The real ‘authoritarian threat’ is already in Downing Street

We have been warned repeatedly and endlessly this past year about the rise of the ‘far right’. This verbal tic is now repeated reflexively by our soft-brained, soft-left establishment. The announcement last week of a convocation of musicians, comedians and celebrities, marching next year under the banner of ‘Together Against the Far Right’, was the culmination of a year of ovine bleating about this imaginary insurgent threat.

While the ascendancy of Reform UK in 2025 has been unsettling for some, and the hoisting of St George’s and Union flags across the land has likewise proved ‘uncomfortable’ for these delicate creatures, many still fail to recognise the genuine forces of authoritarianism now working to thwart liberty and democracy in this country – and who actually have the power to do it. It’s strange, because they’re staring us right in the face: it is the very people running the British government.

The year had scarcely begun when Keir Starmer’s Labour government initiated its assault on democracy, announcing in February that nine areas in England would have their forthcoming local elections postponed until May 2026. The official reason given was that time was needed for a reorganisation of local authorities to take place. However, by a miraculous coincidence, this delay mostly affects areas where Reform is set to make gains.

Last week, the government again announced the suspension of local democracy in several other areas. On this occasion, elections for new mayors were postponed on the pretext that local authorities would need more time to merge with each other. By what I’m sure is just another happy accident, all four of the newly created mayoralties in question are in areas where Reform is predicted to win.

Such events are bad enough in themselves, but they have taken place against a backdrop of measures which also bear testament to this government’s autocratic impulses and its disdain for ordinary people. The recent proposal by David Lammy, the justice secretary, to abolish trial by jury for all but the most serious of crimes is symptomatic of this. Lammy says this ancient right should be dispensed with in order to clear a backlog in the courts. Here he also illustrates Starmerism’s debt to Blairism: a contempt for Britain’s past, borne of a crass, technocratic desire for ‘efficiency’.

As the case of Jamie Michael reminds us, trial by one’s peers might be our last barrier against unfair or disproportionate incarceration. The former Royal Marine was arrested and charged last year over a video he posted in the wake of the Southport murders. He was accused of ‘inciting racial hatred’, but was acquitted by a jury after just 17 minutes of deliberation. When our judiciary and government seem content to dispense two-tier justice according to a citizen’s ethnic background or the respectability of their political beliefs, trial by jury remains a critical safeguard for the common man.

Couple these developments with the proposed enactment of facial-recognition cameras, the overreach of the Online Safety Act and renewed efforts to introduce a digital ID system, then a clear picture starts to emerge: this Labour government is no friend of democracy or freedom.

This is not to say that we are living in a fascist state right now. It is to say that, if such a day arrives, it will not have been at the behest of those ‘merchants of hate’ we are so often warned about. It will have been imposed by those who promised it would ‘deliver change’ and ‘make life easier’.

Juries protect us from the madness of elites

The right to trial by jury is not merely an important ancient principle. It has become a modern necessity. This is because it has become abundantly apparent, ever since the Great Awokening of 10 or so years ago, that it’s not the great unwashed who today fall easy prey to groupthink and mass delusions, but the over-educated elites.

The coterie of aloof, liberal-left activist judges at the heart of our legal system – who have distinguished themselves so disgracefully in 2025, with their angelic belief that borders are but a mere impediment to achieving an ‘Imagine’-style utopia – are a case in point. They, as with our establishment as a whole, act the same because they think the same, being slavish adherents to a wider conformist ideology.

It was the elites, not hoi polloi, who fell most deeply and madly for the tide of hyper-liberal ideology that reached its apogee in 2020, when all the white liberals of the world, beholden to critical race theory, fell over each other to denounce themselves as unwitting racists. It was the supposedly more intelligent and better-educated classes and institutions worldwide who fell deepest for the trans delusion, too.

The elite classes succumbed to a cult-like ideology for the same reason all human beings of all mental ability and education do: the desire to want to belong and the fear of being ostracised by one’s peers for stepping out of line. What made our elites’ behaviour so uniquely despicable was that it was driven by the desire to assert their supposed superiority. Even as they lost their minds, they were still looking down on the rest of us.

The problem with ‘compassion’

Over the past year, we have seen a surfeit of sentimentality in politics. Seldom has any discussion on the two-child benefit cap or school breakfast clubs been complete without base appeals to ‘the children’. Few arguments concerning asylum and immigration have concluded without moist-eyed appeals for ‘compassion’ for people who are ‘human beings’. This has been the year of Paddington Bear politics.

The problem with basing arguments on emotion is that you can excuse any behaviour, no matter how heinous or deplorable, if you appeal to the humanity of the perpetrator. And just as you can make any argument based on sentiment, so you can make any counter-argument on the same premise. When it comes to scrapping the two-child benefit cap, what about ‘the children’ of struggling working families who have to sustain it? When it comes to asylum seekers, where’s the ‘compassion’ for those who have been victims of their crimes – like the teenage girls who have been raped, for instance?

Were our society based on saccharine sentiment alone, there would be no justice at all, because all discourse would be reduced to the same irrational, emotive mush. My wish for 2026 is that there be less talk of ‘compassion’.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.