Oblivion or cosmocracy: the terrible dilemma of weapons of mass destruction

Inevitable self-destruction?

In 1994 the Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum, giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security guarantees, in what was regarded as an exemplar of nuclear non-proliferation. By 2022 , with a full blown invasion of the Ukraine by the Russian Federation, those security guarantees were in shreds, and even Ukraine’s western allies, fearful of a nuclear war, avoided direct intervention against Putin’s forces . The lesson from the Ukraine seems to be that any society lacking such weapons, even if it has nuclear armed friends, is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to deterring aggression from a society that does.

Nevertheless, the continued existence of nuclear weapons seems in itself to condemn humanity to eventual terrible loss of life, the likely collapse of civilisation and possible extinction.

History is a chaotic process, a random walk through a landscape of different possible social states, that continually appears to seek more stable points, simply because stable points, by definition, endure longer.

Now, there are some who would argue against such a view of history, who would argue that it is too passive, that it underplays “agency”, the role of human will. However, there are two countervailing considerations to consider. The first is simply that the consequences of human actions, especially when we referring to the cumulative actions of billions, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes contradicting or interfering with each other in unpredictable ways, frequently interacting with a general environmental context that may itself not be fully understood, are often unintended. The second countervailing consideration is more subtle: if history is process through which we all try and seek solutions to our problems, in such a way as to allow us to achieve whatever we define as our goals, then those historical states that appear closest to solutions, at least to the most numerous or powerful “problem solvers”, will also tend to be more stable, as the historical actors of most influence will not be actively seeking to change those states. Therefore any view of history as a problem solving process, as a reflection of human agency, is itself just a subset of the view of history as a process that continually seeks out new “islands of stability”.

Now, in a situation where massively destructive weapons such as nuclear devices exist, there are only two such islands of stability into which history could drift: oblivion or a world government, or “cosmocracy” in the jargon, with a monopoly on the remaining Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

At this point it is natural to wonder why a world disarmed of WMDs is not a stable solution. The answer is because, though it’s a cliché, these devices really can’t be disinvented; in fact, as technology advances, such weapons are ever more likely to become easier to manufacture and use. We could, for example, imagine techniques being invented to more readily enrich fissionable materials. Another factor currently restricting the actual use of nuclear weapons is that the requirement for a certain critical mass of fissionable material, to trigger a detonation, means that these weapons have a minimum explosive yield, and can never be made entirely clean in terms of radioactive fallout. That is why research has been ongoing for decades to find ways to make sub-critical nuclear-style devices, such as nuclear isomer triggered bombs, or even “pure fusion” devices, where less or no radioactive material is needed in the detonator, and the yield can be reduced to span the large gap between conventional explosives and that of today’s nuclear weapons. Though such weapons may naively seem less dangerous, they actually lower the bar blocking escalation from a conventional war to a full blown use of weapons of mass destruction, and make such an outcome more likely.

Always remember that this the most sensitive area of military research and development. It is shrouded with not only with the deepest secrecy, but also bluff and disinformation. Even arch rival nations may collaborate to suppress secrets that could undermine their own nuclear domination or, if we want to be more forgiving of their motives, risk dangerous nuclear proliferation. Some of the developments talked about above may not only be closer that we might otherwise think, but could even have already happened. The first time we would know would be when the resultant weapons are actually used, just as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now, let’s assume for a moment that, despite all of these concerns, it is possible to genuinely, say, disarm the world totally of nuclear weapons or their equivalents. This would, in and of itself, be a highly desirable outcome as, for a time at least, it would make the world a much safer place. Such a state of affairs could endure for as long as all sides are willing to accept being policed to prove they are abiding with the rules. However, it would start to breakdown with any decline in mutual trust. As and when the world/humanity re-divides into armed camps, engaged in direct or proxy conventional war, each will race to re-develop WMDs. Then either the competing powers will attain a similar capability at a similar time, in which case the upshot is, again, a dangerous stalemate and some form of mutually assured destruction, or one side will seize its temporary advantage in such highly destructive weapons to conquer all others. In the latter case the end result is again a world with a single government with a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, but one wrought by force not consensus.

The counter-argument to all the above is that it over-emphasises the actual military, and political, usefulness of weapons of mass destruction. You can’t, for example, keep order on the streets with nuclear weapons. However, a conquering power does not need to exert such a detailed level of control: merely being able to dominate the local government, including its military establishment, and its associated elites, such that some level of direct or indirect “tribute” can be extracted, is sufficient. That is a purpose for which the threat, or even where necessary occasional use, of weapons of mass destruction, is entirely effective.

Nuclear weapons, or their possible equivalents, are the most efficient way to dump massive amounts of energy on any given target. No other weapon comes even close: not the most powerful “conventional” thermobaric bombs, nor even dropping a mass matching that of a typical nuclear missile from the height of the Moon. As such these armaments are the most effective way to cripple hardened targets such as missile silos, command bunkers or submarine pens, or to destroy physically extensive targets such as airfields, ports, depots or industrial facilities, or to eliminate concentrations of conventional forces, such as armoured convoys or naval squadrons (more here: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century). Failing all that, they can also subdue an opposing population through sheer terror.

Apparently, humanity cannot survive nuclear weapons, but equally cannot relinquish nuclear weapons without inviting subjugation by those who are so ruthless they are willing to play the nuclear card to bully and coerce. Is there a way out of this terrible dilemma?

Is this all outdated thinking?

We have to ask, though, in these days of cyberwarfare, mass disinformation campaigns and drone swarms, is such blunt force thinking now, or soon to be, outdated?

The famous sociologist Max Weber defined a state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” We could pick holes in that, mainly that the use of the word “legitimate” is somewhat circular, but the fact remains that it is the state that can project overriding overt violence over the territory that it controls. Asymmetric forces, such as guerilla fighters, may be able to defeat units of the state military, but only using “hit and run” tactics: if they don’t run, reinforcements will arrive and the guerillas will then be forced to retreat or face death or capture. Where this situation ceases to be the case, and it is the guerillas themselves who can have the final say in any pitched battle, then the guerillas have taken control of that territory themselves and essentially become the local state.

In this contest, to be able to project overwhelming violence over an area or volume of space, the side possessing the most energetic weapon systems will always have the advantage. The side willing and able to simply obliterate the battlefield, if the other side isn’t willing and able to retaliate in kind, will always ultimately win.

Disinformation campaigns may win a political struggle without a shot being fired, and cyberattacks can disrupt an opponent’s war-fighting capability. But once two sides are locked in a hot war, in a fight for survival, it is that ability to project overwhelming violence that is still the deciding factor.

Furthermore, even very dispersed attacks, such as those mounted by a swarm of drones or possibly even much smaller weapons systems, can still be countered very effectively with highly energetic weapons, such as nuclear warheads. For starters, these swarms are physically extensive targets, just like airfields, military bases or ports, that, provided the inevitable collateral damage is accepted, could be destroyed in a single strike by a WMD, either in the resultant explosion, or as a result of additional effects such as electromagnetic pulse. More importantly, unless such distributed weapon systems are, very inadvisedly, entirely autonomous, then they will still be under some form of human control, implying the need for command and control input routed from and via limited locations, such as bunkers. Such concentrated and likely hardened command and control loci are, as we have seen, prime targets for WMDs.

Ultimately, it seems there is no easy way to avoid the decisive military usefulness of these terrible weapons. We are therefore back to our two stable outcomes: oblivion or a world government with a monopoly on use of these WMDs. Given that the latter state is preferable to the former, the question then becomes how to best transition to that world government as peaceful as possible, and ensure that the resultant political structures are benevolent.

Some basic principles for cosmocracy

It should also be noted that a world government, in so far as it could represent humanity coming together as a community, is not only a desirable outcome, but morally obligatory. It is, arguably, the world unity, the coming together of the human family, the “brotherhood of man” (and sisterhood of humanity), so long sought.

Here (Questions and some answers: how to live with yourself and others) is the derivation of a basic reciprocal morality centred around respecting the wants of needs of others as much as your own, provided they return that respect. This is the essentially the moral “Golden Rule” advocated by many mainstream religions and humanists alike. It is a basic ethical principle elucidated repeatedly since ancient times, where the adoption of farming increased population densities and settlement sizes so human beings, evolved to live in bands of relatives and the very familiar, had to solve a fundamental problem: how to create and sustain social relations among relative strangers.

Such a morality knows no bounds. It does not stop at the edges of existing community, nation, “race” or even species. As the referenced article says, “This rule encourages us to create what could be termed a ‘growing moral community’. Note that the moral community could include many beings capable of acting morally towards each other, in other words of following the above simple rule… Membership of the ‘moral community’ is therefore not limited to beings of a particular tribe or nation, or even species, or even order of being, such as created and non-created, as in evolved, beings.”

That is the principle that obligates not only attempting to bring all of humanity into one single community, but ultimately embracing all beings, capable of participating in that reciprocal morality, into such a community. That community then needs a way to regulate itself and to defend against those who would do it harm. It needs a government created from, run by and accountable to the community.

In other words, merely accepting that relationships between communities, such as modern international relations, are essentially dog-eat-dog, is to reject, or at least constrain, a Golden Rule based morality, and therefore be selfish. We are obligated to strive for something better: to create the most universal moral community we are capable of creating. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this morality, of respecting the wants and needs of others, provided they return that respect, is reciprocal. Just as an individual has every right to defend themselves against other individuals who do not reciprocate, so it is with sovereign societies. Indeed, as upholding and extending a system of moral relations is itself a moral act, then deliberately failing to do so is therefore a immoral act. That means that we are also obligated to defend a moral community against those, internal or external, who would undermine or attack it.

However paradoxical it may seem that our cosmocracy, an attempt to create a moral, kind, even loving, moral community, should possess the most powerful weapons that are then conceivable to protect itself, weapons that, used ruthlessly and cruelly, can have appallingly horrific consequences, the absolute obligation to defend a system of moral relations is the resolution to that paradox. If such weapons are conceivable than they will eventually be created and wielded against a moral community by its opponents, if those opponents know that the moral community is incapable or unwilling to respond in kind. That will eventually doom such a system of moral relations to destruction. Militant defence of a moral community is itself an act of love, as the alternative is, in the final analysis, to give the cruel and the selfish free reign.

Taking the moral high ground, showing compassion and understanding, even love, for enemies can weaken the resolve of many opponents and sap their support. Love can conquer most things though, sadly, not entities incapable of experiencing even roughly equivalent feeling in return, and to base any long term plan on an assumption that such entities do not and cannot exist would be very foolish indeed.

Now, if creating a cosmocracy, and ensuring it is strong enough to endure, is a moral obligation, we are back to asking how we transition to that world government as peacefully as possible, and how to best guarantee that the resultant political structures are, and remain, benevolent. Merely possessing a very powerful weapons capability offers essential protection against opponents who may also obtain access to such weapons, but it is no guarantee against tyranny. In fact some would say it invites it, as, say, a nuclear armed global super state, perhaps the very “New World Order” that so many conspiracy theorists fear, threatens any rebellious communities with an ultimate sanction.

Just as the article (Questions and some answers: how to live with yourself and others) derives a reciprocal morality based on the Golden Rule, it also works through the consequences of such a system on how we should organise our society. In particular, as only individuals can really decide on their own wants and needs, on what is subjectively most important to themselves, that article places a huge importance on society being run by consent and consensus. It also stresses that everyone must have an equal say in producing that consensus, as the principle that we should respect the wants of needs of others as much as our own contains within it an implicit but clear commitment on each of us to treat the wants and needs of all, who reciprocate, as equal.

On that basis the article derives a set of principles for governance as follows:

Democratic systems arise directly from this system of morality, and democratic systems that encourage compromise and consensus , rather than those that merely tend to allow a majority to overrule everything and everyone else. Majority decision making should only be a last resort where a decision has to be made and differences are otherwise irreconcilable.

The autonomy of every member of a sovereign society to live according to their own wants and needs must be respected, with the limits to that autonomy, where those limits are necessitated by the fact that anyone’s actions could affect anyone else, defined only by the consensus of that society.

In practice though, a sovereign society is usually composed of many smaller societies, and we each may find ourselves as members of a range of overlapping “communities”. Just as there has to be respect for the autonomy of the individual, so there must be respect for the communities of which we are all a part, at least in so far as those communities themselves reciprocate by respecting this moral system, as those communities will reflect an important part of our own identities, of our own feelings about how best to fulfil our wants and needs, of what “works for us”. Therefore the autonomy of these component societies must be respected in the same way as the autonomy of individuals, with the limits to that autonomy, where those limits are necessitated by the fact that community’s actions could affect other communities and individuals outside that community, defined only by the consensus of both all the members of the sovereign society and all component societies to which those restrictions in autonomy will apply.

Furthermore, the principles derivable by combining a reciprocal form of the Golden Rule with the observation that only we can really know the contents of our own minds, are absolutely fundamental but also, precisely because of being absolutely fundamental, entirely general. How those principles should be applied in detail will vary according to specific circumstances, and again may require a lot of subjective decision making that can only be deferred to a social consensus of some kind. This means that we should respect diversity in the component societies of any sovereign society in terms of their detailed formal and informal rules.

World federalism

Now, applying these principles to a cosmocracy results in the following deductions:

A world government would have to be democratic, with voting systems that encourage the generation of a consensus, for example with preferential and proportional systems being favoured over “winner takes all” systems such first passed the post.

A world government would have to be rules-based, with the rules derived by consensus, or by the decision of the majority if a consensus is not possible, and those rules applying equally to all.

The requirement for a world government to respect the autonomy and diversity of component societies means that decisions have to be made on a basis of “subsidiarity”, meaning delegated to the most local level possible, so that that structure of the cosmocracy will have to be federal, indeed most likely comprising of many levels of nested federations. It isn’t a unitary structure because some autonomy is retained by its component societies, but with the extent of the autonomy of the component societies agreed by the whole. It isn’t confederal because component societies have no moral way to leave the whole provided the whole is still functioning as a moral community, though they can campaign for changes the rules, including to the limits on autonomy. (In a confederation any member should be free to leave at any time).

The federal structure of the world government must give both individual citizens a voice and component societies, most likely “member nations”, a voice, implying at least a two level structure.

A world government would have to promote equality, both before the law and in terms of ability to access life’s essentials.

Equality applies to both individuals and the component societies, the “member nations”. Any arrangements that give some member societies of the cosmocracy more rights than other member societies are abhorrent. Having something like an executive “Security Council” with a few privileged “permanent members” each of which has a solitary power of veto, is completely unacceptable.

Serving all citizens and communities, and doing so equally but also without violating autonomy, while allowing everyone to have a fair say in influencing consensus generation, will mean that a benevolent world government would also have to enshrine certain basic and important needs as “human rights”. As well as being rules-based, a world government will also be specifically rights-based. To best ensure that those rights can only be changed with a broad consensus, they will have to be made difficult to change, for example requiring supermajority voting and/or a vote followed by a confirmatory vote after a “cooling off” period, to alter or abolish.

We should also not forget to “follow the money”. Unless a world government has some control of its own purse strings it will be laughably weak. It cannot be dependent on “contributions” from member states that it will, in all likelihood, have little power to actually enforce. Two sources of funds should be reasonably obvious. The first is taxing the use of resources that are meant, according to international law, to be the common property of all humanity, such as those in international waters, or in the rest of the Solar System. Simply letting billionaires seize all these resources, in something approaching a repeat of the enclosures of the commons and land grabs of the past, is not acceptable. Anyone utilising anything that is common property, especially in a way that depletes its value, should compensate everyone else, so the world government collecting such levies, and using those for the general benefit, is perfectly reasonable. Secondly, the world government should be able to progressively tax the profits of multinational corporations, which would also help to prevent a fiscal race to the bottom as nations compete to attract internal investment by offering the most favourable taxation regimes, and often the services of outright tax havens. Also, to avoid the possibility of a world government ever being forced into bankruptcy, it should be able to create direct claims on resources by issuing its own legal tender, most likely some form of digital currency. This would have the added advantage of giving the world a universal reserve currency independent of any individual nation.

Similarly, so it can respond quickly to emergencies and intervene rapidly to enforce the peace, a meaningful world government must also have some conventional armed forces of its own. It must not be entirely dependent on borrowing the armed forces of its member societies, and any use, or threat of use, of WMDs must be a last resort.

It must be realised that a world government dependent on contributions from its richest member societies, or military support from the best armed, will end up beholden to a few of the most powerful nations and therefore not able to act with equal respect for all. That is why allowing the world government its own tax raising powers and military is so important.

Preventing tyranny

Nevertheless, some may feel that such a world government, with a high degree of financial and military independence and a monopoly on WMDs, would be too powerful, and create a risk of global tyranny. Now, it is important to take the risk of tyranny, of a government that, instead of serving all equally, acts as an instrument that allows a ruling elite to exploit the many, to subordinate the needs and wishes of the ruled to those of the rulers, especially seriously in the case of any form of cosmocracy. That is because, for a cosmocracy, there is no outside. Though the lack of an outside means that the rulers cannot use the typical trick of imposing order at home by asserting the existence of some external enemy, it also means that there is no outside people can run to, no hope of liberation assisted by any outside party, and no chance that, through defeat in war, the ability of the government to maintain control by projecting violence will be weakened. If a cosmocracy becomes tyrannical it could remain tyrannical for a very long time.

That situation could even be regarded as another “island of stability”. If so our choice would be between oblivion in a holocaust caused by widespread use of weapons of mass destruction, most likely starving to death in an equivalent to a nuclear winter, or accepting prolonged global tyranny.

To avoid this grim possibility the powers of a world government must be circumscribed, and not merely by democracy, a federal structure and strong legal protections for universal individual and community rights. Even though all WMDs must be surrendered to the world government, it is also important that the component societies retain their militaries. The military capabilities of the world government must also be agreed and limited democratically. Now, the main point of the military establishment of the world government is to prevent any aggression between its component societies, to allow it to act quickly and independently to force peace in the event of a surprise outbreak of hostilities. It would therefore be wise to keep the size of the armed forces of the world government at very least equal to those of the single most militarily powerful of its component societies, as a minimum. As a reasonable maximum, however, it must not exceed the capabilities of, say, the most well armed half of its member societies combined. Though, in the normal course of events, the purpose of each member society’s military is to deal with domestic threats and emergencies and to assist the world government in peace keeping and disaster relief, it must also be possible for a majority combination of member states to overthrow and re-constitute the world government should it slip into tyranny.

The cache of WMDs available to the world government must also be restricted to a democratically agreed limit. The purpose of these weapons is two-fold. Primarily it is to reduce the advantage that any potential opponent could gain by developing such weapons themselves, so both deterring such a course of action in the first place, and allowing decisive intervention against any entity that does develop such weapons, as the world government could counter any use with a strike of their own, or even use its own WMDs to pre-emptively destroy its opponent’s WMDs. Secondly, and more generally, the world government could also, if necessary, use such weapons to attain a military advantage in an otherwise conventional conflict.

To achieve these limited ends, the size of the WMD cache can be, indeed must be, constrained. In the case of action being needed against a member society or other entity that has illegally developed WMDs, it is very likely that a potential adversary could not acquire many of these weapons before being detected. In the more general scenario of deploying the weapons for actual war-fighting, it is possible that the opportunities for using such devices, although probably critical to the outcome of any conflict, without causing mass civilian casualties, or other unacceptable collateral damage, would be limited. Finally, the cache must not be so large that is full-scale use could threaten the continuation of human (or equivalent) life, either directly or through indirect effects, such as nuclear winter. After all, the main points of this whole arrangement, of vesting control of WMDs with a world government, is to eliminate WMDs as an existential threat, so it would be entirely contradictory to allow the world government to possess such a large stockpile that its own WMDs would still pose the same threat.

