SUNDAY, 10 AUGUST 2025

The UK government has just passed the Online Safety Act, a law requiring everyone who wants to access any internet site that contains ‘adult material’ to register by showing a form of ID such as their passport or credit card details to prove that they are eighteen, or to allow the site to take a digital photo. ‘Adult material’ does not refer only to pornographic sites, as one might imagine, but also includes platforms like Wikipedia, Spotify and Reddit. Governments have two favourite spurious reasons for taking repressive measures against their own people: ‘national security’ and ‘what about the children?’ The UK government are predictably arguing the latter since they are whipping up a moral panic about online dangers to children: anyone who is against the Act is ‘on the side of predators’ according to a government minister. In reality, however, this Act makes children less safe because they will get around this legislation by using free VPNs which are much less secure, or go to Tor, which, according to the experts I have read who seem to know their stuff, increases their chances of ending up on the Dark Web. If the UK government bans VPNs, as they have ludicrously suggested they might, there are other ways for savvy teenagers to get around such restrictions, as I know from teaching students who live in countries where VPNs are officially illegal and yet people use them all the time.

So this legislation probably won’t do anything to prevent young people being exposed to harmful material, but, conveniently for the UK government, it will help the authorities gain access to personal details of their citizens so that they know what we are reading and thinking and saying online. Let’s not pretend that this won’t happen because there will be safeguards to prevent it; firstly because this is the thin end of a wedge that will surely follow, and secondly because we must rid ourselves of the naive belief that governments see themselves as representatives and servants of their people: the truth is that governments of all stripes see their own citizens as, at best, ungrateful children, and, at worst, a potential threat to their authority. I know I’m sounding like a deranged libertarian stocking up his bunker in Montana, but I have a lot of respect for genuine libertarians: the problem is that many people who label themselves ‘libertarians’ in reality want free speech only for themselves and people who think the same as them and would be even more draconian in power than the current UK regime. But I can see the virtues of a true libertarianism which believes in the open marketplace of ideas, even if I dislike the consumerist metaphor.

I have opened this essay with this latest example of a western government plotting to spy on its own citizens because it is symptomatic of what is happening throughout the western world, from the US to Hungary, from Italy to Brazil, from Australia to Slovakia. Governments have wanted to police the internet ever since its inception because it threatens their power and authority, and now, as the whole globe lurches towards despotism, they have become emboldened and are taking the first steps towards making sure that there will no longer be anonymity on the net, and the real aim is not to ‘protect the children’ but to identify people who have what they consider to be undesirable political views. I could have chosen any number of examples: the US, for example, where the immigration authorities are demanding to see the online content of people entering the country and are refusing entry to, or even deporting, anybody who has criticised the current US regime, and where masked ICE officers are arresting citizens on the street and placing them without due process into detention centres (aka concentration camps). The world is entering very dark days indeed.

Is what we are seeing the beginning of the end of modern western democracy? Was Plato right to argue in The Republic that democracy will always lead to demagoguery and tyranny? Are those of us currently living in the west the last generation who will enjoy democratic rights? I’m aware that this may sound alarmist, but history has examples of countries which slid rapidly from democracy to totalitarianism, so ‘it can’t happen here’ seems hopelessly naive. Also, this is a global movement and not limited to a few banana republics, with the most powerful country in the world fully onboard and even leading the hunt for the enemy within. Does this recent rush towards absolutism mark the end of our freedoms or are people like me just scaremongering?

If I state that democracy is at threat, I should first say what I think democracy is. The obvious answer is that it is the right for all citizens to vote in free and fair elections, but this is woefully simplistic. I lived for two years in a country, Singapore, which regularly holds such elections but is effectively a one-party state. Those of us from the west might see this as deplorable and argue that there is no real freedom there, but in reality Singapore functions extremely well as a country. I personally found it intellectually stultifying, at least in terms of what was allowed in public discourse, but people seemed quite satisfied with their government as far as I could tell, certainly more supportive of it than the populace in Europe or America. People who think ‘the west is the best’ will say these people are brainwashed. But for me this is arrogance, an unthinking assumption that our system and our culture is inherently superior to one based on Confucian principles.

I recognise that many people will see my last sentence as ‘woke’, a symptom of the postmodernist west’s lack of confidence in its Greek roots. Western democracy, they argue, is based on the rights of the individual to personal freedom from the dictates of the state, and is therefore hugely desirable. As a westerner, it’s hardly surprising that at heart I largely share this view, and I certainly wouldn’t wish to live in a more collectivist culture if only because I tend to find them deeply boring. But I want to acknowledge that there are alternative ways of creating a stable society and that a society based on the rights of the individual may not necessarily have better outcomes than one which focuses on the good of the people as a whole. And even if we believe that our way is superior, and agree with Churchill’s famous saying that ‘democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried’, we have to justify this belief through reasoning and evidence, not simply adopt it as an unexamined assumption. So I’m not willing to say that western democracy is always superior; whatever the culture and system, the goal should be a society where all are valued, which seems miles away from where the west is heading right now.

