In a recent paper – presently under peer review – I wrote about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK. I argued, as I have repeatedly, that the UK was a ‘fractured society’ when it arrived and that it is taking a damaging if predictable course. I will not repeat myself here.
What I want to do in this brief blog is address the issue of ‘what next’: what might a post-COVID-19 society look like. I am influenced by two factors. The first arises out of a formula I have often deployed, namely, ‘capital buys power to make policy’. This formula has an enhanced relevance in the UK today. Material and social inequalities reached such a pitch post-austerity that the advent of COVID-19 is likely to prompt a crisis of state legitimacy, that is, if there is a triggering event. The second factor is the homicide or George Floyd in the USA. This has been followed not by ‘riots’ but by uprisings. It is a triggering event of precisely this kind that I see provoking a potential crisis of state legitimacy in the UK. It is possible, maybe even probable, that George Floyd’s death will have this effect in the USA.
First a quick note on populism, a much used (and abused) term. Nancy Fraser views the election of Trump in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK as manifestations of a new form of populism. She sees some common ground between the erstwhile supporters of Sanders and those of Trump, and between Remainers and Brexiteers, namely, their rejection of a neoliberal politics of distribution. She doubts however that these ‘masses’ can be welded together into a new counterhegemonic bloc. For that to happen the working classes would have to see themselves as allies against an economy rigged to their detriment and in need of transformation. What she calls ‘reactionary populism’ has little prospect of delivering such an alliance, because its hierarchical and exclusionary politics of recognition would seem to preclude it. ‘Progressive populism’, holding out for the prospect of egalitarian redistribution with non-hierarchical recognition, she thinks, is a better bet.
But then came COVID-19.
Drawing on Fraser’s two contenders for populism, I have postulated four ideal typical scenarios for a post-COVID future in the UK: state authoritarianism; state paternalism, proto-fascist populism; and radical left populism. I characterised these as follows:
Statist authoritarianism: this most closely approximates to a return to the status quo ante. It anticipates a degree of state repression to this end, with further curtailments of democratic processes and a new bout of austerity to claw back COVID-related expenditures by a revised programme of public expenditure and welfare cuts, skewed to hit ‘the many’, and a further tranche of privatisations (as happened following the global financial crisis of 2008/9).
Proto-fascistic populism: this marks a break with conventional parliamentary politics in the wake of a COVID-generated crisis of capitalism and a subsequent populist demand for transformative change. It would feature a platform of economic and cultural nationalism/isolationism rooted in an England-based identity politics of white supremacism.
Statist paternalism: this sees the electoral displacement of the Conservatives by a centrist Labour administration or coalition, committed to a variation to the status quo ante. It might be characterised as a neo-Thatcherite regime, but one even further removed from the post-WW2 era of welfare statism than its New Labour predecessors. It is committed to small-scale piecemeal engineering.
Radical left populism: this is also emergent from populist demand following a COVID-generated crisis of state legitimation, extending to a crisis of capitalism itself. This time it heralds a regime committed to a radically transformative manifesto oriented to left-progressive change and a reformed or post-parliamentary system of democratic politics.
In my paper I suggest that of this quartet the statist authoritarian seems most likely, representing, if not a ‘return to normal’, then a make-do and repressive version of existing UK governance. For want of a powerful narrative and collective agency to promote progressive change in the UK, not to mention the demise of the Corbyn/McDonnell-led Labour Party, any populist swing may well be reactionary.
In light of the ongoing uprisings in the USA, and of Trump’s election-oriented determination to face them down, and end them militarily if necessary, it is particularly important to think of future possibilities.