What does a government do when it has lost the political authority to get anything done? It starts banning things, argues Jack Morgan Jones.
First, they came for our pit bulls. Then, they came for our cigs and vapes. In December, we learned that Rishi Sunak’s Tories are apparently deliberating a social-media ban for teens, and while a full ban is unlikely, it hasn’t been ruled out. The New Year has brought an official policy review that is floating the idea of outlawing ‘extreme’ online porn. It seems that Sunak’s recent approach to policy-making can be summarised by two steps: (1) sporadically identify something and (2) ban it! A moribund government, flailing for political authority, has adopted a desperate political strategy – the ‘easy ban’.
Easy bans are low-effort in terms of the exercise of State capacity, but seek high yield in terms of short-term political capital. The first condition rules out something like the banning of driving without a seatbelt, for example, because that took a decade of incremental legislation. By comparison, notice how quickly the Tories moved on BullyXL legislation. The second condition rules out the 2007 banning of smoking in pubs, given that Labour was ahead in the polls with the Prime Minister’s approval rating net positive. By comparison, think of the Tories of today, and Sunak’s prospects for tomorrow.
Easy bans could be thought of as just another version of ‘dead-cat strategizing’. This term gained traction during Boris Johnson’s Conservative 2019-22 government in reference to politicians who say sensational things to distract the electorate from their policy failings. It became an artificial insider’s term, and has been criticised for assuming some kind of political puppet-master behind every guffaw and gaff.
But unlike the Johnsonian crafted blunder, Sunak’s particular dead-cat distraction serves a political function. Banning something is an exercise of state power. It is a mechanism which has the general function of changing society for various ends. Faced with the prospect of a humiliating wipe-out in 2024, the Tories have decided to chase after policy baubles that convey the authoritative capacity to exercise actual State power, without having to exercise much actual State power given their real lack of authority.
The consequence of Sunak’s government using the ‘easy ban’ to present as strong and stable on the domestic front (at least for a few more minutes), is a consensus where meaningful, let alone ground-breaking, domestic policy reform has no place. Issues that would require the authoritative exercising of state power, such as immigration, housing shortages, or the collapse of our railway networks, are consistently fudged or ignored. In their place, easy bans disguise the void at the heart of British government where political authority should be.
It might be objected that the ‘easy ban’ strategy can be excused because of the way our media-entertainment-industrial complex whips up political narratives. Any politician would be a fool to ignore these pressures, and so maybe the ‘easy ban’ can be dismissed as just another unfortunate feature of modern politics. But this would ignore the easy ban’s proactive political function.
The point to stress is that the political purpose and effect of the easy ban is independent of the merits of banning, say, children using social media. There might be something to be said for banning this or that, but the political reason for banning it is to create a simulacrum of authority. Moreover if the strategy works at all that is because bans are likely to be supported by opposition parties and the effect is to create a consensus understanding of what government is for, a consensus that marginalises what an authoritative government would actually do.
Sunak’s spree of identifying-something-banable is indicative of the fact that his party has insufficient political authority to exercise state power in a way that would have a positive effect on society’s needs. This diagnosis fits with another symptom of the Tories’ desperate, moribund condition: the banging of the culture-war drum. At conference, Sunak’s speech included the phrase ‘a man is a man, and woman is a woman, that’s just common sense’ (and on cue the Tory members erupted like a herd of clapping seals).
Again, the point is not whether Sunak is right about these questions. The point is that the government has been almost wholly ineffective in changing the practices of institutions throughout the public sector which it claims to abhor. Much like with the easy ban, banging the culture war drum gives the impression of competence and authority while exercising neither and, what’s more, obscuring policy questions that require far more of those virtues than the government possesses. Here the opposition parties again play a role. Although they may take the opposite side in a culture war issue, the battle over them contributes to a consensus that these authority-lite problems are what democratic government is for.
It might be that any kind of dead-cat distraction is an inevitable feature of the UK’s party-political system. Once a majority party has had the run of the corridors of power for long enough, maybe they all succumb to complacency. Or else, maybe there really is something distinctively unauthoritative about Conservatives who have lost sight of what if anything they are conserving, some deeper ideological malaise which, for some time now, should have resulted in, as Peter Hitchens says, ‘the destruction of the Conservative Party’. Sunak’s reach for the easy ban is a sign that political disaster, if not necessarily complete destruction, is near at hand. Easy bans are unlikely to save him. The electorate appears to be deeply unimpressed by this fakery.
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