British Politics

Lessons from the English Riots

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“The judge of today needs no such virtues. He is not the agent and exponent of justice, but its mere lackey.”
      L. Mencken 

At time of writing, more than 1,000 people have been arrested in England for participation in riots sparked by the brutal murder of three children by an African. The riots have been described variously as “anti-migrant” or “anti-Muslim,” causing journalists and politicians on the Left to offer weak analyses of the disorder as being the irrational product of online misinformation and Islamophobic prejudice since the Southport murderer was born in the United Kingdom and was not, they insist, from a Muslim background. This is, however, a paradox of the Left’s own making since the riots are best understood as an expression of White working-class exasperation at the increasing pace of demographic change, at the increasing marginalisation and demonisation of the White working class in culture, and of White working-class suffering at the hands of non-White violence more generally. In every meaningful respect, these were race riots with a class subtext. In the English context, Islam and migration, especially in northern England, are merely useful and appropriate bywords for the broader category of racial displacement and for the undeniable sense of a native people under threat. The widespread unrest is a watershed not only because it marked the first major instance of White violence since the 2001 Oldham riots, but also because of how quickly it spread across England, even reaching Northern Ireland. The rapid spread of the riots illustrates that this was not an isolated reaction to an isolated incident, but a guttural nationwide release of anger and frustration that has been building for decades. No less important is the government and police response, ruthless and astonishingly efficient given the suffocating lethargy with which it usually responds to ethnic crime. If anything, the slick response to the riots has all the hallmarks of something long in preparation. Both the riots and the response to them have the feel of a turning point, for better or worse. For those on our side, what lessons can be learned?

Public Shaming and Show Trials

The instinctive, impulsive, reactive nature of the riots gave them an open character not seen in organised Leftist violence with its face coverings and Black Bloc. On the one hand, this was one of the factors leading to their successful and rapid spread. There was a contagious fearlessness to thousands of Whites erupting in rage without shame. Careful preparation for public disorder and civil disobedience, however, was almost non-existent, with the result that the vast majority of rioters were not wearing face coverings or nondescript clothing. Some, including a man wearing a St. George’s flag shirt, wore clothing that actually attracted attention and singled them out for identification. Coupled with a dedicated and fanatically persistent police investigation, which included the use of drones at riot locations, and the fact most of the violence occurred in broad daylight, easy identification thus facilitated a much higher than normal arrest count than would be expected for such chaotic events. While some rioters were arrested at the scene of disorder, a great many more were arrested days later following a process of identification.

One of the more remarkable features of the aftermath of the riots is the way in which police forces across Britain used these arrests for propaganda purposes. Shortly after the riots began to subside, police forces appeared to follow a pre-existing and coordinated playbook by issuing sinister warnings and slick, live-action arrest videos complete with dramatic music. Everywhere the message was the same: “We are coming for you, and your punishment will be severe.” Rotherham’s police chief announced, “If you were there, we are coming for you.” Sussex Police issued a statement saying “We will make you regret your actions.” The head of the Metropolitan police said “We will come after you.”

The most sinister aspect of this intimidation campaign was the universal messaging. This wasn’t a warning to criminals, but to everyone who had attended or even just observed the protests. In other words, the propaganda campaign was directed at every White person who felt moved to take to the streets in outrage. White anger itself was criminalised and stigmatised. Hundreds of mug shots were displayed by regional police forces across multiple social media platforms with gloating, threatening captions, often with the arrested persons street address included. Leftist accounts spammed the comments, gleefully hoping that the arrested persons would face violent retribution from non-White criminals in prison. The BBC offered a searchable “Faces of the Riots” database, containing the photo, name, and other information of almost every convicted rioter, ensuring that they have a stigma, if not a target, attached to them for life.

 

The sentencing of the rioters was also manifestly excessive, especially in light of the fact the British justice system has been notoriously soft on ethnic crime for decades, not least in the category of sex crimes. Without any sense of shame, the authorities bragged of imprisoning a man for almost two years for “shouting at a police dog” while on the other hand releasing rapists and child molestors to make room for White rioters in Britain’s overcrowded prison system. In the perverse value system of the new Britain, a product of Jewish-designed “race relations” laws produced in the 1960s and steadily evolving since then, White anger is the bigger threat and the more dangerous and devastating crime.

Legal Encroachment and Overreach

One development from the riots that has gained most attention is that Britain’s hate speech legislation seems to have entered a new phase of growth and expansion. No new laws have been passed, but the original legislation, especially the 1986 Public Order Act, was sufficiently vague that it has allowed for increasingly draconian interpretation as the culture evolves in a more anti-White direction and allows for stricter enforcement. Jonathan Bowden, speaking in the early 2000s, once said that speech was still relatively free in Britain provided that you didn’t use slurs and provided you didn’t advocate for anything criminal. And at the time he made these comments Bowden was broadly correct. It was perfectly possible to criticise immigration—and even races and racial characteristics—provided it was presented in an intellectual and reasonable manner. Convictions for hate speech were reserved either for movement figureheads such as John Tyndall or Nick Griffin, or else for skinhead groups printing provocative pamphlets.

The growth of social media, however, and its power in the realm of disseminating ideas, has made every White person a potential danger to the prevailing system. The response of the system has therefore been to regard every negative comment made by a White person as a dangerous act of “publishing,” therefore bringing that person under the 1986 Public Order Act which expressly targets anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intent or likelihood of “stirring up” racial hatred. What exactly constitutes “threatening, abusive, or insulting” words is obviously open to interpretation, and as Western culture has moved in a direction in which ethnic populations are afforded more and more sympathy and special privileges and protections, the interpretation of judges has increasingly moved towards protecting them from all criticism. UK judges and prosecutors are also “trained” in part by the Council of Europe’s “HELP course on Combating Hate Speech,” originally developed in 2015. The course provides all the usual propaganda, stigmatising White self-affirmation as a fundamental danger to minority populations everywhere.

The cumulative result of these developments has been that many of those arrested and publicly shamed in Britain in the wake of the Southport atrocity did nothing more than make comments on social media or, still less, merely repost what someone else had written. One wonders if we are not all that far from being arrested in such a situation simply for “liking” an “illegal” status update. Special task forces were established specifically for the purpose of trawling social media for “illegal” posting. Aggressive police officers were banging on doors across England within days, with some social media posters rapidly receiving prison sentences of more than three years for calling for mass deportations and saying they didn’t want their money going to foreigners who “rape our kids and get priority.” Cheshire Constabulary boasted online of a 55-year-old woman arrested “in connection with an inaccurate social media post,” a move that drew the attention of Elon Musk.

Displaying a staggering degree of ethnic solipsism, Jewish Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, who once wrote a novel fantasising about the assassination of a Trump-like President, bleated hysterically that the riots were a re-run of anti-Jewish riots in 1144 following the murder of William of Norwich and demanded that Elon Musk be arrested and brought to trial by English authorities. Freedland worries that Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X has brought about a resurgence in the Right, fretting that “posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer.” God forbid anyone should mention the Jews. Freedland’s solution is that “schools should be teaching information hygiene,” a descriptor equally banal and terrifying since the subtext is clearly a form of brainwashing. Freedland wants “online safety legislation with teeth … if that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it.” Jews, as always, remain at the forefront of censorship, and even the massive over-reach currently seen under Britain’s speech laws are clearly not enough to satisfy Jewish insecurity and paranoia.

