Parliament is suspended in the UK. A communications staffer is marched from Downing Street under police escort. Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn is harangued in Parliamentary corridors. Tory MPs who voted with the opposition are sacked. The unravelling – the loss of a system’s licence to operate – has begun. And begun quite deliberately.
Power has been put ahead of people and functional relationships are a thing of the past as autocracy replaces public accountability in the UK. Observing all the strands of disfunction being pulled together it seems evident that the next move will be to encourage further dissension on the streets so that ’emergency powers’ can be implemented and, at that point, we can probably declare UK democracy dead as Cummings pushes the UK’s countries towards uncivil war and the system breakdown he seems to desire.It has nothing to do with Brexit – that is simply a convenient scapegoat for years of austerity and poor government.
It is instead a screen for Cummings and Co to manipulate an election so they can secure power for the few and misery for the many. Aside from the difficulties the country faces, the current situation, stoked and fuelled a select group of mainstream media moguls already proven to wield too much power and influence, will put communications practitioners within UK’s government in a very difficult position. The electioneering has already begun judging from the tweets, updates and photo ops coming out of No. 10 so the communications teams will be faced with some tough choices in the shutdown period – is the material campaign material or government communications, the latter being a valid use of their time. It’s going to get a whole lot messier in the next few weeks.