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In recent days, Namibians expressed frustration over what they considered to be a slow pace of vote-counting. In 2014, provisional results were announced a day after voting took place. Opposition parties also complained about the use of electronic voting machines, fearing the lack of paper could facilitate fraud. 

economic inequality among the country's black and white population is glaring. About 6 percent of the country's inhabitants are white, with some German-speaking descendants from the colonial era and others originally from South Africa.

The country is also experiencing one of its worst droughts in history, wreaking havoc on crops, scorching grazing lands and threatening the food supply.

the client list for these private intelligence companies reads like a “Who’s Who” list of corrupt political and business figures, including Russian oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Demitry Rybolovlev, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Ben Salman, the Trump campaign, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Joseph Kabila. Government-developed intelligence and cyberwarfare tools have been deployed by private companies on behalf of these and other unsavory private clients to target anticorruption activists and reformers

while this issue is not corruption specific, it is one that the anticorruption community needs to put on its agenda. Anticorruption activists are being targeted, and very often themselves subjected to fabricated allegations of corruption. The community needs to step up to push for stricter regulation of the public-private intelligence pipeline, and to crack down on private intelligence firms more broadly. 

The central feature of contemporary populism is that it is anti-representational, both in a constitutional and an epistemological sense. It opposes representative democracy (favoring plebiscitary alternatives) and professional media (favoring social media or simple propaganda). In place of representation, it favors presentation. This is well-exhibited by a phenomenon such as the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests), the French mass movement against economic injustice, in which a political entity comes into being with very little representational consensus on aims, objectives or policies but is primarily constituted by its presence on the streets and on social media.

mobilizational authorities. Rather than a grammar of “believe me, this is true,” they work via a grammar of “follow me.”

the transformation of our media ecology over the past 20 years that has undermined the status of facts in public life — not so much through replacing them with lies or propaganda (although we see instances of this) but with streams of real-time content and data that are so relentless and voluminous that individuals are increasingly dependent on curatorial practices to orient them

Modern populist movements offer what liberalism often cannot: common purpose, meaning and physical congregation for a mass of individuals.

Those whose power rests on a capacity to move people (emotionally and physically) make no claim to being honest or trustworthy; the fact that Trump or the Brexit leader Nigel Farage are liars is irrelevant to a person who is committed to following them

By their nature, facts are static entities that fit with modern techniques of the printing press, bureaucracy and critical review. But our contemporary media environment is attuned to speed rather than public credibility.

even more moderate political controversies now routinely include questions regarding the politics of knowledge and challenges to elite consensus

Tighter media regulation, public investment in science for its own sake and support for public-interest journalism and education are all obvious ways in which a shared social reality can be bolstered. People don’t need to be trained in citizenship or national service; they need investment in the conditions of a shared world.

Fifty percent of Americans have experienced no increase in real income since the late 1970s. So in what sense is the story of national progress or growth true for these people?

Political alienation and disillusionment appear to relate to mortality and morbidity in curious ways. Psychologists have found that awareness of our own finitude can trigger a heightened demand for authoritarianism. The physical experience of pain makes us unusually receptive to messages that make sense of the world, in terms of heroes and villains.

Democracy and authority in the age of the digital platform are qualitatively different, allowing outrage to move virally and unpredictably. Being mobilized offers forms of embodied, emotional experience that being represented never does.

There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair

The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors

the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others

a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties

the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.

Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.

the innate fragility and dysfunction of the UK's outdated and ramshackle constitutional order. The uncodified constitution - 'a series of understandings that no-one understands' - is very convenient for any party that commands a majority in the House of Commons, because they can do whatever they like, always getting their agenda enacted and controlling the business of the House of Commons itself.

no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)

Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.

"elective tyranny"

The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.

when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.

One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.

our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.

there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society

We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.

In the middle are countries like Britain, which are governed through a recognizable class hierarchy and where lying among the upper classes is governed by an accepted code

In Johnson’s case, he does not even pretend very hard to tell the truth. Colleagues and competitors of his from his time as a correspondent in Brussels still gasp and stretch their eyes at the memory of some of the stories he wrote from there. This is not how a responsible liar behaves, and if you learn one thing at a British elite school, it is how to lie responsibly and with a grave face, as if it were done for the good of the people who believe you. Johnson’s intoxicating schtick has always been that to believe him will make you feel good, not that it will do you any good at all.

Compare and contrast Cummings’s wife, Mary Wakefield, who has an advice column in the Spectator that consists, week after week, of people writing to her asking how to get out of tricky social problems and her replying with the correct lie or evasion of the truth, always calibrated to preserve appearances and remain plausibly deniable. This, it is implied, is what you need to know to be part of the upper classes.

consciousness of a double audience is related to the distinction between public and private truth that has to be maintained in a hierarchical society. It is revealed again by the convention that the one unforgivable sin in a minister is to lie to the House of Commons. What you tell the press or even your constituents is one thing, but you have to tell the strict truth, when that can be established, to your equals in Parliament

Let the problem be dealt with by grown-ups twisting arms behind the scenes while the play goes on as usual on the stage.

This kind of concealment is built into the structure of British public life, and the people who practice it believe they are serving their nation

The Denning doctrine is that for lies to do their necessary work of holding society together, it must never be admitted in public that they are in fact lies.

under the British code the only thing worse than lying is getting caught.

The difficulty with judging lies solely by their success is that you have no defense when they appear to fail. Tony Blair was destroyed by the belief that he had lied over the Iraq War, whether it was technically ever true or not. Once trust is lost, you can’t appeal to the truth of the matter. This is what Cummings and Johnson in their different ways have failed to understand. In a free society, lying works only by consent of the lied-to, and people who tolerate liars who lie by the rules will never forgive a cheat.