Manufacturing Authority

The power of dogma

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By summoning up the past as a means of predicting the future, progressives bolster their own authority at the expense of free speech and democracy, argues Ben Cobley.

Shortly before Liz Truss became the UK’s Prime Minister, The Guardian decided to cast a critical eye over what the nation might expect from its new leader. Truss was taken to task for her ‘aggressive stance against the Scottish National party’ which had seen her brand Nicola Sturgeon an ‘attention-seeker’, describe nationalists as separatists and unequivocally rule out an independence vote.

An editorial knowingly commented:

Ms Truss is playing with fire. She risks burning down the whole house. A Little Englander running a Little England is where her rhetoric leads.

This was a reference to polling data suggesting ‘English indifference to the fate of the union’. More than four in 10 English people claimed to welcome, or at least not be bothered by, Scotland potentially leaving the United Kingdom, while a majority was untroubled by the prospect of a united Ireland.

According to The Guardian’s leader writers:

This is down to the rightwing politics of Brexit, which was a revolt pitting England against itself. Ms Truss has played on this theme during the contest: by inveighing against the civil service; by opposing political unanimity; by reversing England’s historical tendency to look outwards rather than inwards.

It is probably correct that Truss’s characteristically strident and abrasive approach will hold little appeal to the Scots. We are yet to see whether it will appeal to the English, Welsh or anyone else either. Whether she will be an effective leader is a different question but one to which The Guardian already appears to know the answer.

The paper has been able to reach this damning conclusion largely thanks to a politics of causation. The message is that Truss’s approach is destined to fail, leading to the dissolution of the UK, as a subset of the ‘rightwing politics of Brexit’ which it considers to be the ultimate root cause of all this division.

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