Cosmetic Democracy
25th December 2023
Once upon a time, different institutions believed in different things.
Take universities. We had Royalist Oxford and Parliamentarian Cambridge; later came UCL, the “Godless college of Gower Street”; King’s College London was the Tory response. As 2023 began, our graduates received their new-year alumni magazines, featuring refreshingly identical opinions on sustainability, migration, decolonisation.
Like in early East Germany, private companies still exist, but they increasingly understand that their role is to support the state and its ideology. The chief executive of KLM airlines asks people to take fewer flights for the sake of Net Zero; a new label on Nescafé jars reminds instant-coffee drinkers to celebrate “gender diversity”.