It is one of the biggest tragic ironies of the first decades of the 21st century that those who shout loudest about freedom are those who do the most to destroy it.
Last month,* Suella Braverman’s new Public Order Bill received Royal assent just in time for the coronation of King Charles III. It is widely considered that the law was created in response to protest by environmental activists like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. It allows police officers to ‘stop & search’ people without suspicion and introduces new criminal sanctions for taking part in peaceful protests (It is now punishable by up to 12 months in prison to disrupt ‘hardworking people’ on their commute to draw attention to the fact that our planet is quite literally on fire). The law constitutes a flagrant attack on the basic human right of freedom of expression and has been qualified by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as ‘deeply troubling’ and ‘wholly unnecessary.’
We immediately got a taste of what this law will feel like in practice. The Met Police used its new powers right away not only to arrest republicans before they even got a chance to demonstrate against the coronation, but also activists handing out rape alarms.
These may seem like fairly minor incidents. Yet, history tells us that democracy rarely dies with a ‘big bang,’ but rather by a thousand cuts. The police may use their new powers mainly against environmental activists such as Just Stop Oil but could – and probably will – use them against other groups too, just like they did with the additional powers they were given in the early 2000s as part of the fight against terrorists. The question, as Richard Murphy puts it is now: Who will they come for next?
Free speech act
The Tories added insult to injury when the anti-free speech free speechers’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act received royal assent a few days after the coronation. Depending on its application and implementation, the law may very well have some positive effects on plurality of views being heard at universities. Indeed, I do not think we should discard any concerns about freedom of thought and speech in universities. For instance, universities’ decision to cancel events featuring pro-Israeli speakers for fear of backlash from pro-Palestine organisations seem problematic. Similarly, the debate about gender identification clearly has taken a toxic turn that now implies one may risk their job and career for wading into the discussion with however balanced and nuanced arguments.
Yet, there can be no doubt that the government’s intention with the Freedom of Speech act is not to detoxify scientific controversies or promote reasoned debate across a wide range of opinions and views. Rather, it is another ‘anti-woke’ move aimed at stoking the flames of the culture war. Rather than making debate at universities more reasonable, it most likely will achieve the opposite by making it harder to deny climate change sceptics – but also holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers etc. – a platform in respectable scientific institutions. In a healthy democracy with a healthy public debate that may not be a problem, because people – and especially students – are expected to be able to tell truth from lie. Sadly, we do not live in a healthy democracy, and for the foreseeable future the law will most likely mainly be used by far-right ‘think tanks’ to challenge scientific facts and undermine the credibility of academics in pursuit of their private interests.
Public Order, Free Speech, and Brexit
What do the Public Order and the Free Speech Acts have to do with Brexit? Everything! Not in the sense that we needed Brexit to make these laws possible, but in the sense that both are the expression of the same reactionary political ideology, which sees egocratic politicians undermining democracy, while claiming their reality-denying policies represent what the ‘real people’ want.
Brexit allowed a group of far-right political entrepreneurs to highjack the Tory party; promising that it was possible to restore Britain to its former role of a world power. Standing in the way or that goal were simply the modern concept of pooled sovereignty and the rules-based international order. Brexiters seem to believe in a simpler, cruder understanding of sovereignty as an (ill-conceived) notion of ‘independence,’ whose realisation requires as a first step the rejection of international commitments and obligations, e.g. in the form of international conventions on refugees.
This conception of sovereignty at the political level is combined with a quasi-anarcho-capitalist understanding of the economy, where a simplistic understanding of how companies work leads to a ‘free enterprise’ ideology that denies regulatory instruments any value and informs a radical deregulation agenda whose realisation required the UK to leave the EU. Trussonomics emblematically encapsulates this IAE-sponsored economic thinking, but the basic ideas have survived Truss’s downfall on the right fringe of the Tory party.
