The worst thing you can do with a Rishi Sunak speech is think about it too hard. The words won’t make any more sense and they’ll just come down over your regular thoughts like a thick fog. Nevertheless, there was something strange about last Friday’s apparently impromptu thoughts, and I can’t leave it alone.
Sunak is worried that extremists are tearing this country apart. Fair enough, good point, except he wasn’t talking about Suella Braverman or Lee Anderson: he was talking about the Gaza protests.
These “hate marches” in fact have quite a low arrest rate: estimating attendance, the news website Open Democracy puts it at 0.5 arrests per 10,000 marchers. This is lower than the arrest rate at Glastonbury (1.75 arrests per 10,000) and the same as the average for a football crowd. Amusingly, when those figures were released, the head of UK football policing, Mark Roberts, concluded: “So that shows the vast majority of people going to football matches behave and enjoy themselves. That’s important. We need to shake off this idea that this [football disorder] is an English problem.”
I don’t mind the double standard. Football crowds need more leeway for carnival than the rest of the population, otherwise that guy would never have stuck a lit flare up his bottom at the Euros, and which of us could say our 2021 would have been as good? What I mind is the overstatement. Sunak is no excitable backbencher – he is, unavoidably, the prime minister. When he stands in front of No 10 and calls the country riven and ungovernable, makes a hand-wringing plea for order to perfectly orderly, baffled people, you have to accept that he is doing that on the world stage, even if the rest of the world has its own problems and probably isn’t watching.
Is there any chance at all, when the prime minister announces that the country is a basket case, that it might affect Britain’s international reputation? Slightly tarnish our standing as a grownup in the room, maybe even diminish our attractiveness as an investment opportunity? Certainly, with those considerations in mind, it used to be quite abnormal for the political class to slate the entire country. “Problem families”, maybe; “feral youth”, quite possibly – but to talk about a nation sinking into chaos, as Sunak also did last week, describing “a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule”, while you are actually in charge of it … I don’t even know what to call that. What combination of melodramatic overstatement and strategic disloyalty could describe it? Whatever else it is, it’s damn peculiar.
Like so many hideous breaches in the fabric of society, this can be traced straight back to George Osborne and David Cameron. They spent their period of opposition and then easily the first two years of the coalition worrying that the UK was about to become Greece. “Now, that’s peculiar,” we said at the time. “We’re nothing like Greece. And didn’t that used to be a thing the grownups didn’t do, in case it spooked the markets?” It was actually slightly worse than that – Britain was “broken”, according to Cameron, and having a “breakdown”, claimed Iain Duncan Smith.
In 2012, the upstart intellectuals of the Conservative party (grim, hollow laugh) published a book, Britannia Unchained. In among all the economically illiterate free market fundamentalism that would skyrocket everyone’s mortgage a decade later was this extraordinary line: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.” No longer just benefits claimants, malingering fake-disabled people, generations of the workless: nope, the whole lot of us.
What is up with these guys? It’s one thing to govern with the accent on censure rather than compassion; it’s another to actively dislike the population. It’s like walking into a party full of half-acquaintances and slagging off your immediate family. Sure, maybe they are being annoying – but who does that?
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
