We tend to look at politics through the lens of a battle between parties – in particular, given our system, as a battle between the Conservatives (who usually win) and Labour (who sometimes win). Through this lens, we see constant skirmishing: Who did well at Prime Minister’s Questions? Who is leading in the polls? – we see policy evaluation: How is the economy doing? – and the real battle is fought in the lead-up to the General Election at which the party with the best track-record and the best policy proposals will win.
Last week, Elon Musk announced that he was considering giving $100 million to Reform to secure Nigel Farage as the next Prime Minister.
That makes it a very good time to ask: is the ‘battle between two parties’ a valid lens through which to view politics?
Looking at politics through the lens of a ‘battle between two parties’ used to be a serviceable approximation, but is now a dangerous distortion of reality:
- The idea that politics was a ‘battle between two parties’ was only ever an approximation to reality;
- Now it is not even an approximate description of the battle for power – this should be obvious to all in politics, but is apparently not;
- This means that progressives are ‘fighting the last war’ – and that is extremely dangerous for all of us.
Always only an approximation
There has always been more to it than just the two main parties. In the UK, Labour has always had the backing of the Unions, and the Conservatives have always had the backing of most of the media, of the Church, of most of the establishment and of the very wealthy.
Even before Murdoch came onto the UK media scene in 1968, The Daily Mail, The Times, and The Telegraph were all staunchly right-wing. The Daily Mail has been supporting the far-right since the 1930s, as this article by its then proprietor makes clear. The Times had William Rees-Mogg as its editor from 1967 to 1981; Rees-Mogg co-wrote the extreme right-wing book, The Sovereign Individual, which argued for dismantling ‘mass democracy’ and the post-war social contract, and had a huge influence on market fundamentalists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And The Telegraph has been nicknamed ‘The Torygraph’ since at least the 1970s. On the other hand, the Mirror and The Guardian have always been left-wing.
The establishment is hard to define and, of course, not homogeneous – but it is reasonable to say it has tended to be right-of-centre. The Church of England was described in 1917 by Maude Royden as “the Conservative Party at Prayer” – and this may still be fair. Professions like lawyers, bankers, doctors and top Civil Servants have always been relatively well-paid, and this used to correlate with voting patterns.
And of course the extremely wealthy have always preferred a less redistributive system to a more redistributive one and tended to support the Right.
So, both parties had backers with significant (though probably unequal) power: it was always only an approximation to think of politics as being a battle of ideas between parties, but it was perhaps a workable approximation.
Now not even approximate description of the key dynamics
Events over the last decade in both the US and the UK show that looking through the ‘battle between parties’ lens is no longer close to being an adequate description of what drives politics.
It should have been obvious in the US
The US has had at least 8 years in which they had increasing evidence that Trump and his backers were prepared to distort and dismantle US democracy in pursuit of power: there was strong evidence that illegal Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election occurred “in sweeping and systematic fashion” during the campaign in order to help Trump win power; there is no question that he stacked the Supreme Court with loyalists – and this both helped him overturn Roe v Wade and later ensured that he was granted immunity for any official acts – and, most notably, he incited an insurrection when he lost the 2020 Election. He has also been convicted of fraud and sexual abuse.
Viewed through the conventional two-party lens, given the evidence above, Trump would not even have been a credible candidate for the Republican nominee for the 2024 election. In fact, that he was chosen as candidate in 2016 was strange enough: as Lindsey Graham (who later became a supporter of Trump) said at the time, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” He was right in the sense that the traditional Republican Party no longer exists – Trump has made it his party.
And, of course, he has just won the 2024 election.
But he did not do it on his own: he had the backing of a powerful network of far-right think tanks, media outlets, social media channels and big donors who propelled him to victory.
Among the think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the Project 2025 plan stands out. Their plan was so toxic that before the US election, Trump claimed total ignorance of it saying, “I know nothing about Project 2025 … I have no idea who is behind it.” In fact, well over 100 of his former staff members were heavily involved in preparing this plan for his second term, and in 2022 he had said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork in detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” Once the election was out of the way, the denials ended.
