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Sunday, 16 August 2020

The UK is a One Party State

I’ve been thinking about Singapore a lot.  More than usual.  Partly it’s because I’ve recently been learning more about the local wrestling scene there, but mostly it’s because they had a general election last month, and as an amateur psephologist (i.e. a big election nerd) I’m always interested in stuff like that.  One of the key stories of the poll was whether the opposition would be able to make a breakthrough.  And they did!  The centre-left Workers’ Party, led by Pritam Singh, managed to capture a whole 10 seats in the 93-member Parliament of Singapore.  This represents the highest number of seats won by any opposition party since the country’s expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in 1965.  See, progress!

So what’s going on here?  You might look at the above paragraph and call Singapore a dictatorship, but the reality is more complex and a lot more interesting than that.  The centre-right People’s Action Party (PAP) has remained virtually unchallenged since 1959 not just because of its record in government (which can be characterised as increasingly mixed in recent years), but by way of a plethora of political, juridical, financial and discursive means that serve to entrench its power and stack the deck against opposition candidates and parties.

To begin with, the electoral system is an unusual one.  The island is divided into Single Member Constituences (SMCs) – which will be familiar to my British readers – and Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) where each party runs a “team” of 4 or 5 candidates (depending on the area), and whichever party receives the most votes has all their candidates elected.  It doesn’t matter how tight the margin of victory is; if you receive 49.9% of the vote and the other lot get 50.1%, then I’m afraid all of their guys are going to parliament, and all of yours are going back to their day jobs.  As you can imagine, this has tended to inflate the PAP’s parliamentary majority out of all proportion to its actual vote share (though I am duty-bound to point out that there are examples of a similar thing happening in a regular all-SMC system, as in the 2015 United Kingdom general election, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) earned 50% of the vote in Scotland and won 56 out of 59 seats).  Knowing that if multiple teams ran against the PAP in these constituencies the government would sweep the board every single time, the Singaporean opposition parties observe an agreement whereby only one puts itself forward in each GRC, thus creating the best chance of defeating the PAP slate.  Even then, the PAP has other weapons at its disposal.

By law, election campaigns in Singapore run for a maximum of nine days, which gives opposition parties very little time to build momentum and to get their messages out their to a public which usually has very little opportunity to hear what they have to say (imagine the massacre the Labour Party, trailing badly in the polls when campaigning for the 2017 UK general election began, would have faced if they’d had so narrow a window to convince the public that their policies were sensible and desirable).  As in the UK, candidates must pay a deposit to run for parliament, and will not have it returned if they fail to gain more than 5% of the vote in their constituency.  However, while in Britain you must fork out £500 for the privilege of seeking office, in Singapore the deposit is a fat S$13,500 (around £7,500).  One can’t help but feel that the intent is to discourage too much participation in democracy.  And if the PAP can’t hold the prospect of a crippling financial hit over would-be parliamentarians and their parties, they can empty their bank account once they’re elected.

Singapore has some pretty restrictive laws governing free speech (and governing everything, to be honest), and while officially the country’s MPs enjoy immunity from being prosecuted for anything they say in parliament – which in the UK memorably led to MP John Hemming breaking the terms of a court super-injunction to reveal that Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs had been cheating on his wife – the Parliament of Singapore itself has the power to judge whether its members have "abused this privilege".  This means, in effect, that the PAP can open the door for its opponents to be sued for defamation based on their political discourse.  This is what happened to J.B. Jeyaretnam, the Parliament of Singapore’s only opposition MP for a spell in the 1980s, who was a frequent target of civil defamation suits for statements made both outside and inside parliament – which Amnesty International branded “unreasonable restrictions on the right of Singaporeans to peacefully express their opinions and to participate freely in public life” in a 2000 statement – and eventually forced into bankruptcy.  As former Workers’ Party leader Low Thia Khiang colourfully put it, the PAP’s strategy can be summed up as “sue until your pants drop”.  Such strictures on opposition politicians’ speech remain common; in the most recent election Workers’ Party candidate Raeesah Khan was forced to apologise after two police reports were filed against her following the discovery of Facebook posts in which she alleged that police were biased against certain ethnic groups (her team was still elected in the Aljunied GRC).

In summation, the PAP enjoys a pre-eminent position in Singaporean politics not just because of its record in power and the benefits of incumbency as the only government any Singaporean under the age of 60 has known, but through a concatenation of factors present within the political sphere, the law and civil society, which serve to perpetuate its dominance and disadvantage opposition parties.  And yet Singapore is far from meeting the definition of an authoritarian regime.  It is not a free and fair democracy, but it is a democracy nonetheless.  The PAP does not rig elections as dictatorships do.  It has no need to.  So how to categorise such a system?

