Britain is sleepwalking into becoming a soft totalitarian state

Sherelle Jacobs

When it comes to freedom, Britain has reached a tipping point. Our country likes to pride itself on being a champion of liberty – the country that bequeathed private property norms, natural rights philosophy and representative government to the United States, leader of the free world. But after a golden age for liberty that stretches back to the Enlightenment, we are going backwards. Britain’s ranking across all manner of global freedom indexes, from academic liberty to online and media freedom, are in freefall. In a spectacular reversal of history, peacetime freedom is now consistently shrinking rather than expanding. Put bluntly, we are sleepwalking into becoming a “soft authoritarian” outlier in the West.
Some might be tempted to dismiss our draconian response to Covid as a mortifying aberration to never be repeated. In fact, it was merely the tip of the iceberg, the culmination of at least two decades of freedom’s unrelenting decline. The monitoring of lockdown critics – including eminent scientists – by Whitehall disinformation units merely built on a well-ensconced tradition of managerial groupthink and slavish devotion to scientism (rather than science). We would not have been treated to the dystopian spectacle of drones taunting people for walking their dogs had Britain not already established itself as one of the most invasive surveillance states in the democratic West. Local authorities would not have had the audacity to dream up all manner of imbecilic Covid rules had they not spent the past two decades accruing massive new powers of enforcement. One might also speculate about whether the middle classes would have been so prone to conformist compliance had the past 15 years of stagnation not seen the accumulation of virtue usurp the accumulation of capital as the primary marker of bourgeois status. Moreover, upon closer examination, it seems that one of the great lessons of the 21st century is that liberty first rots at the margins of a society, before spreading to its very core. Before we had Covid marshals barking at people, Asbos were used to persecute an under-class for offences as bizarre as loud singing and feeding the birds.
Unfortunately, all the signs are that things are getting worse. The Tories are busily forcing through “the biggest accidental curtailment” of freedom in history, in the form of the Online Safety Bill. The country is carving itself out as a world leader in terrifying surveillance technology. Meanwhile, it is truly shameful to see Poundland “conservatives” behave little better than anti-democratic Remainers, riding roughshod over rule of law. The question is how on Earth did we get to this point? The Northern Ireland Troubles go some way in explaining the rise of a surveillance industrial complex that has steadily grown to take on a life of its own, with state and corporations feeding off each other. One also wonders whether the country is forever waging liberty-destroying wars because of a certain latent martial spirit. Another fatal British quirk is that the 1980s managerial revolution – the single greatest disaster of the post-war period – has proved far more resounding and far-reaching in the UK than anywhere else in Europe. It is hard to overstate how destructive this development has been to freedom of thought; managerialism is the principal vehicle by which cultish false rationalism has come to colonise the mindsets of the British ruling class. As an ideology founded on an elite’s purported possession of objective, mathematically-derived knowledge that is beyond question and applicable to all situations, it has institutionalised groupthink. In the process, it has annihilated Britain’s long-standing traditions of empiricism and nuance.
When it comes to the crushing of dissent and the smoking out of non-conformists across politics, the Civil Service, universities and the workplace, managerialism has arguably proved far more decisive than the rise of vapid wokeism. Critics of the Right argue that since the rise of Brexit, a new deceitful and demagogic populism also threatens freedom. But this is a hopelessly one-sided perspective, given that they are just as much to blame for the imperilling of the country’s liberal democratic structures and norms. After all, it is the attempt of some MPs to thwart Brexit along with widespread denial over festering democratic crises – from the politically unsustainable levels of mass migration to Left-wing bias in neutral institutions – that has ultimately plunged liberal democracy into a legitimacy crisis. Regrettably, amid this swirling chaos a Tory Government has pursued sloppy short-cuts and dangerous quick fixes that shore up risky levels of executive power and undermine our unwritten constitution. The question now is how can we reverse the country’s frightening trajectory? Above all, we need a new vision of freedom that will unite all sides. Given the country’s shift Leftwards – in contrast to the Thatcher era – a liberal economic agenda is unlikely to do the trick. Rather, a new emphasis on freedom of thought and the protection of what Jürgen Habermas has called the “lifeworld” from a totalitarian system might prove more potent.
The colonial origins of the surveillance state and the way state powers are being used to curtail protests could, with a bit of clever persuasion, encourage the Left to join the Right in a popular campaign against technocratic Big Brother. Liberals may also be more receptive to a collective fight for liberty against the scourge of managerialism rather than the woke. Arguably, the West is in sore need of such a new “freedom story”. It may well be the key to ending stagnation, because the stupendous rise of our countries did not historically originate in market freedom per se, but rather a relative respect for free intellectual inquiry and individual flourishing that first began to germinate from the Middle Ages. Yet if Britain does not somehow find the resolve to fight for freedom, further backsliding is inevitable. The country may find itself helping to bring into existence China’s preferred world order of soft totalitarian states. It would be an astonishing fall from grace.
The Telegraph