Welcome to Starmer’s marshmallow dictatorship

Welcome to Starmer’s marshmallow dictatorship Liberal democracy has more in common with authoritarian regimes than its proponents admit Daily Telegraph 22/12/25 Sam Ashworth-Hayes It’s been a strange year in Britain. Downing Street is occupied by a cabal of human rights lawyers, obsessed with the attempt to shift human nature a degree or two closer to the Fabian ideal; the result has been a steady ratcheting of the rhetorical commitment to the grand theories of liberty and democracy, and an equally steady squeeze on the actual liberties that allow that democracy to function.

In the last few days, the Electoral Commission has come out to criticise the Government for delaying local elections, stating that the official rationale is not “legitimate”. Downing Street has retreated further into itself, cutting traditional media sessions that offer an opening for press scrutiny. And the internet regulator Ofcom is drawing up plans to prevent social media users seeing posts with “potentially illegal” inflammatory material until they’ve been approved by censors. There are no prizes for guessing which issues might be deemed “potentially illegal”, or how companies facing swingeing fines will respond when asked to work out where the line should be. There are also no prizes for guessing why Sir Keir is behaving in such an anti-democratic fashion. “If there is a Conservative government, I can sleep at night,” he said. “If there was a Right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.” He couldn’t have summarised the phenomenon of the uniparty any better if he’d tried. Labour and the Conservatives, in this conception, are competitors: Reform is an enemy: an existential threat to a consensus both parties have played their role in promoting. Nor could Starmer have given much more indication as to how he will approach this challenge. As in Europe, if liberal means cannot deliver the desired end, then illiberal ones must do to save democracy from itself. When Reform is on track to win the local elections, picking up a swathe of seats and a boost to momentum, the elections are postponed. When it receives a major cash infusion, giving it the resources necessary to compete with older, established rivals, ministers in the Commons welcome suggestions for restricting donations amid complaints that democracy should not be bought, and quietly ignoring the larger donation made to the Conservatives the year before. Meanwhile, backbench Labour MPs suggest improving the quality of the Commons by barring candidates from standing if they can’t pass an enhanced DBS check. Leaving aside the quaint idea that the public should be entitled to choose who they want to represent them, it’s a proposal all but designed to punish people who veer from the status quo. One of the many flaws in the concept of the non-crime hate incident is that it can cause candidates to fail these checks even when they are completely unaware that such an accusation has ever been levelled against them, even when the accusation was completely spurious. Now tell me, what sort of political views might lead to an accusation of “hatred” by an over-zealous HR drone, or by an opportunistic Labour acolyte? It’s an approach that sits nicely with the attempt to clamp down on the national conversation, and reduce potentially “inflammatory” discussions about migration and its consequences. Demanding that social media users provide ID to access sensitive material ensures that the details of the latest outrage are hidden by many by default, and that those who choose to comment on it are easily identifiable; charging companies with the sort of censorship discussed above will ensure that fewer controversial posts slip through the net to be seen by those users still online. The proposals to abolish jury trials for speech offences, meanwhile, would resolve the problem whereby juries keep letting people brought up on charges of wrongthink off, allowing judges with the right views to determine what is a legitimate expression of political opinion, and what is a remark gravely beyond the acceptable boundaries of discourse. And they will be called upon to make those judgments. The “National Security and Online Information Team” has been tasked with monitoring anti-migrant sentiment on social media; the Research, Information and Communications Unit with producing “counter-narratives”. As the Government’s anti-terror tsar Jonathan Hall puts it, Britain needs to stand up to “free speech absolutists” to preserve democracy: controlling what people can say, and which issues they can discuss, in the name of the public good. Liberal illiberalism, the blob, the immune system of the post-war consensus; call it what you will. Whenever a party threatens to actually alter the facts on the ground – to address migration and integration beyond offering the usual platitudes and easily broken promises – factions which were previously at each other’s throats unite to cast it out. Liberal democracy in the conception of its advocates has a specific meaning that places greater weight on the first word than the second, and within a narrow framework. The purpose of the post-1945 order – the ties to international law, the checks on state power, the endless quagmire of human rights – is to avoid a repeat of the events before year zero. Without this understanding, it can be hard to grasp why freedom of speech and association are weak and qualified, while the freedom to move across borders based on even the flimsiest claim appears absolute and ironclad. If the intention is avoiding the tyranny of the majority, then the state must be constructed in such a way as to avoid ever conceding on these fundamental principles. When Starmer says the alternative to Labour or the Conservatives is an end to Britain as “the tolerant, diverse country that we are”, this is what he means: preserving the results of a project that was imposed without democratic consent. Across Western Europe, politicians marinated in the cultural outputs of the United States, raised in a bloc that slowly put human rights and international law to the centre of its governance, drawn from internationally mobile graduates with ties across the world have used their dominance as a class to impose the policies that suit them best. The result is that the average European parliamentarian is far more culturally liberal than the average voter, and Britain is no exception to this rule: the average Conservative MP in 2020 was roughly where the average Labour voter was on social issues. That people from outside this system want to change it is a threat to the dominance of those who inhabit it, a threat to their prestige, and a threat to their ability to extract “rents” from their control over the country. While its proponents might wish to conceal the fact, liberal democracy is a system like any other, with taboos and rules guided towards its preservation rather than representing immutable truths reached through philosophical reflection. Its defenders are just as keen to conserve it as the old Right was its predecessor: hence the prevalence of liberal authoritarianism in populations around the world. Our regime has a soft centre. The Starmtroopers aren’t always kicking down the door, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t pressure on dissidents to conform. As Adrian Vermuele has written, “coercion is a spectrum” and resorting to the violence that lies at the base of state power is “a confession that the use of the other tools was insufficiently artful”. In Britain, the public is rejecting the result of a decades-long project in immigration without integration, and liberalism without meaningful democracy. If the backlash against it looks like a conspiracy of elites, as Richard Hermer derided “populists” for describing it, it’s because it is one, with more in common with Russian “managed democracy” than any of those involved would like to admit. The coordinated attacks from Left and Right are signs that the system is working as intended: it will reject Farage as a foreign body until he is either expelled, or triumphs. And if he wins, it could spell the end for the vision of Britain our ruling class worked so hard to construct. No wonder Starmer feels unease at night.