The System Monopoly on ‘Safety and Security’

Another lesson from the riots is that the State will maintain its monopoly on ‘safety and security’ at all costs. Ostensibly the State is guarantor of the safety of its citizens, or at least this is the unstated agreement made in Western European states where citizens do not have gun rights and surrender certain of their capabilities of self-defence to the State in the expectation that the laws and law enforcement offered by the State are capable of substituting self-defense with adequate social protections. These social protections are assumed to be effective, so that police forces can be called upon in emergencies, the justice system will punish crime in an effective and fair manner, and, finally, that the State itself has some kind of notional integrity in the form of controlled borders.

The problem in Western Europe is that the State demands a monopoly on ‘safety and security’ but has utterly failed to fulfil its responsibilities in return. It has taken more and more freedoms, but catastrophically and even proudly neglects the basic safety of those whose freedoms it has taken. Whites everywhere have been robbed and betrayed by this bait and switch. Britons have lost much of their ability for self-defence, and thanks to Jewish-devised race legislation they are actively hindered from defending themselves. In fact, they can’t even speak openly about defending themselves. The British people have to endure compromised borders and constant ethnic violence. As a result, they get to experience a form of second-class citizenship in their own justice system. As events in Southport show, they can’t even send their children to a dance class. Just days after the riots, presented in the media as the pinnacle of moral failings, a White man was stabbed in the neck on camera by an African while a motley of other ethnics joked and laughed. No sooner had the blood been washed from the street than eight stabbings occurred at the Notting Hill Carnival, Britain’s biggest festival of multiculturalism. Neither of these latter incidents were presented as a form of civilizational crisis. Instead they are tacitly assumed to be the necessary cost of living in a “vibrant”, “diverse”, multicultural society. Anyone protesting or speaking negatively about vibrancy and diversity must therefore be a monster, and should be silenced, put in prison, and tarnished for life.

The recent riots were an angry, messy attempt by elements of the British working class to grasp at some semblance of safety and security. And, as has happened so often in multiethnic contexts, this involved an attempt at “cleansing” certain areas occupied by a rival ethnic group or groups. The riots, to the extent that some of the violence was directed against the police, were also a form of retribution by the White working class against authorities which had failed and betrayed them. Leftists made much fun of videos of Britons throwing bins and other objects at police, but these were not just random acts of chaotic violence but the expression of genuine hurt and rage at an overwhelmingly White police force that had betrayed its own kind and turned its back in every meaningful way. White safety isn’t a concern in modern, multicultural Britain, and Whites have no right to protest when their own children are butchered by the imported tools of our hidden elites.

The Class Element and the Incentivization of the Left

Another lesson from the riots is that the White population in Britain is diverging strongly along class lines, with trendy metropolitan middle classes and those largely safe in the suburbs unable and unwilling to empathise with their ethnic kin swamped by migrants in Britain’s larger towns and slums. A common theme in social media commentary on the riots was a sneering condescension displayed by liberal, university-educated types against a class of Whites they view as ignorant, tasteless, boorish, and uncultured. This is summed up in the coining of the word “Gammon,” an even more sneering slur than ‘cracker,’ to describe a typical person from the White working class—gammon referring not only to the pale-pink complexion of those being scorned, but also in the assumption that gammon is a cheap, bland, and fatty meat that a “better” sort of person wouldn’t go for. For this kind of White liberal, “racism” is the resort of beer-swilling Little Englanders who enjoy an artery-clogging diet and whose antipathy to migrants is assumed to be irrational, primitive, piggish, and animalistic. The liberal middle classes have the luxury of thinking of themselves as enlightened, superior moral beings because the foreigners they tend to live and work alongside are at the higher end of the IQ and cultural scale.

In England’s post-industrial north, however, entire towns that once hosted the mining, cotton and linen industries have fallen first into decrepitude and then into mass swamping by millions of Pakistanis and other South Asians. Areas that once thrived with an industrious English working-class culture are now displaced by often predatory Asian communities and their gangs. Whites in these areas are scorned by the immigrant populations, and also by those Whites higher in the socio-economic scale, turning to a life on social welfare benefits, television and a mongrelised pop culture, and the petty amusements of cheap alcohol and football. The White working class is thus a despised caste in Britain, which explains in large part why the mass grooming and rape of girls from this group by Muslims went on for so long without a reaction, and why the stabbing of children from this group of “gammons” was not permitted to be protested, or even for the anger resulting from it to be understood. It has become fashionable to loathe the White working class, even in the midst of its suffering and its grief.

Deportation Discourse

The picture painted thus far is a depressing one indeed. It would seem that only negative lessons, and causes for despair, can be found in the aftermath of the riots. And yet, despite the overwhelming cultural and legal force brought against the riots, I believe there are enough glowing embers in the ashes to give rise to some positivity. The harsh penalties given to the rioters, far out of proportion to the weak justice handed out to ethnic criminals, did not go unnoticed. The hashtag #TwoTierKier quickly went viral, a reference to the fact Britain under Keir Starmer now has a two-tier justice system in which the English are punished far more harshly than those of foreign background. While snuffed out on social media, and forced into more convoluted expressions, there is also a palpable underground discourse which is moving more radically to the Right. Halfway solutions and considerations of moderate approaches are increasingly being abandoned. There is a real sense that “no-one is coming to help us,” and that sense of desperation and abandonment is itself liberating. Just a few days ago, The Telegraph posted an article titled “Britain needs a shock and awe campaign of mass deportations to tackle the illegal migrant crisis,” something that would have been unheard of a year ago. The phrase “mass deportations” taps into a growing discourse in Britain in which limiting immigration is acknowledged as being insufficient to rescue the nation from destruction. Only “mass deportations,” the removal of many millions of people of foreign origin, will restore Britain to a position of relative peace, security, and prosperity.

In a sense, Britain could be described as in a pre-revolutionary state of the kind witnessed in former Soviet countries before the “fall of the wall.” There is a superficial culture in which everyone knows what they should say and think, and there is a nervousness with new acquaintances about how much one can say to the other until one is sure that they aren’t “politically correct.” These social rules remain endemic in the workplace, under the watchful eyes of “human resources” apparatchiks who are incentivised to teach and enforce their “diversity and inclusion” dogmas. But underneath all this is the real Britain—astute, aware, and angry. They can’t imprison everyone, and the Saxon is beginning to hate.

 

 

The Politics of the UK Riots

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August is traditionally a quiet month in the United Kingdom. The British go on their summer holidays, perversely leaving the country during the hottest month of the year to seek sunshine in foreign climes. Parliament goes into recess, and so no new laws are passed. Even the media take a break, the lack of newsworthy stories earning the month the nickname “the silly season”, reflecting the inane stories the media have to find to fill their newspapers and TV news programs.

But the sleepy eighth month, named for Augustus Caesar, occasionally acts strangely on the English, a people once famed for their rather dull nature. In August 2011, rioting spread across the country after a Black man was shot dead by police in London. Somewhat earlier, in August 1641, the first battle of the English Civil War (three wars, technically, within a decade) was fought at Nottingham. Today, August 2024 can take its place in the British calendar of civil unrest. But where the mainstream media have concentrated on the visuals of the recent riots, it is the political back-story that needs watching. The question is a simple one; how has a tenderfoot British government made such fast and efficient use of the riots for authoritarian political ends?