In the worst case scenario we should imagine the world government’s WMD cache falling into hostile hands, and all fail-safes preventing their use somehow being bypassed. Of course, in the control of the utterly ruthless, even a small cache of these devices could be used to terrify and there-by subdue civilian populations, essentially holding millions to hostage. Nevertheless, we must also be cognisant of the fact that such an act of mass terrorism is likely to discredit the cause of any faction that so acts: that to menace the general population in this way would be political suicide. Furthermore we should note again, as discussed above, that though WMDs could be effective at subjugating populations at a high level, to coerce governments and ruling elites, such devices are very blunt instruments to keep control on the streets. Conventional military and security forces are more useful for that. By making the world government’s ultimate ability to keep order more reliant on WMDs, and less on conventional military forces, we reduce the possibility that it could turn completely totalitarian, meaning being able to use an extensive security apparatus to enforce its rule over every aspect of life, there-by closing down any possibility of resistance or dissent.

The restricted size of the cache should also mean that, even though they would risk very heavy casualties, opposition by the armed forces of a sufficiently large coalition of member states would still by capable of overthrowing a world government that had turned tyrannical. Therefore, the limited size of this cache is a very important factor in ensuring the military balance between the world government and its member societies.

The critical advantages of world federalism

Of course, though we expect military establishments to be retained at various levels, this would not prevent disarmament, provided that the sizes of the various armed forces, those of the world government and component societies, are kept in proportion. Indeed, as minimum sizes of the armed forces, to keep order against paramilitary threat or in disaster situations, or to allow effective overthrow of the world government should it attempt an executive coup, could be low, there would be considerable scope for mutual disarmament. The very structures of the world government itself, by removing threats and facilitating negotiation, would encourage disarmament still further.

Disarmament would reduce resources wasted on sustaining military establishments that, hopefully, never actually have to be used, and, if used, may be expended and degraded very quickly. That in itself would be one key benefit of a cosmocracy, and one clearly closely associated with the main advantage of cosmocracy: removing the threat of global holocaust.

Next on the list would obviously be dealing more effectively with the existential threat of climate catastrophe. Greenhouse gases care nothing about borders, and only collective action at the widest level, enforced by mutually agreed rules to prevent free-loading, can deal with that essential issue and ensure that any survivable future is possible at all (more here: The climate crisis and why only collective action can solve it).

Beyond the critical issues of environmental crisis, and risk of nuclear holocaust, there are many other vital challenges that are also easier to handle at the global level. Fighting pandemics is also imperative, as it is genuinely the case that, in a world where anyone can be anywhere within a few hours, no one is safe until everyone is safe. Then there is disaster relief, itself a more demanding task as the worst effects of climate change kick in. Administering the global economy to prevent absolute want, correcting instabilities and reducing inequality is also necessary. That includes distributing economic aid to those in need and, vitally, ensuring a minimum level of international regulation and taxation so that questionable, even criminal, economic practises do not go unchecked, of the kind that can lead to a flight of capital to the lowest tax, most weakly regulated domains, and sometimes even bring down entire financial systems. Then there is peace keeping in general, ridding the world of the appalling scourge of war, and upholding standards of international human rights.

The final advantage of an openly formalised, rule-bound, rights-based, democratic, world government is that it avoids the emergence of a far less accountable and potentially tyrannical situation where some approximation of world hegemony is arrived by other means, possibly even drifted into semi-accidentally as a result of “globalisation”.

Some, such as those who are fearful of the secretive creation of what they call a “New World Order”, would argue we at or close to this point already. It is certainly the case that the super-rich have come to form a new international elite, with domiciles in many countries, investments in multinational corporations, savings in tax havens, children educated in the world’s most elite schools and universities, and often multiple citizenships, even though citizenships in particular nations often aren’t really needed for the super-rich, who are seemingly welcome anywhere. While the poor of the world’s nations are often marginalised and persecuted even at home, the super-rich are elevated to apparent “citizens of the world”.

Nevertheless, sovereign nations are still important, even to this new elite. Along with their global businesses, nations are also the chess pieces they move as they play out their rivalries with each other. Most national governments are heavily influenced by this class, and some have been entirely captured: in fact, as those with political power steal the wealth, and those with the wealth buy the political power, the political and economic elites have often merged, with sources of riches from political or economic dealings very difficult to disentangle. Nations are a major source of funds because of the taxes they raise and spend, and, by and large, nations are still the main instrument for projecting organised violence. As of yet, though there are many private security forces, there are, right now, no corporate armies as significant as that once possessed by, for example, the British East India Company. If you want to crack open up a particular territory to your machinations, or seek to deprive anyone of their life or liberty, using the security forces of a nation-state is often the most direct way to achieve such ends, as well as providing considerable legal cover for actions that otherwise could incur the most severe punishments. Finally, it is usually sovereign nations that make most of the rules that apply on the ground, so the international elite needs to influence the governments of nations in order to ensure a legislative environment amenable to its own interests.

This use of nations as chess pieces in a game of their own, with the the mass of humanity caught somewhere in the middle, means that this “New World Order” doesn’t even guarantee world peace. Indeed, the continuation of localised conflicts provides a lucrative side-line in terms of investment opportunities in the arms trade. The cynical reality is actually that this new global elite normally actively campaigns against the development of international institutions that could genuinely hold its power in check. International structures that force open all parts of the world to so-called “free trade”, often meaning low taxation, privatisation and minimal regulation, are favoured, while all others are undermined. Nationalism is often encouraged as a trick to delude populations into opposing internationalism. while accepting the rule of local political factions that are, in the final analysis, tightly connected to, and really dominated by, this global elite.

In this way, an open, formal, accountable, people-driven, world federalist project along the lines we are exploring here heads off the continuing emergence of a global hegemony that really only serves the world’s elite. It is not the creation of a global tyranny, but the necessary antidote to it: a critical mechanism for keeping the power of this predatory international elite in check.

How could cosmocracy come about?

So, if the creation of some form of world government is essential to defeating threats as diverse as nuclear holocaust, climate catastrophe, pandemics, war and predatory elites we are left wondering how such a state of affairs can be brought into being peaceably.

As our interlocking crises cause our species’ situation to deteriorate, with climate change, resource shortages, pandemics, refugee crises, economic collapse and wars, all feeding off each other, it is possible that significant numbers of the global elite, where their power hasn’t been curbed by more localised efforts to promote a combination of political and economic democracy, will come to see improved global governance as essential for even the promotion of their own interests. An extensively uninhabitable greenhouse baked Earth or one ravaged first by nuclear holocaust, and then by the decade long famine of a nuclear winter is, ultimately, not good for business. Some may even prefer that the increasingly bothersome business of politics be “outsourced” elsewhere, while they concentrate on their core activity of making money.

In such a situation weakening opposition, and even grudging support, from the more benign, and themselves increasingly anxious, sections of the global elite, coupled with a popular demand across the world for better and more accountable leadership at a global level, to alleviate terrible suffering and mass death, could yield a compromise where this world federalist project is allowed to go ahead. It may even happen in time to prevent total disaster.

One thing is important to note, though: in this context any attempt on the part of any power group, or temporary alliance of power groups, to create a world government, that would be viewed, at the time, as likely to be authoritarian, would probably precipitate the very final cataclysm it is meant to avert. It is much safer, and less painful, to construct a world government that aims to be democratic, than one that is authoritarian. That’s because people will be considerably more inclined to pool their power if they believe that they will still have a say: that their viewpoint and needs will be respected. In an authoritarian system some groups will grab all the power; others will be forced into a submissive role, subject to exploitation, possible persecution and even extermination. If the emergence of such a state of affairs is anticipated, individuals and groups, especially powerful individuals and groups, will fight like “rats in a sack” to ensure it is they who come out on top. In a world where multiple competing groups have access to WMDs, the creation of a world government that those groups expect to be authoritarian, is blocked by wars so intense that they equate to the apocalypse.

Even in the unlikely event that the most powerful in the global elite manage to cooperate sufficiently to instigate the establishment of an authoritarian global government, it is unlikely that the venture could be brought to fruition before the factions and families within the elite, fearful of betrayal, fall out with each other, and the armed forces of the nations under their influence go to war. Even for the most ruthless amongst them, it is therefore better to launch such a scheme on a democratic basis and then plot to try to take it over again later. Only a democratic, accountable, plan for global governance can inspire the widespread support, from the most powerful to the most marginalised in the global population, necessary to actually succeed.

Once we take a view of historical development as a “random walk” between islands of stability we should pay careful heed to the oft-quoted words that Arthur Conan Doyle put in the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. ” For our present purposes, we could amend that as follows: “Whenever history has done with the unstable and transient, whatever remains, however once unthinkable, is an attainable stable state”. The world federation we are outlining here is one such state. Far from being over-idealistic, it is one of the few stable destinations to which the current world situation actually could lead.

What can we do?

If this world federalist project is so essential, what can we do as individuals to best promote its success? Of course, having the debate and sharing ideas such as the above can help. Crucially, there are also already influential campaigns running in which we can engage. Firstly, there is the campaign for a world parliament, the support of which even includes a former UN Secretary-General. You can read about that and sign up here: Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly.

On the issue of nuclear weapons, the UN itself actually adopted a “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” in 2021, ratified, at the time of writing, by 60 nations (see: Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons). Of course, what we have argued above is that a more realistic alternative would be for all nuclear weapons to be banned except for a smaller cache of nuclear weapons, or weapons of equivalent destructive energies, that would be controlled by a world government, in order to protect everyone from their secret retention or re-development. Nevertheless, right now, that caveat could be regarded as a detail, and anything that encourages the reduction of these terrible and hugely threatening weapons is to be supported. Also, the analysis above could be flawed, and so, as nuclear weapons pose such an extreme risk to the survival of our species, we should hedge our bets and promote anything that could mitigate that risk. To that end the UN initiative to prohibit nuclear weapons also has an associated campaign, which you can read about and sign up to here: The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

And in the further future…

Just negotiating our immediate crises, especially the nuclear threat and climate change, without a mass die-off or civilizational extinction, would itself be a significant achievement, and we have seen how a world government could critically contribute to such an outcome. Otherwise we don’t even have a further future to worry about in the first place. However, in the longer run, stable doesn’t mean eternal: even a pan-human government with a monopoly on the use of weapons of mass destruction, with its own military and tax-raising powers, built on a foundation of consent and broad consensus and with no external threats, wouldn’t last forever. Eventually settlements would be established beyond its effective control, and/or a split would occur, or some faction would manage to secretly develop enough of its own WMDs to offset the pan-human government’s WMDs. We are not saying this situation is eternal, more that it is longer lasting than the disarmed but still divided, or prone to be divided, situation, with no central government with a monopoly of use on the most extremely energetic weapons.

Nevertheless, when that split eventually occurs, humanity would again develop into separate armed camps, threatening each other with WMDs, arguably the most unstable of all the possible scenarios, with the next attainable stable states again being apocalypse or a unified WMD armed government.

If that is the case, then is the only really stable solution oblivion after all? Once we have developed weapons sufficiently powerful that we can wipe out significant fractions of humanity on a single order, have we then doomed ourselves to eventual extinction?

Not necessarily: there are ways out of even this final dilemma. Humanity, or at least something human descended, could expand faster than our ability to destroy ourselves, firstly into the rest of the Solar System, possibly eventually to the stars. Alternatively, or additionally, we could develop self-evolving and eventually god-like AIs, hard-wired for benevolence (though perhaps doing something like that is the only way out of another dilemma, if you stop to think about it).

We could also transform ourselves, perhaps transcend our tendency for violent conflict. A start would be to kindle a genuine interest in a rational moral philosophy not dependent on metaphysical leaps of faith, or that instead, in the final analysis, collapses into mere moral relativism, and then, once we have established such principles at the core of our society, to reorganise politics and economics on that foundation. If that sounds utopian we should remember (for example, as Jeremy Lent does in his seminal work “The Patterning Instinct”) that our “software” is as important as our “hardware”, so that our ideas shape our future as much as the material facts of our existence. We could also, indeed must also, screen out those with psychopathic tendencies from high office (as explored here: Should psychopaths be screened out of holding positions of power?), so that we can’t be plunged into the abyss by an act of pure uncaring malice. Perhaps we could even alter ourselves, take charge of our own evolution, though any such process must be undertaken consensually and with great care, not splitting the species even further into haves and have-nots, like the Eloi and Morlocks in H G Well’s “The Time Machine”, and always bearing in mind that those initiating any such process will be us, flawed humanity, so we must draw deep on wells of wisdom before embarking on any such endeavour, or the results could be tragic. (Incidentally, H G Wells was also a “world federalist”, as were many others: see H G Wells and the war to end war).

Of course, should we choose to follow the never ending expansion escape route out of our otherwise seemingly inevitable self-destruction, and do so without somehow remaking ourselves somehow first, then we can only wonder how the rest of the universe might react to such a potential disturbance.

To avoid war in Europe walk a while in each other’s shoes

Putin is the psychopathic chief oligarch of a gang of oligarchs, many, like Putin himself, with former KGB associations, who largely acquired their wealth by using violence and “kompromat” to steal the once at least notionally public assets of the former Soviet Union. These people are the enemies of democracy everywhere, whether at home or abroad.

But they aren’t completely irrational. They are not hell-bent on world conquest: especially as any such attempt would most likely render said world into radioactive ash, making even a successful conquest rather pointless. Why take such risks when they can simply use “soft power” to get what they want, such a buying up large tracts of London or the UK’s Conservative Party? (See: “Dodgy friends, sinister connections”).

Any attacks on democracy are completely unacceptable: whether by creeping corruption and power grab, or murderous armed assault. Also, mass violence causes horrific suffering, often to the entirely innocent, and can only ever be a very last resort. The ongoing war in the Ukraine has already cost 14 000 deaths, and any further intensification would both be a nightmare and an absolute tragedy.

A situation like this is usually exploited by tyrants and would be tyrants to bolster their own domestic power, by riding waves of nationalism, or by at least by causing a distraction. Despite all the posturing, sometimes these conflicts can actually benefit elites on both sides, increasing their domestic power and the value of their arms investments, with the real victims and losers just being the ordinary people caught in the middle.

But, having said all this, there are genuine concerns on all sides that must be respected. Ukraine and the nations of Eastern Europe fear Russian aggression and want security guarantees. The West wants a stable and peaceful border in Europe, and the overwhelming majority of its citizens want to uphold democracy and avoid humanitarian disasters. The Russians, having been invaded from the west three times since the time of Napoleon at the cost of millions of lives, and having been on the losing side of a Cold War, want security guarantees of their own. The Ukraine played a key role in the original formation of Russia itself (as part of the Kievan Rus’ federation). Imagine, for example, how the British would feel if the Cold War had gone differently, and now Scotland or Wales were considering joining the Warsaw Pact? That the Russians do not want NATO, an extremely well armed military alliance led by a super-power that was their arch rival for most of the 20^th Century, to extend right to their borders, is entirely understandable.

Now, there are many arguments about whether the West broke promises to Russia regarding NATO expansion. Perhaps it would be best to leave the last word on that to Gorbachev himself, who said this in a 2014 interview: “The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.” (See: “Mikhail Gorbachev I am against all walls”).

Personally I would prefer all the people of the world to link arms and peacefully overthrow all of those in power, who, with the odd exception, are generally “aholes”. But absent that perhaps remote possibility we should avoid another war in Europe by trying to walk for a while in each other’s shoes.

Surely there is scope for a win-win resolution of this crisis for everyone, where-by the peace and independence of the Ukraine is preserved by all sides agreeing to guarantee its neutrality, thus creating a buffer state between NATO and the Russian Federation, stopping the war in the Ukraine and allowing the region a prosperous future as the economic bridge between the East and the West?

Should psychopaths be screened out of holding positions of power?

In Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, adapted as the film “Bladerunner”, our technology has become indistinguishable from living systems, and the only way to differentiate humans from androids is by administering something called the Voight-Kampff test, that detects the androids’ lack of human empathy.

One of Dick’s recurrent themes was the exploration of what it means to be human. Once detected, a rogue android is subject to summary execution, and the irony here, of course, is that it is also entirely possible for “humans” to also be deficient in empathy. In fact, impaired empathy is one of the characteristics of the relatively common psychological condition known as psychopathy.

Our human story is littered with abuses of power, including in recent years the infamous murders of George Floyd in the USA and Sarah Everard in the UK by serving members of the police, a situation where a force, supposedly dedicated to protecting the public, itself turned predatory and tragically become the very threat it is supposedly meant to guard against. Abuses of power on a more general scale, such as organised climate change denial or greenwashing, take even more lives. Then there are all the cruelties of human history to consider: oceans of blood and tears. Though it is often very difficult to comment on specific cases, overall it is likely that at least some of these crimes were perpetrated by psychopaths able to exploit positions of power. Therefore, could something like the Voight-Kampff test ever be made available in practice, could it reliably be used to identify psychopathy, and, if so, should psychopaths so detected be excluded from roles where they hold considerable authority over others?

What is psychopathy?

Although a lot of scientific work has been done to investigate psychopathy, there is no completely agreed definition of the term, or firm understanding of causation. In fact, the whole area has become controversial because different interpretations of psychopathy have very divergent implications for treatment and even for whether treatment is likely to be viable in the first place. In recent decades the condition has come to be seen as linked to abnormally low levels of fear and anxiety, possibly related in turn to another typical characteristic of psychopathy: a failure to develop feelings of guilt, as that is a form of anxiety, and then, in turn, due to that lack of guilt, an inability to experience remorse. Another usual symptom of psychopathy is “disinhibition”, meaning impulsiveness, again most likely associated with low anxiety. Finally psychopaths tend to lack empathy, though it is unclear whether that is because the internal emotional life of the psychopath is so different from the norm that they cannot imagine what it is like to be other people, or whether this lack of empathy is a different syndrome, though possibly with a common cause that can both induce “blunted” anxiety responses and suppress empathy. Perhaps full-blown psychopathy only emerges in individuals where suppressed anxiety and impaired empathy unfortunately converge. Possibly the situation is somewhat mixed, and deadened anxiety and empathy can be both aspects of the same psychological syndrome and sometimes also incidentally convergent.

Also, though psychopaths lack empathy, many can be very coldly efficient manipulators of others, so that casual charm and high social effectiveness are also commonly associated with psychopathy. Together, the three symptoms of an absence of empathy, unusually low anxiety and impulsiveness form what are often called the “triarchic constructs” of psychopathy: meanness, boldness and disinhibition.

The causes of psychopathy are complex. The current consensus is that there are genetic and environmental factors, including upbringing and sometimes even brain injury. It is entirely possible that someone brutalised as a child may grow emotionally cold, switching off anxiety responses to avoid over-load, especially if they are already genetically pre-disposed to such an outcome. Impaired empathy could then follow as a consequence of developing a very different internal emotional life to everyone else, and/or simply as a result of being shown little love or affection themselves. Poverty and social deprivation can lead to such a childhood, but so, notably, do some styles of elite upbringing, from the brutal training of males in ancient Sparta, to the British boarding school system. Elites often try to “toughen up” their young so they can better fight to preserve or enhance their elite status, and an environment that emphasises ruthless indefatigability in conjunction with “natural” superiority and privilege over others, while denying parental love, could be particularly prone to inducing psychopathy.

How common is psychopathy?

Most research into psychopathy has been based on study of inmates in prisons. However, and perhaps more relevant here, as a criminal record will usually in itself count against individuals being considered suitable to perform certain roles, or will result in them at least being placed under more careful scrutiny, is the concept of psychopaths who generally avoid criminal conviction and are normally referred to in the current psychological literature as “successful” psychopaths. Now incidence of psychopathy in prison is unsurprising high: 15.7 and 10.3%, for male and female prisoners respectively, as measured by the “gold standard” current psychopathy test, or PCL-R, that we will discuss more later. However, incidence of psychopathy in the general population is also far from negligible, at 1.2% according to the same PCL-R test, or even 4.5% according to a combined analysis, or meta-analysis, of different “questionnaire based” psychopathy tests (all these figures are from this 2021 source: “Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”). Clearer evidence for the existence of the “successful psychopath” is provided by even higher incidences of psychopathy in certain professions and in leadership positions. The preceding study found that 12.9% of managers, executives, procurement and supply professionals and advertising workers were psychopathic. More cautiously, but still alarmingly, in 2010 the creator of the PCL-R test, Robert D Hare, co-authored a study of a series of management development programmes that found that 3% of participants were psychopathic (see “Corporate psychopathy: talking the walk” and “The disturbing link between psychopathy and leadership”). And, if boldness, disinhibition and meanness, and in particular a lack of conscience allowing other people to be treated as mere objects to be manipulated to get your own way, are typical symptoms of psychopathy, then the proportion of political leaders who are psychopaths could be even higher.

