Yes, this really happened.
MATT GOODWIN
I have repeatedly warned in this newsletter about the growing threat to free speech and democracy in the United Kingdom.
At the core of my writing is the belief – based on research – that the greatest threat facing our country comes not from fringe extremists on the streets but a radicalising and increasingly authoritarian political class at the centre of power.
If you want a sense of the sheer scale of this threat and how rapidly it’s evolving then just look at four things that happened in the UK in the last 48-hours alone.
And no – I’m not making any of this up. All of this actually happened.
First, the country’s Labour government has just confirmed, in the King’s Speech, that the British people’s right to a jury trial will be removed. Cases that may result in up to three years’ imprisonment will now be tried by a judge alone.
This from the country that gave the world the common law legal tradition and Magna Carta. As Geoffrey Robertson KC, founder of Doughty Street Chambers, pointed out last month, trial by jury is a unique English institution that has served for centuries to provide a form of criminal justice that is trusted and respected by the people. Remove it and you risk removing public confidence in the entire legal system.
This change, furthermore, was never included in the Labour Party’s manifesto, ahead of the last general election. There is simply no democratic mandate for it whatsoever.
Second, the same Labour government just confirmed, again in the King’s Speech, that it will push ahead with plans to impose a system of Digital Identification.
This despite Digital ID having also never been included in Labour’s manifesto, and nearly three million people since signing a petition against its introduction.
Many critics worry, understandably, that this will result in governments being able to control where people go, what they spend, what they think, and what they do.
Digital identification might just be one stop on the way to joining a Europe-wide digital identification system, backed up by a central bank digital currency.
History tells us that once governments build systems of monitoring and tracking their own people they rarely limit how those systems are used. Powers that are introduced for one purpose are soon expanded for another.
Third, the Labour government also announced that it’s pressing ahead with plans to ‘align’ the UK with the European Union single market area in major areas of our economic life – despite more than seventeen million people voting against closer ties with the European Union, at the Brexit referendum, in 2016.
Contrary to what the people voted for, they will now be forced to pay billions of pounds to the European Union for laws, trading relationships, and rules they will never be able to influence – and which our own politicians will not be able to debate.
The UK will become a ‘rules-taker’, not a rules-maker, surrendering sovereignty and economic independence to a European Union trading block that is not only undemocratic (there is no meaningful competition for executive office within the EU), but represents a declining share of the global economy.
Labour doesn’t care about any of this, of course, because it’s more interested in trying to stop pro-EU social liberals from drifting off to the increasingly extreme Greens.
But the direction of travel is clear for all to see. Despite much of the political class in Westminster, including Keir Starmer and Labour MPs, assuring the British people their vote for Brexit would be respected, step-by-step they are continuing to dilute the democratic instruction of 2016, without even bothering to ask the people.
If this is how the Labour Party plans to win back its pro-Brexit, working-class heartlands across the north of England and Wales, which just swung massively behind Reform, then I look forward to watching the reaction from voters.
And fourth, alongside all this, Labour and the British state just confirmed they have banned several prominent conservative commentators – including a democratically-elected Member of the European Parliament from Poland – from attending a planned, peaceful protest against mass immigration in London.
Keir Starmer has denounced the assortment of conservative influencers, podcasters, and commentators as ‘far-right agitators’. But millions of people will see this for what it is: the latest symbol of ‘two-tier Britain’, the latest example of a blatant double standard that now permeates our national life.
After all, while Starmer and the British state have declared the conservative influencers are “not conducive to the public good”, they seemingly had no problem allowing Islamist sympathisers and anti-Semites to march on the streets of our capital city, welcoming a ‘former’ Islamist and ally of al-Qaeda into Number 10 Downing Street, or allowing more than 200,000 unvetted illegal migrants, including convicted terrorists, to stream across our border on small boats.
Nor, for that matter, did Starmer have any problem at all welcoming Alaa Abd El-Fattah into Britain, an activist who celebrated the murder of Jews and white people. Is this the kind of person, who appeared to praise the killing of ‘Zionists’, call for violence against whites, and express contempt for the West, who Keir Starmer thinks is conducive to the public good?
Taken together, what all four of these things amount to is clear evidence for why so many people in the United Kingdom feel so estranged from their own rulers, and so confused and disillusioned with the direction of their own country.
Increasingly, from mass uncontrolled immigration to Digital ID, from scrapping jury trials to banning entirely legitimate perspectives, decisions are being imposed on our country with absolutely no democratic mandate whatsoever.
The enormous gulf between a radicalising ruling class in Westminster and the people appears to be widening by the day, while the divide between them now feels irreconcilable.
I don’t know about you but to me it increasingly feels as though there are two systems at work – one for ‘approved’ political beliefs and opinions, and one for everybody else.
While those outside the elite minority are left with the overwhelming, palpable feeling that the country they once knew, the country they grew up in – liberal, democratic, free-speaking, sovereign, anchored in traditions of freedom and liberty that stretch back over centuries – is now disappearing before their very eyes.
And perhaps the most bizarre thing of all is that this sinister corruption of our country and culture is not being imposed by a foreign power but is happening under our own democratically-elected government, which justifies these changes in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘tolerance’, ‘empathy’, ‘compassion’, and ‘fighting hate’.
Only this week, for instance, Keir Starmer warned the people not to follow Nigel Farage and Reform UK “down a dangerous path” while at the very same time moving ahead with plans to strip the British people of some of their oldest and most cherished rights and freedoms – the right to trial by jury, the right not to be closely monitored by an invasive and overbearing state, the right to a government that only enacts policies that were in its manifesto, and the right to hear a diverse range of political beliefs, even ones the ruling class might disagree with.
Take all these changes and what is left is unavoidable. A United Kingdom that is slowly but surely becoming more controlled, more authoritarian, more tyrannical, more centralised, more dogmatic and, ultimately, less free.
It was once said that the history of these islands is the history of liberty but who on earth, based on what we’ve witnessed in the last forty-eight hours, would say that today?
This article (In Just 48 Hours, Labour Revealed What Kind Of Country the UK is Becoming.) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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