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Anti-Brexit protest at Conservative Conference, 2017.

William Davies is a Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre. His latest book, "This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain" takes stock of Britain's current historical moment, charting multiple attacks on the basic norms of public life from 2016 to today.

You describe the period between Britain’s 2016 referendum and our leaving the EU in 2020 as a time when “the most dependable building blocks of liberal democracy seemed to be disintegrating.” What were these building blocks, and how were they undermined?

Liberalism in general, and liberal democracy in particular, hang on the idea that certain things are outside of politics – that, in spite of whatever ideological or moral disagreements might occur, certain institutions will endure. This includes constitutional norms, rule of law and some unspoken respect for norms, but it also includes recognition of accredited facts and figures.

The shock of 2016, at least in the UK, was the discovery that these seemingly apolitical and permanent aspects of public life could be either politicised or simply trashed, with considerable political benefits. The examples from the EU referendum are now very well-known: the £350m-a-week claim on the bus, the dodgy spending, the use of Facebook. There was then another wave of this norm-breaking in 2019, peaking with the confrontation with the Supreme Court over the proroguing of Parliament.

There are two questions this poses. One, how is it possible? Maybe it's always been possible to some extent, but perhaps reverence for liberal norms was greater in the past. But changes in the media landscape, most manifest in the rise of social media in the decade prior to 2016, meant that anti-liberal forces could become better organised, better coordinated and more strategic than in the past.

Secondly, why does it succeed? The reason it succeeds in the democratic arena is where a large number of people (as in the US) come to believe that the liberal status quo is a sham, run by a self-interested clique, and that the politicians are all the same. Hence the whole system needs exploding. And one reason why people believe this is that there is some truth in it.

Yet you point specifically to an “abnormal type of politics” as having begun in 2019. Why is this? And can we expect a return to “normal” anytime soon?

In the book, I trace the journey from 2016 onwards, including the ultimately doomed leadership of Theresa May. May was initially seen as being in touch with the mood of Brexit, inasmuch as she was a tough Home Secretary, who believed in defending 'the people' against threats and outsiders. One of the essays in the book discusses this aspect of her ideology, which I trace back to the Home Office.

However, she never fully accommodated the full scale of anti-establishment, anti-liberal politics that was unleashed in 2016. She made the right noises, about 'citizens of nowhere', but she sought a Brexit deal that put economic prosperity above sovereignty, at least in the imagination of Brexiteers, and she never fully threw caution to the wind, other than to call an unnecessary and fateful election.

What happened in 2019, with the rise of the Brexit Party and the Johnson leadership, was that the Tory Party had a choice between dying and accommodating Farageism. It chose the latter, obviously. But to do so, it had to signal that it had no respect for the 'rules of the game', as they once existed, and that this was now virtually a single-issue party of culture war.

Johnson did everything he could to demonstrate this, and reaped the benefits. This is an extremely effective way of running a political campaign, but a shambolic way of running a government. The problem is that, while some sense of 'normality' might be restored to government, the terms of engagement in election campaigns and political clashes more generally, are now permanently set on this path of disruption and, for want of a better word, propaganda. It's hard to see how or why Johnson or the Conservative Party will abandon this in future, and they are currently intent on abolishing the Electoral Commission, for example.

In your account, liberalism exists now as “an ethical persuasion or cultural identity” and has lost its claim to universal legitimacy. Are you writing here of the UK, or do you see this as a Western or global phenomenon?

I think this problem is a global one, as witnessed in the declining power of multilateral institutions, accelerated especially by the Trump Presidency. The European Union also faces a similar crisis, though one that is now reshaped heavily by the circumstances of the pandemic. There will be those who identify with these institutions and wave European flags, but for the same reason, they no longer retain their authority as independent, extra-cultural referees, in the way that liberals hoped.

