Matthew Fennell
@matthew@fennell.dev
It's a scary but very worthwhile listen. It covers public support of civil liberties, the right to protest, the proscription of Palestine Action as well as what Labour should be doing to fortify against an authoritarian takeover.
I have thought a good bit about what government could do, and I believe there are a number of simple things they could do that they're not doing. And those are to fortify democracy against the forthcoming fight.So you could - obviously, obviously - change the voting system. Don't have any stupid internal independent commission, don't have any stupid royal commission, don't consult, just have "Single Transferable Vote - PR Act". You'll get Liberal support, Labour support - push it through. Unfortunately it's not in the manifesto, the Lords would try and delay it.
You would ban foreign influence on elections - it would be straightforward. You would make it impossible to have something like GB News. You would not allow Mr Marshall (lovely man though he is) to run a whole lot of outlets in pursuit of an obvious and transparent political agenda.
It's called parliamentary sovereignty, it's called legislation, it's called having will. There used to a requirement that all media was balanced - return to it. A lot of this is return to the past! A lot of this is recover what Mrs. Thatcher began shredding. The community that benefited from the end of the cold war, through the lack of fear of communism, they destroyed many of the social entitlements originally, and they've turned now to the civil and political, and they're seeking, in my opinion, to perpetually empower themselves. But we can fight back.
Let's have some fights with the right enemies. And if you go down, you go down. That strikes me as a more attractive set of scenarios than simply surrendering on the basis that you didn't achieve some growth that you set out to achieve in 2029.