What if…? – a thought-experiment on democratic commitment

What if Reform UK won the next general election? I invite you to imagine this scenario as vividly as you can, in order to set the stage for the exploration of a philosophical- or theoretical-sounding, but nevertheless increasingly urgent question: what are the responsibilities of intelligent people, when dangerous stupidity gains power by democratic means? Or to put it even more pressingly (since anyone reading this is likely to be one of those people), where in such a case would your responsibilities lie?

The question is increasingly urgent, because the scenario is looking increasingly plausible. “According to YouGov’s industry-leading MRP model run on a sample of 13,000 voters”, it was reported last year, ( YouGov MRP shows a Reform UK government a near-certainty if an election were held tomorrow | YouGov) “Reform UK would win 311 seats were an election held tomorrow”, which in collaboration with the Tories on a projected 45 seats “would almost certainly be enough to see them take the reins of government”. Polls had been showing results of that order of magnitude over several months before that one, so it is unlikely to have been a mere outlier. Of course, since then we have had a change of Prime Minister and there is currently a ‘Burnham bounce’ which has taken Labour (just) back to the top, but such effects are notoriously short-lived. In any case, for the purposes purely of the thought-experiment we can discount this probably temporary adjustment.

Note also that you are asked to imagine, for setting up the thought-experiment, that Reform has won. Thus the issue is not, at any rate initially, about what the intelligent should be doing right now in face of the prospect of their winning. An obvious response in that case would be: everything possible to promote the flourishing of realistic electoral alternatives. We shall come back to this. But for the moment, please do your best to think yourself into the situation where that hasn’t worked, and Farage is already smirking on the doorstep of No.10.

Some brief preliminary clarification is necessary at this point to fix the experimental terms. By intelligent people I here mean those who recognise the imperatives of informing themselves about, and then of justifying their actions by reference to, the attested facts in any relevant field, of deferring to rational conclusions reached by proven (scientific and other) methods for ascertaining those facts, and of ensuring, or at least actively trying to ensure, that their thinking on such matters is fully joined-up rather than in any way fractured or compartmentalised. Now obviously, intelligence more broadly conceived must embrace other dimensions, such as responsiveness to one’s emotions without being at the mercy of them, or various forms of sensitivity to other people. But what I have indicated above are minimum necessary conditions: you can’t (as an adult) be properly intelligent without displaying at least those recognitions and capabilities.

And then, as to dangerous stupidity: what licences us to characterise Reform in those terms? Forget, for this purpose, those of their policies about which intelligent people, so identified, might have differing views. It is possible, for instance, for there to be informed and considered disagreement over the balance to be struck between our duties to variously distressed arrivals from overseas and the need to preserve cultural homogeneity here at home; or over the degree of respect due to individual preference in matters of gender and sexuality; or even over the size and role of the for-profit sector in healthcare. Reform does have a range of policies, that is, which could not fairly be described as stupid tout court. But from the perspective simply of intelligence, as essentially demanding the accountability of belief to properly attested fact, there can be no two views regarding their environmental policies. These, as set out on their website in the document Our Contract with You (Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf)include ditching net zero targets and renewable energy subsidies, fast-tracking North Sea oil and gas extraction (and fracking), and exploring “clean coal mining” (sic). It presumably needs no argument to persuade my present audience that these, along with associated proposals such as revoking ultra-low-emission zones and disincentivising rewilding, presuppose and express sheer, unabashed climate and ecological illiteracy. Allowing anyone who could seriously advance such proposals anywhere near State power would be as dangerous as putting Flat-Earthers in charge of the Ministry of Defence. And if they are seriously offering us this nonsense (that is, if they mean what they say), Reform are not just dangerous but stupid – they are basing policy on wilful ignorance of the facts and of the evidently lethal implications of those facts. If on the other hand they don’t mean what they say, but are peddling what they recognise to be lies for short-term electoral advantage, that is also in our present plight a dangerously stupid thing to be doing. (It is perfectly possible to be thus stupid – selfishly or otherwise obtuse about essentials – while still being clever in the sense of having a sharp eye for the main chance.) Either way, therefore, electing a Reform or Reform-led government would indeed be empowering dangerous stupidity – at least on the climate and ecological front, which is now the absolutely vital central issue.

Note, again, that it is in the first place the policies which are stupid – perversely unintelligent in the basic sense of intelligence as set out above – and only derivatively those who advocate such policies (whether in good or bad faith). Note too the related point that, while for various tactical reasons stupid might not be a helpful characterisation of one’s opponents to employ in political campaigning, and still less on the doorstep of a Reform-inclining voter, that consideration is quite irrelevant to the present purpose. The question here is only to intelligent people, about what their responsibilities as such might be when confronted by the empowerment of what, by their essential standards just as intelligent people, they must recognise as stupid proposals in a vitally important policy domain.

So, now to put that thought-experimental question starkly: supposing such stupidity to have in fact won power through a democratic election, would it be the responsibility of the intelligent

A: to accept that result, while of course continuing to oppose the new Government by all democratic means, as well as unremittingly to monitor, persuade and warn; or

B: to refuse to recognise that Government’s mandate, doing instead whatever they can to subvert its authority, prevent it from exercising effective power and as soon as possible replace it with a coalition of the competent?

