Review: Rebel... by Douglas Carswell, and The Road to Somewhere...by David Goodhart

Rebel – How to Overthrow the Emerging Oligarchy

Douglas Carswell

Head of Zeus, £18.99

Review by Iain Macwhirter

THE former Ukip and Conservative MP Douglas Carswell makes an unlikely revolutionary. The cover of his book depicts a red fist raised in defiance of the ruling class and, presumably, the European Union that he believes aids and abets its rule.

Carswell tells us he is in the vanguard of the new “global insurgency" that led to Brexit and Trump. He comes over, not as a Conservative, but a kind of anarcho-capitalist dedicated to the overthrow the “oligarchs” who have “robbed” the people. But he doesn't see socialism as a solution.

Carswell wants to abolish government, political parties, taxation, regulation and trade agreements. He favours a privatised National Health Service run on the same basis as Netflix. Financial technology like “blockchain”, he says, can replace banks and most of the state apparatus, leaving people free at last to live in a world of unregulated capitalism.

But he also endorses the theories of the left wing economist Thomas Piketty, that 21st-century capitalism has generated gross inequalities of wealth and income and allowed a small group of asset-rich billionaires to practically take over the planet. This is creating social and economic instability because consumption can only be sustained through ever increasing debt.

But Carswell's solution isn't redistribution of wealth – quite the reverse. He argues that measures like progressive taxation or a Universal Basic Income (UBI), far from creating a more equal society, would perpetuate the dominance of the asset-owing elite.

He's fond of references to ancient Rome in the age of the Republic, which was broadly democratic. Then emperors came along and ruined the party, he argues, essentially because a parasitical ruling elite had been allowed to accumulate too much of the wealth of society. The corn dole, a Roman UBI, only perpetuated their rule.

For ancient Rome, read Brussels today. In Carswell's post-Brexit vision, the state-subsidised banks and institutions like the EU are part of a global elite conspiracy that involves the BBC, academics and practically everyone employed by the state. They're suppressing capitalist enterprise and free exchange, which is the only thing that has “elevated the human condition”.

The odd thing, however, is that the European Union Carswell so despises was founded on free market principles and has sought to create a true single market – a project that was inspired by Margaret Thatcher. Free trade in goods and services cannot exist without regulation and standards.

The only regulation he seems to favour is immigration control. Yet, the success of the ancient Roman Republic, as the classisist Mary Beard has explained, was based on free movement, multiculturalism and the extension of Roman citizenship across the empire. In that sense Republican Rome was rather like the European Union.

Another champion of immigration control is the former Prospect editor David Goodhart. He used to be called a “liberal Powellite” because he argued that the welfare state was being undermined by too much diversity. The Road to Somewhere reads like a long “I told you so” to his liberal critics.

Brexit wasn't just about immigration, but it certainly played a big part in the populist revolt. However, Goodhart eschews race, diversity and social class, preferring to divide voters into two categories: “Somewheres” and “Anywheres”.

Anywheres are essentially the educated liberal professional elites who, he believes, have come to dominate the public realm. They are defined by their commitment to gender, sexual and racial equality and have lost touch with older communitarian values like love of country.

Somewheres are mostly, but not exclusively, the non-university educated white working classes who still believe in patriotism and borders, even though they have also largely come to accept progressive ideas about race and gender.

These categories don't stand up to much sociological analysis. But Goodhart is right to criticise progressives for treating all patriots as racists and the white working class as inherently reactionary. The left has arguably become too preoccupied with an identity politics that excludes the culture of ordinary people.

Gross inequalities of wealth and opportunity have left the 50% of society who are not university-educated with increasingly poor life opportunities, now that well-paid manufacturing and clerical jobs have disappeared. Mass immigration has changed many working class communities in ways middle class professionals wouldn't have tolerated.

The Road to Somewhere is like the Brexit version of Will Hutton's seminal The State We're In. It is mostly well argued and extensively researched. But Goodhart's solutions are harder to accept. He wants the return of identity cards for “connecting citizenship to entitlement”; public sector employment restricted to British citizens; and family-centred policies to boost fertility and “reduce the need for immigration”.

Imagine if the Scottish National Party had advocated policies based on “national fellow citizen favouritism”? They'd probably be denounced as racists. It is unfortunate that Goodhart doesn't seem very informed about what's happening north of the border (he appears to think the Faroes are part of Scotland). If anywhere shows that a progressive, civic “somewhere” nationalism is possible, it is here.