A very British revolution

For the first time in its history, Britain is in the grip of state terror

The British state is sharing its monopoly of violence with its political friends to instil fear in its political enemies. There’s a name for that: State Terror. Sound hyperbolic? Join me in a thought experiment. Let us reverse the responses of the British and Israeli states to the continual violent attrition against their own citizens.

First, Britain. Facing down pressure, the government tightens its approach to immigration and domestic order. Stop-and-search is reintroduced. Those who are convicted of involvement in violent crime actually serve genuinely deterrent sentences, rather than being re-released into society. Police forces no longer accept disingenuous ‘reassurances’ from ‘community leaders’ that planned ‘protests’ are to be peaceful. Illegal migrants are securely detained, rather than being picked up and housed at government expense, then allowed to roam free (some claim this last solution would breach international law: but Greece pursues just such a policy with the full support of the European Union’s FRONTEX organisation).

British voters have been conditioned to believe such measures would constitute an unthinkable — not to mention illegal — Rightward swing. But there is no specific individual legal barrier to any of the above measures (not least migrant crime, as the Greek example shows). Stage one of the thought experiment thus has a much lower bar than first appears.

Let us then turn to stage two: modelling the Israeli state’s posture on that of Britain. For this purpose, let us reverse the respective government responses to the 2024 Southport child murders and the Majdal Shams rocket attacks, which killed eleven people in the same year. First, a local Israeli city mayor comes forward to accuse the grieving Druze community of ‘weaponising’ the attacks. Then the police suggests that such community anger has been orchestrated by an unfashionable and defunct political organisation itself akin to a terror group. The Druze then rise up in protest against its soi-disant protector, the Israeli state; which clamps down hard, clearing prison space to make way for the protestors. And so the vicious cycle of grievance and violence is transferred from its original antagonists to the relationship between citizen and state. Hard to imagine? But that is exactly what happens in Britain.

How can such a yawning lacuna exist between the social contracts of two fellow democracies? As Sherlock Holmes once said: ‘Eliminate the impossible and what remains, however improbable, is the truth.’

Applying this logic to Britain leads us to some difficult conclusions. First: that the wave of seemingly random violence and counter-protest that has been sweeping Britain in recent years is not merely a mistake or failure. The finest minds of Britain’s civil service and judiciary cannot credibly be taken aback by the combined result of their actions regarding migration, policing, sentencing, and media pressure. Enoch Powell laid these out quite plainly and publicly over fifty years ago. If our governing classes are too short-sighted to have seen what he did, they should not be in power at all.

Second: that such destabilisation must be regarded as the primary political outcome of these decisions. Skilled migration may be touted as having economic dividends — wage suppression as a shortcut to economic growth — and electoral benefits (if you consider loading one side of the House of Commons to be a benefit, and many do). But those 'positive' impacts pale into insignificance when placed alongside the wider impact, which is at its most acute with the horrific 'rape-gang' phenomenon.

Third: that some kind of cost-benefit analysis of these consequences must have taken place. The political costs are obvious: an ongoing electoral backlash in favour of Reform UK. Yet even this has simply split the Right and delivered a Labour majority — which is in turn rendering the very administrative cadres against whom the protest was directed untouchable, not least via the refusal to hold a national inquiry on rape gangs.

What, then, of the more awkward ‘benefit’ side of the equation? As Holmesian logic dictates, there must be a cui bono behind the bloodshed and grief: ‘however improbable.’ This conclusion becomes more prominent given that — even as the fearful consequences are laid clear — the confluence of migration and social destabilisation is still due to be accelerated.

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History deafens us with reminders that crime and terror have their political purposes. The early French Revolutionaries recruited the Sans-culottes from Paris-hating Provençal vagrants, marching them north to the sound of the Marseillaise. Six decades later, recalling those events, Marx wrote his famous statement: ‘When our time comes, we shall make no excuse for the terror.’ Lenin accordingly drew his early cohorts from the lawless bands of smugglers and horse-rustlers around the Black Sea, his jurist soon alighting on the phrase: ‘Think not of the triumph of Socialist Law but that of Socialism over Law.’ Fascism pressed similar human resources into the Brown and Black Shirts, whose effect was equal to that of the un-uniformed ruffians who supported the French and Russian revolutions. An earlier great political revolutionary, the Prophet Mohammed, also opened the prisons to find new adherents.

