Authoritarianism Doesn’t Arrive With a Coup. It Arrives With a Login

 Authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive with a coup. It arrives with a login, a compliance form, a penalty notice for keeping records in the wrong format. It comes with a quietly extended electoral term, a cancelled bank account, a prison sentence for a social media post. Each measure has a reasonable-sounding justification. The problem is the direction — and how far it has already travelled.

Power is migrating from the visible arena of democratic politics to the less visible world of systems — compliance regimes, regulators with elastic mandates and an expanding mesh of rules governing more of daily life than most people have yet registered. No single measure looks like tyranny. The problem is the cumulative direction and the speed at which it is moving.

None of what follows was in any manifesto. All of it is happening.

Regulating what you may own, burn and keep

Consider what it now means to own a home in Britain. From 2030, landlords will be prohibited from letting properties that fail to meet the government’s Energy Performance Certificate band C standard, with fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance. These are not derelict or dangerous buildings. They are perfectly habitable properties rendered unlettable not by any structural failure but by the Government moving the regulatory goalposts around them. The Government is consulting on extending the same requirements to owner-occupied homes by 2035, at which point the state would decide whether you may sell or mortgage your own home without first spending thousands on ‘improvements’ it has specified....<<<Read More>>>...