While doing a bit of reading following the election in Singapore last month, I chanced upon the term “dominant-party system”, which seems to describe the nation perfectly.  As distinct from a one-party state, a dominant-party system is one in which opposition parties are permitted to exist but one dominant party (hence the name) continually wins elections, and there seems little to no prospect of this changing in the future.  Working definitions of the dominant-party system vary, but tend to emphasise that a dominant party is: “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time” (Gary W. Cox); “[a] party which enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system” (Hans Daalder); “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it presides is fundamentally changed” (Brendan O’Leary), and “that which public opinion believes to be dominant” (Maurice Duverger).

The PAP – which evidently fulfils all of these criteria – appears in a list of dominant parties in the introduction to the Wikipedia article on the dominant-party system, along with United Russia, ZANU-PF, the African National Congress, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Awami League in Bangladesh, and Turkey’s Justice and Development Party.  Yet there is one political organisation notably absent from the article’s rather extensive list of dominant parties, and that is the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  Just as Singapore is not a one-party state but – in terms of who has a chance of governing – might as well be, I would like to argue that you can say the same for the United Kingdom at the present time; the deck is greatly stacked against the left just as surely as it is for the Workers’ Party in Singapore, and the sooner we recognise that fact the better.  To misquote Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, you best start believing in dominant-party systems; you're in one.

Let me be clear; I’m not arguing that our democracy is as (un)free as Singapore’s, nor that I would prefer to live under the PAP-dominated system.  What I am saying is that when I saw that the Conservative Party was mentioned nowhere in that Wikipedia article, I was genuinely shocked; particularly as one of the parties mentioned, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been out of power more recently than the Tories have (2012 as opposed to 2010).  Going through the above definitions of a dominant-party system one by one, we can see how the Conservatives, where the UK is concerned, occupy much the same dominant position as the PAP.

Firstly, let us consider Cox’s definition of a dominant party as “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time”.  Cox suggests that this “long period of time” should be “three to five decades”, but as Patrick Dunleavy argues, “[e]mpiricist definitions of ‘dominant party systems’ incorporating ‘longitudinal’ time requirements risk tautology and create unacceptable lags in recognizing dominance.”  Instead, he advocates for “an analytic definition that can identify parties as dominant independently from their tenure of office”.  This not only cautions against defining dominance purely through tenure – it would be ludicrous to say that the Conservative Party in 1996, approaching two decades in office, was a dominant party when it was so clearly set to be annihilated at the next election – but allows us to consider kinds of dominant-party system other than ones where a party has remained in government for upwards of 30 years uninterrupted.

Dominant parties can suffer reversals, spend a brief amount time out of office and come back just as strong as before at the next election as voters, disillusioned with the former opposition’s time in government, return to what they’re used to (the LDP fell from 296 seats out of 480 in the Japanese House of Representatives in 2005 to 119 seats four years later, only to see 294 candidates elected in 2012).  Additionally, while one dominant party can replace another over a long period of time – in 1984 the Indian National Congress won 414 out of the 541 seats in the Lok Sabha, but now has just 52 MPs while the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has 303 – parties can rise from the margins to become dominant over a very short period of time.  As mentioned above, the SNP won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the United Kingdom House of Commons in 2015, yet at the previous election had just 6 MPs (the stark and very unexpected difference can in large part be attributed to nationalist anger following the No vote in 2014’s Scottish independence referendum – and the UK government’s high-handed manner towards Scotland in the year hence – coalescing support around the SNP, as well as its anti-austerity message).  With that in mind, it certainly isn’t inconsistent to term 2020’s Conservative Party the dominant party in a dominant-party system, even though it has only governed with an absolute majority for 3 out of the past 23 years.  After all, the conditions for the Tories to become truly dominant electorally to the same extent as the PAP, while they have only recently borne fruit, have been taking shape for a very long time.

Which brings us to Daalder’s statement that a dominant party is one which “enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system”; not only do they dominate the elections, they dominate the system under which they are conducted and the discursive sphere through which the public comes to understand politics and appraise the fitness for office of political parties.  Nowhere is this more apparent in the UK than in print media.  The vast majority of daily newspapers essentially function as propaganda on behalf of the governing Conservative Party, with only the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, milquetoast liberalism of the Guardian and centrist clickbait of the Independent bucking the norm.  The BBC, meanwhile, seems to have been utterly cowed by a combination of now having a significant presence of government appointees on its board (an innovation of former Tory PM David Cameron) and the ever-present threat of licence fee removal and subsequent privatisation.  As such, the officially neutral state broadcaster has increasingly proven itself unwilling to interrogate government narratives or to highlight opposition ones, with the result that reporters and editors have regurgitated Tory lies without bothering to check their veracity and, in a bizarre recent nadir, went so far as to depict Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak as Superman.

