The idea that democracy stops when you get the decision you like is getting more prevalent unfortunately. I say that regularly in response to comments on Facebook, although it never seems to get through. Only yesterday some ignorant low life tried to tell me I'm refusing to accept a democratic decision because I am critical of St Boris. The same low life also told to go to Europe if I didn't like it here.
I'm 74. I was born here, and I have lived here all my life. My father was born here and served in North Africa in WW2. He was nearly killed in Sicily. In a bizarre way that could well have saved his life, since his regiment took part in the Normandy Landings. My Grandfather was born here and served in France in WW1. He was injured too but survived. My uncle was born here and took part in D-Day. I could go further back too, so I’m not going to have some ignorant #### (insert your own choice of epithet – this isn’t so far a sweary blog) try to tell me I don’t belong here.
The reality is the opposite. The behaviour of this buffoon (on this occasion I don't mean Boris Johnson) is not democratic. It is not patriotic. It is a betrayal of everything my Father, Grandfather and Uncle put their lives on the line for. It is a betrayal of everything he claims to be standing for! It is him and people like him who are undermining democratic processes. It is him and people like him who are undermining the rule of law. It is him and people like him who are enabling and encouraging the growth of racism and xenophobia.
Do not let them get away with it.
Challenge them at every opportunity.
Do not give up.
Another really worrying aspect is the overlap between Brexiters and the COVID19 deniers. It isn't 100% by any means, but enough to be concerned not just about our political and economic future, but literally about our very existence. I've no doubt that we will eventually got on top of this Pandemic, but we also need to learn from it, because there will be another one.
There is little sign though of any capacity to think rationally and logically in either the loudest Brexiters or the COVID19 deniers so the chances of any learning taking place are slim. (It occurs to me that the only Flat Earther I've ever come across in the wild was also a Brexiter...)
A final story.
Ten years after my father was nearly killed in Sicily he almost died again, seriously injured in an industrial accident that with hindsight was probably due to cutting corners by his employer. Leaving the EU also means leaving the umbrella of their worker protection and Health and Safety rules. Tories have already started demanding we cut back on them and on environmental standards.
Don't let them have their own way.
Past generations fought to get us here. We owe it to future generations to go forward, not back to some fantasy of the Empire.
Europe is dealing with its “second wave” of COVID-19. And governments seem powerless to stem the tide. Dutch political leaders find it difficult to convince their citizens to wear face masks. A large majority of French voters think that Emmanuel Macron’s government has handled the pandemic badly. And Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, is facing anger from all sides about the circumstances that led to a new English lockdown.
According to these leaders, the arrival of a second wave has nothing to do with their own policy failures, or poor communication. No, the numbers are rising because Europeans are freedom-loving people and it’s hard to make them follow rules. “It is very difficult to ask the British population, uniformly, to obey guidelines in the way that is necessary,” said Johnson for example, in response to criticism of his government’s testing policy. Similarly, in the Netherlands some were quick to attribute soaring infection rates to the fact that the Dutch are famously averse to being “patronised”.
The same explanation is often invoked to account for why Europe is doing significantly worse than countries in East Asia, where the disease seems more under control. According to some commentators, the authoritarian, top-down political culture of countries like China and Singapore makes it far easier to implement strict measures than in liberal Europe.
Singapore’s “effective crisis management”, for instance, was supposedly made possible by the fact that its government “has always wielded absolute control over the state, with an iron fist and a whip in it.” Conversely, many believe that a devotion to “individual liberty” doomed the west to its ongoing crisis.
A coronavirus screening centre in Singapore.EPA-EFE
Is this true? Is a poorly functioning government indeed the price that must be paid for freedom? If that is the case, then perhaps we had better give up on liberty. After all, anyone who is dead or seriously ill does not benefit much from being free.
Collective freedom
Fortunately, that’s a conclusion we needn’t draw. As history shows, freedom is quite compatible with effective government. Western political thinkers ranging from Herodotus to Algernon Sidney did not think that a free society is a society without rules, but that those rules should be decided collectively. In their view, freedom was a public good rather than a purely individual condition. A free people, Sidney wrote for instance, was a people living “under laws of their own making”.
Even philosophers such as John Locke, it is worth noting, agreed with this view. Locke is often portrayed as a thinker who believed that freedom coincided with individual rights, rights that should be protected at all costs against state interference. But Locke explicitly denied that freedom was harmed by government regulation – as long as those rules were made “with the consent of society”.
“Freedom then is not … a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any law,” he wrote in his famous Second Treatise. “But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it.”
It was only in the early 19th century that some began to reject this collective ideal in favour of a more individualistic conception of liberty.
A new liberty
In the wake of the French Revolution, democracy slowly expanded across Europe. But this was not universally welcomed. The extension of the right to vote, many feared, would give political power to the poor and uneducated, who would no doubt use it to make dumb decisions or to redistribute wealth.
Hence, liberal elites embarked on a campaign against democracy – and they did so in the name of freedom. Democracy, liberal thinkers ranging from Benjamin Constant to Herbert Spencer argued, was not the mainstay of liberty but a potential threat to freedom properly understood – the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods.
Throughout the 19th century, this liberal, individualistic conception of freedom continued to be contested by radical democrats and socialists alike. Suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst profoundly disagreed with Spencer’s view that the best way to protect liberty was to limit the sphere of government as much as possible. At the same time, socialist politicians such as Jean Jaurès claimed that they, and not the liberals, were the party of freedom, since socialism’s goal was “to organise the sovereignty of all in both the economic and political spheres”.
The ‘free’ West
Only after 1945 did the liberal concept of freedom prevail over the older, collective conception of freedom. In the context of cold war rivalry between the “free West” and the Soviet Union, distrust of state power grew - even democratic state power. In 1958, liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in a one-sided reading of the history of European political thought, stated that “Western” freedom was a purely “negative” concept. Every law, Berlin stated bluntly, had to be seen as an encroachment on freedom.
The cold war is of course since long over. Now that we are entering the third decade of the 21st century, we might want to dust off the older, collective concept of freedom. If the coronavirus crisis has made one thing clear, it is that collective threats such as a pandemic demand decisive, effective action from government.
This does not mean giving up our freedom in exchange for the protection of a nanny state. As Sidney and Locke remind us, as long as even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom.
