“Post-Democracy” in the United Kingdom
Nearly a decade and a half of Conservative Party rule in the UK was last week terminated in spectacular fashion. In what can only be seen as a monumental reversal, the Tories lost 251 seats while Labour gained 211, leaving the latter with a near unprecedented majority of 174.
There is no doubt that this is a historic moment, one that ends fourteen terrible years of dysfunctional, corrupt and — at times — comical misrule. Yet the massive majority that Labour have achieved under their leader Keir Starmer does not indicate mass support for the party nor for its leader. While 34% out of a turnout of 60% might bestow an overwhelming majority of seats upon Labour in the House of Commons, it most certainly does not indicate a ringing endorsement by the majority of the UK population.
Indeed, less people voted for Labour in this election than they did in the 2017 and 2019 iterations, both occasions which saw the Conservative Party returned to government. Last weeks historic result reflected antipathy towards the Tories (and the SNP in Scotland) rather than enthusiasm for a Labour government. Above all else it was about the skewing effects of Britain’s archaic First Past the Post system.
Labour’s low vote (relative to the seats they won) is not surprising. The party has offered up very little in terms of what they would do different to the Conservative Party and all of the left-wing pledges that Starmer made in order to gain the leadership of the Labour party in 2020 are now nothing but ancient history. Starmer’s Labour enter office having promised to broadly stick to the Conservative’s spending plans, to remain wedded to fiscal rules brought in by the Conservatives, to not overturn regressive and authoritarian anti-trade union and political protest legislation, and to not meaningfully renegotiate the catastrophic Brexit deal that is the Tory’s enduring legacy.
Not only will Labour not reverse some of the most vindicate Tory austerity measures (such as the two-child cap on benefits) they are also quite likely to introduce some Labour branded measures of their own. As a result, the working class are unlikely to fare much better under Keir Starmer than under the Tories, whilst the elite are almost certain not to fare any worse. In fairness to Keir Starmer, he never really claimed otherwise and barely disguised the fact that he is essentially a Tory who thinks he can be a more competent one than Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Hence the low turnout on election night and hence the fact that for many people of even a slight left wing persuasion, this does not feel like a victory.
The United Kingdom has voted out one conservative regime and replaced it with another. Perhaps this was the only way that the Tory’s could have been removed. Certainly, the last time Labour unseated the Tories the same dynamic was at play. In 1997, Tony Blair abandoned much of Labour’s left-wing agenda and led the party to a historic victory. Many argue that this is the only strategy by which Labour could come to power due to the perceived wisdom of left wing policies being inherently unpalatable to the British electorate. They point to the two defeats suffered under Jeremy Corbyn and argue that British voters simply do not want to see the kind of radical change Corbyn was offering.
Leaving aside the fact that Keir Starmer at his most triumphant is less popular than Jeremy Corbyn at his lowest ebb, there is a certain truth about the radical left being unelectable. This is not, however, due to voter preferences. After all, polls show that policies such as increased taxes on the wealthy are popular with the electorate. No, this is not about voter preferences but instead is about the preferences of the establishment. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour offered to the electorate a radical programme of government that sought to redistribute wealth to the masses. For Britain’s ruling class, this could never be allowed to happen and for the entirety of Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader they set about ensuring that it didn’t. The main weapon deployed against Corybn’s radical politics was the media. A study conducted by The Independent found that when covering Corbyn, most newspapers “did not act as a critical watchdog of the powers that be, but rather more often as an antagonistic attackdog”, finding that “Over half of the news articles were critical or antagonistic in tone, compared to two thirds of all editorials and opinion pieces”. They also found that “Corbyn’s voice is often absent in the reporting on him, and when it is present it is often presented in a highly distorted way”. The study also pointed out that newspapers frequently engaged in “character assassinations” and propagated the idea that “he is unelectable, that his ideas are unrealistic and loony, and that he is unpatriotic”. Even more damaging, there was often a “persistent association of Corbyn with terrorism”.
After the 2017 election was close enough that the Conservative Party were denied an outright governing majority, the attacks from the press only intensified. One study noted that “Hostile press coverage aimed at the Labour Party at the 2019 election was more than double the intensity found during 2017’s poll”, with press hostility to Corbyn peaking in the days immediately prior to the election. Despite the anti-Corbyn propaganda being more intense and effective than in 2017, a Tory majority was only secured after Nigel Farage had his Brexit Party (since rebranded as Reform) stand down in 317 Conservative seats in order not to split the right-wing vote. We can be certain that if Starmer had been running a campaign that was genuinely opposed to right-wing economic policies, a similar move would have been made and we would likely be looking at a very different political landscape.
