Book review: The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People will take power and change politics in the 21st Century

THE LEADERLESS REVOLUTION: How Ordinary People will take power and change politics in the 21st Century

by Carne Ross

Simon & Schuster, 261pp, £16.99

In other countries it can be an injustice inflicted on a regular basis which on a single occasion leads to outrage, as in Tunisia this spring. In the 18th-century United States it was one tax too far. In the 1960s American South it was a woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus. This year the culprit seems to have been the use of the internet to spread dissension. Take your pick.

Then along comes a disenchanted diplomat who believes we are in a century where the people will take power and change for ever the way governments operate. Carne Ross was a career diplomat with experience in Iran and Iraq and finally in charge of WMD and sanctions within the UK’s delegation to the United Nations. He had to resign from the Foreign Office after giving evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war. He was alienated when “my government’s stories about Iraq stepped from over-simplification into downright falsehood”. To some extent the book is a self-justification. The most powerful chapter is the final one where he opens up about his professional experience and details his transformation from civil servant to idealist anarchist.

Now he runs the world’s first independent diplomatic advisory service. Yes, he advises the governments he thinks are heading for disaster. He is a man scarred by his professional life but it is a bit far-fetched when he declares himself to be responsible for the deaths of half a million children in Iraq because he did his job as a diplomat at the UN devising sanctions. He declares rather self-importantly that, “Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility.” This “mea culpa” chapter reveals a deep personal agony. One of his mantras is to “rediscover what you truly believe in then act”; the sort of advice that gets you in trouble on Facebook.

There is no obligation of course to accept Ross’s theories but it certainly makes the reader think. Nor is there anything new about his comment that so-called democracy is not participative democracy for most citizens. Voters pass daily decision-making to politicians they select so that they can get on with their own lives. He underestimates the importance of elections in calling governments to account. The idea he has that everyone will take more part in governing is unconvincing. A good thought, though, is the idea of using the internet to sound out voters between elections; what he calls “deliberative polling”. It is a tool with more potential than opinion polling because participants can be given a short course on the issue; you have to watch who puts the briefing together, of course.

There is an interesting dimension to the book when it shows that the cosy relationship in ordered democracies like ours has broken down because of outside forces. The pact we have with our government to protect our way of life can’t cope with worldwide unpredictability in the form of terrorism, economic upheaval, climate change and anti-social behaviour as in this summer’s English riots. Who knows what that might do to our social fabric? He likens it to the increase in suicide bombers and their effect on weakening US resolve in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can no longer rely on the fall-back position that soldiers don’t want to be killed so wars will eventually be resolved.

Ross insists on seeing governments everywhere as evil. Perhaps he has been in too many trouble spots to keep his balance. He undervalues the good things that have been done in western democracies in maintaining peace, raising living standards, creating a welfare state, improving education and, yes, handling riots.

He might have a point, though, when he writes that current forms of government have outlived their usefulness because events are too unpredictable for them to cope. If we want to maintain our society, its governance might have to evolve – or be subject to revolution. He sees the way John Lewis’s shops are run as an example for future forms of government, which is at least an interesting thought.

This book could have made a coherent case about the circumstances that kick-start leaderless revolutions (although none are actually ever “leaderless”) and the ingredients that make for success. It doesn’t make that case. History is full of governments or dictatorships that crumbled under popular revolt. There is nothing modern about that. Only the added ingredient of internet communication has made the difference in this decade. That can lead as much to incidental riots as well as to revolutions of historical importance.

I have a habit of reading newspapers from the back to the front. Given the strength of the final chapter, I wish I’d done that with this book. It is not a book to believe; it is a book to challenge.