Britain Is Entering a Parallel
Universe
Brexit, natural disaster, wokeness and a loss of
enlightenment values – Philip Pullman’s novels are an intimation of the
post-pandemic world.
By Niall Ferguson
February 21, 2021, 8:00 AM GMT
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He
was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and
Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New
York-based advisory firm.
In Philip
Pullman’s series of fantasy novels, “His
Dark Materials,” we enter a universe containing an infinity of
parallel worlds. In the most important of these worlds, which is similar to
ours in many respects, evolution and history have had subtly different
outcomes. Human beings have visible souls — small, semi-autonomous “daemons”
that take the shapes of animals. And the Reformation has failed,
leaving Europe still under the dominance
of an obscurantist and oppressive “Magisterium.”
The home of the indomitably mendacious young heroine, Lyra
Silvertongue, is an Oxford in which the nearest thing to physics is “experimental theology.” The Scientific
Revolution has not been fully achieved and the Industrial Revolution looks
equally incomplete. Lyra’s is a world that remains in many ways early
modern. There are no planes, only
balloons and airships. There is a primitive form of electricity but
“anbaric” light is a luxury. The social order too lags behind our own. Servants
rather than machines still perform most menial tasks. There are priories
full of nuns. Politics remains an
aristocratic preserve.
You are unlikely to have read “His Dark Materials” unless
you have children, but perhaps you saw some of the recent HBO adaptation,
notable for an unexpected and not wholly convincing appearance by Lin-Manuel
Miranda as the Texan balloonist Lee Scoresby. If you’ve never even heard of
Pullman, educate yourself. For he is not only as significant an author as that
other great Oxonian C.S. Lewis (in many ways, the initial book in the series,
“The Golden Compass,” is the atheist’s answer to “The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe”). Pullman also seems unwittingly
to have written an intimation of the post-pandemic world.
There are a great many of us who still want to
believe that at some point this year we shall all get back to normal —
meaning life will resume more or less exactly as it was at the end of 2019.
I am sure that by the summer it will feel in most developed countries that the
worst of Covid-19 is over, thanks to a combination of mass vaccination and
naturally acquired immunity. I am also confident that there will be a protracted
global party to celebrate the reopening of bars and restaurants and
the easing of at least some travel restrictions.
I fully expect a bout
of rapid economic growth to ensue: Consumers have accumulated a vast sum of
forced savings, a large proportion of which they are poised to spend — even
before governments add fuel to the fire in the form of yet more fiscal
stimulus.
Nevertheless, I am doubtful
that our near-term future is going to revert entirely to the pre-pandemic
normal. First, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is mutating in ways that few people foresaw
a year ago, becoming more transmissible or more vaccine-resistant.
Second, the dominance of vaccine
nationalism over global inoculation, combined with significant
“anti-vaxxer” sentiment in countries that will soon have more vaccine shots
than they require, will leave the virus
with plenty of time and space to evolve further, especially in the Southern
hemisphere. The elimination of Covid seems a distant prospect. A more likely scenario is that it will
become an endemic, seasonal disease,
requiring annual shots and causing recurrent waves of excess
mortality.
Third, the hypermobility of the pre-pandemic era is highly unlikely to
resume any time soon. Many countries that have managed to suppress the
disease (e.g. Australia and New Zealand) will maintain travel restrictions. Few large businesses will
return to their previous volume of corporate travel: Many meetings that would
previously have necessitated long-haul flights will continue to happen over
Zoom. A significant proportion of relatively high-skilled people will continue
to work from home at least part of the time. And will you throw away all those
masks? Will you resume hugs and handshakes of people outside your innermost
circle? I know I won’t.
Fourth, Covid-19 has exposed how very poor our preparedness for
disasters of all kinds has become, the central theme of my forthcoming book,
“Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” There is a consensus that the next
disaster we shall have to contend with will be related to climate change: That is Bill Gates’s story. Yet there
are other disasters lurking out there to which we attach much lower
probabilities. The eruption of Mount
Etna last week is a reminder that the world has not seen a really large
volcanic eruption since Mount
Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. It has been two centuries since the annual
amount of sulphate aerosol injected into the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions
exceeded 50 million tons. We have forgotten how severe volcanic global
cooling can be.
There’s a pervasive darkness to Philip Pullman’s worlds that
I cannot help suspecting may characterize our world in the years ahead. Much of
“The Golden Compass” is set in “the
North,” including the frigid Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Texan readers are discovering
that the weather of the north can now reach a lot further south than we are
used to.
In “The Subtle Knife,”
we encounter a beautiful Mediterranean country where specters hunt down
adults and suck the vitality out of them — where only children are
oblivious to and safe from the danger. It is remarkable how Pullman anticipated
our ageist pandemic. In “The Golden
Compass,” kids are cruelly separated from their daemons. In the Covid world, they are cruelly
separated from their friends.
