A much-remarked and deeply chilling aspect of the British regime’s social repression following the civil disorder and violence of early August is its pursuit of those who merely engaged in speech online. The various mechanisms of the regime have been crowing about the wave of arrests and jailing, including a Home Office posting that “[t]here’s no place in society for armchair thugs”. But there is, of course: you just have to belong to the government or be one of its valued constituencies. If you are, then you can freely post apologetics for menace and violence, for example this Labour MP extending her generous understanding:
Make sure you click through and watch the video here, for full effect.
Or you can be the Home Office itself, doing its best Westmoreland/McNamara light-at-the-end-of the-tunnel datum — but then there is no British Vietnam experience to ward them off it — with a plain old body-count metric, touted as a sort of success:
These criminals will face the full force of the law
— Home Office (@ukhomeoffice) August 14, 2024pic.twitter.com/HXOHzjCwYT
One of the comments below it notes, “Yet no arrests for the thousands of people who enter the country illegally each year.” But this is the point, and the discrepancy is meant to be noticed: the regime touts its activity specifically to illuminate the difference between that which it tolerates, and that which it represses. The appeals to consistency and accusations of hypocrisy are unmoored from the reality of British governance now. It would be hypocritical and inconsistent if the U.K. regime promised equal justice under law, for example, or punished only commonly discernible lawbreaking. It does neither. If the post-riot prosecutions confined themselves to generally agreed crimes like property destruction, assault, and so on, across all cohorts, then there would be few grounds for complaint and one could argue that it does in fact aspire to equal justice. What is actually happening is a vigorous prosecution of crimethink, mostly under the anodyne term “online offenses,” and unconnected with any demonstrable incitement or violence.
One chilling example comes in the sentencing of Julie Sweeney, a caregiver for her disabled husband, who will now spend fifteen months in jail for a rather sad and morally abhorrent little Facebook post. The judge acknowledged that she was, in effect, a nobody who posted in anger and endangered no one, and he further acknowledged that she was not racist. According to the BBC, “[t]he judge [further] said no one was suggesting that Sweeney would have taken part in any violence.” Yet she will be in jail for fifteen months, and her husband thrown to who knows what mercies, and why? Well, this is why, in the judge’s own words:
You should have looked at the news with horror, like right-minded people.
That’s it. She expressed regime-disallowed opinions, reacted incorrectly to the news, and so off she goes. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it looks as if this sort of thought policing characterises about one in 10 of the Home Office’s thousand-plus arrests. To re-use a phrase, it is done pour encourager les autres. The absence of a definable standard is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Julie Sweeney and a few hundred powerless nobodies with bad opinions are thrown against the wall to motivate the rest of the population to first, be silent, and second, to look to the regime for the permitted ambit of sentiment before speaking. It is Soviet stuff, but the Soviet Union does not exist, and the United Kingdom’s regime does.
It is worth recording that Sweeney meekly thanked the judge.
(In another Soviet parallel, the regime has convicted two 12 year-old children, one of whom was described by a judge as being “more involved in the violence and disorder than any other defendant I’ve seen coming through these courts, adult or child”, which is self-evidently absurd but also characteristic of regime-exhortative hyperbole. The Communist Chinese express their admiration.)
There is a type of American conservative who looks at this sort of thing and reacts with a studied complacency: this could never happen here, they will say, or we would resist if it did. But neither proposition is accurate. It does happen here, at a comparatively low level for now — and it is unresisted. The mechanisms and lessons learned of the various regimes are shared and refined among them, and we are therefore deeply wrong to view the U.K. with smug complacency. (Particularly irritating, from a historian’s standpoint, are references to 1776, the revolution of that year taking place to assert rights discerned in an English context.) What is happening in Britain is a preview of what is exceptionally likely to happen in the United States in the coming of a Harris-Walz Administration. Joel Kotkin’s latest goes in depth on this:
Europe may be fading from global relevance, but its influence is expanding within the US Democratic Party. Today, the party’s core beliefs echo those espoused by the European Union and much of the British establishment – an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews …
Under Harris, the US may try to adopt the censorship policies that are already present in the EU and U.K. We may well see the Democrats attempt to control social media, including arresting people for offensive speech or before they have even committed a crime at all … Biden has already shown a taste for following Europe’s lead on censorship, a trend likely to grow under a Harris-Walz administration.
As has been stated here previously, when the time comes that the United Kingdom follows through on its threats to request extradition of Americans for thoughtcrime, it is probable that a progressive-dominated White House and its apparatus will view the request favorably. This will be especially likely when the target of the request is an irritant to, or opponent of, both regimes: for example Elon Musk. This is not to say that lack of a public profile will be salvific: the American regime knows the logic of pour encourager les autres equally well.