The riots have been well-documented globally; they are a distraction from the real story, that of political manipulation and the use of civil disturbance to change the law of the land. And this Machiavellian program is aimed squarely at the White population. When British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer addressed the nation after Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, his tone was conciliatory and apologetic, praising what he claimed was the ongoing Black fight against racism. His speech after this month’s riots is markedly different, beginning as it does with the following;

“I utterly condemn the far-Right thuggery we’ve seen this weekend”.

The phrase “far Right” is Britain’s equivalent to the Biden administration’s use of “white supremacy”, a meaningless smear by association I wrote about here at The Occidental Observer over two years ago. The organization which has set itself up as the moral arbiter of supposed White racism is HOPE Not Hate (HNH), an equivalent to America’s Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. It is HNH who have popularized the phrase “far Right”, one the government has run with. They are also agents provocateurs, groundlessly alleging that a Muslim woman had had acid thrown at her from a car in the town of Cleveland during the rioting, a claim the local police immediately debunked.

But the temptation is still to blame government ineptitude rather than malevolent design. Before the general election on July 4, it was assumed that as Labour had made no substantive policy announcements, they therefore had no policies. They seemed to be campaigning solely on the fact that they weren’t the Conservatives, and simply would not be equipped to govern. Now, that accusation of under-preparedness looks naïve.

There is a perception that Labour’s authoritarian response to the riots is a result of panic, that they getting tough in order to appear in command. But the government appearing to make policy on the hoof is a grand deception, and this sudden roll-out of zealous and ethnicity-specific strong-arm tactics was in place all along. The riots were engineered and the results both predicted and used in a pre-determined way. The White British working class have been goaded for decades with the effects of immigration and the plainly preferential treatment often given to undocumented men. As in Ireland, the government pushed them once too often, albeit deliberately so.

The initial rioting in Southport, a suburb of Liverpool, was sparked by the murder of three young girls at a dance party on July 29, but there had been something of a prequel in the Harehills city district of Leeds on July 18. The difference between the police response to the latter riot and that of the ensuing and far more serious violence shows patterns which are already beginning to define Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s fledgling government.

For once, the rumor on social media that the alleged killer was a newly arrived immigrant was genuine misinformation. The police withheld the attacker’s name for several days, by now a recognized signal that whoever the perpetrator was, he was not a white Englishman. The accused was in fact born in Wales — a fact endlessly repeated in the media — of Rwandan immigrant parents. But the fuse was lit, and a group which was composed of White Englishmen gathered outside a mosque in Southport, which they attacked. By Friday, riots had broken out in several major cities, and the weekend inevitably saw an escalation of hostilities. Then the police and the media came spectacularly to life in a way that had not accompanied the Harehills riot.

The Harehills disturbance began when an immigrant Romanian family became involved in a stand-off with social services officers who had come to take at least one of the family’s children into care. The ensuing riot attracted a crowd of mostly Muslim young men. The police have shown during pro-Palestine demonstrations that they are reluctant to police ethnic minorities, and when they finally arrived in Harehills, the crowd chased them out of the area. They did not return. When rioting subsequent to the Southport murders was instigated by White, English, working-class men, the style of policing changed completely. This represents a central pillar of what is already a new order; Two-tier policing.

The phrase “two-tier policing” was coined by ex-Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Her use of the phrase, in addition to using the term “invasion” to describe illegal immigration, led ultimately to her defenestration by her party. It used to require a sexual or financial scandal to end a politician’s career. Four words are sufficient today.

Two-tier policing is undeniably taking place in the UK, although that has not stopped governmental mouthpieces denying it. With the advent of citizen journalism, ordinary people whose media information used to come solely from the state-sanctioned, legacy press, are now able to watch the different policing styles employed against Muslims and the White working class. Starmer flatly denied that there is any two-tier policing, claiming that the British police act “without fear or favor”. This phrase was first used in 1829 by the founder of the British police, Sir Robert Peel, and in Starmer’s mouth it is demonstrably untrue. Tempers frayed when Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Force, was asked by a reporter whether he would end two-tier policing. Rowley angrily snatched the microphone from the offending reporter’s hand.

Below is a 12-minute video by Mark Collett, of British political organization Patriotic Alternative (PA, who have been blocked from registering as an official party). It explains two-tier policing succinctly, and PA have been watched forensically for years, meaning that government lawyers will certainly have watched this short exposé. In other words, you know it’s true because if there was one slip-up, Collett would already be in jail. His message is simple; Whites are policed very differently from non-Whites.

And so, while the rioting itself dominates the media, political machinations are clicking into place behind the smokescreen. Labour are determined not to let this crisis go to waste, and they are using methods of control honed by the political class over the last quarter of a century, which links Tony Blair’s Labour government to Sir Keir Starmer’s.

The rioting has been extensive, but it is the damage done to the liberty of the citizenry that is significant. Prime Minister Starmer and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have, to use a phrase beloved of the political class, “been absolutely clear about this”. The current troubles are the fault of White, “far-Right” thugs. Starmer put into place instant retribution for rioters, 24-hour courts to process them despite a normally sluggish judicial process in Britain, and staggering prison sentences of up to ten years for involvement in disturbances, including online incitement. This is not a flustered government grasping at ad hoc policy. This has been a long time in the planning.

Central to this aggressive policy-making are arrest and punishment, and the weaker and more vulnerable those arrested, the better the deterrent. A 55-year-old woman was arrested on August 8 for posting a name believed to be that of the Southport killer, but which was in fact incorrect. Here is what Chief Superintendent Alison Ross of Cheshire Police had to say about the arrest:

It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy. It also acts as a warning that we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person. [Italics added].

It looks as though Ms. Ross is saying that we are all responsible for our actions, but she is not. You won’t hear any mouthpiece of the British Left (which is what the police are) saying such a thing because a belief in personal agency is not in the ideological DNA of the Left, at least not when groups with protected characteristics are being arrested. What she is impressing on the specifically White British is that they are accountable, they can be held to account, even for repeating an inaccuracy. This is reminiscent of a government advertising poster during World War II, on which a fierce-looking army officer barks out the following; “Treat rumours like mistakes. Don’t repeat ‘em”.

Britain’s people are learning a political lesson. If government cannot control the narrative, and therefore the behavior (both physical and mental) of its citizens, it will increase its powers of detention and prime the judicial system towards heavier sentencing for the ethnic bloc of which it disapproves most, which is the White working class. People are already going to jail for their part in the rioting, the usually sluggish judicial system suddenly being given the equivalent of a jab with a cattle prod. There are similarities between what is happening to rioters in the UK and the so-called “insurrectionists” of the infamous January 6 walkabout in the US. But it ought to be pointed out that the British rioters really were rioting, whereas the Americans who still languish in jail over January 6 were guilty of little more than aggravated tourism.

While everyone is being distracted by the main events of the rioting, plus the government’s pulpit-pounding response, it is the activity off-stage and behind the scenes which gives genuine cause for concern. Aside from the flurry of legislation the government is implementing, consider what else Labour have done in their first month in power.

