For decades, economists have shaped public life in Britain. But their time is almost up.

For the last five decades, economists have dominated Britain’s intellectual life. The Thatcherite wave of the 1970s was founded on an economic analysis that urged the withdrawal of the state

in order to make way for the private sector and the market. As Charles Moore recounts in his biography of Thatcher, she used to enjoy pulling The Constitution of Liberty, by the economist

Friedrich von Hayek, from her handbag and declaring that, “This is what we believe.” 

The decisions to deregulate the City in 1986, to sell off council housing, to shut down the coal industry, to privatise industry — all of these policies came as a direct consequence of the

economics — and economists — who influenced her. The New Labour settlement was also at its heart an act of economic rebalancing, and largely the creation of Gordon Brown, an academic

economist. The market could go about its business, so long as it paid its taxes and the public purse remained fat enough to meet the traditional spending requirements of the left. 

After the crisis of 2008, Cameron and Osborne faced very different challenges, but the dominant intellectual stature of economists didn’t change — in fact the political environment became

even more suffused with economic thinking. It had to be that way. The global economy was so close to outright disaster that the economists became something like a fourth emergency service.

Ben Bernanke, the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve, was the perfect economic intellectual for the moment, being a specialist in the Great Depression and the appalling, counterproductive

economic policies of the ‘20s and ‘30s that only made conditions worse. Through him, the world was introduced to quantitative easing (although the Japanese invented it) and the idea of the

zero lower-bound as a means of stimulus. And around the world, though particularly in the US, a host of celebrity economists sprung up: Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth

Rogoff, Carmen Reinhart, Eugene Fama, Bob Shiller and more besides, many of them garlanded with the Nobel prize. They became the dominant intellectual voices in a world desperately trying to

come to its economic senses.

Economists were also the sternest critics of the austerity measures pursued by the Cameron government, which were panned as little more than a naïve re-run of the mistakes made after the

crash of ‘29. In the UK a host of economists dominated the debates over austerity, including Robert Skidelsky, Martin Wolf, Paul Johnson and more besides.

The economists have had a good spell in the limelight and on reflection, it’s a little surprising that they stayed there so long. It’s perhaps a consequence of the dry, rather managerial

style that has entered politics in recent decades. Broadly speaking, there has been agreement between political parties about what needs to happen in a developed nation: we need schools,

hospitals, jobs and so on. The argument comes not over what is to be provided, but how. That’s where your economist comes in handy.

But now the dominant questions that Britain faces are not economic ones, and they are certainly not the stuff of dreary procedural politics. They are hard, elementary questions. What is

Britain? Who are we as a nation? Where do we fit in the world? How do we confront the new nationalist surge taking place in Britain and elsewhere?

These are the quandaries that drive British politics now. And trailing along behind these questions come a set of murkier, rather more sinister challenges, such as the rise of the

ethno-nationalist, Bannonite strain of thought. This nasty, jumbled ideology is bent on destroying the institutions and international norms that have been in place since the end of the

Second World War. The new tendency says that anything that even appears to limit a nation’s room for maneuver must be destroyed. Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi, Erdogan, Orban and in a short while

possibly also Johnson, between them constitute a frontal assault on the ideas that have held the peace since 1945. That old form of western liberalism, according to Vladimir Putin, “is

obsolete.”

The economists’ toolkit contains nothing that can be deployed to fix this problem. Which is not to say that the economists of today have nothing of value or interest to say. Work on

inequality, behaviourism and the productivity conundrum are of the utmost importance. The recent inversion of the yield curve suggests that economists might soon have a recession into which

they might sink their teeth. Those are important, pressing problems — but not the dominant and most alarming ones. To confront these, we will need a new kind of public intellectual, one that

we have not seen and who, in my view, does not yet exist. We are witnessing the twilight of the Economists. It is time for them to hand over. But to whom? 

This sort of intellectual crossing-over has happened before. In 1922, when Einstein’s theory of relativity was gaining attention, the physicist was challenged to a debate by Henri Bergson,

the French philosopher. As Jimena Canales recounts in her book The Physicist and the Philosopher, at the time Bergson was by far the better known of the two (so wildly popular in fact that

on one of his lecture tours to the US, Bergson caused one of Manhattan’s first ever traffic jams.) 

It’s instructive that the philosopher felt himself well-placed to shoot down what was essentially a work of technical physics. It’s indicative of the relative public stature of the

philosopher and the scientist at the time — the philosopher was by far the more respected and more high-profile character. Bergson’s was the dominant kind of expertise.

