19th January 2022
Well, that was a strange day.
The Prime Minister was in defiant mood – as voters and his own backbenchers deserted him.
The Prime Minister was facing a leadership challenge – but not one quite yet.
And the Prime Minster was unable to tell the House of Commons that, as a matter of general principle, a minister who lies to the House should resign.
So a strange day – but also an in-between day.
The sort of day that will be soon forgotten in-and-of-itself, especially compared with some dramatic event that will no doubt soon come.
But.
The real problem, as this blog has previously averred, is not really the person of Boris Johnson.
The Boris Johnsons of this world are, like the poor, always with us.
The Donald Trumps are also always with us.
They are what they are, and they do what they do – the only difference is now that they are able to have political power.
And this is because of two things.
The first is the failure of various small-c conservative gatekeepers – politicians and media figures and others – who should and did know better.
The sort who clap and cheer at such authoritarian populism, when the populists should instead be checked and kept away from positions of power.
And the second was (and is) the complacency of the liberals and progressives.
Those who think that being dismissive of authoritarian populists is enough to somehow defeat them.
It is not – and that is how in just a few years we went from Obama and Blair/Brown and the sentiments of the 2012 Olympics and ‘Yes We Can’ to the world of Brexit and MAGA.
Tutting is not enough – authoritarian populists need to be taken on and defeated.
And small-c conservative need to not be enablers.
Whilst there is this fundamental system failure where conservative gatekeepers and liberal-progressives fail to check authoritarian populism then, even if we get rid of Johnson, there will be another Johnson.
The problem is upstream.
And that is the cultural change that is needed – and the culture war that needs to be won.
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I love the “The Boris Johnsons of this world are, like the poor, always with us.” Great rhetoric and completely right ! Wish I could come up with the same quality.
And yes, completely agree with the “failure of small c conservatives ……and the complacency of the liberals and progressives”.
Indeed very well said! Complacency that nobody and nothing can be a danger to democratise is the direct way into authoritarian rule! I thought we all had learned from the cruel totalitarian regimes destroying Europe with their wars and genocides and brutal suppression but sadly this seems not to be the case! After the fall of the iron curtain and the Beelin Wall there seemed to be hope but with the likes of Trump, Johnson, Orban or Kascynski the western world is on the brink to destroy itself from within.
You are so right, Patricia. It is what happened with the Italian and German fascists. The complacent populations of both countries let the fascists off the hook quite early on. You’d think we might have learned something from history.
…”the second was (and is) the COMPLACENCY of the liberals and progressives. Those who think that being dismissive of authoritarian populists is enough to somehow defeat them.”
I don’t think the difficulties of us progressives are due to complacency, the main problems I feel are our powerlessness and lack of means.
To take one simple issue – how can progressives overcome the many instances of censorship and / or misrepresentation of political news in the UK press? Unless they CAN, the progressives have little chance of defeating the authoritarian populists. And the odds are stacked against them …
The UK press is largely owned and controlled by 5 or 6 (politically right-wing) billionaires, who mostly have only weak ties with the UK and who will be largely unaffected by any damage they do to British society. There are no adequate statutory controls on journalism, journalists or the newspapers to enforce accurate, comprehensive coverage of current affairs – Leeson 2 was regarded as a step too far. The failure to stop unpaid internships being the entry stage for so many journalistic careers mean the profession is overly represented by privately educated individuals from comparatively well-off, London-based and often right-wing families.
There are small independent press outlets (eg Yorkshire Bylines, Skwarkbox, Jewish Voice for Labour) but their reach is limited and their continued existence depends largely on small donations from their readers.
The sustained, largely evidence-free campaign against Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism is a case in point. All the mainstream UK press repeatedly reported the opinions / messages of the same small group of Corbyn’s political opponents as matters of FACT. They didn’t report evidence – sent to them or easily available online – from reputable academic research, Jewish bodies and Holocaust families that contradicted the campaign messages of the first group.
The small independent outlets (eg The Canary) stoutly and repeatedly challenged the factual basis of the antisemitism charges laid against Corbyn, it’s true. However, I’d be surprised if the combined readership of ALL the small independent outlets amounted to more than 10,000 people. The general public won’t even know of their existence, let alone read their output.
To me, this reads as complacency – it’s everybody’s fault but Labour’s.
Labour seems unable to grasp that the road into power is, simply, more votes.
The way the right and left of the party squabble makes them, for many people, unelectable.
The inability to compromise and build a broad church is much more of a problem than the media.
