Imagined Solidarities: Brexit, Welfare, States, Nations and the EU #

Daniel Wincott

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Health Service had a status akin to a shared secular religion in the UK. To borrow Benedict Anderson’s evocative phrase, the NHS is a focus for ‘imagined community’. For Anderson (1991: 6), every nation is an imagined community ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or hear of them—yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion’. Of course, the particular values, institutions, laws and symbols of imagined community differ across nations.

The nation is however not the only political frame or scale in and at which community might be imagined—from the local to the European. Nation and state are different concepts. More clearly than some other states, the United Kingdom has a pluri-national character. How does the UK state relate to the imagined national communities attached to Britishness or those of its other constituent territories: English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh?

The welfare state features powerfully in public discourse within many European countries, often conceived as a contract between citizen and state. It might also be understood as an imagined national solidarity, perhaps even as a solidaristic aspect its national communities shared across Europe. Of course, imagined solidarities can also be imagined exclusions. Taken together these elements might reframe our understanding of ‘social Europe’ and the prospects for the European Pillar of Social Rights.

How did the NHS become a cross-UK focus for imagined community, perhaps in place of wider welfare-state ideas? Traditionally, it has been strong political ground for the Labour Party. Labour claimed credit for the NHS: Aneurin Bevan, a totemic figure on the party’s left, was feted as its postwar creator. On losing power shortly afterwards, Bevan (1952) saw the ‘free National Health Service’ as ‘much-disputed’. Yet decades later, as Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher declared the NHS to be ‘safe in our hands’.

Even so, the NHS experienced waves of reform under Thatcher and every subsequent prime minister. Throughout, health care being ‘free at the point of use’ remained critical. ‘Dispute’ largely vanished from the NHS, at least as an imagined symbol of the UK. Equally, it became increasingly hard to identify what, exactly, the NHS now signified.

Why is the NHS so highly valued across the UK? Are UK health outcomes superior to those of comparable European countries? Is NHS health care of remarkably high quality? The point here is emphatically not to denigrate the NHS. But both Danny Boyle’s NHS celebration for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and the bewildered response of many international onlookers were striking. They illustrate the peculiar significance of the NHS as a shared national symbol: by 2012 it was firmly established as the vessel, par excellence, of imagined community in and across the UK. As a symbol and an imagined embodiment of values, the NHS became available to a diverse range of political projects.

Brexit and the NHS #

‘Take back control’ was the Leave campaign’s key slogan in the UK’s 2016 referendum on European Union membership. More or less grudgingly, even Brexit’s opponents have acknowledged the brilliance of this mantra. For many individuals—perhaps it articulated a sense of a lack of control in daily life: the idea that many people and places had been ‘left behind’ became a staple of post-referendum public debate. It certainly captured the idea that we had lost control to someone and somewhere else. The brilliance of ‘take back control’ lay partly in its emptiness, its lack of substance. Various frustrations and irritations could be projected on to this slogan, be articulated by it. But it would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that Brexit was only motivated by an inchoate, vapid cloud of frustrations. The Leave campaign also offered a clear positive focus for voters, painted on the side of a big red bus—‘our NHS’, for which projected additional funding was the cutting edge of the sharp knife of anti-EU sentiments.

By the time Covid-19 hit, the Leave campaign’s leaders occupied the top elected positions in the UK state. Boris Johnson had just won a resounding victory for the Tories in the 2019 general election. Despite a twisted personal relationship with him—marked by a very public betrayal—Michael Gove had taken on the role of Johnson’s key lieutenant, at the heart of government in the Cabinet Office.

Two of the three major offices of the UK state were now held by MPs from the 2010 intake: the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, and the home secretary, Priti Patel. Shortly after their initial election as MPs, Patel and Raab had been among five authors of a flamboyantly and revealingly entitled volume, Britannia Unchained (Kwarteng et al, 2012). Hostility to the EU was a strong element of Patel’s political credo—her membership of the Conservative Party was broken between 1995 and 1997 by a spell in the Eurosceptic Referendum Party.

Yet leaving the EU was not a major theme of Britannia Unchained. Instead it gained notoriety for its critique of lazy Britons, parsed, in a Conservative Home website article marking its publication, as a ‘disturbing rise in welfare dependency’. The article concluded: ‘We are convinced that Britain’s best days are not behind us. We cannot afford to listen to the siren voices of the statists who are happy for Britain to become a second rate power in Europe, and a third rate power in the world. Decline is not inevitable.’

Into the second decade of the 21st-century, then, these Conservatives associated welfare with a negative dependency culture rather than with a social dimension of citizenship or, like the NHS, with a positively imagined shared community of solidarity. Less than a decade before Johnson and Gove invoked Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal recovery plan from the Great Depression, Patel and Raab had lasered in on ‘statists’ as the arch-villains of Britain’s relative international decline.

Covid-19 strengthened the status of the NHS and shone a blindingly bright light on how politicians and opinion leaders made use of it as a symbol. When the pandemic hit the UK, the government in London seemed willing to imbibe a variety of social, political and economic ideas. Anti-statist libertarianism, including the nostrum that the British—or perhaps the English—were particularly attached to their liberties, was an important element of this liquid draft. Better known for his flamboyant rhetoric than Britannia Unchained-style ideological positioning, Johnson appeared to place particular emphasis on freedom to go to the pub.

When faced with the decision over lockdown, his administration seemed concerned that Britons might not forgo their liberties. Its members seemed surprised that lockdown was implemented relatively smoothly. Perhaps part of the reason for this outcome was that citizens were enjoined to ‘protect the NHS’. The exemplary symbol of ‘us’ who ‘we’, the populace of the UK state, are was arguably almost accidentally deployed. There was a real fear that hospitals might be overwhelmed, potentially with horrendous consequences. In early July, as the lockdown was eased in England—including by reopening pubs—the health minister, Matt Hancock, claimed credit for the government having succeeded in protecting the NHS. Yet in effect the general public had been summoned into protective service for an NHS whose rationale was protecting public health.

