spend enormous sums in pursuit of a fashionable policy and call the expenditure compassionate, while the citizen who asks whether the money might have been spent differently is accused of thinking only of himself.
The same principle applies to social change. A government may alter the character of a neighbourhood through policies determined hundreds of miles away, but the resident who notices the alteration is instructed to become more tolerant. The state may transform the assumptions upon which a society has operated for generations, but the citizen who expresses attachment to those assumptions is suspected of living in the past. There is something particularly convenient about accusing a man of backwardness when he possesses memories which contradict the official description of progress. The past is therefore treated as an inconvenience, and those who remember it are expected to apologise for doing so.
This is not an argument against change. Britain has never been a static country. Its history is one of invasion, migration, settlement, trade, cultural exchange, technological transformation and political upheaval. The Britain of one century would be scarcely recognisable to the Britain of another. The important question is not whether Britain changes, because it inevitably will, but whether its people retain any influence over the direction of that change and whether the institutions responsible for managing it remain accountable to the citizens who must live with its consequences.
A nation is more than an economic unit. It is a collection of memories, institutions, habits, customs, loyalties and inherited assumptions about how people should behave towards one another. These things are difficult to measure and therefore particularly easy for administrators to disregard. A country can survive economic transformation. It can survive technological revolution, industrial decline and changes in patterns of employment. It can absorb newcomers and incorporate new customs. What becomes more difficult is the deliberate destruction of the shared assumptions which once enabled different kinds of people to regard themselves as members of the same political community.
The danger arises when a government becomes so embarrassed by its own history that it begins to treat historical memory as a form of prejudice. The established population is expected to adapt indefinitely, while the state becomes increasingly reluctant to ask newcomers to adapt in return. The concept of integration becomes strangely one-sided. One group is required to accommodate, understand and revise its expectations, while another is encouraged to preserve its own identity indefinitely. In the name of tolerance, reciprocity begins to disappear.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people of different origins living together. A civilised society should be capable of accommodating difference without turning every difference into a political crisis. Nor should every newcomer be blamed for failures created by government policy. People who come to Britain to work, raise families and participate peacefully in national life are not responsible for every weakness of the political system. Responsibility belongs first to those who make the decisions. A government cannot evade responsibility by blaming the population it has invited.
The difficulty begins when the legitimate question of integration becomes impossible to discuss without accusations of prejudice. The citizen who asks whether newcomers should learn the language, understand the laws, participate in civic life and develop some attachment to the country in which they have chosen to live is not necessarily expressing hostility. He may simply be asking whether citizenship still possesses a meaning. A stable society requires reciprocity. The citizen owes something to the country, but the country owes something to the citizen. There must be duties as well as rights, contribution as well as entitlement, memory as well as aspiration.
This principle has also been weakened by the modern treatment of national loyalty. In an earlier age, pride in one's country was regarded as ordinary and sometimes even necessary. A person could love his country without believing it perfect. He could criticise his government while remaining loyal to the country itself. Patriotism and political criticism were not considered contradictory. Today the distinction is often blurred. Attachment to the nation is treated with suspicion, while abstract internationalism is presented as morally superior. Yet a government which cannot explain why its own citizens should possess a particular attachment to their country has already surrendered something important. If national loyalty is regarded as embarrassing, there is little reason to expect citizens to make sacrifices on behalf of the nation when sacrifice becomes necessary.
This becomes especially important in the question of war. Governments have always possessed the power to demand sacrifice from their citizens, and there are circumstances in which such demands are unavoidable. A country defending itself against invasion cannot behave as though national survival were merely another item on an economic spreadsheet. But there is a profound moral distinction between asking citizens to defend their own country and asking them to accept sacrifice for objectives which have never been properly explained. A government that sends young people into danger has an obligation to explain the purpose, the necessity and the national interest involved.
Modern governments prefer more complicated explanations. There are strategic interests, international obligations, alliances, geopolitical necessities and security commitments. Some may be entirely genuine. Nevertheless, the ordinary citizen retains the right to ask the primitive question which bureaucracies dislike most: why? Why should a young man risk his life? Why should a young woman leave her family? Why should the taxpayer finance the operation? What precisely is the national interest, and what happens when the explanation changes?
