Baby, it’s cold pretty much everywhere
DAVID MCGROGAN
The justice befitting the subjects of a tyrant is the least political form of justice, or that form of justice which is most remote from public-spiritedness: the justice to be observed in contractual, private relations.
-Leo Strauss
If you are stuck for ideas once you have completed the obligatory family row, a good topic of conversation to have over the turkey and cranberry sauce while wearing silly paper crowns this Christmas is whether there will actually be a General Election in the UK ever again. Although, thinking about it, this may be a subject better discussed after one has started on one’s second bottle of wine, as an alternative to watching something involving Wallace and Gromit on the telly.
I am mostly joking. I wish I was fully joking. But like a lot of people, I am starting to get a very bad feeling about the way things are going in Britain. A few weeks ago I observed that we are now ruled by a regime which, with Machiavelli, considers political virtue to be synonymous with knowing how to entrench personal rule. Our ruling class does not have a concept of the right order of things, except insofar as it means they are at the top of that order. Politicians may put in place policies and they may appear in the media to say things. But their paramount interest is perpetuating their own power; every other consideration lies below that goal in their hierarchy of priorities. Everything they do serves that ultimate objective. And, in any case, politicians are the least able members of the governing elite: the really capable ones finagle themselves into senior positions in quangos, the Civil Service, the judiciary or the better universities, where they can comfortably exercise power and influence and be paid handsomely for doing so without ever facing the risk of being removed from office.
This was all predicted by Anthony de Jasay, a writer I have recommended before in this context. De Jasay describes politics since the 18th century as passing along a line from the ‘capitalist state’ (where the state errs on the side of doing nothing) to ‘state capitalism’, where the only choices that remain available to the public are consumptive: we are permitted to choose whether we want Bailey’s or brandy after the Christmas pudding; what devices we want to buy little Johnny in order to rot his brain; at which supermarket we want to buy our Christmas turkey, or even, possibly, ham. But there is no choice about who governs or what policies they pursue. There is – although de Jasay did not use this word – a uniparty, and that is that. The regime permits elections to be held, but only insofar as it would look bad not to have them, and only insofar as they do not really change a great deal – the seats just get rearranged but the personnel remain largely the same.
De Jasay foresaw all this (it is obvious to us now, of course) in the early 1980s, and his logic is sophisticated but easily intelligible. The core of his observation is that the state in modernity will always rule over a society containing a heterogeneity of preferences, some of which will necessarily conflict. It must therefore choose which preferences to prioritise. But it cannot do this ‘neutrally’. It cannot simply ‘do what voters want’ because what different groups of voters want may be diametrically opposed, and because in any event resources are not infinite. And nor can it choose preferences on purely utilitarian grounds. Pursuing the policies which would maximise utility is only possible if one has a way to measure utility ex ante. But measuring utility ex ante is impossible without a prior idea about what ‘utility’ means – a subject which will always generate disagreement. Think, for example, about the policy of the sugar tax. A tax on sugary drinks may serve utilitarian goals, if what you mean by ‘utility’ is less obesity or less of a drain being placed on the NHS. But if what you mean by ‘utility’ is freedom, or economic growth, then a tax on sugary drinks will obviously not maximise it.
In seeking to maximise utility, in other words, the state just ends up choosing between values. (In the case of the sugar tax, public health versus economic freedom, say.) And it cannot choose between values without having values of its own. Whoever pulls the levers of the state, that is – Civil Servants, politicians, quangocrats, whatever – has to have preferences, because otherwise how would he or she know which values to prioritise?
Those values, or preferences, can come from anywhere, but De Jasay makes the obvious – though often purposefully ignored and hidden – point that the underlying value which all regimes will always hold dearest is self-perpetuation. It is no good having values which lead to one’s own replacement at the top of the pecking order, because then one will be able to do nothing at all. No doubt politicians, judges, Civil Servants, police officers, academics and the like have their own individual overarching motives and desires. But minimally every single member of the regime will always be animated first by the desire to maintain their current status (and ideally, of course, improve on it).
