Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr*

Nov. 3, 2026 — The disappearance of the human from the institutions that govern us is not a single event but a slow, creeping erosion of our rights.

This is what voters around the world are contending with, including those in the US travelling to the ballot box today for the midterms.

Across politics, law, business, press and regulation, the flesh-and-blood person—the citizen, the juror, the worker—is being steadily replaced by systems, algorithms, and concentrated power.

Common Logic

What connects these developments is a common logic: that the judgement of a normal woman or bloke is inefficient, unpredictable, and best removed.

In politics, parliaments are being eroded. Decision-making migrates to executives, technocratic bodies, and referendums engineered to bypass deliberation.

The legislature, the one institution where ordinary people’s representatives argue in public, is hollowed out—reduced to a rubber stamp or a theatre of performative conflict. When the space for human disagreement shrinks, so does the citizen’s sense of ownership over power.

• The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (a nickname) in the US last year ran through budget reconciliation, a fast-track route meant for budgetary matters. Critics argued it stuffed non-budgetary provisions into a process that is supposed to be limited to fiscal questions. The Senate parliamentarian struck several provisions as violating the Byrd Rule — that provisions must impact fiscal policy— and Democrats challenged a broad range of others. This shows the package was too big to be legislated honestly.
• Bundling hundreds of unrelated policies (tax, Medicaid, SNAP, immigration detention, energy, vouchers) into one vote denies members the chance to deliberate on, amend, or vote against each measure. Critics say that hollows out the Article I duty to legislate meaningfully, and that it forces an all-or-nothing vote, which is closer to a plebiscite than a debate.
• One analysis cited projections that the bill could add $2.4 trillion to the deficit and leave nearly 11 million people without health coverage. Tax cuts weighted toward high earners, paid for partly by cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, is the pattern. US President Trump said he would not put up with such omnibus legislation…then he backed it.
• In the UK, the Starmer/Burnham/Labour administration is slowing debate by elected MPs, by changing law at the last minute before sending it to the Lords, where members of the upper chamber are not elected by the people.
• Labour Lord Rooker last week excoriated the PM Andy Burnham administration’s lawmaking: “I am not interested in what the Commons said on second reading or in Public Bill Committee. What I am interested in is what they put in the bill at the last minute, without any debate or scrutiny. That’s all I’m interested in. How they conduct their affairs in public committee to give the idea and to say they had a full day of report, two and a half hours, 52 new clauses. I mean, it’s a joke.”
• It’s hard to know which of the two countries is in the biggest constitutional crisis.

In the judiciary, the jury—the last routine site where ordinary people exercise sovereign judgement—is in retreat. Plea bargaining, mandatory sentencing, and the expansion of summary proceedings displace lay decision-making.

In the United States and across the Atlantic, the capture of courts by moneyed interests, with judges selected through lavishly funded campaigns or secret handshakes among the Epstein class and the associated dark-money networks, completes the picture: justice administered not by peers but by those who can buy the bench.

In business, the human is fired and replaced by the machine. Automation and algorithmic management treat workers as costs to be minimised and decisions as data to be optimised.

The result is not merely unemployment but the erasure of the workplace as a site of human agency, solidarity, and bargaining. Virgin Media O2 said this week it will cut thousands of telecommunications jobs.

The press, too, has been emptied of the human. Newsrooms once staffed by reporters who lived in the communities they covered are now algorithmic operations where narratives are drawn from the top down—shaped by ownership, political access, and engagement metrics rather than by what readers actually care about.

Wire copy and press releases substitute for reporting; the story that matters to a town is passed over for the story that performs by making readers unnecessarily angry.

The reader is no longer a public to be served but an audience to be modelled and monetised, and the result is a media that tells people what power wants them to hear rather than what they care about. When the press stops listening, the public stops trusting—and another layer of human connection between governed and governor is severed.

In regulation, “big is better” and “might is right” have become the operating creed.

Regulators are captured, enforcement is outsourced, and scale is treated as a virtue in itself.

The human scale—the small firm, the local authority, the individual complainant—is sacrificed to the logic of efficiency.

These trends converge to worsen the constitutional crises.

Constitutions rest on the premise that power is exercised by and accountable to people.

When parliaments are bypassed, juries sidelined, workers replaced, and regulators captured, accountability evaporates. Power becomes abstract and unlocatable—no one can be held responsible because no human appears to be deciding. Populism surges precisely because people sense that the machinery no longer includes them, and they reach for strongmen to force the human back in.

The remedy is not nostalgia but deliberate rehumanisation: strengthening legislatures, protecting jury trial, giving workers a stake in technological change, a spot on the board of directors and enforcing regulation at human scale.

Institutions must be judged by whether real people can see themselves in them. A constitution without humans is merely a machine for producing power—and machines do not answer to anyone.

Voters voting today can help resist the shift toward corporate control by choosing a more truthful—and human—candidate.

(More to come)

*with DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini