One can easily sound hysterical making direct comparisons between contemporary affairs and historical events. It’s not only that the circumstances are never quite the same, but also that the long shadow of time lends the past and its protagonists a sense of weight and significance that we don’t readily apply to the undignified circus of today’s politics.
But it is becoming more and more difficult to make sense of Britain today without reaching for the analogy of Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Reports, published in the Sunday Telegraph by Laurie Wastell and Jacob Freedland, that the Attorney General Lord Hermer personally authorised the prosecution of Lucy Connelly for her social media posts, adds to this atmosphere of a paranoid and vindictive nomenklatura at the fag-end of its days.
This historical comparison risks coming across as a little overwrought, but given that so many very sensible and learned people have spent the last twenty years comparing almost everything in Western politics to the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany — Lord Hermer included — I think we may permit ourselves this small indulgence.
The British public has always had a healthy scepticism for politics and politicians, but the recent mood has been one of withdrawn, sullen cynicism about the whole system. Momentous changes in parliamentary politics — landslides and realignments — have been accompanied by almost no popular enthusiasm. People are starting to get the impression that it is all just theatre, and that the system will do what it will regardless. The government reinforces this by emphasising that in all of the unpopular things that they do, they have little practical choice. Courts, treaties and economic forces compel them; facts of political nature. But nevertheless, we can still find its thumbprint on the scales of justice from time to time.
But what really gives twenty-twenties Britain its late-seventies Eastern Bloc vibe is the almost complete absence of trust in the intentions and motivations of the authorities, especially with regard to justice and law and order. And this really does mark a departure from the long-standing norm. Where people have always regarded ministers and MPs at best as a mixed bag, by and large there has been an underlying acceptance in the impartiality and straightness of the courts, the prosecution service and especially of the police, even if people didn’t necessarily always like them.
Of course, many countries manage to muddle by without people regarding their courts and law officers as the pinnacle of probity and integrity; early to mid-twentieth century Britain was really pretty unique in that regard. In most places and most of the time, people generally understand that to the extent that their justice system functions, it is there as an instrument of rule. Maintaining basic order and punishing antisocial or violent elements is as good as it gets, but this has to be backed up either by reliable state function to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the population, or by force. Either the system is upheld because enough people accept that on balance, they’re better off with it than without it, or else that consent is compelled by threat of being killed or imprisoned. This is cynical, but up until constitutional democracy turned up, most of the systems of government devised by mankind functioned on a greater or lesser degree of cynicism.
As with so much else, what we are witnessing in the justice system, and in public attitudes toward it, is the story of Britain becoming more like the rest of the world. The government is clearly and rightly worried about the risk of ethnic violence; in a number of English towns and cities, the human geography is now typical of the kind of places where that type of conflict flares up. Last August, in the wake of the Southport atrocity, England appeared to be teetering on the brink of outright hostilities, and the authorities risked being left as helpless by-standers lacking any practical means to restore order.
Britain has no gendarmerie or militia, our police are largely unarmed and our army is very small; it is a country operating on the idea that widespread public disorder simply doesn’t happen. But a febrile atmosphere in the days following Axel Rudakubana’s murderous rampage — which itself had followed serious disorder in Leeds due to unrelated ethnic grievances — saw a steady ratcheting-up of tensions in multicultural Britain’s liminal zones. Mercifully for the authorities — and for the rest of us — an anti-climactic day of disorder in Birmingham petered out due to a judicious bit of hands-off policing, and by the far-right failing to materialise as billed. Had that day gone as badly as the West Midlands Police feared, urban England may easily have descended into complete chaos. The powers-that-be were well aware of how close they had come.
I keep using phrases like “the authorities” and “the powers-that-be” because there isn’t really the right term to describe the manner in which the government, the police, the prosecution service and the courts worked in lock-step at that time to send a very firm message to the public. The Government — in the sense of the cabinet — and especially the Prime Minister, clearly agreed with this response and gave speeches backing it up, and on occasions where the law demanded, such as the Connolly decision, the Attorney General gave his consent. But I stop short of suggesting that Ministers were giving the judiciary orders. Instead it seems to have been a far more instinctive reaction caused by a genuine sense of threat, to which the elected politicians gave tacit assurances of political cover.
If this were to have gone on under the kind of foreign government of which we disapprove, we would use the term “regime” to describe the nexus of civil, judicial and executive authorities, co-operating seamlessly in a process-based but politically motivated response to an existential threat to state security. It feels cringeworthy using that term to describe the British government, but that does not make it inappropriate.
The fact of the matter is that the police can afford to back off when disorder erupts among ethnic minority pockets, or if such groups march through central London before dispersing — but if the white working class were to seriously kick off we would find ourselves in very unfamiliar territory for which the state is completely unprepared. It was therefore critical to keep trouble-making limited only to anti-social elements, and not allow it to spread to normal people. In keeping with the neuroses of Britain’s governing class, as well as the practical capabilities of the police, online speech was identified as the primary threat, ahead of all but the most obviously violent or dangerous acts of physical disorder.
