Is Prime Minister Johnson a Political Cousin of Viktor Orbán – or Worse Still Rodrigo Duterte?

I have never been a fan of Mr Johnson, but not long ago I would have considered this an absurd question. Now, I am not so sure.

 

While most media coverage and much political debate has focused on COVID-19 infection and death rates, vaccination, travel restrictions, proposals for vaccine passports and the like, the government has been introducing a number of measures with little scrutiny, and insufficient challenge, that threaten liberties.

 

Let’s start with the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Our current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, talks of the “threat” posed by refugees crossing the English Channel in unstable boats. She has at times referred to rapists and murderers when talking of refugees. One might think that an unprecedented flood of people seeking shelter in the UK threatens our borders and way of life. In fact, the numbers of people seeking asylum in our country peaked at over 80,000 in 2002. Since 2004, applications have been less than half that number. In the year ending March 2021, 26,903 people sought asylum. Nevertheless, Ms Patel describes our asylum system as “broken”. In fact, the only aspect of the system that is broken is the inefficient and inhumane way in which the Home Office processes applications. The bogus claims of Ms Patel and Mr Johnson are well summarized by a leaflet produced by the Refugee Council.

 

 

Still, one might argue that an inhumane and dishonest narrative about refugees does not in itself make Mr Johnson an authoritarian. However, let’s consider Ms Patel’s new Police and Crime bill. This gives the police the power to prohibit public protest if the police consider it too noisy, or judge that it is causing a nuisance. I imagine that many protests are noisy, and most will cause a nuisance to somebody. Moreover, Ms Patel and her colleagues have described Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protests as a “threat” (she loves threats) to our society. These, it seems, are the targets of her noise/nuisance reduction policy, but in future any government could designate a protest it does not like as noisy or causing a nuisance. She has also included in the bill measures designed to appeal to the prejudices of supporters of the government, such as giving the police powers to confiscate the mobile homes of travellers and gypsies who do not park their homes at an official site, of which there are too few, which forces travellers to use unofficial sites.

 

Ms Patel is very busy passing new laws. An update to the Official Secrets Act removes the public interest defence against prosecution under the Act. This is a serious threat to liberty and a handy tool for any authoritarian ruler who wants to ensure that we citizens know nothing of government incompetence or malfeasance. For example, under current law if a citizen should disclose that the government has given contracts for public services to supporters of and donors to the Conservative Party without any due diligence or scrutiny, the person who had revealed this malpractice could claim that she/he revealed the truth in the public interest. If Ms Patel succeeds in passing this bill unamended, that defence will no longer be available. In practice, the government can declare anything it likes a state secret and suppress any attempts to reveal dishonest conduct.

 

Ms Patel is not the only minister who would like to silent inconvenient opinions. The government has characterized Black Lives Matter as an anti-capitalist organization and a threat to public order. Since BLM is associated with campaigns to remove statues, it is also guilty of wishing to “rewrite history”. BLM is thus a threat (the government loves to identify imaginary threats). Our glorious imperial history must be defended. The Secretary of State for Culture, Oliver Dowden, has issued an unprecedented instruction to museums and art galleries telling them that, since they receive public money, their exhibitions must represent the views of the public. A fundamental principle of museum operations has been curatorial independence. Exhibitions can explore new ideas and interpretations or present new data that challenges assumptions and preconceptions. It seems that Mr Dowden has decided that, if museums take the public shilling, they surrender curatorial independence.

 

The BBC is another organization that the government considers guilty of not reflecting the views of the people (meaning, of course, the views of the people as interpreted by the Conservative Party). It is not unusual for the Conservatives to threaten the existence of the BBC, since the party is supported by the majority of the private sector media, whose owners have long resented the competition of the BBC. But a naked requirement that the BBC should toe the government line is new. BBC news coverage has already begun to cower. Interviews of ministers tend not to challenge contentious statements; statements made by opponents of the government tend to be qualified by interviewers with comments such as “The government, of course, states that this is not the case.” Another independent media outlet owned by the state, Channel 4 TV, is another target. A “consultation” (whose outcome is probably pre-determined) is being held to decide whether to sell the channel to a private operator.

 

One of the skills of Mr Johnson is that he has been able to avoid scrutiny and to evade responsibility for actions and behaviour for which other politicians would be censured or sanctioned. He has now extended the evasion of responsibility to his government. In 2019, in order to force through his version of Brexit, Johnson prorogued Parliament. This action was challenged using a process known as judicial review. Judicial review is a mechanism which enables a citizen to challenge the legality of a government decision or action. In the Brexit case, the High Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful. The reaction of the Johnson government was to declare its intention to restrict the use of judicial review – in short, to limit the ability of citizens to scrutinize the government’s behaviour. In short, if you are caught doing something unlawful, the solution is to change the law so that your unlawful conduct cannot be exposed.

 

But the Johnson government has greater ambitions to consolidate governmental power and to restrict the ability of citizens to challenge the government’s abuse of power. The Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto stated: “After Brexit we also need to look at the broader aspects of our constitution: the relationship between the Government, Parliament and the courts; the functioning of the Royal Prerogative; the role of the House of Lords; and access to justice for ordinary people”. This would be done by setting up a ‘Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission’ to “come up with proposals to restore trust in our institutions and in how our democracy operates”. A foretaste of the government’s intentions is new legislation to require, for the first time in British history, that a voter produce a photo ID in order to vote. The stated aim is to prevent fraudulent voting (my American friends will recognize the Republican playbook here). Opponents (I am one) have pointed out that voter fraud hardly exists in this country. The government does not dispute this. Indeed, it agrees that voter fraud is not a problem, but claims that it needs to demonstrate that it could not become a problem in future. Since the most common forms of voter ID are a passport and a driver’s license, this new requirement will probably prevent minorities and the economically deprived (who are not natural supporters of the Conservative party) from voting.

 

The Conservative Party likes to consider itself a bastion of individual liberty. The so-called libertarian wing has raged against pandemic lockdowns, regulations requiring the wearing of face masks and the like, as intolerable infringements of individual liberties. But they have had very little to say about the multiple attacks on liberties that their party has embarked on.

 

Mr Johnson may not be a dictator, but he has autocratic tendencies and may be able to create tools which in future could turn our country into an autocracy or a dictatorship.