Indeed, psychopathy seems to be much more common than people generally expect, especially in people in positions of power or influence. Rather than “Hannibal Lecter” think of a tyrannical manager, an abusive partner, a bullying landlord or letting agent, a deceitful sales person or a confidence trickster. Note that, though psychopaths may not care about doing harm to others, and will be utterly ruthless in the tactics they adopt to get their own way, they are not necessarily personally violent. Equally, sadism is a different syndrome to psychopathy, though it is true that a sadist will find it difficult to fully indulge their tendencies without also being psychopathic. While a sadistic psychopath is the most antisocial personality type possible, some psychopaths find that it is the acclaim of others that most stimulates their blunted sensibilities, and they will seek popularity, up to and including preying upon the darkest instincts and prejudices of others to win their approval. By now, many of us may be wondering about some of the characters we have come across, either in public life or even directly. Though the overwhelming majority of us spend all or most of our lives as non-psychopaths, the statistics above indicate that we all have almost certainly personally known psychopaths, and it is very likely that many of us still do.

How harmful are “successful” psychopaths?

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that there were less “successful” psychopaths in positions of power during our past. How many of the leading figures of history, and usually here we are talking about so-called “great men”, noting that psychopathy rates are higher in males than females, were actually psychopaths? It is very difficult to find serious research on the influence of psychopathy in history, mostly likely because of the difficulty of diagnosing psychopathy in historical figures, but also because of a relativist (the background to these blogs is actually a non relativist morality as explained here: “How to live with yourself and others”), and arguably unscientific attitude, among many historians that definitions of mental abnormalities are purely cultural constructs . It’s doubtful that’s more than partially true. Given the consistency in observed psychopathic symptoms, backed, as we shall see later, by physiological correlates that seem to have more theoretical credibility than say 19^th century phrenology, with its links of skulls bumps to “criminal types”, plus evidence that risk of developing psychopathy can be inherited, it seems probable some mental conditions are as much biological realities as, say, blindness. Also I suspect that, given that it is overwhelmingly likely that a disproportionate number of people of power and influence are psychopaths, that deliberate confusion is being sown: not as an orchestrated conspiracy, as it is difficult for psychopaths to cooperate, but on an individual case by case basis. But the large number of conquerors, tyrants and dictators, with many, many millions of victims, certainly looks highly suspicious.

In the modern world we all have prominent figures who would we be strongly tempted to label psychopaths. The upshot of the preceding discussion, though, is that it means that isn’t hyperbole or name-calling. Statistically, many of those observations will be true. That means we currently have many leaders wrecking the lives of millions, and doing everything they can to concentrate political and economic power in their own hands, crushing any opposition or the systems intended to allow some rule by consent. much like their historical predecessors. Only now, of course, a psychopath in the wrong place at the wrong time could initiate events leading to a nuclear war, or block decisive action on climate change. Now, for the first time in our history, such an individual could be the end of us all.

Then, of course, we have all those psychopaths who, while not the leaders of society, the top figures in politics or business, nevertheless have considerable power over the lives of those who they encounter, up to and including sometimes taking those lives. We are back to the Sarah Everard and George Floyd cases.

So there is a strong “prima facie” case for excluding psychopaths from positions of power: that we should develop, pilot and then roll-out a real Voight-Kampff test. But can we really screen for psychopathy, and what are the counter-arguments?

What would screening for psychopathy really achieve?

First let’s set expectations. Excluding psychopaths from positions of power would not mean total success in ensuring compassionate, just behaviour on the part of those with power other others. None of us are angels. Within elites even non-psychopaths frequently act ruthlessly when competing with other members of elites, and victory in those struggles often depends on how efficiently they can exploit those under their control, as “we” are the elite’s primary resource. Intra- and inter- elite rivalry drives continuous top down class war, and that is a mechanism that, though very likely exacerbated by psychopathy, does not require elites to actually be psychopathic (more here: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”). Some of the greatest crimes in history, such as the genocide of the native Americans at the hands of the Europeans, or the transatlantic slave trade, would most likely have happened anyway, just down to general human greed and selfishness.

Also, we can all be prejudiced, and dehumanise others, especially when doing so allows us to excuse ourselves for acting selfishly. However, psychopaths need victims to exploit and abuse, meaning that anyone who is in any way in a position of weakness is especially at risk, and someone can be in a weaker position, within a given social context, simply because they are a member of an “out group”, for example, the target of racism or sexism. Our everyday prejudices create a situation where the threat posed by psychopaths is amplified, and not just because psychopaths may themselves share in those prejudices. Even the psychopath as contemptuous of the racist and sexist preconceptions of their own society as they are of many other social norms will still preferentially pick on members of that society’s out groups, simply because they more likely to get away with it than if they choose victims from a privileged “in group”. The fact that screening psychopaths out of positions of power would do nothing to eliminate everyday human prejudice does not detract from the fact that everyday human prejudice combined with psychopaths in positions of power is a particularly lethal association for many.

Then there is the “bad apple” effect to consider. Can a sprinkling of psychopaths turn a whole society rotten? It seems conceivable, because just a few psychopaths, and particularly those in positions of influence, can not only lead people astray by direct example, but make trust and cooperative interactions more difficult generally, and cause those who are having to compete with psychopaths to adopt similarly ruthless tactics. In that sense psychopathy can be a social contagion. Speculatively, it is possible that mitigating the impact of psychopathy could induce not just an incremental improvement in the lives of most people in society, but a whole phase shift to a much kinder, more benevolent, social state.

Conceivably the incidence and consequence of psychopathy has been growing slowly worse for thousands of years. Back in our hunter gatherer days, when people lived in tightly knit bands and there were few interactions with strangers, psychopaths had nowhere to hide. With the rise of cities, however, our societies became steadily more impersonal as populations grew, and contact with strangers increased in frequency. Now psychopaths cannot run out of credulous “marks” so easily. The personal lives of psychopaths, and especially psychopathic males, tend to be characterised by many abusive and eventually broken relationships. If, consequently, psychopathic males, and remember the incidence of psychopathy is higher in males than females, hiding within a society based on impersonal interactions, where they can usually outrun their reputation, have more children than non-psychopaths, then psychopathy, which does have a partially hereditary basis, may offer an evolutionary advantage and steadily become more common. Perhaps, if we don’t get as on top of our psychopathy problem, as we were, say, during the Neolithic, “psychopathic social contagion” will eventually consume us all.

Can we develop a suitable test for psychopathy screening?

So if we should screen psychopaths out of positions of power, can we? If accurate tests aren’t practicable then there’s plenty else to be worrying about. We have already mentioned the PCL-R test, which is the commonest assessment for psychopathy and often cited as the “gold standard”. Like many psychopathy tests it is questionnaire based. The PCL-R test itself is essentially a checklist completed by a psychologist based on a semi-structured interview and a review of official records. It was originally created from observations of prison populations and so places an emphasis on overtly criminal behaviours that may mean it actually underestimates the incidence of psychopathy in the general population. The “meta-analysis” cited above (“Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”), as a source of incidence rates of psychopathy, purely draws on these questionnaire style tests, and particularly PCL-R and its variants. Of course, the problem with such tests is that the results will always depend to some extent on the subjective judgements of those completing the checklist.

Other tests measure physiological correlates of psychopathy directly. “Startle tests” monitor individuals’ reaction to suddenly being shown images from the International Affective Picture System, in a way very reminiscent of the fictional Voight-Kampff test. Sometimes it is blink response and skin conductance that is measured (see for example “Psychopathy, startle blink modulation, and electrodermal reactivity in twin men”) though pupil dilation, just like in “Bladerunner” is used in more recent experiments (see “You can spot psychopaths by looking at their eyes”).

Then there are tests based on measuring brain activity and neuroimaging. There seem to be structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, particularly lower brain volumes and activity levels in the pre-frontal cortex, an area associated with “executive functions” such as self-control, and the amygdala, a region involved in the processing of emotional responses, especially fear (see “Psychopathy: Developmental Perspectives and their Implications for Treatment”). A limited number of these studies have employed electroencephalogram (EEG) techniques to monitor electrical activity (see for example: “EEG abnormalities in psychopath and non-psychopath violent offenders”), but most have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activation of brain areas, often while the individual is exposed to similar images as those used in the “startle tests” discussed above. Until very recently, fMRI has been performed in very expensive and cumbersome Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines; at the time of writing, however, cheaper and portable, in fact wearable, “functional near infrared spectroscopy” devices are becoming available (see “Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Its Clinical Application in the Field of Neuroscience: Advances and Future Directions” and “A low-cost, wearable, do-it-yourself functional near-infrared spectroscopy (DIY-fNIRS) headband” ) that may make neuroimaging much more practicable.

It seems entirely possible that a reasonably objective, accurate, properly standardised, calibrated and validated psychopathy test can be cost effectively developed using some combination of the above techniques. In fact, in practice, it is likely to be something far more technologically sophisticated than Bladerunner’s Voight-Kampff test. Arguably, the likelihood of this will tend towards inevitability if human technology continues to advance, meaning that the question explored here, as to whether or not we should screen out psychopaths from positions of power, cannot be avoided indefinitely.

What are the risks?

So let’s imagine we are in such a world. A reliable psychopathy test has been developed and rolled out, and is used to exclude psychopaths from recruitment into roles where they would have significant authority over others. Given that any social intervention of any complexity has a downside, what are the possible negative impacts of doing this that we should aim to mitigate and weigh in the balance?

Some would argue that psychopathic personality traits can be valuable, in particular boldness and disinhibition. Boldness means courage and decisiveness, while disinhibition can encourage non-conformity: a rebellious rejection of current rules and conventions. Both of those traits can be very useful in the right circumstances. However, we must always remember that, for the psychopath, these potentially socially valuable habits of mind exist in a moral vacuum, meaning whatever abilities the psychopath possesses will only ever be used to serve the psychopath’s own goals. The psychopath may personally, though possibly privately, cynically sneer at the rules, but they will fake conformity when it suits and never hesitate to impose potentially harsh rules on others to force them to serve their will. Their attitude to social rules is the very worst conceivable: rules become tools of coercion and oppression, not systems arrived at and continually adjusted by consent that allow people to cooperate for mutual benefit. As for boldness, as that just involves the psychopath fearlessly and ruthlessly pursuing their own agenda, then that too can be very harmful to others. To use an everyday example, many of us will have encountered “corporate seagulls”: managers, and consultants, who metaphorically sweep into a organisation, make a lot of noise, eat all the food and then fly away again leaving only poop and mess for others to clear up. “Corporate seagulls” can be very decisive, but only because their decisiveness is meant to score points to further their own careers, and remuneration, without any care or regard at all for the actual impact of those decisions on the organisations they are meant to serve: all that matters are superficial and short term appearances. The apparent decisiveness of a corporate seagull is a direct consequence of the fact that their decisions do not need to be thought through to any depth. No one who talks about “moving fast and breaking things” (or “getting Brexit done” or “making America/Russia great again”?) should be trusted, and any leader who declares “let the bodies pile high” should be treated with particularly extreme caution.

Then there are the potential social side-effects of a culture of screening out psychopaths to consider. We don’t want a witch hunt or “purity spiral”. In those situations individuals compete with each other to appear as “virtuous” as possible, even denigrating rivals for lack of “virtue”, initially to gain status but also out of fear, intensifying as the purity spiral feeds back upon itself, of themselves being exposed as insufficiently virtuous and then being subjected to group condemnation. Ironically, it is likely that psychopaths, lacking any compunction about lying or manipulating others, are particularly adept at taking advantage of witch hunts and purity spirals, so in the very worst case scenario we could end up with a Matthew Hopkins or Torquemada in charge of completely compromised “psychopathy testing”. Even more problematically, the current scientific consensus is that psychopathy, rather than being a discrete condition, or “taxon” in the jargon, is more likely to be at the extreme end of a spectrum, perhaps with neurosis at the opposite end, “normality” somewhere in the middle and conditions such as narcissism off towards the psychopathy end of the range. Defining psychopathy could be about differences in degree rather than kind (see “Psychopathic Personality: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy”). There is a risk of “scope creep” in our psychopathy testing. To mitigate these risks we need both our psychopathy tests and “threshold” to be rigorously and professionally defined, by psychologists, for our measures to be as objective a possible and for tests to be independently administered only to candidates for roles where they will be given life-changing, and potentially life-taking, power over others. The tests themselves must not only be very carefully designed, but also refined through trials and pilots and peer review. The results of an individual’s test must also only be shared on a strict need to know basis. In dealing with this issue we must not drift into psychopathic behaviour ourselves by dehumanising the psychopaths.

We should only be concerned here about screening out individuals who lack any basic moral sensitivity, meaning having no discernible conscience or empathy, from performing specific roles. Doing so doesn’t seem to be unreasonable. There is little controversy about the principle of testing aptitude, physical or mental, for certain jobs, even if the accuracy of the methods used is often debated. There is also general agreement that many roles have a vital moral dimension, so we expect practitioners to sign up to professional codes of conduct, perhaps the oldest being the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors, with the cost of breaking those promises often being a life-long ban from continuing to practice such a line of work. In the case of psychopathy testing we are just talking about requiring some indication of moral sensitivity in order to perform roles where an individual acting without any measurable conscience or empathy could do great harm to others. It is also likely, as we have seen above, that this basic ability, or lack of it, could be established with far greater reliability than many other job-related aptitudes.

What about the situation where psychopathy testing disqualifies someone from running for an elected office? Shouldn’t voters be allowed to vote for psychopaths, if they choose to do so? On the one hand, the answer to that question could well be no, as we already accept many such disqualifications as apparently valid, such as any candidate for the US presidency having to be US born, or, in the UK, anyone who is sentenced to more than a year in prison being disqualified from being an MP. Alternatively, psychopathy tests may not disqualify candidates, but the results would have to be made public, as in that situation it would be justifiable to conclude that all voters have a “need to know” the results of that specific psychopathy test: even if voters do decide to elect an psychopath it is only fair that they do so with full knowledge and warning. Whichever of those two options is chosen, it is even more important that the independence and objectivity of tests, which could interfere directly with the democratic process, is beyond reasonable doubt.

While a few of the more sensible psychopaths may realise that the last thing they want is people like themselves with power over their own lives, it is likely that many “successful” psychopaths, especially those with influence and power, will ruthlessly connive to frustrate or subvert any initiative to screen psychopaths out of positions of power. There is no avoiding that one, and that may be something with which we are just going to have to be aware of and cope with.

Is the greater risk not to screen?

We live in a crisis prone world where a single blithely callous decision, say with regard to use of weapons of mass destruction or the management, or lack of it, of the climate emergency, could trigger the end of human civilisation. At the same time we have within apparent reach tests that could discern whether the individuals appointed to such roles have any discernible trace of conscience or empathy. We can’t, and shouldn’t, attempt to create human moral perfection, and would, in fact, experience great difficulty even agreeing what that means in practice. Psychopathy testing wouldn’t remove ordinary human selfishness and prejudice. But it would eliminate a lot of real harm and suffering, and make humanity, constantly balanced on the edge of self destruction, a bit safer. Arguably not to develop such testing would itself be an act of massive irresponsibility.

Why centrism is the road to nowhere

In 1997 we all sang along jubilantly to “Things Can Only Get Better”. We were rid of the awful Tories, and had a Labour government back in power again. So what if it prefixed it’s name with “new”: most people who voted or supported Labour barely cared. It was a re-branding exercise. We had never experienced “New” Labour before, so didn’t know what “New Labour” meant.

Of course, there were achievements. Some things did get better. There was the minimum wage, major reinvestment in public services such as the NHS and education, new schemes such as Sure Start., devolution for Scotland and Wales (though no enduring settlement for the just as populous English regions) and reductions in child and pensioner poverty. The first Climate Change Act was put on the statue books. But there was also yet more privatisation, including an expansion of the Tory Private Finance Initiative that eventually proved extremely damaging to the taxpayer, a failure to reverse anti-union laws, no resolution of the housing crisis, no restoration of social care as a public service, the introduction of university tuition fees, no sensible re-regulation on the financial industry, disastrous foreign wars, increasing inequality, no electoral reform despite lots of talk about Proportional Representation and no challenges to the billionaire control of the media (and in fact a “sucking up” to the Murdochs), all amounting to a failure to move the agenda back to the left, leaving the Tories able to pick up where they left off when they re-entered power. Any commitment to socialism was abandoned, even the term itself became the “S” word, never to be uttered by a Labour MP. Issues of economic power were left unaddressed, allowing accelerating power imbalances in society to continue unchecked.

It isn’t 1997. It can never be 1997 ever again. History never exactly repeats for one simple reason: people and societies have memory. Later states of history include the previous states, like Russian dolls. We can never be as enthusiastic about New Labour again because we have lived through the consequences of its limitations. When a not too dissimilar political project, Labour’s “austerity-lite”, was attempted in 2015, it, together with constituency boundary changes, gifted the Tories a parliamentary majority, even though those were the heady days before Brexit triangulation came to dominate Labour politics. Labour won a 30.4% share of the vote, compared to 29.0% in 2010, 35.2% in 2005, 40.0% in 2017 and 32.2% in 2019. And we also understand that, even when “New Labour” worked, it did so in a situation that was utterly unlike now. The 1990s was a very different time, a period before financial crash, austerity, COVID and the climate emergency, when the economy was booming. The rich and powerful, the owners of the UK economy, especially of an extensively privatised and out-sourced economy, could still take their lion’s share of the gains of economic growth while leaving something for the rest of us.

An article from the “Open Democracy” media outlet (opendemocracy/postmodernity-and-the-crisis-of-democracy/) summed up this difference very effectively, and did so in 2009, a year before the end of the first iteration of the “New Labour” project, meaning that what it says is unclouded by hindsight or failing memory. Here is the most relevant quote:

“During a boom, it is not necessary for the governing elite to make choices about how to distribute a limited set of resources. The financial elite can carry on reaping most of the rewards, as long as there is just enough cheap credit and extra tax revenue to keep consumers feeling comfortable and public services afloat. As soon as the boom ends, however, an ugly reality makes itself felt again: the fact that despite the disappearance of clearly demarcated political constituencies, what has not disappeared are clearly identifiable conflicts of interest between sections of the community. The interests of banks and those to whom they lend, of corporations and the employees whose salaries they must pay, of retailers and their customers, of high-rate tax-payers and public-service workers, cannot be perfectly reconciled, because in each case the incomes of the former can only be maintained at least partially at the expense of the latter. It is partly the persistence of such antagonisms, even while the political blocs which once enabled us to name and imagine them have disappeared, which makes politics today so confusing. “

1997 was also only six years since the fall of the Soviet Union. Although many democratic socialists had opposed the Bolsheviks since the start, with that resistance culminating in the tragedy of the Kronstadt Rebellion, in the popular mind the failure of Soviet communism was equated with a failure of socialism in general, while, with the economy of the west booming, free market and neoliberal ideas seemed to have won the day. Even the tensions between capitalism and democracy weren’t yet obvious, with individuals and communities left behind by globalisation not yet cynically exploited by very well connected and financed “pluto-populists” like Trump or Boris, and economic growth meaning increasing inequality was possible even while still reducing poverty. 1997 was just five years after the political scientist Francis Fukuyama infamously jinxed everything by unwisely proclaiming “the end of history”.

Nevertheless, of course, the main argument for centrism is electability. Left-wing parties can only help people if they are in power, so compromise is justifiable. Some will go further, and argue that, when there is a crisis, and people are suffering, dying and despairing in large numbers, then the ends justify the means, and even, say, a candidate for the leadership of a left leaning party, one prepared to make those pragmatic compromises, eroding the fabric of democracy by making radical pledges to a more uncompromisingly left leaning membership in order to get elected, in the full knowledge at the time that those promises are fake and meant to deceive, is morally acceptable, just the cost of doing politics in the real world.