In publishing the macro-scale numbers on its roundup of criminals and dissidents alike, the U.K. regime is not merely echoing the aesthetic of Robert McNamara: it is literally engaging in the McNamara fallacy, which is an analytic error that excludes qualitative factors in favour of quantitative ones. Quantity has a quality all its own — this is evidently the regime reasoning, which counts on sheer numbers, speed, and pitilessness to yield its intended effect. This may in fact work, and the odds are in its favor: contrary to the mythos of insurgency, there are plenty of examples of its suppression. This is especially true when the insurgency fails to generate a sufficiently expansive and durable coalition, fails to attract an elite cohort, and fails to withstand regime action. All these are obvious failures of U.K. — or more properly, English — right-populism, which has only a limited window of time to rectify them. It is less true of American right-populism, which does have a coalition and an elite niche, to an extent; whether it is robust versus the regime will be tested in full if Kamala Harris ascends to the Presidency.
Let us pause here to observe the total failure of meaningful elements of the British ruling apparatus to support that right-populist tendency — which is significantly large, as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election — as evidence that its self-styled Conservative Party is essentially useless. An opposition that remains mute while the regime conducts a national persecution of its base is no opposition at all. The jury is out on Reform.
Per the McNamara fallacy at hand, note that the regimes in both the U.K. and the U.S. entirely neglect those qualitative factors: the moral battlefield. (An appeal to rule-following and quiescent conformity, or else, is hardly this.) Partly this is a reflection of relative power: the regimes simply don’t feel the need to. Partly it is aesthetic revulsion: the regimes genuinely hate their opposition. (There will be a separate essay someday on elite negative reactions to a visible member of a regime-disapproved cohort: a Southerner or a Texan, for example. There are British analogues.) Partly too it is perceptual narrowing, in which it becomes literally impossible for the regime to conceive of viewing the world in any way other than its own. Again, this may not matter. But it may, and if the neglect of the moral contest translates at some point into a moral loss for the regime — a nonzero probability, especially as it came to power weeks ago on the basis not of positive endorsement of itself, but negative rejection of its opponents — then the next round of this, which is sure to come, must see evermore-cruel efforts if the regime is to prevail.
The cycle is well known.
A few notes at the end here. The first is that Britain has, it seems, had serious problems with civil unrest across the past half-decade. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which was a go-to data source on civic violence during the summer-2020 insurrection in the United States, has a very interesting writeup on U.K. rioting now. Within that interesting writeup is this interesting bar chart, which shows that the 2024 level of British violence is well and recently precedented:
Only with the critical mass of the “far-right” coded incidents does the regime swing into full punitive mode, mass-arrest tweets and all. The alert reader will discern why.
Malign American influence is visible here, by the bye: much of the 2020 violence was BLM-inspired, a testament to the U.K. left’s longstanding reflex as intellectual copycats of American progressivism. (This is a well-worn phenomenon globally. The incoming Mexican President is a signal example: Mexico is drowning in blood, and her major social achievement to date has been the promotion of transgenderism. This doesn’t reflect Mexican concerns: it reflects the concern of a Mexican elite sharply focused upon the American-left milieus to which it seeks access.) This cultural and ideological fixation also means the American regime could actually positively affect British-regime treatment of British citizenry if it chose, for example with a simple inclusion of the U.K. as a country of concern in some State Department human-rights report. It won’t happen of course: a conservative regime won’t think to do it, and a progressive regime won’t dream of criticising what it wishes to do itself.
A friend in a separate forum opined that events in Britain now affirmed her belief that America’s formal and written Constitution is superior to Britain’s informal and unwritten constitution of custom and tradition. I think this is a bit unfair, not least as the British regime now is such a tremendous departure from that custom and tradition in its abandonment of moderation and toleration. We have in the United States also had ample experience with the limited value of formal written protections when a regime decides to ignore them. What is really illuminated here is the observation shared by President John Adams with the Massachusetts militia in 1798: that the Constitution, by which was meant a metonym for a society of law and justice, was fit only for a moral and religious people — and wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.
This is dispositive in the long run: not the nature of a country’s regime, but the nature of its people.
This article was first published on Armas, the Substack of Joshua Trevino. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Dear Mr American. Can you please take all the US democrats policies we’re forced to put up with in Europe due to present-day Europe being largely composed of only very theoretically independent US satellite states back and and finally own up to your own dog food? This stuff is yours and not ours and we wouldn’t have to endure it if the corrupt political elites you installed weren’t forcing it on us because you want that.
Playing the man not the ball, rw.
He might just retort that the appalling uk and eu polities copying these dismal policies were elected by us over here…
I thought it was a pretty accurate article.
