A much-remarked and deeply chilling aspect of the British regime’s social repression following the civil disorder and violence of early August is its pursuit of those who merely engaged in speech online. The various mechanisms of the regime have been crowing about the wave of arrests and jailing, including a Home Office posting that “[t]here's no place in society for armchair thugs.” But there is, of course: you just have to belong to the government or be one of its valued constituencies. If you are, then you can freely post apologetics for menace and violence, for example this Labour MP extending her generous understanding:
Make sure you click through and watch the video here, for full effect.
Or you can be the Home Office itself, doing its best Westmoreland / McNamara light-at-the-end-of the-tunnel datum — but then there is no British Vietnam experience to ward them off it — with a plain old body-count metric, touted as a sort of success:
One of the comments below it notes, “[y]et no arrests for the thousands of people who enter the country illegally each year.” But this is the point, and the discrepancy is meant to be noticed: the regime touts its activity specifically to illuminate the difference between that which it tolerates, and that which it represses. The appeals to consistency and accusations of hypocrisy are unmoored from the reality of British governance now. It would be hypocritical and inconsistent if the U.K. regime promised equal justice under law, for example, or punished only commonly discernible lawbreaking. It does neither. If the post-riot prosecutions confined themselves to generally agreed crimes like property destruction, assault, and so on, across all cohorts, then there would be few grounds for complaint and one could argue that it does in fact aspire to equal justice. What is actually happening is a vigorous prosecution of crimethink, mostly under the anodyne term “online offenses,” and unconnected with any demonstrable incitement or violence.
One chilling example comes in the sentencing of Julie Sweeney, a caregiver for her disabled husband, who will now spend fifteen months in jail for a rather sad and morally abhorrent little Facebook post. The judge acknowledged that she was, in effect, a nobody who posted in anger and endangered no one, and he further acknowledged that she was not racist. According to the BBC, “[t]he judge [further] said no one was suggesting that Sweeney would have taken part in any violence.” Yet she will be in jail for fifteen months, and her husband thrown to who knows what mercies, and why? Well, this is why, in the judge’s own words:
“You should have looked at the news with horror, like right minded people.”
That’s it. She expressed regime-disallowed opinions, reacted incorrectly to the news, and so off she goes. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it looks as if this sort of thought policing characterizes about one in ten of the Home Office’s thousand-plus arrests. To re-use a phrase, it is done pour encourager les autres. The absence of a definable standard is a feature, not a bug, of the operation. Julie Sweeney and a few hundred powerless nobodies with bad opinions are thrown against the wall to motivate the rest of the population to first, be silent, and second, to look to the regime for the permitted ambit of sentiment before speaking. It is Soviet stuff, but the Soviet Union does not exist, and the United Kingdom’s regime does.
It is worth recording that Sweeney meekly thanked the judge.
(In another Soviet parallel, the regime has convicted two twelve-year old children, one of whom was described by a judge as being “more involved in the violence and disorder than any other defendant I’ve seen coming through these courts, adult or child,” which is self-evidently absurd but also characteristic of regime-exhortative hyperbole. The Communist Chinese express their admiration.)
There is a type of American conservative who looks at this sort of thing and reacts with a studied complacency: this could never happen here, they will say, or we would resist if it did. But neither proposition is accurate. It does happen here, at a comparatively low level for now — and it is unresisted. The mechanisms and lessons learned of the various regimes are shared and refined among them, and we are therefore deeply wrong to view the U.K. with smug complacency. (Particularly irritating, from a historian’s standpoint, are references to 1776, the revolution of that year taking place to assert rights discerned in an English context.) What is happening in Britain is a preview of what is exceptionally likely to happen in the United States in the coming of a Harris-Walz Administration. Joel Kotkin’s latest goes in depth on this:
Europe may be fading from global relevance, but its influence is expanding within the US Democratic Party. Today, the party’s core beliefs echo those espoused by the European Union and much of the British establishment – an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews …
Under Harris, the US may try to adopt the censorship policies that are already present in the EU and UK. We may well see the Democrats attempt to control social media, including arresting people for offensive speech or before they have even committed a crime at all … Biden has already shown a taste for following Europe’s lead on censorship, a trend likely to grow under a Harris-Walz administration.
As has been stated here previously, when the time comes that the United Kingdom follows through on its threats to request extradition of Americans for thoughtcrime, it is probable that a progressive-dominated White House and its apparatus will view the request favorably. This will be especially likely when the target of the request is an irritant to, or opponent of, both regimes: for example Elon Musk. This is not to say that lack of a public profile will be salvific: the American regime knows the logic of pour encourager les autres equally well.