The Public Order Act shares similarities with Brexit in this respect. Like the Brexit project it is based on a stubborn denial of reality (that Britain cannot be world power anymore in the case of Brexit; the severity of climate change and biodiversity loss in the case of the POA), promises a simple solution (‘taking back control’ in the case of Brexit; giving police power to suppress peaceful protests) to an entirely fabricated or exaggerated problem (EU membership, rather than often misguided economic policies adopted by the EU and its member states in the case of Brexit; preventing ‘hard-working people’ from getting to work in the case of POA). Both Brexit and the POA are policies that at the same time permit an extreme fringe of the political spectrum to grab power, while blocking necessary fundamental policy changes for both reasons of ideology and of short-term political and economic self-interest. The two policies – if Brexit can be considered a coherent policy – also bear similarities in terms of the utter dishonesty that they are based on. In the case of the POA, the most flagrant dishonesty is that the law was created by the very same government that shouts about free speech and riles against ‘cancel culture’ at every turn. As such, the POA illustrates to perfection what the underlying goal of the government is: the freedom for them to do whatever they want; unfreedom for the rest of us.
The wider significance of the POA, however, is even more troubling. The UK was one of the countries that has been instrumental in promoting the rights-based world order and as such also an important and active promoter of individual human rights, like the right to free speech and freedom of expression. While Tory sympathisers will certainly contest that the POA is in anyway anti-democratic or illiberal, it clearly constitutes yet another step down the path towards a less free, more autocratic country. This is dangerous not just for British citizens or people living in the country, but for the world at large, because other human rights infringing regimes around the world can now point to an important Western country that disowns the liberal world order it had been instrumental in building.
The next Brexiter frontier
The POA is very important for another reason too: It indicates that Brexiters are now definitely moving on to the next frontier of their project. Indeed, Farage’s admission on News Night that Brexit has failed, and the fact that a poll carried out by the Express found that 80% of the British population agree with him, shows that Brexit – as an instrument to gain political power – is broken.
Delusional Brexiters like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who recently claimed that the UK’s reaction to the Ukraine war was made possible by the exit from the EU, or Lee Anderson – who tried to construe Tata’s decision to invest in the UK as a ‘Brexit Bonus.’ But, these are – as Chris Grey aptly noted – only Brexit’s last defences and soon enough Brexit will become useless even for its most fervent defenders. Indeed, for Brexiters, Brexit never was a goal, always only a tool to gain power and enrich themselves while reshaping the country according to their far-right reactionary worldview. Brexit cannot help to achieve this goal any longer, because only very few people still believe it is worth pursuing. Recent polling suggests that only 9% of people think Brexit has been a success and only 31% think it was right to leave.
Of course, EU-bashing will continue and sporadically flare up as we are trying to develop a new relationship with the continent, which inevitably will lead to some tensions and divergences of interests and preferences. Yet, on a daily basis, Brexit does not win votes and headlines anymore. Therefore, Brexiters are turning towards other goals and enemies. The renewed attack on the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) led by Andrea Jenkyns who launched a petition – signed by 15,000 people, which she claims shows that the overwhelming majority of a country of 66,000,000 wants to leave the ECHR – is one sign of this. The POA and the increasingly aggressive attacks on anyone who does not share the Tory-rights’ far-right ideology is another.
These tendencies are not a sign of strength but of weakness. Having been in power for 13 years and having quite literally wrecked every aspect of the country, defeat in the next General Election seems all but inevitable; at least that’s what the Tories’ poor showing at the May local elections in England suggest.
Local elections
Having taken place around 18 months before the next General Election, local elections in parts of England and Northern Ireland were widely considered a test for the government and the opposition parties. Ahead of the elections, the Tories tried to manage expectations, predicting a possibly quite bad result. Party chair Greg Hands predicted a loss of up to 1000 of the 3000 or so contested seats. The actual result was worse than that worst case prediction, with the Tories losing 1063 seats and 56 councils. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, the pro-Brexit DUP party did not do well either, having been overtaken by Sinn Fein as the largest party at local level.
Despite the Tories truly disastrous performance, losing many ‘Red Wall’ council seats to Labour, and many ‘Blue Wall’ seats in their traditional heartlands to the Lib Dems, the conservatives spent the post-election weeks with their now favourite activity: Denying reality. Greg Hands tweeted about the few seats where conservatives were still doing well. Others focused on the fact that Labour did not do as well as Blair’s labour did in the local elections preceding the 1997 landslide GE victory (neglecting the fact that it was a very different set of local council seats that were up for grabs back then).
