Monday, February 10, 2025
Could there be a Trump-style coup in the UK?
He says that there are two theories of British exceptionalism which we tell to reassure ourselves that this could never happen, one is the Good Chap Theory while the other is the Cable Street warm bath:
The Good Chap Theory was coined by Professor Peter Hennessy, himself the ultimate good chap, who has spent his life writing about how power is wielded in a country which has (unlike the US) no written constitution—nothing on paper—but which nonetheless muddles through. So taken with this notion is he that he called his collection of essays on the subject Muddling Through.
The Good Chap Theory is the idea that the letter of the rules is less important than the system being run by players who understand their spirit. It was a theory which sort of muddled through until tested to breaking point by Boris Johnson (aided by his sidekick Dominic Cummings) and then by Liz Truss, who got muddled and was rather quickly dispensed with.
The Cable Street warm bath is the one that basks in the fundamental moderation and decency of the British people. In the mid-30s, when fascism was on the rise throughout Europe, we Brits wanted nothing to do with it. Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts may have marched through Stepney in 1936—but they were met with honest working-class folk who gave them a thrashing.
Put these two fables together and we can amuse ourselves with the wild melodrama currently playing out in Washington DC and comfort ourselves that, to borrow the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1936 dystopian novel, “it can’t happen here”.
Rusbridger is not so sure that these models work anymore:
You can be reasonably sure that there are a bunch of bright twenty-somethings in Tufton Street—the HQ of shadowy well-funded right-wing thinktanks—watching every move in Maga-land and plotting exactly how they could transplant it.
We know Elon Musk has developed a keen interest in British politics and might gladly fund Nigel Farage/Richard Tice/Tommy Robinson (delete as appropriate) to have a go at wreaking the same kind of chaos in London as he has in Washington. Blow the whole thing up and start again.
Or you could read the lip-smacking X posts of the British Right’s philosopher-in-chief, Matthew Goodwin, in the hour of Trump’s inauguration. He asked his followers to imagine Day 1 of an equivalent regime in the UK: “A national border emergency is declared; the military is sent to stop the boats; all constraints on North Sea gas and oil are removed; shut down woke ideology; immediately end DEI; establish a new department of government efficiency”. Sound familiar?
How hard would it be?
Coups generally start with capturing the media. Quite a large chunk of ours wouldn’t need much capturing: they’re practically there already. The BBC wouldn’t be a hard nut to crack. Sack the chair (there’s precedent) and get them to sack the director general (ditto). Abolish the licence fee and say the organisation must in future stand on its own two feet. They’d soon fall into line.
You’d need your own version of Fox News: welcome GB News! Do we still need Ofcom to regulate fairness and impartiality? Thought not.
But don’t stop there. Ask every regulator to resign and replace them with loyalists. This would require dealing with the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Happily this office, set up by the Nolan Committee to straighten out public life in 1995, has never been on a statutory footing. So abolishing it would be the work of a moment—done by an Order in Council.
He says that if this supremo has a comfortable majority in House of Commons and that MPs were as loyal/intimidated as Maga representatives seem to be, there would be little problem with parliament nodding anything through. Acts would be paased as skeletons with all the detail subject to secondary legislation and orders in council, while the House of Lords, troublesome civil servants and even stubborn judges could be removed by one way or another.
Without a written constitition, a determined Prime Minister with unquestioning support in the House of Commons could effectively write his own. It is not a pleasant prospect.
