Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of

This is not a book about Brexit. Nor is it a book about the election of Donald Trump. It is about a much bigger issue – one the debate around those extraordinary events has highlighted. What’s at stake is the future of democracy itself, in the UK, the US and across the West.

We live at a strange moment in the history of democratic politics. Today, perhaps for the first time, every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle. Yet in practice the authorities are seeking to limit democratic decision-making and separate power from the people.

They invest authority instead in unelected institutions, from the courts to the European Commission. Elected politicians act as a professional elite, divorced from those they are supposed to represent. And everywhere, the intellectual fashion is to question whether voters are really fit or qualified to make democratic decisions on major issues, such as membership of the European Union or the Presidency of the United States.

Ours is the age of ‘I’m a democrat, but …’, when the establishment insists it is all for democracy, but only in moderation; it just cannot tolerate what one former member of President Barack Obama’s administration calls ‘too much of a good thing’, suggesting that America ‘might be a healthier democracy if it were a slightly less democratic one’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) For some in high places these days it seems that, where democracy is concerned, less really can be more.

It is an attitude captured in the UK by former Conservative prime minister John Major who, dismissing the suggestion that the Brexit referendum result should be binding, declared that ‘the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Some of us might naively have imagined that majority rule was the essence of democracy. But not, it seems, when millions of common ‘tyrants’ vote against the wishes of the minority political elite.

It is time we started not only to defend popular democracy, but to argue for far more of it, with no ifs, buts or by-your-leaves.

So this is not just a book about Brexit, or about Trump. The best place to begin the argument, however, is with the fallout from that UK referendum and the US election, which has brought the bigger picture sharply into focus. Whichever side you were on in those votes, the wider issue of your right to decide is now on the line.

In Animal Farm, his 1945 allegorical novel about the Soviet Union’s descent from popular revolution to Stalinist tyranny, George Orwell gives one of the great definitions of the betrayal of democracy. It becomes clear that the farm has turned into a totalitarian system when the powerful elite of pigs alters the founding principle of Animal Farm painted on the barn wall. To the noble declaration ‘All Animals Are Equal’ they add the qualification ‘… But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others’.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Of course that’s only dystopian fiction from 1945, in the faraway era of world war and totalitarianism. Even Orwell originally entitled it Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. It couldn’t happen here.

Fast-forward to September 2016 and the director of the pollsters BritainThinks goes on BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning Today programme, to discuss the findings of their focus-group conversations with voters from both sides of the June referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

Deborah Mattinson reported that some of the victorious Leave voters ‘think the Remainers are rich people’ who had benefited from the status quo within the EU. Something of a generalisation no doubt, but fair enough, perhaps. That argument at least acknowledges that those Remain voters had made a reasonable decision that might be seen as in their own self-interests. Think-tank research did find that, in the words of one Tory newspaper, ‘Britain’s ruling classes were the only group to vote overwhelmingly to stay in the European Union’.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

And what about the other side of the divide? What did the losing Remain voters in Mattinson’s focus groups think of the opposite lot? Well, she said bluntly, ‘Some of the Remainers think that some of the Leavers were stupid and shouldn’t have the vote.’ This revelation almost had Today’s world-weary host John Humphrys choking on his croissant.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

So it became possible, not in the allegorical dystopias of 1940s fairy tales but in the real world of twenty-first-century British politics, to hear it seriously proposed by some that some members of the electorate, though formally qualified to participate in our democracy, are ‘stupid and shouldn’t have the vote’. Or as Orwell’s oligarchical pigs might have put it, ‘All Voters Are Equal, But Some Voters Are More Equal Than Others.’

That report was no one-off. The ‘too thick to vote’ point might have been particularly blunt, but the underlying sentiment was the stuff of countless tweets, posts, articles, outbursts and reports in response to the referendum. The essential message was that all those Leave voters don’t know what’s good for them. The implication was that they should not have been allowed the right to make the wrong choice on such an issue.

