The hidden mechanisms of unfreedom: part II

Manufacturing consent

Citizens assemble in Bristol

Imagine you get an invitation to an unusual event. The organisers are seeking your input on an important issue of the day, and it seems a rare opportunity to do something socially useful and have a bit of a day out. You'll get to express yourself and make a contribution – to “have a voice”, as we say in the contemporary lingo. Lunch will be provided, along with some “expenses” for your time.

We are looking at one of the key mechanisms of manufacturing consent, a dark art increasingly being used by those with power/after more power to shepherd populations in a certain direction.

In an essay published in 1947 called "The Engineering of Consent", Edward Bernays described the principles of modern public relations as “activities are planned and executed by trained practitioners in accordance with scientific principles, based on the findings of social scientists."

A few decades later, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman analysed how corporate media organisations were using a “propaganda model of communication” to further the agendas of elite groups. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media argued that the US media were fulfilling "a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".

The first text outlines the methods actively used to create certain results; the second the system (or culture, society) which provides the context in which they can work. The following two case studies demonstrate how, in the 2020s, these approaches are being used to change your life and mine like never before.

CASE STUDY: Citizens Support Food Restrictions

Emma Explains Things To Us

In February, the Climate Change Committee, which describes itself as independent but is in fact a taxpayer-funded government advisory body, published its Seventh Carbon Budget. The committee recommended a ban on gas boilers, more flight taxes, restrictions on driving and reductions in the consumption of meat and dairy.

In comments widely published in the media, the CCC's head of Net Zero Emily Nurse tried to make this last recommendation easy for citizens to understand by translating the required sacrifice into kebabs: “If you think about the average amount of meat that a person eats in the UK, if that were all converted to doner kebabs … the average amount would be around eight a week ... in our pathway, we're saying by 2040 that would be six”.

Based on a citizens’ panel convened by the CCC, chief executive Emma Pinchbeck claimed the recommendations had the broad support of the public: “The citizens’ panel were often ahead of even our advice on some of the things they were willing to consider. They are interested and want to do their bit. The public really are proud of the UK’s progress on climate action - we can’t see any evidence that the public wants us to slow down.”

Watching the video the CCC made about the panel, I experienced a strange mix of emotions that can be crudely described as pity and horror. I felt pity for the members of the public who were acting in good faith; horror at how they were being manipulated to agree to restrictions that will affect us all.

Just 26 members of the public from the Birmingham area attended seven workshops run by the market research firm IPSOS, only two of which were face-to-face. The sessions began with talks by experts explaining the Climate Change Emergency and the “transport, home heating, diet and aviation choices that households are expected to make as part of the transition to Net Zero”.

Initially, the CCC organisers found that participants had doubts about the radical changes being proposed. But “once they understood what needed to happen and what the options are”, attendees became tractable: “After presentations on what the changes were and how the CCC had landed on their pathways to Net Zero, participants overall supported the premise that these changes were necessary. Their discussions rarely raised concerns about the feasibility or the necessity of these changes, and instead focused on how these could be fairly achieved through policy levers.”

The phrases “after deliberation” and “following deliberation” recur throughout the CCC report, highlighting the contrast between what people initially thought about an issue, and the conclusion they arrived at with the “help” of the experts.

This tactic worked even on the vexed issue of eating insects.

“Participants were wary of more novel alternative proteins … After deliberations, participants were less against these products.” They could even be persuaded to advocate taxes on certain foods: “Following deliberations, participants were also open to policies that would adjust relative prices of meat and dairy products and alternative proteins” to make them less affordable, especially “if ‘nudge’ policies proved insufficient”.

The same methods had already been used to promote the CCC's Sixth Carbon Budget of 2020 which recommended, among other things, big reductions in the consumption of meat and dairy and the re-allocation of farmland. It was voted on and approved by Parliament in 2021.

The CCC’s people made of the support a “citizens climate assembly” they claimed demonstrated for their recommendations. “Climate Assembly UK has shown there is broad support for climate action in the UK, and we strongly welcome its findings,” said Chris Stark, the then chief executive of the CCC. A comment in the reported hinted at the behavioural psychology underlying the approach: “The experience of the UK Climate Assembly shows that if people understand what is needed and why, if they have options and can be involved in the decision-making process, they will support the transition to Net Zero”.

The assembly – the first of its kind – brought together 108 people from various parts of the UK. “I felt like I'd won the lottery when I got the letter,” said one participant. “I'd be daft not to do it – it's amazing to get the chance to have a say and influence what may happen in the future.”

There were a lot of fingers in the assembly pie. It was commissioned by parliamentary committees and funded by the House of Commons with additional funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the European Climate Foundation - you can check the funders which back the ECP and see if any names ring a bell here. It was run by two of the new organisations Involve and Sortition Foundations, two of the new generation administrators of “deliberative democracy”. On the surface, the proceedings were impressively complex: talks by experts were followed by deliberations by participants who then went on to vote on statements provided to them.

This was the basis of the CCC’s claim that there was public support for a population-wide reduction in meat consumption by up to 40%.

