Truss Nobody: Adam Richardson Q&A
Our next guest on Strange Exiles is the founder of a campaign to bring 'direct democracy' to the UK ballot box. We discuss some recent political 'WTF' moments
Our next episode goes live in early January, but it was recorded a few months back. I spoke to Adam Richardson, who told me all about his new platform political party Direct Democracy UK. Since we spoke however, British politics exploded, with a short-run Liz Truss government deposed after blowing up the economy, and the installation of a new puppet (sized) leader in the form of Rishi Sunak.
As a result, some of the next episode might seem a few weeks behind the increasingly breakneck curve of British spectacle politics - so I caught up with Adam over email to find out his thoughts on the recent chaos at Westminster, the intensifying war in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis, and what this means for his party’s campaign. The chat also serves as a nice introduction to Adam’s ideas and beliefs. Look out for Episode 16 on Friday 6 January.
Bram Gieben: Hello Adam. What the fuck just happened in British politics? Can you explain it for readers and listeners inside and outside the UK?
Adam Richardson: The big picture is we’ve reached the end of a phase of history. The phase-change probably would have been smoother if it were not for Covid and the war in Ukraine. The era of cheap fuel from Russia is over, the era of cheap food from Ukraine “the breadbasket of Europe” is over, the era of cheap labour from China is over. Obviously we didn’t get all our energy from Russia, or all our food from Ukraine, or all our cheap goods from China, but these generalisations are valid and could all be said to exist in the realm of ‘supply and demand’.
We and our fellow Europeans want liquefied natural gas at 2019 rates. Our elected representatives have chosen to side with Ukraine and sanction Russia, so that is now “politically impossible”. We and our fellow Europeans want grain prices to be at the same level as in the past - also impossible, unless Ukrainian farmers suddenly become bullet proof. We and our fellow Europeans want Chinese goods and labour to continue to be the engine of the world economy. Xi Jinping, who now rules China with more dictatorial power than Mao Zedong, is not embracing the wider world. He is inadvertently pursuing isolationism, via strategies like Zero-Covid, which continues to cripple productivity. Adam Tooze calls this situation Polycrisis. In the UK this has played out as Omnishambles.
In between cause and effect is policy. In order to address the price of consumer gas in France, Emmanuel Macron, “the last neoliberal” nationalised the French power group EDF. The most the UK government has done is reluctantly impose wind-fall taxes on the huge profits of fossil fuel companies. That’s because the Conservative party free market zealots and the Think Tanks who advise them are unwilling to adapt, should they be seen to retreat from or disown the previous 40 years of policy. It’s virtually impossible for static politics to survive such seismic changes.
Hovering over all these events and politics is the invisible hand. The markets. For the purpose of this, let's just say “the markets” are the financial traders who work in the city of London and the Bank of England. To say markets demand stability is wrong. No profits can be made in utterly stable markets. But what the markets saw in Truss and Kwarteng’s Mini-Budget was too much. People who work the markets might seem like zealots but they are more like arch-rationalists and realists and they bet that the Mini-Budget was flawed. Such is the nature of markets, that if enough of them bet that it wasn’t flawed, then perhaps there may not have been a run on the pound and a pension bail out. This was not the case, and Truss-onomics was dead.
Liz Truss resigned and will go down in history as the shortest serving Prime Minister. The people who run the Conservative party, epitomised by the 1922 committee, kept calm, marshalled their forces in the press and installed a new leader, Rishi Sunak. In summary, epochal phase-change happened to coincide with ideological exhaustion of ruling elites. A lethal combination that nearly caused economic catastrophe, but has actually compounded our long term economic woes.
Is the Tory party finished, or is it our electoral system as a whole that's in trouble?
In January 2020, the Conservative party looked to have successfully reinvented itself again. Its previous incarnation of socially progressive (legalising gay marriage) and fiscally conservative (austerity) had ran out of steam. Brexit provided an opportunity for a small cohort to chart a path to power and offer a new settlement to the country. Boris Johnson was a fiscally loose populist, who, with an 80 seat majority, really could have had two or three terms in power, were it not for the pandemic, which served to highlight how singularly unserious and unsuitable a leader he was for serious times.
