My book Abolish Westminster was published by Faber this week. And it would have seemed remiss of me not to stop by my old home to note how much of an impact openDemocracy had on the thinking and research which went into it.
The book runs through what I see as the six clusters of institutions which make up the British state, explaining why I think each functions to bend power back to the powerful.
I start by looking at the executive - Whitehall - and some of the most significant departments of state. Much of my understanding of how executive power in Britain was inherited from the monarchy - which sent me down a path of research for the book - came from working with and editing oD’s founder, Anthony Barnett, over the years, and from getting to know and interview his crowd of intellectuals who came together around the social upheavals of 1968.
My understanding of the ideological blindness of the Treasury came, to a significant extent, from years as an openDemocracy editor, publishing frustrated economistscs raging against its doctrines. My chapter on the cabinet office was inspired by direct experience my then colleagues here had in investigating the response to Covid. Dan Trilling, another former oD editor, helped me understand the Home Office, and British policing.
It was while I was working for openDemocracy that I learned where the relevant registers of interests and lists of meetings of meetings for different powerful people are hidden away, and how to craft a freedom of information request in such a way as to get at least some chance of securing at least the tiniest scraps of information.
Much of my sense of the utter dysfunction of the Houses of Commons and of Lords - the deep corruption combined with infuriating culture - was developed through years covering British politics for openDemocracy. Working for a left wing platform during the Corbyn years gave me a ringside seat as the institutions of the British state bludgeoned a progressive movement into the ground.
Publishing some of the country’s top lawyers contributed to my scepticism of the legal system, as did editing and talking with Anthony about the broader constitutional problems with the British judiciary, and it was my investigations (with Peter Geoghegan) into the dark money behind Brexit which led me to Britain’s offshore havens, helping me to understand their importance as bastions of oligarch power from which democracy around the world is being drowned.
The late, and much missed Rosemary Bechler’s long form thoughts on what she called “The Monocultural National Us” were vital to my understanding of the various nationalisms of these islands, and, because of his association with openDemocracy and friendship with Anthony, I was lucky enough to get to know Tom Nairn, the great thinker about nationalism, before he died. His analysis is central to the section on British identity, and the monarchy; and to my attempts to argue against the habit among English progressives of identifying as British rather than English.
My time at openDemocracy started almost exactly a year before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and my first year there was largely spent trying to explain to English progressives why their equivalents in Scotland were largely planning to vote yes. The time I had to develop my thinking and arguments during that period, and also roughly annual trips I took to Northern Ireland to report for openDemocracy, fed directly into the final section of the book, where I argue that the best way to secure radical constitutional change across the islands is to break up the UK.
I’m grateful to openDemocracy readers, who made my decade at this website possible. And I’d be delighted if you bought the book, and checked out my journalism and campaigning project abolishwestminster.com. Let me know what you think.
Adam Ramsay’s book Abolish Westminster is published by Faber now, and available for ordering online, or in all good bookshops. Adam edits the new website abolishwestminster.com He’s a former special correspondent, editor and UK editor of openDemocracy.