At the margins, then, de Jasay describes modern government as always moving in the direction of greater and greater control over the means of self-preservation of the existing regime. Modern government does not recognise preservation of a people or a way of life as a value in its own right, and it certainly does not imagine there is such a thing as a divine order or an Aristotelian ‘right’ way of ruling. It only recognises temporal goals, and the purest of those goals – the ur-goal, if you like; the one without which no other goal can be achieved – is perpetuation of government itself in its current form and composition.
A modern regime then will create a great show of being democratic, but its basic drive is towards the abolition of democracy, since the people are always a latent threat to the fundamental goal of self-preservation. The regime does not do this straight out of the gate, of course, because to do so would invite rebellion or at worst revolution. Rather, over time it eliminates democracy through sham and misdirection, allowing people to vote so long as they can only choose between a narrower and narrower range of options. Eventually, de Jasay tells us, the distinction becomes meaningless – a choice between red and blue, like whether you prefer mint and choc chip ice cream or rum and raisin – and the regime carries merrily on whether people vote for this party or that. You as the individual citizen may make choices in respect of what you buy, or watch on TV, or have for breakfast, for the most part, because that is politically irrelevant. But your public, or political, choices are quietly neutered.
It follows that if genuine regime change threatens, however, the regime will quickly enter an emergency mode and become much less benign. And here I find what Sir Keir Starmer said in an interview with The Economist the other week highly instructive, letting slip [emphasis added] as he did that:
If there is a conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom that would be a different proposition.
You could not getter a clearer statement of de Jasay’s argument than that. Starmer, you will have noticed, is intensely relaxed about the good old Tories winning power, at least as he sees it, if it’s your stereotypical ‘good chaps’ style of conservatism they espouse. That would just be more of the same. The regime is not threatened by that prospect, because ‘regime politics’ is off the table if the choice is between Labour and a May- or Cameron-style Conservative Party (or, for that matter, the Greens or Lib Dems). If a ‘right-wing government’ (presumably he was hedging his bets in saying this so as to include Reform or a more radically-minded Tory Party, perhaps in coalition) were to win, however, things would be different. That would pose a challenge to the regime, since it would involve a serious shake-up, and it would therefore be intolerable – it is a possibility that must not be realised.
And, sure enough, everywhere we look, we see efforts being made by the Labour government to prevent a ‘right-wing’ government from forming – right down indeed to cancelling – sorry, ‘delaying’ – elections. Earlier this year the government, sure enough, delayed elections in nine local authority areas for a year on the spurious grounds that there were logistical difficulties concerning proposed reorganisations of local government in some regions. A few weeks ago mayoral elections in four regions were postponed from 2026 until 2028, again on the grounds that there would be organisational problems. And we now learn that no less than 63 local authorities are being given the opportunity by the government to delay elections from May 2026 to 2027 if they ‘require’ it due to, er, organisational issues. This is millions and millions of people being denied a vote.
It is no coincidence at all that these elections more or less all happen to be ones that Reform could have expected to do well in. And it is also no coincidence that May 2026, when local elections are supposed to take place, is widely expected to be a watershed moment of a kind for Keir Starmer’s premiership – not because Labour are likely to do badly (which they will) but because they may find difficulty even fielding candidates in large parts of the country, such is the extent to which Starmer is hated. (The rationale for local Labour party apparatchiks is obvious. As somebody at one time fairly senior within Labour circles put it to me recently, ‘Not being elected is one thing but not being elected and being abused and ostracised for even standing is something else.’)
But it hardly ends there. Everywhere one looks these days one sees ever greater control being exerted over the means through which a regime challenger might upset the existing order. Over here, David Lammy is busily more-or-less abolishing trial by jury, which handily would put indictable speech-crime offences in the hands of solitary judges for the determination of guilt. Over there, the Prime Minister’s team is moving to reduce the number of press briefings (at which journalists can ask whatever questions they like) at 10 Downing Street and replace them with press conferences with curated questions. Meanwhile, a group of Labour MPs are planning to table an amendment to the Elections Bill so as to require prospective MPs to pass a certain safeguarding threshold with an enhanced DBS check in order to stand for election – which, needless to say, does not only reveal one’s criminal record but also whether one has been recorded as having committed a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Ofcom, the regulatory quango with oversight of the internet among other things, is making noises about requiring platforms to police not just illegal but ‘potentially illegal’ speech, which will include (naturally) content concerning illegal immigration. Wes Streeting, permanently on manoeuvres to be the next PM, has recently declared that he would like the UK to rejoin the EU customs union despite Labour having made a manifesto commitment not to do so at the last election. And so on and so forth.