A Parliamentary Bill intended to restore free speech to university campuses has been abandoned, and not in its formative stages. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 received Royal assent in May of last year, and was therefore effectively law. It even had cross-party support. The Bill was summed up in a governmental report of June 1, 2023 as follows:

[The Act] delivers on the Government’s commitment to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in higher education, helping to protect the reputation of our universities as centres of academic freedom.

On July 26 this year, after three weeks of a Labour government, the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, wrote to colleagues to announce the new government’s intention to proceed no further with the Bill. Her report even allows the Bill to be repealed if constitutionally required for its annulment. The reason she gives, with reference to the academic freedom of speech the original Bill guaranteed, is that “I am aware that the Act would be burdensome on providers”.

In just over a year, in a nation that once led the world in higher education, academic freedom of speech has gone from being a championed priority to being a burden. And Labour are only just getting started.

Shortly before this eruption of dissidence, Starmer announced that there were “too many prisoners” in British jails, and began a program of early release. Once again, the line from Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange echoes. A British MP is discussing early release with a prison governor, and informs him that “soon we will be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”. Starmer had already announced that he will step up early release. But the British prison system has been described as on the brink of collapse in the media for as long as I can remember. Why the sudden desperate need for prison space?

Then there is legislation which was already draconian and which is now under review to increase the powers it grants government.

The Online Safety Bill (OSB) was controversial when it first passed into British law last year. It was marked by an almost total lack of a working definition for key operative phrases and terms such as “harm”, “hate speech”, “offence”, “racism”, and others. This lack of definition is a political tactic I called “usable ambiguity” in a piece on the Bill here. Lack of precise definition should be totally unacceptable where crime and punishment are concerned, but there are already moves to make rigid definition in the law a thing of the past, and we will see a lot more usable ambiguity as the truth is tinkered with. This is civil war at an epistemological level.

Now, the Muslim Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has stated that the OSB needs reviewing in the wake of the rioting specifically to address the confected problem of “misinformation”. Khan is an arrogant man but he has every right to be. As the highest-profile Muslim politician in the UK, he is relishing his new influence over the government. Keir Starmer has already made it clear that when Khan shouts “Jump!” Starmer merely needs to ask “how high?” Why else would a PM newly swept into power with a record-breaking mandate allow a bumptious London Mayor to inform big tech companies that, concerning online misinformation, “if they don’t sort their own house out, regulation is coming”.

Misinformation is what has exercised the Mayor, Elon Musk having taken a keen interest in the disturbances. Musk’s use of his platform, X, as a base from which to troll British politicians has incensed the political class. Musk has attacked Starmer from early in the rioting, and Starmer has responded rather bafflingly by having his Chief Commissioner of Police imply that Musk “will face the full force of the law” and possible subsequent arrest for his online comments. Whatever this government might lack, it is not braggadocio.

“England and Wales have long had very broad criminal offences that make it illegal to say something online that would often be legal offline,” says Michael Veale, associate professor in technology law at University College London. “Those communications offences are the tools that law enforcement usually reach for when dealing with specific cases like Musk’s, prosecuting thousands a year.” And some of those rules have been bolstered by the new Online Safety Act, which was passed into law in the last few months. But there’s a catch. “Even in the new act, these do not extend outside of the jurisdiction, meaning it would be hard to see how they could be used to target Musk,” says Veale. Independent

Before leading the Labour Party to victory, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a powerful figure in the estate of the British judiciary. Strange that he and his Chief of Police should neglect to inform Mr. Musk which law he has broken, and what extradition agreements are in place with whatever country the world’s richest man is in today. The exchange offers a clue to wider ideological concerns. For the Left, criticism of Left-wing ideology is increasingly becoming equivalent to breaking the law. And Starmer genuinely is a creature of the Left.

The only MSM journalist to have spoken about Starmer’s past as a Pabloite (a hard-Left branch of Trotskyism) is the veteran Peter Hitchens, whose late brother Christopher was probably better known in the USA. Hitchens may be a gloomy curmudgeon, but he holds onto stories tenaciously, and is a lone voice in the wilderness of the British media for forewarning an unheeding nation about Starmer’s hard-Left provenance. But we are not seeing the triumph of the Left, but that of the political class.

I recently reviewed Peter Oborne’s seminal book on modern British politics, The Triumph of the Political Class, here at The Occidental Observer. The book was written in 2007 and describes the formation of a separate political class acting in their own self-interest, and to the ultimate detriment of the citizenry. A key point Oborne makes is that, in 2007, the political class was still learning how to control the people in an age of mass communication. In the interim, it has got a lot better at it. Starmer and his party were famously seen as having no policies going into the general election, leading critics to claim Labour in power would be inventing policy as they went along, merely improvising government. This isn’t credible. Five weeks into their new government, the Labour Party certainly has got policies, and I suspect they had them long before their election victory, when they were deemed unpalatable for public consumption. Now, with a huge mandate and a five-year-plan, a Labour Party supposedly unprepared for government looks very prepared indeed.

So, if this government is coming across as panicky and unprepared for power, I suggest that is something of a psy-op. Gross incompetence leading to the exacerbation of a problem is often metaphorically referred to as “putting out the fire with gasoline”. But what if you weren’t trying to put the fire out? What if your intention all along was to make it blaze ever hotter, even if it burns the house down? If the UK is going to hell in a handcart, the handcart doesn’t need to be built from scratch. It was finished long ago.

A Conflict of Philosophies How the threads of peace were severed in 1939

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Evolutionary Psychology Makes Perfect Sense of the Collapse of Britain

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Why has England seen a week of serious rioting by “far right thugs” (regime code for “working-class White people”) and “thugs” (regime code for “South Asian Muslims”)? Evolutionary Psychology – the evolutionary examination of human behaviour – gives us a clear and crisp answer. In his book Ethnic Conflicts: Their Biological Roots in Ethnic Nepotism the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen (1929-2015) found that there was a 0.66 correlation between the amount of ethnic conflict in a country and its level of ethnic diversity. This, in psychology, is  very strong relationship. It proves that multi-racial societies do not work.

As I have explored in my book Woke Eugenics, we are evolved to be with people who are genetically very similar to ourselves: we cooperate with these people because so-doing indirectly passes on more of our genes. Hence, strangers of a different ethnic group activate our flight and fight response; meaning that, in multi-racial societies, we are subject to constant low-level stress. Multiracial societies can only ever have an uneasy and tense peace, with the possibility of ethnic conflict at any moment.

Australian political psychologist Frank Salter, in his book On Genetic Interests, has reduced this down to very simple terms. Two random Englishmen, in relation to a random Dane, are 7th cousins; reflecting how genetically similar the English are to the Danes. In times of war, this difference is enough for people to sacrifice their lives for their ethnic group: if an English soldier stopped 60 Danes from replacing 60 English, this would compensate for the loss of one child. In relation to Japanese people, two Englishmen would be first cousins. They’d need to stop only four Japanese replacing four English to compensate for the loss of one child.

To make matters worse, and as American political scientist Robert Putnam has shown, in multi-racial societies, social trust collapses even among the native population. This is because Machiavellian members of the native population – in essence, traitors – will see an opportunity to attain power over their own group by collaborating with the foreigners, and patriotic natives will realise this.

