Tag: democracy

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The UK is becoming a failed state

It’s becoming clearer that the United Kingdom is heading towards failure – if it’s not already there. So it’s time to install institutions that work for most other states with which the UK likes to compare itself, namely, an elected head of state and a written constitution. Were these accompanied by a proportional method of electing the government, that would drag Britain out of its obsession with medieval methods of governance and procedure that are increasingly irrelevant if not damaging in the modern world, into the 21st century.

The question is, will the money allow anything like this to happen? Because it is very much in the interests of the big money in Britain – and especially in England – for things to remain exactly as they are. Let’s keep tax breaks for owners of huge chunks of the British land and forests, let’s ensure that people remain obsessed with minutiae and let’s not talk about the big issues.

Pyramid of power

Which big issues? Governance and citizenship, key questions with which most democratic states have grappled before installing institutions that work, some better, some worse than others, to enact the wishes of citizens. These are not questions that Britons are ever asked to seriously consider, either by the educational system or the media.

For example, despite clear evidence that the British monarchy is an anachronism, parked at the pinnacle of a pyramid of power that starts there and includes all the lords, viscounts, marquises, dukes and princes, and the entitled nabobs in the House of Lords – mostly unelected of course – who make laws on behalf of less worthy folk, support for the institution remains undimmed, supported by the controllers of public debate who own most of the media.

When polled, the British return a healthy majority in favour of a monarchy. Yet the British monarchy spearheads the patrimony and privileges of an aristocracy that owns a third of all the land and 50% of rural land. It is keen to perpetuate a landed elite and the cultural circle associated with that continuation of aristo-oligarchy, as well as a social sphere with the wealth to remain both independent of the state and to lobby for its own self-interests, thus propping up an ancient class system antagonistic to submission to liberal democratic governance.

Were the monarchy to divest itself of its inherited private wealth and economic interests, and to behave more as a figurehead institution wholly funded by the public, it might be perceived as modernised. However, it clearly has zero interest – either financially or intellectually – in pursuing that course.

Banana republic

Rather, we recently learnt that the monarch interferes with the wishes of the democratically elected government when it’s in her interests to do so. The British state, addicted to secrecy, was forced to admit this. And where there is one such admission, there may well be others.

This alone, had it happened in another continent, would be enough for learned observers to sagely aver that an unelected monarch behaving in this way is contrary to the many definitions of democracy to which the self-appointed upholders of political probity propound.

But here in the UK? Well, we’re different, special…

With no written constitution, in which the UK is alone among the states with which it likes to compare itself, there is no legal redress. The monarch can do what she likes. Instead, quiet words in the right ears, in private, will undoubtedly be deemed enough – the unwashed masses may be informed in due time – to put matters right.

So why do people continue to support the monarchy? The first reason one hears is that the monarchy does no harm because it has no real power. We can put that one to bed with the revelations about interference with legislation.

The second one is that the monarchy brings people together. It’s hard to gather evidence about this one way or the other, but evidence as to what divides the nation is freely available, and it’s powerful stuff. Specifically, the arguments over Brexit strongly suggest there is no universal vision for Britain – or rather, England. Rather, it’s crystal clear that half the country has one vision of the country, namely inward-looking and xenophobic, while the other half sees it as international and outward-looking. If the monarchy brings people together, it’s not working.

One also hears that the monarchy attracts tourism money, although the amounts, in normal, non-pandemic times, are paltry compared both to the cost of public services, such as the hard-pressed and politically emasculated NHS, or compared to the tax breaks for, and avoidance and evasion practised by the afore-mentioned rich and powerful.

The other argument is to point to the elected head of another state – Donald Trump is the obvious if only the most recent example – and say that ‘we’ don’t want that to happen, so let’s keep the Queen. This clearly misses the point: Trump has gone, voted out. We can’t vote out the Queen, whatever she or her successor does. They’re there for life, because of who their parents were.

Failed state

Yet none of these arguments gains purchase in the minds of the British. There’s little support for a constitution from the two main parties, nor for proportional representation, and none for a republic. The electorate continues to vote for the Tory party, an organisation whose interests are orthogonal to their own, working instead in the interests of those who fund it: large corporations and rich individuals who were recently calculated to gain a return on their investment of 100:1 in the form of contracts and tax breaks.

Continued support for an unelected monarchy is also hard to disentangle from the notion of English exceptionalism which permeates the body politic and the media. It resonates with the Brexit debate and the tone in which it was conducted, and the clear evidence that only England voted – very narrowly – for leaving the EU, thereby becoming worse off by any measure.

It seems to my mind that current circumstances make it very difficult to turn this tanker around, if not impossible. The UK is run by the unelected who govern in the interests of the rich and powerful, and who promulgate mythology about the state we are in, making it hard to move outside that hegemony. As a consequence, it’s very difficult not to conclude that the UK is heading towards becoming a failed state.

