Personal breakdown and the British political collapse
Christmas reads (5)
The UK’s rolling crisis that began with the financial crash of 2008 was physical and mental as well as political. At the most basic level, the UK could no longer offer timely treatment to millions of people stuck on health service waiting lists or bring relief to those experiencing poverty and slum housing.
I ended this piece on the Guardian columnist Rafael Behr’s account of his own breakdown by saying that “if we are lucky, Rafael Behr’s brilliant and honest analysis of a country that lost its mind will read as a history. If we are not, it will read as a warning.”
Today it seems to me to be an open question whether our crisis is over. Economic decline and the tensions brought by mass immigration and culture war are hardly recipes for stability, after all.
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A “clenching of the soul,” David Grossman calls it. The Israeli novelist’s description of the foreboding that subsumes you as your life darkens should echo with anyone who has been mentally assaulted and battered. Strength vanishes. The body aches. The brain feels like a muscle twisted by cramp.
Rafael Behr is an essential political columnist, not because he has the contacts to provide inside information, although he has those, or because he is a thoughtful writer and wise thinker, although he is that, but because he feels the clenching of the British soul like a wound. It has produced Politics: A survivor’s guide (Atlantic, £20), the best account of the UK’s crisis I have read.
His body collapsed in 2019. Behr was in his forties, married with a young family. He lived a comfortable, middle-class life without knowing that he carried a hereditary heart condition.
Returning from a run to his home in Brighton, he felt his body tighten. He fell onto the sofa clutching his chest, panting and wincing, “my face flashing red and white”.
Before the heart attack the UK’s rolling crisis provoked a mental collapse. As a Westminster journalist, caught in the minutiae of politics, Behr, like millions of others, had no idea his country carried a sickness.
He would never have published such a bald and naïve sentiment, but deep down he believed in the comforting myth that the UK was a practical, empirical nation, with no time for the insane ideologies and bawling demagogues that endangered other, less fortunate, lands.
After the rise of the SNP, and then Corbynism, and then Brexit, and then Johnson, and then Truss, belief in native common sense suffered a heart attack of its own – a potentially fatal one.
Behr came of age in the 1990s when the UK was briefly comfortable in its own skin. He was from the second generation of an immigrant family. His ancestors, like mine, were Jewish refugees from Tsarist persecution in Lithuania. His parents grew up in South Africa, but moved to London because they could not stomach the Apartheid regime.
The second-generation can go one of two ways: it can violently reject the land their parents chose for them – my grandfather and great uncle became communists; or it can feel that their parents’ refuge is their natural home.
In the 1990s, New Labour ended the cruelty and prejudice of the long Tory rule from 1979 to 1997 – or so it appeared. The neo-liberal consensus guaranteed that the lives of most people would improve – or so it seemed. Britishness was a gentle patriotic feeling, expressed with ironic asides, rather than a Johnsonian, chest-thumping conviction in the UK’s “world-beating” superiority – or that’s what we thought at the time.
No wonder Behr felt he was lucky to have been born into a country apparently at ease with itself.
When that world fell apart, so did Behr.
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