The indispensable Adrian Wooldridge has taken over as The Economist's Bagehot columnist, which is an immense loss to business journalism. But that means e get the advantage of his thinking about the state of UK politics and how it relates to broader global trends. Case in point: his long blog post on globalism versus populism, in which he recasts the debate brilliantly:
For my money the best analysis of what happened was inadvertently penned by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his 1967 essay on “The Crisis of the 17th Century”. Trevor-Roper argued that the mid-17th century saw a succession of revolts, right across Europe, of the “country” against the “court”. The court had become ever more bloated and self-satisfied over the decades. They existed on tributes extracted from the country but treated the country as collection of bigots and backwoodsmen. Many members of Europe’s court society had more to do with each other than they did with their benighted fellow-countrymen. The English civil war, which resulted in the beheading of a king and the establishment of a Republic, was the most extreme instance of a Europe-wide breakdown.
The parallels between the civil war and the referendum hold true of everything from geography to rhetoric. The Cavaliers control the cities. The Roundheads control the countryside. The Cavaliers boast of their superior civilisation. The Roundheads complain about blood-suckers. Trevor-Roper described the Civil War as a “revolt of the provinces not only against the growing, parasitic Stuart Court, but also against the growing ‘dropsical’ City of London; against the centralised Church, whether “Anglican’ or ‘Presbyterian’; and against the expensive monopoly of higher education by the two great universities”. Substitute the corporate oligarchy for the monarchy and the BBC for the Church and you have a reasonable description of the revolt of the Leavers.
This strikes me as far more sensible than the tired debate terminology we have been using over the last year or so. Every time I critiqued the "elites," people argued that I'm a member of the elite by virtue of profession, income, education, etc... Every time I critiqued globalists, somebody pointed out how much of my stuff comes from global markets and how much of my income derives from global trade.
City versus country or, if you prefer, cavalier versus roundhead makes more sense. After all, did not Oliver Cromwell spend much time in London? In other words, you can be a roundhead member of the country party even though you're living in a townhouse in the city.
The worrisome thing, of course, is that the cavaliers and the roundheads ended up in a terrible civil war. But maybe that's part of what Wooldridge is trying to tell us too. As a warning.