For those who have not heard of Project 2025, the box below gives a taste of some of its provisions.
What is Project 2025?Project 2025 (P2025) is a plan which contains both controversial policies and systematic actions to unwind any remaining checks and balances on their implementation, including a list of key employees to be replaced so that Trump can implement these ideas without hindrance in his second term. Controversial policiesDepartments that come under fire include the FBI (which raided Trump’s residence at Mar a Lago as part of its investigation into his handling of state documents) and the Education Department, which P2025 plans to abolish in its entirety. A federal fund worth $18 billion for low-income students will expire; there will be cuts to funding for free school meals, and the Head Start program which provides services to children of low-income families will be eliminated. P2025 wants the Department of Health and Human Services to “maintain a biblically-based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. The project seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and urges the government to explicitly reject abortion as health care. The plan also aims to rollback LGBTQ+ rights. According to Wikipedia, the Environment Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will be closed, and the EPA’s staff, including the science advisor, will be selected based on managerial skills rather than scientific qualifications. States will be prevented from adopting stricter regulations on vehicular emissions, as the state of California has, and regulations on the fossil fuel industry will be relaxed. Unwinding checks and balancesProject 2025 proposes that the President should have total personal control of the entire federal bureaucracy, including agencies such as the Department of Justice which are currently independent and whose independence is essential to preserve the rule of law. P2025 will prevent the Federal Elections Commission from countering misinformation or disinformation about election integrity. And as well as the areas explicitly mentioned in the document, Project 2025 also claimed privately to have drafted around 350 executive orders that are not public. To counter the risk that the target departments and agencies may be staffed with people who do not subscribe to these policies, P2025 has a database of around 10,000 replacements for key staff members across government. Trump’s picks for his cabinet give an indication of the sort of people who are likely to be in the database. There is a saying, “a fish rots from the head.” P2025 is a plan to make sure the rot spreads as fast as possible. |
Many in the traditional media who might have been expected to call this out instead normalised or downplayed Trump’s history and plans. Newsweek’s ‘neutral‘ reporting of Project 2025 is a case study – reading their coverage, you would have no idea that there was any basis for concern at all about the plan. The Washington Post, which had for the last 36 years come out with an endorsement for one or other of the candidates, decided at the last moment not to endorse Harris because its new owner Jeff Bezos feared that, if his newspaper endorsed her, Amazon would lose valuable government contracts under Trump. Several Washington Post Journalists resigned in protest. The LA Times did much the same at the bidding of its owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, also followed by resignations in protest. Many other media outlets were intimidated by Trump’s threats of retaliation against those who criticised him. And of course there are influential outlets like Fox News which have always been supporters of the Right.
Social media, rather than providing a counter, buttressed Trump. Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a protégé of Peter Thiel (who sat on Meta’s Board), has always been supportive of market fundamentalist ideas. Twitter was more neutral and possibly even had a preponderance of progressive users until 2022, when Elon Musk bought it. He claimed to be a ‘free-speech absolutist’ but in practice this meant allowing back accounts that had been banned for hate speech and disinformation, tweaking the algorithms to boost far-right content (especially his own Tweets: he now has over 200 million followers) and throttling progressive content. This year, he started suspending those who criticised him. He was also strongly supportive of Trump’s campaign.
Billionaires as a class supported Trump. As Forbes pointed out in August, “26 billionaires have already given more than $1 million apiece to pro-Trump PACs and committees. … The top industries among Trump’s top billionaire backers are casinos (4), finance (3) and oil and gas (3).” But even this pales when compared with Musk’s donations of over $250 million to the Trump campaign, in return for a role in the new regime.
In a traditional contest between two parties, one of which was led by a convicted criminal, supported by a foreign power, dedicated to the dismantling of democratic safeguards and the post-war social contract and instigator of an attempted insurrection, while the other was at worst uninspiring, the result would not have been in doubt: something has changed in America.
And the same is true in the UK.
