No – the UK is not turning into authoritarian Hungary

You might not have noticed it, but the United Kingdom has apparently become a right-wing authoritarian state. At least, it has according to the frenzied cries of  left-leaning Twitter mobs. The current fashion on the British and European left is to compare the UK’s government to the anti-liberal parties of the right who are currently governing in Poland and Hungary. The left wing commentariat is now determined to paint Boris Johnson’s Conservative government as a grubby populist colleague of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland.

This narrative has gathered momentum after the election result – on Christmas Eve The Guardian published an opinion piece drawing parallels between Britain’s supposed “lurch to the right” with attempts by governments in Poland and Hungary to undermine their independence of their judiciaries and the freedom of the press. Some of Britain’s politicians are also scrambling to get in on the act. Labour MP David Lammy, ever the prophet, said on  Twitter today: “We have already seen Boris Johnson attack the courts and other democratic norms in the UK”. He warned “how dangerous this government can be.”

This typically hyperbolic outburst was made after it was reported by Buzzfeed that Tim Montgomerie, the founder of Conservative Home who was appointed as an adviser to Downing Street in September, was quoted as saying in a speech delivered to a conservative think tank in Budapest in December that Britain under Boris will pursue close links with Hungary.

“Budapest and Hungary have been home, I think, for an awful lot of interesting early thinking on the limits of liberalism, and I think we are seeing that in the UK as well. So, I hope there will be a special relationship with Hungary amongst other states.”

He was duly denounced.

The statement was not Montgomerie’s finest hour, but the howling of the mob was out of all proportion to the alleged offence. It is true that the ways in which Orbán’s government has acted in Hungary provides an interesting example of an illiberal authoritarian movement which has gained widespread traction for its critique of liberalism. Montgomerie is simply wrong in his judgment that this makes Orbán’s movement a desirable political example or ideological partner. His government is an affront to personal freedoms and institutions which all moderate social democrats, liberals, and conservatives all ought to hold dear.

Those who are seeking to capitalise upon this latest episode are being highly misleading, if not outright dishonest, when they argue that Britain is somehow turning into a populist authoritarian state. Boris Johnson’s government has not “attacked” the courts and democratic norms. The British government has not, as Hungary and Poland’s parliaments have, passed laws handing the appointment process for Justices over to party apparatchiks.

Instead, the Conservative party manifesto has called for a commission on the “constitution, democracy and rights” in order “to look at the broader aspects of our constitution: the relationship between the government, parliament and the courts; the functioning of the royal prerogative.”

The party’s election manifesto said:

“We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays”.

An inquiry is indeed sensible after the normal operation of the British constitution has been put under severe strain during the controversial aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016. The relationship between direct democracy, parliamentary representation, the royal prerogative, and the power of the UK’s young Supreme Court have all become confused – clarification is needed.

This is especially true after the contentious role played by the Supreme Court in September 2019. According to Professor John Finnis, one of the world’s leading Anglophone legal philosophers, the decision by the Supreme Court to rule that the royal prerogative power used by the Prime Minister to prorogue parliament was unlawful represented an unprecedented “foray into high politics” which “undercuts the genuine sovereignty of parliament”.

Unlike Poland and Hungary, Britain has always had a common law tradition rich in civil rights for centuries before the establishment of the Supreme Court between 2005-2009. One reason why the  Supreme Court ought at least to be examined is because it is unclear whether its creation has been compatible with Britain’s peculiar, parliament-centred constitutional settlement.

There are other reasons why comparisons between Johnson and Orbán are intellectually lazy. One of the reasons why Orbán in Hungary and PiS in Poland are seeking to challenge the independence of their judiciaries is because they want a free rein to pass punitive legislation against homosexuality and to criminalise abortion. In Britain, by contrast, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is an advocate of same-sex marriage, and he leads a party which, along with the Liberal Democrats, passed historic legislation on this matter in 2013. As of October, abortion is now legal across the United Kingdom, even in the traditionally more socially conservative corner of Northern Ireland.

Fidesz and PiS have undermined the freedom of the press – both have taken over effective control of their national state broadcasters and turned them into propaganda arms of the ruling parties. The equivalent would be Boris Johnson appointing CCHQ propagandists to all of the executive positions in the BBC. The Conservatives have considered abolishing the BBC’s licence fee – a funding method established in 1923 and which is rather antiquated anyway in the age of subscription-based television. But they have not started colonising the free press and broadcasters or turning them into a propagandistic racket.

Ultimately, the comparisons between Britain and Hungary not only oversimplify the very different cultural,  political and ideological circumstances in Britain and Eastern Europe – they also trivialise the true struggle against authoritarian encroachment in Eastern Europe by turning them into a rather blunt and facile dig at the Tories. The real problem in Britain is not the existence of an authoritarian right-wing party – it is the absence of a credible opposition to a centre-right party which has colonised the new centre ground of British politics. So long as such lazy arguments prevail on the left, this situation will not change.