Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, while in preparation for this debate, for reasons I cannot explain, my phone decided to throw up some old pictures that I had kept in archive. A particular photograph came from 1975, of Idi Amin forcing white diplomats to bow down to him to give him subservience and obedience and take an oath of allegiance to his Government. We easily wrote him off then as a tyrant, an autocrat and a man who was intent on showering shame on those he despised and manipulating and destroying their lives.

Well, here we are many decades on, and we have recorded information this week that the former recent President of the United States spent the last weekend in Texas, assuring those who bowed down to him a year ago that he will pardon them when he returns to office and release them of the charges for which they were accused for leaping up on Capitol Hill to destroy the stable democracy of the United States, and that he spent weekends while in the White House destroying and ripping up official papers which members of his Government, in Civil Service terms, literally sellotaped together to provide to the inquiry in Washington.

We so easily used to point at African leaders as despotic and despairing and we now have them in abundance in the West. We have to learn to take account of what is clearly a major failure in our ability to display democracy to the rest of the world when we cannot see it in the places we once revered or even consider home.

I have reflected strongly on this issue, largely because I have felt a deep sense of despair at the state of our own country’s affairs. Before I leave them, I remind noble Lords who are followers of American political writing of a quote that appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920—100 years ago—written by the leading political author HL Mencken:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”


In subsequent writings, HL Mencken went on to explain that

“the inner soul of the people”

was corrupted when the public were lulled into indulgence and indifference by consistent pleasure and abundant choice. He said that this allowed them to take the low road of ease and disengagement, which he called the cul-de-sac of hopelessness. If we care about democracy, we have to ask ourselves: what are we allowing people to be and to do carelessly—and social media fits well into that paradigm—that causes them to be lulled into persistent pleasure and indulgence?

While we have been here, in the course of this debate, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Munira Mirza, has resigned, accusing the Prime Minister of slurs against the leader of the Opposition, saying that:

“There was no fair or reasonable basis”


for the assertions made at the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons. She continued:

“This was not the normal cut-and-thrust of politics; it was an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse. You tried to clarify your position today but, despite my urging, you did not apologise for the misleading impression you gave.”


How can we preach democracy and authoritative, intelligent leadership to a world that now so desperately needs it when those at the centre of our own politics cannot seem to display it?

These things are inconsistencies, and I wonder whether the Minister might reflect when he makes his reply on whether he believes the assertions in the Economist of the last week that at the heart of our problem is the “childish lack of seriousness” at the heart of government and the failure of the Government to tell consistent truth. The Economist says:

“Treating voters as dopes to be bought off with bombast is a feature of the demagoguery that Mr Johnson rode to power. It is an example of the contempt with which populist leaders treat the people they govern. So, alas, is the other trait that has infected post-Brexit Britain: lying”,


consistently in public. We cannot preach democracy to the world if we cannot deliver integrity at home.