Boris Johnson's destruction of democracy is making it easier for the hard right to ruin our planet

The struggle in parliament is about far more than Brexit. It is about protecting the very heart of democracy itself from a dangerous authoritarian demagoguery that threatens the entire planet.

Boris Johnson’s regime seems to be openly at war with planet earth. When Green Party MP Caroline Lucas challenged the prime minister to distance Britain from Brazilian leader Bolsonaro due to his “acceleration” of the devastating fires in the Amazon, Boris refused to rule out a trade deal with Brazil.

Johnson’s intransigence is no surprise. The parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee has warned that precisely due to the Conservative government’s own policies, Britain is on course to miss its own legally-binding target for net-zero emissions by 2050.

Meanwhile, industry trade body Oil and Gas UK has just called for oil and gas production to continue at maximum levels. British investment giant Schroders warns that such a scenario, if pursued worldwide, could lead global average temperatures to rise by as much as 8 degrees Celsius within 80 years – creating a catastrophically uninhabitable planet.

But Johnson’s government is, in my view, the least willing to take any action against climate change. Apart from Johnson himself, both his environment minister Theresa Villiers and his business secretary Andrea Leadsom have previously supported the ramping up of shale gas fracking.

That is because I believe they do not represent the British people by any stretch of the imagination.

On the contrary, many in the cabinet have ties to the notorious Tufton Street network of hard-right lobbyists, revolving around entities like the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – which I would suggest is working hard to subjugate Britain’s economy into a vassal state for US corporate interests tied to Trump.

From the neoconservative Atlas Network (a group of fundamentalist free-market think tanks), to Big Oil actors like the Koch empire and ExxonMobil (among the world’s biggest funders of climate science denial), the interests pulling the strings of the Brexit lobby want to break up the EU to pave the way for the invasion of unfettered American capital.

Both the Trump election and the Brexit referendum were effectively stolen by this interlocking of finance, arms, and fossil fuels run largely by unaccountable white men. Many argued that the campaigns were characterised by racist and Islamophobic xenophobia as their principal weapon of control, as well as digital and psychological manipulation.

In this context, Johnson’s racist comments regarding Muslim women appeal to the basest of instincts, just like when Nigel Farage stood in front of his infamously fraudulent anti-migrant Brexit poster.

Johnson is the man who secretly sought advice from Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, as part of the latter’s bid to build a pan-European alliance of far-right xenophobes. Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, believes that genetics are more important than teaching when it comes to schooling. His head of digital, Chloe Westley, was not only a “Young Influencer’”at Turning Point UK (whose US originators have a consistent history of racism), she also once described as a "hero" For Britain party chief Anne Marie Waters – a far-right ideologue with direct ties to the racial separatist group Generation Identity.

And so the vision that Boris and his clique represent is plain (for some of us) to see. They appear to be unabashed authoritarians, and their grand scheme consists of austerity for the poor, welfare for the wealthy and marginalisation for minorities.

In the face of this onslaught, the most pivotal institution of British democracy, parliament, has offered a valiant last stand. For all that might be said of the problems and limitations of one of the oldest continuous representative assemblies in the world, this embattled institution has, so far, successfully fended off Johnson’s attempted crackdown on the upsurge of dissent from across the political spectrum, including from within his own party.

No one can say that democracy is dead. But the fight is not yet won. If we are to save ourselves and our planet, we must strengthen and protect the core institutions of democracy against those who wish to undermine it for their own gain.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is a systems theorist and author of 'Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence' (Springer). He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute and a Fellow at the Royal Society of Art