The UK’s Regime Is Not Anarcho-Tyranny; It’s Worse than That

Here in the United Kingdom, there is a phrase that is increasingly being used among an educated public in periodic attempts to define the very odd form of regime that’s emerged principally since the prime ministerial office of Sir Keir Starmer began: ‘anarcho-tyranny.’ This term denotes a state of affairs in which the government habitually fails to enforce the basic laws against criminals that makes the ordinary members of society feel safe and secure, whilst enforcing increasingly stringent regulations against those ordinary members of society.

In turn, those living in such a society begin to feel that they live under a tyranny, but not a typical tyranny of the citizenry by the state, at least not directly. Rather, it is a tyranny of the ordinary member of society by bad members of that same society, from which the state absolves itself of the duty to protect them. If tyranny is the worst form of government, anarcho-tyranny is arguably the worst form of tyranny. 

What, though, has been emerging in the UK—and for some time now—is perhaps something even worse than anarcho-tyranny as defined above. For it is not simply that basic laws against criminals are not enforced while the state imposes strict regulations against society’s ordinary members, but rather that the state goes a step further in actively rewarding those people who either are or should be deemed miscreants.

If you are an ordinary person with very modest aspirations, like earning a wage sufficient to look after a family, owning a property with which to shelter your loved ones from the elements, protecting your children from ideological influences that might corrupt them or even lead to mutilations, and all the while hoping not to be taxed to the point of robbery, you will find that your humble aims are almost impossible to achieve. 

The most basic attempts at living a life that roughly approximates a flourishing human existence have been rendered herculean feats. The harder you work, the more your earned money is taken to fund the lives of those who won’t work or indeed have no right to be in the country at all. To flourish in modern Britain is so difficult that people now have the distinct feeling that this has become a land in which the ordinary person is punished for no other offence than being an ordinary person. He is punished morally, culturally, and economically.

That would be bad enough, but it is now widely appreciated that, conversely, if you are a thug or some other kind of contemptible individual, you will be rewarded. Those Black Lives Matter riots that occurred during the COVID lockdown, violating the new rules that suspended the right of assembly and committing crimes of vandalism and looting, were greeted by a police force whose officers permitted these thugs to rampage across the cityscapes. When confronted, the police ‘took the knee’ in reverence towards this violent collective. Starmer, who at the time was preparing to take Downing Street, had himself photographed ‘taking the knee’ in support of this thuggery. In contrast, when peaceful groups assembled in London to protest against the government’s COVID suspension of the constitutional liberties of the monarch’s freeborn subjects, the protestors were beaten to a pulp by a highly mobilised police force.

When Muslim rape-and-torture gangs established trafficking networks across the country to prey upon vulnerable native girls, those who rang alarm bells were called ‘racists’ and ‘Islamophobes,’ and even some of the girls’ fathers were arrested for seeking to protect their own offspring. In some cases, police officers colluded with the Muslim gangs and shared in raping the young girls. The only positive outcome of this national shame of epic proportions is that the phrases ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobe’ have largely become ineffectual in shutting down discussion.

Only after the victims of these Muslim rape-and-torture gangs reached the thousands did it become impossible to suppress what had occurred, and that was after Starmer and the entire political and media alliance had done everything to keep a lid on it. Due to a few brave journalists and activists—many of whom were themselves victims—the truth came out. And yet to this day, Westminster is seeking to prevent any real enquiry, and Starmer is still utilising the now blunted weapon of ‘Islamophobia’ for anyone who wants an open discussion about the very real challenges of Islamic ascendency in Britain.

Concurrently, the state has also utterly and consistently backed the rise of LGBTQA++ politics, even though the adverse effects for young people who are led into the most horrendous conditions of body dysphoria and the resultant mutilations are now known to all. We have, it is clear, a widespread situation of mentally unwell and sexually confused people actively corrupting the youth and using the internet and online anonymity to do it. And yet, notions of ‘transphobia’ have been utilised and deployed by the state to prevent society doing what a healthy, vigorous society would do: stamp out this incredibly corrosive influence. 

The very notion that a family consists of a man and a woman who have children (because by nature they can) is now deemed ‘homophobic’ by our regime. So again, we have a situation in which normality and naturality are declared by a corrupt political machine to be anathema. Indeed, if a homosexual person is unhappy with his or her sexuality and seeks help, anyone who offers therapeutic care in accordance with that person’s wishes will soon be committing a criminal offence as an act of ‘conversion therapy.’

