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I've been toying with how to word this question but I can't think of how to word it well.
Under current British law would it be possible to 'privatize' the government?
In my scenario I'm wanting a private company to take over the running of the country effectively turning it in to a disguised dictatorship, but I want it done by the book.
Is this possible with the current method of passing laws of England?
Technically, the United Kingdom is a Theocratic Dictatorship, ruled by the whim of HM the Queen, which is normally expressed through parliament. That means that any change of law, up to and including the abolition of the monarchy and parliament itself, is possible.
To privatise the government, you'd need to introduce a bill, most likely in the House of Commons. It would go through three Readings, in which the bill is debated back and forth by all members; there's a vote to move to each stage. You'd need a simple majority of the MPs on your side for each vote to pass it along. The bill would then go to the House of Lords, where it goes through the same process. The Lords can propose amendments to the bill; if they do, the bill then has to go back through the Commons. So you'll need a majority of both the Commons and the Lords to pass your bill. If it passes through all those steps, it would go on to HM for Royal Assent; when the Queen signs the bill (normally a formality), it becomes law.
Which means nothing.
Unlike other nations with written constitutions, British government works on precedent, tradition, and custom - but those traditions and customs can be pretty damn ironclad. While abolishing Parliament and privatising government may be technically legal, there is no way in hell that the electorate would go along with it.
There would be huge protests, widespread civil disobedience, and a general refusal to accept the new government. If HM went along with the process (she likely wouldn't), you'd probably see protesters rallying around other members of the Royal Family - William and Harry have the popularity to carry it off - resulting in a quick declaration of a regency. If HM did NOT go along with the process, then it dies right there anyway.
The most likely outcome would be the corporate government being quickly removed by the military, someone in the line of succession - Charles or William, most likely - being made Regent, and elections being held. Members and Lords who voted for the bill could, possibly, be tried for treason on the grounds of "attempting to undermine the lawfully established line of succession".
You've chosen an easy country for that.
Britain has no formal Constitution. That means that every law can be changed by the parliament.
So basically, yes. The only problem you'd face is making the people accept the new regime, but by the book you can achieve it.
Here is an evil plan of mine for the case I ever become filthy rich. The gist: don't privatize the government, privatize the people.
Basically, you need the state in a desperate situation. Unable to pay for social security costs or to ensure the safety of citizens. Then you step up as a generous entrepreneur, and offer to "buy" a bunch of citizens (your employees and their families, or a few small cities). You don't really buy them, they don't become your slaves or anything - rather you promise to take care of them, and in exchange get their taxes and some sort of state-like souvereignity. You pay their medical bills / replace the NHS for them, you provide police and fire brigade services, send their kids to your schools. Short-term, this would be a tremendous financial relief for the state - you'd probably be able to "buy" citizens for close to zero cash. Long term you would want to make a profit, or grow so quickly that it doesn't matter.
Why would you do this? The reason is that you, as a private company, don't have to operate within the same bounds as the state. The NHS has a list of services they are legally mandated to provide, but you are a private company, and your services are up to negotiation. You can cut corners in ways the government can't easily. Some stubborn traditions that are inefficient? Political parties cannot agree on a course of action? You can do almost whatever you want on your private land, hopefully more efficiently than the government could.
What would your endgame be? If you play your hands well, you control almost every aspect of the lives of "your" citizens. Maybe they will even be better off than other citizens (if only because you picked the towns to buy wisely), and will be grateful. And if not, you own their schools and newspapers, so you can manipulate them. You will slowly starve the government, until it cedes more and more power to you. Finally, the old government will be a cerimonial shell, like the monarchy is today. The real power will lie in your corporation.
Why would the British state agree to sell you citizens?
There is plenty of precident for privatization in the UK, even when it was less then beneficial for the people. Often, the state will prioritize short term economic gain vs. long term utility or sustainability.
There is precident for giving corporations quasi-national-state powers. Think of the British East India Company. There is also a history of company towns.
