British society has three years to fend off a far-right election victory. It is important to be clear about what such a victory could entail: a gutting of social welfare, a rollback of abortion and LGBTQ rights, a militarisation of the police, masked paramilitaries bundling citizens into unmarked vans and spiriting them away to incarceration centres beyond the reach of the law, and security forces firing at, and occasionally killing, those who have the temerity to protest.
Each of these actions, it is important to acknowledge, will be conducted with the tacit, and sometimes explicit, approval of a significant section of the electorate. That is, at least until some of them, as individuals, find themselves caught in the unnervingly violent enactment of policies that sounded quite anodyne on paper: reducing crime, cutting wasteful spending, empowering the police, controlling immigration, restoring national pride, making Great Britain great again.
These are not paranoid fantasies. They are the actions of governments run by the democratically elected Republican Party in the United States and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which was once democratically elected and has since disembowelled most institutions of democracy. Will Reform be any different in power? It is not worth taking the risk to find out.