In this view the UK is naturally conservative, and Labour can only win from the “centre”. Now, there are some immediate issues with this, especially, as explored above, here in the 2020s, as against 1997. The “naturally conservative” assumption doesn’t apply to Scotland, or Wales, and most likely not to the youth vote, to student debt ridden “generation rent”, so such a strategy really abandons Scotland, Wales and the youth vote from an electoral point of view. Focussing on the political centre also means most likely struggling to set out a vision bold enough to motivate those, who normally don’t bother to vote, to get out and vote, possibly for the first time. If it works anywhere, it works in the demographically older parts of England. The potential main advantage is that it side-steps the problem that Labour votes tend to pile high in the cities, and therefore are wasted under First Passed the Post, by winning more provincial English seats. It makes most sense to re-pivot an entire political movement in this way if the presupposition is not only First Passed the Post, but, as this is an open-ended long term strategy meant to change the basic character of the party, First Passed the Post indefinitely. Any consideration of formal or informal electoral pacts with other parties around democratic reform such as Proportional Representation are apparently not part of the calculation.

This centre-orientated electoral strategy is therefore high risk. Since 1997 the England and Wales Green Party vote share has increased more than thirteen fold (from a 0.2% vote share in 2010 to a 2.7% vote share in 2019) and the SNP vote share more than three fold (from 2.0% in 1997 to 7.4% in 2019). Even just neglecting Scotland is very likely to mean defeat in and of itself. In the words of the Labour Together Election Review ( https://electionreview.labourtogether.uk/) “If Labour does not reverse its fortunes in Scotland in a significant way, it would need to win North East Somerset from Jacob Rees Mogg to form a majority government.”

There were also factors at work in 1997 other than Labour managing to build a very broad electoral coalition. Firstly, and for the first time in decades, boundary changes favouring Labour rather than the Tories had been brought in through the implementation of the Fourth Boundary Review (dannydorling_publication_id1318.pdf). This wasn’t accidental but had been the result of a Labour effort to analyse and appropriately challenge each detailed change (something bizarrely apparently not done by Starmer’s Labour when confronted with the 2023 Boundary Review). This advantage was largely lost with the implementation of the 2010 Fifth Boundary Review. Secondly, in just the 1997 general election, though that crucially brought Labour back into power and proved the party could form a credible government, there was a semi-formal electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats, not to stand down candidates as such, but to encourage tactical voting and target time and resources in a way that would maximise either Labour or the Liberal Democrats winning a seat from the Tories (http://getprdone.org.uk/learning-from-the-1997-blair-ashdown-tactical-voting-deal/). To assign the sizes of the Labour majorities even around the turn of the century to “centrism” pure and simple is a dangerous over-approximation.

Additionally, if you are going to deceive your own party, including undermining democracy by lying in a key election, you had better be very certain that you are right: that those ends really do justify the very questionable means. This is especially important as, by hiding your real agenda, you will have evaded scrutiny. Your ideas and strategy will not have been subject to a general debate leading up to a meaningful vote. In behaving in this way, you and your circle could perhaps be accused of self-belief amounting to arrogance, even hubris.

This scenario is even more serious if that whole electoral strategy in itself rests on assumptions that not only are potentially out-dated but are actually over-simplified and highly inaccurate. For example, what if the attitudes of the general UK population, when polled, were actually in favour of radial left-wing policy ideas on say, the economy?

That, in fact, was the very conclusion of one highly accomplished campaigner and his researchers, working on behalf of a leading think tank, as they investigated the aftermath of the 2017 General Election. The source is surprising so won’t be revealed until later.

Here are the most relevant quotes from that study:

“We find that on almost every issue, the public tends to favour non-free market ideals rather than those of the free market. Instead of an unregulated economy, the public favours regulation. Instead of companies striving for profit above all else, they want businesses to make less profit and be more socially responsible. Instead of privatised water, electricity, gas and railway sectors, they want public ownership. They favour CEO wage caps, workers at senior executive and board level and for government to reign in big business. They want zero hours contracts to be abolished. The capitalism ‘brand’ is in crisis. It is seen as greedy, selfish and corrupt. The public’s instinctive associations with capitalism compare unfavourably to the public’s associations with liberalism, socialism and patriotism. Indeed, many of those negative associations with capitalism recur, albeit to a lesser extent, in the public’s associations with conservatism. In our poll, the notion that we live in a time of ‘responsible’ capitalism finds little credence among the public.”

“More than three quarters of the public say that water, electricity, gas and railways should be in the hands of the public sector. According to the public, food distribution and retailing, mobile phone networks and airlines should all remain privatised. Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to nationalise railways has broad appeal across age groups and even among Conservative voters. This pattern is replicated for water, gas and electricity. The public are split 50:50 on whether banks—which for many are a symbol of their mistrust of capitalism—should be taken into public control.”

“This research finds that a clear anti-capitalist sentiment permeates throughout many segments of the population. Majority support for nationalisation of railways, water, gas and electricity is overwhelming. The public tend to reject free market ideas in favour of state regulation.”

The report is here: https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/default-library/1710-public-opinion-in-the-post-brexit-era-final.pdf. It was written by Matthew Elliott, self-styled arch Tory “political entrepreneur”, the head of the official Leave campaign (the guy who hired Cummings as Campaign Director) and founder of the “TaxPayers’ Alliance”, and was written for the “Legatum Institute” (part of the global “Atlas Network” of neoliberal think tanks).

With public services such as the NHS coming through the COVID crisis with a far higher reputation than, say, privatised test and trace, and, at the time of writing, an energy supply crisis that is being used to centralise control of the energy supply market into the hands of a few of the more ruthless and powerful big players, plus continuing sky-high housing prices and widespread anxiety about how we can quickly reduce greenhouse emissions, it is likely that attitudes since to have shifted significantly further to the left.

Despite decades of right win propagandising and our billionaire controlled media, left wing ideas, packaged appropriately, can, apparently, really cut through with the general UK population. The argument that Labour can only win from the centre appears to be a myth. It is likely to be even more mythical after a crisis, when people will be more receptive to radical solutions. The right tends to regard a crisis as an opportunity. As Milton Friedman once wrote, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Certainly the Tories never win from the centre. The upshot of “left” parties always aiming for the centre, while right-wing parties use campaigns such as Brexit, or events such as the financial crash, to recurrently reset the agenda from significantly right of the centre, is that the left ends up trying to track a political centre that is being constantly ratcheted to the right. That means accepting, despite the innermost attitudes of the British people, that politics will be forever dragged rightwards.

The failure of the left to reset the political agenda has been a repeated mistake and disastrously defeatist.

This doesn’t mean Labour couldn’t work with other parties on the broader left, on particular issues and to achieve specific ends, provided it retains its own “democratic socialist” identity. For example, given the sinister reality of the continuous and intensifying Tory attacks on our democracy (see how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy) participation in some form of formal or informal “progressive alliance” to defend and revitalise our democracy, around such issues as proportional representation and curbing the influence of dark money, would be actively desirable, and is possibly vital.

It is essential that Labour re-affirms its democratic socialist identity because Labour is the only mainstream vehicle for democratic socialism in British politics, especially under First Passed the Post, and many of the solutions to our current problems are “democratic socialist” in nature. Unless questions of economic power, of ownership, are addressed, and market failures avoided through some combination of publicly owned enterprises and democratically accountable regulation, confronting crises from climate change, through the growing influence of dark money on our politics, to unaffordable housing costs, new pandemics, precarious employment or how we handle the next wave of AI driven automation will be every difficult indeed.

Seemingly the centrists, the “third wayers”, who seek to temper neoliberal free markets with a bit of social democracy, just don’t “get” socialism. They don’t understand the importance of people being able to own and control the things they need to live and make a living. They don’t “get” the fact the Tories deliberately sacrificed lives in an attempt to save profits, because the Tory party is bankrolled by those who intercept most of those profits, and because, overwhelmingly, they would not be the people doing the dying. It’s the same with the most serious challenge of our age: climate change. If the profits from carbon emitting activity accrue primarily to a few at the top of society, the owners, while the costs of climate change are paid by the poorest, because the richest can afford to protect themselves from the effects of the climate catastrophe, then little will happen to stop or drawdown emissions, and even that little is likely to turn into virtually nothing at all when the richest use their money to buy parties and politicians, or control the debate by owning the media. It isn’t unfair to wonder if many centrists have a weaker grasp on the unforgiving importance of “economic power” than the Tories and their wealthy backers. And they absolutely don’t “get” how critical these issues of class and power will be to our very survival as we are inexorably carried yet further into this criss-ridden century.

It is comforting to pretend it is still 1997. Those were simpler and more optimistic times. Or at least, that’s how it seemed, though, of course, in fact, most of our issues were still very much brewing in 1997. In a way, the 1997 beloved of New Labour was a myth, even at the time. There have been more human generated greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 than in the rest of history (see the excerpt from “The Uninhabitable Earth”, published in 2019, here: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/13/climate-change-uninhabitable-earth-david-wallace-wells). But the fact that we didn’t act then, in our naivete and wilful ignorance, leaving the problems to grow, makes it even more crucial that we act now. Obviously, we cannot overturn global capitalism, meaning the economic system where only a few own and control the things everyone else needs to live and make a living, and only then address climate change, because, even if the nature of the emergency sufficiently mobilised the many to defeat capitalist resistance, we just haven’t got the time. Rather, the crisis presents us with opportunities to start the rollback of capitalism, because socialist solutions are extremely useful additions to the toolbox we need to deal with climate change. Instead of just being able to regulate and expecting industries to comply, or attempting to change incentives so as to send the right “market signals”, socialist solutions allow us, where the other approaches aren’t effective enough quickly enough, to take over industries and make them directly accountable to the public. For example, establishing a significant public presence in the energy sector would both better secure and more rapidly green energy supplies. It would also allow more taxpayer investment in green energy generation R&D without risking the benefits accruing to a few private shareholders rather than the tax payers. A crisis can call for direct action and strategic planning, simply overriding all possible market failures.

So Labour centrism is a strategy stuck decades in the past, forced upon the party without debate by undemocratic duplicity, that almost certainly condemns Labour to electoral failure and that, even it did somehow win out, can’t actually provide the solutions to the existential challenges we are facing. And not only does centrism mean moving in a direction that really diminishes chances of electoral success, it also involves attempting to restore an old normal that has turned out to be catastrophic. With financial crash, little pandemic readiness, because there was no profit for big pharma in making preparations, and runaway climate change, compounded by extremely well funded and orchestrated denial on the part of the fossil fuel industry, free market think tanks and billionaire dominated media and politicians, the old normal was quite simply lethal. We know that now. Trying to go back to that “centre” would be utterly insane. Humanity has never needed democratic socialism more than it does now.

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 6: dodgy friends, sinister connections and how we fight back

In part 5 we explored some of the dangerous ideas inspiring Tory political thought. It’s also important to investigate where those ideas and influences are coming from: to track the networks of allies and connections within which the Tories are embedded. We have already noted the close association of many leading Tories, and especially the Brexiteers, with leading right wing think tanks, especially those in the Atlas Network, including in the US, and observed how those pursue strands of neoliberal thought sometimes extreme enough to challenge modern democracy itself, by attempting to limit or rig the suffrage or seeking to drastically curb the role democracy can play in society.

The US links also included ties with the almost definitively pluto-populist Trump network, with Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, even infamously claiming to have offered Boris Johnson speech advice at least once in 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0xMCvhDqzg), In the same year, Johnson himself publicly stated “I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump. I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.” The Tory Brexiteers at times verged on being Trump groupies, especially as a transatlantic trade deal was long mooted as a possible significant Brexit win, with Gove paying the President a particularly sycophantic visit in 2017. Come January 2021 and this put Johnson and the Tories in an invidious position when, having lost the election, Trump made comments that were widely viewed as inciting the subsequent storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters apparently intent on overturning the result. Johnson was very reluctant to criticise Trump personally, arguably having to eventually be shamed into doing so by attacks from the Labour Opposition (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/07/tory-party-leaders-back-pedal-on-trump-after-us-congress-chaos).

Like the Trump network, the Tories have also been continuously called to account for their links to Putin’s Russia, a “managed democracy” that effectively has become a one party state. This started even before the Tories took power, notably with the controversy surrounding George Osborne’s private meeting with Russia’s wealthiest man, Oleg Deripaska, in 2008 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-politics-scandal-idUSTRE49L2XG20081022), and the allegation, which Osborne denied, that he was seeking a “large donation” from Deripaska. Then there is the whole series of confirmed donations, such as from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, who served as a finance minister in Vladimir Putin’s government. As a result of her gifts to the Tory party, including, in 2014, paying £160 000 for a game of tennis with Cameron and Johnson, Lubov became the top female donor in British political history (https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-report-donors-boris-johnson-conservative-party-2020-7). These scandals continue right up to today, with the Financial Times claiming in 1^st August 2021 that a major Tory donor, who has given £750 000 to the party since 2017 and is planning on making at least £250 000 more, “received $4m from a company he knew to be secretly owned by a powerful Russian who was at the time a senior member of Putin’s regime, according to three people with direct knowledge of his business dealings”. (https://www.ft.com/content/4b922f07-9919-4648-915e-065011221906).

Controversy over Russian interference with British politics, especially concerns that this may have affected the EU Referendum, led to the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee conducting an “extensive inquiry” and producing a report in October 2019, the release of which was notoriously delayed by Boris Johnson until a heavily redacted report was eventually published in July 2020. This report concluded that “What is clear is that Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal’: successive Governments have welcomed the Russian oligarchy with open arms, and there are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business, political and social scene – in ‘Londongrad’ in particular.” (Russia_Press_Notice.pdf).

Much of the problem seems to stem from the “golden visa” scheme introduced by John Major’s Conservative government in 1994, that allows anyone investing at least £2 million through UK financial institutions to buy a UK citizenship, without renouncing any other citizenships, and there-by gain the right to legally donate to UK political parties. Although the scheme was suspended in 2018 over fears it was being used for money laundering, the suspension was lifted the following year and the scheme continues to this day, with none of Johnson’s new proposed election reforms, or the recommendations of the “Russia Report”, touching it. A Russian oligarch with a spare £2 million can not only vote but also buy political influence, but a poor person without a passport, driving licence or other valid photo id will, apparently, be turned away from a polling station. This is the quite deliberate reality of the Tories “taking back control”: only wealth really counts, democracy be damned.

A year later, in July 2021, none of the recommendations of the Russia Report had been implemented and the Conservatives had received a further £280 000 from Russia-linked donors, some of it going to Tory members of the Intelligence and Security Committee (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-take-280k-russia-linked-24609835).

Then there is issue of the questionable allies the Conservatives have been making among European governments and politicians. Yet again, this is a development that starts before the Tories re-assume power, this being something of a theme: that although the party’s anti-democratic manoeuvres have accelerated dramatically under Johnson and the Brexiteers, they were given renewed impetus long before, in the wake of the Financial Crash, as new opportunities for winning power and applying economic “shock therapy” beckoned. In June 2009, with Cameron seeking to adopt a more Eurosceptical position in the EU, the Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope led the Tories out of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) Group in the EU Parliament, to form the new anti-federalist European Conservative and Reformists (ECR) Group (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jun/22/conservatives-new-eu-group), and serve as its initial chair. The group included the single MEP from Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK party, notorious for celebrating the part played by Latvian SS units in the Second World, but was numerically dominated by the Tories (with 26 out of 55 ECR MEPs at the time) and the hard right Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, with 15 MEPs.

A very similar move was again initiated by the Tories eleven year later in October 2020, when the European Conservative Group in the Council of Europe, ironically the debating chamber for issues relating to the European Convention on Human Rights, invited the far right so-called Democratic Alliance group to join, apparently at the behest of Ian Liddell-Grainger, a Tory MP who also became chair of the new “EC-DA” grouping

(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-tory-neo-nazi-anti-islam-hitler-conservative-party-b1254794.html). A Tory peer, Lord Balfe, asked PM Boris Johnson to block this alliance with, in Lord Balfe’s words, “virtually every video nasty in the book… and people whose values earlier generations of Conservatives took up arms against to resist” but Johnson did nothing; instead Balfe was expelled from the new group. Quite why the Tories would be eager to ally with representatives of the far right in the European body responsible for upholding our human rights, at a time when it was becoming obvious to them that a complete withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, something they had again sought since at least Cameron’s 2015 general election manifesto, would have to be sacrificed in order to negotiate a Trade and Co-operation Agreement with the EU and “get Brexit done”, we can only speculate about.

The European Conservatives grouping in the Council had already included the Polish “Law and Justice Party”, but the new EC-DA grouping, as well as incorporating an assortment of fascistic parties such as the Brothers of Italy and Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, now also encompasses Fidesz, the ruling party of Hungary. Both the “Law and Justice Party” in Poland, and Fidesz in Hungary, have formed governments that self-identify as “illiberal democracies”, meaning regimes that are crony capitalist and authoritarian, as well as being nationalistic, traditionalistic and socially conservative in the typical scapegoat seeking, in-group prejudice maximising, pluto-populist way. (see https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482 for the situation in Hungary). Hungary and Poland have both experienced the usual transition from neoliberal shock doctrine to authoritarian capitalism, with both Fidesz and the “Law and Justice” party gaining power as typically centre-right or plain conservative parties but clinging onto power in later elections by riding pluto-populist waves and also seeking to lock themselves into place by taking over the media and the courts, suppressing freedom of expression and trying to manipulate elections. (https://theconversation.com/europes-illiberal-states-why-hungary-and-poland-are-turning-away-from-constitutional-democracy-89622).

The Tory party is following exactly the same steps in its continuing executive coup. Indeed, Boris Johnson seems to have adopted Viktor Orban, the leader of Fidesz and Hungary’ s prime minister, as something of a mentor to guide him through the final stages of this project. The Tories have often looked to Orban as an ally within the EU, and Orban was only the second head of an EU state to be given a private audience at no 10 since Brexit. (https://www.politics.co.uk/week-in-review/2021/05/28/week-in-review-johnson-and-orban-are-part-of-the-same-movement/).

So the Tories have dangerous friends with antidemocratic ideas, some of whom are executing self coups of their own, using very similar tactics to the Tories, partially in response to the same underlying historial trends but also to such an extent that it is difficult to believe that the protagonists aren’t sometimes comparing notes. So is the Tory executive coup an actual political campaign, even a conspiracy? Perhaps more like a series of little conspiracies all driven by similar political dynamics, force of habit, copied methods and a shared toxic culture . But haven’t the dramatis personae changed? Yes and no. Despite all the tumult, and the purging of the most moderate and anti-Brexit Tories from the party, a lot of the changes at the top amount to more pantomime than substance. For example, many prominent Tory MPs have at one time or another held ministerial appointments under all three recent PMs, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, including: Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Liz Truss, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson, Brandon Lewis and James Brokenshire. This is a community of political fellow travellers, and not simply because many knew each other long before they reached the apex of British politics, most infamously of course with David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson being members of the Bullingdon Club at the the time when they were all studying at Oxford. No, the Tory party MPs are the mere tip of a political iceberg of special advisors, donors (including a lot of undeclared “dark money”), lobbyists and partisan think-tanks, with the part of that iceberg that tends to be hidden below the waterline providing considerable continuity in terms of Tory strategic thinking.

