Freedom from Democracy - Village Magazine

2 8 July 2017

ROPAGANDA WORKS by sanctifying a single

value, such as faith, or patriotism. Anyone

who questions it puts themselves outside the

circle of respectable opinion. The sacred value

is used to obscure the intentions of those who

champion it. Today the value is freedom. Freedom is a

word that powerful people use to shut down thought.

When thinktanks and the billionaire press call for free-

dom, they are careful not to specify whose freedoms they

mean. Freedom for some, they suggest, means freedom

for all. In certain cases, this is true. You can exercise free-

dom of thought and expression, for example, without

harming other people. In other cases, one person’s free-

dom is another’s captivity.

When corporations free themselves from trade unions,

they curtail the freedoms of their workers. When the very

rich free themselves from tax, other people suffer

through failing public services. When ﬁnanciers are free

to design exotic ﬁnancial instruments, the rest of us pay

for the crises they cause.

Above all, billionaires and the organisations they run

demand freedom from something

they call “red tape”. What they mean

by red tape is public protection. A typ-

ical recent article in the Telegraph

was headlined “Cut the EU red tape

choking Britain after Brexit to set the

country free from the shackles of

Brussels”. Yes, we are choking, but

not on red tape. We are choking

because the government ﬂouts Euro-

pean rules on air quality. The

resulting air pollution frees thou

sands of souls from their bodies.

Ripping down such public protections means freedom

for billionaires and corporations from the constraints of

democracy. This is what Brexit – and Trump – are all

about. The freedom we were promised is the freedom of

the very rich to exploit us.

To be fair to the Telegraph, which is running a cam-

paign to deregulate the entire economy once Britain has

left the EU, it is, unusually, almost explicit about who the

beneﬁciaries are. It explains that “the ultimate goal of

this whole process should be to … to set the wealth crea-

tors free”. (Wealth creators is the code it uses for the very

rich). Among the potential prizes it lists are changes to

the banana grading system, allowing strongly curved

bananas to be categorised as Class 1, a return to incan-

descent lightbulbs and the freedom to kill great crested

newts.

I suspect that the Barclay brothers, the billionaires

who own the Telegraph, couldn’t give a monkey’s about

bananas. But as their business empire incorporates

hotels, shipping, car sales, home shopping and deliver-

ies, they might be intensely interested in the European

working time directive and other aspects of employment

law, tax directives, environmental impact assessments,

the consumer rights directive, maritime safety laws and

a host of similar public protections.

If the government agreed to the Telegraph’s proposed

“bonﬁre of red tape”, we would win bent bananas and

newt-squashing prerogatives. On the other hand, we

could lose our rights to fair employment, an enduring

by George Monbiot

The very rich see freedom from democracy

as a right

The Sunday Telegraph

article failed to connect

these remarks to his

company’s own bloody

baggage, caused by Alton

Towers unilateral decision

to cut red tape

Freedom from

Democracy

POLITICS

July 2017 2 9

living world, clean air, clean water, public safety, con-

sumer protection, functioning public services and the

other distinguishing features of civilisation. Tough

choice, isn’t it?

As if to hammer the point home, the Sunday Telegraph

interviewed Nick Varney, the chief executive of Merlin

Entertainments, in an article claiming that the “red tape

burden” was too heavy for listed companies. He

described some of the public protections companies

have to observe as “bloody baggage”. The article failed

to connect these remarks to his company’s own bloody

baggage, caused by its unilateral decision to cut red

tape. As a result of overriding the safety mechanism on

one of its rides at Alton Towers, which was operating,

against the guidelines, during high winds, 16 people

were injured, including two young women who had their

legs amputated. That’s why we need public protections

of the kind the Telegraph wants to destroy.

The same ethos, with the same justiﬁcation, pervades

the Trump administration. The head of the Environmen-

tal Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is seeking to annul

the rules protecting rivers from pollution, workers from

exposure to pesticides and everyone from climate break-

down. It’s not as if the agency was over-zealous before:

one of the reasons for the mass poisoning in Flint, Michi-

gan was its catastrophic failure to protect people from

the contamination of drinking water by lead: a failure

that now afﬂicts 18 million Americans.

As well as trying to dismantle the government’s cli-

mate change programme, Trump is waging war on even

the most obscure forms of protection. For example, he

intends to defund the tiny US Chemical Safety Board,

which investigates lethal incidents at chemical plants.

Discovering what happened and why would be an imped-

iment to freedom.

On neither side of the Atlantic are these efforts unop

posed. Trump’s assault on public protections has already

provoked dozens of lawsuits. The European Council has

told the UK government that if it wants to trade with the

EU on favourable terms after Brexit, companies here

cannot cut their costs by dumping them on the rest of

society.

This drives the leading Brexiters berserk. As a result

of the Pollution Paradox (the dirtiest corporations have

to spend the most money on politics, so the political

system comes to be owned by them), politicians like

Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have an incentive to

champion the freedom of irresponsible companies. But

it also puts them in a bind. Their primary argument for

deregulation is that it makes businesses more competi

tive. If it means those businesses can’t trade with the

EU, the case falls apart.

They will try to light the bonﬁre anyway, as this is a

question of power and culture as well as money. You

don’t need to listen for long to the very rich to realise that

many see themselves as the “independents” Friedrich

Hayek celebrated in ‘The Constitution of Liberty’, or as

John Galt, who led a millionaires’ strike against the gov

ernment in Ayn Rand’s novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Like

Hayek, they regard freedom from democracy as an abso-

lute right, regardless of the costs this may inﬂict on

others, or even on themselves.

When we confront a system of propaganda, our ﬁrst

task is to decode it. This begins by interrogating its

sacred value. Whenever we hear the word freedom, we

should ask ourselves, “freedom for whom, at whose

expense?”.

This article ﬁrst appeared in the Guardian.

www.monbiot.com

The Pollution Paradox states that

the dirtiest corporations have

to spend the most money on

politics, so the political system

comes to be owned by them

and incentivises politicians like

Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

to champion the freedom of

irresponsible companies