Many people lapped up the testimony of Dominic Cummings in parliament on 26 May. He gave a hell of a performance, skewering his ex-boss Boris Johnson and carrying on vendettas with other cabinet ministers like Health Secretary Matt Hancock in front of TV cameras. He portrayed Johnson as callous, cruel, oafish, inhuman. A walking joke. Hancock was called a liar, accused of ‘misleading parliament’ (lying to parliament) and Cummings claimed to have proof.
His statements to the MPs exposed what we already knew, that the Johnson government is a hollow machine of cruelty, staffed by idiots playing their part in a shambolic disaster. But it also exposes the essential problems of a society grinding towards a post-democratic era – who cares?
Today the prevailing mood is that all politicians are liars, they are cheats, they are drones in suits. That is why large numbers of people like Johnson, or men like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and before him Silvio Berlusconi. They have ‘charisma’, they ‘tell it like it is’. Of course they are all monstrous pro-business psychopaths with egos that would crush an elephant but that doesn’t seem to bother some voters. In an age when politicians are expected to have no integrity, it is not a shock when politicians are exposed as having no integrity.
This is why the ‘honourable’ politicians or business leaders who falls on the sword when they have broken a key moral principle are so rare. There is less accountability because people don’t expect much of them in the first place. This diffuses any response, makes the necessary sense of anger and injustice harder to come by.
It points to the hollowing out of capitalist democracy, the decline of the institutions and the principles of state that the bourgeois politicians used to be so proud of, even if they have always been hypocrites about it.
But what Cummings concluded with is something even more dangerous. After railing against the inadequacies and foibles of Johnson around the COVID response he concluded with a chilling proposal, that a better way would have been to have a “kind of dictator” with “kingly powers”. This is the second danger, that as the political class eats itself and appears to be incompetent it only lays the ground for a more decisive shift to the authoritarian right. More people will come to see a ‘strong man’ figure as the only way forward, away from the squabbling and useless politicians.
Cummings has played his own role in the hollowing out of capitalist democracy, the mass disinformation campaign around Brexit, the conscious and bare faced lies, the cavalier disregard for the law. This is all dangerous fuel to the fire.
Of course what Cummings is saying about the Conservative government is true, but his intentions are malignant. The consequences of Johnson’s policies has been the needless deaths of many thousands. Johnson needs to go, Hancock needs to resign. We need to bring this government down through mass action, to bring Johnson to justice. But we need more democratic accountability and representation, not less. Johnson is only the personification of the twisted needs of the capitalist economy after all, with its drive for profit over people and the market over public health. If Johnson and Cummings are signs of the disease we need a socialist vaccine – and in double quick time.
Cummings revelations will probably be dismissed as sour grapes because he was sacked by Johnson. A Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ to bring about order out of chaos? We had that in the 20th century with Hitler and Mussolini. As with the chaos and disorder of the English Revolution for Hobbes and the collapsed state of globalised capitalism for the ruling class the imposition of authoritarian regimes is an attractive solution. The descent into nihilism and the trivialisation of political discourse when name-calling, guilt by association and strong-arm tactics by right-wing populists have gained traction leaves even limited bourgeois democracies in a parlous state. We already have authoritarian regimes on our doorstep in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Belarus, Russian Federation, Ukraine and further afield in Iran, China, Phillipines, Brazil and so on. Not least to mention the Arab and African dictatorships. That is why we have to fight tooth and nail to save and extend democratic accountability and our anti-capitalist challenge must start to address the very people who are alienated enough to listen to the likes of Trump, Bolsinaro, Duterte and Orban. Not just the whole of the working class but targetting also the most marginalised who are likely to absorb all the poisonous crap spewed up by these people.
The break on all of his is the weakness of Starmer’s leadership and the Labour Parties continued hollowing out as an opposition. In attacking the Left in the Party and trying to out Tory the Tories, even to allowing them to steal Labour Party policies, will guarantee oblivion. Not that I really care about the LP. As far as socialism is concerned it’s a spent force. Any meaningful opposition to capitalism and the likes of Johnson, Cummings and the right has to come from the grassroots which means organsing rank and file workers and arguing within the wider social movements to shift beyond their particular political bunkers towards the labour movement and the Left.