Consistent with this, it has been found that the moral circle of the leftist is more distant from self than is that of the conservative. The conservative moral realm is a series of concentric circles emanating from self: you love your family more than your kin, your kin more than your class, your class more than your ethnic group and so on. This is not so with the leftist: he identifies with another ethnic group over his own; another race over his own. This allows him to betray his group, to collaborate with foreigners, much more easily: Think of Vidkun Quisling collaborating with the Germans to gain power over his native Norwegians.

Ben Jennings on the plight of asylum seekers amid Britain’s riots – cartoon

Pulling at the heartstrings. From The Guardian of course.

If collaborators like this get into power, you can expect them to operate a two-tier system against their own people: The foreigners, upon whom they are reliant for their power, will be policed less harshly, will be permitted and even encouraged to riot with you “taking the knee” to their disorder (as did UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to BLM anarchy and now crowds of armed foreigners are free to congregate while the government combats crowds of White working-class people), and will not be prosecuted for crime, not least because a kind of Anarcho-Tyranny will leave the native population too busy concentrating on their own safety to organise against the collaborationist regime. Indeed, such a regime will pass laws to stop you from expressing your opinions about their immigrant clients – “hate speech” – and they will clearly care more about them than they do about you: If you are White and working class you are not part of their coalition; you are a danger to their power. This is what has happened in England and this why the English working class are rioting. The two-tier system has been clear for all to see and on 5th August the chief of London’s police, Sir Mark Rowley, was so triggered by a Sky News journalist mentioning it that he angrily knocked his microphone out of his hand.

You can also expect the collaborators to spear-head a new morality in which nothing is more important than “the marginalised,” and you can expect high-status people, realising the benefits of conforming to the “current thing” to adopt this morality. And you can especially expect this when we are in an evolutionary mismatch. Our “evolutionary match” is to be surrounded by death; high child mortality that was the norm until about 1800 and the Industrial Revolution. In its absence our instincts – such as ethnocentrism – will be induced to a much more limited degree, as I explore in Woke Eugenics. In fact there is some evidence that high-status people – something predicted by intelligence – will be less instinctive as intelligence is about solving cognitive problems and, so, rising above instinctive responses.

If we turn to the England summer 2024, this has all played out pretty much perfectly and has been well summarised by the “cancelled” campaigner and BLM critic Nick Buckley:

On July 4th, at the General Election, several Muslim MPs were elected to the House of Commons, solely on a “Free Palestine” ticket, displaying the organised power of Islamism in the UK. On July 11th, the new Labour government announced it would release 5,000 prisoners early in September, with most having served only 40% of their sentence; this was because the jails were so overcrowded. On July 15th, we learnt that London’s Metropolitan Police, answerable to a Muslim mayor, had not solved a single petty crime (burglary, car theft, phone theft) in three years, across 166 areas. On July 17th, it was reported that a Jordanian refugee, Mustafa al Mbaidan, who had assaulted a female police officer in Bournemouth in the south of the country, was spared community service on the grounds that “he cannot speak English.”

July 18th saw two “asylum seekers,” Yousef Garef and Amin Abdelbakar, who had stolen a Rolex worth £25,000 from a tourist, being spared jail. On the same day, mass rioting broke out in minority communities in Leeds after social services took four Romani children into social care. They were duly returned, with the government preaching “understanding.” July 18th also saw rioting break out in East London’s Bangladeshi community, following political unrest in Bangladesh, with rocks thrown at police officers and cars smashed. The Labour government had little to say.

On July 23rd, it was announced that Anjem Choudary, Britain’s most infamous Islamist, was to be sentenced for directing Islamist terror on Britain’s streets. On the same day, a British Army Officer was repeatedly stabbed outside his home by Anthony Esan, a Nigerian immigrant, presumably a Muslim.

On July 26th, protests broke out after footage emerged of Greater Manchester Police taking action against Fahir and Amaad Amaas at Manchester Airport. They had assaulted armed officers, breaking the nose of a female officer. There were riots by Muslims in favour of these men.

On July 29th, a 17 year-old, born in the UK to Rwandan parents, walked into a Taylor Swift themed holiday club in Southport and stabbed three little (White) girls to death, stabbing a number of others. On July 30th, a mass brawl involving machetes erupted on the streets of Southport; the ethnic details suppressed by the media. Also, on July 30th it was reported that a homeless Kurdish migrant had pushed a man onto the tracks at a London Underground station after feeling “disrespected.” It was also revealed that another 3,000 migrants have entered Britain illegally on small boats since Labour took power less than a month ago, taking the total number of crossings by mainly young male migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria to around 130,000.

The result was protests, some which turned into riots, in White working class areas which have now spread nationwide; protests against immigration – the child-murderer was, after all, not ethnically English – and against perceived two-tier policing. These were supposedly sparked, in Southport on 30th July, by “misinformation” that the killer was a Muslim, resulting in the mosque being surrounded, but even when that was supposedly debunked, by releasing the killer’s name and ethnicity, people were not prepared to swallow the idea that “he wasn’t an immigrant because he was born in Wales”: He was a foreigner; immigration had caused this, as it had absurd house prices, a sense of being a foreigner in your own country, and massive queues in the National Health Service. In Rotherham, a hotel, in which “refugees” are housed at huge expense, was surrounded and set alight. Rotherham was where the Woke authorities overlooked the grooming and rape of over 1400 underage White girls for decades because they feared being called “racist.”

Completely misreading the level of public fury over the murders and decades of gaslighting over “the benefits of multiculturalism,” the Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and media proclaimed that the protestors were “far right thugs” and they would act to “protect our Muslim communities.” The response was so different to the Leeds riots and to BLM years earlier. Muslim groups, breaking the law by marching in uniforms (without legal consequence) declared a “Muslim Defence League” and rioted in Bolton near Manchester. On the night of the 5th August, they rioted in Birmingham, with no police attempt to control them, beating up local Whites and being reported merely as “thugs” – no mention of ethnicity or religion. Sky TV talked of protests by “far right thugs” as Muslim men could be seen in the background with machetes. One of their reporters, in Birmingham, was forced to retreat to her car, where they slashed her tires. “Far right thugs” have done no such thing.

The English know the government, and especially Labour, are liars; the lies have caused a collapse in trust in “the narrative.” The government claims that rioters will be jailed; magically finding room in the very jails that are completely over-crowded. This disorder shows no signs of calming down at the time of writing (6th August). Elon Musk has predicted “civil war” in the UK, with leftists thugs demanding – via thinly veiled threats in the case of Starmer – that X be brought under their control so that he can’t express his opinion.

I suspect a line has been crossed. This rioting will eventually calm down, but it will keep flaring up, like a chronic disease. England’s short-term future will be Northern Ireland-like sectarianism. Ironically, however, Catholics and Protestants have marched, united and “far right,” through the streets of Belfast, finally at one in their opposition to their own invasion. This is exactly what evolutionary psychology would predict. The comedian Dominic Frisby, whom I interviewed a while ago, sang “We’re All Far Right Now” in a satire of Wokeness. No, “We’re far right thugs now” and this may have united the British against their invasion, as orchestrated by collaborators such as Sir Keir Starmer.

