{"id":2137,"date":"2020-12-29T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/?p=2137"},"modified":"2020-12-30T12:55:04","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T12:55:04","slug":"is-creeping-consolidation-of-power-in-the-executive-a-sign-of-authoritarianism-in-post-brexit-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markargent.com\/blog\/is-creeping-consolidation-of-power-in-the-executive-a-sign-of-authoritarianism-in-post-brexit-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Is creeping consolidation of power in the Executive a sign of authoritarianism in post-Brexit Britain?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Downing St entrance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The leader article in The Economist<\/em> for 21 November, \u201cremaking the state\u201d, offered a chilling and credible reading of the present government\u2019s attempt to reform the state \u2014 by concentrating power in the Executive through a mix of reducing the power of judges, pushing back against devolution, reforming [sic<\/em>] the civil service and tipping power from parliament to government. It comments (rightly) that \u201cThe Tories are right to advocate constitutional reform, bit their proposals take the country in precisely the wrong direction\u201d.<\/p>\n

I share the diagnosis from The Economist<\/em>, but am less optimistic.
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Writing about the government\u2019s mishandling of the pandemic (by pushing \u201cobedience to the rules\u201d over medical objectivity<\/a>) I found myself thinking in terms of the French pychoanalyst Jacques Lacan\u2019s \u201cdiscourse of the hysteric\u201d, where a raft of unconscious anxieties are in the driving seat. Lacan comes up with four discourses, which are a fairly elaborate way of saying that the dominant \u201cdiscourse of the master\u201d \u2014 however it seems to be \u201chow things are\u201d \u2014 never has the whole story. <\/p>\n

My sense is that the attempt to concentrate power in the Executive is doing something profoundly dangerous. This isn\u2019t simply that I don\u2019t like it. It isn\u2019t even just that it undermines democracy \u2014 a people need a way to choose their government but I can live with this not happening as I like (as I do in living with the dysfunction of \u201cfirst past the post\u201d). <\/p>\n

The problem is that it\u2019s pandering to a raft of unconscious anxieties and using these to confer power on the Executive. It\u2019s repeatedly creating situations that have a semblance of acceptability until one looks closely. The government is certainly part of the problem, but it\u2019s not the whole of the problem in as much as there are not vast protests on the streets and opposition parties keep being put in a place where they have no room for manoeuvre (hence the absurdity of the 2019 General Election and the impossibility of doing anything other than support Boris Johnson\u2019s Brexit deal). <\/p>\n

This is pointing to a deep dysfunction \u2014 an obvious explanation is that Europe provided the container for British politics for a very long time, and in voting to leave the EU and then actually doing that, we\u2019ve attacked that containment and left our political system struggling.<\/p>\n

The December 2019 General Election might be a good example. A small increase in the Tory vote gave them a big majority, though arguably this is as much an anti-mandate for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn as it was a mandate for Boris Johnson<\/a>. In the finer detail of that, a sense of difficulty comes from near-impossibility of a meaningful discussion of Brexit, even though the result was taken as a mandate to leave. <\/p>\n

This comes on the back of judges being branded as \u201cenemies of the people\u201d for concluding that the government was acting illegally over Brexit, and an extraordinary shamelessness over the government\u2019s illegal silencing of parliament in 2019 by proroguing it. The role of the courts is to administer the law: something is badly wrong when government sets itself above the law.<\/p>\n

Here are some thumbnail sketches of where power seems to be being consolidated in the Executive:<\/p>\n