Totalitarian Britain

For years, the United Kingdom, like many other Western European nations, has dismantled the cultural, religious, and social institutions that have traditionally assimilated migrants from Africa and the Near East.

The destruction of any meaningful assimilationist regime joined to en masse immigration and neo-Marxist ideology has left Britain increasingly balkanized. British police actively covered up the horrifying Pakistani-led sensational Rotherham child sex rings that operated for more than 15 years, amongst other smaller but still numerous cover-ups.

On July 29, a killer in Southport, a city of 100,000 people 17 miles north of Liverpool, knifed three young girls and injured another 10. Far-right groups, among others, took to social media blaming the government for lax treatment of immigrant criminality and a general indifference to the plight of native-born Britons. Riots ensued, and the British government, led by its new far-left progressive prime minister, responded with what is now a near-ritualistic litany for leftists caught in their own ideological undoing: Keir Starmer blamed the far-right, online misinformation, and Russia.

But, beyond all that, British police also warned British subjects that they could be prosecuted for their social media posts. In a series of missives straight out of a dystopian novel, British police warned that posts that authorities deemed insulting or abusive, hateful, harmful, or potentially hateful or harmful, inciting racial hatred or potentially inciting racial hatred could be prosecuted. If this word salad of subjective non-sequiturs were not enough, the chief prosecutor for England and Wales assured the public that dedicated police officers were scouring social media.

What makes Britain’s turn toward authoritarian thought police so galling is that the U.K. gave the world one of the great anti-totalitarian traditions in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s the society that birthed Sir Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Britain fought Napoleon and then 130 years later it fought Hitler. And it did so because of Britain’s commitment to liberal freedoms, the stuff we Americans view as basic civil rights. Churchill warned routinely about Hitler’s Gestapo police, an institution that monitored the thoughts and speech of the German populace and prosecuted that same German populace for wrongthink and the spread of what Hitler might have thought of as “misinformation” that didn’t conform to what the Third Reich decided would be the truth.

Even after the war was over, Churchill didn’t let up on his fears over censorship. In a speech that was widely panned at the time, he warned that the socialist-friendly Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee was not as far from Hitler’s Gestapo as the British people might have thought. Socialism, warned Churchill, was “in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.” No socialist government, said Churchill, “can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating socialism or voting socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.”

Critics lambasted the speech, but Churchill believed that in the future it would be seen as one of his best. He knew that leftist politics—almost always in the name of altruism—inevitably adopted totalitarian measures to control the lives of citizens. Britain’s history, he knew, stood in a tradition of liberty that was alien to leftist totalitarianism. “Here in old England, in Great Britain … in this glorious island, the cradle and citadel of free democracy throughout the world, we do not like to be regimented and ordered about and have every action of our lives prescribed for us.”

The grim reality of modern Britain is that it has become more like the totalitarian societies it once stood against. Political commentator Josh Trevino noted after a recent trip to Britain that the “prim horror” of the modern British surveillance state “was visible across U.K. media, whose figures positively delighted in reporting the persecution and jailing, not just of those who actually committed property destruction and assault, but of those who expressed disallowed opinions on social media.” Britain’s home secretary, he noted, “appeared on the BBC and reassured viewers that Britain remains a free-speech society, while presiding over the expedited arrests, trials, and convictions of those who spoke wrongly.” Totalitarian Britain has imprisoned a father of young children for a tweet and arrested elderly women for posting wrong information.

More than two centuries ago, Britain stood alone against Napoleon. Prime Minister William Pitt understood the stakes of the battle between Britain and France. In 1805, he told Londoners that by standing up to Napoleonic authoritarianism, England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.” Modern Britain, however, has undoubtedly failed herself by her tyrannical exertions and failed the rest of Europe and the Western world by her hypocritical example.