Much commentary has been published since to explain what this means for the GE next year. One of the most sophisticated ones, no doubt, is Ben Ansell’s blog. Deducing any implications from partial local elections for a General Election is always very difficult. But two points deserve noting: Firstly, anti-Tory sentiment seems to be strong in the country so that extensive tactical voting – whereby people do not vote for their actually preferred party but for the one that is most likely to beat a Tory candidate – has taken place; Secondly, there is a vast majority amongst the British electorate for more centrist and progressive parties than the one in power. Indeed, looking at the national equivalent share of the vote (NEV) – a measure that seeks to capture how the local election results would translate into a national election –, Labour now has a national share of 36%, the Lib Dems 18%, while the Tories now have 29% of estimated national vote share, down from 40% in 2021. The Greens too proclaimed a historic victory gaining 241 councillors and a council majority for the first time ever (in Mid Suffolk). Overall, then, at least 54% of voters seem to support parties with a more centrist policy platform than the governmental party, which is supported by less than a third of voters. To put it flippantly: If we lived in a real democracy, the Tories should not be in power at this stage.
The results are even more remarkable given that this was to first election to take place under the new rules on photo IDs. Much has been written about the blatantly biased rules the Tories have introduced regarding valid forms of voter IDs (see my previous blog post here). Some reports mentioned alarming levels of people being turned away at the polling stations. First systematic figures on the impact of the new rules, however, suggest that around .6% of voters were turned away and 37% of them did not come back with ID, which suggests a net voter suppression of 0.2% - although this figure does not take into account the number of people who were discouraged from voting due to the new rules and did not turn up in the first place. Regardless, the effect probably was at the lower end of what those opposed to voter ID feared and what the government had hoped for. Moreover, it would seem that some elderly people – who disproportionately vote for the Tories – did not understand or know about the new rules and were among those turned away, when the system was very clearly set up to achieve the opposite goal, i.e. suppress young people’s votes. Astonishingly, Jacob Rees-Mogg – who was in the Cabinet when the legislation was pushed through Parliament – freely admitted that the voter ID legislation was indeed an attempt at gerrymandering that has backfired. It is a sign of just how much damage the Tories have already done to British democracy that such a statement barely raises any eyebrows anymore. Indeed, Tory voters do not seem to care about such gross illiberal tendencies, while those meant to uphold democratic standards have reached a level of cynicism that means that such evident violations of the norms on which healthy democracies are built officially go unpunished.
The nationalist international: Darkness at the end of the tunnel
The other interesting outcome of the election was how the Tories strategically reacted to the obvious defeat. Given the strong support for more progressive parties, the conclusion may seem obvious that the majority in a General Election lies to the left of the Tory’s current position. Indeed, basic political science teaches us that majoritarian electoral systems lead to a competition for the median voter. That median voter clearly is further to the left than what the Tories currently offer. And yet, the main reaction to the electoral defeat amongst Tories seems to have been to claim that the poor results were due to a ‘betrayal’ of Johnson’s 2019 manifesto and the key to success lies in doubling down on the far-right strategy of undermining public services and the state, by cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, and becoming nastier.
This was the tenor of a meeting in Bournemouth, where a new Conservative grassroots movement – uniting many Johnson supporters – lay into the Sunak government about its betrayal of Brexit, the 2019 GE manifesto, and in general the abandoning by Sunak of the conservatives’ uncompromising far-right strategy. Worse still, the following week, many senior conservatives attended a meeting of the global movement of ‘national conservatism,’ which constitutes another attempt by US far-right groups to extend their influence to Europe. The group was founded by the US Edmund Burke Foundation and regularly hosts authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orbán and supports post-fascists like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Its London meeting was attended by current members of the government and senior Tories – including Suella Braverman – and served mainly as a platform from where to broadcast conspiracy theories about why Brexit is failing.
