Sir Ferdinand Mount was head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit in the early eighties. He is a Conservative of the kind we might recognise, Old Etonian, centre right or perhaps a bit more and a free market, light regulator who would have been comfortable in any Hague or Cameron government. So his article on Johnson and the present Tory party in the London Review of Books is all the more shocking. It's not a short read - 5,000 words - but an important one. See it HERE.
On Brexit he notes that despite all the anti-EU rhetoric, Johnson has actually sided with Brussels on the three hottest issues of the day, food standards, Huawei and the digital tax on internet companies. Mount also thinks we will have to bend towards a softer Brexit or, as he puts it, "If Johnson is to continue to be God, he will have to temper the wind to the shorn lamb".
Let's hope he's right. But most worryingly, and the central point of the article, he thinks Brexit is not an end in itself, only the means to an end. This is the key passage:
"...the Tory right is engaged on an ambitious enterprise of demolition and detachment, of which leaving the EU is only the most conspicuous – though so far the most momentous – element. Yes, national solitude is the Holy Grail for the Knights Not Round the Table – Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Bill Cash, Sir John Redwood et al – and they have devoted their adult lives to it. But they have more in mind than this. They hope also to undo the constitutional and administrative reforms of the Blair years. What they want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The overall goal is often described, and with justice, as a sort of national populism, of the kind practised by Orbán, Bolsonaro and Erdoğan. But the mechanisms by which this new style of politics is to be delivered and entrenched are peculiar to Britain."
He thinks the swivel-eyed right are intent on rolling back key elements of the constitution, some of them introduced by Tony Blair, these are: membership of the EU, mass immigration, devolution to Scotland and Wales, the introduction of human rights into English and Scottish law and the invention of the Supreme Court.
"The Tory manifesto promised a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission in order to ‘restore trust in our institutions and in how our democracy operates’. But the people who have lost trust most absolutely are the Tory hardliners. The intention is clear enough. Human rights law must be updated to ‘ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government’. Judicial review must not be ‘abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays’. That is, the government is not to be blocked."
This is coupled with attacks on the BBC, an organisation regarded by Dominic Cummings as 'the mortal enemy of the right'.
In other words, Johnson's government, with its huge majority, is systematically drawing power to itself while dismantling or weakening what might be regarded as any extra parliamentary opposition.
Mount's remedy is to build new links to European institutions, and to, "defend and improve our present constitutional settlement: to entrench the human rights of ordinary people, to improve their access to local power, enable them to travel and work where they please, give trade unions a voice in the workplace, give constituency parties back their ability to choose their candidates, give local authorities back their financial freedom, defend the BBC and the Supreme Court and even the House of Lords and any other institution that the simplifiers are attacking"
And what about this:
"These early months, even years, are typical of authoritarian regimes settling in and seeking to gain the confidence of voters nervous of what they have let themselves in for. It is painful to recall the dewy-eyed reports that foreign visitors brought back from early visits to the dictators of the 1920s and 1930s."
Mount's remedy is to build new links to European institutions, and to, "defend and improve our present constitutional settlement: to entrench the human rights of ordinary people, to improve their access to local power, enable them to travel and work where they please, give trade unions a voice in the workplace, give constituency parties back their ability to choose their candidates, give local authorities back their financial freedom, defend the BBC and the Supreme Court and even the House of Lords and any other institution that the simplifiers are attacking"
What's even more disturbing is another article in TruePublica, a web based news source resisting what they call the 'wave of disruption as western countries move from one social and economic crisis to another', asking if Britain is not making the same mistakes that led to the English civil war. Quite an assertion.
The piece's author is not named but it is not entirely opinion. The Hansard Society's audit of political engagement from 2019 shows almost three-quarters of those surveyed said the system of governance needed significant improvement, and other attitudes emerged that “challenge core tenets of our democracy”, the audit’s authors claimed. It predicted that Britain was on the verge of actually ’embracing authoritarianism’
Rosie Carter, a senior policy officer with THS, said: “We are facing a crisis of political mistrust. And when people do not trust traditional political systems, they look elsewhere. That’s when support for political extremes grows.”
What made her believe this is contained in other results from the survey:
"Nearly 60 per cent of people in Britain think the country is in decline. About half believe they have no influence in elections. About half believe referendums solve nothing. About half think Brexit will solve these problems, the other half thinks it will make matters worse. But no-one thinks it’ll be the same. We have left versus right, Boomers versus Millenials, black versus white, nationalists versus internationalists. Scotland wants independence, England won’t give it. There’s nothing in the middle, no compromise, no agreement."
But stunningly, let us see what the population thinks about democracy as currently practiced in Britain:
"..when people were asked whether 'Britain needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules', 54 per cent agreed and only 23 per cent said no. In all, 42 per cent of respondents agreed with the idea that many national problems could be dealt with more effectively 'if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament'. You read that right – over 40 per cent of the adult population of Britain thinks democracy is now a waste of time.
As we leave a continental Europe, where the most stable and prosperous nations have coalition government's formed under some kind of proportional representation, Britain is going in the opposite direction towards a less democratic system where quick but brutal decisions are made by a 'world king' in Downing Street - and apparently with the support of a majority of the people.
It is as if we have forgotten our own history. And Johnson in particular should know what regicide means in England.
The TruePublica article points out the last time Britain was in this mood, the king lost his head and the English Civil War broke out, another battle of two ideologies about the political governance of the country. That also was about England, Scotland and Ireland. At the end we had a military dictator - Cromwell. The country was soon facing complete anarchy and in the end, after a considerable amount of social and economic upheaval, the ‘restoration’ period came about.
Neither Ferdinand Mount or TruePublica is predicting anything like as cataclysmic an event as those in the middle of the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries, but the conditions that created them are starting to fall into place.
We need to be very careful.