It’s unlikely there’s a small group of masterminds or a master plan behind all this, not least because “Tory mastermind” is usually an oxymoron. However, if such a hypothetical cabal existed anywhere then it would most feasibly be within the network around Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, partly because those individuals have been influential in Tory circles over the whole period in question, partly because they have all the appropriate contacts, but also because we might struggle to find sufficient intellectual capacity anywhere else in the broader Tory political community. Dominic Cummings is a close associate of Michael Gove, and served as his advisor from 2007 to 2014, including as Gove’s Chief of Staff from 2011 to 2014. Michael Gove himself was, of course, Cameron’s closest political ally after Osborne and has, as we have seen, served in high office under all three recent Tory PMs. Dominic Cummings first came to know Matthew Elliott during the “Business for Sterling and Europe Yes/Euro No” campaign, where Cummings was Campaign Director from 1999 to 2002. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/09jpSjVUpQ/dominic_cummings_battle_for_downing_street)

Matthew Elliott is less famous than Gove or Cummings, but is a potentially very significant mover in this drama nonetheless. Today Elliott is best known as as the CEO of the Vote Leave campaign, in which capacity he appointed Cummings as Campaign Director. His wife claims he set himself the project of achieving Brexit at least as far back as 2012 (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/tate-brexit-1443580). But Elliot has many other contacts, including to precisely the correct influencers and possible providers of “dark money”, and other forms of assistance, to help push the “Tory iceberg” in an antidemocratic direction. From 2001 to 2003 he was the special advisor to the Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope, the same Kirkhope who later took the Tories out of the EPP Group in the European Parliament to form the far more right leaning European Conservative and Reformists (ECR) Group. Then, in 2004, Matthew Elliott co-founded and served as first chairperson of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a partisan think tank, if with a somewhat “astroturfed” moniker, that is part of the Atlas Network of extreme free market think tanks. His wife is Sarah Elliott, chair of what was the Trump supporting “Republicans Overseas” UK Chapter, while in 2012 Matthew Elliott established the short lived Conservative Friends of Russia. As the Campaign Director of the “NotoAV” campaign, against an “Alternative Vote” voting system, he helped David Cameron defeat any move to AV back in 2011. Possibly as a reward, in April 2012, Elliott nearly became the new Director of Strategy to Cameron, until the move was blocked by Nick Clegg (https://www.conservativehome.com/parliament/2020/10/matthew-elliott-please-apply-to-invest-in-britains-future-and-win-10000.html), and in 2019 he was briefly touted to become the advisor to the then new Chancellor Sajid Javid (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/25/treasury-appoints-ex-vote-leave-chief-matthew-elliott-as-sajid-javid-adviser), someone he had known since 2004 and backed in the 2019 Tory leadership race (https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1134542/tory-leadership-election-sajid-javid-brevet-vote-leave-matthew-elliott). These days he is serves in the Advisory Council of the Free Enterprise Group (https://www.freemarketforum.org/who-we-are-1), “a major initiative from the Institute of Economic Affairs and IEA Forum promoting a freer economy and a freer society” that includes many Tory MPs, notably, in April 2021, Home Secretary Priti Patel, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey and Scottish Secretary Alister Jack (https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-boss-five-cabinet-ministers-23948506). Currently Elliott styles himself a “political entrepreneur”.

Note, however, that this continuous attack on our democracy doesn’t seem to be down to a single mastermind or cabal. It should also be obvious that no detailed “master plan” could have survived the tumultuous period since the financial crash. Nor is it just related to the use of nationalism and xenophobia to supercharge Tory support as, though that has accelerated matters, the process itself started years before the word “Brexit” had even been coined. Rather a slow, but ever accelerating, Tory executive coup is built into the power dynamics of the political situation by the logic of the Tories wanting to exploit global and national crises to push through extreme measures that, once the dust settles, are very unlikely to be popular, because they serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many. That continually induces the Tories to push at the limits of our unwritten constitution, steadily eroding it. Also, the more actions the Tories take that are so questionable they could be deemed illegal, and the ever more extreme the illegality, the more ruthlessly desperate they become to protect themselves by staying in power, so that at least they have the powers of the state on their side to suppress any investigations. Just forcing the resignation of a special advisor or two, or even driving out Johnson himself, won’t change the antidemocratic programme.

So what should we do? We must remember that our laws derive their authority from being formed on the basis of some type of consent. It is especially crucial that any detailed constraints on democracy must ultimately be derived from democratic consent itself. If a law, such as the “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts” Bill, with its wide ranging powers to suppress protest, is antidemocratic, and has no general consent as it was not included in the Tories’ 2019 manifesto, then not only should we disobey, but we are morally obliged to disobey. Otherwise any government, once elected, can then implement any previously undisclosed measures it likes to take our democracy away and, as we have seen throughout all the parts of this series, disposing of our democracy is exactly what Tory-led governments, and their backers, are doing and fully intend to do. So we should all go on protests and be “seriously annoying”. Civil disobedience is necessary, and the more of us participate, the more effectively we jam up our society’s coercive mechanisms.

Such protest must be peaceful, not only because that is the moral and humanitarian course of action, but also because, to be brutally honest, the Tories and their supporters have most of the guns. Occupying the moral high ground is our best tactic, combined with solidarity, because we are genuinely many and our real opponents are few, while also steadily asserting the strength of our case (as these posts attempt to do). Remember always the time and money the right has ploughed into developing its own arsenal of ideas over the decades, even if those ideas are self serving for the rich and powerful and consequently very distorted. Ideas themselves form part of the current of history and are the weapons with which we fight, and those ideas are all the more powerful when they reflect truth and justice. It is vital to frame the narrative of the general debate in society. Ultimately, this is a battle for minds.

Also never forget, though, the brutality of what we are seeking to avoid: the return to a “situation normal” where most of us merely exist as “objects” to serve the elites, as exploited proletarians, serfs or slaves. That is the long scream that is most of recorded human history, and history takes an even darker turn where and when the powerful deem the oppressed expendable, as many of us may become once more waves of automation roll in. Our resistance must be resolute. As Malcolm X once said, at a rally for striking hospital workers: “The hospital strikers have demonstrated that you don’t get a job done unless you show the Man you’re not afraid to go to jail. If you’re not willing to pay that price, then you don’t deserve the rewards or benefits that go along with it.”

In political terms we need to rejuvenate and save our democracy. We stand at a critical moment in history, not least because of the climate crisis, and, unless we ensure that decisions are made for the benefit of all, the rich and powerful will crush and sacrifice the powerless. A progressive alliance of some kind to force the Tories out of power and bring in a form of proportional representation seems essential. As at least one key study indicates that even people who regard themselves as “democrats” are still tempted to give a licence for “democratic backsliding” to their own side once others issues are muddled up with questions of democracy (polarization-versus-democracy/), that being one way power grabs win support and democracies die, it would be sensible for any such progressive alliance to fight a general election purely on the issue of saving our democracy, and then for a second general election conducted on the basis of the new rules to held as soon as possible there-after.

Whatever we do, we don’t have long. The Tory executive coup has been a long time in the making, deliberately gradual so we would struggle to notice what was happening, but relentlessly accelerating all the time. It is likely that 2019 wasn’t a free and fair election, and anyone hoping that the next one will be is sadly deluded. The time to act is now.

The previous part is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/09/02/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-5-dangerous-ideas-and-our-disposable-democracy/

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 5: dangerous ideas and our disposable democracy

In part 4 we explored the “historical currents” that are pushing the Tory political machine to attempt to destroy democracy in order to lock itself and the interests it represents into power indefinitely. But how are these “freedom-loving” Tories justifying this to themselves and amongst themselves? Sometimes everyone, even a Tory, has to look in the mirror. Rationalisations are needed, even if some of those rationalisations might be too “challenging” and too controversial to be voiced publicly. Surely this big picture is just paranoid: how can the Tories, especially the constantly “will of the people” invoking Brexiteers, be so prepared to attack democracy itself?

Firstly, bear in mind that we are about to enter sinister territory, where there are people who’s “solution” to society’s problems is to deprive, or render worthless, the one thing the powerless can use to defend themselves against the powerful: their vote. Don’t expect “democratic” politicians to be proclaiming these ideas too loudly in public, as that could be career limiting. Nevertheless we won’t have to search very hard in the wider circles of right wing opinion to find some making such arguments. In fact, we can start with those from whom many Tories derive their direct philosophical inspiration.

Take Friedrich Hayek. Hayek is the leading light of the neoliberals, and was Thatcher’s mentor, with his “The Constitution of Liberty” becoming something of a bible for the Thatcherites. During one Conservative Party policy meeting, Thatcher famously slammed down her copy of Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” on the table declaring, “This is what we believe.” (https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/this-is-what-we-believe-margaret-thatcher-and-f-a-hayek).

The “liberal” part of the word neoliberal refers, just as we would expect, to a strong emphasis on “freedom”, though, of course, there is a lot of discussion about exactly how freedom should be defined. For “neoliberals” freedom tends to mean strong support for property rights and for market-based interactions free of government “interference”. Now, there is a common misconception that all forms of liberalism must necessarily involve support for democracy. While it is true that democratic governments, because they are accountable to the people, will find it harder to restrict the freedoms of the people than authoritarian governments, there is no logically necessary connection between democracy and liberalism, unless an extremely dogmatic view is taken that acting in accordance with the democratic will is the very definition of freedom. If the latter position is rejected then it is clear that there is nothing logically stopping a democracy acting in an “illiberal” manner, for example a majority depriving a minority of its freedoms. Democracy does not equate to freedom.

The preceding point is crucial and should be re-emphasised, as it can initially seem counter-intuitive: there is no logically necessary connection between neoliberalism, or indeed between any of the strands of right wing libertarian thought, and support for democracy. In fact, right wing libertarianism tends to emphasise purely majoritarian democracy, and to criticise democracy as little more than the tyranny of the majority, even mob rule. If they mention democratic mechanisms that tend to favour the emergence of a consensus compromise rather than majority rule, such as proportional representation or preferential voting systems, at all, it is to be disparaging. For example, Hayek says this: “It is by no means obvious that proportional representation is better because it seems more democratic.” (That quote, and all following Hayek quotes unless otherwise stated, are from Chapter 7, “Majority Rule”, and its footnotes, of “The Constitution of Liberty”).

Having focussed down on purely majority rule forms of democracy, right wing libertarians are sceptical of its worth. Hayek says, with some justification, “There is little reason why the majority of people who have joined for some purpose… should be regarded as entitled to extend their power as far as they please.” Ayn Rand, the founder of a strand of libertarian thought she named “Objectivism”, that is very popular among the US right and is also taken as a source of inspiration by many of our Tories, Sajid Javid perhaps being the most famous example, is even more scathing about democracy: “Democratic” in its original meaning [refers to] unlimited majority rule … a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.” (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/democracy.html).

Hayek, however, is prepared to accept democracy as a “means rather than an end”, seeing a number of practical benefits of the system, “Democracy is the only method of peaceful change that man has yet discovered,” being perhaps the most quoted. Hayek continues, “The second argument, which historically has been the most important , though we can no longer be sure that it is always valid, is that democracy is an important safeguard of individual liberty.” Finally, he sees benefits in democracy for political engagement and participation: “Democracy is, above all, a process of forming opinion. Its chief advantage lies not in its method of selecting those who govern but in the fact that, because a great part of the population takes an active part in the formation of opinion, a correspondingly wide range of persons is available from which to select”.

At this point then we can make another vital observation about right wing libertarian beliefs regarding democracy. At worst it is to be avoided, but even at best it has no inherent moral worth, being rather a decision making arrangement that can be useful. Many democrats, by contrast, would see an innate virtue in democracy, even if its isn’t always virtuous in its effects.

Of course it’s certainly true that democracy can’t decide everything. You wouldn’t, for instance, “vote” on the truth of mathematical proof, or “vote” on accepting a scientific hypothesis rather than testing it by observation or experiment. Indeed, if for strong supporters of democracy the need for democracy arises from moral considerations then those moral considerations are logically antecedent to democracy and underpin it. Or, in other words, the moral case for democracy runs deeper than democracy.

In this view democracy is something arising from morality, as a way, when we have exhausted rational argument and evidence and arrived at the point where we have to make a subjective decision about what people prefer, that everyone’s idea of fulfilment, of what “works” for them inside their own heads, is counted equally, at least provided they are willing to accord others the same respect. In this view democracy is just a result of applying one of the oldest and most widespread, and arguably most fundamental, of moral principles to politics. That principle is the Golden Rule, basically that we should respect the wants and needs of others, or at least of those who return the favour, as equal to our own. Following this argument, democracy, though in practice it will often be imperfect, very much has moral worth in and of itself, and not just because of its likely side effects. (More here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/questions-and-some-answers-how-to-live-with-yourself-and-others/).

Right wing libertarians do not, however, assert any moral case for democracy. If they did so they would see the value in more consensual forms of democracy, and for universal suffrage, in other words for democracy in its more modern forms. Rather they are, at best, indifferent to such modifications and enhancements to democracy.

For example, Hayek regards universal suffrage as something that could well be positively undesirable: “It is also possible for reasonable people to argue that the ideals of democracy would be best served if, say, all the servants of government or all recipients of public charity were excluded from the vote.” The footnote that accompanies that sentence is especially shocking, perhaps especially for a book published, as was “The Constitution of Liberty”, as late as 1960: “It is useful to remember that in the oldest and most successful of European democracies, Switzerland, women are excluded from the vote and apparently with the approval of the majority of them. It also seems possible that in primitive conditions only a suffrage confined, say, to landowners would produce a legislature sufficiently independent of the government to exercise effective control over it.”

Therefore right wing libertarians see no necessary logical connection between their philosophy and democracy, do not see any inherent moral value to democracy as a way to make communal “value judgements” and are decidedly ambivalent about aspects of democracy that many democrats would now see as essential, such as universal suffrage. Also, note that, though we have primarily used Hayek as the basis of this analysis, because of his prominence as the leading philosopher of the right wing libertarians, as epitomised by his key influence on the Thatcherites, the views of other influential right wing libertarian thinkers, such as Ayn Rand, are even more sceptical of democracy. There is an egalitarian tendency inherent in democracy with which right wing libertarians are distinctly uncomfortable, with the basic upshot that they regard modern democracy as entirely disposable.

It should therefore not be surprising that, in practice, these right wing libertarian ideas have tended to be associated with a drift towards authoritarianism. The problem with neoliberal programmes of “reform” is that they prioritise capitalism over democracy, meaning the interests of those with most market power over everyone else, at least in the immediate term. Measures such as slashing public services and welfare payments, reducing labour rights and suppressing unions, removing consumer or environmental protections, privatisations and cutting taxes on the wealthiest can eventually prove very unpopular, Many neoliberals would argue that such market “liberalisations” will eventually benefit everyone, in the “rising tide lifts all boats” sense, but the usual upshot of such policies, as we have seen, is rising inequality, which becomes the rich getting richer while the poor actually get poorer when crises, sometimes caused by neoliberal deregulation itself, hit. Hence the need for neoliberals to implement their policies using the three shocks as outlined in Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”: taking advantage of the public disorientation after a crisis, “shocking” the economy with sudden market “liberalisations” and then, if there is resistance in the streets, using state power and political terror to force compliance.

Of all the strains of right wing libertarian thought though, it is the neoliberalism of Hayek’s and Friedman’s circle, the “Mont Pelerin Society” as it is formally known, that has most often been cited as the direct inspiration for policy programmes of radical “economic reform”. The subsequent association of neoliberalism with authoritarianism has been tracked by an increasing number of commentators from at least Klein onwards, to the extent that research into “neoliberal authoritarianism”, and indeed “authoritarian capitalism” in general, now seems to have become something of an academic cottage industry.

Neoliberal market “liberalisations” have been combined with and/or followed by increasingly authoritarian, “strong man”, type rule, first in in countries such as Chile and Argentina, and later, for example, in Russia, Brazil, India, Turkey, Poland and Hungary, even if, as authoritarian neoliberalism causes economic and political power to converge into the same hands, the temptations of corruption and “crony capitalism” prove too strong, and pure “authoritarian capitalism” is what eventually emerges. In the final analysis, the wealthiest and the most powerful are most interested in their own wealth and power, and neoliberal dogma is just a convenient excuse most useful in the early stages of their ruthless economic and political aggrandisement. Indeed, the very grievances caused as market “liberalisations” accelerate inequalities usually necessitate the elites transitioning to “pluto-populist” tactics, such as firing-up in-group prejudices and scapegoating the “other”: foreigners, migrants and the socially non-conformist. Ultimately the finer points of the thought of Hayek or Friedman are of little interest to most hard-faced strong men (and they are sadly nearly always men), and ideology is more about finding the most effective ideas to deploy as weapons in their continuing, if ever increasingly loaded in their favour, power struggles than it is about “truth”.

It is Chile that provides perhaps the earliest and clearest example of the links, in practice, between the neoliberalism of Hayek’s and Friedman’s circle and anti-democratic politics. After the 1973 military coup that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, General Pinochet and his military junta ruled the country for seventeen years. During this period, a new Constitution was enacted in 1980, and radical neoliberal economic reforms were implemented. Hayek and Friedman visited Chile twice during the Pinochet dictatorship, to give interviews, lecture and provide advice to the government. Friedman advised Pinochet to administer a “shock treatment” to Chile to reduce the fiscal deficit through deep cuts to public spending, including privatising public healthcare and education (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-constitutionalism/article/towards-a-theory-of-neoliberal-constitutionalism-addressing-chiles-first-constitutionmaking-laboratory/AFEC4BE02411DA7466F1F4CE4F578913). Meanwhile, Hayek notably told a Chilean interviewer: “My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” (https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/17/the-road-from-serfdom/). As for the particular “liberal dictatorship” to which Hayek was referring, according to Amnesty International, as reported in the New York Times, Pinochet’s junta “disappeared” more than 1,500 Chileans just between 1973 and 1977 (“A Green Light for The Junta?” New York Times. 28 October 1977: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/28/archives/a-green-light-for-the-junta-in-the-nation.html).

Perhaps as a homage to Hayek, but most likely without any sense of irony, the new Constitution, when it arrived, was named the “Constitution of Liberty”. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-constitutionalism/article/towards-a-theory-of-neoliberal-constitutionalism-addressing-chiles-first-constitutionmaking-laboratory/AFEC4BE02411DA7466F1F4CE4F578913). This 1980 constitution locked Pinochet into the presidency at least until 1990 and as commander-in-chief of the army until 1998.

Therefore it is clear that, not just in theory but from its very first application, “neoliberalism” has had a “troubled” relationship with democracy. Nor is this an issue confined to the late 20^th Century: similar polemics that promote capitalism over democracy have continued to be promoted by right wing libertarian commentators and their think tanks.

For example, we have Moscow’s “Gaidar Institute”, named in honour of Yegor Gaidar, the economist and politician who applied neoliberal “shock therapy” to Russia in the early 1990s. Now, the Gaidar Institute is a respected think tank, co-hosting the “Gaidar Forum” each year (which it promotes as Russia’s “Davos”). Francis Maude, a Tory peer and former minister who is also a close associate of Michael Gove, together they helped found the “Policy Exchange” think tank in 2002, spoke at the Gaidar Forum in January 2018. Maude made a fairly anodyne speech about on one of his pet topics, central government reform (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgTGHtkDCqk). That subject is also close to the heart of Gove, and his close confidante and former advisor Dominic Cummings, and Gove hired Maude as a consultant to advise on reform of the Cabinet Office in 2020 (https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/tory-grandee-francis-maude-to-review-underfire-cabinet-office-in-wake-of-coronavirus). Now the Gaidar Institute funds “research” into the “link” between universal suffrage and public debt, as part of the repeated refrain of the right, ironically especially since governments were afflicted with huge debts as a result of the financial crash, that it is the fact that the masses can vote and demand a welfare safety net and decent public services that it is the real problem, not the deregulated bankers and their asset bubbles of dodgy financial instruments followed by governments having to bale them out and deal with the aftermath.

So, in 2016, the “Chief of Department of Institutional Development ” at the Gaidar Institute of Economic Policy (also leading research fellow at the Russian Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation) echoes Hayek at his most reactionary in criticising universal suffrage and advocating what he calls “taxpayers’ democracy”, meaning that only those who pay taxes should be able to vote and not those who are the recipients of public spending, as the latter group have a conflict of interest, meaning that they will continually vote just to drive up spending and taxes unless their votes are taken away. Of course, in reality there isn’t such a clear distinction between taxpayers and recipients of public spending, as even the poorest will pay indirect taxes such as VAT, and even the richest will enjoy “benefits in kind” such as driving on roads and having their extensive property protected by state law enforcement. If, to clarify the situation, we took “taxpayers” to mean those making a net contribution, and we ignore the fact that it could be difficult to deduct benefits in kind from each citizen’s taxes to calculate a true net contribution, then this is simply making a case for plutocracy. The argument ruthlessly and wilfully disregards the fact these taxpayer-voters also have a conflict of interest, which is to disregard their obligations to broader society as much as possible, and to try and arrange state affairs to boost their own wealth and power, for example perhaps favouring anti-union laws, deregulation and the rolling back of public provision to create new markets for their own businesses, while opposing the redistribution of wealth and privilege that may, at least in the first place, have been acquired by theft, extortion, corruption or exploitation. Everyone in society has their own “interests”, and anyone who is willing to respect the wants and needs of everyone else as equal to their own should also have their wants and needs respected equally. All such citizens who can meaningfully vote should have the vote, as sometimes there will be no other objective way to weigh up all such interests in the balance, especially when decisions come down to subjective value judgements.