“The Book of Dust”
depicts Lyra’s Oxford devastated by a disastrous flood. Those who live
there can easily imagine such an inundation, having seen the Thames so often
burst its banks and submerge Port Meadow in recent years.
Nowhere
does the future look less like the recent past and more like Pullman’s parallel
universe than in his own country, England. True, 2021 has got off to a
much better start for the U.K. than 2020 did. Thanks to world-class research at Oxford and elsewhere, bold
procurement decisions led by Kate Bingham, head of the government’s task force,
and the experience of the National Health Service in mass vaccination, the
U.K. has surged ahead of the European Union in the vaccination race.
The European Commission has handled the vaccine challenge so
badly — simultaneously centralizing procurement and slowing it down, then
lashing out at the U.K. with empty threats to close the border between Northern
Ireland and the South — that even the most ardent proponents of Brexit can
scarcely believe it. (“I understand Brexit better now,” a pro-EU source at the
drug company AstraZeneca told the Spectator last month.) Close to a quarter of
the U.K. population has now received at least once vaccine dose, compared with
12% in the U.S. and less than 4% in Germany.
However, this success story comes after an annus horribilis. Excluding tiny
Gibraltar and San Marino, the U.K. has the third-worst
Covid mortality rate of any country in the world, exceeded only by
Slovenia and Belgium. The country saw two of the world’s worst waves of
excess mortality, in April last year and again over the Christmas holidays.
The U.K.’s gross
domestic product shrank by 9.9% last year, the worst performance of any
major economy apart from Spain, according to the International Monetary
Fund. The last annual contraction larger than that was in 1709, when economic activity was steeply reduced throughout
Europe by the “Great Frost,” the coldest
winter in five hundred years. This has been attributed by modern research to the exceptionally low
sunspot activity known as the Maunder Minimum, as well as to volcanic eruptions
in the two preceding years at Mount Fuji, in Japan, and Santorini and Vesuvius,
in Europe.
The worst years in
English economic history, according to the Bank of England, were 1629, when the economy contracted by
25%, and 1349, when it shrank
by 23%. The 1340s were the decade of the Black Death. I still cannot work out what went
wrong in 1629, a year best known to political historians as the beginning of
Charles I’s 11-year “Personal Rule” without a parliament.
A contraction of nearly 10% turns the economic clock of a
country back around six years. Also turning the clock back is the effect of
Brexit, which formally came into effect at the beginning of this year, after
four and half years of divorce negotiations. As I warned back after the June 2016
referendum, Brexit was always going to be one of those divorces that takes a
lot longer and costs a lot more than the exiting spouse imagined at the outset.
Sure enough, now that Britain has its decree nisi, the true costs of splitting
up can no longer be glossed over. The U.K. has opted to phase in border checks
on EU imports gradually until July 1, whereas U.K. exports to the EU have faced
the full suite of new restrictions since Jan. 1. The Road Haulage Association has
reported that U.K. exports to the EU
have fallen by more than two thirds, though the government does not accept
this claim.
Not only is trade in
goods suddenly a lot more difficult than it was before — cue a hundred
press stories about customs paperwork crushing small businesses whose owners
voted for Brexit — there simply is no
agreement on trade in services. Nor are the Europeans in any hurry to
recognize London as having equivalent regulatory status with euro area
financial centers.
As people anticipate the new world in which London is no
longer both de facto and de jure the EU’s principal financial center, the City
is losing out. A chunk of London’s swaps business has migrated. There is
already talk of changing the rules that allow asset management funds based in
the EU to be managed from the U.K. Most startling of all, Amsterdam overtook London as a stock trading center in December.
That probably hasn’t been true since 1709, if not 1629.
It’s sometimes forgotten that the 17th century Dutch Republic led England in terms of
financial development: the former had a “golden age” while the latter was
wracked by a religious and political civil war. Only with the ouster of
James II and the installation of William of Orange as king of England in 1688 — the so-called “Glorious Revolution” — were Dutch economic institutions imported
to London from Amsterdam.
The English already had their own East India Company, but
before 1688 it was commercially inferior to its Dutch counterpart. In 1694 the Bank of England was founded
to manage the government’s borrowings as well as the national currency, similar
(though not identical) to the successful Amsterdam Wisselbank founded 85
years before. London was also able to
import the Dutch system of a national debt, funded through a stock
exchange, where long-term bonds could easily be bought and sold.
Brexit has also turned the clock back demographically.
According to the Migration Observatory at Oxford, the U.K.’s foreign-born population shrank by just over 1 million in the first
three quarters of 2020. About 481,000 of those departing were born in the
EU, reversing an influx that began in 2004, when the U.K. was one of only three
established EU countries (the others were Ireland and Sweden) to allow
immediate free movement by the citizens of the 10 Eastern European states that
had just joined the union.
Of all the political
mistakes that led to Brexit, this is the one that attracts the least
attention, because it was made by a Labour government, based on civil
servants’ disastrous underestimates of the likely westward migration flows.
