Hitler: Very keen on referendums and stuff like that.
"The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off."
Evelyn Waugh - Men at Arms
Like a lot of English people in the grip of Posh People’s Disease at the time, Evelyn Waugh had a few wobbles in the 1930s.
He and his chinless associates were tempted by Franco in Spanish Civil War, and briefly saw something benign and civilised in Mussolini’s apparent ultra-Conservatism.
But Hitler, Waugh finally concluded, was plainly both mad and bad – and the degree to which the wider European far-right was prepared to collude spoke volumes. Waugh repented some of his earlier folly.
Now I know that any comparison between Hitler and David Cameron would rightly be written off as hysterical. But like the penitent Conservative Waugh, many of the lefties amongst us need to ask themselves a few questions about their complicity in overlooking some spectacularly reactionary stuff.
I’d go further than that: This week, the Conservatives promoted perhaps the most reactionary and dangerous set of proposals that any party with a realistic prospect of victory has ever announced in this country.
In their local government proposals, they have adopted the very worst excesses of populism. And by populist, I don’t mean any half-arsed Phillip Gould-type attempt-to-push-the-party-where-focus-groups-tell-them sort of populism.
No. The Tories are looking to universalise the kind of populism that the Germans made illegal after the war because they knew where it took them in the 1930s.
This week, the Tories were shown in their true light: Hateful, with all disguise cast off.
They are proposing:
- an extension of the concept of ‘elected officials’ - particularly police commissioners
- referendums on council tax rises
- referendums on any issues on which citizens demand them
- directly elected mayors (at the behest of a local referendum, if I understand their position correctly?)
- direct participation in structural change at a local level
In each case, these measures provide a veneer of accountability while removing the deliberative policy making processes. These will be replaced with tools that will only further empower the most active privileged citizens in any community (and, of course, those with access to the media or the resources provided by pressure groups).
In addition, the general attack on regional government can only be seen as a means by which central government can obtain further control over local government. I hope it’s not a cheap and partisan point to make when I say that the Conservative government of the 1980s was responsible for an unparalleled degree of political centralisation?
For a party that has done so much to ‘detoxify it’s brand’ on many of the issues that it was responsible for during these years, you would think that the complacency on the question of centralisation may be one that could come back and bite them?
Apparently not.
The plans to sideline local councillors – and this is what these proposals add up to – are indicative of a poisonous disregard for everything that is good about democracy.
That these measures will result in worse policymaking goes without saying. But the most interesting point – for me – has been the silence with which our liberties-obsessed commentariat have greeted this. Some years ago, Matthew Parris illustrated just how poisonously illiberal unmediated public opinion can be.
For those of us who believe that collective action can bear valuable fruits of some kind, the creeping populism of the referendum and the directly-elected officials (the promotion of which Labour have not been entirely innocent) presents a huge danger.
Imagine the nightmare of a thoughtful train of policymaking on a huge issue like .... say .... climate change .... being entirely derailed because a demagogic right-wing newspaper decided to poke its readers into an oppositional frenzy.
I know, I know. That could never happen here.
Paraphrasing Tim Garton-Ash a while ago, when politicians were able to win elections and start the process of government, they often exhibited what Machiavelli called virtù - the capacity for collective action and historical vitality.
Referendums remove that capacity at a stroke. If you are looking for an explanation for illiberalism – for the promotion of a bureaucratic / policing agenda – look no further than a Parliament along with local and regional assemblies that have had the virtù sucked out of them by the constant imperative to consult with stakeholders, negotiate with veto-wielding vested interests, disruptive agenda-led newspapers, opinion-polls, well-heeled pressure groups, bureaucrats and managerialists.
It is these players that now hold a collective whip-hand over an almost friendless political class. Only the distributed moral wisdom of Parliament can protect civil liberties and good government. Yet the self-styled crusaders that seek to defend our liberties have nothing to say on the subject.
About the author: Paul is a London-based blogger with a mixed track-record over at Never Trust a Hippy and a few other places. He usually writes about representative democracy and decentralisation. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paul0evans if you usually do that kind of thing. Read more from this author