This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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British democracy is under attack - we must fight to protect it

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

There are two ways you go bankrupt, Ernest Hemingway once wrote. “Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s the same with how our democratic rights are taken from us.

As prime minister, Boris Johnson has gradually chipped away at norms and standards. Parliament has been prorogued. Electoral laws broken. Rules trampled on.

Now his government is set on a sudden assault on our democracy.

Forget the pantomime in Downing Street. Let’s look instead at the ghost of Christmas future made flesh through some of the egregious pieces of legislation that will be winding their way through the Houses of Parliament in the coming months.

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There’s the Policing Bill that criminalises protest, and could lead to protesters being sentenced to 51 weeks in prison. An Elections Bill that will give the prime minister control over the elections regulator and force voters to carry ID to exercise their franchise. A Nationality and Borders Bill that could strip British citizenship from people at the flick of a pen.

That’s not all. An extension of the Official Secrets Act will place legal constraints on journalism and whistleblowing. The Human Rights Act is to be ripped up. Ministers will be given the right to throw out judgements made under judicial review.

Channel 4 is to be sold off by a culture secretary who is on record misleading the public about the finances of a broadcaster that has long been a thorn in Johnson’s side. Meanwhile, a cabal of anti-lockdown Tory MPs – with longstanding ties to the dark money-funded American Right – increasingly dictate the government’s pandemic policy.

This is what democracy dying suddenly looks like. And we need to act now before it’s too late.

Corrupting democracy

As with anything that happens gradually, then suddenly, it is easy to become inured to just how broken Britain’s democracy has become.

This is a government that ripped up parliamentary standards in a doomed attempt to save the disgraced MP, Owen Paterson, who had lobbied for companies that paid him hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The Downing Street parties – and their cack-handed cover up – are more a symptom than a cause of the rot, but they are indicative of a morally bankrupt elite. While many in the media talk of ‘sleaze’, the reality is that Johnson has presided over a culture of corruption and clientelism. What other words are there to describe a politics in which political donors are given privileged access to a VIP lane for lucrative COVID contracts?

openDemocracy first started reporting on irregularities in COVID contracting in April 2020. When we revealed that a PR firm close to Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove had been given a bumper contract without any tender, the Cabinet Office dismissed our questions. Earlier this year, a court found that Gove broke the law in awarding Public First a public contract.

There are so many examples that it’s hard to keep track.

Take David Frost. He has flounced off as Brexit minister, but the good lord will remain a peer for life. Evidently, the animus of right-wing Tory MPs towards “unelected” health experts does not extend to former Scotch salesmen now selling Singapore-on-Thames.

Of course, Frost will have plenty of like-minded company among the ermine. As openDemocracy revealed recently, £3m is the going rate for Tory donors who want a seat in the House of Lords. The Met Police declined to investigate “peers for sale”. Plus ca change.
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