That sneering attitude was even reflected in the satirical magazine Private Eye; under the spoof headline ‘Turkeys Vote for Christmas in Referendum Cliffhanger’, it reported that some turkeys were already regretting their ‘Brexmas vote’ as ‘evidence is piling up that, come Christmas lunch, they will in fact have their heads cut off, their giblets put in a plastic bag and be well and truly stuffed’. If it was irony the Eye was after, how about ‘Satirists Side with Establishment’?6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Then came the second political earthquake of 2016 – the November election of Republican candidate and celebrity capitalist Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. The bitter responses to the voters’ failure to elect Democratic Party favourite Hillary Clinton were if anything even more starkly anti-democratic than the anti-Brexit backlash.

‘Your Vote is a Hate Crime!’ declared anti-Trump protesters, graffiti artists and bloggers, implying that Trump supporters should be denied not only their vote, but their liberty.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

One leading Democrat commentator issued the blanket declaration that ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter’. Meanwhile a celebrity professor of political science drew the no doubt scientific conclusion that Trump’s victory was ‘the dance of the dunces’, made possible by wasting the right to vote on ‘uneducated, low-information white people’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Some voters, it appears, are now deemed ‘more equal than others’ because they are considered better-informed, or just better people.

As with the barn in Animal Farm, here too it appears that the writing is on the wall. The Brexit vote and the Trump election have shone the spotlight on democracy. Many in the upper reaches of politics, the media and culture do not like what they see.

They fear that they are witnessing a revolt of those whom candidate Clinton branded ‘the deplorables’ during the US election campaign. And they find the idea of such deplorable people exercising democratic power frankly revolting.

Reservations about allowing the people to vote and have some power over their lives have been around ever since the ancient Greeks invented the concept of democracy. As we explore in chapter 3, even in the modern era democracy was long considered a dirty word in the upper echelons of Western societies. It is only in more recent times that these prejudices have been restrained beneath the surface of polite society, as everybody has felt obliged to pay lip service to the principle of democracy.

But the fury of the political, economic and cultural elites in response to the 17.4 million UK voters who dared to back Brexit, and the 62 million-plus Americans who had the temerity to vote for Trump, brought these anti-democratic poisons bubbling to the surface of our civilised societies once more.

The real Brexit–Trump connection

There has been a concerted attempt to explain the link between the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump. For angry social media commentators, it seemed obvious that ‘both were clearly mired in racism, bigotry and hate’. Many mainstream media pundits took a similar line, concluding that ‘both votes were marked by emotional, divisive campaigns’ and were won on ‘a tide’ of racism and hate.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Much of this misses the point. The important link between the Brexit and Trump votes was not the campaigns, but the reaction they provoked. Both results were met by an extraordinary outburst of fear and loathing from political and cultural elites, revealing their barely concealed contempt for the people and democracy. If there has been a dangerous hatred on view, it is the hatred of the ‘herd’ on both sides of the Atlantic.

To be clear from the start: while I supported the Brexit vote, I have no truck with Trump. The parallels are only in the way those backing the two campaigns have been condemned from on high.

Both results reflected the intensity of feeling against the respective political establishments. But the outcome was different. Whereas the vote to Leave the EU represented a positive blow for more democracy, the turnout for Trump was a negative reaction to the same problem of a political elite lacking legitimacy. There is a difference between supporting a broad democratic principle in a yes/no referendum, and backing a specific party’s narrow-minded candidate in an election.

That is why some of us in the UK who voted Leave with passion could not have contemplated voting for the illiberal, free-speech-stomping Donald. Nor, by the way, could we have stomached supporting the illiberal-liberal Hillary Clinton. (Note to the confused: the Brexit referendum result was not a vote for Trump fan and UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who responded to his triumph by giving up politics rather than taking power.)

No; the genuine comparison between the two concerns not the actors, but the anti-democratic reaction to the results. The backlash against Brexit set the pattern.

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate went to the polls to vote in a referendum on whether the nation should Remain a member of the European Union, or Leave the EU. They voted to Leave, by 51.8 per cent to 48.2. The 17.4 million who voted Leave constituted the largest number of people who have ever voted for anything in British political history; the 16.1 million who backed Remain made up the second-largest vote for anything, reflecting the importance of the issue. (The most votes ever acquired by any party in a UK general election were the 14.1 million won by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1992 – representing 41.9 per cent of the votes cast. Oddly, Major did not seem to object to the tyranny of the minority on that occasion.)

