The moment Britain changed

Who do you think said these words three days after the 2016 UK Brexit ref­er­en­dum, in an at­tempt to ex­plain the re­sult?

“Waves of mi­gra­tion and glob­alised cul­ture washed among us, erod­ing our sense of self. Whole com­mu­ni­ties changed colour and lan­guage, leav­ing older peo­ple cut off... but the self-con­fi­dently multi-eth­nic, lib­eral, urban class… barely no­ticed.”

It’s more than a bit sur­pris­ing but the per­son who spoke these words look­ing di­rectly down the cam­era on pub­lic tele­vi­sion is not a can­di­date for an ultra rightwing po­lit­i­cal party. His name is An­drew Marr and since 2005 he has been the host of his own hour-long BBC TV news and cur­rent af­fairs in­ter­view show.

In fact, his pro­gram has long been a part of my fam­ily’s Sun­day morn­ing rou­tine. (We are usu­ally eat­ing my wife’s won­der­ful, home-cooked crepes at some point when his show is on.)

Like al­most all of the en­trenched British es­tab­lish­ment, Marr is a grad­u­ate of Ox­ford or Cam­bridge uni­ver­si­ties. He has the gen­eral ap­pear­ance of a quite shy and usu­ally po­lite man, es­pe­cially so when speak­ing to roy­alty and Hol­ly­wood film stars. Re­cently, though, he has seemed in­creas­ingly ex­citable at times.

I re­cently saw his post-Brexit piece-to-cam­era again and re­alised that his ex­cite­ment was gen­uine this time. What view­ers orig­i­nally saw back then on this par­tic­u­lar edi­tion of his show was a man tak­ing sides after a pro­found event. The words he used were de­lib­er­ate and showed up his true al­le­giance. Marr was sid­ing with the con­ser­v­a­tive racists, some of whom are clearly new-style fas­cists.

In other words, he was lin­ing up with those who are — un­der­neath all the pol­ished British smiles — in love with power. They are power wor­shipers: one ac­cu­rate de­f­i­n­i­tion of a fas­cist. The most im­por­tant el­e­ment in their out­look is hav­ing some­one to hate and this is al­ways a mi­nor­ity group. Even bet­ter if the mi­nor­ity is eas­ily recog­nised in pub­lic places.

His­tor­i­cally, these lovers of power have come from all so­cial sec­tions of so­ci­ety but have al­ways favoured sup­port­ing the strong over the weak, the poor, the dis­abled, the un­em­ployed. In the UK, they have al­ways trum­peted the ‘Par­lia­ment and rule of law’ ar­gu­ment as a fun­da­men­tal ‘British value’, then ig­nored it or bro­ken it when it suits them.

Of course, in mod­ern Britain and the wider world today (and prob­a­bly for a long time in the past) there is no law. There is only power. This is what George Or­well said about to­tal­i­tar­ian so­ci­eties like the one he imag­ined in his novel ‘1984’. In my opin­ion, it is a phrase that per­fectly de­scribes our time. The law does not exist, ex­cept the abil­ity to en­force it. An­drew Marr knows this. He is a fright­ened man. So am I. I am fright­ened of the exact same thing as him: a rule of brute force in Eu­rope.

In Britain now, the rule of law has been shown to be a hol­low claim. Rule by those with the abil­ity to com­pel oth­ers to do their will, by force, has now begun. The courts and pris­ons are more than full. Po­lice num­bers are now so shrunken by con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment fund­ing cuts and sta­tion clo­sures that they are at times un­able to de­fend one per­son or group against an­other. The peace­ful are being at­tacked by the vi­o­lent, some of whom are fas­cist crim­i­nals, oth­ers are just crim­i­nals.

Broad­cast all across the na­tion, watch­ing An­drew Marr’s rant al­most three years later, I re­alised some­thing crit­i­cally im­por­tant. This wasn’t the mo­ment Britain changed. It was the mo­ment I re­alised it had started to com­pletely change.