Revolting: How The Establishment Are Undermining Democracy And What They’re Afraid Of

Mick Hume

Collins, £6.99

Review by Iain Macwhirter

MIKE Hume says he is a passionate advocate of popular democracy and free speech. And God knows we need defenders of democracy and free speech in these troubled times. But Hume isn't a passionate advocate of any old democracy – he is a purist who believes that the people most of us might call democrats are in fact enemies of the people. And yes, Supreme Court judges, he does mean you.

Hume was furious at their interference over Article 50 and vents his wrath against all constitutional lawyers in terms Donald Trump would tweet in approval. He believes they should keep their wigs out of politics and stick to the criminal courts.

But hang on: surely the Law Lords of the Supreme Court were upholding democracy – parliamentary democracy – against the attempt by the Prime Minister, Theresa May, to bypass parliament using the pre-democratic powers of royal prerogative to pass article 50 into law? Mr Hume brushes this aside, along with all constitutional arguments. Indeed, he condemns all constitutions for “summoning the democracy of the dead to entomb the living”, which is a clever aphorism until you start to ask what it means. Democracy is surely impossible without agreed rules about how that democratic polity should function. People need to know if they are living in a presidential system, a parliamentary democracy, constitutional monarchy, a plebiscitary democracy or whatever. If they don't, there isn't pure democracy, there is pure chaos.

Hume claims to be a marxist, but he doesn't seem to be interested either in Lenin's ideas on democratic centralism or soviet worker democracy. Nor does he consider whether single party democracies, like the People’s Republic of China, are in any sense democratic. I assume he doesn't, but you can't be sure with the “editor at large” of the contrarian website, Spiked!.

He seems to reserve particular scorn for representative democracy in the UK, which is why he was so outraged at the judges of the Supreme Court upholding parliamentary authority. He says those who argued that parliament is the source of democratic legitimacy were trying “justify their attempt to overturn a [referendum] result they did not like”. Needless to say, Hume voted for Brexit.

He also celebrates Donald Trump's victory as a revolt of the democratic masses against the wicked elites. But here he contradicts his constitution-phobia by giving the thumbs up to the American system under which presidents are chosen, not by popular majority, but by electoral college. You might have expected this radical democrat to be arguing that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Presidential election because she received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. But no.

You might also have thought that a radical democrat would favour proportional representation, rather than the undemocratic first-past-the-post-system in which the number of MPs in the House of Commons bears no relationship to the actual number of votes cast. But again, no. PR is another distraction, apparently, by “policy wonks and academics”.

He rails also against those who seek to limit the franchise in elections. Some people, in the wake of Brexit and Trump, have apparently been calling for unintelligent people to be deprived of the vote until they wise up. I don't know who he has in mind here because I've never heard of anyone seriously arguing that we should restrict democracy to certain categories of voters.

But then it turns out that Hume is against extending the democratic franchise to 16 and 17 year olds, on the grounds that this “infantilises” politics. The Scottish referendum surely demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that people who are old enough to marry and join the army are also mature enough to vote. He doesn't even advocate abolishing the monarchy on the grounds that “elected politicians are held in such low esteem that many people would vote for the monarch anyway”.

So what kind of democracy does match up to Hume's exacting standards? Well, throughout the first 200 pages of ranting against the left, liberals, the European Union, BBC, student radicals, philosophers from Plato to Noam Chomsky (all enemies of democracy), he repeatedly writes approvingly of the “red in tooth and claw” democracy of ancient Athens. Pericles had the right idea. “Let's revive the spirit of Athens,” he proclaims, “minus the slavery and misogyny”. Well, quite.

Everyone was equal in the Athenian citizen's assembly he says, where “people’s juries made most laws; jurors were selected by lottery and left to legislate without the guiding hand of any autocratic judge”. We'll set aside whether this is a reliable account of democratic practice in ancient Athens and take it that he supports direct democracy through people's assemblies, presumably expressing their choices through plebiscites, of which Mr Hume repeatedly says he approves.

But wait. After all the quotes from Pericles’ funeral oration, we come to the final chapter in which Hume spells out his idea of democracy. In this we discover that Hume isn't arguing for direct democracy at all. “Such an ancient system could hardly work today” he concludes. “We are no longer dealing with a city state that constitutes a few thousand active citizens.” Which of course is where representative democracy came in.

Suddenly Hume appears to have been arguing all along for an essentially parliamentary form. He says: “There is nothing necessarily wrong with viewing elected MPs as representatives rather than delegated agents of the electorate. It is important that political leaders are able to lead and have minds of their own.” He says he wants our system to be revived by the “Athenian spirit” but gives no concrete proposals as to how to inject this Geist (the German term for “spirit”) into our constitution-free demos.

Now, I enjoy a rant as much as the next man, and Hume makes some good points about the way the working class was scorned by (some) liberal elites and leftists after Brexit. Freedom of speech is under attack on some university campuses where political correctness has, truly, gone mad. But you can't just spend 80,000 words destroying an army of straw men, berating social democrats and attacking representative democracy as a sham, and then have precisely nothing coherent to say about how to reform it.

Someone at Collins should have got him down from his high horse for two minutes and asked him exactly what this book is about. “In God's name, Mr Hume, what are you trying to SAY?”