Raymond Williams used the term “structure of feeling” to describe “affective elements of consciousness and relationships,” or the fluid, shared cultural tendencies which organise our making sense of the world.¹ A structure of feeling in Williams’ view is necessarily “difficult” to define, but can be seen as shared, historically specific, patterns of interpretation and sense-making, which incorporate not only ideologies and symbolism, but an emotional “worldview”. It is a language of understanding and expressing how parts of the world relate to each other, somewhat less rigidly structured than an ideology, but more as a shared cultural perspective, built out of repeated statements which prioritise some interpretations over others. I’d like to suggest here that thinking about the past and present through the relationship of precedents reflects a distinctive attitude to time, infusing these patterns of interpretation with emotional power and resonance, which can be productively engaged with as a structure of feeling, specifically because of how instinctively and easily it has been drawn upon, and how powerful a structure this has come to be in recent British history.

The structural function of precedent thinking can be seen most clearly in Brexiteer narratives of the past, and how they interact with other political norms regarding Britain’s history. The COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain at a time where its elite political culture was most obsessively focused on achieving goals imagined to restore one particular precedent, and heal one breach of continuity in the recent past. This attitude can be seen in the overt rhetoric of the Brexit referendum, with the focus on “taking back control” and regaining lost “independence”. The decision to enter the European Union was framed as a mistake which could be undone, and an error which could be corrected. Precedent thinking reveals itself in contemporary British culture through the frenetic efforts to restore precedents seen to be in breach, and the way in which restoring and correcting that divergence has been pursued at such immense political, economic and human cost.

To think critically about the present moment, it is necessary to think back to this moment and unpack how its view of history became normalised in elite political culture. To some with a long memory, this language of undoing errors of the past might sound familiar: just like the frontiers of the state, whose expansion could be “rolled back”, this narrative closely resembles the view of British history which was central to Thatcher-era Conservative policy. As Stuart Hall wrote in 1979, even before the election, Margaret Thatcher had already “won”, by successfully transforming Britain’s political language. What this meant in practice, however, was that she had successfully developed a neat historical explanation for how Britain had gotten to the particular point it was at, and presented the Conservative Party as the only possible “solution” to the crises of the present.

This approach seized on established tendencies in late 1960s and early 1970s political analysis, which escalated throughout the 1970s: this was the perception that Britain as a nation was “in decline”, and that this decline could be seen through the economic instability of the 1970s. Rather than viewing the recessions and inflation of the 1970s as patterns which were shared by the global economy, magnified by mismanagement at a national level, viewing Britain as a “declining” nation in this way took a wider view, interpreting the recent past as a journey away from its “greatness” overall. This journey coincided with the post-1945 governments’ commitment to the construction of the welfare state, building of new towns, and embracing a planned economic future. It also coincided with increased American global political influence; decolonisation and the shrinking of the British Empire; and, crucially, with increasing migration to Britain from former colonies, especially from the Caribbean nations and South Asia.

In this culturally conservative structure of feeling, change itself was seen as betrayal, an affront to the absolute ideal of Britain as “great”. This emotional language of crisis, and its political functioning through “mapping together” experiences of change into a single national narrative, was identified during the 1970s itself in the CCCS study Policing the Crisis.² Paul Gilroy has explored this pattern in postwar British culture, describing the grafting together of different historical symbols into a single “moral universe” as a political neurosis of “postcolonial melancholia”. Focusing on how the Second World War had come to be understood as the dominant touchstone for national identity and political memory, Gilroy argued that this functioned as a means of displacing and repressing grief at the “loss” of Britain’s imperial power, and a refusal to face its realities.³ This foundational unresolved grief informed attitudes to change more broadly, including:

The apprehension of successive political and economic crises, with the gradual breakup of the United Kingdom, with the arrival of substantial numbers of postcolonial citizen-migrants, and with the shock and anxiety that followed from a loss of any sense that the national collective was bound by a coherent and distinctive culture.

The political culture of the 1970s had been suffused with this pattern of interpreting a wide range of social and political changes as both betrayals of an imagined prestigious history, and where current conflicts and economic crises were presented as evidence of that downward spiral.⁴ Under Thatcher, the Conservative party was able to seize on this existing cultural pattern, and link the perceived “failures” of the recent past to the failure of “socialist” political experimentation, which the Conservatives were solely able to correct. This story explained how Britain got to where it was, and it presented the action which needed to be taken as part of restoring old traditions.⁵ By framing these changes as ones which had led Britain away from itself, Thatcher as Conservative Party leader was able to cast herself and her Party as being the ones able to restore old lost continuities as part of the path of progress; these changes were to be consistent with and uphold traditions, in this view. The Labour Party, whose policies for the last quarter century had been explicitly focused on building a different future, was therefore cast as archaic, a kind of outdated or superseded vision of the past. This paradoxical story explained the present by elevating some precedents and rejecting others, while presenting the Conservative Party in the position of defending and restoring valued traditions.