That’s not how we see it now. Compare the legacies of Bergson and Einstein. The former is certainly respected, but books like Matter and Memory, despite its influence on Proust, now come off

as preposterously subjective and at times impenetrably difficult. (Bertrand Russell was even stumped by some of Bergson’s ideas.) There is no sense in which Bergson persists in the public

imagination, despite occasional name-checks by Monty Python. But as for Einstein, his insights into the equivalence of mass and energy led through Hiroshima to the terrifying nuclear

stand-off of the cold war, to Chernobyl. More than any economist or philosopher, the post-war world belonged to Einstein. Science was so dominant that the philosophers began to reach for a

near-scientific purity in their work — see for example the rise of logicism, the positivists, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Communists even took up the scientific

mantle, claiming that Marxism itself offered a vision of a society so ordered that it was in fact an expression of scientific perfection, a claim that was, in turn, attacked by philosophers

of science, most notably Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies. Science had seeped into every corner of the intellectual life of the 20th century. In this way the philosophers were

knocked off their perch. Their discipline had become secondary.

Economists are at a comparable point now. The economic intellectuals of both right and left are being overtaken by problems to which they offer no solution. On the left, the washed-up

Marxian view has re-entered the Labour party with a vengeance. All of the old confiscatory tendencies have returned, despite the Venezuelan example of the catastrophe they would bring. 

But the Corbynite determination to bring this kind of socialism to Britain is itself an attempt to solve a problem that isn’t there. The seeds of Britain’s current ill-tempered fight with

itself do not arise from poverty or deprivation. The Brexit campaign was funded and urged on, not by the trades unions, but by the hedge fund class, those financiers who are desperate to

throw off the chains not of poverty but of EU financial regulation. The Labour party can go on all it wants about social justice, but the vile national mood and the uncertainty that’s there

for all to see have been propelled primarily by the political instincts of the final-salary pension, retiree class, who voted for Brexit in their droves. The left’s economic analysis has no

answer to this. That’s why the Labour party is at its lowest-ever level of support in polling history, at just 18 per cent. 

The right’s economic prescription is just as ineffective, made all the more so by having become lethally entwined with Brexit. There are vague assertions about the economic benefits of

leaving the EU, and Jacob Rees-Mogg (nb, a hedge-fund manager) has stuck dutifully to the line that leaving the EU will result in cheaper food in British shops. Such Brexiter claims are

familiar and do not need repeating here. 

A deeper problem is that there are now a large number of people on the British right who don’t seem to care about the country’s economic prospects, or rather, who would happily subordinate

them to their own ideological worldview. See for example Boris Johnson’s notorious “F*** business,” remark. See also the YouGov poll of Conservative party members, which found that 61 per

cent of respondents were in favour of going ahead with Brexit even if it caused “significant damage to the economy”.

This is the ideological impulse that dominates UK public life now. The word for it is “nationalism”. That’s the challenge — the threat — that we currently face. In the raw, Bannonite form

popularised by Trump, it has taken on a shameless ethno-nationalist character, one that demonises Muslims, Mexicans, South Americans, anybody different. They can die at the border or be

detained there in facilities that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman, has called “concentration camps”. It’s noteworthy that Bannon has also acted as an advisor to Johnson,

advising him on among other things his resignation speech, or so Bannon says, at least. But then when considering Johnson’s comparison of veiled Muslim women with “letter boxes,” then one

starts to get a familiar whiff of Bannon. He’s also been advising Nigel Farage. The Brexit Party, which Farage leads, is now on 23 per cent in Westminster voting intention polls. That’s

second place, one point behind the Conservative party. 

Who are the intellectuals to confront this rising tide of political nationalism? Where are they? What shape will they take? There have been some striking ideas thrown up in response to our

“post-liberal” moment, including by the writer David Goodhart, who famously diagnosed society as being divided into either “somewheres” or “anywheres” these being Britain’s two dominant

tribes. It was an idea that echoed in the words of Theresa May, when she remarked that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”. The economist Paul

Collier has written about the plight of British towns and the excessive dominance of London in driving dissatisfaction with the political status quo. There are other examples of thinkers

coming to grips with modern Britain — but what they have in common is that they are all primarily diagnostic, seeking artfully to frame Britain’s flaws, rather than both to diagnose and then

solve them. 

So who can Britain turn to? What kind of public intellectual do we need in order to confront our current nationalist moment? To help answer that question, consider the following two quotes.

The first is from Ann Widdecombe, formerly of the Conservative Party and now a Brexit Party MEP, and the second is from Geoffrey Boycott, the former England cricketer. Both are commenting on

Brexit. 