The past six months has been a period of extreme crisis for the party. It's worse than the collapse and in-fighting under John Major in the early 1990s. Polling continues to predict the party will have 20-100 seats after the next general election. Reducing the party to not even the official opposition. That would be the Liberal Democrats! So they really are facing an existential moment. But if Sunak can keep the party seemingly united and delay the election as long as possible, they should retain official opposition status with more than 100 seats.
However, the Suella Braverman debacle highlights how the party now contains extreme wings. Braverman has publicly expressed that she would, if she could, implement an immigration system and home office policies worse than you see in Children of Men. Also there is no guarantee that delaying the next election is prudent either. Peace is not coming to Ukraine soon. Energy bills and inflation will remain high. The next two years will see the cost of living crisis escalate and more and more people will blame the party that’s been in power for over 12 years.
Labour’s polling lead is based on opposition to the Tories, not support for Labour's unannounced policies. The Labour party thinks it is playing a canny game with the press in not announcing any major policies, so they cannot be mauled by the right wing press. They will of course have to announce them in their election manifesto. But by then, they believe they will get a fairer hearing in the press and all be swept up in the churn of an election cycle.
I can understand why no party that has just won a big majority under First Past the Post, would want to end that election system for another. But the Labour conference did vote for Proportional Representation. The leadership is staying tight lipped. A better fix - not that I want to fix our unRepresentative Democracy - would be to improve the situation around Open Primaries. With trust in politicians at an all time low, one could say that we are sending the wrong people to parliament. It should be easier for people, who better reflect their communities, to challenge those in power.
Direct Democracy of course offers a better, alternative means of representation - ie self-representation. Self-representation, unmediated by party politics, unconstrained by dark money and lobbyists, undaunted by the challenge to literally save our species from the existential threat of environmental catastrophe.
If Labour win the next election and implement PR and the Tories are on less than 100 seats then there would be little to stop the Conservative party breaking up into separate parties. The original party would attempt to offer older voters continuity with the past and another far-right nationalistic party, taking it’s cues from Sweden, Italy and Hungary, would aim to attract young voters with an anti-elitist message. The two would likely govern together anyway in future collations. The UK’s political future is looking distinctly European. But will it be Italian or Scandinavian?
How have the events of the past few weeks shaped your approach to the Direct Democracy project in the run-up to the next election?
The state of recent UK politics was neatly summed up by the Greenpeace protestors during Liz Truss’ Conservative Party conference speech: “Who voted for this?” read their sign.
With the resignation of Truss, the 1922 Committee was not going to repeat the mistake of letting the insane gerontocracy of Conservative members choose the next PM. High barriers to entry were erected with the potential for a new leader to be confirmed in 4 days. Those barriers proved too high for Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt with both pulling out in the final hours and minutes of the contest. Rishi Sunak was duly appointed leader of the Conservative and Unionist party and thus Prime Minister. Sunak made no public statements during the process, preferring instead to secure the public backing of 193 MPs. In another affront to democracy, the number of people “electing” the Prime Minister, fell further still.
July 2019: Boris Johnson - 92,153 Conservative party members
September 2022: Liz Truss - 81,326 Conservative party members
October 2022: Rishi Sunak - 193 Conservative MPs
If the ballot had been extended to the membership, polling suggested Boris Johnson would have won - easily. Sunak, who gained the support of 60,399 Conservative party members when competing against Truss, inherits a divided parliamentary party, a disenfranchised membership and a depressed nation. The undemocratic dance of musical chairs at the top of the Tory party is like a parlour game on the Titanic.
Recent events, such as three Prime Ministers in three months, exemplify how our politics is broken and we should consider alternatives. One exists in Switzerland and it happens to be the most trusted system in the OECD. The Swiss system is semi-Direct Democracy, where there are still elected representatives in their Federal Assembly, but crucially, the citizens are offered regular referendums on big decisions. The last Swiss referendum day held on 25 September, allowed citizens to vote on laws related to Factory Farming, Pension Reform and Taxes.
