Notice How the Establishment is Trying to Defend the Stasis Quo

Nay. Rub not your eyes. I wrote “stasis quo” and meant it. (Pronounce it stah-sis with a short ‘a’, please: or ‘æ’, if you know how that sounds.) I did not mean ‘status quo’. Or not only that. For an explanation see somewhere below. But, as an anticipation, I am using “stasis quo” to mean not ‘the existing state of affairs’ but something more interesting: ‘the existing conflict.’ And I am going to argue that I have the suspicion that there are great forces amassed trying to defend the stasis quo.

This short piece is meant to be a contribution to political understanding, and as I go on I will try to substantiate the point by falling back on a historical essay about British politics by one of my old teachers, which came out in 2019.

You know that in 2016 a cat was let out of the bag. The entire EU stitch-up whereby referendums were reversed, constitutions were repackaged as treaties, was confounded by Perfidious Albion when Cameron, for political reasons, capitulated to the old but previously ignored pressure to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. You know this story: Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, UKIP, Blair, finally Cameron: who, vainly, perhaps, because he had made good political use of one or two referendums on other things – the Alternative Vote in 2011, Scottish Independence in 2014 – decided to go for a third. Well, we all know from fairy tales that things go wrong on the third occasion. Goldilocks, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, Three Little Piggies, etc. And on the third occasion Cameron put his foot through the floorboards, broke the chair, failed to huff and puff and blow the house down with project fear, and voila, we voted for Brexit.

Between 2016 and 2026 we have witnessed the enterprising resistance of the Old Order and its attempt to put this cat back in the bag. We see it, now, with the concerted, as it seems, resistance to Common Sense / Reform / Restore / Populism / Far Right / Fascism. For this is exactly the sort of politics that most people in the Old Order want to keep out of the system.

And so, not for the first time, there is a conspiracy among the members of the established parties to exclude one element of our politics, to scapegoat it, and make it effectively taboo.

This has happened before. Today I read a piece by my former director of studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, the great Boyd Hilton – a very elegant bit of historical writing, which, if you cannot access it, I will send you – a piece in a Boydell Press book, Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life Since 1800, entitled ‘Politics, Rhetoric and the Serial Fluctuations of “Small State” Ideology in the Long 19th Century and After’. A bit of a mouthful, that title. But the piece is, basically, a brilliant short history of British politics since around 1832. It has an emphasis on the 19th century, but Boyd comes right up to Johnson, Sunak and Truss, plus Corbyn. Let me extract the most striking insights. The piece is about 20 pages long. For me, it was a delight. For some of the more impatient below-the-liners, it might be important to say that it was somewhat longer than the average X post or even Daily Sceptic article.

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was a victory for free trade and Cobdenism. After the failure of 1848 in England, there was a brief euphoria that Chartism had not led to catastrophe. It was brief, “but it lasted long enough to validate free trade and by extension small state, free-market capitalism in the national psyche”. Then, in 1853, Gladstone in a budget “established the Victorian minimalist state, based on low taxes, low welfare, low spending, balanced budgets and Treasury control”. This lasted for 30 years until the agricultural depression of 1880 damaged charity, made the state necessary for the social intervention that was to come, especially after 1910 and again after 1945 – and which was to lead to questions about increased taxation, and also make Keynes famous. Broadly speaking, the success of the Liberal party after 1853 in making itself the party of fiscal probity encouraged the Conservatives, a bit lost since 1846 and even more lost after Protection became irrelevant, to engage in a more interventional policy — hence they became, oddly enough, the party of public health, education, trades unions etc. (Boyd says: “The Conservatives defied logic [after 1846] by stubbornly clinging on to the role of official Opposition, despite not only losing only most of their leadership after 1846 but also their main raison d’étre in Protection. Hence it was they who stepped on to the vacant chess square labelled ‘Social Reform’.”) Then came the end of the mid-Victorian boom. By now free trade was so entrenched that no one thought of reviving Protection when cheap American wheat entered the country from the late 1870s onwards. This hit everywhere hard, including the universities, but it hit Ireland especially hard, and eventually led to Home Rule.

Now, at this point, Boyd refers to an old book by Cooke and Vincent, The Governing Passion (1974) which argues that

Gladstone and Salisbury tacitly but deliberately colluded in promoting Home Rule as the great existential issue on which each side would fight to the death, in order to polarise politics along traditional religious and nationalist lines and so prevent the emergence of a social democratic, interventionist middle ground.

How about that? Collusion between opposition party leaders. They elevated one problem in order to maintain a system of politics that worked on favourable terms for them, and at the same time worked to exclude a rival style of politics that threatened their status quo.

In fact we need a new phrase for this.

The word status is Latin. It means ‘state, condition’, originally ‘standing’. Status quo, as everyone knows is ‘the existing state of affairs’ or something similar. But there is similar word in Greek, stasis, which, by a mysterious twist of etymology, though it also originally meant ‘standing’, came to mean, ‘standing over there rather than here’, hence ‘a faction’ and hence ‘fighting between factions’: hence, eventually, discord, civil disorder, sometimes even civil war.

So how about a barbaric neologism?

Stasis quo.

Let us defend the stasis quo.

Which = “Let us keep the conflict the way it is at the moment. The world might be divided, but ho hum, it is our division, and we don’t want to divide it in any other way. Let’s fight in the old style.”