This Tory-dominated media class, as has been noted by many on the left, seems less interested in holding the government to account than holding the public to account for criticising the government (or agitating for progressive politics in general).  As such, you can sit there in the Question Time audience, pink-faced and frothing with rage, demanding that the leader of the opposition commits to vaporising thousands of innocent Iranian civilians with nuclear weapons if the need arises, and the worst that will happen is that Twitter wags will make memes of you and call you a “gammon” (after which right-wing talking heads will defend you on the grounds that calling you a gammon is an example of classism and racism, two subjects which they have never previously pretended to give a flying fuck about).  However, if you dare to ask the Conservative panellist a difficult question on the same programme then the ghouls at right-wing blog Guido Fawkes – run by Paul Staines, a self-professed Pinochet admirer who proposed an alliance with the far-right British National Party while a Tory student leader – will trawl through your entire social media history and get you suspended from your job for a very obviously sarcastic tweet saying that “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism […] is the most toxic part of his legacy” (a sentiment with which I’d have assumed the aptly-named Mr Staines would agree).  And woe betide you if, as the worried father of a sick child on an NHS ward, you believe that you have the right to give the Conservative Prime Minister a piece of your mind regarding hospital underfunding while at the same time being a member of the Labour Party; contrarians with massive foreheads will call your emotional intervention “a political act” and “a campaigning stunt”, and the Political Editor of the BBC will doxx you to her 1,200,000 followers.

And while the speech of left-wing activists in the UK is much less free than their right-wing counterparts, that goes for opposition politicians too.  I remember shaking my head at the Raeesah Khan story I mentioned above; why should someone have to apologise, I thought, much less face legal ramifications, for alleging that the police discriminate on the grounds of race?  How unfree Singapore is.  But now I see the monstering – both online and in newsprint – that the Black Labour MP Dawn Butler has received this month for having the temerity to suggest that the Metropolitan Police might not be completely above reproach in this regard, and I wonder how different the two situations really are.  In both cases, female MPs of ethnic minority backgrounds have been punished for speaking up about racial injustice.  This comes off the back of Butler having been forced to close her constituency office after racist threats and violence against premises and staffers: a blatant suppression of political activity about which the self-styled free speech warriors – your Brendan O’Neills and Toby Youngs – have stayed curiously silent, as have the Tory press in general.  She should have gone full transphobe on Twitter, like J.K. Rowling did.  Maybe she could have got an open letter defending her right to free speech too.

This is the reason a large group of Twitter leftists react to any opinion poll showing Labour behind the Tories by posting something along the lines of “Any competent leader would be 20 points ahead of the worst government in history.  Starmer must resign”: to mock all those people who were saying this in complete earnest while Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party.  (Don’t believe me?  Here’s a certain Mr T. Blair.)  It was an absolutely ludicrous argument, as has been borne out by Labour having never been even a single point ahead in the opinion polls since Keir Starmer – a man who presumably meets the definition of a “competent leader” by the standards of the Corbynsceptics – took over.  Calling the Conservatives “the worst government in history” (based on their handling of Brexit, Universal Credit or whatever else) was one thing, but stating that Labour should therefore be trouncing them in the polls fundamentally failed to reckon with the huge advantages in public perception the media’s extremely right-wing bias allows the Tories to enjoy, especially when set against Labour and Corbyn, who the press never missed an opportunity to call a Marxist, terrorist supporter, anti-Semite and much more besides.  Such is the nature of the dominant-party system.  Ask yourself: would you look at a foreign country where the national newspapers are almost all controlled by owners loyal to the governing party and who toe the party line almost to the letter, and conclude – even if you do not believe the government of that country to be doing “a good job” of governing – that the opposition have failed if they are not 20 points ahead in the polls?  It’s like blaming Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov for Putin still being in charge of Russia.

That’s why I have only ever said “Starmer should be 20 points ahead” in jest.  I may think Sir Keir is doing a crap job so far (and I do think it), but because I understand that the UK is a dominant-party system I would never state, as the intellectually dishonest Corbynsceptics did, that Labour would be topping the polls if only they had a better leader.  When I canvassed for Labour last year in Pudsey, a marginal Leave-voting seat eventually won by the Tories with an increased majority, I was essentially having to go door to door convincing people that everything they had read about the party and Jeremy Corbyn for the last 4 years in the newspapers and on Facebook was wrong.  You can appreciate that it was a tough ask, made even harder by Labour shooting itself in the foot by including in its manifesto the promise of a second EU referendum that not a single person I talked to – even those who had voted Remain – wanted.  While walking the streets of Pudsey I foolishly allowed myself to be heartened by the fact that I barely saw any Conservative posters in people’s windows, whichever part of town I was trawling.  It was just as the nice man at my Momentum meeting had told me; the Tories’ ground game was pathetic compared with ours.  But the simple truth I realised when the results came in on 12 December is that the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could win a general election without canvassing a single voter, or even campaigning at all.  Why bother, when you have newspaper editors, opinion columnists, radio shock jocks and reactionary Twitter blue-ticks doing the hard work of getting your message across and delegitimising the opposition, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?  I hate to break it to the Starmtroopers, but it isn’t going to get easier now you have a sensible lawyer in a suit to sell people, instead of a jam-making peace campaigner.