As Solzhenitsyn wrote: ‘a Marxist system is recognised by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalises political opponents.’ ‘But why?’, cries the too-civilised mind. The answer is simple: everyday terror demoralises and desensitises society to the point where it cannot resist those alterations which cannot be delivered by existing political structures. Defenders of the Russian and French Revolutions would rightly point out that these countries did not have democratic processes through which to deliver the desired change (much less did Mecca and Medina). Given that Britain does ostensibly still have democracy, we must therefore look to the second part of the definition: ‘which cannot be delivered by existing political structures.’

Here we arrive at a great irony: that the first iteration of such demographic and institutional changes in the UK has itself handicapped more recent democratic opposition to the very same process. The migratory component commenced with the appointment of Barbara Roche as Immigration Minister in 1999. It soon took only six weeks for an applicant from Central Asia or the Middle East to achieve 'indefinite leave to remain' in the UK. In a neat piece of gaslighting, Roche was then moved on to become Minister for Women (reminding us of Chateaubriand’s quip that Bishop Talleyrand and Minister of Police Fouché were ‘sin leaning on the arm of vice’). The culture she put in place — under which race and migration became untouchable subjects at all levels of government — saw immigration to Britain increased by a factor of six under New Labour. The attendant ‘march through the institutions’ meanwhile had a twofold effect: first, criticism of the process was silenced; and, second, the Civil Service and Judiciary become sufficiently powerful to render powerless successive General Elections to deliver the stronger outcomes that the electorate so clearly wanted on immigration and security.

In common with the revolutions of the past, these parallel processes have resulted in an ever-greater degree of cognitive dissonance being forced on the population. Even as an obsessive prurience took hold of public life — with ministers resigning over a distantly-remembered straying hand, or retirees' houses being ransacked due to historic false witness — it was an open secret that tens of thousands of children were being subjected to the most horrific sexual crimes imaginable under the omertà of police and local government. Such dissonance in turns gives rise to the need for ever-greater narrative control ('Four legs good: two legs better', as Orwell memorably had it). It is a moot point whether greater international scrutiny of Britain is finally causing this the suspension of disbelief to collapse.

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To understand how have arrived here, it is worth going back and considering the type of Western-Marxist theories being enacted. These were developed not for sudden revolt against monarchies but precisely for the slow erosion of Western democracies. A brief tour of the relevant literature might start with the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary theorist György Lukács. When Western populations failed follow the Russian example and rise against their countrymen in 1919, Lukács elaborated the doctrine of Cultural Terrorism: that ‘Western Civilisation is the enemy’. The tour might then take in the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, whose 1965 essay on ‘Repressive Tolerance’ dictated that ‘tolerance’ should be a ‘partisan goal’ extended only to ‘policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed’ and withdrawn from ‘prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions’. Here you find the origins of ‘two-tier policing’ as well as two-tier sentencing (although Marcuse also rather sweetly believed that ‘revolutionary terror as terror implies its own abolition in the process of creating a free society’.) The tour might round off with far-left American activist Saul Alinsky, whose 1971 Rules for Radicals included such recognisable takeaways as ‘make the enemy live up to its own rulebook’ and ‘keep the pressure on’. Although these theorists might appear recondite in the Twenty-First century, they are certainly not obsolete. Knowingly or unknowingly, the current generation of Western Leftists is steeped in their ideas (Hillary Clinton wrote her university thesis on Alinsky). But their ‘thought leaders’ will never openly admit to putting these into action, even as they dominate the Academy. Hence the insignia of the Fabian Society being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In even plainer sight are the ‘four stages of undermining free societies’, outlined by self-professed KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in a 1984 TV interview. These are Demoralisation, Destabilisation, Crisis, and Normalisation. Britain is nothing if not demoralised; it is nothing if not unstable; and it now appears to be in crisis. Meanwhile, the process of normalisation also seems to be well under way: some type of domestically-focused standing army; the release of violent criminals to make room for protestors (remember Solzhenitsyn); and ‘Operation Scatter’ to embed migrants more deeply in society. Whether or not Bezmenov was genuine, like Balaam's Ass he seems unnervingly accurate. Under the cover of the resulting terror and social paralysis, the institutional march will be resumed in the form of Blairism 2.0. As always, the 'state of exception' introduced by social destabilisation provides essential cover for institutional changes that could not be achieved under the historical operation of a country's Social Contract.

