Badenoch’s dangerous lurch into the online swamp

Still, it’s worth stopping for a moment and thinking about what happened. In case you missed it, the petition the leader of the opposition mentioned was started by a publican from the West Midlands, and one of the roughly seven people who voted for the Conservatives over the summer.

Its purpose is straightforward. “I would like there to be another General Election,” Michael Westwood wrote. “I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election.” How big of him, to speak for the many people who voted for the other lot, and had been feeling so powerless until then. 

At time of writing, the petition has gathered over 2,850,000 signatures; by the time you read this, it is likely that the number will have reached the three-million mark. How and why has it become so popular? Well, it both is and isn’t easy to say. On the one hand, things do sometimes go viral online, for reasons no-one can quite explain.

On the other, the petition was mentioned on social media by Nigel Farage and Elon Musk, among others who would like to see British democracy get destabilised. Again, it would be easy to decide to ignore it entirely. A number of pro-Europe petitions managed to get millions of signatures during the years following the Brexit referendum, and they didn’t change a thing.

There is no reason to believe that this effort will be any different. What should be concerning, however, is that it was brought into the chamber of the House of Commons, in the context of a high profile exchange. 

Because so many politicians and political journalists are addicted to social media, the lines between Westminster and the internet have become increasingly porous. Online conspiracy theories like “15-minute cities” have been mentioned in Parliament by backbenchers before. In one extreme case, former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen eventually became a full-fat conspiracy theorist, and lost the whip.

Though MPs are desperate to show the public that they do not live in ivory towers away from the real Britain, they really ought to stop feeding the hand that is likely to bite them one day. Badenoch may have enjoyed that cheap jibe at Starmer, but she should remember that she is also the leader of a mainstream political party.

The only people who benefit from the worst of the internet seeping into Westminster are the populists aiming to destroy the establishment. They have, across the world, become adept at blurring the boundaries between genuine political discourse and demands from the mob; between reasonable arguments and propaganda disguised as complaints. They do it because they know that it makes it easier for them to win power. After all, the Overton window won’t shift itself.

Of course, the petition was mostly harmless to begin with, but its weaponisation by bad faith actors should have made Badenoch realise that no good would come out of bringing it up. If her argument is that the will of two million people is so important that it must be mentioned in the Commons, where will she stop? 

It would be very easy to find two million people in Britain who agree with very unpalatable things. Hell, four million of them voted for Reform back in July. Telling small but statistically significant groups of people that their goal will be taken seriously if they shout loudly enough is not good for democracy, even if it can sometimes be cynically convenient.

Everyone agrees that Westminster shouldn’t be a bubble separate from everything else, but that doesn’t mean some boundaries shouldn’t be drawn. Badenoch is pulling down the drawbridge at her peril, and ours.