Ah, I’m sure you’re going to say, but weren’t Labour in an even more dominant position in 1997 than the Tories are now?  Were they not a dominant party?  To which my answer is “yes, on the face of it”.  Yet there’s a huge “but”.  It’s true that Labour’s gigantic 179-seat majority in 1997 (with a lead of quite a bit less than 20 points, incidentally) was far higher than the 80-seat majority the Conservatives won last year.  But to understand how dominance arises and is maintained, you have to look at what political parties do when they’re in advantageous positions.  Apparent dominance can be built on a foundation of sand.  To bring things back to wrestling, there used to be a company called World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that not only challenged the WWF’s status as the pre-eminent grappling purveyor in America, but actually supplanted it, with its weekly Monday night broadcasts beating WWF in the ratings 83 weeks in a row at one point.  In 1997 some estimates put the promotion’s value at as much as $500m.  Four years later WCW was dead, with WWF purchasing the trademark and tape library of their hated rival for a mere $4.2m.  The company had made the mistake of believing that the good times would never end, signing its ageing top stars to hugely lucrative contracts which also gave them creative control over how their characters were presented and effective vetoes over storylines that made them look weak, with the result that younger performers were never elevated to the point that they could be long-term replacements for the likes of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage in the main event slot.  WCW also got into hugely wasteful habits financially, such as regularly flying all 160 contracted performers to TV tapings because the shows were often written at the last minute and the creative team didn’t know which wrestlers they’d need on hand, and paying soul legend James Brown $25,000 for an appearance that they failed to promote to prospective pay-per-view buyers in advance; the sort of thing you can get away with when business is booming, but not so much when it’s in terminal decline.  In short, WCW had mistaken a period of sustained supremacy over the WWF for entrenched dominance as a market leader.

Many political analysts made the same error when appraising New Labour’s position in the late 90s and 2000s, as – fatally – did many within New Labour itself.  I’m sure many people thought the Tories were completely dead and buried, especially in 2001 when they gained a princely 1 seat in a general election notable solely for Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott decking a farmer who threw an egg at him.  But Tony Blair’s main problem – well, besides waging a war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence that led to the deaths of over 100,000 civilians – was that he never attempted to build a party that, as O’Leary puts it, was “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it preside[d] [was] fundamentally changed”.  For all Margaret Thatcher’s faults – and there were many – she presided over a government that fundamentally reshaped the social fabric of the United Kingdom: crushing trades unions, flogging council housing to private buyers and letting the tendrils of the free market inveigle their way into damn near every aspect of the nation’s economy.  Conversely, when New Labour came to power with a parliamentary majority that meant they could have passed virtually any legislation they wanted, they forfended to renationalise the industries Thatcher sold off – having loudly dropped the so-called Clause Four from the party’s constitution, which had promised to do so – and made no attempt to repeal the anti-union laws introduced by the Thatcher government.  This is why the furore from old New Labour hands when newly-elected MP Zarah Sultana used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to demand an end to “40 years of Thatcherism” seemed so utterly confected; after all, Blair himself has stated, “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them” (I’ve already quoted the old Hague-dodger’s own words back at him once in this article, so why not do it again).  Indeed, Thatcher herself remarked in 2002, with great perceptiveness, that she considered Tony Blair and New Labour to be her greatest political achievement.  Such was the ideological dominance of the Tories of 1979-1990 that vast swathes of its dogma were accepted not just by the next Conservative administration but by the next Labour one too.

As such, New Labour’s claim to be a dominant party is deeply questionable, especially when we consider the nature of its decline and eventual ouster.  It enjoyed “a preponderant influence”, to use Daalder’s phrasing, amongst the media, orchestrated skilfully by Press Secretary and later Director of Communications Alastair Campbell, but the favour of traditionally Tory-supporting publications was only granted temporarily (and very much contingent on Blair’s aforementioned unwillingness to depart too far from Thatcherism).  As soon as New Labour outlived its usefulness to the press barons, newspapers reverted to supporting the Conservatives (see the Sun’s memorable “Labour’s Lost It” front page).  All that buttering up of the right-wing press did nothing to create lasting dominance.  And, like World Championship Wrestling, the party sowed the seeds of its own demise.  As much as Blairites like to blame Corbyn’s far-left agenda for the loss of a swathe of Leave-voting seats in northern England (the so-called “red wall”), and as much as Corbynistas are more likely to lay the blame at the feet of the continuity Remainers – including Keir Starmer – who pushed so forcefully for the suicidal second referendum policy, the reality is that the rot had set in in such regions long before these men rose to prominence in Labour.  To take one example, Bishop Auckland, won by the Tories for the first time in 2019, had a Labour majority of 21,064 in 1997, but by 2010 this had fallen to 5,218.  New Labour created precious little in the way of meaningful work in deprived northern areas to replace the mining industries decimated by the Thatcher government, relying instead on casual call centre jobs and crumbs from the table of the booming financial services industry in London, and a string of Labour councils, scarred by memories of internal battles against the Trotskyist-led Liverpool administration that resisted Tory cuts in the 1980s, pushed through stringent austerity measures following the 2008 financial crash.  Similarly, the national party meekly accepted the Conservatives’ successful attempt – abetted by the same newspapers that had been trumpeting Tony Blair’s virtues not so long ago – to paint the UK’s recession as a result of government overspending rather than a crisis of global capitalism.  New Labour’s biggest achievements – the minimum wage aside, which can be said to have become a truly dominant ideology – were consequently swept away by a Conservative Party that had never abandoned the Thatcherite ideal of small government.  What kind of dominance is it that is so easily reversed?