The modern press gang does not require a wooden ship, a recruiting officer and a cudgel. It requires legislation, regulation, publicity campaigns, moral vocabulary and the repeated suggestion that questioning the policy is somehow disloyal. The chain has become invisible because it is printed on official stationery. The citizen is not dragged from his home; he is persuaded that resistance is socially unacceptable. This is, in its own way, a more efficient method of securing obedience. A frightened man may resist his captor, whereas a man who has been persuaded that his captivity is evidence of his own virtue may defend the cell.
The same transformation can be seen in the treatment of political dissent. In a healthy political system, disagreement is ordinary. Governments make decisions, citizens object, newspapers criticise, opposition parties attack, ministers defend themselves and elections settle some questions while leaving others unresolved. The arrangement is untidy, but democracy is necessarily untidy. Modern political managers dislike untidiness because it interferes with the appearance of consensus. Consensus, however, is often nothing more than disagreement which has been discouraged from becoming visible.
If everyone appears to agree, the government can claim that its policies reflect society. If someone disagrees, the disagreement must therefore be explained as an aberration. Perhaps the person is misinformed. Perhaps he is angry. Perhaps he is radicalised. Perhaps he has been influenced by social media. Perhaps he is suffering from nostalgia. The possibility that he has simply examined the evidence and reached a different conclusion is the possibility least often discussed. The citizen must not merely be wrong; he must be defective.
This is where political language performs its most useful service. Its purpose is not always to conceal what is happening. Sometimes its purpose is to make certain thoughts psychologically difficult to express. A man who says that he disagrees with a policy is making an argument. A man who has been taught that disagreement makes him hateful has been given something far more useful to the government than censorship: shame. Shame is cheaper than censorship because the state need not silence the citizen when the citizen has learned to silence himself.
Meanwhile, the physical realities remain stubbornly indifferent to political language. Houses remain expensive. Taxes continue to be collected. National debt continues to accumulate. Public services remain under pressure. Elderly people continue to grow old. Young people continue to wonder whether they will ever own a home. Roads require maintenance, hospitals require staff and schools still have to educate children. Yet governments continue to discover money for another initiative whose principal achievement will be the production of a report explaining why the previous initiative was insufficiently ambitious.
Eventually arithmetic begins to defeat rhetoric. A government cannot indefinitely spend more than it possesses and call the difference compassion. It cannot indefinitely demand sacrifice from one section of society while insisting that another has a permanent moral claim upon resources. It cannot continually tell people that their concerns are imaginary when they can see the consequences with their own eyes. Nor can it expect a nation to surrender its historical memory indefinitely without eventually producing citizens who begin to ask what, precisely, they are being asked to surrender.
This is where the keepers of the keys have made their greatest mistake. They have confused silence with consent. The distinction is crucial. A population may remain silent because it trusts its institutions, because it believes its representatives are acting in good faith or because it accepts the necessity of an unpopular policy. But it may also remain silent because it is exhausted, because it sees no practical alternative, because it fears social consequences or because it has been persuaded that nothing can be changed. Such silence is not necessarily consent. Sometimes it is merely patience.
Patience can survive for years. It can survive governments, economic crises and even wars. People will tolerate considerable hardship if they believe that sacrifice is fairly distributed and that those governing them are acting honestly. What destroys confidence is not hardship alone but the conviction that hardship is being imposed selectively, explained dishonestly and borne by people who had no part in making the decisions.
Once that conviction takes hold, grievances which previously appeared unrelated begin to connect. The pensioner who feels forgotten discovers that the young worker cannot afford a home. The young worker discovers that his taxes are rising while his prospects diminish. The small businessman discovers that regulation multiplies while large institutions receive exemptions and subsidies. The soldier wonders what exactly he is being asked to defend. The ordinary citizen looks at his town and wonders why the people making decisions appear so indifferent to what he can see with his own eyes.
At first these people have little in common except dissatisfaction. Then they discover that they share a suspicion: that the institutions established to serve them have gradually become institutions which manage them. This is the point at which political awakening becomes possible. It need not be violent, and indeed the most consequential political changes in a democracy are often remarkably peaceful. They can begin with an election, a newspaper column, a public meeting or simply the moment when millions of ordinary people cease accepting the vocabulary which has previously been imposed upon them.
