The Bridge on the River Why?
I suppose I have fallen, again, for the 4 dimensional chess of a master politician out to distract us all from the sinister inner workings of a plot to undermine the UK, by writing a post about a bridge that has never been, and probably never will be, built. The argument, such as it is, over the Foreign Secretary’s vision for a trans-Channel thoroughfare that goes above, rather than below the waves, is a mixture of tedious, irritating, and thoroughly underdone that — to more cynical current observers — perfectly exemplifies all that is wrong with modern British politics.
To me, it is a symptom of an ongoing identity crisis engulfing the UK, and one whose particular engineering quirks are less interesting than what it says about the underlying state of the UK’s political culture, and indeed political identity. Crystallising much of this crisis, for me, have been two tweets sent by the journalist Harry Cole — this one, decrying a lack of ambition on the behalf of people who’ve been negative about the idea of a bridge; and this one, denouncing Remainers for sneering at the idea. They are by no means universally representative, but I do think they offer a useful point around which to hinge an argument.
It is bizarre for people to convert this argument into one about faith in one’s country. I do not recall such a debate, for example, over HS2 — no-one was accused of being unpatriotic for not endorsing that. The same is true of the third runway at Heathrow, or of more hypothetical schemes, like a supertram for Leeds. A narrative about national pride or ability simply did not figure here, and yet with regards to a Channel bridge, we find it creeping in everywhere. Why is that so?
Only a country so ill at ease with itself could turn this sort of infrastructure proposal into an existential debate — could attach support or opposition to the project to a wider question of faith in oneself. It is an attachment facilitated by the physical relationship between what is proposed, and what is driving the crisis. Europe is what has caused this crisis, and so everything that touches — in this case, literally — Europe, comes to be a symbol for that crisis.
This is intensely difficult, because many of the most important issues facing the country right now do come into direct contact with the question of Europe, and I suspect they will continue to do so for some time to come. With so many things connecting to the source of the identity crisis, I would argue, that means that the crisis will be carried on for some time to come, making it much harder to resolve.
What is compounding all of this is that neither side (for they behave as if there were two sides, rather than many shades throughout, and to some extent behaving as if X were true makes x true in a certain way) really seems to want to admit that we are discussing a crisis of a common identity. Neither Continuity Remain nor Continuity Leave seem to be comfortable with recognising what it is they have in common with the other, and instead view it as a zero-sum battle over things that can only be the property of them or the other.
In this case, Leave’s position that only they can truly believe in the UK, a position mocked by many in Remain (with some degree of fairness) as “Tinkerbell politics” is one that has been pushed to the fore. Faith in nation is insufficient to overcome fact — truthiness, ultimately, will always be overturned by the truth when they collide — but faith in nation remains an important organising principle for many peoples’ world views. Remain appears to have abandoned that ground to Leave entirely — rather than actively embracing nation, many Remain voices appear to disparage nation, or at the least express nothing but despair about the nation of Britain.
They — we — are of course all discussing the same nation here. Many of the people who build and work on Britain’s great innovations of recent decades may well have voted Remain. It would be absurd, in some material sense, to question their dedication to achieving great works of engineering that benefit the nation. Those who exist closer to the thin line between Remain and Leave, who live in the grey ground between, should not be faced with a camp that voices only joy, and a camp that only voices despair, about something many of them do feel occupies a key role in their mental universe.
From my perspective — as a longstanding Remainer — that the Remain group appear to be so deeply unwilling to embrace nation is one of the reasons I don’t think the UK will about-face for some time to come. Surrendering ground to such troubling assertions as those made by Mr Cole above is a tactically foolish move. But strategically it also bodes ill — faith in the nation is not something reserved to one side of a political argument, the vast majority of the time. It is something common to all sides — what is debated is how best to advance the cause of the nation, rather than who embodies it.
The easy response, therefore, to the bridge question is to dismiss it as a silly endeavour by a political charlatan. The harder response is to listen to what it is saying — both about the UK’s troubled identity, and about the surrendering of key bits of common ground by one side or the other in the debate — and seek to remedy those shortcomings.