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Lessons from Murdoch’s News Corp

There’s a number of depressing conclusions to be drawn, even at this early stage of affairs from the revelations about News Corp’s activities.

The first is that people — from individuals rightly sickened at the thought of News of the World journalists poring over Milly Dowler’s voicemails to politicians who should have known better — only seem to have voiced concerns when it involved a little girl. ‘It could have been us’, runs the thought.

And yet, the hacking — if it deserves that description as it only seems to have involved dialling into publicly available numbers and trying passwords until they found one that worked — had not only been going on for years but was known about for years. Few seem to have cared much about it when it involved people seen as disposable — actors, sportspeople, Z-list celebrities and the like.

It’s much the same when you discuss the issue of whether the UK should retain the monarchy. The two most common responses I’ve encountered concern the individuals — the Queen’s doing a good job and I wouldn’t want Blair — or the tourist money they supposedly bring in. Whether or not a country that describes itself as a modern democracy can continue to do so while it has an unelected head of state seems to be irrelevant: it’s simply not part of the discussion.

In both cases — Murdoch or royalty — the principal of whether it;s correct per se to hack into phones or to maintain an unelected head of state is not an argument it’s possible to have, or that people raise with themselves. Issues seem only to matter if they has a directly personal relevance. How we are governed seems not to fall into that category.

The second issue is that the ones truly responsible for this dismal state of affairs — the politicians who have been kowtowing to News Corp all these years — seem likely to be the ones who will be let off lightly. Cameron will be dented and might, in the most optimistic of scenarios, resign. But the rest of them will get away with it.

This is a direct consequence of the feeble level of political debate in this country, as I’ve already noted. It seems we get the politicians we deserve. If we continue to buy the News of the World — or Sun on Sunday as it will morph — then nothing will have fundamentally changed.

Yet the third issue is one that can be easily fixed: the low level of priority assigned by mobile operators to security compared to convenience. Voicemails seem to have been ridiculously easy to break into because passwords weren’t changed from their defaults; subscribers are unlikely even to have known their voicemails had a password let alone that they needed to change them because the operators didn’t tell them about it.

Britain prides itself on being a stable democracy with traditions many of which have changed little over the last 500 years. Consequently, people are not encouraged to think about issues of governance or principal involving public life. Maybe it’s time we did.

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Democracy loses to Murdoch – again

Capitalism tends to create monopolies. Over time, we’ve all come to appreciate that monopolies are generally a bad thing (perhaps with the exception of a few areas such as utilities and railways) and should be curbed.

They accumulate too much power in one organisation’s hands, and, because of lack of competition, tend to be able to raise prices to any level they like as well as reducing product choice.

And the media is an industry where that’s particularly egregious because it tends to undermine the democratic process. Here’s a case in point.

According to Ofcom, the UK’s media and telecoms regulator, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV operation BSkyB has now reached a point where the regulator has published “a further consultation as part of its pay TV market investigation” as a result of its “concerns about the restricted distribution of premium sports and movies channels operated by BSkyB”.

Specifically, Ofcom is concerned about the “limited distribution of football and movies”, which has seen national games such as cricket and football disappearing from terrestrial TV, and instead commanding premium prices on top of already-expensive pay TV bundles. The regulator said that it “considers that Sky has market power in the wholesale supply of channels containing this attractive content, and that it is acting on an incentive to limit the distribution of these channels to rival TV platforms”. It won’t let its rivals have access to that content for a reasonable price.

Ofcom issued that statement on 26 June 2009. On 6 July, in a little-reported speech – note that Murdoch-owned newspapers dominate the UK market – the UK’s opposition leader David Cameron, who looks set to become UK Prime Minister in 2010, has promised that Ofcom “as we know it will cease to exist….Its remit will be restricted to its narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy.

“And the policy-making functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.”

Only one organisation will benefit from Cameron’s new policy: BSkyB.

In other words, the opposition leader, who is now being politically backed by Murdoch in his many media outlets, is already paying back the political capital that Murdoch has invested in him. That’s despite the Tories’ much-trumpeted belief in competition – which clearly does not apply when there’s Murdoch brown-nosing to be done.

The result will be even greater concentration of media power in the hands of one organisation, fewer outlets for not just movies and sport but news too, and – doubt it not – further politically motivated attacks on the UK media’s one big success story, the BBC.

And, incidentally, if you doubt that the BBC, despite its faults, is a success story, just ask any informed observer outside the UK if they would like to see a BBC-style setup replicated in their own country: none will demur.

If the product in question were rivets, perhaps this would be of little moment. But the product is information that’s required by the electorate.

I leave the logical conclusion to your conscience.

There’s more on this in the Guardian here.