Just 35 people discussed the issue, with 29% voting to place the idea of “some, just less meat” low in the list of priorities. As Ben Pile pointed out in this video, just 10 individuals were being used to represent the wishes of 66 million people.

The birth of a new governance technique

As the Climate Assembly UK website notes, “governments and parliaments around the world are increasingly using citizens' assemblies in their work”. Judging by the client lists of the companies which organise them, they are popular with councils.

Assumptions are key to this method of gaining public consent for measures that would be unpopular. Participants are invited to discuss only the “how”; the “what” has already been decided.

People may arrive at the event with a variety of feelings and ideas, but once the organisers have established the parameters, the method seems to work beautifully. The author of the report on the citizens' panel for the Seventh Carbon Budget commented:

“Participants supported the household choices: After presentations on what the changes were … participants overall supported the premise that these changes were necessary. Their discussions rarely raised concerns about the feasibility or the necessity of these changes, and instead focused on how these could be fairly achieved through policy levers.”

Questions and doubts are easily dealt with. “Some participants expressed concerns around specific policies and technologies early in the process. However, as they learned more about the challenges and had the opportunity to discuss policies and technologies in more depth, they supported the choices as necessary and actively engaged with how these could be delivered.”

The organisers did face some unknowns, but these had to do with how far governments could go and what measures people would tolerate to bring about the desired change. In commenting on the results, the CCC people sometimes note participants' willingness to go even further than they expected in agreeing to restrictions.

The human desire to be helpful and appear virtuous is strong, and in this case led to participants advocating for food to be deliberately made more expensive for their fellow humans. Reading the material, I was at times put in mind of the famous Milgram experiment.

So much for the process of generating acceptance at the events. The next step was to amplify the conclusions and communicate them so they could affect decision-making for the whole society. The Citizens' Assembly was used to persuade Parliament that it only need to nod through what the public already wanted. Media coverage featuring relatable examples and personable women fostered the impression that the proposals had widespread support.

Amid this heady mix of emotion, information and prescription, the circularity of the structure of the consultation can be hard to see. A government takes advice from “independent” experts paid for by the government. Parliament commissions research on which Parliament then votes. Citizens produce “recommendations” which have been provided to them.

Few notice the underlying shift of values involved. As Mike Benz points out in this interview, democracy is quietly being redefined so that the basis of legitimacy lies not in the consensus of individuals but in the consensus of institutions.

These institutions are staffed by “experts”. But, crucially, they are financed and run by a powerful minority which has clear ideas about the direction in which they want to take the world.

No coup or dramatic takeover is involved, just a steady growth in the power of the state, corporations and supra-national bodies, the erosion of democratic rights and the ongoing shift of resources to the top. And it's all coming about with the apparent consent of the population.

It's a truism that the results of polls are affected by the questions, they way they are framed and phrased. Yet this fact does not account for the funny feeling I've had about YouGov polls since 2020 when poll after poll “revealed” that a majority of Britons was happy with ongoing lockdown measures or were calling for more restrictions.

The next example demonstrates how polling as another mechanism of manufacturing consent.

CASE STUDY: The Times Goes to China

An officer of the times

Recently, a body called The Times Crime and Justice Commission published the results of polling which found that more than half the public (53%) are in favour of universal digital ID, while less than a fifth (19%) oppose it.

“Universal” is, of course, a euphemism for compulsory.

One of the enduring features of British society is its antipathy to national identity cards. Churchill abolished them after the Second World War to “set the people free” and in 2004 Boris Johnson MP wrote about the “loss of liberty” they entailed, promising to eat his own if such things came to Britain. National ID is one of those policies which can't be imposed on an unwilling population: if significant numbers refused to use ID, the system would soon collapse. Hence the need for consent.

Citing YouGov polls (two-thirds in favour; fewer than a quarter against), the Times Commission also recommended social media restrictions for the under-16s backed up by digital ID – a policy that would effectively require everyone to submit ID in order to be allowed online.

Oh, and the Times Commission also called for police forces across the country to use live facial recognition.

Mandatory digital ID as a condition of access to goods and services. State permission required to use the internet where everything you read or posted could be monitored. And outside, on the streets of Britain, the mass surveillance of innocent citizens.

The glib comprehensiveness of this three-pronged recipe for authoritarianism took my breath away.

And look, here's the justice minister casually remarking that the commission’s proposals could become law.

The grand-sounding Times Crime and Justice Commission is a child of News UK, formerly known as News International or, more commonly, the Murdoch empire. Set up in April 2024 with Times journalist Rachel Sylvester as the chair, the aim of the year-long project was to look at the future of policing and the criminal justice system. It took evidence from 500 witnesses, notably the police and judiciary, and ran focus groups and opinion polls in order to gauge public opinion.

Perhaps the first thing to note is the oddness of a media organisation undertaking a such a project. I say this in full knowledge of the fact that newspapers do take positions on social issues, using their pages to publish The Guardian campaign on homelessness or The Telegraph's campaign to keep village Post Offices. But in this case, News UK has invested significant resources and used methods which extend way beyond campaigning journalism to come up with recommendations that would end our way of life.

