The return of liberal authoritarianism
Is Britain in the process of 'democratic backsliding'?
It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a ‘hybrid democracy’ by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!
What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.
Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining ‘the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence’, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having ‘total contempt for democracy’.
Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, ‘is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.’
This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.
When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.
There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as ‘stealth authoritarianism’, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.
By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat ‘hate’ as well as ‘misinformation’. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok ‘deepfake’ feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.
As for the British state’s definition of ‘hate’, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.
It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that ‘If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.’