In publishing the macro-scale numbers on its roundup of criminals and dissidents alike, the U.K. regime is not merely echoing the aesthetic of Robert McNamara: it is literally engaging in the McNamara fallacy, which is an analytic error that excludes qualitative factors in favor of quantitative ones. Quantity has a quality all its own — this is evidently the regime reasoning, which counts on sheer numbers, speed, and pitilessness to yield its intended effect. This may in fact work, and the odds are in its favor: contrary to the mythos of insurgency, there are plenty of examples of its suppression. This is especially true when the insurgency fails to generate a sufficiently expansive and durable coalition, fails to attract an elite cohort, and fails to withstand regime action. All these are obvious failures of U.K. — or more properly, English — right-populism, which has only a limited window of time to rectify them. It is less true of American right-populism, which does have a coalition and an elite niche, to an extent; whether it is robust versus the regime will be tested in full if Kamala Harris ascends to the Presidency.
Let us pause here to observe the total failure of meaningful elements of the British ruling apparatus to support that right-populist tendency — which is significantly large, as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election — as evidence that its self-styled Conservative Party is essentially useless. An opposition that remains mute while the regime conducts a national persecution of its base is no opposition at all. The jury is out on Reform.
Per the McNamara fallacy at hand, note that the regimes in both the U.K. and the U.S. entirely neglect those qualitative factors: the moral battlefield. (An appeal to rule-following and quiescent conformity, or else, is hardly this.) Partly this is a reflection of relative power: the regimes simply don’t feel the need to. Partly it is aesthetic revulsion: the regimes genuinely hate their opposition. (There will be a separate essay someday on elite negative reactions to a visible member of a regime-disapproved cohort: a Southerner or a Texan, for example. There are British analogues.) Partly too it is perceptual narrowing, in which it becomes literally impossible for the regime to conceive of viewing the world in any way other than its own. Again, this may not matter. But it may, and if the neglect of the moral contest translates at some point into a moral loss for the regime — a nonzero probability, especially as it came to power weeks ago on the basis not of positive endorsement of itself, but negative rejection of its opponents — then the next round of this, which is sure to come, must see evermore-cruel efforts if the regime is to prevail.
The cycle is well known.
A few notes at the end here. The first is that Britain has, it seems, had serious problems with civil unrest across the past half-decade. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which was a go-to data source on civic violence during the summer-2020 insurrection in the United States, has a very interesting writeup on U.K. rioting now. Within that interesting writeup is this interesting bar chart, which shows that the 2024 level of British violence is well and recently precedented:
Only with the critical mass of the “far-right” coded incidents does the regime swing into full punitive mode, mass-arrest tweets and all. The alert reader will discern why.
Malign American influence is visible here, by the bye: much of the 2020 violence was BLM-inspired, a testament to the U.K. left’s longstanding reflex as intellectual copycats of American progressivism. (This is a well-worn phenomenon globally. The incoming Mexican President is a signal example: Mexico is drowning in blood, and her major social achievement to date has been the promotion of transgenderism. This doesn’t reflect Mexican concerns: it reflects the concern of a Mexican elite sharply focused upon the American-left milieus to which it seeks access.) This cultural and ideological fixation also means the American regime could actually positively affect British-regime treatment of British citizenry if it chose, for example with a simple inclusion of the U.K. as a country of concern in some State Department human-rights report. It won’t happen of course: a conservative regime won’t think to do it, and a progressive regime won’t dream of criticizing what it wishes to do itself.
A friend in a separate forum opined that events in Britain now affirmed her belief that America’s formal and written Constitution is superior to Britain’s informal and unwritten constitution of custom and tradition. I think this is a bit unfair, not least as the British regime now is such a tremendous departure from that custom and tradition in its abandonment of moderation and toleration. We have in the United States also had ample experience with the limited value of formal written protections when a regime decides to ignore them. What is really illuminated here is the observation shared by President John Adams with the Massachusetts militia in 1798: that the Constitution, by which was meant a metonym for a society of law and justice, was fit only for a moral and religious people — and wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.
This is dispositive in the long run: not the nature of a country’s regime, but the nature of its people.
Postscript:
Three further reads or watches, as the case may be. First is Abigail Anthony at National Review. Second is Ed West:
Last but not least is Doug Murray: