Sunday, November 07, 2021
Johnson poses a threat to British democracy
There was an outstanding opinion piece in yesterday's Guardian by Jonathan Freedland in which he argues that Boris Johnson's contempt for the rule of law, and belief that he and his friends are beyond its reach, poses an extraordinary threat to our democracy. If If you’re on Team Johnson, he says, the normal rules don’t apply.
He says Johnson does not regard even those laws he himself put on the statute book as binding. An impeccable source reports that, at the G7 meeting in Cornwall, the prime minister told French president Emmanuel Macron that he had only “sort of” signed the Northern Ireland protocol, currently the cause of so much tension between the two countries:
And sometimes these two elements – favours for pals and rule-breaking in matters of state – come together. The most obvious example is in the bonanza of Covid-related contracts handed out to chums at the start of the pandemic, with a “high priority” VIP lane created for those lucky enough to be in a minister’s contacts book. That created a stampede of ministerial mates, often hawking goods or services that didn’t work, which both cost taxpayers’ £2.8bn and wasted precious civil service time. As the Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham puts it: “So keen were they to get their mates to the trough they interfered with getting the right stuff.”
Freedland's conclusion is bang on the nose and elucidates far more elegantly than I, some of the themes of posts on this blog:
The pattern is now clear. Rules that might hold the government to account, that might act as a check on its power, are either to be ignored or rewritten. The bodies that enforce those rules are similarly to be hobbled or neutered in the name of “reform”. Johnson wanted to do that this week to the parliamentary standards system, adding it to a target list that already includes the courts and the electoral commission. Meanwhile, his culture secretary threatens the BBC, announcing that fearless questioning of the prime minister by one of its interviewers has cost the organisation “a lot of money”.
We hesitate to use the word because it sounds so hyperbolic, but this is how the slide to authoritarianism begins. Not as it was in the old newsreels, with strutting dictators and balcony speeches, but with cronyism and special treatment; with enforcement of the law for “them” and exemptions for “us”; with the steady weakening and eventual removal of the constraints on government power. It is the dismantling, bit by bit, block by block, of the apparatus that holds up a liberal democracy.
I spoke with a minister late on Thursday who, though furious over the Paterson debacle – “It’s a total car crash” – rejected the notion that Johnson is like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in Eton tails. “This was the Brexit gang looking after one of its own,” he said. Johnson keeps making special dispensations for his friends not out of a power-crazed desire to demolish the democratic architecture, but because “he wants to be liked … It’s a damaged neediness.” Add to that, he says, a Vote Leave self-righteousness that tells itself: “Elites have let the country down; we don’t have to follow their norms.”
Even if you buy all that, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the motive for Johnson’s actions that counts but their impact. He didn’t get his way this time: fury from usually supportive newspapers and on the Tory benches forced a rapid climbdown. But this was what he wanted, and what most of his MPs were ready to give him – a shredding of the rules to ensure those in power are unbound, and ever harder to remove.
It is time the electorate woke up to these issues, however I fear that, without a credible and effective opposition, by the time they do so, it will be too late.
He says Johnson does not regard even those laws he himself put on the statute book as binding. An impeccable source reports that, at the G7 meeting in Cornwall, the prime minister told French president Emmanuel Macron that he had only “sort of” signed the Northern Ireland protocol, currently the cause of so much tension between the two countries:
And sometimes these two elements – favours for pals and rule-breaking in matters of state – come together. The most obvious example is in the bonanza of Covid-related contracts handed out to chums at the start of the pandemic, with a “high priority” VIP lane created for those lucky enough to be in a minister’s contacts book. That created a stampede of ministerial mates, often hawking goods or services that didn’t work, which both cost taxpayers’ £2.8bn and wasted precious civil service time. As the Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham puts it: “So keen were they to get their mates to the trough they interfered with getting the right stuff.”
Freedland's conclusion is bang on the nose and elucidates far more elegantly than I, some of the themes of posts on this blog:
The pattern is now clear. Rules that might hold the government to account, that might act as a check on its power, are either to be ignored or rewritten. The bodies that enforce those rules are similarly to be hobbled or neutered in the name of “reform”. Johnson wanted to do that this week to the parliamentary standards system, adding it to a target list that already includes the courts and the electoral commission. Meanwhile, his culture secretary threatens the BBC, announcing that fearless questioning of the prime minister by one of its interviewers has cost the organisation “a lot of money”.
We hesitate to use the word because it sounds so hyperbolic, but this is how the slide to authoritarianism begins. Not as it was in the old newsreels, with strutting dictators and balcony speeches, but with cronyism and special treatment; with enforcement of the law for “them” and exemptions for “us”; with the steady weakening and eventual removal of the constraints on government power. It is the dismantling, bit by bit, block by block, of the apparatus that holds up a liberal democracy.
I spoke with a minister late on Thursday who, though furious over the Paterson debacle – “It’s a total car crash” – rejected the notion that Johnson is like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in Eton tails. “This was the Brexit gang looking after one of its own,” he said. Johnson keeps making special dispensations for his friends not out of a power-crazed desire to demolish the democratic architecture, but because “he wants to be liked … It’s a damaged neediness.” Add to that, he says, a Vote Leave self-righteousness that tells itself: “Elites have let the country down; we don’t have to follow their norms.”
Even if you buy all that, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the motive for Johnson’s actions that counts but their impact. He didn’t get his way this time: fury from usually supportive newspapers and on the Tory benches forced a rapid climbdown. But this was what he wanted, and what most of his MPs were ready to give him – a shredding of the rules to ensure those in power are unbound, and ever harder to remove.
It is time the electorate woke up to these issues, however I fear that, without a credible and effective opposition, by the time they do so, it will be too late.