It becomes clear that underlying the specious arguments in these Gaidar Institute papers the real worry is one dating back to at least the time of Aristotle: a fear that in a democracy the poor will form a mob that will eventually simply rob the rich: “Introducing universal suffrage weakened safeguards of private property… as feared by Aristotle (who warned against ‘ochlocracy’ – the sort of the ‘mob rule’) and conservative-minded Founding Fathers like Madison and Adams. The latter wrote: ‘Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted’. ” (Universal_Suffrage_100_years_of_undeclared_conflict_of_interest).

It is very likely that this concern runs under most, or even all, right wing libertarian objections to universal suffrage. In a way this amounts to the same observation made by left-leaning academics that “capitalist democracy” is really a contradiction in terms, but seen from the other side, from the right, from the perspective of the rich and powerful, or at least their apologists and academic attack-dogs. Also, as mentioned above, it is true that extending suffrage was, especially for the much of the 20^th Century, roughly up until the end of the 1970s, associated with declining inequality. In that case, it could be argued that universal suffrage was doing its job and improving the general welfare. After all, “ochlocracy” is only a possibility if there are significant divisions between rich and poor in the first place. To argue that universal suffrage is wrong because it promotes equality is frankly perverse.

As for the arguments about universal suffrage and public debts those are equally questionable, and not least because many recent debt crises can be attributed to neoliberalism itself, from those arising from the global financial crash to huge private debts caused by wage stagnation and landlordism. The basic argument here is one of correlation: that increasing public debts and extensions to the suffrage go hand in hand. Of course, correlation is not causation, and in practice extensions to the vote and government debt have often correlated because both have been triggered by the need to mass mobilise society to fight wars. A couple of further considerations are also ignored. The first is that the despots of even non-democratic societies have usually struggled to raise finance, especially that needed to fight wars, as they are torn by the need to extract the resources needed on the one hand, and on the other by not wanting to provoke revolt among those who will be taxed, especially at a time when they are facing open conflict with external powers. All states therefore have an in-built temptation to increase debt to avoid this dilemma, democratic or not. In fact, proto-democracies, such as the early English parliaments, were often summoned by rulers to mitigate this dilemma, as mechanisms by which the rulers could try and obtain consent for taxation. Democracy can thus be seen as lubricating the machine of state finance rather than impeding it, as, in many places and times, that was its first purpose. This leads onto the second consideration, that citizens who identify, often proudly, with a society will not seek to undermine it, and arguments on the basis of fiscal responsibility are often actually “easy sells” with even the mass of voters.

Finally, debt increases when expenditure exceeds income, and the Gaidar Institute analysis ignores the “income” side of the equation, especially tax, Tax returns will increase not just when tax rates are raised or new taxes levied, but, even if tax rates stay constant, if the economy grows. It is perhaps not accidental that in the UK it is the Tories and not Labour who have, since 1946, been responsible for most of the increase in the national debt, even pre-COVID (https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/11/27/the-tories-created-two-thirds-of-the-uks-national-debt/). Nor have the Tories been associated with overall better economic performance (https://theconversation.com/labour-are-much-better-at-running-the-economy-than-voters-think-new-research-162368), despite being in power for most of the time since the UK adopted universal suffrage.

This Gaidar Institute paper is deeply objectionable, backing its arguments with opinions from people like Calhoun, one of the apologists for slavery in the American South, and so combining a nasty streak of racism and xenophobia with its elitism and authoritarianism. Unfortunately, though, it is hardly alone. There is a whole sprawl of secretly funded right wing libertarian think tanks, generally neoliberal though also frequently involving the Randian “Objectivists”, spanning the globe. On the odd occasions their funding does get revealed, it tends to be traced to billionaires, historically often the oil money of the Koch brothers of the USA. Currently 481 of these think tanks are members of the “Atlas Network” (https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory), a self-styled “tremendously” impactful force in the “global freedom movement”. The oldest Atlas members, such as the “Institute of Economic Affairs”, are UK or US based, though often with a distinctly “transatlantic” flavour, and have close associations with the Conservative Party. For example, when Boris Johnson formed his first cabinet in July 2019 the Institute of Economic Affairs was able to boast that 14 of those around the Downing Street table – including the chancellor, Sajid Javid, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, and the home secretary, Priti Patel – were “alumni of IEA initiatives”. (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/29/rightwing-thinktank-conservative-boris-johnson-brexit-atlas-network).

In 2017 the Tory Brexiteers worked with several Atlas think tanks, including the US based Cato Institute, to draw up a detailed, 239-page draft legal text for a possible US-UK free trade deal. It is an “adjunct scholar” at the Cato Institute who provides another typical neoliberal argument against democracy (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa594.pdf). This argues that voters are irrational and ill-informed, so that democracy should be limited, with collective decision making significantly replaced with “private choice” and “markets”. In particular, the author laments that voters do not think like economists (and generally he means classically and neoclassically trained economists). This paper was written in 2007, just before the Financial Crash. Possibly the author would have struggled to make such bold claims in the immediate aftermath.

However, he does not claim that economists are perfect: “The striking implication is that even economists, widely charged with market fundamentalism, should be more pro-market than they already are. What economists currently see as the optimal balance between markets and government rests upon an overestimate of the virtues of democracy. In many cases, economists should embrace the free market in spite of its defects, because it still outshines the democratic alternative”.

Of course, it is true that voters are often irrational and ill-informed. That’s in itself one of the justifications for representative democracy, or for demarchy, such as when “juries” are randomly selected from the citizenry and “hothoused” until they can pronounce on decisions of guilt or innocence, or a citizens’ jury or citizens’ assembly can decide an issue of public policy. It’s also an argument for better public education, especially in critical thinking skills, and for improving debate, including having elements of the media as free as possible from government or corporate influence, and for trying to restrict the influence of dark money and the covert use of private data on social media. Though it would perhaps be unfair to expect a 2007 paper to address the latter, social media related, concern, the fact remains that none of those possibilities are discussed in this paper at all. The currently parlous state of global democracy is at least partially due to the self-serving manipulations of the pluto-populists; it would be, shall we say, really rather galling if the billionaire backers of those assaults on democracy then use the fact that it is now so damaged to justify undermining democracy still further. Really, they should have stopped breaking democracy in the first place. The fallibility of voters is also why democratic mechanisms that encourage the formation of a consensus compromise, such as proportional representation or preferential voting systems, are likely to yield better results than pure majoritarian democracy but, as usual, this paper focusses exclusively on majoritarian democracy.

The paper states that: “Like markets, democracy can be limited, regulated, or overruled.” We need to be very careful here. Interpreted one way this statement is entirely reasonable. We have already seen that democracy is not a sensible way to make decisions that could be based on logical proof or empirical confirmation, and that democracy, rather than deciding on the most fundamental moral principles, arises from those principles, so that the idea that there are some basic moral constraints on democracy is entirely defensible. One of those moral constraints, for example, would be the right of freedom of the individual, meaning respecting individual autonomy, or “personal choice” to use the words of the paper. However, the libertarian right ignores the fact that our actions affect one another, and so that there have to be limits to personal autonomy, as otherwise there will be continuous conflicts and the powerful will expand their own “autonomy” by crushing the autonomy of the powerless. As defining what impacts of our behaviour on each other are, or are not, acceptable requires many subjective value judgements, it is one of those decision making processes that must be based on consensus, i.e. on some form of democracy. In other words, a democratically derived consensus is needed to agree the limits of personal autonomy, to avoid the autonomy of some coming at the cost of the loss of autonomy of others. Also note that, as that consensus defined concept of personal autonomy then acts as a constraint on democracy, democracy is here constraining itself, for example, agreeing that freedom of personal religious belief is an individual right.

Similarly, when it comes to deciding the scope of markets, such as which services should be provided publicly to all or left to the market, or how markets should be regulated, and note that all markets require rules of some kind, then again we will usually be into complex decisions that cannot be made objectively, where value judgements are needed and everyone needs to have a chance to assert their own viewpoint and own interests. So, again, just as with setting the exact limits of personal autonomy, defining the scope and regulation of markets has to ultimately be based on some form democratically generated consensus.

This doesn’t mean that we might not delegate the actual decisions to others, especially to experts, or to our representatives who then seek the detailed advice of experts. But it does mean, at the very least, that we reserve the collective right to withdraw that decision making authority from such people if we judge them to be incompetent or not to be acting in our best interests.

The alternative would be to permanently abrogate all such collective decision making authority and leave defining the limits of our democracy and the limits of markets to some type of elite. Unfortunately, history teaches us that elites are nearly always self-serving, that they struggle to be impartial and objective, and will rule in their own interest. Even if we postulated an incorruptible, benevolent and enlightened elite, it’s value judgements, it’s own subjective sense of what makes life worth living, most likely would not be the same as that of the rest of society.

Therefore, we have to conclude that when it comes to defining the detailed limits of democracy and markets those decisions must themselves ultimately be based on a democratically derived consensus, as those decisions cannot be made totally objectively, and cannot be trusted to unaccountable third parties. Postulating “limits on democracy” does not allow an escape from the need for effective democracy in the first place, as in practice the details of those essential limits have to be assented to democratically and are provisional. Limiting democracy is therefore not a permanent solution to any issue of voters being irrational and ill-informed, and such a problem must be addressed directly, through measures like education and adopting democratic mechanisms that encourage consensus compromise over outright rule by the majority.

We should also be clear that the main point of this paper is to assert that the “free market” “outshines the democratic alternative”, and that what the author means by “democratic alternative” is any form of public, communal provision of services that is, in the final analysis, democratically accountable and democratically managed in any way, such as healthcare or education. The upshot of this Cato paper would be to replace provision based on communally recognised need with ability to pay. In a capitalist society, where by definition only a few, the “capitalists”, control the things that people need to live and make a living, the result of rolling back the public sector and letting markets rip will therefore be rising inequality, all other factors being equal. Ironically, markets perhaps work best for everyone in a context that could be called “socialist”, where the control of the things that people need to live and make a living is reasonably equally distributed among the many. Then there are no capitalists to potentially exploit workers, and, with everyone having access to what they need to work and survive, broader equality in terms of purchasing power in the markets. But there is no getting away from the fact that drastically expanding markets at the expense of public provision in a capitalist context very much favours the “capitalists”. Therefore we are back again to the inherent tension in a “capitalist democracy”, between capitalism and democracy. Again, if that tension is not resolved democratically, we end up in a society organised entirely to serve the wealthy.

The libertarian right, just like the radical left, acknowledges the contradiction in “capitalist democracy” but, predictably, resolves that tension by plumping firmly for “capitalism”. If “astoturfing” is a favourite pluto-populist tactic, where-by billionaire money is used to set up groups and campaigns that falsely appear to have spontaneously arisen from below among the “masses” rather then in reality having been created from above on the part of their “masters”, literally fake “grassroots”, then perhaps it’s more “respectable” equivalent, this time using “dark money” to fund important-sounding “institutes”, with imposing offices bearing impressive nameplates, that then output, as ostensibly serious “research”, material that is nothing more than propaganda of the most fanatical and dangerous kind, should be called “brass-plating”?

As these are the philosophies that inspire the Tory right, and that are used, for example, to justify the deregulatory drives of the Brexiteers, we now know that there is no reason to equate Tory expressions of their love of freedom as anything to do with democracy, and possibly not even with freedom beyond the freedom for the rich to continue to make as much money as possible. “Take back control” doesn’t mean Parliament or the masses are taking back control, it means the wealthy Tory backers. Also, when they talk about the need to respect the “will of the people”, they are lying.

So, if these are some of the dangerous ideas influencing Tory political thought, it’s also fair to ask if they are also associating with equally dangerous friends, of similar beliefs and anti-democratic tendencies? Who and what are the main agents “behind” the slow but accelerating executive coup? And what can we do to stop them? Those are the questions we will address in the final part.

Part 6 is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/09/03/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-6-dodgy-friends-sinister-connections-and-how-we-fight-back/

The previous part is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/09/01/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-4-deep-dark-under-currents-at-the-bottom-of-the-gravity-well/

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 4: deep, dark under-currents at the bottom of the gravity well

In parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series on Tory power grab, we saw how the slow but accelerating Tory executive coup has unfolded in practice from 2010 until 2021. In the remaining parts of this series we’ll look at the deeper factors, ideas and agents at play that have been driving the whole process inexorably forward, including similar processes in other countries, and what to do about it.

Arguably, the fact that the main raison d’etre of the Tory Party over its entire existence has been to “conserve” and protect the interests of the ruling class, always meant that the Conservative Party would, sooner or later, be exposed as incompatible with universal suffrage. In the words of Aneurin Bevan “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.” Universal suffrage, though, is only about a century old in the UK, and that century was dominated by the nation having to fight two World Wars and a Cold War. Those conflicts required high levels of social cohesion: in the First and Second World Wars so that all the resources of society could be marshalled to further the cause of victory, in the Cold War to minimise the risk of Eastern Bloc inspired, armed and funded insurrection (even if in practical terms that eventually amounted to little more than arms running via Libya to Irish nationalists). It is perhaps not entirely accidental that it was only in the 1980s, once the Soviet system was crumbling and had clearly lost its general appeal, that the Tories first broke with a more paternalistic post-war consensus. Perhaps the Tories becoming toxic to democracy in the aftermath of the Financial Crash was simply the first moment that their inconsistency with mass democracy could become fully manifest?

There are other factors at work too, making this the time when, it order to defend the elite class interests that they have always served, the Tories would try and lock themselves in power. There’s a specific, somewhat local one, that the Tories, mainly as a result of student debt and the housing crisis, and the way both those issues clearly link to current and past Conservative policies, have radicalised nearly an entire generation of younger voters against them (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ge17-and-the-making-of-a-labour-generation/). The youth have been given a very harsh “political education”, and lessons have been learnt that many will retain throughout their lives. The Tories have become ever more dependent on older voters for support, and older voters do not endure forever, so that, provided the younger voters remember that “political education” of their formative years as they age, the Conservatives face a serious challenge as a democratic force. The Conservatives need to try and somehow defuse a “demographic time bomb”, and they are entirely aware of this themselves, with former Tory cabinet minister David Willets saying in 2017 “The worst-case scenario is, we lose the support of the younger generation, and don’t regain it ” (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/29/tories-risk-permament-loss-of-youth-vote-says-willetts),

Then there are more general, indeed global, factors, that are driving politicians and political parties that serve the interests of the richest, including the Tories, to undermine democracy and lock themselves and their fellow travellers in power.

The essential background to this part of the story is rising inequality. Partly, this is an effect of globalisation, itself caused by technological change, such as the invention of container ships and the internet, as well as the removal of impediments to trade and the movement of capital. Rising inequality is also the direct result of innovation, with some becoming, for example, dot-com billionaires, while others lose their jobs, including factory workers switched for robots, typists replaced with word processing software or supermarket staff displaced by self check-out. A third factor was “government capture” by the elites, leading specifically to anti-labour legislation and tax changes that favour the wealthy. Most recently, particularly since the Financial Crash, there has been considerable asset inflation, especially increases in property prices and rising stock prices, the former often exacerbated by housing shortages, but both resulting from the way governments have tried to avoid post-crash recessions by injecting new money into the banking system, using the mechanism normally described as “Quantitative Easing”.

The evidence of this rising inequality, both in the UK and elsewhere, is reasonably clear. In the case of the UK, the Office of National Statistics said this about the decade from 2011 to 2020: “The gap between the richest in society and the rest of the population has widened over the 10-year period; the income share of the richest 1% increased from 7% to 8.3% between FYE 2011 and FYE 2020.” (www.ons.gov.uk/householdincomeinequalityfinancial/financialyearending2020). The pattern is similar with UK wealth inequality, with the share of wealth held by the richest 1% of the UK population falling to its lowest level of 15% in the early 1980s, and since then rising back to about 23% (https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/wealth-gap-year/), meaning that the 1% in the UK have increased their wealth share by just over half.

Globally, the picture is similar, indeed worse, in many countries. The 2020 UN World Social Report “Inequality in a Rapidly Changing World” states: “… income is increasingly concentrated at the top of the income ladder… The share of income earned by the richest 1 per cent of the population increased in 59 out of 100 countries or areas with data from 1990 to 2015… In 2015, the top 1 per cent earned more than 20 per cent of all income in 18 countries with data, including Brazil, Chile, India, the Russian Federation, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.” Wealth inequality has also increased, and is even higher: “The following findings have been widely publicized: while the bottom half of the global population owned less than 1 per cent of all wealth in 2018, the richest decile (top 10 per cent) owned 85 per cent of all wealth and the top 1 per cent alone held almost half of it… The existing evidence also suggests that, where income inequality has grown, wealth inequality has grown even faster since at least 2008… In addition, the distribution of income between capital and labour has undergone major changes. The share of wages in total GDP declined in a majority of countries (91 out of 133 with data) from 1995 to 2014… Improvements in labour productivity have not translated into better labour compensation. Wage stagnation is likely to disproportionately harm workers in the middle and at the bottom of the income distribution, since they rely mostly on labour income.” (https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2020/02/World-Social-Report2020-FullReport.pdf).

The fact that increasing shares of global income and wealth were being appropriated by the super-rich was a trend that was noticed even before the Financial Crash. Investment analysts working for the financial services multinational Citibank adopted a special term to describe this whole phenomenon back in 2005: “plutonomy”. According to these analysts a plutonomy is an economy “where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few” so that: “In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” (https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf). To wonder whether or not it is the super-rich who really “power” the wealth creation, beyond the circular argument that they can invest much more than anyone else simply because they control the far greatest share of wealth in the first place, especially as the vast bulk of people have no net wealth at all, would be a digression, though for the analysts, as this report was intended to be read by their wealthiest clients, the element of flattery was most likely intended.

Notoriously, though, in their next report on “plutonomy”, in 2006, the same analysts identified the most significant threat to this cosy arrangement: “…the rising wealth gap between the rich and poor will probably at some point lead to a political backlash. Whilst the rich are getting a greater share of the wealth, and the poor a lesser share, political enfrachisement remains as was – one person, one vote (in the plutonomies). At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich… We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions. However we are keeping a close eye on developments.” (https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-2.pdf).

In other words, the richest have in many ways the simplest possible reason to undermine democracy: to preserve the very inequality that makes them the richest in the first place.

Rising inequality also directly increases the influence of the richest over politics, as they can make more “dark money” available, to donate to political parties, campaigns and “think tanks” that are really just propaganda generating machines for their donors, to pay lobbyists and data analysts and public relations firms, to buy into media companies or fund comfortable little non-executive directorships for retired politicians. That in turn leads to more “government capture” and yet more inequality as a result of measures such as tax cuts for the rich, reduced public services like less real terms per capita funding for state education, anti-union laws, plus more globalisation, up to and including using the intelligence, military, and even nuclear, assets of states to threaten other nations into opening themselves up for trade and investment, as happened with the Soviet Union. (With the the most ruthless agents of the Soviet state, KGB officers and their ilk, using their muscle and “kompromat” to help seize state assets as the Soviet economy privatised, and creating a kleptocratic oligarchy, it is hard not to be cynical about the Cold War being fought for the sake of freedom, when it leaves the nastiest of the b*stards we were fighting against actually much enhanced in power, and the people still not free).

Rising inequality additionally generates disaffection with democracy, especially a democracy being gamed by the rich. That in turn allows the wealthy, exploiting grievances caused in the first place by policies that they actually promoted, to cynically redirect that anger to their own ends. There’s even a new word for that tactic: “pluto-populism” (https://vip.politicsmeanspolitics.com/2019/08/01/no-deal-brexit-like-brexit-in-general-is-simply-pluto-populism/).

