The Crime and Policing Bill, currently completing its passage through Parliament, represents the most comprehensive assault on the traditional liberties of the freeborn Englishman since the Stuart kings. It is more dangerous than those royal provocations, because it comes dressed in the language of safety, of community, of respect, and because it is only part of a wider pattern that, when you step back and see it whole, should stop the blood.
Let me begin with a man most people have never heard of. Giles Udy is one of Britain’s finest historians of Soviet Communism. His book Labour and the Gulag is a work of meticulous, uncomfortable scholarship, tracing the seduction of the British left by the Bolshevik experiment. He has spent twenty years studying what it actually looks like when a state decides that its ideological certainty entitles it to total control over those who do not share its worldview.
Udy has recently made a statement that I suspect cost him some effort to compose. He is not a man given to hyperbole. But writing about Soviet repression, he finds it, as he puts it, “really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.” Hard, but he reaches it nonetheless. “What Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common,“ he concludes, “is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to total control over all those who do not share their worldview.“
He is careful to note we have no Gulag, no death penalty. So am I. But his observation about the tools of control is what should make us stop. Legislation, and courts co-opted to apply it. The policing of dissent, hate crime orders, arrests, the long-term seizure of electronic appliances to intimidate those against whom no charges are ever brought. Twelve thousand arrests annually for social media posts. The framing of dissent as fascism, a habit, Udy notes, with deep roots in the Labour movement’s Stalinist period, when ‘fascist‘ became the approved term for anyone who inconveniently noticed what was happening in Moscow. Orwell’s thought crime, he argues, has become a reality. It is 2026, and he cannot believe what he is seeing. Nor can I.
– Gawain Towler writes a terrifying essay
Yes, it is difficult and painful to comprehend. The power of belief and ideology to blind people to reality is depressing. I suspect it goes back to the dawn of humanity and is with us to this day. Just look at Net Zero, Trans Ideology, the unquestioned for the Palestinian “Cause” despite evidence like this. And I think this is worse than people supporting these depraved barbarians in Gaza. I think those supporters really can’t see the truth because it runs so contrary to what they believe that it simply can’t be true.
This is a tragedy for our species. And one that seems very difficult to avoid. I am not saying impossible. I am not denying the existence of moral agency.
Actually, y’all haven’t been freeborn for several generations. You have just reached the point where it cannot be denied and the existence of the “Thought Police” is apparent. You say that there is not yet a GULAG or the death penalty. Wait for it. I suspect this generation will see and fear whatever British equivalent is weasel-worded into operation. In fact, this forum may not last long.
I commend to your attention to writing that predates our Revolution; by an Englishman named John Locke. And also the happenings at a location called Meriam’s Corner.
Subotai Bahadur
I dunno,
Last night I watched the first episode of “The Prisoner”. Never seen it before. It’s scary. Universal surveillance, no “real” cash, social credits, compulsory ID, no private vehicles, even a smart watch and it doesn’t look like a Gulag and it is all ostensibly very “nice” except you can’t ever leave. It’s brilliant in little details like people being numbered but taxis not being and even girls in bikinis wearing ID tags on them. It’s very scary because it isn’t grim on the surface and because it whilst in the ’60s it was SF it now looks like, if not exactly a documentary then at least a believable manifesto.
Giles Udy is to be commended for making a cogent statement that could impair his professional reputation.
I myself have been making comments, for quite a while, on Samizdata (and elsewhere) that could impair my reputation, as you might have noticed. But i do not think that i am entitled to be commended for it: I just hope to be allowed to keep doing it without consequences.
Here is a double-barrelled opinion even more outrageous than Udy’s:
* If the Woke did not kill tens of millions (yet), like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did, that is because the Woke are too dumb to manage to kill tens of millions;
* That implies that, in at least one sense, comparing the Woke to Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, is an insult to the latter trio.
— I’ll add a couple of other outrageous opinions:
* Wokism is better understood, not as an ideology, but as a mental illness.
* The “intellectual” roots of Wokism: the Frankfurt School and Post-Modernism, pretend to teach people to detect structures of power — but in reality they make people unable to detect real structures of power. They serve the interests of the Establishment.
(This is an idea that i conceived in the last couple of days.)
But there is an unofficial death penalty. People can be sent to prisons where they will most likely be killed by their fellow inmates.
@Roué le Jour
But there is an unofficial death penalty. People can be sent to prisons where they will most likely be killed by their fellow inmates.
FWIW, I found this an interesting claim, so I did the math. If federal and state prison were a city, it would have about the 10th highest murder rate (per capita) of any US city, a little above Chicago and about a third the murder rate of our worst city, St Louis.