That Farage didn’t feel the need to offer the Tories a helping hand this time around is due to the fact that Starmer’s Labour poses no threat to the UK establishment. The routing of the Conservative Party is not the problem it would have been in 2019 since Conservative Party values will more or less continue to rule the country. This explains the fact that Starmer received an extremely easy ride from the media compared to that which Corbyn was subjected to. Tellingly, he was even endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s right wing tabloid, The Sun. Even more tellingly, it was only after the election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader and his crushing of the Labour left that the UK media fully turned their attention to the absolute disaster the Conservative Party had become. Boris Johnson was eventually hounded out of office as the corrupt liar that the media always knew him to be, a fact largely ignored whilst Corybn remained a threat.
Such warping of the political narrative continues even in the wake of this election. The four seats won by Farage’s Reform — for example — are given far more prominence and significance than the fact that four left-wing independents unseated Labour candidates. Indeed, when we include the Green party there are more MPs to the left of Labour in England than there are to the right of the Tories. Left-wing opposition, however, remains invisible if not illegitimate for the media whereas the fringe right-wing politics of Nigel Farage remains a useful tool with which to keep Labour in line and to distract the population from questions of economic justice.
Britain’s political system has, time and time again, worked exactly how Britain’s political class wanted it to. Elections are held, the system is legitimised, the government even changes and very little of substance actually changes. This doesn’t seem like democracy at all to me but at the same time we cannot say that democracy has ended. After all, there are still elections, political parties, debates, representative government . . . all the trappings are there. We therefore cannot say that the UK exists in a situation of non-democracy.
The academic Colin Crouch puts forward the concept of “post-democracy”, which he notes “is not the same as non-democracy”. For Crouch, the term post-democracy “describes situations when boredom, frustration and disillusion have settled in after a democratic moment; when powerful minority interests have become far more active than the mass of ordinary people in making the political system work for them; where political elites have learned to manage and manipulate popular demands; where people have to be persuaded to vote by top-down publicity campaigns”.
Post-democracy has the features of democracy in that elections take place and can lead to changes in governments, but it is a much-degraded form of democracy, one in which “public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams”. Politics thus becomes much more of an elite oriented pursuit, while “The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them”. Meanwhile, behind the scenes and away from the “spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests”. It seems to me that Crouch’s “post-democracy” thesis is a pretty accurate description of politics in the UK at the present moment.
So as the dust settles on the 2024 election, business continues as usual. Everyone can pretend that whatever unpopular decisions the Labour Party will shortly introduce have been endorsed by the electorate and that when the Conservative Party oppose them they actually have something different in mind. This is obviously quite depressing but thankfully, post-democracy contains within it the seeds of real democracy. After all, people generally do not particularly like things being terrible and certainly do not enjoy lacking a voice with which to express this, or power with which to change it.
As a result, there still exists the possibility of a genuine opposition emerging. Perhaps a grassroots movement rises up to challenge Labour’s fiscal conservatism and austerity. Perhaps what’s left of the Labour left breaks from the party and joins the Greens, independents and other elements to form a genuine left-wing opposition. Maybe, eventually, dissatisfaction with Starmer reaches a point that he is deposed and is replaced with someone on the left of the party who can actually offer a bit of hope to the electorate. Or even a genuine choice, you know; the kind of choice that we’re meant to have in a democracy.
Unfortunately, post-democracy also contains within it the seeds for something far more dangerous. If genuine left-wing opposition is consistently thwarted, and if concerns of economic justice and national decline continues to be manipulated by the media into a growing xenophobia (as has been the case now for decades) then there is a real possibility of the main opposition to Labour being the sort of far-right movement that would make the post-Brexit Tory party seem genuinely cosmopolitan. Fascism is on the rise across the west and the inevitable disappointment that will arise from the type of Labour government post-democracy has delivered to the UK means that there exists a real danger that in 2029 we speak not of post-democracy but of the death of democracy.
Zack Breslin is an essayist and author of several books including Donald Trump: Deadbeat Tyrant and The Coming Storm
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