So now we come, finally, to our last criterium by which a dominant party is defined: a party which is simply, in Duverger’s words, “that which public opinion believes to be dominant”.  I think the preceding few thousand words have made clear the extent to which small-c and big-C conservative ideology completely suffuses the UK’s politics right now, and I would put it to you that only absolute wingnuts think anything different.  I mean, imagine how right-wing you would have to be to look at an 80-seat Tory majority, a populace of which almost 50% willingly admit to having little to no sympathy for destitute refugees crossing the English Channel, a media class which seems to regard even the most minor expressions of “wokeness” as akin to a new Spanish Inquisition, a public sphere in which a prominent newspaper columnist and wife of a current cabinet minister feels empowered to tweet a photo of their shared bookcase including a history book by convicted Holocaust denier David Irving and a now-debunked pseudo-scientific tome which purports to “prove” that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, and come to the conclusion that the left controls all levers of power throughout the country and its institutions.  (As it turns out, exactly as right-wing as Peter Hitchens.)  And if you still aren’t convinced, take a look at the opinion polls that have been released during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the Conservative government caused the preventable deaths of tens of thousands people who would still be alive if they’d locked down one week earlier, and seemed at once point to be more than ready to let the disease spread through the population unchecked, letting 250,000 people die to protect the economy.  Is Labour in the lead?  By 20 points?  By 1 point?  No, it isn’t.  The Tories are more popular, and it’s not even close.

It’s staggering how little negative impact the government’s (mis)management of the pandemic has had on its ratings.  But this is what happens in a dominant-party system.  A system where the government enjoys a “preponderant influence” on a media that seems more interested in slavishly defending the ruling party than scrutinising it; look at Evening Standard columnist and Times Radio presenter Ayesha Hazarika’s now-infamous “hipster analysis” tweet – somehow still not deleted – in which she decried the public’s insistence on wanting to know the rationale for not locking down (concerns which I would say were extremely well-founded, in the light of all the deaths and what have you).  As for “ideological influence”, you only have to look at the sheer spinelessness of Keir Starmer in opposing the government to see that, just as Blairism worked within Thatcherism’s new status quo rather than dismantling it, Labour seems to have decided on a policy of “constructive opposition” that looks more like critical support, and not just where COVID-19 is concerned.  From taking to the pages of the right-wing Mail on Sunday to demand that the Conservatives enact a policy they have already declared they are in favour of, to taking the knee in symbolic support of the Black Lives Matter movement before announcing his disagreement with all of its political goals, to standing by while his party takes a step back from advocating trans rights (an issue Corbyn’s Labour wasn’t even particularly good on to begin with), it seems there are no lengths to which the Labour leader will not go in order to signal his party’s acceptance of the paradigm the now-dominant Tories have created.  I hope it works out for you, mate.  Good luck winning a majority once the press turns on you, the leftists you’ve alienated go back to voting for the Greens or the TUSC or no-one at all, the Conservative voters you’re trying to woo decide they’d rather have the real McCoy than a watered-down version of Boris Johnson’s programme, the Leavers in the red wall remember that you were the guy who tried to take Brexit away from them, and your chances of winning back Scotland further recede into the ether.  And don’t assume the canvassers with whom I froze my arse off pounding the doorsteps last year are going to want to repeat their efforts on your behalf.  Not that it'll make any difference if they do.

I’ll say this for conservatives; they know how to build dominant parties.  Whether it’s the Republicans in the USA trying brazenly to gerrymander their way to endless rule, the Conservatives making sure that austerity measures fall most severely upon the shoulders of deprived areas with Labour councils (who can then take the blame on election day), or the PAP’s wielding of every weapon at its disposal to prevent Singapore’s opposition parties from gaining momentum, right-wingers understand at a fundamental level that governments have the power to dictate how the political game is played in the future.  It’s something that liberals, with their naïve faith in due process and their belief that conservatives and the media moguls who cheerlead for them can be mollified on a long-term basis, are yet to grasp.  The consequences, within my country’s context, are plain to see.  Despite what I stated in this article’s provocative and ultimately inaccurate title, the United Kingdom is not a one-party state, but it might as well be.  I hope to see Labour in power again: even Starmer’s Labour, which, notwithstanding all my critiques, would be an improvement on the current mob.  But from where I’m standing right now, there’s just as little chance of another Labour government in my lifetime as there is of dear Mr Pritam Singh becoming Prime Minister of Singapore.

