The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it | Andy Beckett

The scaremongering has begun about Biden and Starmer, while Trump and Johnson undermine democratic norms

For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.

The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”

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