The establishment will then perform its favourite trick and declare that the people have become dangerous. There will be solemn editorials, warnings from experts, television discussions and reports on extremism. There will be appeals for responsibility and reminders that democracy must be protected. The possibility that the anger might have been produced by years of political failure will receive rather less attention. It is always easier to diagnose the anger of the population than to examine the causes of it.
There is an especially revealing contradiction here. Democracy is praised as a system in which the people govern themselves, yet the electorate is frequently treated with suspicion whenever it reaches a conclusion that displeases the institutions accustomed to guiding it. The public is trusted when it agrees and manipulated when it does not. Elections are celebrated when they confirm the established consensus and described as threats to democracy when they overturn it. Thus democracy becomes not the right of the people to choose, but the duty of the people to choose correctly.
This is how the changing of the guard becomes visible.
The old political order assumes that the new one will inherit its vocabulary, institutions and assumptions. But eventually a generation of voters may discover that the official language no longer describes their experience. They may reject the approved terminology. They may rediscover patriotism. They may begin asking questions about borders, citizenship, taxation, sovereignty, national responsibility and the purpose of government which their predecessors had declared settled. The establishment will call this regression because every political class naturally assumes that its own opinions represent progress.
History may judge differently.
The danger for Britain is not that it will change. Change is inevitable. The danger is that it will cease to distinguish between necessary change and fashionable change, between genuine compassion and political calculation, between integration and fragmentation, between international cooperation and the surrender of national responsibility. A confident nation can absorb enormous change because it possesses a sufficiently strong sense of itself to determine what it will accept and what it will reject. An insecure nation can be transformed almost without noticing because it has lost the confidence to object.
The final danger, therefore, is not revolution but disengagement. A country can continue functioning for a surprisingly long time after its citizens have ceased to believe that its institutions belong to them. The trains will continue to run, Parliament will continue to meet, ministers will continue to give interviews and civil servants will continue to produce memoranda. Television studios will remain full of people explaining the seriousness of the situation, while outside the studio ordinary citizens will continue paying the bills.
Everything will appear normal.
Yet something essential will have disappeared.
The people will no longer believe that the keys belong to them.
That is why those who possess political power should remember that they are custodians rather than owners. Their authority is temporary. Their offices are temporary. Their policies are temporary, and even their reputations are temporary. The country existed before them and, barring catastrophe, will exist after them. They should therefore be extremely careful about what they dismantle in the name of progress, because history is a patient creditor.
It permits governments to borrow against the future for a surprisingly long time. It allows debts to accumulate, institutions to weaken, promises to multiply and public patience to be consumed. Then eventually the bill arrives. The rulers who have grown accustomed to silence discover that silence was not forgetfulness. The people who appeared apathetic discover that they were merely waiting. The questions which were dismissed as unreasonable become unavoidable, and the political class discovers, usually with considerable surprise, that the country it believed it was managing has been keeping its own ledger.
The final absurdity is that men who believe themselves to be the masters of history are usually only its temporary occupants. They may alter laws, redraw boundaries, rename institutions, subsidise one interest and tax another. They may lecture the population on morality and tell it which opinions are respectable. They may even persuade themselves that they have abolished the old political instincts which once bound the country together. But they cannot abolish memory, and they cannot command the tide merely by issuing an administrative instruction.
Britain has endured governments which believed themselves indispensable before, and it has survived them. The ships still sail, the bells still ring and the old stones remain beneath the new paint. The graves of those who came before us remain where they were placed, indifferent to the latest political fashion. Beneath all the official noise there remains the stubborn and inconvenient fact upon which every democratic government ultimately depends: the people are not subjects. They are the source of the authority which the keepers merely borrow.
The keeper who forgets this may hold the keys for a very long time. He may have the committees, the departments, the regulations, the newspapers, the advisers and the carefully constructed vocabulary. He may even persuade himself that history has been tamed. But there remains one thing which no government can permanently abolish: the capacity of ordinary people to remember what they were promised, to compare it with what they received and eventually to ask the question which the keepers of the keys would prefer never to hear.
Who gave you the keys?
And when the guard changes, who will be standing on the other side of the door?

By John Shenton