The big problem in the UK is that the media do not report objectively. For example the People’s Vote marches which attracted over a million people on to the streets of London did not secure the coverage that was warranted given the scale of the protest. There are many examples of media bias which conditions the view of many in the UK. It is quite shameful.
I think you are right Linda and the point DG makes is vital. A second US civil war is not in view, but some shots have been fired and some folk have been killed ; Xi & Putin are encouraged in their beliefs ; countless hopeful millions in HK, Belorussia, the Ukraine and elswheres are disheartened. The end of Western Democracy is not in view, though there is a faint whistling sound…. It is high past time to look up.
The current partisianship has shown that most folk read to have their opinions confirmed (just as some politicians fire those who disagree with them, instead of listening, to gain valuable intelligence).
If we take week day newspaper purchase as a proxy for voting intent (I know it is mostly us old buzzards who still read papers, but it is mostly us old buzzards who vote) the l-r breakdown will surprise no one :
Sun 1 210 915
Mail 908 510
Mirror 336 814
Telegraph 317 817
Express 223 387
Star 202 019
Guardian 210 268
i 143 627
ft 142 064
547 082 2 660 629
(apologies for the wonky table- the important two figs are the 0.5m leftish readers and 2.6m rightish.)
For reference the registered electorate numbers 46.7m.
No surprise either to see that the British and particularly the predominant English electorate votes right. As most folk are not fascinated by politics (which used to be a Good Thing) and read what they like, they will be strongly influenced by their press (step forward Johnson of the Telegraph) and the British press is about as free as our fee-paying schools are public.
Both Momentum and La France Soumise are playing off-stage to their few accolites.
As ever, the centre ground must be won.
Some could say that since the Obama-B/B days, this is what happened : concerns of large parts of the electorate were ignored -> Ukip sprang up -> tories tacked right + labour atrophied -> New Tories won big majority ->purged dissent + further polarised the electorate to keep their their big-enough minority -> NTs cannot climb down, nor get back to the centre -> On the contrary they must strenuously keep cheating till they crash. –> almighty mess + scramble for votes –> most voters bewildered and voting for safety –> NTs win super super majority and on past form, they will work in ways that make the whistling louder.
No one can doubt that the Press or privately funded web sites will be key in the next general election. A fine moral stand by the FT & Guardian with a few gallant independent commentators will not get their point accross to the voters in the terraces before it is too late ; they will barely be read.
I have suggested before that the right to vote should be earned so that it is valued ; we could also say that the right to own papers should be earned by some upstanding moral undertaking or other safeguard. But neither notion looks practicable in day light. I personally have no idea what the answer is. But as David suggests, it is past time to look for one.
I think Linda is spot on and it’s true all over the world. Fighting that battle in an electoral system which allows private party financing requires lots of resources and forces progressives not to step on big corporates’ feet (e.g. Blair, US Democrats).
Beautifully written as always, but what you’re really advocating with your “small c” is small communism – as a first step…
Am a small ‘l’ liberal
Without the neo- prefix
What I don’t get is the photo with Cummings where he said they were working, was it bring your wife to work day. That along with her bring called “first lady” during recent G7 meeting really confuses me because it seems as if she has power at No.10,when generally PM’s other half’s only really get saw at official events ,so seeing her & Boris round the table with wine & cheesboard really annoyed me,in my lifetime I can’t think of any other PM’s half sitting outside whilst their other half worked ,that is if we are to believe they were working, I’m hoping Sue Grey publishes CCTV stills dated & time stamped as evidence. I’m not holding my breath but they they done it with Hancock so why not Johnson if he is telling the “truth”.
I remember Cummings blogg saying she was addicted to parties,the way I look at that is to show how she’s went from Staines to Cole to Johnson who is now PM,by the way I’m not trying to be facetious but just pointing out why she might be addicted to them because I take her as power hungry & sees this as a way of showing it ,especially to friends & aquantices. It’s an absolute joke of a cabinet & I don’t want to spam up comments with some of the stupidity they have done from Raab not knowing about us bring connected to France with the Chunnel to others not understanding the Good Friday Agreement,its pretty ridiculous the state of his cabinet & the ones he’s picked for certain jobs. Think latest is Williamson being awarded when he got the sack did he not for leaking to the so called journalist with Tice as sugar daddy,I’ve no idea how we ended up like this but I’m sure history is going to have a right old laugh about it.
