The impairment of democracy in the UK

The UK's johnsonist government is planning to impair democracy in at least three ways:

• A Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill will get rid of the fixed five-year period between general elections and return the power to call early elections to the prime minister
• Plans to force voters in Great Britain to to prove their identity when they vote at general elections will be introduced in an Electoral Integrity Bill
• A Judicial Review Bill will set out the government's plans to change how its decisions can be challenged in the courts

– BBC

The first of these will allow a party in power to pick the best moment for an election to maximise its chances of remaining in power. This will tend to increase the amount of time between effective changes of government as parties can pick their moments, thus reducing the number of moments when the people of the country can choose who rules them.

The second of these is straightforwardly voter suppression. It is justified by the supposed prevalence of electoral fraud. This is a fabrication: if electoral fraud was common in the UK why is it not being reported to the electoral commission whose whole purpose is to investigate it, and who say that 'there remains no evidence of large-scale electoral fraud in 2019'. Well, it is not being reported because it doesn't exist. Instead rumours are being spread by the government and its agents in the press that there widespread fraud which is somehow being hidden from view. This is a trick taken straight from the playbook of Donald Trump.

The third is a response to a small problem that the johnsonists have had: a lot of the things they have tried to do have turned out to be illegal and have been found to be so so by the courts. The rule of law is, of course, inconvenient to people whose view is that they are the law. And so they are moving to end the rule of law: in the glorious future they imagine for themselves what the johnsonists decide to do will, simply, be law because it is their will.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism, 1951.