We are not sleeping, though. As Ferdinand Mount notes in his 2012 polemic, The New Few: or A Very British Oligarchy — Power and Inequality in Britain Now, it is easy to amass numbers to join the National Trust or gather in defence of wildlife or climate. This remains true. But although we are alert, politically, we feel powerless.

How unusual to hear a plea for equality from the party of government — which, admittedly, was in coalition with the Liberal Democrats at the time of writing. But Mount — a journalist, a fine novelist, a former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit and a baronet — isn’t a garden-variety Tory. He has the wisdom to fear rampant inequality, and the destabilisation, and ennui, you find when it thrives. That is, he is a real One Nation Tory. Boris Johnson now uses the phrase as if he found it in a corner and picked it up, so we cannot yet know if he means it. I hope he does. I think he doesn’t.

suggested reading

The Tories should have listened to Jesse Norman

By James Kirkup

Mount, born in 1939, has watched the Britain he knew ebb away. The institutions of liberal democracy he describes are still present, looking much as they always did: parliament, the cabinet, the judiciary, local government, the BBC. But we sense a poisoning. We smell it in the air; Mount would agree. As he points out, we are trapped within an oligarchy which, like ivy, “will cling to any support; and when you cut it back it keeps on growing again”. But not a particularly functional one. It wasn’t when he was writing, and it is worse now. Inequality has destabilised it, and a competent oligarchy would never allow that. It is, rather, a rotting oligarchy.

How did it happen? In the book, Mount stares at the lie printed on a Scottish £10 note, promising to pay the bearer on demand, and he marvels at how the banking oligarchs merged themselves with dud banks to cause a global crisis for something as dull as greed. There is no conspiracy here to charm Leftists. It is sadder than that: it was incompetence, and hubris.

Mount mourns the death of localism: the decline of local councils, which had vast power before central government stole it for a management class that did not even know why they wanted it. Everywhere oligarchy seeks to centralise: “the Health Minister wants to close the cottage hospital. The bishop wants to close the little churches. The official pressure continues to work against the local and against the human scale.”

Mount mourns the seaside conferences where political parties made policy, chose their candidates and terrorised their leaders into compliance with their wishes. In its heyday, he writes, “Labour MPs were usually penned in an enclosure to the right of the platform looking like defendants in a Communist show trial”.

Suggested Reading

How Lefty luvvies lost the plot

By Gareth Roberts

Now they are pictures for broadcast news and, because we know this, membership of political parties is in its death throes. Labour may boast of its almost 500,000 members, but it is applauding its own decline. The party had almost six and a half million members in 1965, a fact which, when I repeated it on Twitter, people simply refused to believe; we cannot remember a time when we had control of our leadership. Cabinet government, Mount continues on, is a nonsense, the civil service has declined and parliament, without its control of time, is “a fig leaf, a rubber stamp, a ghost of past glories”.

The media will not stop it. The media does not even cover Parliament anymore, unless there is a crisis and then we are too late, reporting only on the wreckage. The BBC is sinking under its own oligarchical tendencies; so is the Labour Party. It is now, and this is funny, an oligarchy.

What political figure will triumph when parliament is vestigial? Mount is writing in 2012, but he guesses right: the charismatic. “Now would-be-personalities must make their mark on Question Time or Have I Got News for You. The lion comique of these arenas is Mr Boris Johnson, and it was through his mastery of them that he rose effortlessly to become Mayor of London, not for anything he did or said in the House of Commons, for he did and said very little there.”

Suggested Reading

2019: the year the West wised up to China

By John Gray

We have, it is true, rejected one set of oligarchs since The New Few was published: the oligarchs of the European Union. Mount makes no judgment on the EU, for it is not his way. He is, to the Twitter generation, a very strange journalist: deft, subtle and self-effacing. But he offers up Europe as another convincing argument for our feelings of powerlessness. He is potentially optimistic; if we can reject one set of oligarchs, we can reject another. But I wonder if our oligarchs threw out European oligarchs to gather more power to themselves. You could call it the revenge of the local, since the UK is now the local.