Faced with such a complete and integrated process, the average law-abiding British citizen is faced with three options. The first is to give up and keep their head down. As safety — let alone comfort — becomes a precious resource, mere apathy becomes a luxury. Those who lived under the Soviet Union talk of going into ‘survival mode’ each day: a sentiment increasingly familiar to British city-dwellers. From such a viewpoint, the ‘peaks’ of the process — the mass stabbings and bombings — do not stand apart from wider social collapse but instead sit at on a spectrum also encompassing gang violence, rape, and unchallenged shoplifting.

The second is to resist lawfully. Yet, as we have seen, political resistance has already been emasculated by the very processes against which it is aimed. This drives people towards a third option: the type of physical resistance we saw across Britain in response to the Southport child-murders. But even this simply creates another ratchet by providing the revolutionary state with the one thing it most wants: an opportunity to suppress the historical mainstream, which it will start to characterise as the enemy-within. The ‘Far Right’ has become such an essential trope for Keir Starmer's rhetoric that he even reached for it in response to calls for an obviously-needed national inquiry into the rape gangs — including by the victims themselves.

The historical waymarkers to the identification and promotion of such an internal ‘phantom menace’ are once again plentiful. For the French Terror’s ‘Committee of Public Safety’, the enemy-within were the aristocrats; the bourgeois for the Bolsheviks; the Bolsheviks for the Nazis; and Jews for just about anyone. It is who whoever happens to be adverse to the goals of the state and its proxies: in this case, the white working classes who are equally averse to both the middle-class facilitators of state policy and the imported disorder groups which create the conditions for it to be implemented. Conveniently, these are also the very same constituencies who have successively transferred their votes away from Labour — first to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson; now to Reform UK under Nigel Farage. As such, it is no surprise that state-backed ‘counter-protests’ now directly target Reform UK.

The third potential response is to embrace the institutional change programme, even if it means giving up on a more free and homeostatic way of life in favour of greater authoritarianism. Polling in recent years has shown a sharp decline in support for democracy in favour of ‘security’. That such sentiments coincide with the rise of multiculturalism reflects de Tocqueville's main insight — itself recalling Aristotle — that democracy rests on a shared culture. The demonisation of the idea of the Nation-State therefore proceeds apace: not least by switching out the Latin natio for the Greek ethnos to provide the altogether more scary-sounding 'Ethno-State'.

There is, however, a subset to this final category: those who embrace such changes precisely because they mean ‘giving up on a more free and homeostatic way of life in favour of greater authoritarianism’. Here we might pivot from the general historical backdrop to some more specific features which have re-emerged in Britain — and which are now being leveraged in favour of the above processes.

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The first is the rise of the Small Totalitarian. It is a common trope that Totalitarianism sets out to destroy the individual: as Orwell wrote, ‘a boot stamping on a human face forever’. But is it not quite that simple — after all, someone still has to wear the boot. Enter the Small Totalitarian. This is a person who uses local political enforcement for a taste of power. In his fabulous retelling of European Jewish culture in the century before the World War Two, Genius and Anxiety, Norman Lebrecht recounts the following anecdote from a composer entering the Berlin opera for the first time since the Nazis took power: ‘I had never met a Nazi until then. I didn’t think I knew any. But suddenly here they were. The double bass player who never got promoted. The most difficult stage hands. An unhappy make-up artist. They were now in charge.’

Small Totalitarianism is equally effective in private companies as in public sector and civic organisations: witness the extraordinary dominance that cost-centre departments such as Human Resources and Marketing have gained by introducing political leverage into the private sector. This psychological segment has been sent into overdrive by the recent tensions, prescribing the state-mandated ‘correct’ response in their local social-media groups (just as they have done in previous years over Black Lives Matter, Climate Change, Gaza, the Brexit Referendum, and successive General Elections). In doing so, they help the world-view of violent proxies and disorder groups percolate into the mainstream.

If Small Totalitarians are the bricks that make up the authoritarian social prison, then its overall architecture is provided by the Narcissistic State. This self-explanatory phenomenon reached its inflection point with the Covid Lockdowns. Britain was subjected to a complete economic and social shutdown to ‘protect the National Health Service’ while being subjected to videos of NHS staff basking in the attention by doing anything other than delivering health services. In the intervening period, we have watched as other government agencies — notably the police — flatly refuse to deliver the service for which they exist, while simultaneously arrogating ever greater attention, power, and resources to themselves.

