“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever,” said O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984.
Alternatively, you could imagine a sandal.
Last month I visited Sutton Hoo, the famous Anglo-Saxon burial site of a king and his ship in Suffolk. A gold coin pendant in the museum caught my eye. It depicted a triumphant Roman standing over a conquered barbarian, his sandalled foot placed firmly on the supine opponent’s chest.
The ship burial probably dates from AD 625, long after the Romans had left. The gold could have been melted down by the Anglo-Saxons but instead it was fashioned into a pendant. Maybe it conferred the prestige of the Roman world onto the wearer, or was totemic of victory. Perhaps it was an ironic reminder that the Romans were gone and every empire has its day.
The Roman on this coin was the Emperor Honorius, who ruled between 395 and 423. Miserably for Honorius, he was Emperor when the Visigoths captured and plundered Rome and when the British Isles slipped from Roman control. In fact, when Romano-British cities asked him for help against barbarian attacks he told them to look to their own defences. You would never know all this from the coin, which is a fine piece of reputational management.
Coins have always been more than lumps of precious metals; they are also a means of propaganda and control.
Early bronze coins depicted cattle, as the state property of Rome was originally comprised of herds of cattle. Then coins featured Roman deities such as Mars, the god of war, or symbols of the state such as the she-wolf with twins. Later in the Republic, images of politicians featured on coins. The first living man to be embossed on a coin was the powerful Julius Caesar. One silver denarius minted around 29 BC shows a Nile crocodile (the symbol of Egypt) with the inscription “Egypt conquered”. And other coins also showed emperors defeating barbarians, gleaming with undistilled power.
Imagine handling a coin which depicts your own subjugation. If you were privileged, hard-working or lucky enough to obtain some of this lucre for yourself, it was nonetheless a reminder of the sandal on your chest. Every time you bought a luxury good, your fingers would slide over the embossed symbol of your defeat. Coins reminded you of your place in the world.
Coins in circulation in the U.K. are at a record low. In fact, not a single one or two penny coin was issued in 2022. Yet there has never been greater potential to use money for propaganda and control.
Digital money and particularly Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer the potential for the Government, through the central bank, to see every purchase and transfer you make, in real time. And not just see, but control.
Of course, our governments in the West will say that central bank money in digital form is convenient, safe and stable. They will promise never to use it as an instrument of control, as an authoritarian Government would. Here in the U.K., our cosily-named proposed ‘Britcoin’ would supposedly exist alongside cash.
China, the country that took the lead with lockdowns, has taken the lead with CBDCs. It started researching CBDCs in 2014 and has been running live trials of DCNY (Digital Chinese Yuan) for years, with the size and scale increasing each time. The Chinese Government has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend their DCNY quickly, for times when the economy needs stimulus. That’s right, an expiry date for people’s money has already been trialled.
The Chinese ‘Social Credit System’ is a broad regulatory framework that is designed to score and incentivise the trustworthiness of individuals and companies. In other words, the Government will either reward or punish various forms of behaviour using real-time monitoring, data gathering and sharing, curate blacklists and red-lists, and use punishments, sanctions and rewards.
A report in 2019 found that 23 million people had been blacklisted from travelling by plane or train due to their low social credit score. In 2018 a student was denied access to university because her father was in debt. There isn’t a centralised and transparent set of rules, instead it’s been operated locally so far, but it has been reported that behaviour such as poor driving, spending too long playing video games, or posting fake news can result in low ratings, as well as more serious matters such as not fulfilling court orders.
You won’t find many Chinese critics of the Social Credit System – there is probably a sanction for criticism of Government policy. You’d think this system would unite Western commentators in horrified criticism, but it is quite neutrally and even warmly described by some Left-leaning writers and think tanks.
We don’t need to look as far as China to understand the implications here in the West. In 2019, Mastercard and Doconomy launched a credit card with a carbon footprint calculator that can switch off your spending when you reach your carbon max. This functionality is voluntary, but it could be an automatic aspect of a CBDC.
