HOW DID the oldest Parliamentary democracy become tyrannical? We are governed by quangos that are unaccountable to our elected representatives.
Our state is hard on speech but soft on crime.
Journalists are interrogated for their political opinions.
Our elected representatives, and nominally non-partisan civil servants, spent years thwarting the Brexit referendum and misrepresenting the ‘science’ on covid.
How did we come to this?
First, let’s admit, sadly, that Britain is not the most democratic of the categorical democracies. Democracy means that the people vote for their leaders. Britons don’t vote for leaders. They vote for parties, which choose party leaders, who become premiers if the party wins enough seats in the House of Commons.
The leading party is over-represented in Parliament, which exacerbates the tyranny of the majority. And this isn’t even a tyranny of the majority of voters. It’s really a tyranny of the largest minority. Sir Keir Starmer has a strong majority in Parliament with only 34 per cent of the vote.
Worse, our representatives increasingly favour minorities within their minority: the tyranny of the minorities. That’s how illegal immigrants have ended up with more privileges than citizens.
Increasingly, the favoured minorities have been specified by religion, race, gender, and sexuality: the tyranny of tribalisms. What we have come to know as two-tier justice is really two-tier justice by tribe. For instance, anti-Semitic protesters are protected by police, while counter-protesters are arrested for being ‘openly Jewish’.
While most fathers end up separated from their children and forced to pay for children they hardly see, Muslim men can escape family courts by choosing sharia courts.
While heterosexual men were prosecuted for rape by prosecutors who hid exculpatory evidence in order to raise rape convictions, those same prosecutors neglected the rape of children by largely immigrant gangs. They turned a blind eye to sex-selective abortion and female genital mutilation too. Who was the chief of the Crown Prosecution Service then? That man is now prime minister: Sir Keir Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
The tyranny we’re seeing this decade is acute in the judicial system: police, prosecutors, judges, and court quangos, such as CAFCASS (Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service). All are unelected.
In theory, you can express your displeasure to your MP. Your political representative should be expressing your displeasure to the Department of Justice, which then would govern judges, prosecutors, and police accordingly.
In practice, your representatives tell you that they shouldn’t interfere in the ‘independence’ of government. Meanwhile, the DoJ protects officials from the public. Departments of government are focused on protecting public servants more than holding them accountable. They are guilds whose members share a self-interest in protecting each other lest anyone is held accountable for their performance.
To continue to make an example of the judiciary: the reason the DoJ’s guidance is often vague or, worse, contrary to the intent of the statutes, is that the DoJ wishes to avoid accountability for bad judges, prosecutors and police. Accountability is work. Vague guidance, or guidance that deviates from statutes, is difficult for the public to hold up as a standard for how officials should behave. Without standards, there is no accountability.
That is how police got away with ignoring the Rishi Sunak administration’s order to stop recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’. Some constabularies continue to record them. How does the DoJ respond? With ‘guidance’. Nobody is fired or reprimanded. No datasets have been deleted, although some have been compartmented.
Who is held accountable? Nobody. Even the calamitous Dame Cressida Dick was never held to account for the Metropolitan Police’s corruption, cover-ups, phone-hacking, non-performance and even murder. She spent 12 years at Assistant or full Commissioner level, before she left. And she left because the Mayor of London lost confidence in her, not the DoJ. That was in 2022. Has the Met reformed since then? Not beyond the usual platitudes.
Prosecutors and judges hold an additional advantage. That advantage is case law, which allows judges to refer to how fellow judges have handled crimes. Over time, activist judges can push case law further away from the intent of the statute.
Case law helpfully gives judges precedents on how to interpret statutory law, but unhelpfully enables them to avoid statutory law. Case law is the excuse for accelerating judicial over-reach and politicisation. For instance, Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke recently sentenced a traumatised Army veteran to two years in prison for Facebook posts which described the summer’s riots as a ‘civil war’ that could end in ‘bullets’. The prosecutor asked her to take into account the accused’s attendance at a right-wing rally. She did, three months after she spared a child rapist (after the defender asked her to take into account prison overcrowding).
Who voted for any of this? Where were the referendums or majorities or manifestos or statutes that justify this radical swing in the interpretation of the law?
Here’s a solution: Parliamentarians should get back in the habit of specifying statutes so that judges interpret less and obey more. For instance, no statute specifies that divorced fathers should be separated from their children for about 90 per cent of the year, and should pay their ex-partners for the privilege. Case law and quangos have normalised these injustices. Legislators could end these injustices by simply legislating that fathers and mothers have equal rights.
Here’s another solution to over-reach by public-servants: they should be elected by the public they serve. Then we can vote them out when they go woke. Yes, radicals can vote in woke officials too, but woke is a local problem. Most Britons oppose Britain’s woke drift. I am proposing that you should be able to vote against your woke local officials or leave that locality. Currently you have no recourse, except through your national-elected representative – who won’t interfere in ‘independent’ government.
Electing local officials is a local solution. We still need a national solution. We need more democratic accountability for our national representatives, through party primary elections, direct democracy and fair representation of majority will.
Our current system is justified for producing strong governments. But Britain hasn’t seen strong government in decades. For most years since the 2000s, we’ve been governed by coalition (David Cameron and Nick Clegg; Theresa May and the DUP) or by governments that look strong in terms of seats but are actually weakened by defectors or factions disobedient to party whips (including the Sunak and Starmer administrations).
Without strong government, the three main parties have tacked to the centre, and put elite consensus before hard choices: the tyranny of the centrist.
At the same time, the three main parties have condemned other parties as extremists, and posed as moderates, while getting nothing done, lest they be accused of extremism: the tyranny of the moderates.
The tyrannies of the centrists and moderates are ultimately tyrannies of the minorities, lest any minority accuses a politician of extremism. Thence the majority becomes labelled as extreme, and government works against the majority.
Britain needs fewer quangos, more democratically elected officials, more over-specified legislation, less re-interpretation of legislation by unelected officials, less case law, and more representation of majority will.
These solutions aren’t perfect. All solutions are trade-offs. Representing the majority will inevitably reinforce the tyranny of the majority. But I prefer the tyranny of the majority over the tyranny of the minorities.