Of course there is something worse than murder, namely constant ongoing torture and rape, which is disturbingly common in our prisons, especially the state prison system. People call it “prison justice” and they seem to relish it. Me? I think it is an abomination. If we really think some types of criminal deserve corporal punishment, we should have the balls to do it officially in a controlled and sound manner. We should not be outsourcing it to some of the very worst psychopaths from our society.
I think that Labour sees power slipping away from them before they are in any position to seize full control. The next election could well see them reduced to the same second tier party status as the Tories and the Greens.
This is not to say that the next election will give Reform UK total control either, but I suspect more likely that they will be able to squeeze a majority (however narrow) out of the electorate and start dismantling the structures of the tyrannical state that Blair and his cohort have constructed and prevent us from sinking further into the abyss.
Freedom is a little too much to expect, but less tyranny would be a breath of fresh air.
The real enemy is the 5th column of Communists in the deep state, the QUANGO’s and the Agencies. All must be cleansed like the Augean stables of legend.
Ideally, these mechanisms of undemocratic control should be abolished, or if that cannot be achieved in the short time available in a first term, to reduce the staffing and budget to a vaporous entity and make sure the small staff remaining are loyal to Reform UK principles, not Communist ones.
Fraser,
I agree entirely, although I was obliquely referring to the British practice of sending people protesting about Muslim immigration to prisons controlled by Muslim inmates.
Sounds like this infrastructure could come in handy for Perry’s lustration campaign
If one believes, with Thomas Hobbes and Blackstone (yes – Blackstone as well) that the state (in this case Parliament) can do anything it feels like doing – and its whims are law. And if one believes, with Jeremy Bentham, that there is no such thing as natural justice (that it is nonsense – indeed nonsense on stilts) and the only justice is what the state does for the “greatest good of the greatest number” (with “good” being defined as pleasure) then tyranny, tyranny total-and-absolute, is inevitable.
The British establishment does not need Karl Marx – they have plenty of British thinkers to justify tyranny, to justify unlimited state power.
It is astonishing how far back this support for tyranny goes.
For example, Thomas Hobbes was not really saying anything that his mentor Sir Francis Bacon (the great enemy of Sir Edward Coke) had not already said – said in support of the all-mighty-state (the New Atlantis 1610 – and Bacon’s belief that no court had the power to protect the liberties of ordinary people AGAINST the state, and that ordinary people had no right to defend each other AGAINST the state).
And even in the Middle Ages (the Wars of the Roses) writers such as Sir John Fortescue, in effect, (in his “On the Laws and Governance of England”) denied that the High Court of the King in Parliament FOUND law (i.e. worked out what the natural law, natural justice, was in a particular matter) and declared that the King and Parliament “MADE” law (was a legislature – in the modern sense of that word) – and Fortescue also claimed that the King alone in France MADE (not found – MADE) law – which would have made the King of France not a Christian King under natural law, but (rather) a Roman Emperor – a despot.
Fortescue was not some freak – he was highly respected, and he also called for a Council of Experts to be created to guide the King on economic policy.
So the roots of tyranny, and of rule by “experts”, goes back a very long time.
Indeed, before anyone points it out, all the way back to Plato – and his “Guardians”.
By the way…..
There is no great divide between Common Law and the European tradition on all this – it was Montesquieu (a Frenchman) who wrote “The Spirit of the Laws” against the sort of state power that Louis XIV (the Sun King) represented, and it was Bastiat (another Frenchmen) who wrote the short classic “The Law” in defense of natural justice (natural law – the non aggression principle).
In modern times, before his tragically early death (murder) the Italian legal writer Bruno Leoni wrote “Freedom and The Law” showing how different The Law is from “legislation” (i.e. the ravings of “legislatures” or “Progressive” judges).
A judge who does not follow the principles of natural justice (the non aggression principle concerning the body and goods of others) is worse than a bandit – and so is a “Parliament” or “Congress” or other “legislature”.
One does NOT “make” law – one applies the pre-existing principles to the circumstances of the case. And to this one must understand those principles of jurisprudence – and support them.
One of the “tells” (in a card playing sense) that showed that the Philosophical Radicals (the followers of Jeremy Bentham) of the early 1800s (including James and J.S. Mill) were not quite the lovers of liberty they presented themselves as, was their funding of copies of the works of Thomas Hobbes in every library in Britain – not refutations of the works of Hobbes (not works by Ralph Cudworth and others), no the works of the great defender of tyranny – Thomas Hobbes, and it was NOT about getting to know your enemy the-better-to-fight-his-influence.
Before politics (before the defense of tyranny) there is philosophy – specifically the philosophy of the human person (“the nature of man”) what Aristotle and other Ancient Greeks called the “Nous” (I wonder how many British people use that as a slang word for intelligence without knowing it is Ancient Greek) and the “logos” – what makes the rational (conscious – self aware) human (distinctively human) soul – in both the religious and non religious sense.