But I am not optimistic. One truth frightens me particularly. The Prime Minister is no longer, as Mount notes back then, primus inter pares: first among equals. If he has a large majority, and is clever, Parliament is not his conscience but his instrument; and his activists, disgusted at their inability to choose their own leaders and policies, left for the National Trust long ago. There is nothing to suggest that oligarchy is anything other than ascendant.

It is not a happy book, then; for me, it captures the essence of a miserable decade. But it is consoling to see the decline of liberal democracy noted so carefully, and in rare prose, by a respectable Tory of the kind that is, like his world, almost extinct.

Middle-class used to be about having some disposable income after you had paid basic bills, including rent and food. But in the current circumstances, the term is so heavily blurred by the many and varied attacks on its members that it can mean any group that the writer dislikes. Here is an example of the kind of attack to which I refer. It happens to come from The Daily Telegraph:

“They [Remain supporters] are discombobulated by the fact that those who make £30,000 a year selling double glazing technically belong to the same sect as those who make £30,000 editing poetry books; and that Oxford graduates are theoretically condemned to the same social strata as those brandishing a degree from Oxford Brookes.”

The fundamental argument is that only snobbery can lead to a different political decision regarding membership of the EU. We also learn that “Many voted Brexit precisely to disorientate and dislodge the old elites and to allow ordinary people a greater democratic say and real democratic clout.”

If I were to ask the writer who the old elites are, I would probably sound like one of them; indeed, Remain insistence on detailed reasons to Leave has become itself a sign of entitlement, as has any wish to stage a debate. Such friendly non-elite folk as the TV historian David Starkey lambast ‘the Establishment’ — of which he is not a member, apparently — as treasonous for negotiating on behalf of the EU.

Suggested reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

And it’s not just the Right. On the Left, The Canary is home to thousands of attacks on the elitism, centrism and middlingness of the BBC, like this one:

“During BBC Question Time on 12 September, host Fiona Bruce’s mask slipped for one revealing moment… it demonstrated a light-hearted, good-natured playfulness between the BBC host and her Conservative minister panellist.”

They are all in it together. Like many articles on the Canary site, the piece is mostly composed of tweets by Labour politicians and Labour Party members. The Right dislike the BBC too, and for the same reason:

“Andrew Neil… has complained that the corporation’s comedy output is too left wing… self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged left-wing propaganda.”

Many who have attempted to analyse the reason for the divisions in developed economies have blamed the middle classes. For instance, David Goodhart’s analysis of the Brexit vote as a conflict between the somewheres and the anywheres insists that the anywheres are part of a techno-elite equally happy in any city — rather like the urban elite defined by Christophe Guilluy in his analysis of the gilets jaunes. Guilluy writes that “a new bourgeoisie, secure in its gentrified redoubts” has left behind the ordinary citizen. He also uses the term bobo — bohemian bourgeois — coined by David Brooks in 2000.

Among synonyms for bobo, Wikipedia lists champagne socialist, hipster, liberal elite, and metropolitan elite. All are terms of abuse rather than analysis, so it is unclear who Guilluy means. And then comes the slippage: Guilluy uses the phrase “the upper class” as though it meant the same as the bobo class and the new bourgeoisie, since all of them, according to him, see globalisation as an opportunity; then in another paragraph, these individuals have become “executives” and then “the corporate upper-class”, growing richer at the expense of an unidentified majority. They are “the wealthiest”.