I think that the problem with the west’s focus on the atomised individual is that, as Plato argued, when belief in this collapses it inexorably leads to its opposite, some form of tyranny or fascism: there is little collective consensus to glue a nation together and help it overcome such inevitable periods of challenge. So I personally don’t believe that the 20^th century, with its goose-stepping and its concentration camps and its murder of millions, was an anomaly which will never be repeated. Nor do I think the fact that similar atrocities occurred in Asian countries like China and Cambodia necessarily disproves this because in these cases a model based on a western idea (Marxism) was imposed as a foreign concept on a population in an attempt to replace its traditional social and political structures. It couldn’t, of course: it takes more than a change in official ideology to turn the tanker of culture around.

A cursory glance at the Wikipedia entry on democracy makes clear that what is often seen as a simple concept (the right to vote) is actually a complex web of overlapping ideas. To cover just a couple of them here, there is first the division between constitutional democracies, where there is a written constitution that in theory defines and protects that democracy against power grabs by extremist malcontents while safeguarding the rights of minorities, and the system in other countries, such as the UK, where there is no such official written statement of basic citizen rights, and which are arguably more flexible as a result. Then there is the split between representative democracy, as in the UK and the US where individuals are voted into office to represent their electorate, and direct democracy where major changes are subject to referendums of the populace. There was once a general belief that modern technology would lead to more openness and an increase in referendums but this has not happened, as the furtive introduction of the latest phase of the Online Safety Act demonstrates: open government is, if anything, farther away than ever as administrations hire PR experts to help them conceal and camouflage what they are doing. And both representative and direct systems have weaknesses: corruption in the case of the former and the threat of populism and demagoguery and control by the mass media in the latter.  

One thing which almost all political thinkers agree on is that the separation of powers, with its roots in Locke but associated most with Montesquieu, is essential to a thriving society. This divides the powers of the administration into the legislature (which makes the laws), the executive (which executes the laws) and the judiciary (which interprets the laws), and is careful to ensure that there is no concentration of power in any single place, because as the famous saying goes, (attributed to Lord Acton), ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. However, the reality is that this is ultimately a convention which is dependent on the goodwill of political actors, and, as Trump has shown by his willingness to ignore the courts, if a country’s political leader is brazen enough to tough it out, there is little real protection against autocracy. The press and the media (the ‘fourth estate’) can theoretically act as correctives, but, as Turkey under Erdogan shows, it’s the easiest thing in the world to throw awkward investigative journalists into jail.

More generally, democracy depends on an acceptance by all parties concerned that the result of an election is sacrosanct and must be honoured. Probably the most worrying feature of some recent political events is that there are now not merely individuals like Bolsonaro and Trump who refuse to do this (power-hungry autocrats will always exist and any successful political system must be able to contain them), but entire political parties who are happy to go down this route if it keeps them in power. Perhaps democracy’s crucial, fundamental weakness is that a neo-fascist party only needs to win an election once, after which it can cancel future elections. My apologies for proving Godwin’s Law, but this is what the Nazis did in 1930s Germany (and anyone who doesn’t think the same thing may happen in the US if the Republicans are doing badly in the polls in 2028 has drunk the Kool-Aid in my opinion). In the contemporary world, there are many political parties which believe in elections only if they win them.

Another similarity with Weimar Germany and the current situation in many countries is a weak and divided opposition. Many British parliamentarians over the years have argued that the quality of any government in a democracy, especially in a two-party system like the UK, is dependent on the quality of the opposition (an idea recently picked up by academics like Trantidis). If this is largely true, and I personally believe it is, and the political culture of the UK has badly decayed as a whole, a simple change of government is unlikely to stop the rot. This idea is supported by the abject performance of the Labour Party, which, now that it is in power, is busying itself in nonsense like the Online Safety Act in an attempt to distract from its incompetence as a government to date, but is failing to achieve anything other than to add gross illiberalism to its sins (and ironically almost certainly reducing its own vote since the bulk of young people vote Labour but it is doubtful they will do so after this). My American friends are equally critical of the Democrats at national level, most of whom seem more interested in not upsetting the status quo and waiting for their own turn in power than in providing genuine opposition to the current regime.