Imagined communities, nations and states #

Anderson’s imagined communities are nations. But his questions ‘who are we?’ and ‘why and how, if at all, do we support one another?’ are not asked only of nations. First, we should consider institutions, particularly state institutions. Our political language tends to suture the nation to the state—a form of methodological nationalism or national-statism. The state provides (many of the key) institutions that make nations imaginable. And if we do owe one another obligations or feel solidarity with one another—states have played a pre-eminent role in making that solidarity real. Across Europe, these imagined solidarities are often deeply bound up with social protection and redistribution.

Secondly, nations (or nation-states) are not the only spatial scales at which communities are imagined. When describing levels of analysis other than the nation-state—sub_national_, inter-national and supra_national_—our language remains saturated with the idea of the nation. For precisely this reason, it is sometimes imprecise. For example, self-defining nations exist within (Scotland, Wales) and across (Catalonia, the Basque country) existing states. The words are (revealingly?) awkward, but it would be more accurate to talk of sub-state/state/supra-state levels, entities and institutions, at least for the UK. (In federal systems, such as Germany and the US, the word state refers also to the units that make up the federation.)

Moreover, lived experience of community is in places. Each lived life is a vector through time and space, in a series of particular locations. As the analysis of English community studies by Jon Lawrence (2019) shows, localities are also imagined. Anderson’s imagined community is also relevant at more local levels.

Perhaps more obviously, spatial scales above the nation-state also have an imagined existence. European solidarities have often been canvassed. The EU is engaged in significant redistribution of resources across its spaces and places. Effort has been invested in the Pillar of Social Rights. Yet, the EU seems to have struggled to weave a powerful and inclusive imaginary of ‘social Europe’. How widely, and for whom, is Europe imagined as a community or a place of solidarity? It seems to have been built around and avoids impinging on imagined national solidarities.

Forgetfulness, anachronism and imagined solidarity #

Imagining any national community involves huge feats of forgetfulness. Typically, things are forgotten about the imagined nation’s imagined past—think of Black Lives Matter in, and beyond, the United States. At its metropolitan centre, the UK state seems to have a permanent partial amnesia about its own peripheries. That centre has often taken a peculiarly relaxed view of the possibility of secession by, say, Scotland or Northern Ireland. But this is matched by forgetfulness about, neglect of and occasional synthetic outrage over devolved perspectives. Covid-19 has revealed a similar view of provincial England.

Shocked and fitful awareness of the border on the island of Ireland has marked the tortured story of UK Brexit processes. The motivations of Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish first minister throughout Brexit and the pandemic have been read as wholly independence-focused, not as those of a leader with governmental responsibilities. The patience of Wales’ Labour-led governments—traditionally strongly committed to the UK union—has been stretched almost to breaking point. Hancock has practical policy responsibility for health (and social care) only in England. Yet, for a Welsh audience, in April he wrote: ‘In the end it’s not a Welsh Health Service or an English Health Service but a National Health Service. We are all on the same team and we will all get through this together, as one United Kingdom.’

Hancock, it seems, understands the power of the NHS as a political symbol. It is, of course, as politically legitimate for him to hold this view of the UK as for Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, to call for Scottish independence. But Hancock’s statement, made at the height of the emergency, was a basic misdirection about the realities of health policy and provision in Wales.

Historical forgetfulness is also important. The academy is deeply implicated in the construction of a mistaken national history of the UK welfare state, which in turn became a shared artefact for western Europe. This story revolves around a putative golden age, which, it says, began in 1945 and continued until the mid-1970s. British postwar social reforms, made in the name of the nation, play the pivotal role in this narrative. Distinctively alert to welfare’s boundaries, Maurizio Ferrera (2005) nevertheless articulates a conventional view: ‘British reforms introduced between 1945 and 1948 designed the first coherent and systematic architecture of a universalistic welfare state.’

Yet these reforms were not made in the name of the welfare state. They were completed before TH Marshall delivered his signal 1949 lecture on social citizenship in Cambridge. The welfare-state term is absent from this lecture. Three years later Bevan published In Place of Fear. His single mention of the welfare state is revealing: ‘The National Health Service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach.’ Bevan was at least as likely to refer to the ‘British’ as the ‘National’ Health Service in this volume.

Labour’s postwar reforms were certainly pathbreaking. Narrating them as if intended to found the welfare state is however anachronistic, projecting subsequent concepts inappropriately back on to an earlier historical moment. Doing so exaggerates the historical reach of the idea of the welfare state.

Bevan’s words recall divisions of seven decades ago. As the NHS is celebrated today, those early years now bask in the golden glow of an enduringly significant founding moment. After Brexit and through Covid-19, however, change to the territorial and social governance of this north Atlantic archipelago is unavoidable. If read as an achievement which can never again be matched, the NHS’ imagined golden history could prove delibilitating. A nostalgic postwar mythology might limit what can be imagined now.

The notion of les _trente glorieuses _suggests similar ideas grip other parts of Europe. They may overshadow the whole EU project.

References #

Anderson, B (1991 [1983]), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso

Bevan, A (1952), In Place of Fear, London: Heinemann

Ferrera, M (2005), The Boundaries of Welfare: European integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Protection, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Kwarteng, K, P Patel, D Raab, C Skidmore and E Truss (2012), Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity, London: Palgrave Macmillan

Lawrence, J (2019), Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England, Oxford: Oxford University Press