There is plenty of organisational wierdness in the UK, for example the City of London - not to be confused with the city called London - which is a private state in the city, in which not people, but corporations have voting rights. That gives me reason to believe that this would fly, too.
There is a trend to "private public space". You think you are in a public space, but it actually belongs to somebody and not the commons / the government. You have the same rights there as in someone else's back yard.
In the end, you should be able to reign like an absolute monarch. The only thing you have to fear is that people do what they did back then - protest and fight to gain rights and representation in your corporate "government".
There is no constitution or jurisdiction, in any country on Earth, that is unchangeable or not amendable.
If you want to do it by the book, and the book allows you to, then the answer is: yes, you can do it "by the book".
If you want to do it by the book, but the book does not allow you to, then you re-write the book, and then the answer is: yes, you can do it "by the book".
You asked for a reality-check, so here it comes: people will notice. No book today is written in such a manner that — if you try to abolish democracy by the book — you can avoid getting noticed. When noticed, people will move to block your machinations. And if you try to re-write the book, then that will be noticed, for the same reason: the book is written such that it will be noticed. And — again — people will move to block you.
This is because that which is written in book is only an implementation; a way to put words on something. That something is the intentions and the spirit that necessitated writing the book. And even if you, in very a lawyer-esque manner, manage to get around the letter of the book, you can never get around the spirit of that which caused the book to be written in the first place. And that spirit does not reside in the book.
Define "the government"...
All utilities have been privatised for a considerable time. Prisons are run by private companies. Likewise construction, so-called "public" transport and refuse disposal. Schools have had substantial elements of privatisation. Various elements of the NHS have private competition, and some (e.g. dentists, opticians, even GPs) are entirely privatised already.
How successful these have been is very questionable. Let's just say that for many of these privatised services, it costs the government more (in real terms) than those services cost when they were publicly-owned, and the quality of service is not necessarily better. Still, belief in the unequivocal benefits of privatisation is a near-religious conviction without evidence, not an evidence-based policy, and it's not possible to argue with a belief that doesn't have evidence. This means that any attempt to discusss this will simply be dismissed out of hand by its advocates.
The last 30 years have also proven that the general public are perfectly willing to accept privatisation as a way of delivering public services if the privatisation advocates tell them that it will deliver those services better and cheaper. It's also proven that the general public will then tolerate the situation later when it turns out that privatisation delivers worse, more expensive public services. The failure can be easily blamed on the individual companies delivering those services, not on the systemic failure of the policy.
So, how to deliver your dystopian vision? The first simple steps are to privatise policing and the judiciary. Policing is easy - we already have private police forces running prisons, transporting prisoners and providing security for various public places, after all. For the judiciary, it could be as simple as professionalising the role of judge/magistrate.
Once you've got that, you're mostly set. You do have the question of where the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Queen would feature in accepting this, though. The Commons could fairly well be rigged, but the Lords would be much harder. Even though the Lords don't have the power they used to, they can still call the Commons on doing unethical stuff (after all, that's their reason for existing). It's not the same as a veto, but it can expose the situation to the public.
And the Queen would also be involved, since in theory she runs the country. As a constitutional monarchy, for her to get involved would be pretty much a nuclear option which might take the monarchy down if she didn't have the support of the public, but if the result would be bad enough for the country then it's perfectly imaginable that she would effectively lead a coup. So you need a monarch prepared to let this happen on their watch too. It seems unlikely that Liz 2, Chas 3 or Bill 4 would allow it to happen, but we've had enough bad, cowardly or ineffectual monarchs that you can't discount it completely.
It already is privatized. Parliament, the Courts, every aspect of the state serves at Her Majesty's pleasure, so, in theory, you could have a Johnny English scenario.
Of course, given the English history of violently overthrowing unpopular rulers, the coup might not last very long.