The result was a remarkable popular rejection of the institutions of the EU – which, as chapter 4 argues, have been one of the major barriers to the practice of democratic politics in Europe. It represented a demand for more democracy and national sovereignty, and less diktat from the Euro-bureaucracy. It was also a sharp slap in the face for the British political class, who have long used the EU to sidestep democratic debate at home.

The UK’s political, economic and cultural elites, who had all assumed until the last minute – along with every pollster, pundit and bookmaker – that Remain would win easily, reacted to the referendum result as if an earthquake had caused the solid ground to disappear from beneath their feet. How could this have happened?

After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn those British voters that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a political descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices.

They had been told to vote Remain by the leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, from Tory prime minister David Cameron to left-wing Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. They had been instructed that there was no realistic alternative to voting Remain by the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the President of the United States, a cross-section of leading lights from the arts and every imaginable celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten. For its part, the official Leave campaign had looked like an embarrassing shambles. Yet still a majority of voters had refused to do as they were told they must, and opted to Leave the EU.

In the eyes of the establishment it appeared that the only possible explanation for this outrageous outcome was that those millions of voters were simply too ignorant, too uneducated, too gullible, bigoted or emotional to understand what they were being told. Leave voters were depicted as being like that naughty child whose finger is drawn inexorably towards the big, red button by all the warning signs telling him ‘Danger – Do Not Press’.

Most striking was how quickly the discussion ceased to be about the specific issues of Brexit, and became about much bigger questions of democratic decision-making. The emphasis shifted away from what the electorate thought of the EU, towards what the pro-EU elites thought of the revolting electorate. Answer: not much. It may take a long time for the wrangling over the details of UK–EU relations to become clear. But the wider threat to democracy in the anti-Brexit backlash was evident from the start.

To clarify: this book’s attack on the antics of the pro-EU elites is not aimed at the 16.1 million who voted to Remain. That would be a remarkably large ‘elite’ by anybody’s standards. Most of those Remainers were normal voters who made a rational choice, just as the Leavers did. Millions of them are also respecters of democracy. In a YouGov survey published in November 2016, 68 per cent of all respondents said that the UK should follow the referendum result and go ahead with Brexit. Those who had voted to Remain in June were now ‘evenly divided’ between those who ‘think the government has a duty to implement the decision and leave’ and those who ‘would like to see the government ignore or overturn the referendum result’.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

The political, economic and cultural elites leading the anti-democratic campaign to ‘ignore or overturn the referendum result’ were a small minority within that minority, symbolised by such big-name, big-headed Remainers as Tony Blair or Sir Richard Branson. The 2016 poster girl for their crusade was Gina Miller, the multi-millionaire investment fund manager who led the legal challenge to the government over Brexit, because she said the revolting voters’ verdict made her feel ‘physically sick’. After the high court found in her favour, Ms Miller the City financier declared that the abuse she had received ‘means I am doing something right for investors’.11 (#litres_trial_promo) This clique constitutes an elite in the worst sense of the word, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a class of people ‘having the most power and influence in a society’, not due to any superior talents but ‘especially on account of their wealth or privilege’.

Weeks after the vote, European President Jean-Claude Juncker gave the official EU version of events in an interview with a French youth YouTube channel (where else would you make an important announcement these days?). Monsieur Juncker claimed that the blame lay with British politicians who had spent more than forty years spreading ‘so many lies, so many half-truths’ about the EU, telling ‘your general public that European Union is stupid, that there is nothing worth …’12 (#litres_trial_promo) His underlying message was that the ‘general public’ in the UK must have been sufficiently ‘stupid’ to believe whatever lies the politicians fed them.

Yet if anything looked ignorant or misinformed in this discussion, it was Juncker’s claim that influential British politicians have been indoctrinating the general public with anti-EU ‘lies and half-truths’ for more than forty years.