So what are we going to do about this?  How are we going to advance leftist ideals if the Labour Party isn’t getting a sniff of power ever again?  How are we going to fight the Tories?  Well, you’re a smart person.  You’ll figure it out.

Monday, 25 May 2020

Dominic Cummings is an Asshole, Don’t Be an Asshole Like Dominic Cummings: A Philosophical Essay

It has long been my contention that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a nation possessed of a significant number of little Hitlers for whom the only thing they love more than imposing rules on people is breaking rules they think shouldn’t apply to them.  Now this may seem axiomatic to a lot of you, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about increasingly frequently since the 2019 general election, and the current COVID-19 crisis has only exacerbated this feeling.  While most people have obeyed lockdown rules for the greater good of public health, others have, to be blunt, taken the piss (with the Conservative government’s vague and ever-shifting advice providing a handy veil of plausible deniability in the case of my compatriots who seem to believe that possibly transmitting the virus to other human beings and killing them is an acceptable risk to take in the name of enjoying a day out at the beach).  And of those who have accepted the reality and necessity of being locked down, there would seem to be a direct correlation between their levels of resentment and time spent grassing their neighbours up on social media for daring to be outside, with no thought given to whether they might simply be taking their legally-mandated daily walk around the block, rather than being on their way to stand outside a garden centre coughing on the customers.  As an asthmatic with an immunosuppressed partner, I realise the importance of enforcing social distancing to stop the spread of COVID-19 more than most, but there are clearly a number of Brits out there who are clearly relishing the chance to act as self-appointed lockdown police.  Not for nothing did the comedian Stewart Lee describe Twitter as “a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers”.

It’s this resentment that I want to talk about in light of recent revelations concerning Dominic Cummings (special advisor to Prime Minister and thinking person’s moron Boris Johnson), his apparent two trips up to County Durham last month in clear violation of lockdown laws, and the extent to which this makes him an asshole.  Now, to be clear, I’m not using the word “asshole” as a subjective pejorative term based on the man’s hard-right politics.  Sure, he ran an abusive anonymous Twitter account with the aim of venomously smearing opponents of then-Education Secretary Michael “Tesco Value Slappy the Dummy” Gove, he helmed a Vote Leave campaign which weaponised and exacerbated rank xenophobia, and he seems to have a worrying interest in eugenics, but while I might (and do) call him an asshole for this, if you were a committed Tory you might say that these were not the actions of an asshole but of a patriot who uses robust methods to gain desirous outcomes for his country.  (You’d also be cordially invited to fuck off and stop reading this blog forever, but that’s beside the point.)  Rather, when I call Dominic Cummings an asshole I am doing so specifically in relation to his breaking lockdown, using the word as the moral philosopher Aaron James does in his brief, amusing 2012 treatise Assholes: A Theory.

The bulk of James’ book is concerned with attempting to construct a working definition of the asshole qua asshole.  This does not encompass genocidal monsters; as James explains, “There are not enough harsh names for these figures, and it is fine to add ‘asshole’ to the list.  But it would be deeply offensive to only call Hitler or Stalin an asshole; there are much more important ways to describe them morally.”  Rather, James concerns himself with “the mere asshole”, the kind of low-level irritant, jerk or boor you come across every day (at least when you’re not staying home to protect frontline health services).  He defines this kind of person as one who:

1) “allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically”;
2) “does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement” and
3) “is immunised by his sense of entitlement against the complains of other people”.

They are the driver who cuts you off on the motorway, or the shopper who doesn’t put the trolley back where they found it when leaving the supermarket.  In short, they believe themselves exempt from the rules that others are compelled to abide by; not just in terms of obeying the law, but fulfilling unwritten moral contracts governed by innate or socially constructed sense of “the right thing to do”.

It goes without saying that the asshole, as James has it, would not believe that it behoves them to observe lockdown regulations, and would be far too selfish to recognise as legitimate the argument that they should limit their own activities to protect others.  By this definition, Dominic Cummings, despite his argument that he drove 260 miles from London to County Durham to arrange childcare for his four-year-old son when he and his wife came down with COVID-19 symptoms, can be termed an asshole, because he put others at risk of infection.  He did so not only by almost certainly coming into contact with non-COVID-positive human beings in the course of his two journeys north, but by markedly undermining public confidence in the lockdown.  This undermining is especially risky for public health because of the presence in British society of a type of asshole that James’ book doesn’t cover: the person - usually white, middle-class and comfortably off - who believes they have a right to bend or break the rules not simply because they innately believe themselves entitled to “special advantages”, but because they feel, paradoxically, that they have earned this right because they are the sort of person who always follows the rules.