It is this slippage – from bourgeois to elite to establishment to globalisation – that has become fundamental to the populist policies of the Trump and Johnson regimes, and also of their opponents on the far left. But the whole structure relies on the unexamined conflation of the CEO of, say, Uber (who makes $6.4 million a year) with a head teacher or a systems analyst. While the former could be understood in good old-fashioned Marxist terms as taking more than a fair share, the others are just as dependent on a salary of dwindling value as any policeman or ambulance driver. Hollowing out the middle as a repeated rhetorical move is the reason that the politics of both Left and Right are becoming ever more extreme, and ever more resistant to even the suggestion of compromise. Compromise is now repeatedly represented as betrayal; differences of opinion are figured as treachery.

The many are now committed to the removal of the institutions that promote the cause of “the elite”. Such institutions are resisting the will of the people, resisting their rights. It follows that “the people” is a category that excludes members of “the elite”; judges, civil servants, students, parliamentarians, and academics are not “the people” and nor are they part of “the many”. Instead, they are part of the few. This group of non-persons may now include in some contexts doctors, lawyers, and anybody in the arts.

Suggested reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

It is worth reminding ourselves that at least these groups are not actually disappearing, or not yet, but they did disappear in Ukraine in the 1920s, in Poland in late 1939, in Chile in the 1980s. But that literal disappearance was preceded by a figurative blanking, a series of routine attacks on the prestige and credibility of the organisations they represented.

Unfortunate, too, is the assumption that working for a globalised company makes you an enthusiast for globalisation and therefore non-aligned to a country or land. Ironically, Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentary general Henry Ireton argued exactly that about everybody who was not rich enough for the then strenuous franchise test for the House of Commons: that they did not have a stake in the country and could move abroad if the laws became displeasing or disadvantageous.

Obviously, this is conceptually completely cracked when contemplating Cromwell and Ireton’s agricultural labourer contemporaries. But it is really just as ridiculous when contemplating the average lawyer — or teacher or doctor for that matter.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By DARREN 'LOKI' MCGARVEY

Historians usually say, glibly, that liberal democracy requires the middle classes to survive, and it is well understood that their economic destruction through the hyperinflation experienced in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was one of the reasons for the rise of fascism. In Britain, the middle classes have not had to face this level of economic woe – yet; the collapsing pound and stalling of the property market are not the brightest of signs.

There has, however, been an equal loss of cultural capital, and soft power. The populist consensus across the Conservative party relies heavily on the fact that nobody thinks of themselves as an oligarch, and everybody can be relied on to see themselves as clinging on precariously. One reason for that, of course, is the tireless efforts of the press to stir dread, including fear of weather events and of rising knife crime. One of the deepest ironies of the referendum campaign was these same newspapers use of the phrase “project fear” to describe the political tactics of their opponents.

In exactly these ways, the many genuine threats to middle-class well-being and security can be further deployed against them. One characteristic form of this is the ironic pity piece in which some unfortunate professional working couple are lured into describing how difficult it is to live on £120,000 a year, so that they can be jeered at by those struggling on far less. It’s a modern pillory.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Successive attacks on the middle classes are attacks on representative democracy itself. The current government stance on Parliament and politicians is not very different from Jeremy Corbyn’s contempt for Blairites. Judges are traitors. Lawyers are liars. Scientists fake results. Academics have all caved cravenly to social justice warriors. Objectivity is so impossible to imagine that one of the words we use to describe it — disinterested — has all but disappeared except as a synonym for boredom. These circumstances have created the opportunity for the political chaos we have now seen. If we want to survive it, we need to make sure that the centre can hold.

I propose an alternative definition of middle-class that should prevent the misuses and disavowals we see in the public sphere: those who pay income tax. Fewer than three-fifths of the adult population have high enough incomes to pay any income tax at all. I also propose an alternative definition of upper-middle-class: those who pay higher rate tax, around 15% in 2017. I propose this because it’s free from ideological freight.

If we can keep a more clear-sighted view of the income of the groups under discussion, then perhaps we have a chance of inoculating ourselves against the more specious claims and counter-claims of our modern populists.

