The Null Device

2013/7/7

Charlie Stross speculates about the suggestion that, politically, Britain may be functionally a one-party state:

I'm nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party.
The Ruling Party is a meta-party; it has members in all of the three major parties, and probably the minority parties as well. It always wins every election, because whichever party wins (or participates in a coalition) is led in Parliament by members of the Ruling Party, who have more in common with each other than with the back bench dinosaurs who form the rump of their notional party. One does not rise to Front Bench rank in any of the major parties unless one is a paid-up Ruling Party member, who meets with the approval of the Ruling Party members one will have to work with. Outsiders are excluded or marginalized, as are followers of the ideology to which the nominal party adheres.
The Ruling Party Stross posits has a few characteristics: it's comprised of people from a specific background (typically public-school, politics/economics at Oxbridge or LSE, often followed by a career as a barrister), and, as befits entities which have little to fear from public opinion, is not answerable to the general public (who can take their frustration out on whichever of the publicly visible parties nominally forms the government at the moment). The interests they serve are of multinational corporations (which Stross previously equated to a form of alien life which has taken over the Earth) and free-floating elites (i.e., those who stand to benefit from privatisation, the endless trough of contracts or the good old-fashioned Friedman Shock Doctrine). Of course, the problem is that, if democracy becomes increasingly a sham, sooner or later it will lose a crucial advantage it has over other systems, i.e., it offering a mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power:
Moreover, we are now discovering that we live in a panopticon, in houses of glass that are open to inspection and surveillance by the powers of the Deep State. Our only remaining form of privacy is privacy by obscurity, by keeping such a low profile that we are of no individual interest to anyone: and even that is only a tenuous comfort. Any attempt at organizing a transfer of power that does not ring the changes and usher in a new group of Ruling Party faces to replace the old risks being denounced as Terrorism.
My conclusion is that we are now entering a pre-revolutionary state, much as the nations of Europe did in 1849 with the suppression of the wave of revolutions that spurred, among other things, the writing of "The Communist Manifesto". It took more than a half-century for that pre-revolutionary situation to mature to the point of explosion, but explode it did, giving rise to the messy fallout of the 20th century. I don't know how long this pre-revolutionary situation will last — although I would be surprised if it persisted for less than two decades — but the whirlwind we reap will be ugly indeed: if you want to see how ugly, look to the Arab Spring and imagine it fought by finger-sized killer drones that know what you wrote on Facebook eighteen years ago when you were younger, foolish, and uncowed. And which is armed with dossiers the completeness of which the East German Stasi could only fantasize about.

charlie stross oligarchy politics postdemocracy thatcherism-blairism uk 0