Extremists can only win by selling you fantasies. Everything is simple, everything is someone else’s fault, and the reason nothing gets fixed is because “the establishment” is stopping them. Then they get into power and reality turns up like a bailiff with a clipboard.
At that point there are only two options. You admit you can’t deliver and you lose the next election, or you make sure you don’t lose the next election. That’s where the “strong leader” act stops being entertainment and becomes a requirement. Scrutiny becomes sabotage, opposition becomes treason, and institutions become enemies. Not because you’re brave, but because you’re exposed.
And who pays? Not the wealthy backers. They can insulate themselves from chaos. They have assets, lawyers, options, and the ability to move money and opportunity somewhere quieter. It’s ordinary people who pay, in higher bills, worse services, longer waits, fewer rights, and a country that becomes harder to fix because the people in charge can’t tolerate being proved wrong.
This is not just a far right problem. Far left politics can do the same thing. Different slogans, same flaw. When politics is built on moral certainty and impossible promises, reality becomes the enemy. Constraints are treated as betrayal, compromise is treated as corruption, and anyone pointing out the numbers is accused of sabotage. It’s intoxicating, right up until you need a functioning economy, a working state, and a government capable of doing more than shouting.
There’s a deeper irony here that rarely gets said out loud. People talk about a dictatorship of the wealthy versus a dictatorship of the proletariat, as if they’re opposites. In practice they can both end up as the same thing: rule by an elite.
The dictatorship of the wealthy often doesn’t need to announce itself. It just quietly happens. Money shapes policy, money shapes media, money shapes what is “realistic”, and elections become a choice between two versions of what donors will tolerate. It’s oligarchy with nice stationery.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is meant to be the working majority taking control. But the proletariat doesn’t sit in ministries and committees. A party does. A political class does. A security apparatus does. The working class becomes the moral justification while power concentrates in the hands of a new elite that claims it speaks for “the people”. The slogans change, but the incentives don’t.
So the mechanism is bigger than ideology. It’s extremism itself. The further you go from trade-offs and consent, the more you end up needing force, because you can’t keep your promises any other way.
This is where our electoral system comes in, and it’s the bit the “FPTP gets things done” crowd never want to look at too closely. Yes, FPTP gets things done. That’s the problem. It can hand a party a huge majority on a minority of the vote, and then that minority can do whatever it likes, however radical, with only the flimsiest consent.
Some of it gets reversed by the next lot, which is why we lurch from one direction to another. But the damage to institutions and long-term capacity often doesn’t reverse at all. Once you’ve hollowed out the state, degraded trust, or made a big structural mistake, you don’t just click your fingers and put it back.
That is why we get swings and reversals every few years, and why long-term planning becomes almost impossible. Under FPTP, you don’t need to build durable consensus, because you can win big on 35 or 40 percent and treat the rest of the country like background noise. So one government yanks the wheel hard to the right, the next yanks it back, and the country spends decades in political whiplash. Big infrastructure, energy strategy, industrial policy, NHS reform, housing, skills, defence procurement - all of it becomes party branding rather than national strategy.
Under PR you still get governments, but you get governments that look more like the electorate. You need a real coalition of voters and parties to do big things, not just a lucky distribution of seats and a split opposition. It slows down the worst impulses and forces compromise, which is precisely why the loudest people hate it. They don’t want persuasion. They want power.
So when someone tells you FPTP is better because it “delivers strong government”, what they usually mean is it delivers government that can ignore most of the country and still call itself legitimate. It lets a determined minority grab the levers and pull them hard, while everyone else is told to shut up because “the people have spoken”. Even when most of the people didn’t vote for it.
Here’s the deal you are actually signing.
If you’re the leader of an extremist movement, you’d better be ready to rule by force once your promises collapse, because reality will expose you and you’ll need something else to hold on to.
And if you’re the voter cheering on “strong government” under FPTP, you’d better be ready to pay handsomely for your vote, because the whole point of that system is that a small number can “get things done” against the will of the majority. Once you’ve handed that power to people who despise accountability, you may not get another meaningful choice.
Not because democracy ends with tanks in the street, but because it gets hollowed out, bit by bit, until your vote is just a ritual and you’re still waiting for a GP appointment while they’re on telly blaming judges.
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