Undoubtedly, there has been Russian meddling in democratic elections and Chinese economic pressure – but neither of these can explain the scale and depth of popular discontent. In fact, our age of anger has its origins in the moral bankruptcy afflicting economic liberalism, and the rapid cultural change brought about by social liberalism. Establishment parties seem to be struggling to understand this.

Worse, though, is their failure to recognise why liberal democracy is under strain from within. Since Antiquity, philosophers from Plato via Aristotle to Cicero have warned against the slide of democracy into autocracy. Today this warning applies to liberalism and the way it unleashes democracy’s demons – oligarchy, demagogy, anarchy and tyranny.

Further reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

Liberals today, instead of defending open markets, promote existing cartels and new monopolies. As a result, more than a decade after the financial crash, the banking behemoths that rule global finance are still ‘too big to fail’. Our everyday economy is dominated by the Frightful Five – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. By controlling access to information, these tech monopolies restrict not just economic competition but also free speech. Their plutocratic power undermines both open markets and democratic debate.

In turn, this oligarchic control reinforces the drift towards demagogic politics, as both establishment liberals and populist insurgents exploit popular fears about economic and cultural insecurity. Democracy is, as a result, caught between technocratic facts and the ‘post-truth’ of anti-elite challengers. Neither upholds common sense and what George Orwell called ‘common decency’, including respect for political opponents. Instead, they demonise each other and practise a politics of ideological purity and the closing down of robust yet civilised debate.

The demons of oligarchy and demagogy reinforce anarchy, in the sense of social fragmentation, and as a result societies are increasingly balkanised. The social capital involved in interpersonal trust and cooperation has declined significantly. Civic ties are weaker just when public trust in our main public institutions is substantially lower. Loneliness has escalated from personal misfortune into a social epidemic with around 9 million people in Britain being socially isolated. All this feeds a strong sense of powerlessness.

Oligarchy, demagogy and anarchy also exacerbate what Alexis de Tocqueville called in Democracy in America the ‘tyranny of voluntary servitude’ – a “kind of servitude, ordered, mild and peaceable, a singular power, tutelary, all-encompassing”. This applies to the surveillance capitalism of the tech monopolies, which extract data from their users and use it to manipulate their behaviour for maximum profit. In the name of choice and emancipation, personal autonomy is usurped by permanent monitoring and free will is subverted. We voluntarily hand over our humanity without realising it.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

But these three irrepressible demons of liberal democracy can be tamed. The alternative to an ever-greater oligarchic concentration of wealth and power is not simply better regulation but a much more fundamental change of ownership to transform the rentier economy that extracts excessive profits, as with the tech platforms.

The radical move would be to downsize incumbents by breaking them up and introducing limits on ownership concentration – not simply send them off with a  fine. Anti-monopoly regulators in the US and Europe should force monopolies to spin off recently acquired business lines, so that there is a structural separation of the core business from new activities.

Facebook would have to sell off its acquired image and messaging services Instagram and WhatsApp. Google should relinquish ownership of YouTube that provides a rich data mine with end-to-end control, from email via web browsing to operating systems and advertising platforms such as Chrome or Android. And Amazon should be compelled to separate its e-commerce platform from its offline retail operation.

Further reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

Those who object on grounds of market freedom have to be reminded that it is the ‘robber barons’ who replace open and competitive markets with closed corporate monopolies. There is a noble tradition of enforcing anti-trust laws, as with Theodore Roosevelt deciding to smash the monopoly of Standard Oil in 1911, and it needs to be renewed. Politicians and regulators should hold Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to his word: “Move fast and break things.”

Splitting up the tech platforms is also an important element in tackling the demon of demagogy. Facebook and Google have to be treated as media corporations and subject to the same rules and regulations. The regulators should be given powers to hand out fines to all new media found to produce or distribute bogus stories in an attempt to attract attention and advertising. That includes those click-hungry mainstream media outlets which persistently feature falsehoods by embedding links to lies on their websites. Printing insincere apologies on page 19 will not do.

