Why we need urgent action to protect our democracy and our social contract

European democracy is at risk from hostile actors. In the UK, if we do not act, we may find ourselves going the way of the US. But there are things we can do, if we can get our politicians to recognise and act on the risks.

European democracy is at risk from hostile actors

Before his election, Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025 or the people involved in drafting the plan. This was false at the time, and most of the plan has now been implemented. The risks to US democracy and the US social contract are growing more obvious by the day:

• Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the troops into Minnesota, because the governor and other state officials have opposed illegal behaviour by ICE agents and there are mass popular protests after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good;
• He is openly discussing cancelling the mid-term elections because of the risk that if they go badly for him, he will be impeached.

But it is not just US democracy that is at risk: Trump’s new National Security Strategy of the USA makes it clear that the Trump regime will support far-right parties in Europe rather than the existing governments which it calls, “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.” And Trump has even talked of using military force against NATO allies in his quest to take control of Greenland. Here is an extraordinary letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister:

In the UK, Farage is a would-be Trump: he has openly endorsed Project 2025, and there is a UK-based but US-funded think tank developing a UK equivalent, Project 2029,  for him. He has also been supported by Elon Musk, who at one point offered to give $100m to support his campaign.

The Intelligence and Security Committee highlighted the probability that during the Brexit campaign, Russia had intervened to support the Johnson/Farage pro-leave campaign, and called for an Inquiry, which has not taken place. Farage has long been a supporter of Russian policy and more recently, further links between Reform members and Russia have surfaced.

In December, Blaise Metreweli, the new head of MI6 highlighted this combined threat from hostile state actors and US big tech supporting extremist politics in the UK and elsewhere, stating that “We are now operating in a space between peace and war.”

The consequences of doing nothing

According to current polls, Reform is ahead of the other parties on 28% of the vote. Under our current voting system, that could be enough to give them a majority in Parliament and enable them to push through the sorts of damaging changes which P2029 would contain: scrapping the NHS and replacing it with a private insurance-based scheme; industrial scale deportations; removing human rights legislation; slashing public services to fund tax cuts for the wealthy; unwinding checks and balances and attacking ‘activist’ judges, lawyers, journalists and academics.

Things might change without intervention. But with the fiscal rules we have today, there is only a remote chance that we will see economic renewal; and the 10-year plan makes a turnaround in NHS performance improbable. Voters are unlikely to be impressed.

If Reform wins, we should expect many of Farage’s voters to be angry and disappointed – as with Brexit, the promised upsides would not materialise, except for the very wealthy, but the downsides would be catastrophic. The NHS policy alone would drive many into bankruptcy, while others would simply have to do without treatment. And we should not expect to retain our human rights.

Economically, socially and democratically, Britain would be transformed for the worse.

What can we do?

The most obvious thing is for the government simply to deliver the first half of the promised ‘decade of national renewal.’ Unfortunately, that would require major U-turns; and even if it happened, there is little time for the benefits to be felt. Delivery is vital for the good of the country, but it is not enough to deal with the threats to our democracy.

The second thing is to prevent electoral distortions. We should take immediate and far-reaching steps to remove dark money from our politics and to tackle industrial scale disinformation. In practice these are both difficult to do to sufficiently well to reduce the risk of a populist party seizing an election with the support of foreign donors, hostile States like Russia, and compliant media.

The third thing is to entrench protections so that, if a populist far right party were able to come to power, there would nevertheless be checks and balances in place. This is also difficult in our system where a parliamentary majority permits virtually anything.

Even with these measures in place, the risk to the UK remains unacceptable.

There is one other measure which would help enormously: the introduction of proportional representation (PR). Our current voting system, first-past-the-post (FPTP), distorts voters’ intentions. Usually, it gives far too large a majority to the party with most votes. Labour got a huge boost under FPTP at the last election (34% of the vote leading to 63% of the seats). In contrast, PR ensures that parliament accurately reflects how people voted. If Reform were to win 30% of the votes, they might nevertheless get a majority of seats under FPTP; but under PR, they would have only 30% of the seats and would require coalition partners to enable them to implement P2029.

Conclusion

Without rapid defensive action, Britain may well go the way of the US and become a formerly-developed country with an increasingly impoverished population living in a flawed democracy.

We need our politicians to act. And our Defensive Constitutional Reform project aims to take these arguments to them, while there is still time.

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