Brexit isn’t working, and there are potholes everywhere. Those are not equivalent challenges. Fresh asphalt heals cracked carriageways in an afternoon. Repairing a fractured continental alliance is the work of a generation. One problem did not cause the other. But they are on the vast continuum of political failure – from global to local – that coincides with 14 years of Conservative rule and for which the party will be punished in local elections on Thursday.
Also this week new customs checks on a range of EU imports are being implemented, throwing a bit more sand in the gears of trade. The measure has been deferred multiple times, and is now being only partially rolled out. The government has held back in tacit recognition that the economic impact is only downside: bureaucracy, queues, disrupted supplies, feeding into higher prices.
Those costs are not as tangible as the decay that voters see on the high street. Business investment that has been withheld as a result of rupture from the EU single market is not visible in the way of shuttered shops and queues to see a dentist. But it all stirs the general malaise.
We have been lurching down cratered roads, turning right at every junction, only to reach a dead end. The passengers feel sick and want to get out. The driver, tetchy and resenting criticism from the back seat, won’t admit he is lost.
So back we go down pointless, grimly familiar policy byways. Rishi Sunak’s latest plan to turn things round involves cutting benefits for people with depression and anxiety, on the grounds that they are probably hamming it up and should be at work.
Haven’t we been here before, prime minister? We came this way just before the last immigration crackdown. Or was it two crackdowns ago? Maybe it doesn’t count as a new idea each time a different Conservative leader says it.
Lack of direction is both a personal failing in Rishi Sunak and a matter of timing. He might be clever and diligent, but he doesn’t come across as a man of fertile imagination, and he came to office in the Tories’ 13th year in power, as their fifth consecutive prime minister.
A long incumbency is physically and intellectually debilitating. Politics is knackering. There is no time in government to ruminate on what isn’t working and why. The longer a mistake goes uncorrected, the higher the penalty for admitting it. No one wants to have been wrong for so long. Ideological sclerosis sets in.
Certain kinds of politician thrive in those conditions. A party that has grown complacent in the habit of power promotes apparatchiks and zealots. It favours people who are skilled at clambering up a closed hierarchy. Mediocrity flourishes by mastering sacred orthodoxy and preaching to the faithful. The craft of winning new converts is neglected.
In their own styles, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were both beneficiaries of that mechanism. So was Humza Yousaf, although the shibboleths required to take charge of the Scottish nationalist party don’t sound much like the ones that secure the Tory leadership.
The SNP has been supplying first ministers to Bute House for three years longer than the Tories have been staffing Downing Street.
The sequence of events that compelled Yousaf to resign this week are distinct to the parliamentary arithmetic and policy debates at Holyrood. The comparison with Sunak’s situation is limited, but there are common themes.
Yousaf was unlucky to have been handed the chalice of high office just as the concentration of poison – a slow drip of underwhelming government, then a massive dose from financial scandal – reached lethal levels. He was the protege of a popular leader, Nicola Sturgeon, whose legacy then unravelled. He was perfectly credentialed for continuity at a moment of soaring appetite for change. The talents that made him look like a safe choice from inside the SNP bubble turned out not to be sufficient for success at running a government. Not a million miles from the Sunak scenario.
There is also the analogous problem of Scottish nationalism in Edinburgh and Brexit Toryism in Westminster rubbing against limits of cherished ideological projects that aren’t going to plan.
Support for Scottish independence is resilient, just short of a majority, which puts a solid floor under SNP support. But the drive for a second referendum (or Sturgeon’s ill-conceived notion of projecting one “de facto” on to the next general election) has run out of momentum.
Many Scottish voters who might like the idea of independence one day care more about competent government right now. The SNP’s fixation on a single proposition is not just a distraction from other issues but a disincentive to think about policy solutions. When dissolving the union is always the answer, there’s no need to interrogate the question.
The Tory crisis is more profound because Eurosceptics got the liberation they craved and it didn’t satisfy anyone. They led the people to the Promised Land, and it sucks.
The analogy riles Scottish nationalists not least because rejoining the EU is an ambition for an independent Scotland, which implies the antithesis of Brexit.
It is true that Westminster dictates the terms of UK-wide politics more meaningfully than Brussels ever did in the paranoid imaginings of (mostly English) Eurosceptics. The Scottish independence movement accommodates progressive opinions that Tory Brexit ultras anathematise as wokery.
But the two movements are alike in wishing away massive economic and technical impediments to the realisation of their vision. And that, in turn, is symptomatic of a flaw intrinsic to nationalism, regardless of its cultural inflection.
The foundational concept takes a variegated society with competing interests and casts it as a unitary people with a collective will and destiny. That encourages denial of complex challenges and generates bad policy. The subsequent failure is then projected as sabotage by a malevolent external oppressor.
Nationalism is high-octane fuel for winning campaigns, but not suitable for the machinery of government. Mining the same old grievances can defer a reckoning with reality, but not indefinitely. Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf share a misfortune in having taken over the controls of once powerful engines just as they sputter and stall.
It doesn’t matter whether the enemy is Westminster or Europe, the mechanism for perpetual blame-shifting and evasion of responsibility is the same. Once encoded in the ideology of a ruling party, nationalism will stultify original thinking and suffocate talent. Eventually it will test the patience of even sympathetic voters. It is too abstract to address local problems and too insular to manage global challenges. It can’t fix Brexit and it isn’t filling any potholes.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
