The connotations of the term «liberal democracy» need to be put in question. To the extent that «democracy» implies rule by the majority of voters «liberal democracy » has long been misleading as a description of the political systems of western countries, where electoral outcomes are determined by small minorities able and willing to invest serious resources to limit the electoral agenda and secure results favouring their interests. Colin Crouch’s concept of «post-democracy» describes the aftermath of a «democratic moment», now passed, in which minority investors were briefly unable to do this. This fairly characterises the situation in Britain, and many other western counties, from the 1970s onwards. Meanwhile the rapid development of capitalism in authoritarian countries shows that democracy is not, as is often supposed, a necessary political framework for capital accumulation: the next phase in countries such as the UK may be even less democratic and also less liberal. Following the UK’s post-war «democratic moment» investor dominance was relatively easily restored, assisted by the inherited undemocratic culture of the UK state. Investor dominance is however made precarious by the weakness of the British economy and by the severely eroded capacity of the British state to remedy it. The result has been a serious decline in almost every dimension against which the democratic health of a country can be measured, and a shift from consent to coercion in the mode of political management of successive governments since the 1980s. It is even possible to discern in this shift a common ideological and material thread linking its constituent elements: an embryonic neo-fascism, in which the population is increasingly divided into a «healthy» majority whom the state approves and protects, and other elements who are considered less deserving, or even undeserving, of protection, and against whom the majority may be polarised and even mobilised.