To elaborate on how people come to believe this, another philosophical detour seems in order, one that seems especially relevant considering we’re discussing a matter of state intervention in public health.  The philosopher Michel Foucault conceived “biopolitics” as the set of technologies - including statistical analysis, public health and education - by which governments seek to create a well-behaved and pliant population (which Foucault called a “superrace”) in order to engender efficient economic production and the orderly running of society.  Those who are perceived to resist this ordering, on account of actions, cultures and even genes which are deemed deviant, are considered a “subrace” from which governments determine the superrace needs to be protected.  For Foucault, race and racialisation are less about skin colour than a constantly shifting conjunction of infinitely variable biological and behavioural signifiers.

Other thinkers have sought to complicate Foucault’s distinction between superrace and subrace.  Taking a term from Roman law, Giorgio Agamben defines those who resist biopower’s ordering of the community as homo sacer (meaning “bare life”), suspended between bios and zoē: between superrace and subrace.  For Agamben, under regimes of biopower “the realm of bare life - which is originally situated at the margins of the political order - gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction”.  In short, they produce “a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being” that is placed into what Agamben calls a “state of exception [which] is neither external nor internal to the juridical order" of the biopolitical state.  As it proves consequently “impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law, such that what violates a rule and what conforms to it coincide without any remainder”, the people the state constructs as homo sacer remain at its mercy, their legally uncertain status rendering them susceptible to all kinds of abuses.

It’s not so much in vogue as a way of conceiving technologies of political oppression as it used to be, but many thinkers earlier in the 21st century found biopolitics very useful as a way of framing the categories and the logical contortions the architects of the War on Terror produced to justify its excesses (and, indeed, its very existence).  In 2002 Slavoj Žižek wrote of “the ‘unlawful combatant’, who is neither enemy soldier nor common criminal” as a form of bare life, and a year later Agamben himself noted the “immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the ‘military order’ issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorised the ‘indefinite detention’ and trial by ‘military commissions’ (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.”  This is not to say that states which are willing to circumscribe or mystify legal rights within carceral spaces will necessarily limit themselves to just that.  As François Debrix and Alexander Barder argue, “the virtual ‘real possibility’ of the exception (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib) may also seek to draw our attention towards the idea of a supposedly unique, unusual, extreme, or indeed ‘exceptional’ zone as if such a site were not the norm, or as if it were not supposed to be real or actualised anywhere else”.  That is, a state which creates a state of exception somewhere can and will do so everywhere if it considers it necessary.

So what does this have to do with your middle-class curtain-twitching lockdown enforcers, you might ask?  After all, insofar as the British state apparatus constructs homo sacer from the bodies present within the borders it administers – and it definitely does – it does not do so from among the “squeezed middle” or “just about managing”, to use two equally risible phrases coined by our nation’s two main political parties to describe the lower-middle class in the 2010s.  Rather, it does so in spaces like the Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and on the streets so many have been forced to make their home in the age of austerity.  However, never let it be said that the comfortably-off white British people with whom I am concerned lack the imagination to conceive the existence of people simultaneously bound by and detached from the law; more accurately, detached because they are bound.  Only, they do not imagine a homo sacer oppressed by this legal indistinction, but one that enjoys the right to be liberated by it.  And the identity of this pseudo-bare life is themselves.

Ours is a country whose national discourse is suffused simultaneously by a deep sense of superiority and a deep persecution complex, which leads the folks mentioned above to misappraise their standing in society in three main ways.  Firstly, you have those who like to imagine themselves as some kind of oppressed minority, because the PC brigade won’t let you push dog shit through the letterbox of the Asian family down the street anymore and are gifting honest working Britons’ taxes to house definitely-not-imaginary Somali asylum seekers in palatial Kensington estates.  Then there are the “what if I went to private school but had fuck all money throughout?” crew, the people who are convinced that because their lifestyle is typical amongst their social set and because they have little money left over every month because most of their salary is tied up in Porsche car loans/multiple mortgages on their buy-to-let empire/paying for their kids’ tennis lessons in an attempt to buy forgiveness for cheating on their mother with a work colleague, they are therefore nothing more or less than Average Joes.  By way of example, witness this frothing gammon steak confront my local MP on Question Time to declare that he, a man earning more than £80,000 per annum, was not in the top 50% of earners in the country (the UK median salary is just over £30,000).