As others have noted, Britain doesn't have a formal Constitution, so the government can be changed through acts of Parliament. For most countries, it would require amending the Constitution, but again, most if not all constitutions have some legal procedure for amending them.
You face the far more difficult practical problem of how you would get such changes passed. To make a story plausible, you can't just say that one day someone came along and proposed totally re-organizing the government and Parliament passed this and it was done. Real life doesn't happen that way.
Any change requires that you get powerful groups and institutions on your side. To do it legally usually requires that you get some important elites on your side: one or more major political parties, the media, the schools, major businesses, etc. You don't necessarily need the majority of the people but it helps to have at least a substantial minority. Having the police and/or the military or other people with guns is also helpful.
Radical change is usually best done in small steps. If you announce tomorrow that everyone is to be rounded up and taken to slave labor camps, people are likely to rebel. But if you announce that you are taking away one small freedom, most people will say, I don't like it but it's not worth fighting over. Then take away another, and a few months or years later another. Avoid doing something that will destroy many people's lives all at once. You want people to think that they have too much to lose to risk opposing the government on this.
And of course, you don't publicly say, "Our plan is to take away everyone's rights and turn the country into a dictatorship." You say, "We are facing this extreme crisis and so we are calling for these temporary emergency measures until the crisis is over." Or, "We have no choice but to do this extreme thing because our enemies are trying to destroy us and this is the only way to fight back." Or, "Extreme? How are we being extreme? This is plain common sense." Etc.
As mentioned, the obvious way is to get them to pass a bill.
The sneaky way is to outsource so many of the countries activities that, eventually, Parliament becomes a bunch of figureheads with, maybe, slightly more clout than the royal family. Or less clout if the royal family owns/influences those businesses.
The 1987 movie RoboCop gave a somewhat plausible path to privatizing an otherwise democratic society. In the movie, Omni Consumer Products (the corporation that builds RoboCop) is a private company that has been outsourced to run the Detroit police department. While the movie uses a fair amount of hyperbole, the general implication is that OCP is the de-facto government of the city. The outsourcing of the enforcement of laws allows them to, essentially, do things "above the law".
In the United States, Congress has, over the past century, created governmental institutions to create Federal regulations. Examples include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Communications Commission, etc. Each agency has the ability to write regulations (essentially laws) and determine enforcement. I'm not as familiar with Britain, but this style of governance is quite popular in modern liberal democracies around the world.
If you combined these two concepts, you could create a system that at least still "appears" like democracy (as in there are still elections) but would not actually function like one. Create a governmental agency with the ability to write laws and then have that agency be privatized because only this one company can fill that role. Over time they write laws that make them more and more powerful, while elected officials deflect blame or concerns over those laws (either out of fear or self-interest). Eventually you would wind up with an oligarchy, where the real power is held by this one company running the governmental agency that has taken over all other aspects of the government via regulations.
The City of Gurgaon in India is probably the most compelling example of how a private company could privatize most of the role of government.
It is also relevant of comparable developments in the U.K., because ultimately, India's legal tradition is a direct outgrowth of the British system of government.
Maybe have a look at the series of books about Thursday Next by Jasper Fforde, where the Goliath corporation has achieved something like that. True, the universe there ticks with certain differences (mammoths and time travel to name but a few). The author's imagination is immense. And even if you would not find it inspiring, it's still a great fun to read!
As I understand the English system it would be a piece of cake. It is sort of a surprise it is not happening, if it is not.
http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/electing-mps/ /To become an MP representing a main political party a candidate must be authorised to do so by the party's nominating officer. They must then win the most votes in the constituency./
Obviously this is not the case in the US where any random person with the funds can hold himself or herself out as a candidate and even a candidate of a particular party, the opinions of the parties themselves notwithstanding. Chaotic and disruptive, but definitely democratic.
In a system where randoms cannot just stroll in but any candidate must be put forth by the party, then all the company needs to do is quietly take the reins of the party(s) and then put up its own puppet candidates. Badaboom, if they say that in the UK.
