The Danger of Populists

I've just watched Piers Morgan on ITV's Good Morning Britain publicly humiliate yet another government minister as a direct result of Dominic Cummings having been ejected from No10 and the disgraceful 200 day boycott of GMB ending. It was Michael Gove's turn and he obviously thought he could handle it better than his colleagues, but watch for yourselves and decide. 

What it underlines to me is that for any democracy to function, a whole number of independent institutions must be functioning effectively in order to counter the phenomena of the spectre ever-present of the 'elected dictatorship'. The media is absolutely crucial in this, especially with the advent of the internet and sadly the rules by which the BBC have to play by are simply no longer good enough. 

Democracy is under serious threat on both sides of the Atlantic and the other revelation from Covid and lockdown has been that of CNN the US-based news channel. As with Piers, this outfit does not have any truck with nonsense and lies and just keeps calling-out politicians without fear or favour. 

From a somewhat surprising source, here's a recent article (slightly edited) from Civil Service World on the dangers we face:-         

Populists in power: the impact on public administration

What do populists do when elected to government in countries with robust democratic and public administration institutions? The choice, some recent scholarship suggests, is simple: reform or sabotage.

Populism is, by definition, anti-pluralist by claiming to represent a singular “will of the people”. And it is by tendency autocratic, because any divergence from this “will of the people” is obviously oppositional and thus has to be suppressed. They are “enemies of the people”. So robust, pluralistic, democratic, public administration presents it with a huge problem if, and when, populist parties or individuals come to power.

--//--

Trump and US federal administration

Reporting on the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election the Financial Times noted that: “Mr Trump seems so hell-bent on destroying faith in American governmental institutions — the courts, the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — that the US could cease being a functional state, let alone a model for the world.

Steve Bannon, who still remains the closest thing to an intellectual touchstone for Trumpism, never made a secret that his true goal in backing Trump was the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. (Peter Spiegel, FT, 23 Nov 2020) While politicisation of the upper levels of the federal “administrative state” is common in the US, with thousands of direct Presidential appointments, Trump took this to a whole new level.

Trump systematically filled senior positions with either people who were openly hostile to the missions of the federal agency concerned, or deeply ignorant of what it actually did, or simply left posts vacant to stall decision making. Much of this was recorded in the best-selling The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. But Trump also used resources and other administrative devices to try to sabotage the federal bureaucracy, as Bauer and Becker record in their case study.

Johnson and Whitehall

The context of the populist “Get Brexit Done” government of Boris Johnson is of course different in many respects to the US federal administration. But the strategy has many similarities. The overall approach was summed up in The Economist magazine recently:

“The plan, which has the support of the Tory party and was outlined in the 2019 manifesto, is to weaken the judicial, political and administrative limits that have been placed on the power of the executive. Brexit is only the beginning. By the time of the next election, ministers will have control over more policies, enjoy more discretion and face fewer restraints than they have for decades.....[this is] conservative counter-revolution against checks and balances to executive power built up over half a century.” (The Economist, 19 Nov 2020)

For the British ‘administrative state’ this has already had a dramatic impact. An unprecedented number of leading civil servants – including the cabinet secretary, permanent secretaries and the government’s chief lawyer – have either quit or been forced to resign. Most recently Alex Allan, the prime minister’s adviser on the ministerial code was also forced out over the Priti Patel bullying affair.

A sort of parallel, semi-privatised, apparatus has been constructed alongside the Department for Health and Social Care and the English NHS. NHS Test & Trace, run by Dido Harding, now controls £22bn of public spending. If it was a government ministry, it would now be the fourth largest in spending terms. It has tens of thousands of staff, but employed by private sector contractors. Similarly the Vaccine Task Force, run by Kate Bingham, is spending billions on vaccine contracts.

Neither Harding nor Bingham is a minister or civil servant and their powers, status, codes of conduct, and accountability remains opaque at best. These are just a few examples of how the Johnson government is subverting norms, politicising appointments and side-steeping traditional structures of the UK’s administrative state.

The American ‘administrative state’ is robust. Bauer and Becker argue this makes it very hard to dismantle – suggesting this may be the grain of truth behind Trump and Bannon’s complaints about the so-called “deep state”. It is indeed a state with deep roots and seems to have survived, if weakened, the Trump era.

In the UK we have four more years of a Johnson government. Whilst the PM's equivalent of Steve Bannon – Dominic Cummings – has now departed, his similar agenda to Bannon’s of ‘blowing up’ the administrative state clearly remains. It will need careful monitoring.