Tom Mutton, a Director at the Bank of England, said that the Government would be required to make the final decision on whether a U.K. CBDC should be programmable. Sir Jon Cunliffe, a Deputy Governor at the Bank, said:
You could think of giving your children pocket money, but programming the money so that it couldn’t be used for sweets. There is a whole range of things that money could do, programmable money, which we cannot do with the current technology.
As this quote reveals, CBDCs won’t just alter our relationship with money but with Government. Governments around the world have shown increasingly authoritarian tendencies during the management of the Covid pandemic, and more recently to discourage driving in cities. Behavioural science has been leveraged to manipulate, incentivise and coerce us into behaving as model citizens. Do we want to negotiate with Daddy State to be allowed to spend our ‘pocket money’ as we wish?
An account-based CBDC would give the Government enormous power over your money as your identity is connected to the money. A 2020 Bank of England discussion paper gave examples of programmability, for example that smart cars could automatically pay for fuel directly at the dispensing pump, with automated taxation and charitable donations at point of sale.
That all sounds very convenient. But politicians pushing Net Zero goals on an unwilling population could choose to go a step further. If you insist on keeping your private car, despite the inconvenient 20 mph speed limits, the Ulez and congestion charges, and the Low Traffic Neighbourhood barriers, they could simply dictate a maximum fuel spend in a given time period. Just 10 of your Britcoins on petrol this month, sir, no more driving for you.
Money grants freedom and so it is also weaponised to deny freedom. Domestic abusers restrict access to money, and therefore essentials such as food, clothing and travel. Economic abuse is insidious, effective and subtle, and it leaves no bruises. As with the domestic abuser, the potential is there for the Government to weaponise money to exert the ultimate financial control.
The jackboot and the sandal were graphic symbols of authority subjugating conquered peoples. If programmable CBDCs are introduced, your own digital financial footprint will be used to control you. The means of control change over time but the insatiable desire for total control remains constant.
Laura Dodsworth is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A State of Fear: how the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her new book is Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it. This article first appeared on her Substack page, the Free Mind, which you can subscribe to here.
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I was a little disparaging of Joanna’s last piece in DS, but this has far greater merit. I recognise myself and all my dangerous far right friends in these words. How to get this across succinctly though.?
Live and let live?
Sadly though the whole philosophy espoused in this article is now simply history. There is nothing I do not recognise but it is a longing for that which will never return. I fear that the next few years will brutalise our country and its British people. To imagine that our future is not dystopian is to close eyes to the wreckage that has been wrought and the wreckage that is to come under this WEF Labour government.
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
That is the future.
” is now simply history. ”
I know what you are saying but her words very much describe my life and where I live. I know I am lucky and privileged but the world she describes does still exist, here down the deep lanes of North Devon as depicted in the wonderful photographs of Jame Revilious. I will be out on Wednesday night at the village emergency committee, checking the list of the village’s emergency chainsaw operators. It may not last for ever and it may be under threat but at the moment it does still exist.
I’m with you on this SD and a good article yes – open gardens in our ‘village’ (fast growing into small town – thankyou central government planning overrule) bought people out in droves and umbrella’s yesterday to nosey around and call in and view the little garden my friend (82 + old frail & widowed) has made – a perfect small south facing garden, tamed by her knowledge and interest. And fortified by my rather fine (I say so myself) chocolate checkerboard cake. She and I both agree we are lucky to have the space to enjoy and the interest and the company to keep us both going. For as long as we can.
It’s the same where I live in the west country and it’s why I moved here 8 years ago.
But it’s changing fast: already a small town which was 98% white has visibly growing numbers of “ethnic minorities” who I very much doubt were able to afford to buy a property here, so they will be occupying social housing. I am not making a comment about them as individuals, they may all be perfectly lovely people, but the fact is the area is visibly changing … very quickly.
“And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter” …. except as we see around the country and particularly in some areas the creed does matter … and it matters a great deal.
Ditto in rural Oxfordshire
Enjoy it while it lasts. Where I live was pretty much the same till bout 5 years ago. Now new packets of migrants get opened every week.