We spoke a bit about Brexit in the podcast, and how referendums can be problematic as well as practical. Given the current political fallout has a lot to do with Brexit, are you still committed to the principles of referendums?
Absolutely. Always more democracy not less. Brexit was in many ways more than just a referendum. If Switzerland, a country comfortable with giving the power of law making to its citizens, had held a referendum on the same question, it would have been viewed, quite rightly, as a once in a lifetime event - a choice with potentially extreme consequences.
Few Swiss Direct Democracy referendums ask their citizens to engage in magical thinking. Their referendums are on tangible, meaningful issues. Not something like “sovereignty”. As I say on the podcast, perhaps such a monumental question should have required a super-majority decision of over 60%. I maintain that the toxicity of Brexit was due in part to an unfamiliarity with autonomy. If Direct Democracy can prove it’s worth, then with it we can build a fairer society that tolerates debate and promotes cooperation on the big issues of the day.
What do you think are the best actions a person can take if recent events have made them feel disillusioned with politics?
Google Direct Democracy and check out Swiss Direct Democracy. Then they would see that there is an alternative to our current politics. It feels as if there is a conspiracy of silence on the topic. By which I mean; the Swiss system has existed for decades if not centuries and as the OECD survey shows it is the most trusted system of government in the world.
Why is it so highly regarded? Because Swiss citizens get to "interact" more directly with "government", by voting in regular referendums on creating or changing laws that affect their lives. Referendum questions that they themselves may have brought to national prominence, just by collecting signatures from citizens. AND YET... few know about the Swiss system overseas. I've never, ever, seen the system mentioned on TV or mainstream press. Like all the best things, one has to search for it and seek it out yourself.
How's the Direct Democracy app coming along, and has the Elon Musk Twitter takeover affected any of your long term plans, given that you were looking at integration as a possibility?
A group of coders from a Direct Democracy Discord reached out to me and we are now seriously engaged in producing a voting app we are calling True Will™.
Musk’s takeover is akin to a billionaire buying a newspaper in the 80s or 90s. You know the long term trend is down, less readership, less clout etc. But it doesn’t matter. It’s about prestige. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Musk would never be so analogue as to own a newspaper, so he owns Twitter instead. If Musk can merge Twitter into a wider ecosystem similar to China’s WeChat, in pursuit of ‘Project X’ “an app to end all apps” then he would consider the purchase a success.
For the foreseeable future Twitter will remain the nexus of online political life. Twitter polls offer a quick way for followers to vote on a singular issue. Twitter users and the general public are being primed to engage with this type of instant online polling. More people voted in 2009's Britain's Got Talent final than for any one of the political parties putting up candidates in the 2009 European elections.
A Direct Democracy UK Voting App would build on existing technology and connect its users in opposition to the current unrepresentative system of government. A DDUK app would record every major bill that is being brought to the House of Commons for a vote. Aligned with a countdown to the actual vote, users can register a binary vote for or against, and offer commentary (like Twitter posts) on the details.
Before mass adoption the app would illustrate the strength of feeling on various issues and could be used to apply pressure on local MPs ahead of votes. With mass adoption the app would act as a parallel democracy, in which the true will of voters would be recorded. A DDUK app would disrupt the mainstream pollsters, such as Ipsos Mori, with a clearer representation of voters preferences on issues, debates and government votes.
Previously, in order to change the world you needed a lot of money or a lot of people. Now you need a lot of data. If the voting preferences of the citizens of the UK could be recorded frequently it could be used to apply political pressure and bring real change - a system known as Parallel Power. True Will™ from Direct Democracy UK will be the tool for mass enfranchisement, to empower millions and change the UK for the better.
Look out for my full interview with Adam on Friday 6 January in the usual places. Until then, happy new year to all of our listeners!
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