LAST week, I found myself participating in a pro-democracy demonstration: not in Hong Kong or some other distant authoritarian state, but in the heart of my own city, London. I am no stranger to protest marches, but I never expected to have to take to the streets to defend something as fundamental to British life as parliamentary democracy.
That was before prime minister Boris Johnson announced his intention to suspend parliament for five weeks in order to push through a no-deal Brexit.
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Yes, the B-word. I didn’t really want to write about Brexit. This is a column about environmental issues. But bear with me, because I believe the current state of UK politics tells us something about environmental battles to come.
The “stop the coup” protests –and counter-protests – outside the Palace of Westminster in the past weeks weren’t widely reported as pro-democracy rallies, but I think that is fundamentally what they are. The idea of proroguing parliament to secure Brexit is, to many, including myself, profoundly undemocratic – not to mention darkly ironic, given one oft-cited reason for Brexit, for the UK to restore full parliamentary sovereignty and take back democratic control of its affairs.
I do understand that there is another way of looking at it. In the 2016 referendum, the majority of voters supported the UK leaving the EU, but three years and a lot of parliamentary wrangling later, the UK is still in it. If parliament has to be suspended to deliver the will of the people, then so be it: the direct democracy of the referendum trumps the representative democracy of parliament.
There are counterarguments to the counterarguments, of course, but wherever you stand on the Brexit issue, the same basic, broader question applies. In a democracy, is it ever legitimate to decide that an objective is of such profound importance that established political structures or constitutional procedures can be swept aside to achieve it?
Contemplating the Brexit struggle, I was reminded of conversations I had with scientists and policy-makers after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its 2018 report about the radical and rapid changes required to stop warming from exceeding 1.5°C. Some openly questioned whether the scale of the challenge was compatible with democracy.
“Which is more important, saving the planet or saving democracy?”
You can see why they worry. Environmental action is political. The status quo is dragging us to disaster and we face difficult choices about how we run the economy, obtain energy and food, move ourselves around and build infrastructure. Freedoms we take for granted will have to be constrained. There will be losers.
Will it really be possible to persuade enough people to make the necessary sacrifices to avert environmental disaster? Or will the majority kick the can down the road and vote for short-term self-interest? At this point, I don’t think these are hypothetical questions. Every election from now on, in every jurisdiction, is a test of democracy’s ability to avert climate disaster. Its track record so far isn’t encouraging.
At some point, then, environmentalists may have to ask themselves a very difficult question: which is more important, saving the planet or saving democracy? As we have seen with Brexit, I think we will find that many people who are otherwise impeccable democrats will decide ditching democracy is the lesser of two evils. Some may look with envy to authoritarian regimes such as China, which has stated its aim to build an “ecological civilisation” and, politically, looks more capable of doing so than any democracy.
At this point, it helps to bring in a bit of cognitive science. For many people in the UK, Brexit appears to have become what is called a “sacred value”: something so central to their identity and worldview that it trumps all else. As the name implies, such values are often religious, but not always. Nationalism, freedom and democracy are sacred for some people, too.
Environmentalism can also be a sacred value. When the climate crisis bites harder, we will face a similar reckoning. Now I’m on the side of parliamentary democracy, but when the shit truly hits the fan, I’m not so sure that I would take to the streets to defend it.
Is there a way to reconcile the two? When I asked Caroline Lucas, the UK’s only Green party MP, whether climate action was compatible with democracy, she said yes – but only if we build a mass movement to persuade politicians to act. Time to put my marching boots back on.
- This column appears monthly. Up next week: Annalee Newitz