Rising inequality can nevertheless be tolerable to the general population when nearly everyone is getting richer, in other words in periods of high growth. That’s why those Citibank analysts failed to detect their anticipated political revolt against “plutonomy”. However, there is an inherent contradiction between capitalism and democracy, which means that social conflicts in a “capitalist democracy” will escalate rapidly as economies slow if inequality doesn’t correspondingly decline. That contradiction arises because capitalism serves the interests of those with market power, meaning property and money to spend, where-as democracy is meant to serve the needs of everyone (this is explored more fully here: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii71/articles/wolfgang-streeck-the-crises-of-democratic-capitalism). That tension can be ignored by most people when an economy is clearly expanding and the capitalists can style themselves as the “rising tide that lifts all boats”. The rich will even get away with taking a larger share of the economic growth than everyone else, plutonomy style, provided that nearly everyone gets at least some of that growth. The tension within capitalist democracy becomes intolerable to many, however, when growth is sluggish or even declines, and everyone has to fight for a share of a generally fixed or even shrinking economy, so that usually the only way for someone to acquire wealth is to take it from someone else. At this point a system where the “few” control the means that others need to live and make a living, and do so without being able to make even tenuous and questionable claims of furthering the general welfare, loses any justification whatsoever. (For a comprehensive treatment of the implications of zero growth on capitalist democracies see: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1463499620977984)

Growth declined first in the Western nations, due in part to competition from emerging nations, as facilitated by globalisation, causing de-industrialisation and offshoring of jobs, but also automation, leading to rising profits for the few but unemployment and stagnating wages for the many, plus falling birth rates and some exhaustion of the most readily extractable natural resources. As humanity as a whole runs against global resource and environmental limits, especially the capacity of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb greenhouse gas emissions without causing catastrophic climate change, the whole economy is likely to have to transition to a lower growth state, at least for a decade or two. Breakthroughs such as fusion power, factory cultured food, nano-technology or room temperature superconductors, and the creation of an off-Earth economy as a result of much reduced launch costs and ideally the foundation of an industrial base on the Moon and asteroids that can expand using its own resources, without needing vast energies to lift mass out of our planet’s deep gravity well, may well eventually allow escape from these constraints, but not in the immediate future, and in most cases not soon enough to contribute to stabilising the current climate. Furthermore, growth will probably to have to be additionally constrained in the richer nations, to allow the emerging nations a chance to catch up, or billions will be left trapped in poverty.

In a negligible or even negative economic growth situation the contradiction between capitalism and democracy is likely to be unsustainable. One or the other will have to be chosen. Elites, with their thinks tanks and very well paid, highly connected and expertly informed advisors, can anticipate this, and are already exerting their influence to ensure that “capitalism” is chosen. Also many of the world’s super-rich, even at the same time as funding climate change denial, will feel a pressing need to bolster their own power and privilege against the threat posed by successive global crises. The slow Tory executive coup is part of these developments too, even though very few at the top of the party can possibly make even the dimmest connection between their conniving power grabs and climate change or launch costs.

Even without declining growth rates compelling elites in many “capitalist democracies” to head-off possible revolts, a power grab on the part of the global elite would be happening anyway, though with less urgency and intensity, as result of an even slower and deeper dynamic: the gradual re-convergence of political and economic power. Those with economic power, or “wealth”, use it to buy political power, from politicians and parties to mercenaries, while those with “political power”, or the power to make and enforce the “rules”, use it to steal the wealth. As a result economic and political power have such a strong tendency to converge that for most of human history both forms of power have resided in exactly the same hands, usually with “landed” elites. We, however, are arguably at the end of a long period of disruption where, starting in Europe with the Black Death, which killed nearly half the population and left the landed lords with more land than there were peasants left to farm it, plus expansion of commerce and industry and the discoveries of new lands overseas, especially the Americas, led to the ruling class dividing in two. A new “capitalist” class arose to rival the power of the traditional landed elites, so that political and economic power actually drifted apart, and the divided elites, often fighting each other, had to repeatedly make concessions to the masses as they vied for their support, or were even too weak, in some places at some times, to stop representatives of the masses from rising up and actually taking charge of the political situation for a while, even if, sometimes, that process just resulted in the creation of new elites rather than enduring equality.

That unusual period of disruption, in Europe and in many of the places across the globe where the Europeans settled, meant that there was a accelerating tendency for society to be run for the benefit of the many not the few. For once, most members of a society, with the exception of those other peoples the Europeans enslaved or tried to exterminate, were no longer mere objects born to serve the elites. Proto-democracies arose, initially as a peaceful way to resolve conflicts within the elites, but, starting in the 19^th Century and reaching its climax in the 20^th Century, there were moves to extend the vote, eventually including women. Slaves were freed and eventually some concessions made to respect the rights of those who had survived the exterminations. Over the last century universal suffrage resulted in a trend towards falling inequality as the lot of the masses improved dramatically.

Except that the elites would not remain divided forever. In the late 20^th Century globalisation boosted the wealth and power of the richest and caused them to start to cohere into a new multinational ruling class. By the end of the 1970s a full blown counter-revolution was under-way, so that inequality slowly started rising again, in places such as the USA and UK, from the early 1980s. In this view of history the Tory executive coup is in part just another aspect of this longer, subsurface historical process of societies “relaxing” back to their equilibrium state, with both wealth and power residing in the hands of a single ruling class, in this instance a new global billionaire plutocracy. (More here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light/).

All of this is fuelling the rise in authoritarianism across the globe. In that sense then there is nothing unique about the slow Tory executive coup in the UK; it is just a local example of a phenomenon that’s much broader in both time and space. That is why the Tories have so many exemplars, and backers, abroad, in the USA, Russia, Poland, Hungary, India, Brazil and Turkey in particular, even if the “pluto-populist” network that for a time coalesced around Trump is, for the moment, largely out of power in the USA. The political actors here, far from being visionaries, are just themselves being propelled by deeper historical currents that only become visible when we zoom out our perspective, and see the aggregate result of the day to day actions of lots of these little, localised “geniuses” over the longer term.

Those deeper historical currents in no way fully determine the actions of the most influential members of a society, such as the politicians, their advisors and their sometimes shadowy super-rich backers. What an individual does, caught in the vagaries of their life, remains unpredictable, as are therefore the details of historical events. But those deep historical currents do bias the actions, and the consequences of those actions, of historical agents, meaning that they increase the likelihoods of events moving in certain directions. Those biases can be subtle but also pervasive, so that, even if individuals are unaware of those biases, the biases themselves and the effects of the deeper historical currents become obvious when many actions of many individuals, and the consequences of those actions, are summed over space and time. This is the way more general processes of historical causation, which create underlying trends, interact with the more specific, the personal and the day-to-day. (This general historical process then itself only becomes unpredictable when those historical currents are pulling into potentially divergent directions and with similar strengths; when history is balanced on a knife edge and is at some type of turning point, then, and only then, can the unpredictable “specifics”, the personal and the day-to-day, matter in terms of being able to alter the underlying historical reality, in the same way that the gentlest breeze could alter the outcome of a coin toss).

So we now understand the “historical currents” that are pushing the Tory political machine to attempt to destroy democracy in order to lock itself and the interests it represents into power indefinitely. But how are these “freedom-loving” Tories justifying this to themselves? We’ll look at the excuses they are using amongst themselves, though never too openly, and the rather limited and somewhat surprising right-wing interpretation of “freedom”, in part 5. Together we’ll encounter a raft of ideas that amount to rationalising the destruction of our democracy.

Part 5 is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/09/02/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-5-dangerous-ideas-and-our-disposable-democracy/

The previous part is here:https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/08/31/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-3-exponentiating-executive-coup/

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 3: exponentiating executive coup

It is now, with Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in 2019, that the antidemocratic process that had fired up in the Tory party in the aftermath of the Financial Crash, and had always been more of an emergent phenomenon than a detailed, continuous plan, an “unintended consequence”, or perhaps more accurately semi-intended consequence, of the desire on the part of certain Tories and their backers to use the crisis to implement their dream policies, while, at the same time knowing full well that those policies were likely to eventually prove unpopular with the electorate, turns into more of an explicit programme. The clearest evidence of that is page 48 of the 2019 Tory manifesto, which includes plans to address a non-existent problem with voter impersonation that amount to voter suppression, curbs on the courts being able to hold the government to account and interference with our human rights, together with vague allusions about bolstering the not particularly democratic, and in practice usually Tory favouring, first passed the post system of voting and somehow strengthening powers of the security forces to defend us against “terrorism and organised crime”.

In the general election, 52% of the population vote for parties to the left of and more Brexit sceptical than the Tories, but the first passed the post system still delivers Boris Johnson a landslide victory with an 80 seat majority. With the Tory victory the executive coup moves into a whole new phase, as the measures mentioned in the manifesto, and more, are rolled out systematically.

Three of these we have already touched upon. The “Spycops” Act (the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act) gained royal assent on 1st March 2021. It authorises covert intelligence sources to potentially carry out any crime in connection with the conduct of their duties.

Then there was the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, still making it’s way through Parliament at the time of writing. This bill states that any protestor causing any person “serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity” could be subject to “, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years, to a fine or to both.” (https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/42132/documents/484). Elsewhere it makes it clear that even the “noise” generated by a protest can equate to causing “serious distress” to a person or organisation. The provisions of this Act are both so onerous and so open-ended that it effectively gives the state the power to arbitrarily put down any protest it likes, arrest the protestors and, should the law hold up in the courts, imprison those protestors for years at a time.

Thirdly, the Elections Bill 2021 (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/elections-bill-2021-summary-factsheet/elections-bill-2021-summary-factsheet) introduces the requirement for voters to produce photo id that, as discussed above, could disenfranchise two million, mostly the disadvantaged and marginalised. As such voters are more likely to vote Labour it has been interpreted by some commentators as inspired by Republican voter suppression tactics in the US (https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/05/10/boris-johnson-accused-of-republican-style-voter-suppression-ahead-of-controversial-photo-id-announcement/). The bill also strips the Electoral Commission of its power to bring criminal prosecutions and undermines its independence by subjecting it to more parliamentary scrutiny, possibly in revenge for its investigations of dodgy Leave campaigns during the EU referendum. It doesn’t increase the derisory fines the Electoral Commission can levy for offences: only a maximum of twenty thousand pounds, not much for stealing an election or a referendum given that provisions to force a re-run are very limited, so that reversing the result of an election where offences have been committed very rarely happens, and an amount that the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas attempted to have made “unlimited” in a failed amendment to the special bill used to call the 2019 General Election.(https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2019-2019/0010/amend/early_daily_cwh_1029.1-7.html)

Indeed, despite volumes being written about the rising role of “dark money” in British politics, the Government’s main reaction at the end of 2020 was to up-rate spending limits for the first time since 2000, from £19.5 million to £33 million for national party spending (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-spending-limit-cap-b1766182.html). Perhaps that isn’t surprising, as in the 2019 general election period the Conservatives received two thirds of all political donations (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-which-party-received-the-most-donations/) and spent 37.5% more than Labour (https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/financial-reporting/campaign-spending-political-parties-and-non-party-campaigners/political-party-spending-previous-elections).

Other changes to election rules include the long awaited new constituency boundaries and a repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

The Tory plan, dating back to the days of Cameron and discussed above, had been to drastically redraw consituency boundaries, reducing the number of constituencies from 650 to 600, while at the same time changing voter registrations from household registration to individual registration. The new constituencies would then be redrawn to include roughly equal numbers of voters, but those numbers would be derived from the 2015 electoral rolls, at the point where the numbers registered would be at a low point, as by then all the old style household registrations would have been excluded, but many people wouldn’t as yet have individually re-registered, and those not registered would have tended to be renters and the young, so more likely to vote Labour. The plan failed. It proved difficult to find 50 MPs willing to “retire”, making the reduction in constituencies very hard to agree, and the Lib Dems were able to kick the whole scheme into the long grass, while Theresa May never got round to implementing the new boundaries before losing her majority.

The 2019 Tory manifesto still included a commitment to redraw consituencies based broadly on each constituency having roughly an equal number of voters, and even the plan to reduce the number of MPs wasn’t dropped until March 2020 (https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/government-ditches-plan-to-cut-number-of-mps-from-650-to-600-because-brexit-will-increase-their-workload). In itself much of this sounds reasonable, especially as, by now, the whole exercise had been so delayed that the voter numbers were to be derived from the 2020 and not the 2015 electoral rolls, and by 2020 the number of voters registered under the new system was at an all time high (www.ons.gov.uk/electoralstatisticsforuk/march2020). However, in a first passed the post system, a lot depends on exactly where the boundaries are drawn, and Labour votes tend to pile high in the cities. In 2019, for example, it took 50 837 votes to elect a Labour MP, as against 38 264 votes to elect a Tory MP (though bear in mind that the more seats a party wins the lower the number of entirely wasted votes, so the number of votes to elect an MP tends to fall as vote share goes up. The comparable figures for 2017 were 49 152 and 43 018). The Boundary Commission is independent, but, even so, the new boundaries are expected to allow the Tories to win 5 – 10 more seats (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tory-extra-seats-boundary-changes-b1861707.htm).

The other way first passed the post favours the Tories is that the left vote tends to be fragmented across more parties. For example, if you analyse the 2019 General Election, for the whole UK, including all parties that won at least 0.1% of the popular vote, then there were 10 left and centre parties in the running (including as the “rightmost” parties in that bloc the Liberal Democrats and the Alliance party in Northern Ireland) as against 5 parties on the right (the Conservatives, the Brexit party with their partial and one-way electoral pact with the Tories, UKIP, the DUP and the Ulster Unionists). Slyly, the Conservatives therefore included in their 2019 manifesto a commitment to “continue to support the first passed the post system of voting”. In May 2021, in the wake of losing 11 out of 13 of the elections for metro mayors to Labour, this gave the Tories a pretext to announce replacing the supplementary vote system used in mayoral elections, which allowed voters to express a first and second preference, with first passed the post (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/09/government-to-change-english-voting-system-after-labour-mayoral-victories). This was followed, just two months later, by a Tory reorganisation of local government, which involved forming new unitary authorities seemingly carefully structured to also boost Conservative control of local councils (https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/lgc-briefing/jenricks-reorganisation-inconsistency-raises-political-suspicions-22-07-2021/).

With an 80 seat majority the Tories had no remaining use, at least right now, for “fixed-term” parliaments, especially as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act had been widely blamed for “frustrating” Brexit and causing political deadlock, and was, as explained above, up for compulsory review in any case. So, in 2021, the Tories introduced a Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill (https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/41467/documents/206), intended to allow the government to freely call elections whenever they like, as if the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has never existed. But, this being the Tories, of course it includes a few new power grabs, notably the right to “appoint an alternative day for the meeting of the new Parliament, in place of the day that would otherwise have been the day for the meeting of the new Parliament” and, so a dissolution of Parliament by the government cannot be legally challenged in the same way that their illegal prorogation of Parliament was in 2019, it also disallows the courts having any say at all in the operation of the bill. It’s also unclear what this means for the 2014 “Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act“, as that, as we saw when discussing Cameron’s power grabs, applies spending limits up to a year before an election. While that period should have been predictable with fixed term parliaments, now that the PM can call a snap general election whenever he likes, the limit becomes retroactive, meaning organisations such as trade unions could find themselves having already spent too much immediately an election is called.

As well as stopping the judges ruling in any way on any dissolution of parliament, the Johnson administration intends to curb the power of the courts in other ways too. The Tories, especially since May lost her case in the courts regarding her right to trigger article 50 without parliamentary approval, and Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament being declared illegal, have long found it grating that the courts sometimes question the legality of their decisions. In the Queens’s Speech of 2021 the Government announced in would that it would press ahead with a judicial review bill, legislating to “restore the balance of power between the executive, legislature and the courts”. The aim, allegedly, is to prevent the courts getting drawn into political controversies, i.e. exactly the type of controversies that tend to arise when a ruling party is carrying out a gradual executive coup (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/jun/02/plans-to-restrict-judicial-review-weaken-the-rule-of-law-mps-warn). As part of its broader reforms of “constitutional arrangements” the Johnson administration is also considering whether the appointment of Supreme Court judges should be subject to parliamentary approval (https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2019-10-08/debates/DA90CA87-1F09-4647-A143-27383CB95B30/ProcedureForAppointingJudges).

When executing your executive coup, it also helps to keep the media on side, or at very least cowed and silenced. The Tories already enjoy considerable advantages when it comes to the UK media. Most of the media is billionaire owned and swings in their favour: for example, in the 2019 general election nine national newspapers endorsed the Conservatives, as against five for Labour.(wikipedia/Endorsements_in_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election). Also, the BBC, though not a state broadcaster, is constantly concerned about the next renewal of its TV licence fee, or even with losing the right to levy a licence fee altogether, and is therefore usually reluctant to take a strongly anti-government line. As ever though, the power grabbing Tories, not content with these in-built advantages, have connived to tilt the playing field even more, appointing Richard Sharp, who has donated £400 000 to the party and Tory MPs since 2001, as BBC chair (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/14/richard-sharp-chair-bbc-political-independence) in January 2021 and, at the time of writing, attempting to appoint Paul Dacre, a director at, and the former editor of, the very Tory supporting Daily Mail newspaper, as head of the media regulator, OFCOM. Meanwhile, the Government is also turning its fire on Channel Four. Channel Four, like the BBC, is also a public service broadcaster, but, unlike the BBC, is entirely self funding, so doesn’t have to worry about the government continually re-authorising its right to levy a TV licence fee, and therefore, reasonably free of both government and big business influence, tends to take a more independent line in its news coverage. The Johnson administration is therefore proposing to sell off Channel Four (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9716727/Furious-Tories-say-struggling-Channel-4-sealed-fate.html).

Should the media still prove a challenge, the Government is also seeking to acquire another stick with which to beat it, by revising the Official Secrets Act to increase the maximum sentence, from two years to an unlimited prison term, when someone, and in practice this will most often be a reporter, discloses leaked material, without even any provision for a defence that the disclosure was in the public interest (Consultation_Document_Legislation_to_Counter_State_Threats.pdf), prompting headlines such as “Journalists could face up to 14 years in prison for stories embarrassing the Government under proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act that would treat them like foreign SPIES” even in the Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9806517/Journalists-face-14-years-prison-embarrassing-Government-proposed-law-change.html).

If, by now, anyone has started to wonder if some of these measures could be challenged as violations of our human rights, then that is arguably why the Tories are also planning to review our Human Rights Act (https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/more-than-350000-of-taxpayers-money-spent-on-tory-manifesto-commitment-to-review-human-rights-act-1056637). Additionally, the Government has already put its own sympathisers in key roles in at least one body supporting the upholding of some of our human rights, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, where David Isaac, the chair from 2016 to August 2020, criticised Liz Truss’s appointments of four new commissioners in November 2020 as attempting to make the commission do her “bidding” (https://www.ier.org.uk/news/the-ehrc-is-becoming-a-political-instrument-former-chair-says/).

Of course, it is in the nature of politicians and political parties that they seek power, but this apparently exponentiating trend of the Tories since 2010 to aggrandise their power and privilege, of a power grab intended to lock themselves and their policies in place indefinitely, is extreme, at least for British politics. We have seen that one driving factor for this slow executive coup is the simple fact that ultimately their transformation of our society, because it is intended to benefit the few, won’t ultimately be popular with the many, coupled with a “disaster capitalist” temptation to exploit each and every crisis as pretexts for advancing their plans still further and faster, first with the Financial Crash, then Brexit and now COVID, up to and including causing or exacerbating crises.

In Part 4 we’ll take a look at the deeper historical factors propelling this dramatic and dangerous Tory power grab.

Part 4 is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/09/01/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-4-deep-dark-under-currents-at-the-bottom-of-the-gravity-well/

The previous part is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/08/30/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-2-brexit-turbo-charge/

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 2: Brexit turbo-charge

In part 1 of this series on Tory power grab, we saw how the process really started with Cameron’s first administration. In this part we’ll see how Cameron’s gamble with Brexit, though it costs Cameron himself the top job, starts to dangerously intensify the Tory assaults on our democracy.

