Britain is much closer to tyranny than you think. Consider a recent social post by Zia Yusuf, one of Reform UK’s leading figures. “Recent events demonstrate why I view the Tory and Labour politicians who created the burning injustice of modern Britain as traitors to their country,” he wrote. “A reckoning is coming.”
- +Not yet worried about tyranny in Britain? This is why you should be
- +Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
He didn’t define those “recent events”, or what his reckoning would entail, but historically speaking, those deemed “traitors to their country” do not fare well.
He didn’t define those “recent events”, or what his reckoning would entail, but historically speaking, those deemed “traitors to their country” do not fare well.
Perhaps British exceptionalism reassures you that authoritarianism could not happen here. Well, American exceptionalism once excluded the possibility of someone like Donald Trump becoming president, let alone dismantling US democracy at a speed “unprecedented in modern history”, as one recent report put it. In just over 16 months, Trump has concentrated power in the executive, hobbled the media, attacked voting rights, politicised the federal bureaucracy, weaponised the justice system against his opponents and deployed the National Guard to Democratic cities.
An authoritarian leader could go further and faster on British shores. We have no codified constitution, no first amendment-style protection of free speech, no state governments, no federal courts. Parliamentary sovereignty means that any party with a Commons majority faces precious few obstacles to its agenda. Our unelected second chamber can be neutralised with ease. Reform proposes replacing the House of Lords “with a much smaller, more democratic second chamber”, which sounds superficially appealing, except how it would be “more democratic” is intentionally left undefined. “Structure to be debated,” reads its 2024 manifesto.
Successive governments have already built an authoritarian edifice for Reform to occupy and extend. For decades, anti-protest laws and so-called “anti-terror” legislation have strangled democratic liberties. Keir Starmer’s government proscribed the anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, making mass arrests of people – many of them elderly – for holding placards in support. Witness, too, how pro-Palestinian leftwing commentators Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur have just been banned from entering Britain because, according to the Home Office, their presence in the UK “may not be conducive to the public good”.
Reform plans to leave the European court of human rights and to repeal the Human Rights Act, stripping away the legal protections against the state. It wants to create a British version of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US deportation force that seizes migrants from homes, workplaces and the streets. Here, it would operate with a far more centralised state. It would oversee a mass deportation programme targeting not just undocumented migrants, but those with indefinite leave to remain. Foreign nationals in social housing would be deported. “Our legislation will mean lawyers and judges will be powerless to stop any of it,” brags Yusuf. “Will be fun seeing the looks on the degenerate lawyers’ faces when they realise this.”
Reform would politicise the civil service, replacing its leaders “with successful professionals from the private sector, who are political appointees”, as it put it in 2024, while granting ministers the power to sack civil servants. The government would be granted direct powers over the police and would attack the independence of the judiciary, dressed up as a war on “activist judges”. Reform demands an end to “two-tier policing”, arguing without evidence that leftwing movements and minorities are treated with kid gloves while far-right rioters and “white British people” are persecuted.
What that means in practice is a Reform crackdown against the left and minorities. Reform is committed to banning pro-Palestinian protests, smearing them as “inciting hate and violence”. Expect the same rationale to be used against other protests – not least protests against Reform itself. Farage has demanded “Antifa” be proscribed as a “hate organisation”. No organisation called “Antifa” exists. It is simply a convenient catch-all term for leftwing dissent.
The scrapping of the Equality Act would trash core legal protections against discrimination. Farage declares that growing numbers of young Muslims do not share British values. It would be naive to believe that a ban on “all face coverings in public” and mass Muslim prayers near historic sites is as far as state-backed Islamophobia will go.
Yusuf threatened to defund Bangor University after its politics society declined a request by a Reform MP to speak. The party’s 2024 manifesto pledged to “cut funding to universities that undermine free speech”, a euphemism for institutions refusing to submit to hard-right politics. It will roll back voting rights, from restricting postal voting to removing voting rights from Commonwealth citizens, but don’t expect it to end there. Recall how Reform claimed it had lost the Gorton and Denton byelection because of “sectarian voting and cheating”, only for the police to find no evidence of it.
Britain would enter an authoritarian death spiral. People will inevitably fight against these intolerable assaults on democracy, and that resistance will be met with further crackdowns on civil liberties. Figures on the left would face imprisonment for pro-Palestinian activism, or for opposing British ICE raids, on the grounds of violent incitement. They will face difficult choices: stay and fight, or struggle from exile.
Do not expect a minority Farage government to be restrained by Kemi Badenoch’s Tories. They, too, support repealing the Human Rights Act, creating a British ICE, attacking the independence of the judiciary, banning protests. Across the west, the so-called centre-right has collapsed. The postwar cordon sanitaire – the principle that the hard right should be treated as illegitimate – has been breached. Witness how, in the US, few Republicans resisted Trumpism in the end. Our rightwing newspapers would cheer all this on. The BBC could be neutralised with ease, given that government controls its funding settlement, renews its royal charter and influences senior appointments.
The demise of British democracy is not dystopian science fiction. This isn’t scaremongering: it’s a rational assessment of the evidence. You have been warned.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
