We in the UK are on the verge of embracing, if only through resignation, disbelief, tabloid pugilism and sheer damn tiredness, a new variant of despotism. One that will be policed and lubricated by state surveillance if it succeeds – a danger that Paul Mason set out in the Guardian yesterday. The comic photo-opportunities of Prime Minister Johnson with a bull today and a kipper tomorrow are contrived. Their aim to encourage us to lower our guard and regard his government as irrational bluster and boosterism. Whereas he and his hedge-fund backers seek to turn us into the playthings of deregulated capitalism.
We need, clear bold leadership to inspire the opposition now essential to save our democracy. To do so, we must rewrite the rules of the game with even more audacity than Johnson and his adviser Dominic Cummings. The priority is not just to remove them from Downing Street, but to do so with a call to action that reaches far beyond the election of a new government.
For the present crisis shows that we dare not continue being governed in the manner of the past. Our institutions are too hollowed out and their conventions have lost traction. To save our democracy we have to replace it. I recently confronted this paradox – of the need to demand we save a system of government that includes a monarch, lords, prime ministers with prerogative powers, weird procedures and clap-trap inherited from Empire days in the name of democracy. For sure the domestic price of successfully imposing centuries of tyranny on others is that we do not enjoy the normal framework of democracy, namely a constitution that we the people can call our own as citizens. Nonetheless, we have also inherited an unequalled tradition of liberty, law and toleration that fuels the spirit of self-government.
