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, using the differing reaction to the attacks in Majdal Shams and Southport as our guide.

First, let us model a hypothetical British state response on Israel’s approach to domestic security. Facing down pressure from quangocrats, liberal media, and multilateral organisations, Britain tightens its approach to law and 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. This implies that a failure to pursue such measures is not a result of obligation, but of state choice.

Let us then turn to stage two: modelling the Israeli state’s response to Majdal Shams on that of Britain’s response to Southport. First, a local city mayor comes forward to accuse the grieving Druze community of ‘weaponising’ the attacks, even as they bore the twelve white palls to their graves. Then the local police service suggests that the same community anger has actually been orchestrated by an unfashionable and defunct political organisation itself akin to a terror group. Unsurprisingly, the Druze then rise up in protest against its soi-disant protector, the Israeli state; then, the Israeli state in turn 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? Well, that is exactly what is happening in Britain today.

Why does the life of an Israeli citizen mean so much more to that country’s governing class than that of a British one to ours? How can such a yawning political, moral, and judicial 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’s law and order situation will lead us to some difficult conclusions.

First: that the wave of seemingly random violence 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. These include: actively incentivising illegal migration from cultures radically opposed to that of Britain; hosting young people from African countries which have recently seen civil war; soft-touch policing of the above groups, set against wild over-policing of mainstream opinion; disproportionate sentencing between the two; suppression of the majority religion paired with the active protection of the minority; ignoring or facilitating the gang-rapes of thousands of children which, had it happened overseas, the state would be treating akin to a crime against humanity; and, of course, immense and obvious media pressure for differing standards to be applied to all of the above. If our governing classes are too short-sighted to have anticipated the outcome of their actions, they should not be in power at all.

Second: that violent 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 the impact of either pales into insignificance when placed alongside that of illegal migration: continual headlines about mass murder and rape, which in turn have become an example to certain naturalised citizens (as seems to have happened in Southport).

Third: that some kind of cost-benefit analysis of these consequences must have taken place. The political costs are obvious: an electoral backlash of the sort we saw in favour of Reform UK at last month’s General Election. Yet even this turned out to be cost-free, as it simply delivered a massive Labour majority. This massive majority is now rendering those very administrative classes and disorder groups, against whom the protest was directed, in effect untouchable.

What, then, of the more awkward ‘benefit’ side of the equation? As Holmesian logic dictates, there must be a cui bono behind the bloodshed: ‘however improbable.’ This conclusion becomes more prominent given that — in spite of all the fearful consequences laid clear in recent weeks — the process is still due to be accelerated.

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History deafens us with reminders that terror has its political purposes. The early French Revolutionaries recruited the Sans-culottes from Paris-hating Provençal vagrants, and marched 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 later alighting on the phrase: ‘Think not of the triumph of Socialist Law but that of Socialism over Law.’ Fascism, with its greater concern for formalism, pressed similar human resources into the brown and black shirts. Yet the effect upon doubters among the German and Italian populations was equal to that of the un-uniformed ruffians who supported the French and Russian revolutions. History’s first 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. Such change typically seeks permanence through a similarly super-political ‘march through the institutions’. 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 democratic opposition to demographic and institutional changes has already been handicapped by the first iteration of such changes. The Blairite march through the institutions was so successful that successive General Elections since 2005 — and one Referendum — have been rendered seemingly powerless to deliver the stronger outcomes that the electorate so clearly wanted on immigration and security. The demographic component meanwhile commenced with the appointment of Barbara Roche as Immigration Minister in 1999, before she was — in a neat piece of ‘gaslighting’ — moved on to become Minister for Women (reminding us of Chateaubriand’s quip that Bishop Talleyrand and Minister of Police Fouché were ‘vice leaning on the arm of sin’). The culture she put in place saw immigration to Britain increased by a factor of six while New Labour were in office.

If it appears paradoxical that a revolutionary process now claims more ground as a result of its own success, we should recall two contributing factors. First, that revolutions always accelerate with their own success. This was recognised early on via the Marxist (and later, more specifically Trotskyist) doctrine of ‘Permanent Revolution’. Second, that the type of Western-Marxist theories being enacted were developed precisely for the slow erosion of democracies rather than the sudden overthrow of absolute monarchies.

The briefest summary of these might start with the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary theorist György Lukács. When Western populations failed to rise against their countrymen in 1919, he elaborated the doctrine of Cultural Terrorism: that ‘Western Civilisation is the enemy’. It 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’. And 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. But its ‘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 KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in a 1984 TV interview: Demoralisation, Destabilisation, Crisis, Normalisation. Britain is nothing if not demoralised; it is nothing if not unstable; and, within weeks of a Labour government being elected, 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. Correlation may not equal causation, but that’s an awful lot of correlation to wish away to coincidence. Under the cover of the resulting terror and social paralysis, the institutional march will be resumed in the form of Blairism 2.0.

Faced with such a complete and integrated process, the average law-abiding 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 wholly apart from wider social collapse, as we are often led to believe, but rather sit on the extreme end of a spectrum that also encompasses gang violence, rape, and unchallenged shoplifting.