This is what a strain of philosophy from (for example) Dr Martin Luther through Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and (yes – sadly yes) James and John Stuart Mill – denying the human personhood, the human person.
In the case of J.S. Mill this may seem an outrageous claim – was he not the arch defender of liberty, but, tragically, it is correct. As (for example) James McCosh spent more than 400 pages showing in his his examination of the philosophy of Mr Mill.
Mr Mill, partly (partly – not totally) locked into the philosophy of Hobbes, Hume and Bentham on what a human is, strips away much of what makes a human a human BEING, a PERSON. Leaving a husk which has no real moral agency – and to whom political (as well as moral) liberty can not, therefore, really apply. Mr Mill never really really broke with the darkness of Hume – which he called the “light of Hume” in “explaining” (really explaining-away) the human mind.
One can and should fault Mr Mill on his dishonest denial of dissent on economic matters (his pretense that everyone agreed with the Labour Theory of Value – when he knew very well that such economists as Samuel Bailey and Richard Whately utterly rejected it), and on his dishonest denial of dissent on political matters (his pretense that “everyone agrees” that local government should do XYZ – when he knew very well that ratepayer groups OPPOSED local councils taking on these expensive functions), but it is in philosophy, the de facto denial of human personhood (which became popular with students at both Oxford and Cambridge although Mill never taught at these universities) that the real damage was done.
To bring things into the 20th (and 21st) century – when, in the last months of his life, Professor Harold Prichard of Oxford asked a visiting Ludwig Wittgenstein whether Descartes was correct about “I think, therefore I am”, he got the despicable reply “old man – am what?” a de facto denial by Ludwig Wittgenstein of the human person (of the “I” the rational soul in the Aristotelian sense) – but it is not just one vile person (and Wittgenstein was vile – for example his only criticism of Soviet tyranny was that he thought that Trotsky would do a better job), it is the fact (and, sadly, it is a fact) that the establishment thought that Wittgenstein had given a “brilliant” reply.
They did not just share his hatred of liberty (hatred of “capitalism” – despised by Bertrand Russell and other fake “liberals” who were really socialists), they also shared his denial of (really his hatred of) the human being – the moral agent.
The British, and general Western, establishment is rotten to the core – not just in their politics, but in their philosophy – in what they believe humans to be.
It is not a secret that I am not now on good terms with the British “Libertarian Alliance” a group with which I was associated (and which I admired) in my youth – and it is often supposed that I now dislike the “Libertarian Alliance” because of their anti Americanism and antisemitism, and there is some (some) truth in the view that I dislike them for these reasons – but the root of my disagreement with them is philosophical, their following of philosophers long popular with the British establishment – Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, and, yes, that tragically conflicted man John Stuart Mill.
The problem starts with a lack of constituted government from a single document including a list of political rights that governments cannot change easily or at all.
I understand the pessimism of virtually all commenters here about doing such a thing. I believe its possible and the only way we will ever be free people.
I believe our parliament was started by a king who invited citizens to start a parliament. Centuries later a different king tried to abolish parliament. Parliament triumphed. People have been invited to choose who enters parliament. That has increasingly been neutralised. The citizenship needs to triumph. Power genuinely needs to be returned back to the people from whence it was taken.
Stuart Noyes – as you know Sir, the pro liberty consensus that is needed to produce a good Constitution no longer exists in this country.
This is a indeed a tragic state of affairs.
And even a good Constitution may be undermined by spiritually corrupted judges – look what Californian judges did to that Constitution, for example – making up such things as a right for illegal immigrants to get government benefits and services – this is no-where in the document, dishonest people (judges) just made it up.
Freedom of Speech? Right to Keep and Bear Arms? these things (and anything else) can, sadly, be destroyed by a few “Progressive” judges – regardless of the text of a Constitution.
By the way – the modern leftist establishment (for example European Union) term for leftist judge is “independent” judge – if a judge is described as “independent” they are almost certainly a scumbag.
The following is my position.
Sir Edward Coke rather than Sir Francis Bacon.
Ralph Cudworth rather than Thomas Hobbes.
Sir John Holt rather than Sir William Blackstone.
Thomas Reid rather than David Hume.
Edmund Burke rather than Jeremy Benthan.
And James McCosh rather than than J.S. Mill.
Paul,
Please stop calling me Sir. Stuart is fine.
I believe you are correct. The last leader we had who understood the need for freedom of speech was Thatcher. That’s just one political rights we need.
The US founding fathers did a good job creating a constitution to protect people’s happiness and posterity. They recognised politicians are the biggest threat to that. Yet humans are inventive. The founding fathers never realised the legal branch would become legislators.
How do you stop that?