Born Brits and Pink Posturing: A Racist Dickhead’s Prophecy Gets Nearer to Fulfillment

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Teddy bears. Unicorn balloons. And the bathing of public buildings in pink light. Leftists regard such sickly sentimentality as an entirely acceptable response to the slaughter of three little White girls in Southport by a Black savage. It’s entirely acceptable to leftists because it is absolutely no threat to the leftism that creates such tragedies. It postures, it preens, and it pacifies. Perfect!

Acceptable response to the Southport slaughter: Teddy bears, unicorn balloons and pink posturing (images from The Guide, Liverpool and Sky News)

The only other acceptable response is, of course, the reinforcement of leftist lies about the causes of Third-World pathology. This is what the Guardian’s Sunday edition had to say about the Southport stabbing:

Last Monday, three girls under the age of 10 were killed at a dance workshop for primary schoolchildren in a horrific knife attack that left eight more children and two adults seriously injured. A 17-year-old male has been charged with their murders. It was an act of unspeakable evil, a particularly terrible instance of the male violence against women and girls that is endemic in our society. (“The Observer view on the riots after the Southport killings: extremists have launched an assault on the rule of law,” The Guardian, 4th August 2024)

Let’s unpick those leftist lies in the Guardian. On that sunny Monday by the sea, there were many thousands of men within easy walking or driving distance of the little girls at the dance workshop. The vast majority of those men were White. What were the odds that the “particularly terrible instance of male violence” would committed by a Black male? If the Guardian were correct in its analysis, the odds would be absolutely tiny. Just like the odds that Britain’s worst ever gerontophile rapist would be a Black male. And like the odds that the suicide-bomber who deliberately targeted female pop-fans would be an Arab male.

Rwanda’s claim to fame

But in every case the perpetrator of “unspeakable evil” against women and girls was non-White rather than White. If the problem were “male violence,” as the Guardian claims, that simply shouldn’t happen. It just isn’t mathematically plausible. Nor is it mathematically plausible that the rape and prostitution of women and girls should be carried out on an industrial scale in Britain by men from the small Muslim minority. No, it’s White men in Britain who should be the overwhelming majority of stabbers and rapists and suicide-bombers and pimps. That’s if the Guardian is correct in its analysis. It isn’t, of course. It’s lying. The problem is not “male violence,” but the genetics and culture of non-White males from the Third World.

The Southport stabber, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff to parents from the Third-World nation of Rwanda. And what is Rwanda best-known for? Simple: it’s best-known for a genocide carried out with bladed weapons by members of the dark-skinned Hutu tribe against members of the lighter-skinned Tutsi tribe. Rudakubana is a dark-skinned Hutu who slaughtered very light-skinned Whites. In the light of the Rwandan genocide, it becomes perfectly comprehensible that he was the sole male among many thousands to attack little girls with a knife in Southport. It wasn’t “male violence”: it was the much higher propensity of Black males to be violent.

A decades-long diet of betrayal

But Rudakubana’s murders have certainly provoked a violent reaction from many of Britain’s working-class White males. I don’t condone their rioting, but I understand it perfectly. The White working-class have been betrayed again and again by the party that was founded to champion their interests. After all, it’s called the Labour Party, not the Lawyer Party or the Third-World Invader Party. But “Labour” has been a lie for decades, because the party is now run by slippery lawyers and is unshakably committed to serving the interests of Third-World invaders. That’s why the Labour MP and Labour council for the Yorkshire town of Rotherham ignored the Muslim rape-gangs preying on White working-class girls in the town. Meanwhile, the Labour government headed by the slippery lawyer Tony Blair opened the borders to yet more invaders from the Third World and to cheap labour from Eastern Europe. Labour also resolutely opposed Brexit, which was seen by many Labour supporters as a vote against open borders and for their own economic betterment.

Those repeated betrayals by Labour explain why so many working-class Whites in northern England switched their votes in 2019 to Boris Johnson’s Conservative party, which had promised to control migration and “level up” the stagnating or falling incomes of working-class Whites. After they voted, they were betrayed yet again. The Tories promised to lower immigration and proceeded to increase it even further. And they continued Labour’s policy of housing unaccompanied male “asylum seekers” in working-class areas all over the country. Sexual harassment by non-White males has now become a daily feature of countless White females’ lives. Often the harassment escalates to sexual assault and rape. The staunchly feminist Labour party doesn’t simply ignore the problem, but works night and day to make it worse. In the light of all those betrayals, the only puzzle about the riots by working-class White men in August 2024 isn’t that they happened, but that they took so long to happen. The murder of three little White girls by an imported Black savage in Southport proved to be the final straw.

Islam + Free Speech = Islam

Labour have responded to the riots by condemning their traditional supporters as “far-right thugs” and gloatingly promising to ruin their lives by jailing them. There was no sympathy for their situation, no recognition that they had legitimate grievances, no apologies for the way they have been repeatedly betrayed. Instead, there was vilification and promises of harsh punishment. Other self-proclaimed friends of the working-class drew on the vocabulary of the schoolyard to condemn the only policy that will protect the White working-class. Here’s Tom Slater, one of the Trotskyist libertarians at Spiked Online:

We still don’t know what motivated the killings in Southport. Police say there are no signs yet of a terrorist motive. Racist dickheads continue to post about mass deportations and Islam, even though the suspect is a born Brit who reportedly ‘has no known links to Islam’. But there’s certainly a similar whiff of resignation, of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, to the official response to the slaying of these girls, just as there was after the Islamist murder of young girls in Manchester in 2017. (“Southport and the deadly cowardice of the elites,” Spiked Online, 31st July 2024)

There you have it: the Southport stabber is a “born Brit” who just happens to be Black, rather as the Manchester bomber was a “born Brit” who just happened to be Arab. That being so, I have a question for Tom Slater: Why do “born Brits” like those behave like their racial brethren overseas and not like “born Brits” who just happen to be White?

I’m confident Tom won’t answer the question, just as he didn’t answer a question I posed after he previously deployed schoolyard insults against his ideological opponents. In 2021 Muslims – many of them “born Brits” – protested at a school in Yorkshire about a teacher who had shown a religious-studies class some satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The teacher and his family are still in hiding. Tom Slater said that those Muslim protestors were “dickheads.” In response, I posed this never-answered question:

The “libertarians” at Spiked believe in protecting the rare and fragile phenomenon of free speech by opening the borders of White nations to unlimited numbers of highly illiberal tribalists from the Third World. So here’s another question for Tom, Brendan [O’Neill], Julie [Burchill] and the other libtards at Spiked: If you support free speech and open borders for Muslims, while Muslims support censorship and open borders for Muslims, who exactly are the dickheads? (“Libtards Wail, Muslims Wait: Why Fans of Abortion Won’t Defeat Fans of Muhammad,” The Occidental Observer, 31st March 2021)

The answer is obvious. So are the answers about why non-Whites kill and harm Whites in such a one-sided way and about how to stop them doing it. At the beginning of this article I said that in the mainstream there are only two acceptable responses to the Southport stabbing: sickly sentimentality and leftist lies. Those responses are acceptable because they won’t solve the problem. Leftists do not genuinely care about slaughtered schoolgirls or suicide-bombings or any other form of Third-World pathology, because Third-World pathologies don’t threaten leftism. On the contrary, they strengthen leftism by justifying more authoritarianism, more surveillance, and more transfer of money and resources from Whites to non-Whites.