The Narcissistic State represents a reversal of the key principal of the British social contract as outlined by Bishop Gilbert Burnett in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that ‘government is for those who are to be government’. As the state once again starts to exist for its own sake, it increasingly fails its citizens. Yet — much like individual narcissists — it still seeks praise even in this failure. We see this in the language adopted by the NHS ‘heroes’ or the ‘painstaking’ work the Metropolitan Police put into failed investigations. Here we recall the citizens of the Eastern Bloc who were not only expected to endure cold, fear, and hunger but also to applaud those who kept them in such a condition. The state never accepts blame or criticism, and reacts sclerotically when confronted with either (the Metropolitan Police Commissioner physically lashed out at a reporter who raised the question pressing most heavily on the mind of the public in the wake of the Southport murders). Instead of looking to itself for answers, the British state scours the four corners of the earth for extrinsic causes for very civil unrest it had helped seed. The Director of Public Prosecutions suggested that foreign states might wish to extradite their own citizens to Britain for departing from our parochial political narratives. Labour MPs and their media outriders demonise Elon Musk for ‘interfering in British politics’, and threaten sanctions accordingly. Yet the same cohort will segue in the next breath to welcoming the assistance of global NGOs or discussing the danger of Britain being affected by the authoritarianism of other governments: self-knowledge never being the forte of narcissists, let alone the acceptance of responsibility.

A key psychological function of narcissism is the tendency to judge things solipsistically in relation to oneself. The Narcissistic State — to adapt a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin — similarly ‘looks everywhere and sees only itself’. Even as those whom it is meant to serve slide into irrelevance, it remains attuned to slights against itself. Hence the policing of ‘crimes’ against the state and its ideology now take precedence over threats against the mere public. When asked the identify the real victims of the slide into disorder, narcisstic-statists will all too often nominate themselves.

Although a narcissistic, individualised culture and government by proxy groups might seem contradictory, they can be mutually reinforcing. Speaking in 2019, an anonymous source described one of the goals of the British Government's Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) as being to ‘corral the Princess Dianaesque grief’ in the wake of mass-terror attacks. ‘This job has changed significantly’, the quote continued, ‘from planning for organic, “people” responses to tragedy, to being told: “We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there?”’. Exactly such a combination of timeliness and positive hysteria marked the de facto government ‘counter-protests’ which took place on 7 August 2024 in response to the Southport riots. The headlines about ‘Britain Uniting’ ignored widespread recent intimidation and large-scale damage to private property rooted in incitement from the militant Left and political Islam. And yet — in common with the Narcissistic State itself — the celebratory tone of the resulting blanket front-page coverage was uncritical. Only upon later inspection did the demonstration appear have been engineered by some well-placed disinformation about a wave of expected anti-immigrant protest that day — none of which materialised.

This reflects a final element of the emergent style of government in Britain which it has in common with undemocratic peers around the world: it not only shares its monopoly of force with violent proxies but uses those proxies for narrative control. The joint effort between the government and Muslim groups to push the notion of 'Islamophobia' is a case in point. Lest the deniability of the de facto link between official and proxy arms of state policy be taken too literally, the two will sometimes align themselves publicly — and share credit for the desired outcomes. The result is that streets — under the sway of the power principle — replace Parliament as the crucible of politics. Even as Prime Minister Keir Starmer talked up the gravity of the crisis in mid-2024, he did not recall Parliament. State responses were instead dictated by political and judicial fiat — including deeper social media control, fast-track courts, and selectively longer sentencing.

Is there a way back for Britain? The counter-revolutions of history have tended to mirror the revolutions they displace, typically involving massed crows and hurried departures by helicopter. Douglas Murray previously not-so-subtly alluded to this outcome with his suggestion that the public might have to ‘sort this out themselves’. Elon Musk made an even more cinematic suggestion of ‘civil war’. Yet the technological prowess of the state has far surpassed the point where the power principle it employs can also be employed against it. If revolutions can only be reversed by borrowing their own techniques, what of a slow march back through the institutions? But the Conservative Party governed for fourteen years without lifting a finger in that direction — with the result that those institutions are now marching right through society.

A homeland is just a garden with high walls. Now those of Britain have been torn down, the resulting flight may tilt her more towards her diaspora (as all revolutions do). This would complete a karmic reversal whereby once-imperial Britain becomes an internal colony — pitting proxies against each other on a divide-and-rule basis — while the ark of English culture and English capital is forced to find refuge overseas. If that sounds hopeless, consider the dispersed survival of cultures such as the Lebanese and the Armenian. On which note, we might return finally to our initial comparison: Israel.