Commentators have interpreted the relevance of the national conservatism meeting in the UK different ways. Nick Tyrone suggests that the NatCon strategy will not fly in the UK where people ‘even on the right, are reasonably liberal on a lot of things and in particular do not want the UK turned into some sort of poxy version of the United States of America.’ Some commentators even predict the end of the Tory party within the next two to three years as a result of its association with the NatCon movement. Chris Grey – in his Byline Times column (print version) – argues that a NatCon takeover of the Tory party might very well lead to its electoral obliteration and possibly a split of the party. Political scientist Tim Bale – quoted in the Guardian – suggests that we can expect the Tory party to further slide into a US-style right-wing MAGA extremism, but there is limited electoral potential for such a culture wars focused strategy to work in a situation where people mostly worry about their living standards.
As usual, I am somewhat more pessimistic than these commentators. There is the hope that the Tories being captured by an increasingly well-organised extreme right would lead to many voters defecting to an alternative centre-right party, i.e., the LibDems. That would spell an epochal shift in the UK’s party landscape and condemn the Tories to a marginal right-fringe position. However, equally likely is that the well-financed and right-wing press-backed Tory voting machinery will continue to be the main right-wing alternative to Labour, in which case a NatCons-led Tory party could pose a serious threat to liberalism in this country. To be sure, few people would currently completely buy into the NatCons discourse. But that may change if the UK’s oldest and electorally most successful party is led by a NatCon – David Gauke’s money is on Suella Braverman it would seem – who can use that platform to push the boundary of what is thinkable further into authoritarian, reactionary territory. If that came to pass, we could expect a relentless barrage of nationalist messages being blasted by the Tory propaganda machine, which eventually will start to turn what now seems like extreme ideas into the mainstream – similar to wat happened with the idea of Brexit. How ever extreme the views expressed at the NatCon conference now seem, once these things have been said, they already seem less shocking, simply because they have been said. They are not unspeakable anymore. From there to not being indefensible is only a relatively small step. And even if they may remain fringe views, they shift the entire political ‘field of the thinkable’ further to the right.
In this respect, another worrying takeaway from the NatCon conference is the OpenDemocracy’s Seth Thevoz’s observation that 80% of attendees at the conference seemed to be under 30. Rather than a blast from the past, might the NatCon ideology be a way to attract a certain type of younger voters – however marginal – to the Tory party, thus rejuvenating their electorate and diffusing its ‘demographic time bomb’? Regardless, it would be foolish to take lightly the fact that very senior Tories – including Braverman, Rees-Mogg, and Michael Gove – attended the NatCon conference. As Jonathan Freedland wrote in his Guardian column: The conspiracy theories thrown around at the NatCon conference constitutes the cultivation of a stab-in-the-back myth to explain away the ever more obvious failure of Brexit and the search for the traitor wielding the treacherous dagger will get nastier. The ditching by the government of the Retained EU Law bill illustrated that nastiness inside the Tory party.
The Retained EU Law Bill U-turn: Brexiter backlash against reality
The government has now official announced that it would drop the planned Retained EU Law (REUL) bill, which would have seen around 4000 pieces of incorporated EU-legislation be automatically repealed by the end of the year unless they were explicitly reviewed and retained. The move was widely expected and interpreted as further prove that Sunak was on a path to restore some normality and realism to the government’s approach to Brexit after the folly of the Johnson and Truss governments.
Yet, clearly the conservative party is not ready for even such a modest amount of realism as not axing a vast range of existing laws with any plan for replacement. The backlash against the government’s U-turn was fierce and Kemi Badenoch was in the midst of it. The Telegraph and other far-right Tory voices denounced the move as a betrayal of the spirit and substance of Brexit. Badenoch herself suggested it was made necessary by a ‘Whitehall blob’ conspiracy. So, rather than owning up to the new-found pragmatism and realism and starting the process of overcoming the madness of the Brexit years, the government itself accepts the far-right Brexiter narrative of ‘deep state,’ ‘civil service conspiracy,’ etc. Again, we see a shifting of the political spectrum in the UK, where defending a reasonable position is becoming politically risky! Instead, reason and pragmatism have to be disguised as a far-right conspiracy in order for the government not to see its authority wane.