It should already be obvious in UK
After Brexit, the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed the roles of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in using sophisticated micro-targeting of tailored messages to voters during the Brexit campaign. She showed that, for the first time in UK politics, modern Psychological Operations (PsyOps) techniques had been deployed against the British population and highlighted the risk to democracy this implied. Since then, the technology has advanced further, and the amount of data held on each of us has increased – but nothing has been done to prevent such PsyOps from being used in future elections. The Intelligence and Security Committee warned us of Russian interference and called for a proper Inquiry – but there has been none.
After May’s government ran aground on Brexit, Johnson led a government which was not renowned for being systematic. But in one area it was both systematic and effective: removing checks and balances on its own power. It tackled everything from the independence of the Electoral Commission and the ability of the courts to hold the government to account to the right of civil servants to give unbiased legal advice to ministers and of citizens to peaceful protest. There are echoes here of Project 2025.
Most recently, Musk offered $100m (around £78 million) – and the support of social media – to the Reform party. This is technically illegal but there are obvious loopholes: he could give the money via his UK subsidiary or as his father has suggested, he could become a UK citizen for the purpose of being able to make this donation. The limit for campaign expenditure by all parties in the last election was increased to £35 million – so Musk will have to deploy much of this money in ways which would not officially count as campaigning.
This is clearly a game-changer for UK politics. As Lord Johnson of Lainston, the Conservative Party Co-chair, said last week, it is extraordinary that Musk is “basically buying one of the political parties here.” That is an understatement: Musk is aiming to buy UK politics. And if he succeeds, we can expect a UK equivalent of Project 2025 and an end to effective democracy.
A lens that ignores all the points above is one which ignores the real power battle and the real dangers we face. Here is an updated lens.
Last year we wrote that the far-right might be about to lose the battle but still planned to win the war. We noted that having the far-right vote split between two parties was a major challenge and said:
“… the options are: 1. Destroy the Conservative Party and throw your weight behind Reform; 2. Destroy the Reform Party and throw your weight behind the Conservatives; and 3. Engineer some kind of merger.”
They may have chosen Option 1.
Progressives are fighting the last war
Despite all the signs that Trump and his backers were showing an extraordinary disregard for democratic norms – or even anything remotely resembling them – the US government took no extraordinary steps to prevent a recurrence. It treated Trump and his backers much as it had treated George HW Bush and his backers. The UK Government cannot afford to be so relaxed.
Trump is now President-Elect and the Republicans control both Houses. He is well-placed to implement Project 2025 – a plan which will dismantle key aspects of the US social contract and its constitutional safeguards. The damage to the US (and to the rest of the world) may be enormous – and very hard to reverse.
The UK government is new and cannot be blamed for not having acted yet, but it seems to think that no extraordinary steps will be needed here to protect our democracy. Even its reaction to Musk’s proposed donation seems to be that it is “not a current priority.” If that is true, it is dangerously complacent.
Conclusion
If we do not want to go the way of America, we must start to look at political reality through a different lens: in the House of Commons, it still looks like a battle between Labour and the Conservatives; in the outside world, it is already something very different. To see what action we must take, we need a new lens.
Recognising the importance of action, we have started a new project: Defensive Constitutional Reform which will propose practical actions the government can take while there is still time.
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3 comments so far
I am deeply concerned at the direction our politics is moving and the way balance is shifting even further to the right, some of Labours policies do not reflect my views on having a country in which the balance needs to be adressed so that we live in a country that prospers through Government policies of wealth distribution and results in a fair society for all and not the few.
While it is certain that Labour’s policies are sub-optimal (when did we ever have an optimal government?), the point the article is making is that focussing on that, when our democracy may be on the verge of being dismantled is looking through an outdated lens.
We need an allaince of LIbs, greens, plaid and SMP and anyone who will share a platform of outspoken opposition to the stealth fascism which is encroaching even into Labour.
No other opposition party alone can save us. they must work together for:
Pr, rejoin, parliamentary reform, press reform, public NHS, proper taxation esp of mega corps, make fossil fuel pay for climate change mitigations and plastic apocalypse clean up, end austerity, stop appeasing crooked utilitiy owners and nationalise by seizure
We need separation of state and capitalism.
If there is a better plan I’d like to hear it.