Dreaming of England: how to make sense in a time of upheaval

These finely woven and open-minded essays have a dark stream trickling through them: of loss, chances missed, past success fading and no longer giving solace. This elegiac strain of regret, disappointment and intimations of mortality is invoked by, or attributed to, most of the public men and women profiled by Jason Cowley in Reaching for Utopia.

The title is puzzling. While Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, draws out politicians and others on their ambition to “create the history of our era”, and many wish to make the world better, most find what he calls “the age of upheaval” puzzling, opaque and often fail. They do so either in the manner of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Arsène Wenger and Tiger Woods, after having succeeded; or David Cameron and Ed Miliband, without having succeeded.

Yet perhaps the writer who has left the greatest mark is the one he could not interview: AE Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad. Written in the late 19th century, this powerfully sad Anglophiliac poem — “still/Much good, but much less good than ill . . . Where luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure” — is, Cowley argues, “of deep interest and relevance” after the 2016 vote for Brexit. He does not make it wholly clear why it is so, except to mention that the poem breathes “this nostalgia for an older, sweeter, purer England”.

Brexit is for Cowley a terrible, senseless wound on the British body politic. This is felt most deeply to be so by metropolitan liberals, who give no shrift to the fact that the majority of voters in the 2016 referendum expressed a preference for a political centre, Westminster, that gives them at least a little leverage over rulings on their lives, against one, Brussels, that has still to construct an accountable and comprehensible locus of political decision-making. Brexit for him is a purely reactionary act.

Yet, ever fair, Cowley includes an interview with Michael Sandel. The philosopher argues that, however well intentioned the policy outputs of Brussels are, “people want a voice, people want a say, people want a more robust democratic system. It’s a mistake to neglect that.”

And among his best portraits are of the Brexit architect Nigel Farage (“The Arsonist”), whose conversation is quoted fully; of the Eurosceptic Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose public amiability and smartness he thinks are underrated; and Theresa May, doggedly pursuing a Brexit that “means Brexit”. The UK prime minister is routinely represented as governing with a noose round her neck; in Cowley’s profiling she is a woman of intelligence, more aware than either her Tory or Labour predecessors of the downsides of globalisation and liberalisation.

These vignettes are not merely fair: they are, mostly, vivid, the product of a style at once apparently artless yet reasoned. “The Golden Generation” catches well the energy, intellect and arrogance of the New Labour advisers, some of whom later became politicians (and, in differing ways, failed) — Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, the brothers Miliband. His interview with Ed Miliband, in 2014 while opposition Labour leader, is of a politician given to invoking grand aims but failing to give details on mechanisms, and unable to recognise that “Europe’s social democratic moment, if it ever existed (it did), is fading into the past”.

It is a world Cowley knows well. He is no Shropshire lad, but an Essex one, raised in Harlow New Town, a postwar construct that seemed, according to the head of its development corporation Sir Ernest Gowers, “too good to be true”. Yet, to Cowley, it is “where I was born and grew up. It is my home town.” It is, in a sense, a utopia.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of An Age of Upheaval, by Jason Cowley, Salt, RRP£12.99, 308 pages

John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor

Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

Let's block ads! (Why?)

https://www.ft.com/content/50b0e44e-ad11-11e8-8253-48106866cd8a