An aspiring Muslim rapper

But leftists definitely and deeply care about riots by working-class White men, because such riots pose a potential threat to leftist power. However misguided and misdirected the violence may be, it arises from the understanding that the expulsion of non-Whites from the West is the only way to end the Third-World pathologies non-Whites have inevitably created. In the meantime, it isn’t leftists or Trotskyist libertarians who have accurately foreseen what comes next in Britain. Instead, it’s a racist dickhead called Nick Griffin (born 1959), the former leader of the state-infiltrated British National Party. Griffin isn’t popular among genuinely far-right people in Britain, but I think a prophecy of his from the beginning of the century is getting ever nearer to fulfillment. The prophecy seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, but Griffin predicted that sooner or later the British army would have to be sent into Muslim districts to quell Muslim riots. After which, an aspiring Muslim rapper who was turning his life around would be shot dead and the fun would really begin.

Griffin’s prophecy is looking a safer and safer bet. The mainstream media did their best to ignore the way some Muslims responded to the White working-class riots of 2024 by roaming about with weapons and chanting “Allahu Akbar.” When the White working-class riot, police get injured. When Muslims riot in earnest, police are going to get killed. Then the army will have to be sent in and Griffin will be proved not just a racist dickhead but a clear-sighted prophet too. Thanks to the evil and insane immigration policies of both the Labour and the Conservative parties, Britain is entering some very interesting times.

The Litvinov School: On Who Betrayed Whom in 1938

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Predicting the Uniparty: Peter Oborne’s “The Triumph of the Political Class”

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The Triumph of the Political Class
Peter Oborne
Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback: Pocket Books, 2008

Words and phrases often enter the political lexicon via the US media before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the UK, and one such recent migrant is the “uniparty”. The Americans have been using it for some time, and the Right-of-center media in Britain are now cautiously trying it out. The idea, of course, is that the two-party system central to both US and UK politics is an optical illusion, and in fact the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or Conservatives and Labour, does not exist in any meaningful sense. If the British MSM read more and talked less, they would have realized that the British uniparty was discovered back in 2007 in a book entitled The Triumph of the Political Class, by lobby journalist Peter Oborne.

A lobby journalist is the equivalent to a member of the White House press pack, guaranteed access to the inner circles of government and thus worth the attention of the political observer in a way that plain op-ed writer is not. Many political hacks write about government with their faces pressed up against the window looking in; Oborne has been respected and even befriended by some of the most powerful people in British government. But the book was inspired by Oborne’s increasing disillusionment with the way in which the great political reforms made by the much-mocked Victorians were overridden as the twentieth century turned into a new millennium. What had been a system which prioritized public service over private acquisition had changed into a new political cadre in which “the most bitter rivalries at Westminster have involved factional conflicts within individual parties rather than collisions of ideology and belief”. This discovery, Oborne writes, “was very frightening indeed”.

Oborne begins with the architecture of the British political class, calling it “a manifestation of the state”, and locating its inception specifically with the arrival of Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 1997. Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, he writes, was the last time there was a genuine ideological difference between the two main parties. Whereas politicians once gained status in Parliament by virtue of their position in society, they now gain status in society directly relative to their position in Parliament, and there is increasingly a disconnect between politicians and the real world of employment, a world they find baffling. Britain had shifted to what Oborne calls “cartel politics”, an impregnable ideological fortress within whose walls both major parties co-exist.

Oborne makes no claim to having discovered the concept of a political class, citing the late nineteenth-century lawyer and social theorist Gaetano Mosca, whose Elementi di Scienza Politica was translated into English as The Ruling Class. It is notable that the book is “today viewed by some historians as a theoretical precursor of the fascist ideology”. This has now become a commonplace move with ideas that are getting too close to the truth: file under fascism.

Oborne sets the political class in its recent historical context by contrasting it with the British “Establishment”, a phrase coined by historian A. J. P. Taylor, and which Blair in particular used as a political tool by claiming it was outmoded and hidebound. His “big tent” politics gave the illusion that the days of the Eton-educated, old money, traditionalist ruling class were over, and that politics was about to descend from its class-bound Olympus to dwell among mortals. This was technocratic smooth talk, of course, but Blair’s people went to work on the idea of the Establishment with fine attention to detail.

One of Oborne’s key insights is that, in 2007, the techniques of the political class were still a work in progress. A complementary realization is that the new political class would not have the organic core of the old landed class, but would rather be put into the hands of PR gurus, spin doctors and focus groups. Media coverage had accelerated, and so the new breed required grooming in dress, speech, and lifestyle, in order to promote to the public a carefully tailored image.

This is not a simple requirement to act with decorum or integrity, as it once would have been, but rather a pre-programmed regimen whereby politicians are “outfitted” for the media, the synaptic link between the political class and the electorate. This extends to speech, and the famous “Queen’s English” (now once again the King’s English) once favored by the political class defers to so-called “Estuary English” (from the region known as the Thames Estuary) as a default speech pattern. Clothing becomes indistinguishable from that worn in the corporate management workplace. A politician’s private life, once off-limits to the media, is now used as a form of self-promotion, and “It is automatic for a member of the Political Class to exploit family and friendships in order to sell his political career”.

This is the positive PR veneer. The negative involves the attack on existing and once-respected standards of behavior. Politicians, it is stated ad nauseam, are “judged by higher standards than ordinary people”, implying that the plebs have lower standards, that “virtue only resides in the state, and that civil society is largely corrupt”. After citing Mary Wilson, wife of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1970s, who did not accept £33 for some published poetry, Oborne compares Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, claiming that the human-rights lawyer was exemplary of the new political junta: “She would have been a familiar part of the landscape in the mid-eighteenth century, when the governing class made little secret that it sought public office as a vehicle for pursuing self-interest”.

Her outrageous abuse of position included a speaking engagement for a cancer charity dinner for which her fee exceeded the amount raised at the event, a personal phone call to a director of Manchester United football club to negotiate a discount for a team shirt featuring David Beckham’s number, and an invitation from a Melbourne designer store to take a few things as a gesture of goodwill. She walked out of the store with seventy items. These seem like trifling examples of shameless behavior, but they are indicative of a new code of office in which personal enrichment outpaces public duty.

Her husband’s talent was to mask the project to insulate the political class while making it look as though a much-needed revolution would return politics to the people. Blair pledged “To liberate Britain from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working”.

Compare Mao Xidong’s list of revolutionary aims from China’s “Red August” in 1966, just after the Cultural Revolution began. Mao’s mission was to sweep away the “four olds”: Old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. This rejection of the outmoded political past was cast as modernization, the shibboleth of the political class.

The sweeping away of the past was not, however, to return to the values of public service, but intended instead to remold the British constitution to answer the needs of this new style of politicking, and that meant undermining the major institutions of government. The Blair government systematically attacked the civil service, the judiciary, the intelligence services and the very power of Parliament itself. The idea of a collective executive loyal to the crown was anathema to Blair. Everything came down from him and his inner circle.