Totally agree
You in English is both second person singular and second person plural and this is “you American” [politicians] and not “you, Joshua Trevino”. I stopped the article at the point where it was proposed that the Democrats and Kamala “child of immigrants” Harris are basically a European fifth column in the Land of the Free™ and I don’t plan to read the other parts of it.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of bad things emanate from the US Dems, but there’s also more resistance in the US to US Dem type ideas.
That our overlords live freer than we do isn’t particularly surprising. When someone like Joe Biden declares “transwhatnot” to be “the civil rights issue of our time”, all the German government du jour will reply to that is “Yessir!”
I tend to agree. Almost all UK, and for that matter European, problems emanate for the US. We’ve been under attack from a woke mind virus whose origin can be found in the bowels of Democrat thinking and promoted by American Influence. And it’s difficult to imagine that the US doesn’t have its mucky paws all over the globalist project as well. They are certainly far from blameless.
But Americans still have the Free Speech that we don’t have. America has traditionally been a right of centre Country. Whereas Europe has been a Social Democracy. ——-Should Harris win and continue the Biden/Obama/Clinton socialist experiment by handing over the running of the USA to the UN then all of us are in big trouble. The only hope that this does not happen is if Trump wins another term.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had the measure of government over 150 years ago. I recently re-read this and was astonished by just how prescient his words sound today:
“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
I have to agree with this person. He’s surely gone full-on ‘Stalin’ and there’s no sign of it letting up;
”Misogyny – Terrorist
Rioting – Terrorist
Hurty X Post – Terrorist
Actual Terrorism – Mental Health
Make it make sense!
Dear Police, please don’t arrest me.”
Meanwhile, regarding this whole ”extreme misogyny” Horlicks, who better to comment then our Jim Davidson? Now there’s a blast from the past, but he speaks 100% truth;
”Jim Davidson lays into Yvette Cooper’s plan to add extreme misogyny to terrorism offences.
He notes Labour don’t know what a woman is. He notes Labour “brushed grooming & rape gangs aside.”
Jim comments on “unvetted illegal men” coming into the country.”
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1825858454075953347
They say everybody has a book in them. I’d say Starmer should think of authoring; ”How To Be A Perfect Hypocrite, For Dummies”
https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1825832724759777302
And he’s a pervert/paedophile apologist. Good job I’ve got receipts so I don’t get extradited and sent to jail;
”This is a Reminder of what “MORALLY BANKRUPT” looks like …
A British Prime Minister that deems the British People to think this acceptable…
Child Sex Offenders :- NO PRISON
Social Media Posters :- PRISON”
https://x.com/tarquindemeza/status/1825810341952978956
Mogs, the late Great Christopher Hitchens was responsible for the the complete quote you cite: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases , remain.”
Having just attempted to read his Trial of Kissinger I wish Hitchens, C had taken his own advice!
It’s not that he is necessarily wrong, or over-enthusiastic about what is clearly one of his many passions, it’s just not easy to read the book, nor to sort the wheat from the chaff
In my experience, (and I’ve read 90% of his works), there’s a lot more wheat than chaff, and the highest quality wheat too. Try ‘No One Left to Lie To.’ Neither ‘Slick Willy’ nor Kissinger dare even attempt to sue, realising that Hitchens had them bang to rights.
Maybe I should have started Kissinger after reading some historical background to the events he discusses, so the rant came with context
Even without reading the book, most on here will realise Kissinger was on of the founding Globalists of the New World Order.
Hitchens’ ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ focussed on the latter’s conspiracy to commit murder, war crimes and treason. NWO considerations weren’t on the menu.
Kissinger also played a part in the Chinese one child policy. Globalist to the core.
Or how about “The Beadie Eyed Parasite Chronicles”
“Actual terrorism” = Mental Health, ——Hilarious. or it would be if it was not so PATHETIC.
An “extreme misogyny” law isn’t intended to protect “ordinary” women who are at risk of physical harm …… working class women who are the main victims of immigrant/ethnic minority violence, let alone the poor women who are semi-slaves in the Muslim community and at real risk of violence from male family members if they dare transgress Islam’s code of behaviour.
It’s intended to protect left wing, middle class champagne socialists and activists (like Yvette Cooper) from the hurty words which “ordinary” working class white men may use about them.
“ Britain’s informal and unwritten constitution of custom and tradition…”
But Britain does have a formal written constitution, Magna Carta – and the 1688 Great Bill of Rights too.
Both simply ignored. We’ll see how much notice is given to the US Constitution after 1 000 years of erosion by legislation and ideological rot.
Under Magna Carta the King ceded his sovereignty to the people, which is why no subsequent Parliament can be bound by an Act signed by the Monarch passed as a Bill in a previous Parliament.
And that means there is no legal obligation to obey any Act of Parliament, but because the State has the monopoly in violence we are forced to comply or suffer.
Under Magna Carta the King ceded his Right to collect taxes without consent. So we cannot legally be obliged to pay taxes – but see above… State monopoly on violence.
