"The country"

"The country" often does not mean the whole of the people.

Sometimes, mindess drivel can be inadvertently illuminating. So it is with Chris Mason’s question about the government’s decision to abolish the two-child benefit cap:

Was it evidence, I suggested to the prime minister, that his mantra of “country first, party second” had now been reversed?

You might think that Starmer is indeed putting the country first because lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty not only helps a good part of the country directly but also has wider benefits as cutting child poverty can raise future earnings and productivity. Surely, therefore, Mason’s question (which the BBC saw fit to headline on World at One) is obviously ridiculous?

Not necessarily. It’s a glimpse into a longstanding mindset. David Kynaston quotes a diner at the Savoy shortly after Labour’s 1945 election victory:

But this is terrible - they’ve elected a Labour government, and the country will never stand for that. (Austerity Britain, p76)

This sounds an absurd description of a general election in which Labour and Communists won over half the popular vote. But it’s not if you realize that for these people “the country” comprises not the entirety of the British people but only a small subset of it: the rich.

This view dates back at least as far as John Locke. Here’s C.B.Macpherson:

To him the labouring class was an object of state policy, an object of administration, rather than fully a part of the citizen body….Only those with ‘estate’ can be full members…The labouring class, being without estate, are subject to, but not full members of, civil society. (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p224, 248)

Mason is in this tradition. For him, the millions of the poor are not part of “the country”. In this light, his question makes sense.

I’m not picking on an isolated idiosyncratic example here. In March his colleague Faisal Islam said the government had made the judgment that “the country cannot afford to sustain recent ballooning increases in the health-related benefit bill”. That makes no sense if you regard benefit recipients as part of the country - because they can’t afford not to recieve them. But it does make sense if you think of the country as our Savoy diner did, as consisting only of the rich to whom the benefits bill is indeed a cost rather than what it really is - a transfer from some to others.

The BBC is echoing Tory rhetoric here. In July, Kemi Badenoch said that “the country cannot afford Starmer’s concessions” on welfare cuts. And Helen Whately, shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, says “the country cannot afford” rising benefits. All are oblivious to the fact that welfare benefits are a transfer, not a cost - an error which makes sense only if you define “country” to exclude the worst off.

Now, I’ll concede that there is a sense in which the Tories might be right. Insofar as welfare benefits disincentivize people from working or impose deadweight costs of bureaucracy then they do reduce GDP. In this sense our national income is lower and so the country is indeed poorer. But these deadweight costs are an order of magnitude (or more) less than the actual benefit bill, and are offset at least in part by the long-term costs to the economy of child poverty and by the benefits to capitalists of more stable demand and increased legitimacy.

Even if the benefits bill is a cost in the proper sense, then we must say that if the country (in the proper sense of the word) can’t afford this cost, then nor can it afford all the other things that reduce potential output such as Brexit, or illiberal immigration policy, or weak competition and regulation policy, or a public sphere that is relentlessly hostile to anything resembling thought, or an overly complicated tax system, or a bloated financial sector, or an economy dominated by rentiers, or inadequate management, or high inequalities of wealth and power, or... etc. The fact that politicians and the BBC do not often say that all these are burdens on “the country” highlights my point - that “the country” is often used to exclude many of our citizens.

And not just the poorer ones. “We are the patriotic party” Nigel Farage recently told his Reform UK Ltd conference (despite having a convicted traitor among its leading members). You’d think that a party that despises a lot of the country - Jews, Muslims and many immigrants - could not be patriotic in the sense of loving one’s country. But it can, if you regard the country as comprising only the whiter portion thereof.

Benedict Anderson famously described the nation as “an imagined political community”. This imagination, however, is used not merely to bind people together but also to exclude some of them. Which is how “the country” is so very often used.