Britain has entered the age of anarcho-tyranny

Four cases that reveal a deeper story

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Here are four things that happened in the United Kingdom in the last three weeks.

First, a migrant from Sudan was filmed trying to behead another man on the streets of Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Second, the public watched the horrifying footage of Henry Nowak’s murder and learned that police officers appeared more concerned with investigating (false) allegations of racism that had been made against Henry than trying to save his life.

Third, millions watched footage of a violent confrontation at Manchester Airport and then learned that, after two trials, the Muslim men who visibly assaulted a police officer would face no further prosecution.

And fourth, seven Afghan nationals, five of whom had arrived illegally in Britain on the small boats, have been charged with forty child sex offences.

What do all four of these stories have in common? I would suggest to you they all symbolise how the UK has now entered a new state of ‘anarcho-tyranny’.

The term was first coined by the American conservative writer Samual Francis, who, writing in 1994, pointed to the rise of what he called ‘an entirely new form of government’. His argument was simple, profound, and also ahead of his time.

A healthy nation-state, he pointed out, performs a handful of basic functions.

It controls the borders, enforces the rule of law, protects its own people from violence and disorder, and ensures that criminals who do break the law are punished.

But a nation-state that instead succumbs to anarcho-tyranny does the very opposite.

It becomes unable or even unwilling to perform its most basic tasks — controlling the borders, tackling petty crime, keeping people safe, and so on — while at the very same time becoming more intrusive, more bureaucratic, and more oppressive towards its own law-abiding citizens.

The state, in other words, forces its own people to live with both anarchy and tyranny at the same time. It pushes society to the very edge while clamping down on the freedom of its own people.

Now look around the UK today. Does it not look and feel like we have entered a state of anarcho-tyranny to you?

On one level, the state is not just failing to control the borders and stop illegal migration but is now openly encouraging it, offering people who want to break our laws incentives for doing so.

It struggles to deport foreign offenders. It is failing to stop a surge of shoplifting, petty crime, and sexual violence.

It cannot even remove blatant evidence of criminality on our high streets, with vape shops and Turkish barbers — what citizens walk past every single day — a glaring symbol of the state’s failure to fight crime and restore law-and-order.

It refuses to ensure criminals serve their sentences, letting many of them out early. It’s even failed to build enough prisons to ensure that criminals can be punished.

Yet remarkably, while the UK state can no longer perform its core duties it appears ruthlessly effective when it comes to regulating, monitoring, taxing, licensing, restricting, censoring, and policing the behaviour and speech of its own people.

While failing to stop burglaries, shoplifting, and knife-wielding gangs who make the lives of the decent majority a misery, the state still manages to devote considerable resources to oppressing its own people.

Monitoring and policing their social media posts. Arresting more than thirty people each day because of what they share on social media, even throwing them into jail.

Imposing ‘non-crime hate incidents’ to try and control what they say, and think.

Fast-tracking ‘digital identification’ and the Online Safety Act to hand the state even more control over its citizens.

Using the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 to restrict people’s right to protest, the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 to put them under greater surveillance, and the Communications Act to further curb legitimate dissent.

Scrapping their ancient right to trial by jury because the state is failing to manage the sheer weight of criminality.

Introducing a new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ to further control what people can say about contentious issues, including the glaring failure of the state to address grooming gangs and Islamism.

Pushing the tax burden on the hardworking majority to the highest level in peacetime while simultaneously failing to stop £28 billion of the British people’s own money being sent, through fraud and corruption, to Islamic State and hostile regimes.

Refusing to lower the cost-of-living for tax-paying citizens while simultaneously forcing them to pay tens of billions of pounds to support illegal migrants and other nations through foreign-aid.

Failing to provide citizens with decent healthcare — as reflected in the fact we now have doctors who specialise in ‘corridor care’ — while forcing those same people to pay £10.1 billions of pounds a year in welfare for foreign nationals.

Failing to crackdown on a long list of violent extremists and terrorists from minority backgrounds who were already known to authorities — Axel Rudakubana, Valdo Calocane, Salman Abedi, Khuram Butt, Usman Khan, Michael Adebolajo — while still managing to imprison thousands of citizens for happening to say the wrong thing online.

A state, in other words, that is now so incompetent that it cannot tell its own citizens who is entering the country but is more than willing to tell them what they are allowed to say, what they are allowed to think, and what they are allowed to do.

A state that cannot prevent, say, a migrant from entering the country illegally before attempting to behead another man, or murdering Rhiannon Whyte, or murdering Thomas Roberts, or murdering Wayne Broadhurst, but which can make sure it is endlessly warning its own citizens not to “cause division” or become “far-right”.

This is anarcho-tyranny - a state that is visibly failing to perform its core duties, is pushing society to the very brink, while at the same time increasingly regulating and policing every aspect our lives.

This is the paradox that sits at the heart of anarcho-tyranny. Those who respect the rules are given yet more rules, while those who break the rules face few or no real consequences. The state becomes weak where it should be strong, and strong where it should be weak.

And that is what we see all around us today, is it not? A UK state that is weak and failing when it comes to dealing with criminals, illegal migrants, welfare scroungers, and fraudsters. But a state that is increasingly strong, oppressive, and authoritarian when it comes to dealing with the decent majority of tax-paying, law-abiding, peaceful citizens.

This is why the concept of anarcho-tyranny might resonate with many people in the UK who now feel the palpable and profound sense of unfairness that it’s producing.

Millions of people are now waking up, daily, to find a growing list of rules and laws being enforced against them, often ruthlessly, while those who openly and brazenly violate our laws and norms somehow appear to escape punishment.

This perception is now becoming one of the defining features of life in the United Kingdom and lies at the root of why so many people feel so angry, frustrated, and disillusioned with the ruling class.

The UK, it used to be said, was defined by a ‘civic culture’ where people were certainly sceptical of their rulers but they were still, on the whole, willing to defer to them.

But in the new era of anarcho-tyranny, where the people are now visibly being pushed to the very edge by a ruling class that is incompetent and oppressive in equal measure, who would ever say that today?

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As always, I’d welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Paid subscribers at our weekly Live discussion at 2pm today on the Substack App.

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