Largely agree, but laying the blame for populism on liberals not resisting hard enough seems misplaced. We tried, very hard. In the US they tried a moderate machine politician and she lost, and in the UK they tried a “radical” left winger and he lost too. What were they meant to do?
I think the populist turn is more like the weather – once certain external conditions (inequality, desperation, grievance) are in place, it’s going to happen whether you fight against it or not.
If there was a failure among liberal politicians it was earlier in the process – not that they did not fight hard enough during the campaign, but that they did not adequately address those environmental conditions while they were in power, allowing the seeds of populism to take root.
The blogpost is careful not to just blame liberals.
But liberals and progressives have a share of the blame – though gatekeeping conservatives are more culpable
Nothing is gained by not being candid – liberals and progressive let the guard down
I agree with your analysis, but as others have hinted – how do we get rid of them?
I was musing this morning, what would have happened if the Opposition (all parties culpable) had not allowed Johnson his election in 2019? How would he have been able to soldier on with a minority Government when Covid struck? We might just have got a genuine Coalition comparable to the War time one to deal with the problems. One thing I do console myself with now is that the Tories are trumpeting how he Got Brexit Done. As long as Brexit continues to be a mess, then at least the Tories will have to shoulder the blame. Excuses about Labour or What about Corbyn won’t cut it.
Very true.
Can we have more on the nature of the work required by those of good will?
It seems to me that part of the problem is that, paradoxically, the establishment of small c conservatives and small l liberals have tried to do too much by themselves and have lost touch with the majority of people.
This is not entirely their fault. 70 years ago, most working men were connected to their party through a union rep they would see every day. And the management and entrepreneur classes were connected through a web of social and charitable clubs. The narrative was a struggle between the two groups which kept people engaged and kept the parties aligned to their tribes. And it was a real struggle. The workers’ conditions were unacceptable in a civilised society, and everybody knew that things had to change.
But by the nineties, this had changed. Most people lived a life of luxury unimaginable in the 50s. And for the last few decades we seem to have progressively abdicated our politics to professional career politicians while we spend our time enjoying the fruits of success.
So it’s a systemic problem. The problem of “Happily Ever After”, which is the big lie in the fairy tales up on which we all grew. (Sorry about that construction. I can’t help myself.)
The unsurprising result is that the professionals ended up doing what they judged best rather than what we actually wanted. When we woke up to that, we were vulnerable to the populists.
So the challenge for those of good will is, first, to reconnect to the people and find out what they actually want. Then to assess and learn from it. Then to persuade, so far as they can. But finally, to promise and deliver what the people want. Even if we think it’s not the best solution according to our criteria.
Trueish, but I think we will need to start from further back as many people do not even know what they want (my mother would commend a guid skelp). Faces sucked into Tiktok, they first need explaining what the options are and where they will lead to.
“Lead” there’s a verb that’s been hiding away these past few years…… come out from under that bed this very minute and stand up straight!
Robert Shrimsley sums up the situation very well today.
He is right that there is no return to a wiser kinder Tory party. But nor is there a prospect of Labour returning to a more internationalist view as Rachel Reeves seems to be suggesting.
Free movement, open trading etc with EU benefits all, it’s just difficult to sell.
This is the first time I have left a comment, after several years of reading, devouring and learning from your blog. And I agree absolutely, this authoritarian populism is becoming normalised and it really scares me. As an aging liberal/progressive sort of woman, what scares me just as much is my feeling of powerlessness in the midst of all of this shenanigans. You refer to “this fundamental system failure where conservative gatekeepers and liberal-progressives fail to check authoritarian populism “. But where is our power? What can we, the little people, do to turn the tide?
Well quite, Sue
And thank you – and others – for following my blog
Linda – perhaps we could split the difference and say that the problem has been the complacency of liberals and the powerlessness of progressives! Or, indeed, the complacency of liberals towards the changing threat on their right flank, combined with obsessive and almost entirely unwarranted vigilance on the left flank – a time-wasting distraction at best, political self-harm at worst.
I remember the attitude of the BBC towards the Referendum Party on election night in 1997; I also remember the attitude they (or at least Jeremy Paxman) took to the Respect party in 2005. As late as 1997 it was quietly understood, across the political centre, that the extreme Left were worth keeping an eye on – they were scruffy and noisy but sometimes had some decent ideas – while the only thing that needed to be done with the extreme Right was to chuck them out and keep them out. Some time in the next eight years those labels got switched; by the time Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party he might as well have been Nick Griffin.
