Can democracy survive government by omerta?

Conservative politicians attribute our parlous economic situation to the cost of Covid and the inflated price of oil and gas due to the war in Ukraine.   The barmy budgeting of Liz Truss and her malfortuné Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, sometimes get a mention, a cautionary tale of self-destruction.   As for the third of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: the word “Brexit” shall never pass the lips of a government minister.

How should we describe this deliberate omission?  Google to the rescue: an English version of the South Italian word omertà, a “code of silence and code of honour and conduct that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders”. Omertà is popularly associated with the Mafia.

Ministers and MPs know a great deal about the impact of Brexit — hence omertà.   The UK Department of Trade and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, like the European Commission, are all clients of Cambridge Econometrics.  In a report commissioned by the Mayor of London and published in January 2024, Cambridge Econometrics estimates that we lost 2 million jobs due to Brexit, and that in 2023 the average person was nearly £2,000 worse off (Londoners by £3,400) than had the Referendum gone the other way.   Goldman Sachs’ 2024 report “The Structure and Cyclical Costs of Brexit”, puts the economic loss caused by Brexit at between 4 and 8 per cent of GDP and concludes that since the referendum, Britain has “significantly underperformed [compared to] other advanced economies”.  Both reports, based on complex calculations, emphasise the impact of Brexit on trade and investment.

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), an independent public body funded by the Treasury, analyses our public finances and produces bi-annual economic forecasts intended to guide Government’s economic policy. So it is heeded by Prime Ministers, except of course Liz Truss.  It broadly supports the conclusions of Cambridge Econometrics and Goldman Sachs. Rishi Sunak is well aware of the extent of Brexit damage.

In 2016, David Cameron, believing he would win the referendum, turned a complex issue into a binary choice.   No rules were established to govern the conduct of the ensuing campaigns, nor the information provided to the electorate.  Voters need accurate, relevant information to make informed political choices.  Voters making a huge decision by direct democracy were lied to and misinformed in a campaign led by charismatic but unscrupulous men.

The public did not necessarily believe their lies or the battle-bus promise of “£350 million sent per week to the EU” being returned to the NHS, but such disinformation served to dramatically and divisively raise awareness of the Leave campaign.  Thanks to the nurturing of division and hostility, any empathy for the thinking and feelings of people on the other side of the argument could not get a look-in.

“A shared framework for containing conflicting aims” created by “good faith compromise”, “positive agreements and brokered bargains”, appear in Brook Manville and Josiah Ober’s The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton and Oxford University Press 2023, as important ingredients in any functioning democracy.  They offer a simple definition: the pithy “No boss – except one another”, but there is no discussion of how this is best achieved by direct or representative democracy.

It is a stretch to describe the Brexit referendum, conducted in a climate of disinformation and lies, the subsequent negotiations and the unlawful proroguing of Parliament, in these terms.  The consequences were the reverse of what Aristotle called “civic friendship”, seen by the two authors as sustaining democracy.

Omertà about Brexit is part of a wider government omertà about the damage done to our political culture, with its unwritten but well understood values and codes of conduct.  It is important, though counter-intuitive, to recognise the erosion of democracy added to by the 2016 referendum , with its compelling slogan “Take Back Control”.  The quantifiable economic consequences of Brexit are not the only ones to contend with; there is also the absolutist mindset encouraged by the binary referendum choice, in versus out, pervading public attitudes.

The gradual nibbling away of the mainstays of a democratic culture has done nothing to improve voter turn-out.  Youth are giving up on their fundamental civil right to vote, to sack the government and install another, to put into practice – Manville and Ober’s – “no boss except one another”.  In addition, many people are responding to continuous grim reports on radio and TV with “news avoidance” that further encourages a “they’re all the same” rejection of political participation.

The 2022 Electoral Reform Act directly affects turn-out and not only in general elections.  The Bill abolished the supplementary (second choice) vote and made mayoral elections first past the post, generally thought to favour the Conservative Party.   Voters not showing photographic voter ID are turned away, an imported form of voter suppression, part of the US Republican electoral playbook, known to disadvantage youth, ethnic minorities and poorer voters.  In the 2019 general election — before this requirement — 33 alleged impersonations with 9 convictions came to light, amongst 32 million people who voted.  A 2023 YouGov poll found that one in four voters were unaware of the new requirement.  In last year’s local elections, according to the Electoral Commission, some 4% of eligible voters said they didn’t vote because of the new regulations.  Voters in a democracy need obstacles to voting removed, not inserted on spurious grounds.

Electoral campaigning can, and is, used as an opportunity for the destruction of “civic friendship” by gaslighting and the flagrant untruths of attack ads.  In support of the Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, a video purporting to reveal panic on the London Underground appeared on X (Twitter).  It turned out to be filmed in Penn station, New York. “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime”, Londoners were staying at home, said the voiceover.  Picture of empty street.

After complaints, the fake “evidence” from the USA was taken down — but the fake assertions about citizens’ safety in London stayed in.  The Greater London area, with 9.75 million people, will have more crimes (for example than Greater Glasgow, with 1.7 million, to which London is sometimes compared), just as it has more bins to empty, more air pollution to be cut.  As ministers know, meaningful crime statistics are based on the size of the population.  In the real world, the crime rate in London is below the national average.

There is danger that such American-style attack ads have also infected the Labour Party.  One of their on-line ads a year ago asked: “Do you think adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison?” It answered: “Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Shocked shadow ministers and party members protested.  Sir Keir Starmer had a torrid time on Sky News trying to limit the fallout.  The truth is that such ads are widely shared and read by millions, creating a serious temptation for politicians who find that honesty and truth-telling disadvantage them.

We’ve got several more months of campaigning to endure. Omertà, disinformation and voter suppression are poisoning our political culture.  Together they preclude acknowledging and learning from experience.   This is not how democracy survives.  This is not how to heal domestic divisions, nor counter the rise of threatening authoritarian regimes that are opposed to democratic values.  You don’t have to read The Civic Bargain to figure that out.

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