It isn’t 1955 anymore. The Vicar doesn’t cycle down the lane and my grandmother does not get her mangle out from the Anderson Shelter. There was no such thing as “diversity”. You got no money unless you worked, which is why my grandad spent 50 years down the Michael Pit. We didn’t eat micro wave junk and fill our belly with Cheesy Wotsits and Irn Bru. Young girls didn’t push their babies along in a pram and ignore them completely because they are fiddling all the time with their silly phone. ——-But then again people will say I have to move with the times. —-WHY?
Varmint yr family are very lucky to have you.
Why thankyou . I am very humbled.——–If you mean it
Agree.
I have never believed in change for changes sake.
The red thumbs down people are big Cheesy Wotsit fans obviously
How about this – conservatives care about people as individuals, the left just cares about the system.
They just care about power.
and votes
It’s an absolutely superb article. I may have been disparaging about her last piece too. I think what she’s saying here is the left (Tory, labour communist green lib dem) essentially has a complete god complex. Who here doesn’t think David Cameron would rather see Dianne Abbot as pm rather than Nigel Farage?
This!
Thomas Sowell puts it very well.
The policy arguments between liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians, do not arise just from differences in priorities regarding freedom, equality, and security. At root, they draw from different conceptions of the nature of man. The Left holds an unconstrained vision: Given the right political and economic arrangements, human beings can be improved, even perfected. Success is defined by what people have the potential of becoming, not by people as they are. The Right holds a constrained vision: People come to society with innate characteristics that cannot be reshaped and must instead be accommodated. Success in political and economic policy must be defined in light of those innate characteristics.
I recognise elements of this in the place I live – a county town in a fairly rural area, traditionally Tory. We now have a Labour MP. I think the problem is that a lot of the people involved in the kind of thing described in the article are simply too “nice” or too asleep.
Very well put, Joanna. I enjoyed this article a lot. I nodded a lot, too. Thank you.
Bang on… with the exception of enjoying Love Island! Nice, uplifting piece.
I do hate any article that makes a claim of something being better without saying what it is compared with.
It is as bad as claiming that change is a virtue when it is Labour change, whereas climate change is bad.
I take it from the article that we have not had a Conservative government for years, and probably decades.
PS I don’t have a deep memory of Lord Salisbury, I am not quite that old and anyway I don’t mix in those circles.
Not to mention warm beer and old maids cycling through the mist to church.
Give me a break. There is a horrible kind of demanded conformity in the vision outlined here. A kind of socialism, if you like, or subordination of the individual to the collective.
Thanks, Joanna, for reminding me that I am not, and never will be again, a Conservative. Let’s hear it for William Gladstone and not be seduced by the siren song of Disraeli.
Well, I don’t know if I am a conservative or not. Any society will have some element of “demanded conformity” won’t it? Don’t the problems start when the “demand” is with menaces – you must voice the right opinions otherwise you will lose your job, you must take this injection, you must give the state all your money?
That’s a nice village that you live in, Joanna!
You have nailed it Joanna
Sovereignty of the individual, self-responsibility, self-respect, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, property Rights, celebration of heritage, our common language, morals, values, manners, traditions and Common Law, free market capitalism/free trade.
Conservatism is adopt and conserve what gives best outcome – but experiment, evaluate, evolve – not obsession with process irrespective of outcomes.
Welfare State, NHS, State education, redistribution of wealth via taxation, State intervention in the economy, social engineering, telling us what we may/may not put into our bodies, State determination of values, morals, is not Conservatism. But that describes many ‘Conservatives’ and every ‘Conservative’ Government since the war.
Love it! Thank you Joanna.
Ah, what a lovely vision of Olde Englande, suddenly brought crashing down by… “LOVE ISLAND”????
She claims that “We Conservatives” all enjoy DISGUSTING PORNOGRAPHY and VOYEURISM????
Speak for yourself, Joanna.
And where in your Item 2 is the village pub and post office?