In the 2015 General Election, and although the Tory vote share barely changes (from 36.1% to 36.8%), and the Labour vote share increases slightly (from 29.0% to 30.4%) the Tories manage to unexpectedly win an absolute majority of 10 seats because the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote, as they are punished for their part of the coalition government, ironically leaves the Tories as the party with the most votes in more seats.

The unexpected formation of a Tory majority government meant that Cameron, despite personally favouring continued EU membership, now had no choice but to implement his proposed EU referendum.

It also meant that preparing for and campaigning in that referendum would dominate what remained of Cameron’s administration. His government did, however, initiate what would become the Investigatory Powers Act, known to some as the “Snooper’s Charter”. The Act was to give the government sweeping legal powers to hack devices and intercept communications, including data relating to internet sites accessed. The legislation was controversial and did not pass until Theresa May was in office in 2016, and then in 2018 had to be further amended when the High Court ruled that it breached EU law, resulting in the use of the powers provided by Act being limited to instances where there was “suspicion of serious crime”. On balance, though, the Investigatory Powers Act looks more like a reaction to concerns about domestic terrorism than an attempted power grab intended to keep the Tories in power indefinitely by allowing them to “spy” on opponents.

Indeed, with the Brexit issue now very much on the table there was no more time to attempt any further “locking in” of Tory rule. Except, of course, that Brexit itself, as its supporters, both within the party and beyond, were all too aware, would turbo-charge the Tory power grab, and not just because it could potentially remove the need to tediously have to agree any laws affecting markets with the UK’s EU partners (and indeed when the “UK-EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement” was eventually signed at the end of 2020, though it initially established a “level playing field”, it did allow for the UK to gradually diverge from the EU, but with both parties then being able to start to apply tariffs. Arguably, with the COVID crisis devastating the UK economy, and their allies in the USA weakened by the failure of President Trump to secure a second term, the Tories had simply opted to put a “No Deal Brexit” onto a slow rather than a fast boil). Riding a populist wave of nationalism and xenophobia into power and then exploiting those same mass emotions to consolidate their authority is, of course, a standard trick of those with antidemocratic intentions. And there was a darker dynamic shackling the Brexit project together with the gradual Tory “executive coup”. Brexit itself was bound to cause disruption: there would be losers as well as winners, especially in the short term. Notably, it would create another crisis, and therefore further opportunity for disaster capitalism, “Shock Doctrine” style, actually helping to justify the long-sought deregulation as well as possibly tax breaks or other subsidies for the wealthiest, measures that could considerably benefit businesses, especially big businesses, at the expense of workers, consumers and ordinary tax-payers. Once that reality became apparent to the people there would be considerable anger: with even those who had voted for Brexit feeling betrayed. So, with Brexit, as with much else of the Tory programme since 2010, we see the same dynamic in operation: extreme but likely to eventually be unpopular and semi-concealed plans meant that the Tories, in order to be able both to execute those schemes but also not lose power, have essentially no choice but to undermine democracy, to methodically carry out yet further steps of their gradual executive coup. Brexit both facilitates and necessitates power grab.

In 2016, of course, there is a narrow majority for Brexit in the referendum and Cameron resigns rather than sort out the fallout. Boris Johnson runs in the subsequent Tory leadership race, but an unexpected back stab from Gove, and Angela Leadsom’s accidental self annihilation, leave Theresa May as the last person standing without the contest reaching beyond the Tory MPs themselves and generating a wider campaign. This is a set back for the more extreme elements in the Tory party, but even more so in 2017 when May herself tries to ride a wave of nationalism for her self declared “red, white and blue” Brexit. To an extent May’s strategy works, and she increases her vote share to 42.4%, but Labour also increases its share to 40.0%, and the Tories lose their absolute majority.

The main point of the general election had been to give May a sufficient majority to force a Brexit deal through Parliament. Now, compelled to lead a minority administration supported by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, May was even less able to “deliver Brexit” than before, being unable triangulate a compromise between a Brexit hard enough to satisfy the likes of her European Research Group MPs and her new DUP allies while being soft enough to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland and win support from Labour MPs. To be fair, the task was logically impossible. Her time in office was totally dominated by Brexit and especially the repeated failures to have a Brexit deal approved by the Commons. Still, May half accidentally manages to make two further contributions to the Tory power grab, firstly by setting a precedent for trying to bypass parliament, and having a run-in with the British courts, when she attempted to initiate the process of withdrawal from the EU (the triggering of “Article 50”) without parliamentary approval, and secondly through the whipping up of yet more nationalistic populism during both that clash with the judges and her election campaign, the former seeing the “Daily Mail” brand judges “Enemies of the People” and the latter causing the same tabloid to carry the headline “Crush the Saboteurs.”

The country ends up ever more divided, with Parliament only managing to come together to reject each and every one of May’s Brexit deals, which attempt to square the circle by pleasing all sides and end up pleasing virtually no one. By June 2019, May is forced to concede defeat and a new race to find another Tory leader is initiated.

Boris runs again for the Tory leadership, and wins, appointing a new cabinet including far more Tory right wingers in high offices of state than May’s or Cameron’s administrations. To some this take-over of government by the most extreme faction of the Tory party without even a general election felt like a “Brexit coup” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/25/power-brexit-boris-johnson-radical-conservative-party). Like his predecessor, though, Boris Johnson faces the problem of the make up of the current British parliament. Rather than immediately risk another election he decides to restrict parliamentary debate on any new Brexit deal by suspending Parliament, effectively in all likelihood giving Parliament little choice but to accept the deal or cause a “No Deal” as time runs out and the UK automatically exits the EU in any case.

Here we therefore see another dynamic of the slow Tory executive coup in action. As with May’s attempt to trigger Article 50 without parliamentary assent, the Tory programme, in this case to remove obstacles to the dreamt of deregulation by leaving the EU, can be so fanatically extreme that it pushes at the limits of the UK’s unwritten constitution and gradually, by normalising undemocratic practice, undermines that constitution, even when each individual attempt to evade the rules in itself eventually fails, provided the perpetrators escape any punishment, which, unfortunately, they always did. We are about to see another dynamic in action too, as such extremism drives away any moderates within the Tory party as they finally wake up and try to frustrate this slow creep towards autocracy. Thus the antidemocratic process that starts with an attempt to avoid democracy curbing implementation of potentially unpopular Tory policies reinforces itself as it turns the Tory party into a purer, more streamlined, more efficient vehicle for its own realisation. The executive coup, like any process that reinforces itself through positive feedback, exponentiates.

When Parliament came back after its summer recess on 3rd September, and with only seven days to go until its suspension (“prorogation” in the jargon), furious MPs passed a bill to delay Brexit passed the end of October. The bill passed due to the rebellion of 21 Tory MPs, who were consequently suspended from the party. The upshot was that Boris Johnson lost his working majority in Parliament on just his second day of sitting in Parliament as PM. In the meantime the courts declare the prorogation illegal and Parliament is reconvened on 25th September. Lacking any majority Johnson now attempts May’s tactic of actually calling a snap general election, but fearing that the government’s plan is a disastrous “No Deal” Brexit, the Commons blocks the calling of a general election three times. Ironically, now the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has become an impediment to the Tories’ power grab. On 29th October, having also made some concessions about extensions to Brexit, Boris Johnson introduced a bill into the Commons that bypassed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act by allowing the calling of a single early general election by a simple majority of the House of Commons.

In Part 3 of this series on Tory power grab, we’ll see how with the 2019 General Election, and it’s aftermath, the exponentiating nature of the executive coup becomes inescapably clear.

Part 3 is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/08/31/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-3-exponentiating-executive-coup/

The previous part is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/08/29/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-1-financial-crash-and-shock-doctrine/

How and why the Tories are destroying our democracy part 1: Financial Crash and Shock Doctrine

In July 2021 a bill allowing anyone deemed to have caused “serious annoyance” on a protest to be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison passed its third and final reading in the lower house of the UK Parliament.

If you have been paying attention you might link that potentially arbitrary suppression of the right to protest with other Tory measures such as introducing a requirement to produce photo id in order to vote, a measure that it is estimated could prevent two million voting, generally the poorest and those leading the most precarious lives (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/04/millions-in-uk-face-disenfranchisement-under-voter-id-plans).
All, apparently, in order to “solve” a problem of voter fraud that doesn’t really seem to exist. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/05/10/boris-johnson-accused-of-republican-style-voter-suppression-ahead-of-controversial-photo-id-announcement/)
Or you might remember the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act (nicknamed the “Spycops” Act) that grants immunity to undercover state operatives committing criminal offences and that, as the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights noted, “contains no express limit on the types of criminal conduct that can be authorised. Even the most serious offences such as rape, murder, sexual abuse of children or torture, which would necessarily violate a victim’s human rights, are not excluded on the face of the Bill”. (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt5801/jtselect/jtrights/847/84707.htm#_idTextAnchor014)

You need to go further than this though, to see the even bigger picture. These measures are alarming enough in themselves, but they form part of a pattern of Tory assaults on our democracy, driven initially by expediency and opportunism, motivated by a compulsion to force through programmes of changes so destructive to most people that democratic accountability has to be as constrained as much as possible, rationalised by dangerous ideas and supported by powerful and sinister friends across the globe.

The pattern taken in its entirety amounts to what political scientists call an “executive coup”, one that was slow in its early stages, but is now accelerating. An executive coup, sometimes also called a “self-coup” or a “soft coup”, is “in democracies, an abrupt change in rules or procedures by the incumbent chief executive that effectively concentrates power in his or her hands and short-circuits electoral competition.” (https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/a-coup-lexicon/). Quite possibly it culminates in a Russian style “managed democracy” and an effective one party state.

Arguably it starts in the aftermath of the global financial crash. Though the crash had been caused by the financial deregulation promoted by the right, by the faction often called “neoliberals”, the “neoliberals” never let a good crisis go to waste. Neoliberals believe in the maximising the rights of property and minimising any public interventions in markets. One of the first leading economists to self identify as neoliberal was Milton Friedman, an advisor to Reagan and Thatcher, who once wrote, in the preface to his work “Capitalism and Freedom”: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” The author and activist Naomi Klein extensively explored this link between neoliberalism and crisis in her 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism” (https://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine.html). The title refers to the three “shocks” exploited by neoliberals to force through their policies, starting with “using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.”

In the UK the crisis saw the public purse bale out the banks, and tax returns fall while welfare spending had to increase in the subsequent recession, resulting in significant increases in national debt. To the Tories and their broader neoliberal support network the debt was the perfect excuse to massively cut public services, despite the fact that conventional wisdom is that the fastest remedy for a recession not actually caused by over-spending is to increase spending to stimulate recovery. But they could make inane comparisons to personal credit cards and use those to justify austerity, consistent with their vision for a low tax (especially on the wealthiest) society with reduced public services (the wealthiest don’t need public services as much, e.g. they pay for private education and healthcare, even security) and more opportunities for the companies of the wealthiest to make profits (providing the services that are no longer public).

The problem with such schemes is that, sooner or later, they are unpopular, and unpopularity does to make for democratic success. Even more tellingly, the Tories under Cameron were already drawing up plans to completely reorganise and hollow out the NHS on the basis of local “commissioning groups” buying in services from “any competent provider”. That was the change programme “large enough to see from space” that became the 2011 Health and Social Care bill, as eventually enacted in 2012 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/7/contents). But, although this largest reorganisation since the NHS’s creation had taken years to prepare, it was too controversial to explicitly be included in the 2010 Tory manifesto. Cameron had gone even further than omission, for example promising on 20th August 2009:
“We will not persist with the top-down re-structures and reorganisations that have dominated the last decade in the NHS.
They have caused terrible disruption, demoralisation and waste, and the people who work in the NHS have just had enough of it.
We believe we can make a big improvement in NHS performance – both in terms of quality and efficiency – within the structures that already exist. ”
(https://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/601321)

Of course, it is the inclusion of those odd words “top down” that indicate Cameron was lying. If he was ever brought to book about the claim he could attempt to wriggle off the hook by saying that the 2012 Health and Social Care Act gave all power to the local Clinical Commissioning Groups, so it was bottom up, not top down, ignoring that fact that all the new structures and rules had very much been imposed top down in the first place!

Cameron was never publicly held to account for his lie. In any event, the Tories were not too anxious about any of this, about the planned austerity or the equally planned but deliberately concealed NHS reforms, as they confidently expected to win a majority in the 2010 general election. The big problem was therefore not so much how to get into power in the first place, but how to stay there long enough to bring about their desired radical transformation in society: permanent austerity and a largely privatised NHS. Staying in power was the driver for the first wheeze they settled upon, as included in their 2010 manifesto: individual voter registration.

This was in itself a seemingly innocuous change: forcing people to individually add themselves to the electoral roll rather than allowing someone to register, all at once, everyone in a household. But it was anticipated to cause people who frequently move address, such as younger people and renters, to disproportionately fall off the register. And then, and here’s the real kicker, the Tories wanted to dramatically reorganise parliamentary boundaries on the basis of the voter numbers as recorded under individual voter registration, including reducing the numbers of MPs from 650 to 600. As people less likely to have a long term address are less likely to vote Tory, this was a way to lock in a Tory advantage into the electoral system. (https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Registration-Report-BES-website.pdf)

As it happened, though, in 2010 the Tories failed to secure their expected majority, and had to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. This created a real problem, as how could the Tories now implement their planned very controversial policy programme when the coalition could fall apart at any moment? The solution was the power grab that would become the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, as the Tories, yet again, turned a crisis into an opportunity. This was portrayed as a concession to the Liberal Democrats and a “giving away” of the executive power to decide the timing of elections, as it would now require a two thirds majority in the commons to agree to a dissolution of Parliament requested by government. At the same time though, it made it much more difficult for Parliament itself to ever bring down an administration. That was its real point. Before the Act the speaker could designate any piece of government legislation as being of sufficient significance to be a confidence measure, meaning that a single government defeat would trigger a general election. After the Act only a specially requested and precisely worded “no confidence” motion would have the same effect, and the government was then given a two week grace period in which it could attempt to get the motion reversed with a motion of “confidence”.

The “giving away” of the executive power to call an election was also tokenistic, as was comprehensively proved when Theresa May called an early general election in 2017. The two thirds majority requirement is easily satisfied when any opposition, whose whole purpose is to attempt to replace the standing government, will be very reluctant to appear weak and “chicken” by not accepting the challenge of a general election when it is thrown down by the ruling party. Even in 2019, in the midst of a constitutional crisis that couldn’t have been dreamt of in 2010, when a broad section of the Commons blocked government attempts to dissolve Parliament because of fears that it would allow the clock to be run down to a No Deal Brexit, the government eventually bypassed the act by passing, by a simple majority, a special new act of Parliament just to call a single general election. Nevertheless, that experience turned Prime Minister Johnson against the Act and, together with the fact that the Lords had introduced an amendment to the original Act requiring it to be reviewed in 2020 and possibly repealed there-after in any case, would spell it’s eventual doom in 2021. Cameron’s original intention had been that the Act would apply indefinitely, until forced to compromise on “two terms and then a review” by the Lords, but even Johnson’s later repeal of the Act would would come with some more power grab. More on that later.

Maria Eagle said this about the Fixed-term Parliaments Act during the debate that followed after Deputy Prime minister Nick Clegg had introduced it for its second reading ( https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2010-09-13/debates/10091315000001/Fixed-TermParliamentsBill), in September 2010:
“It is almost as if the Deputy Prime Minister does not really care whether the Bill works or not, as long as he can send a reassuring signal to his parliamentary party and his Tory ministerial collaborators that this Parliament will last for five years, whatever the strains—which are already showing—may be in the interim. The rapidly changing provisions, the substantial but unthought-through shifts that we have already witnessed, the thoughtless interference with long-standing constitutional conventions which have been mentioned by many Members on both sides of the House, the indecent haste with which a major constitutional Bill has been introduced when there was no need for it to be rushed through the House, the total lack of consultation or pre-legislative scrutiny … all those things make us suspicious about what the true motivations might be…. The truth is that the Deputy Prime Minister is using vastly overblown claims to hide a tawdry piece of fixing that took place over a few days in a testosterone-filled room packed with erstwhile political enemies who were intent on one thing: producing a political stitch-up that could deliver government to both parties, while preventing each from double-crossing the other for the duration of a Parliament. The fact that they decided to do that by using novel constitutional props is absolutely clear from the proposals that emerged.”

The Labour Party however, having included a commitment to fixed term parliaments in its 2010 manifesto, decided it had to officially support the bill. So it was that the first plank of the Tory executive coup was enacted, without which the Tories had every reason to believe they wouldn’t be able to re-establish themselves in power, unless they sacrificed the most controversial parts of their programme such as their intended, and eventually disastrous, NHS reforms.

Then in 2013 the Government introduced the Electoral Registration and Administration Act, allowing any voters who didn’t individually re-register, expected to be those who change address frequently as they don’t own their homes, and therefore more likely to be Labour voters, to be excluded from the electoral roll. However, in further setbacks for the Tories, their Liberal Democrat allies never agreed to allow the Tories to implement their expected boundary changes, assisted by the difficulty of getting 50 MPs to “fall on their swords”, and also ensured that the voters who had to re-register under the new individual registration scheme would not be removed from the register until after the 2015 general election.

So, by now, the Tories had guaranteed themselves at least one whole term in office through the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which itself was due to run for at least two terms, and without in reality much reducing their ability to call an early general election should they choose to do so, just as Theresa May would in 2017. They had also attempted to remove voters likely to vote Labour from the electoral roll through individual voter registration, and to reduce and redraw constituencies on the basis of those new voter numbers. But, as yet, they hadn’t done anything to try and rig election campaigning. Therefore, in 2014, the government passed the “Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration” Act. Cameron defended the act as cleaning up lobbying activities, something that it actually failed to do, as was to be ironically proved in 2021 when Cameron himself got caught up with the whole Greensill lobbying scandal . That failure shouldn’t be a surprise, for the Act was never really intended to restrain corporate lobbying. Instead, for a full year before an election, the act clamped down on charities and unions running any campaigns that might influence voters, so that if they spent more than £20,000, including on staff and offices, during that year they had to register with the Electoral Commission as if they were political parties.
( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/15/cameron-lobbying-act-business-politicians-2014-charities).

Other than having to throw the odd bone to their Liberal Democrat coalition allies, it seemed the Tories, minority government or not, could now do pretty much what they liked, including those massive reforms of the NHS and drastic and “permanent” austerity, aided and abetted by the fact that most Liberal Democrat MPs, when forced to choose, proved to be considerably further to the right than most of their party members, and desperate to cling onto power and their ministerial appointments at any cost. (To be fair, the Tory supporters in the media and in right wing think tanks such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance had actually done a better job of getting the electorate to believe propaganda such as “Labour caused the global financial crash”, or that austerity was unavoidable, than Cameron and his associates could have dreamt of in 2010, limiting the Liberal Democrats freedom to manoeuvre still more). But the third pillar of the Tories neoliberal project, after much reduced public spending and low taxes, especially on the rich, is deregulation, i.e. seriously weakening worker, consumer and environmental protections, and there was still one obstacle to their plans for deregulation: membership of the EU. Frustration at this situation had led, within the Tory party, to the rise of a powerful Eurosceptic faction, led by a group of backbench MPs who styled themselves the “European Research Group”. Outside the Tory party similar concerns caused some disaffected Tories, and a loose network of wealthy business people, in the UK but with links extending abroad especially to the USA and Russia, to back Nigel Farage and UKIP, potentially splitting the Tory vote in future elections. In an attempt to re-unify his own party, and head off that electoral threat, Cameron made the promise of an in/out referendum on EU membership part of the 2015 Tory manifesto, in the cunning expectation that the result would be another hung parliament, so that his Liberal Democrat coalition partners would insist on blocking any such referendum.

In Part 2 of this series on Tory power grab, we’ll see how Cameron’s clever little plan comes horribly unstuck, and how Brexit then turbo-charges the executive coup.

Part 2 is here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/2021/08/30/how-and-why-the-tories-are-destroying-our-democracy-part-2-brexit-turbo-charge/