It may be natural to focus on dramatic moments, such as the attempted coup in Brazil by supporters of Bolsonaro, but most of the removal of our freedoms happens stealthily, little by little, and, if I am allowed to add another cliché to this essay, I’ll draw on the metaphor of the boiling frog. At the moment, for example, advocates of the Online Safety Act are focusing on things like policing porn sites; however, it is only a matter of time before this will become providing proof of identity before entering all of the virtual world in the interests of national security, and perhaps finally every citizen being given a unique number they must use or even a microchip implanted under their skin so that their every movement can be tracked. Again I accept that this may sound like dystopian hyperbole, but modern technology will enable future neo-fascist governments to raise surveillance to a level that the Nazis could only dream of. And even if you reject this possibility as the cheesy plot of a trashy sci-fi movie, the validity of electoral results is being eroded by mundane practices such as gerrymandering or adding extra requirements to the process of voting in order to reduce the turn-out of people who won’t vote for you, things routinely done by all parties when they get into power. In the UK and the US, and I imagine in many other countries I know nothing about, elections are basically viewed as a game and a little cheating around the edges is seen as ‘all is fair in love and war’. The good of the country is a secondary consideration to the good of the party: our chimp-like brains remain loyal to the tribe rather than to nebulous abstract concepts such as freedom or fairness.

Which segues nicely into the role that we play in all of this, as citizens and voters. A quote from de Maistre which is often cited is that ‘Every nation gets the government it deserves.’ Admittedly, he was saying this as a monarchist who was no friend of democracy or any form of power to the people, but the quote would not be so well-known and so often repeated if it didn’t strike a chord, even among those who want no role at all for monarchs or religion in the state. The dictatorships of Italy and Germany, and even those which ended more recently like the ones in Portugal and Spain, are receding from collective memory, and we are beginning to take our current freedoms for granted, or even to shrug our shoulders at the idea of losing our democratic rights. In effect, we are ripe for plucking, especially since this is exacerbated in a world which is struggling to adapt to the major changes being wrought by online technology, as radical perhaps as Gutenberg’s printing press was in changing public culture and discourse, and which now faces the further earthquake of AI. To use yet another cliché, this has all the hallmarks of a perfect storm.

My one ray of hope – and I admit it’s a rather feeble one – is that maybe this over-reaching by the UK government will create some kind of united opposition to the Act that will outlast what I hope will be its demise. The fact that it is Labour which has introduced this regressive piece of legislation is shaking up the settled alliances of UK politics: almost everyone is against it, but I imagine right-wing opposition would be much more attenuated if a Tory or Reform government had passed this Act. Clearly there will always be fringes of people who would happily see a modern version of the final solution – haters gotta hate – but hopefully there is enough in common between the cultural left and right which might draw some of the venom out of the current chasm between them and we can go back to focusing on what people share rather than what divides them and try to unite as a country once more. But the portents are far from hopeful at the moment. When ‘wokes’ attack the OSA, they focus on the threat to things like LGBT rights and Gaza, while ‘gammons’ talk about media suppression of anti-immigration protests: almost everyone remains loyal to their tribe. But I have my tribe, too. I have to admit to a concern that the far right is using this crisis of trust in our government to serve its own purposes and is not genuinely committed to freedom of speech, but even so I still have to oppose a law which is so anti-democratic. I feel I have little option but to believe that the right’s commitment to open debate is sincere, even if future events might make me look gullible.

To repeat, a lot of what I say in this essay may seem far-fetched but I think we need to recognise how quickly things can deteriorate and that what took centuries to build can disappear in a historical blink of an eye. Most Greek learning, for instance, was lost during the Dark Ages (let me briefly acknowledge that this is a massive oversimplification), so who is to say that a similar thing couldn’t happen to our present global reality? The west has a deep belief in the inevitability of progress, but history suggests that things decay much more easily than they flourish. Despite its global spread, there is nothing special about our civilisation which will automatically protect it from internecine war and catastrophic decline.

Looking back at what I’ve written, I feel it lacks an overarching thesis that draws its strands together into a cogent argument: it is more like a labyrinth of ideas that I struggle to work my way through. For instance, I have only lightly touched upon the problematic definition of democracy and the complexities of political theory in general, topics which could merit several books rather than a few paragraphs in a blog, and it would take years of study to do full justice to these issues. But this topic matters deeply if we want to leave the generations who follow us with something more than a dystopian world in which human life is closer to the automatism of anthills and termite mounds than the noble vision of humanity that emerged during the Enlightenment. We all have a role to play in trying to breathe life back into our moribund politics and turning it into something that emancipates human potential rather than enslaves it.