Widdecombe first: “It is as nothing compared to the sacrifice that we asked a previous generation to make in order to ensure Britain’s freedom. My granny was bombed out in Plymouth. People

lost sons and husbands and fathers and they did this because they wanted freedom.” And then Boycott: “We fought two world wars and we came out on top. Why? Because of the spirit and the

determination of the British people. We are strong people. We’ll survive.” 

Consider also Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill, which the Cambridge historian and former keeper of the Churchill archive Piers Brendon once described to me as being “riddled with

errors,” and “written in the style of the Beano”. Consider also Jacob Rees-Mogg’s book on the Victorians, which was described in the Times by AN Wilson as “staggeringly silly… anathema to

anyone with an ounce of historical, or even common sense”. Writing in the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes called it “an origin myth for Rees-Mogg’s particular right-wing vision of Britain”.

Britain it seems, has a serious case of memory loss. The arc lights of the Blitz burn so brightly in the imagination that they obscure all else, giving way to a jingoistic and extremely

dangerous, distorted view of British history. It fell to the US historian Timothy Snyder to point out the clanging lie at the heart of the myth of Britain standing alone during the dark days

of 1941. The UK, he pointed out, was at the time the centre of a global Empire — it was anything but alone. Britain’s economic web reached from India to the Caribbean and the extent of that

reliance on other nations is brilliantly set out by the historian David Edgerton in his book, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. Britain wasn’t alone. The truth is, it never has been.

To know itself better, Britain has to start telling itself a clearer, truer story about its own past. The national psyche cannot be made up simply of a never-ending Christmas day-on-the-sofa

loop of “The Dam Busters,” “Where Eagles Dare,” and “A Bridge Too Far”. Britain’s past was no film. Our history didn’t start with Chamberlain at Munich. 

The nationalist voice is gaining such traction in Britain because it speaks in precisely these reductivist terms. The challenge of our time and for the public intellectuals who will confront

this arrant nonsense is to show that the past is not simple and that the true story of Britain is compound, complex and not drawn on celluloid. Yes sure, we “won” the Second World War — but

then we “lost” at Suez. What about that? Does that make it one-all? We were also successfully invaded by the Normans, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Romans and more besides. What does that do

to the national score-sheet? Or should we forget about all that simply because it happened so long ago? Alright. But when’s the cut-off point for when history stops mattering? 

Perhaps it’s time for the economists to hand over to the historians. Now that Britain is looking to re-shape its political and economic relations with the entire rest of the world, maybe the

people who’ve spent their lives studying the history of those relations will have important insights to share. Historians such as Peter Frankopan, whose book The Silk Roads reframed the

history of human progress. Instead of a western European story, Frankopan concentrated on the lands between the eastern Mediterranean and the China Sea. In this history, Britain becomes a

bit-player in a much larger global swirl, going back millennia. Mary Beard’s brilliant popular TV history of the Romans, along with the accompanying book, has been one of the most

significant, mass-market history works of recent times. The notion that Britain’s identity is a product of ancient conquest seems lost nowadays. The same is true when it comes the

intellectual history of our islands. Jim al-Kalili has written brilliantly on the history of science, showing how for centuries the ancient Arab world acted as a repository for the ancient

wisdom of the Greeks, which in turn triggered an intellectual flowering in the middle east, this while Europe was still mired in the dark ages. The wisdom of Plato, and indeed the Arabic

numeral system that we use today, were only later imported back into Britain, when they were re-translated from the Arabic by the 12th Century natural philosopher and monk Adelard of Bath.

Our intellectual foundations are therefore deeply entwined with the ancient history of the middle east. 

This broader and more developed vision of Britain is what the country requires, if we are to be saved from what the historian and jurist Jonathan Sumption recently referred to as “the

zealots”. In his recent BBC Reith Lecture, Sumption addressed the failures of our time and the sense of political failure that has descended. In his concluding remarks, Sumption said this:

“Prophets are usually wrong but one thing I will prophecy-we will not recognise the end of democracy when it comes—if it does. Advanced democracies are not overthrown, there are no tanks on

the street. No sudden catastophes. Not brash dictators or braying mobs. Instead the institutions are imperceptibly drained of everything that once made them democratic. The labels will still

be there, but they will no longer describe the contents. The façade will still stand but there will be nothing behind it. The rhetoric of democracy will be unchanged but it will be

meaningless. And the fault will be ours.”

It is voices such as these which now need to be heard. At the moment there is an intellectual vacuum where the response to Britain’s unhappy slide ought to be, and our current public

intellectuals are failing to fill it. And the longer that vacuum persists, the more dangerous it becomes.

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