George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
The abolition of non-crime hate incidents by a Labour government, reversing a policy introduced by a Conservative one, has been received as a civil liberties victory. It is worth asking whether it is anything of the sort.
The NCHI regime was introduced during the peak years of institutional progressivism, when the political cost of resisting such measures seemed to outweigh the cost of implementing them. It is being abolished in the aftermath of the Allison Pearson affair, now the calculus has reversed. Neither decision reflects principle. Both reflect the same mechanism: a government reading its polling and moving accordingly.
This is usually described as democratic responsiveness. It is better understood as a symptom of weakness.
A government that is genuinely confident in its legitimacy governs. It takes positions, defends them, and accepts the consequences. A government that lacks that confidence must operate differently. Unable to lead, it must identify which sections of the population can be moved by pressure, carry them as far as they will go, and hope the rest follow or at least acquiesce. The policy agenda is not an expression of conviction; it is a series of tests of what the readily intimidated amongst the population, the ‘intimidable’, will tolerate.
This model contains its own undoing. The intimidable are intimidable bidirectionally. The same psychological disposition that made a large portion of the population willing to accept NCHI’s, hate speech prosecutions and the general apparatus of progressive social enforcement is the same disposition that is now making them responsive to a backlash framing. They were not convinced in the first place; they were pressured. Pressure from a different direction produces a different response. The policy infrastructure built on their acquiescence has no more stability than that acquiescence itself.
This is not a new problem, but it is an accelerating one.
The degradation of the modern attention span and the compression of the news cycle have made poll-driven governance more volatile and its outputs more incoherent. Government policy now moves at something close to the speed of social media sentiment, which means it is permanently reactive and permanently exposed to whoever can generate the most pressure at a given moment. The recent observation that British elites are among the least likely demographics to read at length is relevant here: the people most responsible for setting political direction are increasingly operating on the same short-horizon, affect-driven information diet as everyone else. The result is a political class that cannot think past the current week because its environment no longer rewards doing so.
There is a thought experiment worth entertaining at this point. Suppose a political actor were to dispense entirely with the pretence of responsive governance and announce, openly, that they intended to govern on the basis of their own judgment and the judgment of those they considered worth consulting. No poll-chasing, no managed retreats, no seventeenth U-turn. Just a frank acknowledgement that democratic legitimacy, in the sense of an ongoing mandate derived from shifting public opinion, is not the basis on which they propose to operate.
The conventional assumption is that this would be politically fatal. I disagree.
There is a distinctly British instinct, shared across much of the Commonwealth, for a certain kind of authority: clear, unashamed, unapologetic. It is simply coded far too heavily in former glory to be accessible in the modern tone. The current arrangement, where contempt for the public is tacit rather than open, requires constant maintenance. The government must simultaneously govern against the public interest in various respects while pretending to serve it and must retreat whenever that pretence is threatened. This is expensive, unstable and, above all, legible to the people it is being practised on. Open confidence is preferable.
This is not an argument for authoritarianism. It is an observation that the current model is not as democratic as it claims, and that its instability comes precisely from the gap between its presentation and operation. A government which claimed less and delivered more would be on firmer ground than one that claims everything and delivers whatever the latest poll permits.
The NCHI reversal is, then, a useful case study rather than a victory. The underlying question it raises whether any policy infrastructure built on the intimidable rather than the convinced can be made durable, has not been answered. The architecture of the past decade and a half was constructed on that foundation. Some of it is now being dismantled by the same logic that built it. The rest will follow when the polling changes again.
The question for those who actually care about the direction of the country, as opposed to their position within whatever direction is currently prevailing, is what a mandate that does not depend on the intimidable would look like, and how it would be built. That is harder than reading a poll.
It is also the only version of this problem that has a solution.
George Beglan holds an LLM (Distinction) from Durham and read Jurisprudence at Oxford; he has published on law reform in the Cambridge Law Review
The abolition of non-crime hate incidents by a Labour government, reversing a policy introduced by a Conservative one, has been received as a civil liberties victory. It is worth asking whether it is anything of the sort.
The NCHI regime was introduced during the peak years of institutional progressivism, when the political cost of resisting such measures seemed to outweigh the cost of implementing them. It is being abolished in the aftermath of the Allison Pearson affair, now the calculus has reversed. Neither decision reflects principle. Both reflect the same mechanism: a government reading its polling and moving accordingly.
This is usually described as democratic responsiveness. It is better understood as a symptom of weakness.
A government that is genuinely confident in its legitimacy governs. It takes positions, defends them, and accepts the consequences. A government that lacks that confidence must operate differently. Unable to lead, it must identify which sections of the population can be moved by pressure, carry them as far as they will go, and hope the rest follow or at least acquiesce. The policy agenda is not an expression of conviction; it is a series of tests of what the readily intimidated amongst the population, the ‘intimidable’, will tolerate.
This model contains its own undoing. The intimidable are intimidable bidirectionally. The same psychological disposition that made a large portion of the population willing to accept NCHI’s, hate speech prosecutions and the general apparatus of progressive social enforcement is the same disposition that is now making them responsive to a backlash framing. They were not convinced in the first place; they were pressured. Pressure from a different direction produces a different response. The policy infrastructure built on their acquiescence has no more stability than that acquiescence itself.
This is not a new problem, but it is an accelerating one.
The degradation of the modern attention span and the compression of the news cycle have made poll-driven governance more volatile and its outputs more incoherent. Government policy now moves at something close to the speed of social media sentiment, which means it is permanently reactive and permanently exposed to whoever can generate the most pressure at a given moment. The recent observation that British elites are among the least likely demographics to read at length is relevant here: the people most responsible for setting political direction are increasingly operating on the same short-horizon, affect-driven information diet as everyone else. The result is a political class that cannot think past the current week because its environment no longer rewards doing so.
There is a thought experiment worth entertaining at this point. Suppose a political actor were to dispense entirely with the pretence of responsive governance and announce, openly, that they intended to govern on the basis of their own judgment and the judgment of those they considered worth consulting. No poll-chasing, no managed retreats, no seventeenth U-turn. Just a frank acknowledgement that democratic legitimacy, in the sense of an ongoing mandate derived from shifting public opinion, is not the basis on which they propose to operate.
The conventional assumption is that this would be politically fatal. I disagree.
There is a distinctly British instinct, shared across much of the Commonwealth, for a certain kind of authority: clear, unashamed, unapologetic. It is simply coded far too heavily in former glory to be accessible in the modern tone. The current arrangement, where contempt for the public is tacit rather than open, requires constant maintenance. The government must simultaneously govern against the public interest in various respects while pretending to serve it and must retreat whenever that pretence is threatened. This is expensive, unstable and, above all, legible to the people it is being practised on. Open confidence is preferable.
This is not an argument for authoritarianism. It is an observation that the current model is not as democratic as it claims, and that its instability comes precisely from the gap between its presentation and operation. A government which claimed less and delivered more would be on firmer ground than one that claims everything and delivers whatever the latest poll permits.
The NCHI reversal is, then, a useful case study rather than a victory. The underlying question it raises whether any policy infrastructure built on the intimidable rather than the convinced can be made durable, has not been answered. The architecture of the past decade and a half was constructed on that foundation. Some of it is now being dismantled by the same logic that built it. The rest will follow when the polling changes again.
The question for those who actually care about the direction of the country, as opposed to their position within whatever direction is currently prevailing, is what a mandate that does not depend on the intimidable would look like, and how it would be built. That is harder than reading a poll.
It is also the only version of this problem that has a solution.