I present the alternatives in artificially sharp contrast – acquiescence or subversion – to give the question real bite. There would no doubt be a range of intermediate and less uncomfortably clear-cut stances to adopt in the actual event, but let us take them all for present purposes to come down (as they probably would in reality, when push came to shove) to one of these two positions. And again, to press the question home: to which of the alternative responses would you consider it your responsibility to contribute? The challenge is, of course, to get a handle on how far your commitment to democratic legitimacy extends. Are democratic values so overriding for you that even the enabling of lethal stupidity must be regarded as warranted if democratic process has been duly followed?

Three further clarifications, however, are needed to bring this question into properly challenging focus. Firstly, it is to be distinguished from the more general question whether democratic process can ever legitimately be suspended in grave emergency. There are indeed multiple historical examples of plausibly legitimate such suspension – most recently and locally, perhaps, Britain in 1940, when in face of French collapse and the real prospect of German invasion a general election was postponed sine die, and Churchill’s war cabinet of half-a-dozen men exercised for a period, as he himself retrospectively judged in his memoirs, more effective power and uncontested authority throughout the country than Hitler had in Germany (Sir Winston Curchill, The Second World War vol 2 Their Finest Hour, London: Cassell, 1949 p.315.) But even here it might be claimed that almost universal recognition of the need to address imminent peril stood in for a kind of continuing democratic mandate (as in Low’s famous “All behind you, Winston” cartoon). The conditions of our present emergency differ in crucial respects. We are confronted with lethal danger only under interpretation – actual adversities like storms, flooding, wildfires and the species holocaust only evince climate and ecological destabilisation to people informed of the science and possessed of a certain basic statistical nous – that is, put roughly, to intelligent people. The immediate danger – of doing nothing, or not nearly enough, to prevent destruction at least as severe as that caused by modern warfare from happening, through such destabilisation, in the medium-term future – is also only graspable under such interpretation. It is thus on those capable of the relevant interpretation – that is, the intelligent as I have defined them, and on you as one of their number – that the real responsibility for confronting those thought-experimental alternatives must fall, and no equivalent to a tacit universal mandate is in the case.

Secondly, there is no shirking the challenge by claiming that ‘democratic process’ as we currently have it is not properly democratic, and so doesn’t really warrant its outcomes. For those who envisage improvements to this machinery (proportional representation, recourse to citizens’ assemblies and the like) actually face just the same issue over how those improvements are to be introduced: by gaining majority support for them under the system as it presently is, with all its admittedly lamentable defects, or by somehow overriding that system on the grounds of its being so deficient as not to be able genuinely to mandate anything? The question of how far the present democratic process can in fact legitimate its outcomes is only brought into sharper relief, therefore, by raising it not in respect of merely sub-optimal outcomes such as Brexit, for instance, or the election of a Johnson on the back of it, or governments with crushing Parliamentary majorities from 30% of the vote, but in the imagined situation of its having produced something which intelligence cannot but recognise as genuinely perilous.

Finally, someone might object that the challenge as I have set it up does not present real alternatives, since option B is in practice empty – what could intelligent people, as such,  actually do to subvert the effective authority of a duly elected Government? This, however, is seriously to underestimate how far they run the country already. The fossil-fuel state’s day-to-day functioning entirely depends on civil servants, executives and scientific professionals in regulatory and other public agencies and major service industries, corporate leaders, lawyers, teachers at all levels, engineers, local government managers, senior officers in the forces…all those who are quietly engaged in the hands-on business of keeping in reasonably working order the system on top of which democratic politicos prance and declaim. This is especially apparent in a country like Britain with a strong tradition of tacit epistocracy, where an educated élite, sometimes pejoratively labelled ‘the Establishment’, has been what has generally functioned behind the scenes to save governments empowered by democratic head-counting from their grosser follies (albeit this élite lost the plot on Brexit). But all complex societies of the kind which most urgently need rapidly-driven green transformation are only viable because they have multiple cadres of people working along these lines. It is not fantastic to see these people, or even just those of them most alert to the climate and ecological emergency – the climate-intelligent, as we might call them – recognising, and deciding to use, the leverage given them by the fact that the organised withdrawal of their co-operation could swiftly bring the socio-economic machinery to a standstill. They could of course exert such leverage under either of the two options identified, but under the second they would be deploying their blocking power deliberately in pursuit of an ‘internal coup’ to compel the formation, from a range of political elements, of an emergency government to replace Reform. (Not only is this not fantastic, it might even be thought less fantastical than waiting for a democratic system which could plausibly elect a Reform majority to address our plight.)

So I submit that the choice between options A and B is a real choice, and should pose a real challenge to those whose democratic commitment has not yet been stress-tested in this thought-experimental way. I know what my response is – anyone interested, indeed, can glean it from the more recent contributions which Green House has, somewhat uneasily, allowed me to make to its website (see the link under About). But the question is what do you think, and where do you stand? I hope readers will respond by putting this question seriously to themselves, and then by debating the issues raised, perhaps starting with comments on this website. For, just to return in conclusion to the matter of what the climate-intelligent should be doing now, when a Reform victory is still only projected: should B appear even potentially a live option, it could only prove so in the event if the ground for it had been seriously prepared. We could not just come together out of the blue (or the turquoise), on the morrow of the election, to start implementing it. Unprepared, we should find ourselves in the present bind of thinking Americans, who face an equivalent situation not by way of thought-experiment but in grim reality. As well as working to preclude the disaster of a Reform government by electoral efforts, therefore, might it perhaps be already the responsibility of climate-intelligent people to begin coherently anticipating how they should coordinate and organise themselves, were that strategy to fail?