Everywhere, in other words, strenuous efforts are being made, to return to de Jasay’s wonderful phrase, to be as ‘totalitarian as the government can get away with’. Individually, these changes would not sound like much. Cumulatively, they send a message: democracy is best avoided. It is not just a mad panic (though mad panic is certainly party of the equation for some MPs, with Labour now polling at 18.7%). To repeat: Starmer would not be worried if he was merely going to lose the next election to somebody like Theresa May. What he is worried about is regime change, which is what might happen under a ‘right-wing’ government.
And what we, the people, need to worry about is therefore that this is merely the start of Project Stop Fascism. Labour were only elected 18 months ago, and they have already reached a position at which they think it sensible to delay elections, mostly abolish jury trials, and begin edging back towards EU member status. What might they do in a year’s time? Two years’ time? Three?
Delaying the next General Election would require primary legislation, and one reassures oneself by thinking that they surely couldn’t go that far. But I’m by no means the only person who has had the thought crossing his mind, and the fact that senior Labour figures are being forced to dismiss the idea publicly – a dismissal which is about as reassuring as your boss telling you that there are ‘currently no plans for compulsory redundancies’ – itself would have been unthinkable two years ago.
The story of 2026, to make a very easy prediction, will be defined by attempts to delegitimise the Reform party as an electoral force, and – ideally – to further entrench the existing regime by limiting the options available for voters to choose. And in closing it is worth reflecting on the dismal state of affairs in Britain as it descends further and further into what I have previously described as a tyrannical mode of rule.
In his influential book On Tyranny, Leo Strauss described tyranny as in part characterised by a reduction of the field of ‘justice’ to merely commercial or pecuniary considerations. The tyrant is perfectly happy for people to exercise consumptive choice in the market. What he does not like is ‘public-spiritedness’ – all things considered, he would rather ordinary people were apolitical and focused on their quotidian, private concerns. He likes state capitalism, in other words, where political choice is reduced to a mere charade and where his own status goes unthreatened; he detests the idea that genuine change may be up for grabs, because then he may end up being reduced to a private citizen like any other. He therefore does not concern himself with what the people get up to in private – as long as what they do and say is decidedly de-politicised, of course – and indeed he encourages their engagement in entertainments and other distractions. That way, they take their eyes away from matters of public justice, and focus only on the here and now.
I was reflecting on these remarks when, while composing this post, I happened to visit the BBC news website and found, prominently displayed as a significant item of news, a story about…what to watch on TV on Christmas Day. Bake Off, ‘Strictly’, or Amandaland? And I was struck by the shrinking political horizons of the UK public in 2025. We appear to have grown, over the past thirty years, increasingly incapable of acting to actually change the way we are governed; since 1997 there have been no meaningful distinctions between the approaches taken by the various political parties, with the qualified exception of 2019 (when Brexit had simply borked everybody’s minds). And there have likewise been no meaningful distinctions between governments during that period: whichever way we have voted, it has essentially been steadily less competent variants of Tony Blair, all the way down. Yet here we are, at Christmas time, blessed with a million choices between entertainments – one could even watch an hour long video of a man driving at night along the A38 and A44 from Exminster to Worcester after Christmas dinner if one happens not to like ‘Strictly’ – and a thousand foodstuffs on which to gorge ourselves. I do not for one moment mean to suggest that I will not be as overindulgent as the next man on Christmas Day. But Strauss’s words leave us with much to ponder as we look towards the coming year. Will ‘public-spiritedness’ reassert itself despite the best efforts of the governing regime? Or will justice be limited to the sphere of ‘contractual, private relations’ in perpetuity?
This article (A Cheerful Message of Yuletide Tyranny) was created and published by News from Uncibal and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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