Those who voted for Brexit to reverse these flows are seeing their wish come
true, especially in London, from which there has been a veritable exodus of
migrants.
I used to worry,
half-jokingly, that the net result of Brexit would be turn the social and
economic clock back to before 1973,
the year Britain joined the European Economic Community. I am old enough to
remember the shabbiness of the country in those days: the inefficiency
of nationalized industries, the excessive power of trade unions, the pervasive
mood of cynicism that was good for sitcom scripts but not much else.
Economically, however, not even the combination of Brexit and Covid-19 could
return living standards to the low levels of those days.
Yet culturally the
country seems to be lurching even further backwards. It is not just those
on the right who quietly craved a less cosmopolitan country. It is also those
on the left who seek to repudiate almost all of British history since 1709. The
“woke” elements on British campuses
took this repudiation to new depths earlier this month with a conference on
the “racial consequences” of Winston
Churchill at the Cambridge college that bears his name.
Speaking at this event, Kehinde Andrews, author of “The Psychosis of Whiteness,” described
Churchill as “the perfect embodiment of white supremacy” and the British
Empire as having been “far worse than the Nazis and lasted far longer.”
Madhusree Mukerjee argued that “militarism is the core of the British identity”
and called for statues celebrating British militarism to be taken down. No Churchill defenders were among the
panelists.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson last week announced new
measures to uphold free speech at British universities. That may provide
protection to the conservative thinkers who have recently been subjected to various forms of “cancellation” at
Cambridge and elsewhere, but it will do nothing to stem the tide of wokeism.
The government may stand, as Williamson said, “unequivocally on the side of
free speech and academic freedom, on the side of liberty, and of the values of
the Enlightenment.” But the academic left repudiates the Enlightenment as a
mere helpmeet of imperialism and likes nothing better than to claim that conservatives
are “weaponizing” free speech. So dominant are such ideas on some U.K. campuses
that the clock appears to have been
turned all the way back to the mid-17th century, when it was routine to
denounce one’s ideological enemies as heretics and to condemn their ideas as
blasphemy.
Pullman’s England seemed
a through-the-looking-glass place when I first read his novels to my older
children. I now realize we are hurtling
towards it.
Nothing would turn the clock back further than the breakup of Britain — an eventuality
predicted many times over the years. The New Left writer Tom Nairn published a
book of that title in 1977. I remember being briefly converted to the cause of
Scottish independence by the arguments of that book, combined with renditions of
the Corries’ faux national anthem, “Flower of Scotland,” at international rugby
matches. (I was 13 and soon grew out if it.)
But Scottish independence, which I have opposed
throughout my adult life, may now be inevitable. Elections to the
Scottish Parliament at Holyrood are scheduled for May 2021. The Scottish
National Party, which is campaigning for a second independence referendum, is
on track to win a comfortable majority. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola
Sturgeon, does not want to proceed to a “indyref 2” without the U.K.
government’s consent. However, on Jan. 24, her party published a “Roadmap to a Referendum,” which
stated that if the party wins a majority in May, it will hold an independence
referendum regardless of the U.K. government’s consent — the same
strategy that led to chaos in Catalonia in 2017.
My favorite cartoon of the year so far was by Graeme Keyes.
It depicted an Englishman striding resolutely westward with a suitcase labeled
“BREXIT,” while a kilt-wearing Scotsman sauntered in the opposite direction
with a suitcase labeled “EXBRIT.”
Recent polling points to a wider disintegration of the
country officially known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland. Not only do 49%
of Scottish voters now favor independence over 44% who oppose it; 42% of voters
in Northern Ireland also support a United Ireland. Moreover, the English
themselves are becoming resigned to these outcomes. Some 49% of voters in England now think Scottish
independence is likely; 45% would either be “pleased” or “not bothered” by it;
and an amazing 57% would be “pleased” or
“not bothered” by Irish reunification.
No one knows how exactly the Scottish economy could cope
with independence, especially if it were to apply to join the EU as many
nationalists would like (remember, Scotland voted emphatically against Brexit).
But practicalities are no more in focus than they were in 2016, when the
English voted to leave the EU — despite the fact that this would be a much more
momentous divorce, ending the union of
parliaments of 1707 and potentially even the union of crowns of 1603.
You see what I mean about turning the clock back? And yet it
may be time for me to accept this process of historical shape-shifting instead
of trying to fight it. Reading the novels
of Walter Scott, the first of which appeared the year before Tambora
erupted, I am reminded time and again how contingent the Anglo-Scottish union
was at its outset, and how hotly contested, sparking major rebellions in 1715
and 1745. Just as Pullman’s novels conjure up an imagined England, in which
modernity does not quite come together as it has in our world, so Scott’s
remind us of what the pre-modernity was like — a world not just lacking in
modern technology, but afflicted by religious zealotry and intolerance.
The thought that we might be on our way back to that world
would make my daemon — if I had one — shudder.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