Persistent misinformation in all media should lead to the loss of their legal licence. Where individuals or groups are explicitly targeted, the ‘right to reply’ should be extended in a spirit of free yet fair argument.

The fundamental task for both media and politics is to nurture a commitment to truthfulness that can once again inspire popular trust. What is required is a new ethos in public discourse. This would involve informal norms such as the defence of robust debate, viewing your opponents as legitimate instead of demonising them as ‘traitors’, and a joint concern for mutual flourishing rather than merely personal advancement at the expense of others. Without such a shared ethos and some common norms liberal democracy will continue its slide into the anarchy of social fragmentation.

Further reading

Can bribery fix democracy?

By Peter Kellner

To rebuild civic ties, a genuine democracy needs to pluralise the state, not just by devolving political authority and central bureaucracy to lower levels according to the principle of subsidiarity. It also has to encompass a much greater participation of groups and associations in the public sector.

For example, associations could provide a wide range of public services by forming cooperatives and mutuals that use state funding to deliver education, health care or welfare. By contrast with free-market managerialism or bureaucratic statism, such associations would focus on members – funders such as local government, but especially workers and users.

Moreover, the pluralisation of the state can extend to utilities by establishing public-interest and community-interest companies. Like cooperatives or employee-owned businesses, such companies operate on the basis of mutualist principles that involve in their governance owners, workers and users. Public- or community-interest companies pursue not just private profit but also a social purpose by reinvesting their profits in the business and in the community instead of simply enriching the top management or institutional shareholders. The building of an associative democracy is an alternative to oligarchy and anarchy.

Further reading

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

Taming democracy’s demons is especially urgent at a time when both liberal elites and anti-establishment insurgents are undermining parliamentary democracy and are silent about what binds people together as members of national communities. Both polarise politics just when democracy needs a transcendent conversation about how, in a context of plural values, we can forge a common life.

This will require far more than restating liberal democracy’s founding values of liberty and equality or delivering on the promise of prosperity and peace. Rather, democracy requires a renewed civic covenant – what Edmund Burke called “partnership … not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

This emphasis on covenantal ties among generations can help us address the growing economic injustice between young and old today. Society is not a contract of individuals but a partnership between the generations that balances individual rights with mutual obligations and contributions with rewards. Without a commitment to civic covenant, democracy will continue to disintegrate.

Adrian Pabst is the author of The Demons of Liberal Democracy

The first, is a story framed around democratic values and the electoral rise of parties that appear to threaten those values because they repudiate the democratic ideal of equality between citizens. In practice, of course, democracies never realise such an ideal even in regard to voting, since they invariably restrict the franchise by age and for prisoners. But as this ideal has come to dominate much of the discourse of democracy, democrats can no longer make arguments for other exclusions to the franchise, or to anyone’s legally protected rights.

Neither can they overtly deny the equality of citizens by privileging the historical, cultural or ethnic identity of any group of them over any others. Consequently, parties that explicitly and unreservedly reject multiculturalism – such as Lega in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands –make themselves parties in conflict with democratic values. (In this story, multiculturalism has become essential to liberalism, which is essential to democracy.)

The strongest manifestation of such an attack on democratic values is the Fidesz government in Hungary led by Viktor Orbán, which having now been in power for eight years has systematically deployed anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric as a central electoral strategy, and acted against any manifestations of multiculturalism in practice.

Suggested reading

Are centrists a threat to democracy?

By Peter Franklin

Orbán’s government also appears to threaten the conditions of a liberal democracy by running roughshod over freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, the separation of government and the party in campaign expenditure, as well as by effectively ending the existence of the Central European University in Budapest. In doing so, Orbán appears to treat democracy as a means, through its majoritarian features, to other ends, not least the consolidation of personal power.