Bail was denied, people with no previous exposure to the criminal justice system were remanded in custody, and the duty briefs who were provided to those charged with incitement sagely advised their clients to plead guilty to charges including the most grievous possible motivations for their words and actions. As a short term tactic, it worked. Heavy sentences were handed down, and however cynical they may be growing, the public could still appreciate a swift demonstration of systemic force. Authority had been maintained, and order was returned relatively swiftly.
Yet, almost a year on, we find an establishment that is struggling to come to terms with the longer term costs of this way of operating. The wave of anger following the rejection of the appeal by Lucy Connolly prompted a bewildered response by the defenders of the legal order of England and Wales, including prominent KCs and commentators, the latter most volubly exemplified by the Mail’s Dan Hodges. The reflexive response by Britain’s legal establishment is to argue that, given due process was followed to the letter, the correct outcome had necessarily been arrived at. It is unclear whether this was mere disingenuity, or whether such commentators are genuinely unable to perceive the nature of what the British judiciary stands accused of.
Many of the most criminally repressive legal regimes in history were also very good at following their own rules to the letter
To state it very frankly; despite the pride that those who work in Britain’s legal system hold for their steadfast adherence to proper processes, many of the most criminally repressive legal regimes in history were also very good at following their own rules to the letter. A number of these KCs and commentators seemed to believe that the fact Lucy Connolly had pleaded guilty to the most egregious of the charges laid against her closed the case, where in fact the victims of political show trials almost always do that.
Lucy Connolly may not have been tortured in the basement of the Lubyanka, and the police may not have made explicit threats against her family, but a decision was made to take her from her home and keep her in a cell until she went to court. She was denied bail which is normally afforded to all but the most dangerous criminals; she was separated from her family and she was appointed counsel who browbeat her into pleading guilty to the most egregious of the charges laid against her. If members of the bar cannot see that that decision was political in its motivation, everybody else can. The public do not trust — or did not used to trust — the legal system in this country simply because of its adherence to process; they trusted it because they saw that the people who worked in it generally had a profound commitment to impartiality. We are somehow going to have to figure out how to run a justice system without that degree of automatic trust from the public.
In his 2005 polemic Our Culture, or What’s Left of It, Theodore Dalrymple noted that the internal propaganda of communist states did not appear to be intended to persuade its audiences, less still to brainwash them. Instead, its purpose seemed to be to humiliate the populace by subjecting them to obvious absurdities about the societies they inhabited, which they were forced to repeat and powerless to repudiate. This is most clearly conjured up in the image of Havel’s Greengrocer, who displays meaningless communist propaganda in his shop to afford himself an easier life. It wasn’t just that it was demoralising; it demonstrated that almost everybody was willing to parrot nonsense under their shared circumstances. It undermined the probity of the individual, and created a society of emasculated liars who were easier to control.
Two days after Connolly’s appeal was denied, the front pages of most British newspapers were full of positive coverage of the campaign to blunt the tips of kitchen knives to prevent them being used to stab people, as Axel Rudakubana had done. This was supposedly prompted by a survivor of the attack, who had come out in spontaneous support of the campaign on the grounds that kitchen knives “triggered” her due to the trauma she endured, and the potential for an unblunted knife to be used in a similar way again.
The “Let’s be Blunt” campaign emerged suddenly in January during a period where much of the news agenda was being dominated by growing public anger around the rape gangs scandal. It was aided almost immediately by a public intervention from the actor Idris Elba, along with the full support of the Home Secretary in a parliamentary statement shortly thereafter. The campaign enjoyed fulsome coverage across the political spectrum of Britain’s print media, and was covered extensively and uncritically by the BBC. Having then gone a little quiet, it reemerged in the aftermath of the Connolly appeal decision, again with universal positive coverage in print and in broadcast media.
I cannot help but return to Dalrymple’s explanation of the propaganda of the Eastern Bloc
The campaign is so patently absurd that its shortcomings do not need to be pointed out to any sentient being. I will say only that every last one of the hundreds of millions of kitchen knives in British homes would need to be handed over or blunted to keep them out of the hands of the most motivated assailants, and that it would be quite easy for somebody so-minded to fashion a point out of a blunted knife. I’m sure that even a child could come up with dozens of other obvious flaws.
Perhaps manufacturing news to prevent coverage of stories that might lead to unrest is the sort of cynicism that we should just expect from modern government. But this campaign makes so little effort to hide its lack of authenticity, and its premise is so maddeningly ridiculous that I cannot help but return to Dalrymple’s explanation of the propaganda of the Eastern Bloc. Britain’s current regime cannot yet quite force us to mouth their absurdities as in Havel’s time, but they can have us sit and watch as the institutions that once made us a free country do so.