This explanatory framework allowed for genuinely radical breaks with the past to take place during the 1980s, while being championed as consistent with existing traditions. The transformation of London’s Docklands into a free enterprise centre, for example, or the abolition of the Greater London Council, or the closing of coal mines, involved destroying historic landscapes and institutions to clear space for new economic orders. This type of destruction took place through the invoking of Victorian-era and imperial precedents of Britain’s greatness, cohesion, and power. By removing barriers placed by others, or pushing back on new intrusions, Thatcher-era policies could frame radical intervention as restoring Britain on its correct path.

This is one reason why, even though Thatcher personally voted for the entry into the European Economic Community years earlier, the roots of precedent thinking which have fuelled Brexit can be traced back to this time. During the years that the Conservative Party was out of power, this pattern in explaining Britain’s history of postwar change as needing to be selectively undone did not go away. It appeared in a partial and complex form in New Labour’s rhetoric; while under Tony Blair, the Labour Party often described its role as a “modernising” force, it also attempted to position itself as the heir to liberal traditions, and to a neutralised, inoffensive “labour tradition” reframed as benign social democracy. While Blair wanted to frame New Labour as a “new dawn”, in practice the party’s approach to “modernisation” broadly meant continuing to remake the public sector in the image of the free market, as Stuart Hall noted in 2003. More significantly, however, even when Labour appealed to the past during the New Labour years, special care was taken to avoid the 1960s-1970s. The very idea of New Labour implied the need for a radical break with the Old, and ultimately upheld the shared principle of the party’s recent history as a failed experiment.

While striking this narrative balance was successful in fuelling its 1997 landslide, that electoral stronghold eroded at each following election for New Labour, and the narrative grew even less cohesive and riddled with inconsistencies at each turn. Following the global financial crisis, the uneasy Conservative-Liberal coalition elected in 2010 attempted to strike a similar balance between adopting the language of progress and appealing to an alternative tradition of One Nation conservatism. The language of One Nation defined who counted as part of that nation in ever-slenderer terms, through the twin strategies of brutal austerity, and the ferociously invasive May iteration of the “hostile environment”. The hostile environment policies made every point of interaction with the state predicated on the assumption that migrants were illegitimate, so that “suspicion becomes a form of national citizenship.” Similarly, the “reforms” of the welfare system vastly expanded the already-existing presumption of guilt or deception by the applicant, refining it to be more punitive, more demanding, more heavily policed. Both of these intrusions were explicitly designed to be transformational, to intervene on established patterns; and both of these were justified to defend a manufactured scarcity in the state, and therefore to protect a fictional norm at the nation’s core from the onslaught of difference. “One Nation” as a palliative to ease the tensions of coalition, however, did not signify the rejection of restorationist precedent thinking within the Conservative Party, and it laid the ground for further escalation.

European relations had been contentious throughout Thatcher’s premiership, where the conflict between arch-conservative, traditionalist conservatism and monetarist, free market radicalism was especially fraught. The European Community, and its moves towards greater monetary, economic, and border integration, were inherently focused on removing distinctions between member nations, and therefore could be seen as interrupting legal and institutional precedents at the level of the nation. At the same time, those barriers were being removed in favour of the kind of economic integration which would facilitate easier movement of capital, and while new regulations were part of this process, the European Community was founded with the goal of constructing and streamlining a single market. This tension cut through the debates around around the European Exchange Rate Mechanism that led to Margaret Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1990, which persisted through the debates on the Maastricht Treaty under Major. (Those events also formed the background to the formation of the Anti-Federalist League in 1991, which would be renamed UKIP in 1993.)

These conflicts around the value of idealised national traditions relative to expansionist European market integration would persist, and eventually escalate, during the Conservatives’ period of opposition, and this conflict deeply influenced Cameron’s approach. As part of his campaign to become leader of the Conservatives in 2005, David Cameron had promised to withdraw Conservative MEPs from the European Peoples’ Party group in the European Parliament, indicating his willingness to concede to Eurosceptic demands. After The Sun switched editorial support to the Conservatives in September 2009, Cameron wrote an open letter to their readers in November 2009, offering a ‘cast iron promise’ to hold a referendum on the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, or Lisbon Treaty. This did not take place, partly because the UK bill ratifying the treaty had been passed the previous year, and the treaty itself would come into force only weeks later. This tactic would be one Cameron would draw on again in 2015; after five years in coalition with the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ election manifesto put forward the commitment to hold a referendum on EU membership, theoretically placating Conservative Eurosceptics, while fending off an electoral threat from UKIP.