Oborne quotes fellow journalist Hugo Young in defining the British Civil Service as a body which “represents and personifies the seamless integrity of past, present and future government rolled indistinguishably into one”. This is precisely the tradition Blair’s government sought to undermine and, in Oborne’s phrase, “emasculate”. With Blair’s huge mandate, this led immediately to “a sustained and brutal attack on the influence of permanent officials”. The role of Secretary to the Cabinet sounds menial but is in fact one of the most important roles in the Civil Service, and Oborne shows Blair reducing the holder of the post to “a debased and peripheral figure”.

There was nothing slow about Blair’s march through the institutions of government. The Foreign Office, once one of the most respected government departments, found that its very integrity made it a target. The Blairs were notorious for holidaying at the expense of others, and took full advantage: “Very soon after entering Downing Street the Blair family started to see the foreign service, with its access to large houses in desirable overseas locations, as a potential travel agent”.

British intelligence saw the rise of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6. Intelligence increasingly became a political tool, and Oborne notes its rise as coincident with that of the new political class. The intelligence gathered before the contentious entry of Britain into the Iraq War both served that class, and led ultimately to the notorious “sexed-up dossier” which many have found misleading at best, and designed solely to bring the UK into the conflict at the behest of the Americans at worst. This shake-up of government also saw MI6 as increasingly less concerned with national security threats and more dedicated to intruding into the lives of ordinary people, which leads Oborne on to discuss Labour’s manipulation of the law of the land.

The analysis of the judiciary by Blair’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett, “was extremely close to the Marxist proposition that the protections offered by the courts are simply ‘bourgeois freedoms’.” With a sustained offensive against Britain’s famous habeas corpus law, aimed at preventing illegal detention in the absence of evidence, the new breed of politicians struck back at ancient history and the Magna Carta. It was a short step to taking on one of the most ancient and venerable of British institutions; the monarchy.

The co-opting of the funeral of Lady Diana Spencer by Tony Blair, and his sentimental catchphrase, “the people’s princess”, have become notorious as a symbol of Blair’s wish to have a higher public profile than the royal family. The most telling example of Labour’s contempt for the monarchy came from Blair’s infamous press enforcer, Alastair Campbell, largely responsible for the Iraq dossier noted above, and to all intents and purposes a member of Blair’s Cabinet. In Jordan for the funeral of King Hussein, Prince Charles came to meet Blair and Campbell in a makeshift office with only one chair. Blair shook hands with the then Prince of Wales, while Campbell “was sitting slumped in his chair making calls on his mobile [and] simply ignored the Prince”.

As an experienced journalist, one might expect Oborne to be strong on the vital role of the media, and its effective capture, in the formation of the political class. This new executive, he writes “sought to give an almost constitutional role to the British media by building it up as an alternative to existing state institutions”. The result of this replacement is that “at its simplest, journalists become instruments of government”. Journalistic aims are altered, and not subtly, from being supposedly impartial reportage to forming a quasi-constitutional department of government devoted to myth-building and the maintenance of the Blairite project. The Blair government oversaw the creation of the “narrative” we hear so much about, a word which has its roots in story-telling to the tribe.

An added function of media is to act both as a client of government, and to be cast as hostile, the enemies of progress and modernization. Blair divined early on that enemies of his government needed to be put into the public consciousness even if they didn’t actually exist, and despite Rupert Murdoch being effectively a key member of Blair’s cabinet, the line from government was implicitly that the state was fighting with monsters who would oppose good and righteous governance. The BBC — who began to be referred to as “the state broadcaster” around this time — were the mainstay of the operation:

“The distinction between an aggressive, illegitimate press and a well-meaning government has formed the template of a great deal of BBC reporting over the last decade. It became automatic for BBC reporters and commentators to portray any government crisis as a contest between press and government, just as Campbell had suggested”.

I saw Alastair Campbell once on a street in London. We looked at each other for several seconds, and he was obviously aware that I knew who he was. I wouldn’t say the look he gave me portrayed the face of evil, just the face of ambitious malevolence.

The Iraq War was the pinnacle of Labour’s media-generated deception program. The government effectively lied both to the public and to the House of Commons over Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, his willingness to use banned chemical weapons on British troops, and the likely death toll for allied forces. This was, in the end, far outstripped by hecatombs of dead Iraqis. It is a strongly held opinion on both sides of the British political divide that both Blair and Campbell should have been tried for war crimes.

The final masterstroke of the Blair government’s total occupation of the political estates was its use of techniques of mass formation honed in the world of corporate advertising and marketing. Blair copied and adopted Bill Clinton and Karl Rove’s technique of triangulation, whereby advanced software could discount blocs of votes and concentrate on a relatively small number of undecided voters in swing states. Britain has a similar balloting system to America’s electoral college, and so the persuasiveness of any policy message to the people becomes instead a jig-saw puzzle with key pieces which must be privileged when campaigning: “The Political Class negotiates with the voters through television and searches out their opinions through mechanisms such as focus groups and techniques based on market research or borrowed from the advertising industry”.

This “manipulative populism” has been in place ever since, and Oborne’s book shows it under construction, unclear at the time but now a familiar apparatus.

Oborne wrote, in 2007, that the political class had won. The theatrical element to politics, increasingly absorbed from the US, had become the whole show. Oborne relates a story of his visit to a Tony Blair walkabout in an English town. Blair was filmed talking and smiling with all his charm and empathy on show, the good people delighted to bask in the presence of Dear Leader. The only problem is that all the “members of the public” had been hired and paid by the Labour Party. When security realized who Oborne was, they tried to keep him away from the press event. When he finally got in, they tried to throw him out. He was a bad courtier.

Oborne’s epilogue was written as Gordon Brown had recently taken over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister, and despite some cosmetic pledges to correct some of the constitutional excesses of the Blair era, such as announcing government policy in the House of Commons and not via the media, Oborne notes that he only typified the political class. Oborne’s final sentence is in the hope that David Cameron would be “capable of leading an insurgency against the Political Class — or whether he will… become no more than another manifestation of its alluring, corrupt and anti-democratic methodology”. Britain got its answer, and now that the political class is merging fully with the global elites, we have just had the bizarre experience of a nominally Conservative party spending 14 years setting up a far more socialist Labour regime which is only just beginning to show what is to come.

We see the results of the changeover Oborne describes today in Britain. In 2007, “The values of the Political Class… [were] still in the process of formation”.

Now, another chapter has been added to the playbook, as the British uniparty — which recently passed the baton between its two main runners — is happy to allow criticism of government incompetence be openly pronounced. But Government incompetence is a psy-op. The British uniparty is in fact highly competent, just not in an area of expertise which serves anyone else but themselves. The course of Britain towards ruin is not sloppy governance but grand design, part Bezmenov, part Samuel T. Francis’s anarcho-tyranny. The British political class are not only competent, they have been honing that competency over the last 30 years and are, to put it simply, becoming very good at being very bad. This class has done what they have always said they wanted to do, which is to reintroduce morality into politics. Just not, as a child might say, in a nice way. Oborne’s prediction for the future of Britain, made 17 years ago in this most important of British political books, has shown itself to be prescient: “This estrangement between a tiny governing elite and mainstream British society is one of the overwhelming themes of our age, and it will only get more desperate, and more dangerous”.