The second is to resist. 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 have just seen across Britain. But even this simply creates another ratchet by providing the 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 historical waymarkers 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. The enemy-within is whoever happens to be adverse to the goals of the state and its agents. The current enemy-within is the patriotic white working classes, who are equally averse to both the middle-class facilitators of state policy and the imported proxies who carry it out. Conveniently, these are also the very same constituencies who have successively transferred their votes away from Labour — first to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson, then increasingly to Reform UK under Nigel Farage. As such, it is no surprise that state-backed ‘counter-protests’ are now directly targeting Reform UK.

The third potential response is to embrace the institutional change programme. Polling in recent years has shown a sharp decline in support for parliamentary democracy in favour of ‘security’, especially among young people. This remains the case even if it means giving up on a more free and homeostatic way of life in favour of greater authoritarianism. 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. In its place, our leaders offer what is referred to in the Balkans as ‘stabilocracy’: a gently simmering pot on which the heat can be turned up should certain populations defy them too much.

Yet there is 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 and as a placebo for personal issues. Once again, it is nothing new. 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.’

This dynamic could also be called Reverse Stoicism. The less someone is able to control themselves, the more they seek to control the world around them. Given the self-arrogation of power provides its own perverse reward, they need no little external inducement to do so. And the worse their personal issues, the greater the need for their displacement. In this reading, the state pushes its psychological warfare campaigns not simply to demoralise society but to create footsoldiers who enforce state ideology — even if, as in the case of transgenderism, it is the very ideology that has damaged them in the first place.

Small Totalitarianism is useful not least as it 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 wielding political power, usually in alliance with external consultants and NGOs. Small Totalitarians are immune to facts: as Yuri Bezmenov said, ‘You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information’. Yet they help the worldview of violent proxies and disorder groups percolate into the mainstream. Across the country, 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, the Brexit Referendum, and successive General Elections.

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 also being subjected to videos of its members 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 starts once again to exist for its own sake, its priorities diverge from those of its citizens, and it increasingly starts to fail them.

Yet, like individual narcissists, the Narcissistic State demands praise even in failure, as encapsulated 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. It never accepts blame or criticism, and reacts sclerotically when confronted with either. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself physically lashed out at a reporter for asking him the question which is pressing most heavily on the mind of the public. Instead of looking to itself for answers, British law enforcement is going to the four corners of the earth to seek extrinsic causes for very civil unrest it has seeded. The Director of Public Prosecutions has suggested that foreign states might wish to extradite their citizens to Britain for departing from our state-sanctioned political narratives. Yet the same cohort will segue in the next breath to discussing the danger of Britain being affected by the authoritarianism of other governments; self-knowledge never being the forte of narcissists.

A lesser-known psychological function of narcissism is the tendency to judge things solipsistically in relation to oneself. A narcissist might exclaim that a view is ‘the most beautiful in the world’ simply because of who is beholding it. 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 highly attuned to slights against itself. Hence the policing of ‘crimes’ against the state and its ideology takes precedence over threat against mere individuals. When asked the identify the real victims of the slide into disorder, they will all too often nominate themselves.

The great prophet of modern narcissism was, of course, Christopher Lasch. His The Culture of Narcissism was released in the US way back in 1979, a solid twenty years before these features became dominant in Anglo-American government. This begs the question of whether the style of government has merely followed the general culture or vice versa. Either way, government and people have become aligned in a culture which is emotive, yet un-empathetic; profligate, yet mean-minded; and empty, yet never quiet.

A narcissistic, individualised culture and government-by-proxy might seem contradictory but 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 this combination of timeliness and hysterical positivity marked the pro-government ‘counter-protests’ of 7 August 2024, which appear to have been engineered by some well-placed disinformation about a wave of expected anti-immigrant protest that day (none materialised). 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.

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 use those proxies for narrative control. 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 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, he did not recall Parliament. The Leader of the Opposition, former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, was accordingly able continue undisturbed his serene contemplation of Californian restaurant menus.

State responses were instead dictated by political and judicial fiat — including deeper social media control, fast-track courts, and selectively longer sentencing. Both the manner of justice and the underlying offences arguably contravene the very same European Convention of Human Rights that is so often instrumentalised in favour of keeping migrant criminals at liberty in the UK. The ‘Right to a Fair Trial’ clause under Article Six would, however, require a rioter to lodge an ‘Innocent’ plea, giving them the right to ‘sufficient time and resources to prepare a robust defence’. (In reality, most of the rioters seem to have been corralled by their lawyers, who will often have as much or more interest in the ostensible welfare of the state than the actual welfare of their clients, to plead guilty). Article Ten, on Freedom of Opinion, seems to be a moot point — at least for now. It would be quite the volte-face if Labour were to be confronted with the need to withdrawn from the Convention, while anti-immigrant protestors fell back on it.

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 such an outcome with his suggestion that the public might have to ‘sort this out themselves’, while 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 we we have just seen fourteen years of unbroken government by the Conservative Party without a finger being lifted in that direction — with the result that the institutions are now marching back through society.

A homeland is just a garden with high walls. Now those of England 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 is forced to find refuge overseas. If that sounds hopeless, consider the durability of cultures such as the Lebanese and the Armenian. On which note, we might return finally to our initial comparison: Israel.