Seen from Orbán’s vantage point, however, his disruption is not to democracy, but to liberalism. For Orbán, he is a democrat, and the difference between him and his critics elsewhere in Europe is they are liberal democrats and he is a Christian democrat. His idea of democracy rests not on equality but the representation of the people in government and the assumption that the people can be equated with the cultural and religious majority. He wants to claim the heritage of Christianity and he is unashamed in repudiating the ideals of liberalism that he presents as unable to accommodate the realities of human experience around faith, tradition and family.

However much Orbán’s speeches on the subject of democracy are self-serving, including of his own material interests, they also pose awkward political questions for the future of democracies. In this case, the question of where liberal democracy constituted by a set of values can sit in relation to the traditions of Christianity in Europe is far from clear. If liberalism and democracy must indeed go together, then democracy and Christianity can certainly become uneasy bedfellows, as evidenced in the historical clash in Europe between liberalism and the Roman Catholic church (even as in a number of ways liberalism was parasitic on ideas within Christianity about the dignity of the individual).

Suggested reading

To save democracy, we must disrupt it

By Carl Miller

Yet the clash is far from inevitable. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote one of the most powerful statements that democracy was ultimately a value claim about the equality of citizens, was a Catholic who believed that democracy was the working of Providence and that to try to halt it was a futile endeavour to fight God.

After the Second World War, the Christian Democrats, who became the primary party of the centre-right in a number of  countries where Catholicism was historically strong, reconciled Christianity to democracy by stressing the importance of both the individual and European historical communities and the ability of the state to protect both. Indeed, this is the political lineage that Orbán, although Protestant, in part wants to claim. It is also one of the reasons why Fidesz has been able to maintain its presence in the European People’s Party, which was formed largely by Christian Democratic parties in the 1970s, despite Orbán’s violations of liberal values.

The second story that has emerged about the vulnerability of democracy in Europe is primarily about the way in which the European Union, and the Eurozone in particular, negates representative democracy as a form of government because of an unresponsiveness to elections.

In part, this is a matter of who takes authoritative decisions about economic policy. In recent years, the European Central Bank (ECB) has not only decided monetary policy, it has also decided which states’ debt to support with asset purchases under first the Securities and Market Programme and then Quantitative Easing.

Suggested reading

How the Eurozone could avert disaster

By Peter Franklin

The ECB’s unwillingness, in the autumn of 2011, to continue buying Italian bonds after the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, reneged on delivering the legislation that the outgoing and ingoing ECB Presidents, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, had ordered him to pass, led to the end of Berlusconi’s premiership and the appointment of a technocratic cabinet. Less dramatically, but no less significantly in terms of democratic politics, Trichet and Draghi also gave a deadline to a lame-duck Spanish government to pass legislation for which it had already failed to win parliamentary support.

In a state like Italy, which depends on the ECB to support its borrowing in financial markets, having elected politicians in leading positions in the executive has become a risk. Italy has not had an elected finance minister since the demise of the Berlusconi government and now, even with a government formed by a coalition of the two insurgent parties, the Five-Star movement and Lega, it has a law professor as Prime Minister.

Whether the Italian government can prevail over the Commission in the stand-off over the size of Italy’s planned budget deficit will depend as much as anything else on how the financial markets assess the willingness of the ECB to find ways to support Italy’s debt when it ends QE purchases from December.

Suggested reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

The democratic problem that arises from the Euro is compounded by the place of treaties in the political order of the EU. The treaties work as the constitution of the EU but they contain more than a set of constitutional rules about how power is to be distributed and decisions taken. They stipulate rules about substantive matters from the macro-economic commitments that Eurozone states must uphold to border controls and access to labour markets within the EU.

These were issues that once could be contested within democratic politics and now cannot be. The constitutional rules around them are also extraordinarily difficult to change, given that every member state has to consent to a treaty revision. From the time of Maastricht, treaty ratification became increasingly subject to a national referendum in a number of member-states, reflecting a recognition that significant constitutional change risks being disruptive without clear democratic legitimation. But, paradoxically, the growing use of referendums on these treaties only ultimately served to make treaty change more difficult because governments failed on a number of occasions to win support for ratification.

