It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn’s was one of them

Seumas Milne in The Guardian


If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.

The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.

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 But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.

But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.

The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.

At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.

But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.

It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.

But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.

The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.

That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.

That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.