Then you have the third kind: the assholes.  Specifically, the assholes who believe that their shining virtue in following the rules gives them the right to flout them, and to not be punished for flouting them (and, indeed, to not be considered to have flouted them at all) by dint of their being, at their very core, “the sort of person who always follows the rules”.  Now, we already know that your freedom to disobey laws, rules and conventions is largely dependent upon your class, race, gender and political alignment.  Contrast the wall-to-wall media coverage of mostly white Brits attending “socially distanced” (but clearly not actually socially distanced to anyone with eyes) VE Day street parties with the solemn advice issued to Muslims to observe the holy day of Eid ul-Fitr within the privacy of their own home.  Or consider the recent row wherein Sarah Vine, right-wing newspaper columnist and wife of cabinet minister Michael Gove, in an apparent attempt to rub her privilege in the faces of her “trolls”, tweeted a photo of their shared bookcase which included, amongst its many delights, a discredited tome by a “race scientist” which argued that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites, and a history book by a convicted Holocaust denier.  I know that playing the “can you imagine the media reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had done this thing that a Tory did?” game is incredibly futile, especially now he’s been replaced as leader of the Labour Party by a sentient necktie with a nice line in forensics and shafting the left, but come the fuck on.  Already widely castigated as an anti-Semite by the right-wing press (and much of the liberal media at that), he’d have been raked over the coals.  With regard to Dominic Cummings, the risible clown college known as the Daily Telegraph ran a piece yesterday by anti-immigration flange David Goodhart which argued that “There is a kind of hyper-democratic rancour abroad that refuses to contemplate that our rulers, at least while they are ruling, deserve some special treatment”, which I at least appreciate for saying the quiet part loud.  I could go on.

However, we’re specifically talking about the people who claim the right to defy rules not by dint of race, class, gender or political bent, but by their own lawfulness.  The British like to imagine themselves as people who go about their lives guided not only by the rule of law but by manners that are not codified in any statute but are followed because they are moral goods in and of themselves.  It’s how we get this fetishisation of good-natured queueing as an especially British trait, despite the fact that 1) foreigners seem perfectly able to do this as well even if they’ve never been to Hemel Hempstead, and 2) people in the UK have a capacity to become extraordinarily rude and irritable if the amount of time spent queueing is, say, 10% more than what was expected.  As such, many - especially those comfortably-off middle-class whites unused to being told “no” - feel entitled to a reward for doing things “the right way”.  You see it in the deployment of the phrase “otherwise law-abiding motorists”; as the argument goes, I pay my taxes on time, I’ve never stolen or committed assault, so why shouldn’t I be able to break the speed limit if I want to?  After all, I’m a model citizen, and I always obey the law.

It’s this dynamic which explains the ferocity of the reaction to Dominic Cummings’ breaking of lockdown by newspapers and commentators usually so slavish in their support of the Conservative Party (when the Spectator is calling for you to go, you done fucked up); newspapers and commentators enjoyed by vast swathes of the social group described above.  People who shrugged away or even celebrated existing double standards regarding rule-obeying and rule-breaking are up in arms because the expectation of reward inherent in the construction of the “otherwise law-abiding” pseudo-homo sacer has been violated.  Free speech absolutists in the Tory press who defended Sarah Vine’s right to own books by a Holocaust denier, knowing full well that the same freedom to own whatever books one desires is not necessarily possessed by others without the privilege of being employed by said Tory press - we might call these people “asshole enablers” - have suddenly discovered that “special advantages” are not acceptable when someone in power has wielded a perceived right (the right to defy lockdown for the sake of one’s family) that these enablers believed themselves unable to enjoy.  What an asshole, they think.  Was being an asshole an option all along for me as well?

Let me be clear what I am not arguing.  I am not calling ordinary people assholes for quite rightly wondering why Dominic Cummings is able to drive to County Durham with COVID-19 symptoms while they were forced to watch relatives’ funerals via Zoom.  Rather, it is precisely because they felt the pain of loss and of the unfairness of not being able to be there to hold their loved one’s hand as they slipped away, and then stayed home anyway, that they are not assholes.  There is nothing wrong with being angry that the platitudes of “we’re all in it together” issued by the Conservative Party were not true after all (as indeed, they were not true when David Cameron’s government was slashing public services to the bone in the name of “balancing the books”).  However, it is important that we do not react to the asshole behaviour of Dominic Cummings by becoming assholes ourselves.  “I guess I’ll just do whatever I want if this guy can” is not a helpful response to this outrageous behaviour, nor is it going to help us save lives.  There’s already enough people out there potentially spreading disease by refusing to socially distance, sometimes while complaining about people refusing to socially distance (“otherwise law-abiding plaguespreaders”).  And under our constantly changing “new normal” there’s already enough leeway for people to place themselves into a zone of “legal indistinction” (as Agamben might have it) in the name of their own freedom or convenience if they so desire.  Be “the sort of person who follows the rules” not because you expect it to earn you the right to disregard them when you so desire, or even because you wish yourself to be imbued with some nebulous moral virtue, but for the simple reward of saving another human being’s life.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that we need to be better than Dominic Cummings.  Based on his actions over the last few days, and the last few years, it isn’t hard.