The shredding of political convention started with austerity, not Brexit

There has been much talk since 2016 about how Brexit has wrecked Britain's political norms—with the disregard for truth and evidence, the conspiracist attacks on democratic institutions, the lack of concern for the national interest, and the support by leading politicians for a policy they know will cause harm.

It is true that the post-referendum attacks on judicial independence by Paul Dacre's Daily Mail were well outside the norms of British politics, and sought to drive public discourse to increasingly extreme paranoia. The executive and legislature resorted to increasingly chaotic chicanery as Theresa May attempted to drive through her Brexit deal, with parliament's procedural conventions contorted beyond precedent by activist Speaker John Bercow.

There is a risk, however, that declaring 23rd June 2016 some kind of Year Zero of British political disintegration obscures what went before—indeed, such declarations smack of a view that everything was going swimmingly until the Leave vote.

It was austerity, not Brexit, that first tore up the accepted norms in British politics. We don't know exactly how many people have died as a result of austerity. We know of suicides by people who'd had their benefits cut or refused. We know that life expectancy in the UK has stalled for the first time, though nobody is quite sure why. A study linked austerity to 120,000 deaths between 2010 and 2017—although such bold assertions have their critics.

The exact number of people who have died primarily due to austerity is unknown, and impossible to measure. But people died because of austerity. And it was predictable, and predicted, that cuts to benefits and to local government—the product of policies the government trumpeted from the rooftops—would have that effect.

This sort of talk is often dismissed as “shrill” by a certain kind of smug insider, who finds talk of poverty and death a noisome intrusion on the important business of gossiping about Westminster intrigue.

But the shrillness is warranted. Government policy came with a domestic death toll, complete with numerous publicly documented examples as the benefit system imploded. Many of the deaths were the result of the suffering that these cuts and sanctions imposed, as a supposed incentive to encourage people into work.

Previous governments had of course demonised and targeted particular sections of the population—immigrants, miners, single mothers, the unemployed. But for a British government to callously harm parts of the domestic population—and for those policies to continue unabated even as the sinister consequences came to light—is still extraordinary.

It is surely the most basic norm of any democracy that a government does not press on with policies that have such an impact on mortality. But that norm did not survive the respective stints of George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith at the Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions.

Another norm is that governments don't use retrospective laws to circumvent the courts—and yet that too was ignored by IDS. When the Court of Appeal ruled in 2013 that £130m worth of benefit sanctions had been illegally applied, the government sought to rush through emergency legislation that would have not only changed the rules in response to the court decision, but made its effect retrospective so the government wouldn't have to fork out compensation. Thankfully, its efforts were thwarted by the Supreme Court.

More recently, Esther McVey, one of IDS's hapless successors, was pulled up for misleading the House of Commons over the disastrous rollout of Universal Credit—but got away with an apology, when under previous governments it would have been a career-ender.

Austerity was built on a propaganda war waged by an ideologically-bound network of think tank fanatics, right-wing editors, blowhard columnists and negligent ministers. Targets of their public onslaught successively ranged from benefit claimants, to local councils, to public sector unions, to GPs, to the previously unassailable junior doctors.

Given that some of the key propagandists for austerity are the same as those for Brexit, it is little surprise that the reckless disregard for norms and boundaries displayed in pursuit of the former have grown into the chaos driving the latter. Matthew Elliott, for example, went from co-founding the pro-austerity Taxpayers’ Alliance to running the Vote Leave campaign, and has now been brought in as special adviser at the Treasury.

But what has apparently not been considered is that as and when this group is finally booted from office, the radicals running Labour may apply the same disregard for norms right back at them.