The Escalation of Anarcho-Tyranny: Starmer’s Britain

In 2020, the Left was flirting with the abolition of police and prisons. Today, they pose as the champions of both these things, despite their very recent status as irredeemable hotbeds of systemic racism. It is mightily impressive what singling out the white working classes can do for an institution’s reputation—with the elites, if not with the people.

To be clear, many of the individuals getting locked up for civil unrest after the slaughter of three girls in Southport deserve their sentences. It is thoroughly anti-conservative for anyone to condone breaches of the king’s peace, especially when the violence is directed at rank-and-file officers in the line of duty. I am as happy as anyone to see that the frenetic scenes appear to have calmed. That said, there are well-founded concerns about two-tier policing and the intensified crackdown on freedom of speech set in motion by Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Together, they add up to an escalation of anarcho-tyranny in Britain.

As I have written before, anarcho-tyranny refers to an insidious state of affairs whereby, far from living in a law-governed country, the most basic rules can in a disconcerting number of cases be gleefully broken by anti-social delinquents. At the same time, their civilised betters are subjected to an ever-expanding web of dictates, constraints, and speech codes. Under our woke moral order, when agents of the regime will behave like anarchists and when they will behave like tyrants is easily predictable in advance. If one of their accredited victim groups commits a crime, the approach will be plodding, permissive, and as pathetic as the law can be diluted to allow; if one of these same victim group’s claim to sanctity is felt to be threatened by a certified oppressor, the approach will be swift, despotic, and as severe as the law can be stretched to authorise.

This rough formula, as practised by the British state, has become more blatant since the feverish and, in many cases, deplorable reaction to Axel Rudakubana’s mass stabbing in Southport. In this respect, I have been proven wrong about Starmer. While he might have the devilishly subtle Tony Blair in his corner, the prime minister has outed himself as a far less cunning political operator than I had imagined was the case.

Despite countless imported horrors, from industrial rape gangs and endemic knife crime to sectarian in-fighting and Islamist intimidation, only now that a backlash has been triggered among Britain’s host population do we see a sudden concern for ‘law and order’ setting in among our otherwise feeble leaders. Ministers and magistrates have rushed to exhibit a sentimental toughness that would have made Richard Nixon blush amid the turmoil of 1968.

As Justice Minister Heidi Alexander boasted on the BBC, “all elements of the criminal justice system stand ready” for the accelerated delivery of over 500 new prison places for those causing—as well as a few supposedly inciting—disorder. Why is such severity only employed when native Britons riot, however disgracefully, in response to the horrific consequences of fatal and disastrous policy-making?

Now that we live under a Labour government, the anarcho-tyranny is as much the result of cynicism as ideology. At least since Blair, the former party of the proletariat has been consciously dependent on minority voting blocs, having long ago ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial, ethnic, and religious grievance. What Eric Kaufmann calls “race taboos” are still very much at work. However, Starmer’s exclusive focus on the ‘far Right’ and his neglect of the root problem also indicate a more sinister motive: punishing enemies—in this case, the white working classes who overwhelmingly oppose mass immigration—and rewarding clients, if not quite friends, among imported diasporas.

Indeed, while otherwise respectable citizens get imprisoned for horrible rage rhetoric online, this sternness is conspicuously lacking elsewhere, not least in areas where it is most needed. Due to overcrowding, a mass release of prisoners—many of whom can be guaranteed to have a more alarming track record of violence and recidivism than intemperate old ladies on Facebook—is also currently underway.

Earlier this year, Prisons Minister James Timpson was arguing that prison does not work and berating the UK system for being “addicted to sentencing and punishment.” Albeit with highly selective swiftness, he and his colleagues have now succumbed to this same addiction. Meanwhile, they have shown no effort whatsoever to free up space by deporting the 10,000+ prisoners who are foreign nationals—close to one in eight of the total 85,851 incarcerated up and down the country.

One of the beneficiaries of this mass release, the Daily Mail reports, will be a teenager involved in a fatal machete attack on a 14-year-old boy. Lawson Natty, the felon in question, has served no more than six months of a close to three-year manslaughter sentence. While rioting and even nasty Facebook posts are bad, are they really worse than killing someone with a monstrous blade? Even assuming his lawyers were resourceful enough to make a successful manslaughter plea, would a white British gang member who knifed a 14-year-old Muslim to death amid the recent anarchy be likely to find himself released back onto the streets after just half a year behind bars? Everybody knows the answer. We have no choice but to conclude that prison only ‘works’ for a certain kind of offender, guilty of a certain category of offence.

It takes two elements to make a police state. 