If you don’t like this phrase on the grounds that it is a barbaric combination of Latin and Greek, I submit that we are used to such solecisms. Take the word ‘sociology’ which is the bastard child of one Latin word and one Greek word.

So, Salisbury and Gladstone in the 1880s wanted to maintain the stasis quo.

As his piece continues Boyd finds a similar pattern forming later on, this time with Baldwin and MacDonald in the 1920s and 1930s.

Cooke and Vincent were cited above for their belief that in 1886 Gladstone and Salisbury had colluded to keep political conflict artificially vertical by focusing on issues of identity. Here they were almost certainly influenced by Cowling’s opposite argument in The Impact of Labour (published three years previously in 1971), i.e., that during 1918-23 the Conservative and Labour leaderships schemed to make politics artificially horizontal — a trajectory from which neither Baldwin nor MacDonald deviated during their subsequent periods as leader. Being committed to rival forms of corporate capitalism, tacitly but intentionally, the two men conspired to ratchet up class rhetoric in their public statements because they knew such a discourse would deny the Liberal rhetoric of individualism any space of its own.

This is not so much an Overton window as a Machiavellian window. If the window is over here, then you and I can see the light, but him, over there, will seem irrelevant, untouchable, perhaps mad, certainly a bit fascist. The Machiavellian window: I quite like that. Aye, politicians can try to move the window around, those young Nicks (Clegg, Timothy et al.)

Then Boyd refers to Cowling’s next book The Impact of Hitler. It

was not about [the] manipulat[ion of] events, but about how the retrospective public perception that Churchill had been overwhelmingly right, and Neville Chamberlain correspondingly wrong, over Hitler and the Munich agreement, allowed a romantic form of ‘big state’ conservatism to relegate ‘small state’, economically liberal Conservatism for the generation prior to Thatcher.

He cites Ewen Green, an Oxford professor I saw once or twice, with a blond moustache, who liked a smoke, and alas died young, who said in ‘Thatcherism: An Historical Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999), which I also have just reread, that what we now call the Butskellite consensus was not so much a reality as a myth on which the emergence of Thatcherism as a clear alternative depended. “The idea of consensus, as constructed by Thatcherism, was crucial to the whole Thatcherite project.” Nice argument, Green. It is amusing that Burnham is creating his own myth of the 1970s, reminiscent of the Tory myth in the 1970s of the 1930s, which was the time when they were said to have taken the wrong turn, acquiescing to Keynesianism. Burnham is Thatcherism in reverse. Far less smooth than Blair. But we should not underestimate this aspect of Burnham. People may well prefer the Burnham myth to the Blair myth. The Blair myth, of which the Cameron myth was an addendum, was that ‘New Labour’ would continue Thatcherism. The Burnham myth is that Labour will finally destroy it. (Note how Burnham is trying to wind the clock back to a much older stasis quo than we have thought about since the 1990s: the one of the 1970s and 1980s.) This myth is a strong one. It makes Labour look strong – finally. It makes Badenoch and Farage look irrelevant. The danger is it also makes 2026 look irrelevant.

Green says the idea of consensus is as important than the reality. But we can clarify. The reality was important for 1945 to 1975. The idea became politically important after 1975. N.B. It is not that there was no consensus. It is, rather, that a bold ‘small state’ politics was, in effect, proscribed during that time, and it was only for politicians to be bold when the old order began to break down, after 1974, making realignment possible: now with Labour as a sort of frank social intervention party – the descendant of Disraeli’s Tories – and the Conservatives as a frank individualist capitalist market party – the descendant of Gladstone’s Liberals. Ironies abound.

Boyd says Gladstone and Salisbury shifted tack in the 1880s and made politics about identity, not economics. And surely what we saw after 2010, though anticipated as far back as the 1990s, was the gradual revival of a variegated identity politics (Brexit, Jordan Peterson, George Floyd, the Boats etc.) and a displacement of the Blair-Brown-Cameron-Osborne-Sunak-Reeves chunter about growing the economy. ‘Growing the economy’ is the strangest of all phrases designed to keep politics in a despond of tax-and-spend-and-gesture-at-saving: it is a phrase designed to keep politics going anywhere else, e.g. into Nigel Farage’s pocket.

COVID-19 was a false exogenous shock: exogenous because apparently from outside (a virus, pangolins etc.), and false because it was exaggerated appallingly by hyperperformative show-and-tell politicians. But the interesting thing is that it sliced across the rising identity politics and, for a brief moment, was a totalitarian means by which almost every politician, out of ignorance and opportunism, tried to maintain or assert their favoured stasis quo and of course status quo through a bit of lockdown.

So what do we have?

Politicians, at any time, may be conspiring to stitch up the system in order to exclude certain other alternatives. Any consensus is likely to be formed by excluding some others. Indeed, René Girard, that fine old theorist, took it as fundamental that any consensus that has anywhere existed has depended on the exclusion of a third party.

At any time politicians may find it useful to engage in open conspiracy against the established hidden conspiracy. This means there will be phases when formerly closed subjects are opened, enabling us to question things which were not questioned in the previous generation.

We are at a stage in which some politicians are engaging in an open conspiracy against the established conspiracy. But there are many who are still, more covertly, trying to defend the established conspiracy, by denying that it is a conspiracy, by holding it up as reality, and by calling anyone a ‘conspiracy theorist’ who says anything about it.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.