“Creeping authoritarianism” is the wolf of the left, and we cry it all the time: I remember, almost nostalgically, thinking David Cameron was a creeping authoritarian for outsourcing punitive benefits initiatives to private companies; and that Theresa May was one when she earned the dubious accolade of politician least likely to answer the question in a broadcast interview. However, there is no ignoring or denying the vastly more anti-democratic manoeuvres of Boris Johnson’s government.
The elections bill, currently in the Lords, features mandatory photo ID, which is well known to disfranchise younger and lower-income voters. It poses a direct threat to the reach and independence of the Electoral Commission, has serious implications for who can and cannot campaign at election time, and extends the perverse first-past-the-post voting system to the election of mayors and police commissioners. Beyond the explicit restriction of democracy, there is no plausible rationale for the bill; and unsettlingly, very little attempt has been made to produce one.
Make Votes Matter has organised a protest against it this Saturday, which feels slightly poignant, under the shadow of the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, which would make the attendance of such a demonstration fraught with real personal risk.
This, too, has moved to the House of Lords, having passed its first stage last July. It contains many chilling provisions: the extension of stop and search; a new crime of interfering with “key infrastructure”; and the introduction of the “protest asbo”, a serious disruption prevention order that (the clue is in the name) you can get before you’ve actually disrupted anything. It was plainly framed with environmental protests in its sights, and indeed its advocates use the techniques of Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain – the traffic-blocking and pavement-gluing – as their proof that the current law is too lax.
Yet you only need to look at the Sarah Everard vigil to see what happens when police powers over demonstrators are extended – in that case, by Covid legislation. This bill would affect the right to assemble in every particular and every instance.
More sickening still is the nationality and borders bill, which makes it easier to strip the citizenship of anyone with a second nationality to fall back on, thereby creating a two-tier system of rights: white Britons at the top, minority-ethnic Britons at the bottom.
Many of these measures, if they did pass into law, would struggle to get past the Human Rights Act: but that, too, has been under constant attack from the right wing of the Conservative party, with a consultation announced yesterday that is nothing short of a provocation (Prof Francesca Klug and Dr Natalie Sedacca will lay out the implications more fully at an online event next week).
Then there are the atmospherics, memorably listed by Anthony Barnett: a prime minister who doesn’t bother with the truth and everybody knows he doesn’t; who “dresses up in the occupational costumes they wear in laboratories, hospitals and fish merchants (he has a particular liking for fish and crabs)”; who removes himself from scrutiny; who always smiles, and “everyone around him smiles”. These are the optics of a mini-dictator, while those around him create the conditions for him to remain in power perpetually.
But there’s a hitch: what happens when the people around him stop smiling? What happens when the lies suddenly do matter? What happens when his party unity is shot? What happens when the anger reaches beyond Extinction Rebellion? To perform as badly as Boris Johnson is currently doing, to openly lie and spread untruths in the House of Commons, to breach your own rules so flagrantly and be so openly unrepentant, you really need the power of an actual dictator. You need to be able to throw your critics in jail.
It’s not enough that you might, soon, be able to imprison members of Insulate Britain. You need to be able to shut down the phonelines of LBC and restrict access to the internet on a whim. Authoritarianism, if it’s to have any protective power for such inadequacy, has to go a lot faster than a creep.
It’s peculiar that Johnson, with his expensive and so often flaunted education, didn’t think this through. Temperamentally, he is unsuited to the full implications and demands of his own agenda. Unlike his home secretary Priti Patel, who has a natural flair for the language of constraint and cruelty, Johnson craves approval, and is at heart a libertarian. He has built a political persona whose one consistency is bumbling, tousle-haired frivolity. It’s possible that he doesn’t have the requisite ruthlessness in him. Though it is more likely, I think, that this is just a lack of competence and foresight.
By no means is this a call to complacency: this government isn’t over until it’s over, and the urgency of resisting these encroachments to democracy hasn’t in any way abated. Yet the fight against them looks more winnable every day.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
