What if democracy collapses in Britain? What happens then?

In the video above, I directly take on answering the questions stated in the headline by imaging a dictatorship of the monarchy - or put another way, a reversion of British executive power back to how it existed before the Glorious Revolution. A time of actual political power resting in the hands of the King or Queen, instead of the monarch being simply a figurehead. I started thinking about this when I began re-reading Anthony Burgess’ 1978 novel 1985, which is both an homage and an updating of Orwell’s classic book. In the dystopia of 1985, the King becomes the supreme ruler of the UK after a period of unrest. Anyhow, I go into all of this in detail in the video, so please do watch (and like and subscribe, while you’re there).

This conversation stems from a worry about the state of democracy, in Britain and elsewhere. We’ll focus on the UK just for the moment.

The UK is in an odd place right now. The Tories were roundly rejected last summer by handing Labour a massive majority. This was achieved on a remarkably small share of the vote, almost as if the electorate said to Starmer and co, “Look, you lot are on a short leash. You better start making things better very soon or we’ll get extremely upset.” And lo and behold, Labour have not been able to achieve much over the course of their first year in power and in fact, have made a series of large errors.

This, as you will all know, has led not only to the Reform party being way ahead in the polls, but those polling numbers being confirmed on the ground in the local elections. We seem headed for a Reform government now for a simple reason: the electorate are desperate and seem willing to roll the dice on an unproven entity which currently only contains five MPs. People want change and they want it now.

This begs the question: what if Reform get in at the next election and are then seen to fail? This would leave very few options for an even more desperate electorate. It is just about possible that at that stage, the Conservative Party finally realises a large opportunity to be given another chance looms large if they can just find a leader who isn’t mind-bendingly awful. Yet given their recent history, I doubt very much they would seize such a chance. The Lib Dems and their silly stunts? No, I don’t think so. Everyone will be seen to have failed.

If this happens, I fear for democracy in Britain. Said like that, it seems trite - like something to say when you don’t know what else to utter. “I fear for democracy in Britain”. What is the material consequence of democracy failing in the UK? Well, that brings me back to my “King as supreme leader” idea. Having the monarch take control of the country would be a very, very British way of establishing an authoritarian state. Benign (hopefully, at least), steeped in tradition, could be explained away by British constitution buffs (“You see, the granting of sovereignty to parliament was only through the hands of the monarch in the first place, and in a time of great need, blah, blah, blah”). It wouldn’t feel like the way the continentals do authoritarianism, with all that frogmarching and gulags and burning things - and not being like the continentals is what really matters here, let’s be frank.

This would be made all the more possible if William were King. Young, extremely likeable across the political spectrum, putting William in charge of everything might have great appeal at some point in the relatively near future. He’d probably be terribly reluctant about it as well, proving himself up to the task with that alone.

The British people can’t back away from Brexit, at least not yet - the national embarrassment of having made a mistake that massive is still too horrible to fathom. Instead, it seems like we might need a dictatorship to get it done properly (which really would be the ultimate irony, given the Brexiter insistence that Brexit is all about democracy and in fact, democracy made pure). Of course, all of this is just banter, talking about something that is very, very unlikely to ever happen. Having said that, most of the last ten years of western democracy has seemed like banter gone mad. If you’d asked me in 2015 which scenario I thought the more likely one, democracy breaking down in Britain and the monarch becoming the all-powerful executive leader, or Donald Trump becoming president of the USA not once but twice, I would have thought the former much more likely, simply by dint of the latter sounding hilariously insane.

Stranger things have happened, in other words. Watch this space.