The historical relationship between the political idea of nationhood and democracy in Europe runs through both of these pessimistic stories about the state of democracy. Representative democracies emerged in Europe around nation-states where the authority of the state was legitimated by the idea that it was the representative of the imaginative political community of the nation.

Suggested reading

Europe 2025: how populism saved democracy

By John O'Sullivan

Under present political conditions, nationhood has become, however, a problem for democracy because to some observers it appears to negate the value of equality in multi-cultural societies, even though there is no necessary reason why a political claim to shared nationhood cannot accommodate significant cultural differences. Yet, despite this attack on the language of nationhood, no political substitute for delineating the people who choose representatives in a democracy has been established. Nor has there materialised a politically serviceable conception of a European people – who have never been asked in any collective capacity to elect representatives.

Democracy is much more difficult in practice than is often supposed. If it is not to risk being tyrannical, then it needs to be checked by some liberalism either in its institutional configuration or its citizens’ values, even as liberalism is a contested and historically contingent set of commitments.

If it is not to be simply a rhetoric by which an elite, formed by technocratic accreditation or wealth, justify their power, then elections need to allow the possibility of some meaningful political change. And if it is going to exist at all, there needs to be sufficient commonality of political identity among citizens to accept that they should choose representatives collectively and can be on the losing side of elections without recourse to rebellion. The difficulty for democracy in Europe is there are reasons to worry that there are too many places, including the European Union itself, where at least one of these political conditions is not in evidence.

For the far Left, it is the free market system itself that has created this existential crisis. If ‘Capitalism is killing the planet’, as the placards at radical eco-protests proclaim, then what other choice is there but to overthrow the system?

Yet to believe that anti-capitalism offers a panacea for climate change is to ignore twentieth century history. The destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union was unparalleled in Western democracies. By the time of its collapse, 40% of Soviet citizens lived in areas where air pollutants were three to four times the maximum allowable levels, nearly half of the children in Leningrad (St Petersburg) were suffering from intestinal disorders caused by drinking contaminated water, and a fifth of the population lived in ecological disaster areas.

Further reading

Blazing Arizona: why adapting to climate change is deeply immoral

By Peter Franklin

The market may not guarantee an optimum allocation of resources, but the price mechanism is essential in determining resource scarcity. No bureaucrat or communist idealist – whether Stalinist or Libertarian – has yet found a way to replicate this function.

This does not mean the state has no role to play in encouraging better choices (more on that later), but knowledge about resource availability is fragmented and fluid, and is not something that can be slotted neatly into a government database.

The existence of private property can also act as a bulwark against the destruction of the environment (though it by no means guarantees it). When nobody owns something – a plot of land, say, or a forest – it tends to fall into disrepair or be exploited to destruction.

All of which disproves the idea that capitalism is the root of the climate change problem – the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the radical environmentalists is the equivalent of standing atop a sand dune and grandiloquently declaring ‘If I were king’.

It is also a myth to think that liberal democratic countries are a bigger obstacle to climate action than autocracies. So far, democracies have taken a stronger stand in climate change mitigation than non-democratic regimes. The only exception is in democratic states where corruption is high.

Suggested reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

The problem, then, is not liberal democracy, but liberal individualism. In a finite world, the demands of 7.7 billion people for a comfortable life will inevitably crash up against the planet’s limitations, whatever the economic system. In the face of a rapidly warming planet, liberal individualism is unsustainable. In Patrick Deneen’s words, it “undermines the virtues and cultural norms needed to enable humans to live together in harmony”.