Free trade
May 2023 will also go down in history as the month during which one of the two new Free Trade Agreements (FTA) the UK has signed since Brexit – the one with Australia – came into force. It has become common knowledge that this trade deal is probably one of the worst that any free country has ever signed (see my last post). A new report by Politico suggests that rather than Liz Truss, it was Boris Johnson who nonchalantly made major concessions to the Australian side over dinner in Westminster. Be that as it may, the key point is that another so-called ‘Brexit benefit’ turns out to be a shot in the foot instead. Therefore, we do not see Brexiters arguing about who can take credit for it, but about who should be blamed for it. The most damning, embarrassing, and humiliating illustration of just how absurdly bad the deal is for the UK was a short clip from an Australian TV show where three presenters literally laugh their heads off when discussing the UK’s export potential. So much for patriotism and national pride!
Labour to the rescue?
Given the gloom and doom that the Tories have brought to the country in their 13 years in government it may seem logical to turn to the main opposition party for hope of some light. Yet, despite the good performance at the local elections, Labour leader Keir Starmer too have reached the conclusion that the election results strengthen the case to double down on right-wing rhetoric in his attempt to turn the local- into a General Election victory next year. His article in the Express used language worthy of a Boris Johnson or a David Frost stating that “’our European friends and competitors are not just eating our lunch – they’re nicking our dinner money as well.’ Chris Grey in his excellent analysis of Labour’s strategy notes that this may be grubby, but may make sense to win back the votes of disappointed leave voters and perhaps necessary to gain marginal seats in the next GE, while not reducing dramatically Labour support in safer ones. Here, Labour’s success in Red Wall council wards may indeed have encourage Starmer in his thinking that his centre-right strategy is working.
Prof. Grey also argues that Starmer’s red lines of not rejoining the single market, the customs union, let alone the EU, are not actually unnecessarily limiting labour’s leeway regarding negotiation closer ties with the EU if they win te election, because rejoining any of these would be unrealistic in a first Labour parliament anyway.
Similarly, the Independent’s Ian Dunt argues that there is a large difference between Starmer’s rhetoric and Labour’s actual plan in terms of establishing closer ties with the EU. Indeed, looking at the details of Labour’s proposals, they appear more nuanced and radical than the rhetoric suggest. Thus, they include the possibility of dynamic alignment of standards, which would be an important break with a key Tory red line that forced hard Brexit onto the country and probably as far as any government can go in moving us closer to the EU.
These are all very good points. However, I find it difficult to fully share these quite optimistic assessments of Labour’s strategy. It may all make political sense if one assumes that winning back socially conservative ‘Red Wall’ seats in the North of England is key to a GE victory. Yet, I do not think Labour’s strategy to adopt some of the Brexiter discourse and language and their analysis of key policy issues in order to capture the leave vote comes without a cost. Accepting the Brexiter narrative and using similarly divisive language towards the EU implies accepting their flawed analysis of what caused British people’s grievances. Accepting the Brexiters analysis of the immigration issue and of free movement (as Labour does by backing the Tory’s ban on families of overseas students), of single market membership, but also of public order (Starmer refusing to commit to repeal the POA) legitimises the Tories’ analysis of the issues that the country is facing and thus implies buying into their worldview. That worldview may become a new consensus that may prove impossible to break and that sets a new baseline for what is politically feasible far to the right of what is currently the case. Accepting the Brexiters’ analysis of the problems and only attacking them on the delivery of their solutions will make it difficult for Labour to offer an alternative narrative that zeros in on the country’s actual problems, rather than the construed ones that fuel the Brexiter government (most importantly ‘overregulation,’ ‘loss of sovereignty,’ ‘mass immigration,’ ‘wokeness,’ etc.). Perhaps a second Labour term would afford the government more leeway to find its own voice, but I doubt the country can afford another five years of fighting windmills while not addressing the real problems. Once the country is freed from the Tory reign, what is needed is a swift re-establishment of the freedoms that successive Tory governments have taken away from us. Labour should make that goal an explicit manifesto commitment, otherwise illiberalism and unfreedom may become the new normal.
*For a combination of family- and professional reasons it has been impossible for met to find time to blog for over a month. I hope regular readers will forgive me for covering an eventful month in one – very long – post. I am hoping to get back to my regular fortnightly rhythm soon, but the summer months do not look promising. Regardless, Brexit continues to evolve, and I am determined to continue the task of documenting and commenting on how that process is affecting our country.