8 - Holding It Together? The Coercive Turn and the Crises of Party and Bloc

Summary

In this chapter, I explore the contradictions, crises and conflicts associated with the 2019 Conservative government's attempts to manage the trajectory of the conjuncture. Building on the discussion of culture wars in the previous chapter, I turn to other elements of the governmental repertoire, with particular attention to the simultaneous expansion of coercive capacities and the centralisation of power in the hands of the ruling party. Just as culture wars were never ‘merely cultural’, so these strategies were both material and symbolic, evoking a variety of legitimating devices for their introduction, including the continuing deployment of the imaginary of ‘wealth’. I then consider these strategies in the light of the emerging fissures and fractures within the Party and within the wider ruling bloc. The problems of maintaining these two ‘unities in difference’ dominated the life of the Johnson government (2019– 22), culminating in the overthrow of Johnson by the parliamentary Conservative Party and his replacement in the summer of 2022 by Liz Truss. Her arrival and departure as party leader and prime minister coincided with the last phases of writing this book but have already contributed to the expanding proliferation of crises, contradictions and conflicts. The chapter ends with some reflections on the arrival of what might be called ‘zombie Thatcherism’ (to borrow from Jamie Peck).

Law and order politics (again)

In the UK, the public reactions to Brexit, political dislocations, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter became entwined with campaigns of environmental activism and challenges to violence against women (particularly after the kidnapping, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer). The aftermath of this case intersected with continuing investigations into undercover police spies, particularly those who had infiltrated social movements and, in some cases, formed relationships and had children with members of those movements (McFarlane, 2020). Indeed, the Metropolitan Police were rarely out of the headlines as policing problems, failures and disasters accumulated – from a series of highly publicised racialised stop and search actions to the policing of a vigil to commemorate Sarah Everard, which itself resulted in the sexualised trolling by police officers of one protester who was arrested at the vigil (see, inter alia, Rodger, 2021; Topping, 2021).