Are advanced liberal democracies also more advanced in authoritarian practices? Metapolitical strategies and the suppression of the left in Britain

This paper seeks to examine what advanced liberal democracies look like when one employs research techniques that are more typically applied to ‘flawed’ democracies. British democracy is examined as a case in which ordinary politics was systematically displaced by ‘metapolitical’ disputes during the period 2015-20 in which the opposition Labour Party was under leftwing leadership. In line with contemporary theorising on the flaws of democracy in East-Central Europe (Stanley & Bill 2020), ‘metapolitical’ is used here to refer to discourse about who counts as legitimate or worthy to participate in politics, potentially to govern. This is distinguished from ‘ordinary’ political debates, which concern the varying merits of different policy platforms. The concept of the metapolitical allows us to view the British Labour Party – both its leftwing and centrist orientations – as subject to an overzealous policing of the leftward flank of liberal democracy’s ideological range on the part of a national political and media establishment. Such practices may be endemic to a sub-set of advanced liberal democracies in which pro-egalitarian left movements enjoy significant support but find themselves hindered by insinuations of democratic illegitimacy. In comparative terms, the strategic recourse to the metapolitical on the part of the powerful represents a very sophisticated form of authoritarian practice (Glasius 2018). This strategy serves to constrict the parameters of democratic possibility in ways that rely almost entirely on the ‘soft’ institutions of liberal democracy, in the media and civil society. In East-Central Europe, this strategy is most typically used alongside less sophisticated strategies like gerrymandering and extra-judicial harassment that sabotage accountability in the ‘hard’ institutions of the legal-institutional sphere. This suggests that metapolitical strategies may actually be both more effective and less subject to scrutiny in advanced democracies similar to Britain. Precisely because advanced democracies contain media institutions like the BBC and the Guardian that command a level of trust among citizens that is not analogous to that of, say, Bulgarian National TV or 24 Chasa, metapolitical narratives will tend to be more effective in producing desired outcomes without recourse to blunter authoritarian practices targeting ‘hard’ institutions. As a bonus, metapolitical strategies are also less likely to provoke downgrades in democracy databases. Indeed, the liberal British press is so widely trusted by scholars that its narratives, inclusive of metapolitical framings, have very often stood in as the first draft of political science scholarship (Maiguashca & Dean 2020). Yet by this account, metapolitical strategies are both subtle enough to evade censure and effective enough to produce the precise political outcomes favoured by economic elites; sufficient perhaps to unsettle common binary understandings of political regimes as ‘advanced’ and ‘flawed’ liberal democracies. Bill, S. and Stanley, B., 2020. Whose Poland is it to be? PiS and the struggle between monism and pluralism. East European Politics, 36(3), pp.378-394. Glasius, M., 2018. What authoritarianism is… and is not: a practice perspective. International affairs, 94(3), pp.515-533. Maiguashca, B. and Dean, J., 2020. ‘Lovely people but utterly deluded’? British political science’s trouble with Corbynism. British Politics, 15, pp.48-68.