For onlookers, Britain’s repressive turn is something of an enigma. Why are restrictions being tightened — on public protest, journalism, trade unionism — in a country where civil unrest is virtually absent? What could an establishment, in bipartisan agreement about every fundamental economic and geopolitical issue, have to gain from waging a war against an enemy too weak to fight back?

In a narrow sense, authoritarian measures can be said to serve a practical purpose: minimizing disruption and the bad publicity that flows from it. Although Britain’s annual strikes days remain low by historic standards, the government has tried to counter the recent uptick in industrial action by introducing labor laws that limit walkouts in the public sector. Similarly, following the rise of disruptive climate activism, parliament has passed policing and “public order” bills that make it easier to jail protesters. And in the international context of the New Cold War, attempts to strengthen the security state (by making it an offense to publish “restricted” information, for instance) are an obvious complement to rising militarism.

It would be wrong to claim, with more optimistic commentators on the British left, that these reforms reflect a deep legitimacy crisis, and consequent drift toward coercion in the absence of consent. While there is no great enthusiasm for Labour or the Tories, nor is there an alternative mass politics on the horizon. Corbynism, a challenge from above rather than below, failed to leave a powerful socialist movement in its wake. The Tories’ Thatcherite domestic program and hyper-Atlanticist foreign policy have met no serious opposition in the streets. Draconian legislation is therefore aimed at individuals and institutions that the government considers an inconvenience — or “public nuisance” — as opposed to a genuine threat.

Yet if these are the immediate objects of repression, Britain’s illiberalism is also driven by a deeper dynamic. It is, among other things, a response to the country’s ongoing economic malaise, characterized by “sustained stagnation, literal decline and repeated failure to recover adequately from severe shocks,” as Adam Tooze has written. The precarious growth model of the New Labour years, based on a puissant financial sector, cheap credit, and asset bubbles, was destabilized by the banking crisis of 2008. Since then, the country’s traditional boom-and-bust cycle has been replaced by an unprecedented decline in relative productivity. In the hope of attracting investment, David Cameron’s Tory–Lib Dem coalition pursued an austerity agenda that further undermined the conditions for growth. By sapping state capacity, it impeded the UK’s response to subsequent tremors: first Brexit, then the pandemic, now the war in Ukraine.

If forecasts are correct, the country’s annual growth rate in the five years leading up to the 2024 election will be a miserable 0.2 percent. Whoever enters Downing Street will face a series of chronic problems recently itemized by the Financial Times: declining real incomes, barriers to expanding the labor force, atrophied public services, and capital markets unsettled by the cost of borrowing.

Neither party is willing to contemplate a serious economic realignment in light of this bleak conjuncture. Though they disagree on minor points of scale and emphasis, their shared priority is to restore “fiscal credibility” by starving the public sector of funds while using modest supply-side reforms to stimulate growth. Both have conceded that the state must step in to contain the cost-of-living crisis and swap public for private ownership in areas where the market has entirely broken down. Yet even Labour’s tentative steps toward an active green industrial policy have now been halted for fear of exceeding public spending limits.

It remains to be seen how effectively the Westminster parties will manage Britain’s decline or uphold its centralized state. But whatever the fortunes of their programs, they will inevitably perpetuate suffering for much of the population. Without major cash injections, the health care, transport, and education systems will continue to collapse. And without meaningful concessions to the major unions — ruled out by both parties — reasonable living standards will be out of reach.

Given all this, low expectations are a gift to Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak. Both have tried to draw a dividing line between ordinary people who are prudent enough to accept their lot and reckless utopians who strive for higher things. The former know that any viable “growth plan” will be slow and painful, while the latter make unreasonable demands for better services and wages. In this quasi-Freudian schema, political maturity is defined as the ability to forego instant satisfaction. This value is embodied by the party leaders themselves, who love nothing more than to contrast their grim realism with the infantile delusions of their predecessors. By distancing themselves from Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss, they signal that an adult sensibility has supplanted a childlike naivety.

Authoritarianism plays a crucial role in diffusing this disposition. A large part of its function is symbolic: to stigmatize the act of protest, to entrench the separation between the hardworking majority and the disruptive minority. It creates the perception that the average citizen is someone who “gets on with it,” taking their immiseration on the chin, while only criminals kick up a fuss.

Far from serving a purely defensive purpose (to secure the state against supposed risks), repressive laws represent an offensive strategy to cleave society into these opposed camps. Hard power — the cuffs and batons of the Metropolitan Police — is merely the outward sign of soft power: a struggle taking place at the level of ideology. When Sunak and Starmer stress the need to get tough on crime, what they are really talking about is thought-crime: nonconformity, refusal to accept reality, deviation from “grown-up politics.” (In Britain, you can now be threatened with arrest simply for holding a blank placard, since you may be tempted to write something politically contentious on it.)

The elements of so-called “technopopulism” are inherent in this approach. There is a cross-party consensus that policy decisions are the preserve of a cognoscenti insulated from popular pressure. Yet this cadre also positions itself on the side of “the people,” conceived as a unified entity pitted against a external adversary: climate campaigners, trade union militants, Putin relays, and so on. Labour and the Tories contend that what the British people want is stability and continuity, even if this means considerable hardship, whereas their enemies are set on chaos and disorder. When the campaign group Just Stop Oil blocks the motorways, or when transport workers shut down the railways, these disturbances are framed as an ominous foreshadowing of any attempt to renovate Britain’s broken economic model: a process that would involve intolerable disruption, inconvenience, and upheaval. Clamping down on such actions is a means of foreclosing broader visions of social transformation.

This shared orientation shapes the political contest between the two parties. Each claims that the other is incapable of maintaining law and order, and is therefore aloof from the concerns of the general public. The Conservatives evoke the memory of Jeremy Corbyn, asserting that Starmer remains tethered to a hard-left fringe that will open the borders and unlock the prisons. Labour points to cronyism and corruption in the Tory ranks, insisting that the incumbent is too untrustworthy to defend the realm: too beholden to private interests to represent the general one.

The partygate scandal, in which Britain’s disgraced former prime minsister was revealed to have held parties in Downing Street during the height of 2020’s lockdown, was a boon for the Opposition in precisely this respect: it created a direct link between the government’s elitism and its libertinism. If Sunak considers himself above the rules, Starmer can demonstrate his common touch by enforcing them. He is a man of the people precisely because he is a strict disciplinarian. Sir Keir is, after all, a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service who advocated twenty-four-hour courts during England’s 2011 riots so as to ensure all involved faced the full force of the law. Whereas the Tories are “compromising our security” with their mismanagement, Labour will restore it with their own brand of popular conservatism.

According to the most recent polling, these tactics have been broadly successful. Many of the restrictions on protest enjoy public support, and Labour is on track for a parliamentary majority next year. Its election will likely lead to a period of authoritarian consolidation, with the unblinking consent of supporters in the liberal media. Starmer’s autocratic tendencies have been likened to Tony Blair’s, but their meaning differs in our current historical context. While New Labour used state repression and surveillance to create flexible market actors who could realize its vision of an open, meritocratic society, the newest iteration of Labour has no such ambition. It is trying to cultivate a passive citizenry, not an active one. Its paradigm is not the entrepreneur of the self, but the weakling who suffers what they must.