The first is that the police care nothing for the law in the exercise of their powers. On this front, we recently saw no less a figure than the director of public prosecutions himself tell Sky News that even people who share footage of criminal disorder could be charged with inciting or stirring up “racial hatred.” Of course, it is illegal to republish material that is illegal qua material, as in the case of child pornography or official state secrets. This is because it is not possible to publicise either of these without implicitly participating in the offences themselves. However, it is surely not criminal to post material which, while it might depict illegal activity, is not illegal qua material. In other words, there is nothing unlawful about filming or sharing footage of criminal activity in a way that avoids complicity in the activity itself, as is true of most of the videos of civil unrest we have all seen circulating on social media. Otherwise, we would not have countless videos of 9/11 or London machete fights—something of a freshly imported pastime in the English metropolis—available online. If I am correct, the advice given by the director of public prosecutions showed gross disregard for the law.

The second condition for qualifying as a police state is that the law’s enforcers regard themselves as above reproach. On this front, Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, has all but directly threatened to criminalise those who refuse to back down on the accusation that a two-tier policing system has developed in Britain. This is fanatical and dangerous. By definition, a country in which the police cannot be questioned is to all intents and purposes a police state. For an officer of the law to imply that any criticism to this effect is potentially criminal incitement itself only proves the point.

The good news is that we do not need to blame all police officers or insult every magistrate. We are confronted not by a grand conspiracy, but by a culture that has become endemic to police forces, as well as the broader justice system, and shapes the way in which these institutions operate.

Particularly since The Macpherson Report (1999), the police and the courts have felt immense pressure to prove their ‘anti-racist’ credentials. There has been a concerted effort to genuflect before minorities as a form of atonement for the way in which, under our ‘institutionally racist’ system, certain groups have supposedly been ‘marginalised’ and ‘mistreated’ for the benefit of the white majority. This is not paranoid speculation. The police are quite open about their surrender to this blood libel against their very existence and make no secret of their mission to cleanse themselves through the active pursuit of social justice. It is reflected in everything, from their language to their public relations. In terms of day-to-day policing, this so often translates into treating different groups unequally in order to make them equal.

Take their constant use of the word ‘communities’ as a euphemism for tribal interest groups living in Britain’s ghettoised towns and neighbourhoods. This in itself reveals that the authorities are anxious to treat such populations like foreign sub-cultures, rather than as an indistinguishable part of us and thus subject to our laws. All of the nonsense we are forced to endure about ‘meeting with community elders and leaders’ only reinforces the point that the inhabitants of these areas view themselves as a sort of separate nation, to be dealt with through what Charles Moore has described as “gatekeepers drawn from their own race or religion”—a people within Britain, not of Britain. Consequently, they are inclined to regard impartial policing as an intolerable interference in their internal affairs, as an oppression of their own kin by outsiders.

Two-tier policing is what happens when state institutions are terrified of igniting these combustible sensitivities, paralysed by fears of being called racist, and—in the case of the 21st century Labour Party at least—chronically dependent on such minorities for easy votes. The state thus acts like a conciliatory diplomat—with the weaker hand, we might add—when dealing with such groups. Everything becomes a matter of defusing community tensions, engaging with local stakeholders, and maintaining the ragged tapestry of multiculturalism. This is our reward for combining insane levels of diversity with crippling taboos around noticing, let alone doing anything to mitigate, the balkanisation that results.

Some might ask, ‘If there’s two-tier policing, why are there so many foreign-born prisoners at all? And why does the arrest data look as it does when broken down by ethnic background?’ The point, of course, is that anarcho-tyranny is not so far gone that the regime never comes into contact with those suspected or guilty of the most heinous crimes. (Britain’s grooming gangs disgrace, swept under the carpet for decades, is the exception to this general rule.) As a result, any groups engaging in murder or terrorism at unusually high rates will continue to crop up in official data. Two-tier policing occurs most obviously when there are collective displays of tribal grievance—as was the case in Harehills and in the West Midlands, where the authorities took a back seat—and when the crimes are less serious.

Even with more serious offences, the evidence suggests that when the focus is on murder alone and the data is disaggregated according to ethnic background, the police in fact overuse force on white Britons in proportion to their propensity to commit the crime. The exact opposite is true of groups with higher homicide rates. And in any case, as has been noted, even many violent criminals are now being released earlier than seems consistent with the safety of the law-abiding public.

Overall, a majority of British people, no matter how they voted in the recent election, believe that immigration policy in recent years must shoulder some of the blame for the recent civil unrest. When elected leaders consistently defy public opinion, why feign surprise that the more hot-headed among us—again, wrongly but understandably—resort to expressing themselves through violence instead of the ballot box? Worse still, these deeper concerns are not likely to be addressed any time soon.

This is because the tacit social contract underlying Britain’s representative democracy has been ripped up over the past few decades. The shreds of paper have now been cast definitively into the fire. Everything that the present Labour government has done and continues to do is best understood as a brazen attempt to draft a new relationship between the individual and the British state—only we, the host population, are not party to the talks of this agreement. That is not to say we will avoid being victimised by its terms.