People are starting to ask if it’s possible for UK society to become totalitarian. They’re behind the curve – it’s started.
Totalitarianism has many names – authoritarianism, Marxism/Fascism, the Controller society, etc. At least two billion people in the 20th century lived under totalitarian regimes – regimes where the individual’s rights are effectively zero if the State doesn’t like you, and your private actions are at least policed, directly or indirectly, through informants. Disagree with the government and you’re off to the Gulag or worse. Seriously.
This is of course a disaster for a healthy society that needs constant enthusiasm and optimism to provide the diversity of thought, critical thinking and risk-taking needed for innovation to happen and solve upcoming problems and make each others’ lives better.
Of course, all societies have aspects of this state control when “national security” is said to be at stake. But how limited is it in law and in practice? In the UK we probably got it about right from WW2 until the 1990s.
But by the time of the 1997 Blair 1 general election, the shine had already come off the enjoyment of the fall of the Berlin Wall – from the Left’s perspective. Influenced by the idea of a new Euro-Communism which embraced capitalism ‘with permission’ but under a cultural noose (actually that mindset is closer to Fascism than Marxism if you think about it), they set about putting the lipstick on the long-term gorilla. And Blair was the perfect lipstick. Unaware, I was fed up with John Major and co, and voted for Blair.
Since then we’ve had a generation of moves that have led to where we are now in October 2024, with a new Labour Government (rightly in our system) taking its position of power despite a low vote. But this power will capitalise (excuse the pun) on previous moves that come under three interconnected main umbrellas:
- Blairite reforms which became concrete plans in the 1990s drew power away from Parliament and into ‘institutions’. Of course we want top, brilliant Civil Servants serving the Government and the populous who, on balance, voted in that Government. But the shift is for more of them to be self-serving – more distant from Parliamentary control. Now about 100,000 unelected State-sponsored top senior leaders have control of half the economy and all its major levers. Some are international, so are not primarily serving the British voter.
Now the Gordon Brown (who was mainly Tony Blair’s Chancellor) Report of 2022 can be implemented by this Labour government and this will distance voters much further from power. This cements the administrative State over private choices.
- From Climate Change to DEI, capitalism has been trashed by activists like never before. I recall in post-Berlin Wall times, being told on mainstream TV programmes by all sides “There is no effective system other than capitalism”. But from the moment Lehmann Brothers went pop in 2008 and took down the whole financial domino (and I lost a bucket load of money myself then as well, due to the cancellation of signed commercial contracts), capitalism has been seen as indefensible. What’s unfortunate here is that the US government was forcing DEI policies onto banks to soften their loan criteria in the 2000s, and underwriting bad loans, which had more effect on the ‘bubble and bust’ in my view than ‘greedy capitalists’ causing the crash. After all, capitalists didn’t suddenly become ‘greedy’ then – they were just as greedy before. What’s new? It was (at least in large part) a financial (money-printing) crash due to market distortions, not a proof of the end of ‘late-stage capitalism’.
I reckon only 1 in 50 people have considered that aspect, or sadly, even want to, as it doesn’t fit the narrative. It’s pretty unsayable in polite company as people SO want capitalism to fail, so they can control other people’s choices. Climate and environmentalism of course provide new challenges to the uncontrolled ecenomy. And DEI points out how racial disparities can be perpetuated if capitalism remains. That’s a) arguable – look at progress in freer economies, so I don’t believe in the CRT “infinite malleability of racism”, and b) Compared to What? But clearly there are fair criticisms to be made on systemic (or at least uneven) effects of capitalism.
I’ll leave that one for another time, but suffice to say that capitalism lost its reputational pants during the period from 1991 to 2024!
3. Finally, the bigger you make the State, the more the concentrated power of the unelected State ‘elite’ group rises. And this power ‘over’ (not ‘of’) the people will naturally happen, and increase exponentially, as government spending rises from 35% of GDP, towards 50%. It makes sense that as the State becomes more influential than the people/taxpayer economically, a tipping point effect shifts the balance of power rapidly away from one and towards the other.
Conservative governments trend towards government spending being about 35% of GDP over time in office in normal circumstances – but in recent years did not. It left office in June 2024 with a massive 44.7% of the whole economy spent by the State. And Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s upcoming first Labour Budget will increase this ratio and embed it for years to come.
It is a natural outcome that if you vote for both a weakened Parliament and a very large State, and remove the conservative (freedom of individual) impulse too – eg Boris (2019-2022) was naturally a libertarian-style conservative despite the Covid restrictions he felt he had to introduce – then you are asking for a Marxist-Leninist style authoritarian/totalitarian State-led control of the individual, sold as compassion and safety. This is what Martin Gurri calls the upcoming ‘Controller’ State.
Labour’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has announced this week, ‘The culture war is over’. This is not an observation – a majority of the electorate do not want the extreme versions of new ideologies. But you are not being reflected by this Government, you are being instructed by her. What she means is that her Government now has the power to crush your majority dissent. Think post-War eastern Europe. Sound familiar?
Maybe it’s us who are now on the wrong side of a new Berlin-type Wall.
Photo acknowledgement: By FOTO:FORTEPAN / Nagy Gyula, <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0″ title=”Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0″>CC BY-SA 3.0</a>, <a href=”https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49704920″>Link</a>