Deneen is a Right-wing Catholic thinker who rejects many of the freedoms that liberals should defend (like gay marriage), but when applied to untrammelled markets, rather than to cultural questions, his argument stands. Without common forms of life there can be no freedom for the individual, and catastrophic climate change – prompting huge migrations of people and the potential submergence of great cities such as London under water – poses an obvious threat to this common life.

There is, therefore, something to be said for critiques of neo-liberal capitalism – even if calls on the far-Left to reject capitalism in toto and replace it with central planning are misguided. In Naomi Klein’s 2014 book on climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, she writes:

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.”

This is a pertinent critique of a particular strain of capitalism, rather than capitalism itself. As the Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott has written, the struggle to combat climate change “brings out the best and worst of capitalism”. It is because of capitalism, and the market incentives it creates, that great strides have been made in developing clean alternatives to dirty fuels such as oil, coal and gas. It is now cheaper to produce solar and wind energy than most fossil fuels.

Further reading

$10 a barrel for oil? The age of the electric car is closer than you think

By Michael Liebreich

The problem is when a particularly polluting resource is abundant, which is true of oil and gas. A decade ago peak oil theory was fashionable. It claimed that because oil was a finite resource demand would soon overtake supply, leading to the terminal decline of the industry in the foreseeable future.

The flaw in the theory is that new technologies are constantly being developed to extract resources from untapped sources, be it shale or mining deeper wells – also driven by capitalist incentives. Peak oil may become a reality one day, but we still have enough oil and gas to fry the planet many times over.

And that is why expecting the market alone to solve global warming is as much a mistake as believing that an end to markets will solve it. As long as fossil fuels remain relatively abundant they will be cheap enough to use profligately. Some government intervention is needed to change consumer behaviour. This is perfectly compatible with capitalism: the state shapes the context in which markets can operate, from defending property rights to regulating to protect consumers. But over recent decades we have become reluctant to use the state to defend the rights of the commons – that needs to change.

More from this author

Camus' rejection of tyranny is worth remembering today

By James Bloodworth

A practical example of this would be getting rid of internal flights in Britain. Few of these flights are essential – it takes around half an hour longer to get to Manchester from London by train than it does to get there by plane. And this doesn’t include the extra hour it takes to pass through airport security. Yet the cost of train travel in Britain is so exorbitantly expensive – and trains are so unreliable and uncomfortable – that people regularly choose to fly.

The unwillingness of the state to restrict the use of inefficient and environmentally damaging transport brings us back to the belief in liberal individualism: that a person should be free to travel how he or she pleases, regardless of the consequences.

On climate change, as with much else, the public good is not always synonymous with the interests of private, wealthy individuals. Indeed, the two are often opposed. Yet it needn’t take any large-scale coercion to reconcile these competing interests, just a greater willingness on the part of the state to move people towards sustainable choices.

Our politicians appear to re-learning this lesson, albeit slowly. Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to intervene in “broken markets”, and the 2017 Conservative Party manifesto rejected what it termed the “cult of selfish individualism”. However we still have some way to go: which politician will call for a ban on private motor cars within our congested cities, as Peter Franklin asked on UnHerd last week? No prospective candidate for the mayoral seat in London – ranked as one of the world’s worst commuter cities – has yet dared propose the idea.

Further reading

Who'll have the guts to ban cars from our cities?

By Peter Franklin

As climate change ramps up, we can expect massive price-hikes for basic foodstuffs due to crop failures and severe flooding in coastal areas. As it prompts waves of migration from draught-stricken parts of the world, social tensions are likely to increase as populists stir up resentment against newcomers. The resulting tide of national chauvinism risks unravelling the social fabric that makes a country like Britain worth living in. There is still time to ward off the worst-case climate scenario, but as the IPCC put it, it will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.

Those who have traditionally resisted the state taking any action at all to moderate human behaviour – typically in the name of classical liberal ideology – thus face a paradoxical choice: accept that liberal individualism means death for the common life, or acquiesce in the destruction of the very freedoms they purport to be defending.