looting and heroic failure: the Liz Truss episode

 

William Hazlitt, unlike Coleridge or Wordsworth, was not only an admirer, initially, of the French Revolution, but believed in its principles to his dying day. He saw the turn to the right of the Romantics – the intellectuals of his generation – as a betrayal. I look back at the first Cold War as the Burkian war – the war of the anicen regime powers against the French revolution – and in those terms Hazlett plays the role of the unreconstructed fellow traveller.

He had company. Byron was scathing about the rightwing British establishment – appealing to an earlier Whig notion of liberty. And of course Shelley was always there on the battlements. But Hazlitt was not a poet, but an essayist. In fact, one of the great English essayists, to the embarrassment of his Victorian posterity. John Stuart Mill could resurrect Coleridge, in search of a liberal consensus, but not Hazlitt. This is one of the reasons that the English universities, usually so meticulous in producing “collected works”, have been so late to take on Hazlitt.

Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon is one of his more obscure works. It is true, too, that he saw Napoleon as perhaps too uninhibitedly the product of the Revolution. The Napoleon who sought to restart slavery in Sainte-Domingue is reactionary in the worst sense. But, at the same time, as Marx thought too, the Napoleon who occupied much of Germany and Italy brought with him an enlightened form of the state that was absolutely necessary for modernization – from regulations concerning abattoirs to modern policing.

In the Life, there’s a marvellous passage where Hazlitt goes after Southey, that tadpole eater, and foresees, in spite of himself, the economic backbone of Cold Wars:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

In fact, in the Cold War economy in the twentieth century, the development of nuclear weapons allowed for a twofer – they were highly expensive, highly necessary, and their very presence mean that they were not to be fired off in the air on any account. From the economic point of view, they were almost perfect commodities – luxury and necessity in one.

One of the ways of looking at the Revolution and the wars that followed is to compare the financing of these wars with the wars of the 18^th century. One of the great advantages of Britain, in those world wars, was the state of its finances. Although British GDP was considerably less than France’s, it was France that was always teetering near backruptcy, since the profligency of the monarchy was paid for by recurrent bankruptcies of the state. Thus, the interest on loans to France had to be high – much higher than loans to Britain.

To pursue the Burkian Cold war into real war, Britain had to radically reorganize itself – which it did by taking itself off the gold standard. It helped that the financial world shifted from Amsterdam to London, after the French invaded the Netherlands. Although to an 18^th century mind like Hazlitt’s the English national debt seemed like a nation-crusher, it turned out that this debt was a great advantage to Britain.

From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Within that one-two step, Britain, where the financial center of the world was now located, made its debt a mainstay of the rentier lifestyle.

Here’s what  the Cambridge Economic History of Europe says: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

Now, the proper name for this is looting. War, in Hazlitt’s imagination, was simply loss. This is the moral image of war. But another image of war is about gain. Gain, it should be said, or loot, is still something the established poohbahs are ashamed of. Thus, war is always about principle. When the anti-war peeps said that the war with Iraq was about blood, this was perceived by all the great poohbahs as laughably naïve. Of course, in the business press, there was a great excitement about the chance for profit, but this existed in another discursive universe. When that universe did obtrude itself on the vision of the poohbahs, it was dubbed something like free enterprise, to give it that secret ingredient “freedom” – Freedom, like the phrase No Women and Children Admitted, which the duke and the dauphin put on their playbills for the Royal Nonesuch, is a lure. “If that don’t draw em, I don’t know Arkansaw” – said the Duke. Freedom is in that same category.

The UK version of looting, with both its internal and external aspects, created a mighty power. But that power has vanished. As Finton O’Toole observed in his book on Brexit, Britain without an imperial project is slowly becoming prey to the nationalism – and in particular, English nationalism – that had been repressed under the British ideal. Also repressed, I would say, is the idea that the wars are looting expeditions. In that repression, the compromise image – which O’Toole captures well – is that of heroic failure. To which the Liz Truss fiasco aligns itself all too well.

“The grand balls-up is not new, and in English historical memory it is not shameful. Most of the modern English heroes, after all, are complete screw-ups. The exploits that have loomed largest in English consciousness since the nineteenth century are retreats or disasters: Sir John Moore’s evacuation of Corunna in the Peninsular War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, the ‘last stand’ against the Zulus at Isandlwana, Gordon of Khartoum, the Somme, the flight from Dunkirk. This culture of heroic failure Barczewski defines as ‘a conscious sense of celebration of the striving for an object that was not attained’. She points, for example, to the ten memorial statues in Waterloo Place, a key site flanking the great processional route up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace: five relate to the disastrous Crimean War, one is of Franklin and one is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died with four of his men having failed to get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s pragmatically planned and unromantic Norwegian expedition.  

Oddly, the leaders of the Leave movement often seem to relish the prospect of just such a failure. It is as if the entire enterprise was undertaken under the sign of a phrase of John Major’s, the former Tory PM, who when asked about some Thatcherite policy he was implementing replied: ‘if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.’”

Heroic failures past, heroic failures future – such seems to be the impulse under the surface of Brexit Britain. Combined with Truss’s open economics of looting by the very wealthy, things are going to plan – that is, going to hell in a handbasket. All hands stand by as we salute the coffins!