As it turns out (and in ways that I couldn't have imagined while writing the essays in the book), liberalism's future now rests hugely on a single question, of the ability to value life equally in the face of a health crisis. This was always the looming question for liberalism given climate change, but it has been brought to our attention more vividly and rapidly by the virus.

You might say (as I discuss in the Afterword of the book) that liberalism in Britain had a reprieve for a few months in the Spring of 2020, when the various building blocks of public consensus – expertise, statistics, public administration, the BBC – acquired new political credibility and respect. The demons of 2016 were quietened for a while. But every time Johnson or his close colleagues get in trouble, they resort to the same tactics of disinformation and disruption, which is what has now returned as a kind of new abnormal.

You call your book “real-time sociology”, a search for structures and conditions that underlie the fast-moving news cycle. Why is this kind of work important?

One of the difficulties that liberals had (and still have) in understanding what happened over the period I'm discussing is that their own political assumptions and ideas about the world stopped working. It was taken for granted that people vote in favour of higher GDP growth, consensus, social peace. But what if they don't? What if they have a desire to throw things up into the air, and what if they might have good reasons for that? In many ways this is a repeat of what was seen economically in 2008, when basic explanatory principles of liberal economics stopped working.

What sociology offers, and what my writing hopefully offers, is an awareness of broader and longer-term trends, within which crises come to make some kind of sense. Marxism is probably the most prominent such theory, inasmuch as it treats change and conflict as normal features of capitalism. I'm not a Marxist, though I am Marxian in some of my approach and thinking. The importance of such work, as far as I see it, is to demonstrate that chaos is not as chaotic and inexplicable as it seems; that irrationality has its own underlying reasons and logic.

Critical theory (and even psychoanalysis) shares some of this impulse too, which ultimately points towards a very faint glimmer of the original Enlightenment impulse to view the world as comprehensible, without resort to dogma. That to me is what sociology can do, and what it brings to situations of upheaval. In some respects, it means doing the job that liberals and liberal institutions are no longer able to, namely of establishing the underlying 'rules of the game' or causal chains, when the explicit and taken-for-granted ones have been lost.

The book ends with a plea for “a coalition of legal and economic re-builders”. Who belongs in this coalition, and how do we achieve it?

Many thinkers, especially on the Left, but including the liberal Left (and also, incidentally, the early neoliberals), have sought to highlight the ways in which the economic and political world is manufactured – that is, a product of written and unwritten rules of participation and activity. I've been particularly interested in the past in the co-operative movement and Erik Olin Wright's vision of 'real utopias' – that is, institutions that are not simply capitalist, but viable and exist on the fringes of orthodox capitalism.

Other radicals, including David Graeber, have done a huge amount to de-naturalise aspects of the economy that seem obvious and normal, and to make them appear unacceptable. The other intellectual movement that is worth noting now is the emerging 'Law and political economy' field, of Katherina Pistor and others.

For many years, I've wondered what could be possible if radical lawyers were to get to work on designing templates for an alternative economy. This is what the early neoliberals did, but I also witnessed the need for it in the context of co-operatives, where getting advice on structuring and formatting a democratically-owned firm is incredibly difficult. Campaigning or advocating for something is very different from technically constructing and sustaining it, and that's been a long-standing problem for alternative models of ownership and control.

However, right now, it's clear that the 'old normal' is no longer acceptable, for obvious and good reasons. But nobody can live without some form of normality, and the dream of doing so is generally indulged by right-wing libertarians, delusional leadership gurus and those who think that 'entrepreneurship' is the solution to everything.

We should demand normality, of a superior kind. This requires a coalition of those with the technical know-how, but also the sense of political urgency, who can design constitutions, templates and viable forms of organisation, that will allow for greater collective security and risk-sharing. In some ways it's about a different vision of entrepreneurship, inasmuch as that means creating alternative economic forms, but with a broader concept of innovation. If that includes 'social entrepreneurs' and 'social enterprises', that's fine. This isn't about ideological purity, but about transformation of the rules and practices of everyday life, as a matter of existential urgency.