That combination – heightened vigilance towards the Left, complacency towards the Right – is at the root of a lot of what’s gone wrong since 2015. It needs to be reversed.
You could say that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were populists. The characteristic of connecting with people and galvanisting support is not itself the problem, and those who saw that in Boris were not wrong. Nor, for that matter, was Bill Cinton immune from breaking rules when it suited him.
Are they both also people who should have been stopped by others?
Agreed.
As said, it is not Johnson but the political ecosystem. And I suggest the problem of what to do with a mature democracy that carries a lot of baggage.
Political survival, keeping in with one’s caste, the getting and keeping of money. These are for oneself and one’s friends. Then there is the structure of the media – political club, a vehicle for steering the debate. Most people in the UK vote according to opinions expressed in a few tabloids and tabloid-like broadsheets. These seem the important things to control.
On the basis – you scratch my back etc – one wonders why the editors of the main news groups approve of Boris and the Tories so much. Obviously money and power, the two are joined at the hip. The Labour and Liberal parties look to be anathema to the media – political club and the public are easily scared. The difficulty is there is no place for a Social Democratic party along European lines. Such a thing would be an enemy to the Tories and also to Labour and carries the dread word European – so dead before birth. Which leaves Labour as the only runner in a two horse race.
Which is a gift to right wing media. One has only to put on the telly one of Labour’s horny handed (and voiced) children of industry to scare off the wavering service economy voters. Labour needs to move rightwards if only to get voted in. Remember Blair had to lie to the unions in order to get their backing. The Unions are a great strength but also a great liability.
Which brings us back to keeping in with one’s caste. Education, work in finance/admin and owning property are the first steps toward rising up the caste ladder. For the rest try Cecil Northcote Parkinson’s article ‘La Ronde’ in ‘The Law of Delay’ published back in the late 1960s. Not much changes really.
Superiority complex, that’s the PM’s problem.
As Wittgenstein once remarked, i.e., that exhibitionism consists in showing off what one is not or does not have.
Great blog – but do not underestimate what the foot soldiers are up against https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r.
Progressive political parties need more people who are willing to win this battle one doorstep, one phone call, one conversation at a time if they are to fill the very dangerous vacuum which (you are right) the populists otherwise step into. That is hard and requires significant commitment.
So next time somebody says “You’re all liars” (on the phone, on the doorstep – not on social media!) the riposte is “yes almost all of us tell lies — when did you last tell a lie?” – “But not many of us (including politicians) do so on the industrial scale of the populist who currently masquerades as a/our leader.” We need to give confidence to people that not all politicians are the same – because we are not! Nor are we so different from the general population – most of whom lie………
Well said. Johnson is the first tory prime minister to have been voted in by the conservative party membership and by a large majority knowing the type of person he is from his term as mayor of London and they and they alone are all therefore collectively responsible, the Tory party as a whole.
Goodness me, nail, head, the, on, hit. Re-arrange in any order you like. In his own way, Corbyn was also an authoritarian populist. In 2017 I campaigned for a local MP, not my MP, he was pretty well assured of victory, whereas local intelligence suggested she was in danger of imminent demise. I hadn’t done much campaigning as I had recently been diagnosed with bowel cancer and was going into hospital a week post the election for a major operation -it worked – I am still here. The local organiser/apparatchik was so convinced she would lose he had two boxes of Kleenex for the count. She won with a reasonable majority – and on we went to Boris. Three short years later and they both lost. He was Phil Wilson, the member for Sedgefield famous for having his name on an amendment with the MP for Brighton, she was Jenny Chapman, Shadow Secretary for |Brexit and MP for Darlington – my next door constituency. They both (+others) went as the red wall turned blue to deliver Boris and Brexit. Brexit has been delivered – well it hasn’t really – there are some very significant outstanding issues, but the bits that mattered to voters in Sunderland, Sedgefield, Darlington, Bishop Auckland and Hartlepool – yes – Hartlepool home of Andy Capp, were all delivered. My question? Simple really, given that for many of these voters it was the first time they had voted Conservative, why would they bother a second time? Brexit is done, the motivation is gone. Which is why Boris has to go, but in truth that will not make the difference.Someone is going to have to find a new dream for them to cling on to. A word of advice to Boris’s successor. Brexit worked brilliantly for you lot, levelling up, not so much, nobody in these parts thinks it will ever happen – our evidence – 300 years of capitalist history!
Look at post-WW1 German politics.
The circumstances plus the hyper engaged agitators (politicians) won the day in 1933.
Ditto for Russia in 1917.