Beyond those short-term strategic goals, the decision to hold a binary referendum made little legislative sense, in that integration meant that the distinctions between member parties could not be easily reinstated. Proposing the question implied a simple solution which would not be possible, as the British Government is discovering. There was no legal precedent for how this would occur under EU law, in that leaving the Union had never been done before; again, unprecedented action being pursued in the name of restoration, drawn from a familiar rhetorical playbook. By the time of the referendum, warnings against “1970s-style socialism” by Cameron, or “1970s blend of divisiveness and business-bashing and union control” by Johnson, were well-established historical caricatures used to demonise Labour in the present. The progression from deriding the decade as a series of socialist failures, to a series of more general failures, was made easier by the established pattern of Conservative figures warning against various figures “turning into” Ted “Who Governs?” Heath. The expansion of the “rolling back” rhetoric therefore grew from existing explanations: mistakes were made in the 1970s; now they must be undone. The appeal for those who support this view of EU membership lies perhaps partly in the simplicity of its framing. If joining the EU gave away sovereignty to some other entity, then surely that can be taken back, as if power had the properties of three-dimensional objects, given as gifts which could be reclaimed years after being handed to an ungrateful recipient.

The problem with these stories is that their power does not necessarily reflect their correspondence to realities, even when they “make sense”. In this case, Brexit is not simply rolling back the frontiers of a European state, and sovereignty is not a finite object that can be moved around at will. Brexit involves dissolving and remaking legal structures which are interwoven. The world has changed since 1975 and therefore nothing can simply be “undone” or returned to that context. It must be actively made anew. Precedent thinking’s compelling power helped propel the Conservative Party into positions of power, but that does not mean that it reflects the legal and economic realities being faced.

In order to even propose the Brexit referendum, Cameron was therefore unleashing culturally-conservative precedent thinking from the market radicalism it used to be yoked to. The decision to not only hold the referendum, but to treat it as a mandate for policy, the political balance which was the core of the Thatcherite narrative composite has broken down. Now, the symbolic is not only ascendant, it is dictating the political show. Its needs and demands are imposed politically above all others; the colour of a passport, the shape of a banana, are so important that the barely-remembered (by the English) partition of Ireland could raise recurrent practical difficulties for a Brexit settlement, and a new border could be drawn around Kent. In this logic, unprecedented borders are being devised to correct imagined historical errors. It is of course not historically new for there to be a disconnect between actual political action, and how it is seen or described. The shape and nature of the current gap, however, indicates the voraciousness of exclusionary cultural conservatism which drives this idea of repairing a breach of precedent. The political symbolism of winding back, of restoring, of erasing interventions and removing mistakes, is being pursued at the expense of both former allies as well as opponents, and overrides other precedents in favour of the primary goal. As a structure of feeling, Brexit’s precedent thinking overrides all other precedents, in favour of one national story, pursued specifically because of its exclusionary power.

Through this pattern of reading the present moment as the culmination of a narrow, continuous historical narrative, British elite political culture was predisposed to a symbolically rich, and materially violent, response to COVID-19. Not long after 20 March 2020, the BT Tower messages slipped back into more familiar symbolic messages, echoing the wider patterns of government framing: stay at home slogans, and announcing the times of “clap for carers,” the movement perversely co-opted by a political and media class to venerate the same NHS which they had sought for decades to gut into a corporate marketplace. These cheery broadcast fictions of unity conflicted with the very disparate experiences of the pandemic across Britain, where COVID-19 has further compounded existing racial, class, regional, gender, and social divisions, running through existing fault lines of inequality. These widening injustices added resonance and further impetus to Black Lives Matter and trans rights protests; yet the images broadcast from the BT Tower, and in official rhetoric, were of an artificial unity, where everyone was pitching in together against a common “enemy”. Amongst commemorations of VE Day, Armed Forces Day, and VJ Day, the BT Tower marked the date of the then-postponed London Pride events by broadcasting the Pride flag (notably, not including trans flag stripes). Drawing on Churchillian analogies which Brexit had left at his fingertips, Johnson’s attempts to associate a virus with the Second World War reflected the importance of invoking the most powerful precedent available, even where the content of that precedent was based on mythic fiction rather than reality. The binaristic framing of Second World War precedents, of “us” and “them”, also proved useful when opposing the “enemy within”, or the resurgence of protest movements against the idealisation of imperial cruelty. During the BLM protests in London in June 2020, the idea of potentially moving a statue of Churchill from Parliament Square was one that Johnson swore to “resist with every breath in [his] body.” The very principle of ideal tradition and greatness could be “defended” through the proxy of defending slavers’ and imperialists’ statues, tangibly illustrating the narrow, canonical chain of authority which Conservative precedent thinking locates themselves within.

The persistence of this all-purpose militant language, even after Johnson’s own experience of the virus might have cautioned him towards its inadequacy for use against microorganisms, illustrates how structurally reliant British conservatism is on Churchillian tropes of “Britain Alone”. The nationalist focus also indicates how little awareness the British government has with countries which have achieved temporary successes in COVID-19 management, even when these include Commonwealth nations which theoretically appeal to Brexit-era Conservative imperial nostalgia. Rather than trying to look for lessons from the present from outside its borders, Britain has looked to ill-fitting mythologies of the past. In a global pandemic, postcolonial melancholic allusions to fighting them on the beaches indicate how narrow the library of precedent-bound thinking which political rhetoric draws from has become, and how locating the present in this lineage distorts how it is perceived.