Almost until the referendum campaign began, the political outlook labelled ‘Euro-scepticism’ had been a fringe affair, considered in parliament to be the preserve of only a few Tory head-bangers. Since the UK joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, no government had advocated leaving. The last time any major UK political party pledged to leave the EU at a general election was back in 1983, when it formed part of the Labour Party’s left-wing manifesto – described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – which resulted in a devastating defeat.

In the June 2016 referendum campaign, the leaders of every mainstream party – including Labour’s Corbyn, supposedly a long-standing left-wing Eurosceptic – backed the conformist Remain campaign. Even leading Tory Leave campaigner Boris Johnson had no history of being anti-EU, and had gone so far as to write an (unpublished) pro-Remain column months before the referendum.

The popular Brexit vote looked far more like a spirited revolt against discredited and two-faced politicians than any tame acquiescence to their instructions. In response, those politicians reacted as if they had been shot at. After the referendum Cameron quit as prime minister with a speed normally reserved for political leaders who are assassinated in office.

Bewildered leading Members of Parliament from all sides joined hands to bemoan the ‘national disaster’ of the Brexit vote. The immediate reaction was well captured by Labour MP and former government minister David Lammy, who tweeted a desperate appeal to his fellow members of the political class: ‘Wake up. We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness and bring this nightmare to an end through a vote in Parliament … there should be a vote in Parliament next week.’13 (#litres_trial_promo) For the Right Honourable Lammy it seemed a display of popular democracy was madness, people voting other than as instructed a nightmare. All honourable parliamentarians needed to wake up and overturn the historic referendum result within the week.

Another senior Labour MP, Keith Vaz, bewailed the ‘crushing, crushing decision … a terrible day for Britain … catastrophic. In a thousand years I would never have believed the British people would have voted in this way’. So how could a majority of those who voted – including his own constituents in Leicester – have done so in such an unbelievable, catastrophic fashion, and inflicted what Vaz seems to think was Britain’s most terrible day since circa 1066? They voted, concluded Vaz, ‘emotionally rather than looking at the facts’.14 (#litres_trial_promo) It couldn’t possibly be that voters had looked at ‘the facts’ and reasonably drawn the opposite conclusion from their MPs; it had to be that the naughty children had let their feelings run away with them.

Politicians and lobbyists who claim to be most in favour of change in the UK seemed among those most upset by the popular vote to change Britain’s relationship with the EU. Progressives and the Left have historically been the people who fought to ‘leave’ the current state of the world. Yet now they appeared determined to ‘remain’ in the status quo of the conformist EU.

The establishment’s call for a Remain vote had been backed by leading liberal and left-wing voices from the Guardian to the New Statesman, the Labour Party mainstream to the ‘Corbynite’ Momentum campaign. Some reacted with bitterness and bile when the popular vote went against them. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, grand dame of British liberalism, denounced the ‘stupidity’ of the Leave campaign and demanded that 231 Labour MPs – 70 per cent of whose constituencies returned majorities for Leave – must be ‘brave’ and vote to ‘save us’ from the votes of 17.4 million Leavers – in the name of ‘representative democracy’, of couse.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Nationalist politicians whose declared aim is to enable their people to break free from the United Kingdom appeared particularly furious at any suggestion that the British people should want to break free from the European Union.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party declared a state of national ‘fury’ over the Brexit vote (the majority of voters in Scotland supported Remain) and threatened to veto Brexit, in the apparent belief that democracy means 1.66 million Scottish Remain votes are so much more equal than others that they can outweigh 17.4 million Leave votes from across the UK.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the province of Northern Ireland, where a majority backed Remain, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness denounced the ‘toxic’ UK vote and declared that: ‘The island of Ireland is facing the biggest constitutional crisis since partition [in 1921] as a result of the Brexit referendum.’17 (#litres_trial_promo) This might have come as a surprise to those who recall the ‘constitutional crisis’ posed by the twenty-five-year armed conflict over sovereignty that raged in Northern Ireland from 1969, which first brought Mr McGuinness to public attention. For this leading Irish republican, however, it appears that a popular vote for Britain to leave the EU is now far more ‘toxic’ than the arrival of British troops to keep Northern Ireland within the UK.