Here is a fun little mind game: think of any contentious issue, and you will find that the state is on the side of the thug or toerag. Pro-abortion advocates, with their contorted faces and blue hair and nose rings, comfortably have the backing of the state, while the Christian who wants to pray for the unborn outside an abortion mill is swiftly arrested by the police. The military veteran struggles to resettle into society and find work with his particular expertise, but the illegal immigrant is gifted a mobile phone on arrival and put up in a taxpayer-funded hotel, free to roam the streets for native meat. Farmers and hunters of the British countryside are persecuted, while hunt saboteurs in their balaclavas and paramilitary garb go about trespassing, threatening, and intimidating; the former are subjected to adverse policy while the latter are free to tyrannise rural Britain. Real criminals are released from prison early while law-abiding parents are locked up for fruity Twitter posts objecting to the infelicitous outcomes of badly regulated immigration. 

There is little that ties those various issues together besides the fact that they are all instantiations of the constant siding of the State with thugs and crooks and wrong’uns against normal, decent people. For the UK has become a land that is almost defined by the punishment of virtue and the rewarding of vice. As the writer Harrison Pitt has noted, in Britain the police are simultaneously both absent and yet oddly present everywhere. If your car is stolen, or you’re mugged in the street, or attacked on the train, or your home is broken into, you can expect the perpetrators of such crimes to suffer no repercussions. But if you express your discontent at the degradation of your homeland in a fiery-worded social media post, you can expect a visit from your local constabulary without delay. 

Such a political and social condition is exactly what could have been predicted amid Keir Starmer’s rise to power. You can tell just from looking at the man that Starmer is inclined to think that the more clerk-like an administration, the better it is. This is precisely what is so wretched about the truncated, rationalistic—what Edmund Burke called the “geometrical”—mindset: it assumes that politics is principally regulatory rather than teleological. 

Let me explain. If you think that politics is about regulation for the sake of control, then you will naturally end up focusing on monitoring, levelling, and taxing ordinary life. If you think that politics is about attaining society’s telos—its flourishing—then you will naturally focus on on-the-ground public safety issues that hinder the actual survival and thriving of that society. 

As the philosopher Nina Power has observed, Starmer has developed a kind of theocracy, but it’s one subordinate to a “malignant spreadsheet god.” The most pernicious characteristic of that god is that it thrives on the social chaos to which it simultaneously appears to be blind. The more chaotic and corrupting and violent society becomes due to the government’s refusal to govern, and its choice to positively reward vice and miscreancy, the more justified the government deems itself in intensifying its totalitarian regulation of society. 

In political philosophy, there is a longstanding distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, which in popular commentary are unfortunately often conflated. In an authoritarian regime, it is generally acceptable to think and say whatever you like, as long as you do not criticise the government. In a totalitarian regime, you can generally criticise the government as much as you like, but if your opinions conflict with those sanctioned by its regime, you may very quickly find yourself in deep trouble. 

Here in the UK, whilst there are indications of the rise of a left-wing authoritarianism in the government, it maintains a regime that is more or less totalitarian, using social disorder to increase its totalitarianism, which it then deploys to punish forbidden thought. I can say what I like about Starmer, and I do, but it’s very likely that my concerns about Islamic encroachment will land me on the wrong side of the thought police.

An interesting recent example of this regulatory totalitarianism is that of Starmer’s announcement that he will provide £40,000,000 to create a nationwide security service for the protection of mosques and Islamic schools. Why, one might be tempted to ask oneself, would such a security service be required? What could it be that’s causing the development of an unwelcoming attitude towards an Islamic presence in the UK? Could it be the rapid development of a parallel law within the country’s borders, or the swift replacement of longstanding communities by Muslims across large towns and cities, or the repurposing of loved buildings as mosques, or the rise of jihadist movements calling for the political takeover of Britain, or the organised rape and torture of native girls, or any number of issues that could weaken the otherwise famously welcoming attitude of the British? Rather than addressing these concerns, considerable funds will be taken from the taxpayer to fund a regulatory approach that, of course, accelerates Britain’s Islamification, the growing challenges of which will serve to justify more regulatory totalitarianism.

It is thus important to understand that the use of the phrase ‘anarcho-tyranny’ to describe the UK government’s regime may not be wrong, but it’s gravely incomplete. Again, anarcho-tyranny simply refers to a state in which basic laws against criminals aren’t enforced while it enforces strict regulations against society’s ordinary members. Our regime goes a step further. It punishes by adverse policy and inordinate taxation the basic aims of our nature—having a family, providing for that family, having a home, maintaining a cohesive society, desiring to protect our homeland against degradation—whilst rewarding crime and wickedness. Hence, the phrase ‘anarcho-tyranny’ fails fully to account for the malignity of our situation. What we have is thuggery by establishment.