So what’s the solution?
“The proper business of the Courts could not be conducted if every citizen who conceived himself insulted could immediately bring an action for defamation without cost to himself. Fish-porters and charwomen pass through life exchanging frank opinions about each other’s characters, but never, so far as is known, feel the itch to bring an action for defamation. […]
“There will always be a certain delay in the Courts so long as the Crown and Parliament decline to equip them with an adequate supply of judges and shorthand-writers.”
So by making frank opinions a criminal offence unless they support the Party Line, 2TK will unleash a mass wave of nouveau-criminals, and a shortage of criminal barristers to try them.
[1] A P Herbert, “Is Magna Carta Law?” Uncommon Law, Methuen 1935 (parody).
This “Evil irrelevant Europeans responsible for Kamala Harris … !!1” article is also a great opportunity to retell the following brilliant joke I read in the Spectator on Saturday (form slightly improved by me).
Midnight in the Kremlin. Witching hour. Putin has had the ghost of Stalin summoned to ask him for advice. “Comrade Stalin,” he addresses him, “German tanks are approaching Kursk! Can’t you help me? What shall I do?” Stalin makes him wince by patting him heavy-handedly on the pack, roars with laughter and replies “Absolutely no problem, Vladimir! Just do what I did! Beg for as many tanks and planes in the USA as you can get and send the Ukranians in with them as cannon-fodder!”
That’s 46 years of Communist reign of terror, with countless people put to death in gruesome ways all over eastern middle Europe which was largely turned into a depopulated wilderness where flourishing farms used to be, all brought to you courtesy of the champions of the free world because, whatever Stalin’s many faults might have been, at least, he wasn’t German and we got the richer part of Germany to exploit in the bargain!
It will get to the point in this country where all we are allowed to say is “Good Morning, isn’t it a lovely day, isn’t everything in the garden lovely”? Everything else will be HATE SPEECH
“You should have looked at the news with horror, like right-minded people”
What a wan*er. Maybe she was watching in horror everyday when they mentioned how many illegals have arrived who we know nothing about, and that British taxpayers have the pleasure of supporting. What is not to like!
I did look at the news with horror ….. at the pro-Hamas-terrorism Marches in London which were allowed to continue week after week despite blatant intimidation and threats of violence, which the police and terrified Establishment did nothing to stop.
Never forget that Speaker Hoyle unilaterally changed Parliamentary Procedures to suit Two-Tier-Keir and the Labour Party because he was SCARED for MPs’ and their families’ safety.
If there is ever a revolution….These traitors in the HO will have their asses torn out!
” It is less true of American right-populism, which does have a coalition and an elite niche, to an extent; whether it is robust versus the regime will be tested in full if Kamala Harris ascends to the Presidency”
Well lets hope she doesn’t win huh!
Don’t forget the US has the 2nd Amendment as a default insurance policy against a rouge state, ironically which they already have.
“There will be a separate essay someday on elite negative reactions to a visible member of a regime-disapproved cohort: a Southerner or a Texan, for example.”
Or Andrew Bridgen!
All the nostalgic Haddockian talk of Magna Carta in these comments won’t hide the impracticality of fighting back against a creeping authoritarian regime. The impracticality is: money. Day-to-day authoritarianism is not imposed by a uniformed bully travelling down from London to personally deliver “guidance” from some single dictator or central cabal: that is more the style of the Mafia or County Lines or the Home Office. Rather, it is the perfectly ordinary-looking chap in the council office who says “I am not allowing you to do this” or “You must do that”. In principle, you can say, “SEZ WHO?” in court as a “judicial review”, but unless you have £500,000 up front you won’t get past a lawyer’s secretary, let alone a hearing in the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the legislation that the original chap was implementing, by “just obeying orders”.
However, there is hope in that there are situations that can be fought by crowdfunding or benefactors or publicity. For example, some 74,000 rail passengers may have been unlawfully prosecuted within the Single Justice Procedure, and “silent praying” may turn out to be constitutionally protected. Doubtless the FSU will be involved in forthcoming cases too, as I can’t see Two-Tier Starmer is too weak to tackle the problem of creeping authoritarianism, or is even part of it.
My question is really regarding the role of the judicial system.
Are these arrested people really innocent until proven guilty? Do they have a fair trial? Do they have good representation?
I am not sure.
Keir Stalin branded them as Faah Rite (knowing nothing about their political allegiances – if they have any) and they have been called criminals by various Ministers/MPs and the MSM …… before any trials were held.
Someone is innocent until proven guilty, so no, none of them have had a fair trial.
If Trump does not win this election, the USA will be flushed down the same toilet britain has just been flushed down.
America does not want to descend into globalist hell. That is why we are voting for President Trump. For some reason the majority of Brits I know hate Trump. I will never understand why.