I don't believe for a moment there's a genuine, organic demand from the British people for compulsory digital ID or for the state to regulate our use of the internet.

What the Times Commission is attempting to do is to create the impression that there is public consent for unpopular policies. Meanwhile The Times newspaper has published a lot on digital ID, including a number of articles by or about that influential yet unelected policymaker Tony Blair.

Blair is a BIG fan of mandatory digital ID. When in power officially he established the framework to introduce it in the UK, which was scrapped by the coalition government elected in 2010. Since then, Blair's repeatedly pushed for digital ID from outside Westminster, using his large, well-funded think tank the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to promote it. The reasons why Britain “needs” digital ID vary: first it was terrorism, then to facilitate vaccine passports, then to deal with illegal immigration, tackle fraud, help the NHS and keep down taxes. There’s also a big vague Because Technology kind of reason.

Anyway, The Times likes to help him get the message out. See Blair calling for digital ID with William Hague in The Times in February 2023, claiming the public will sacrifice “privacy for “efficiency” in January 2025, and arguing, just like The Times Commission, that facial recognition will help bring justice in April 2025.

Blair's latest argument, that “Digital ID is the Disruption the UK Desperately Needs”, bears a strong resemblance to the opening line of the report published by The Times Commission which argues that the “system is broken … it's time for a change”.

The vagueness of the reasoning makes the idea sound harmless, but this is deceptive. It taps into fears arising out of the chaos and breakdown we see around us, using it as the basis for a subtle threat: IF we don't do Whatever – in this case consent to digital ID – things will only get worse.

This technique is far from new. The philosopher Hobbes made a last-ditch attempt to stop modern democracy from coming into being with the idea that, in the absence of a strong ruler, life would be “nasty, brutish and short”. The Hobbesian state of nature was manipulation in the guise of concept, and aimed to gain one-off consent for absolute rule. The contrast between this and the form of governance in which politicians hold delegated power conditional on respect for basic rights – in other words, liberal democracy – can't be overstated.

And there's the point: you can’t have genuine democracy when the government has the kind of power that digital ID and mass surveillance, both on and offline, would give it.

It was surprising to see names of journalists I've known decades effectively advocating the end of democracy in one of the oldest, most esteemed publications of the land.

But here we are. The Times Commission illustrates how a post-democratic model of governance is working its way into the fabric of our society without most people realising. And while it’s an example of manufacturing consent, it also illustrates a mechanism I covered in the first piece of this series, that of hijacking or institutional capture. As we'll see in forthcoming pieces, the mechanisms of unfreedom tend to overlap.

The protections of freedom

What are the protections against these Machiavellian methods?

One could simply be called “reality”.

In 2021, some 60 Bristolians were brought together in a citizens' assembly to make recommendations in response to the question “how do we recover from COVID-19 and create a better future for all in Bristol?” with a focus on climate change, transport and health.

Recommendation 10, to “fundamentally reimagine the places we live so that they are people centred (i.e. create liveable neighbourhoods)” got support from 91% of participants.

Fast forward to 2025, and I'm reading comments on a Facebook group with thousands of members dedicated to stopping Bristol's first “liveable neighbourhood”. Although only partially implemented, the scheme was already causing huge levels of distress: locals complained of traffic gridlocked in the surrounding streets, much longer journey times to school and work and of feeling trapped and isolated in their own area. In the two years since the campaign I helped to start - details in my piece for The Spectator - many people pointed out these foreseeable consequences. But the council went ahead anyway, overcoming local opposition by using the police to help contractors install roadblocks in the middle of the night.

You can manufacture as much consent as you like by persuading well-meaning folk to agree to bland statements in a room. But sooner or later, reality will break through.

This is learning about manufactured consent the hard way. (The Bristol story is still unfolding: now the council has imposed its first “liveable neighbourhood” by brute force, it's planning a second, larger one.)

The second protection - awareness - could prevent these things happening in the first place.

I wrote part of this piece in a co-working place where I couldn't avoid hearing the conversation from the next table. It was dominated by one party, an articulate and energetic woman. It was nice to hear how well her new lover was treating her, but in all honesty I only got interested when I heard the words “Gates Foundation” and “global health”. In the subsequent work call, it was clear the thirty-something was organising an event for young people to talk about “democracy”, “health” and “climate”.

The woman was evidently skilled, hardworking and cared deeply about her work – likely also an accurate description of Climate Change Committee head Pinchbeck. But we need to remember that good human qualities can be manipulated and used to various ends.

I remember my mother bemoaning my grandmother's response to marketing communications. “She thinks she has to answer every letter,” she sighed.

The workings of manufactured consent are hard to see largely because they are new. But, just as humans before us came to understand that advertising is about persuading us to part with our money, we too can wise up to the mechanisms of unfreedom.

What are we agreeing to again? The CCC’s citizens panel deliberating