Stirrings of rebellion in unhappy Britain

I read it right, the first time. An ‘elite police division’ has been assembled by the Home Office to monitor remarks made by social media users on immigration, at a time when the provision of over two hundred hotels for illegal migrants is causing rising tension in communities.

Of course, the Daily Mail article meant specially-skilled officers, but it is also true that the ‘elite’ is being protected. For Britain is not being run for the good of the ordinary people, but for a predatory class that is solidifying its power in an emerging global technocracy.

Is it too late for citizens to resist? Much depends on a minority of dissidents, while the majority of the populace appears docile and blissfully ignorant of the prison being built around them.

Nonetheless, there are hints of revolutionary spirit in the country, albeit misdirected into false saviours such as Nigel Farage’s Reform, futile rallies and petitions, or various media outlets that cynics regard as controlled opposition. Certainly, millions of people have lost faith in politicians, the BBC and the institutions of society, but we are a long way from the violent unrest predicted by David Betz of King’s College London,

I looked back to the time of the Civil War, to consider whether Britain is again at a tipping point. My guide was The Blazing World: a New History of Revolutionary England (2023) by Jonathan Healey. It’s a work of thorough scholarship, although I came to realise that ‘new history’ means using modern language of identity politics (male householders are ‘patriarchs’) while the Barbary pirates who took hundreds of thousands of English coastal folk as slaves is overlooked (despite occurring in the period covered by the book).

Religious conflict was rife, and the Gunpowder Plot in 1604 was a failed attack by Guy Fawkes and colleagues on the Protestant establishment. The conspirators were hanged until almost dead; then they were castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered, before a fervent crowd of Londoners. The authorities wanted everyone to know that the wages of rebellion were death – through exemplary punishment. Traitors’ heads were put on spikes on London Bridge.

Today there is no barbaric execution, but merely writers of social media posts may be subjected to inquisition for domestic terrorism.

Whenever challenged, the current powers-that-be use the judiciary pour encourager les autres, as displayed by the immediate and severe imprisonment of protestors after the Southport murders last year (magistrates’ sentencing was shown on BBC News). This raised cheer from the progressive middle class, who readily reveal their contempt for the white working-class, as observed by George Orwell. No sleep was lost on the savage attack on innocent girls; the danger was uneducated oiks rebelling against the ‘values’ of multiculturalism. Keir Starmer and ministers declared the guilt of protestors before trial.

An early factor in the eventual Civil War was land enclosure. The Levellers and Diggers organised revolt against the division of farmland, burning hedgerows and filling ditches. The yeomanry of England, who would in the past have sided with their local community, were opposed to this disruption. As Healey wrote, ‘yeomen were able to benefit from the rising prices, rising land values and falling wages that come with population growth’. Therefore, ‘they did well out of exactly the things that were harming their pooper neighbours’.

A similar detachment is seen today, with the professional-managerial class supporting open borders and enjoying the proceeds of a low-wage economy. Like the yeomen, they have been elevated to gentry in the social hierarchy.

In James’ reign the Bible became widely available, and lay readers were particularly drawn to the books of Daniel and Revelation, ‘with their compelling and vivid foretelling of the end times’. The Muslim Ottoman Empire was threatening Christendom, which was riven in sectarianism. Humanity appeared fallen. After decades of a receding tide of faith in the West, recent developments in technocracy and prospects of transhumanism have resulted in a revival of scriptural reading. Described by some as the Mark of the Beast, the Covid-19 vaccines exemplify interpretations of Revelation in the perceived dehumanising dystopia planned for the masses.

In present ‘cancel culture’, people lose their livelihood for expressing a problematic opinion; for example, on transgenderism. Freedom of speech did not exist in the seventeenth century, when heresy was a capital offence. Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in search of a place to practise their version of Christian life. In the twenty-first century, there is no New World for escape from the global digital surveillance system. Networks of critical thinkers have emerged, but no website, group or movement would be allowed to gain too much traction.

Discipline was maintained by crude and humiliating punishment. Troublesome women (‘scolds’) were strapped to the ducking stool, while drunkards were put in wooden stocks and pelted with rotten fruit. Often the word of a snitch was enough to prove guilt. James was a zealot against witchcraft, bringing to England the Scottish obsession with finding and burning alleged witches. This historical brutality against women is a feminist argument against patriarchal power, but the tendency to project evil on an individual and possibly innocent target persists, as arguably demonstrated by the case of Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse convicted of baby killings on scant evidence.

Ultimately the authorities want to control our minds. The pub, where people can speak freely about their rulers, is being targeted by the government through extortionate tax and a so-called ‘banter ban’. King James was no Puritan, realising that sport, dancing and festivals of Merry England served as bread and circuses.

However, he wanted to rid the country of its alehouses, supposedly as dens of inequity but perhaps more importantly as the forum of irreverence, rumour and ridicule. The Gunpowder Plot was planned at a pub on The Strand. James ordered that a house of correction be built in every town. Freedom to sup ale ended at an undefined stage of inebriation

Ironically, Britain’s internal strife occurred while war raged in Europe. James, a pacifist, died in 1623, and was succeeded by his son. After a disastrous naval exploit at Cadiz in 1625, Charles signed a peace treaty with Spain in 1630. In 1628 Charles’ right-hand man, the unpopular Lord Buckjngham, was assassinated. His funeral was held at night, to spare it from jeering crowds. The king himself was losing support in the populace, and as food shortages, plague and unrest recurred, he became increasingly dictatorial. He dissolved parliament when he could not get his way.

This tumult led to the carnage of the Civil War, between Parliamentarians and Royalists. The former, led by Oliver Cromwell, were committed to the Common Law, and were of Puritan bent. The latter were anti-Puritan and defended the hierarchical order. In battle, the New Model Army prevailed over Charles’ Cavaliers. The revolution succeeded, but lessons from that episode of history are heeded by rulers whose heads could end on the chopping block.

One of the factors in the momentum of the Great Rebellion was the dawn of a free press. Prior to the 1640s pamphlets were brought from Europe, but censorship was tight. As English society was split down the middle, the monarchy could not suppress the news bulletins produced around the country, and so it produced its own propaganda to cast the irreverent and seditious missives of the other side as conspiracy theory or dangerous misinformation, while promoting the official narrative as the only truth.

Today’s mainstream media are acting as an arm of government, which has passed laws such as the Online Safety Act to curtail dissent. Videos on YouTube, however, are now more widely watched than television programming. ‘Auditors’ (livestreamers who show the action from the front lines of protest) play an important part in informing people of what the major news outlets either ignore or disparage (depending on orders from above).

Whenever civil disorder is rumbling, there is always the diversion of war. In the seventeenth century, after restoration of the monarchy, war kept minds and muscles occupied. Now, after decades of peace, the British people are being primed for conscription, being led to believe that Vladimir Putin’s Russia or the Iranian theocracy could strike at any time. The Stop the War Coalition, which mounted a huge campaign against Britain’s engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been remarkably quiet on the the dramatic expansion of NATO, increased military spending and sabre-rattling with the Kremlin. Some wars are more equal than others.

The traditional working class has little interest in the militarism of the British state, while the privileged graduate class has ditched its pacifism in a call to arms (although they will happily leave the fighting to their poorer compatriots). The intelligentsia, as we know from the first half of the twentieth century, are predisposed to eugenics (a pseudoscientific enterprise now disguised in the green clothing of Net Zero). Fearing the devil making work for idle hands as jobs are replaced by AI, the rich may be inclined to use war to wipe millions of ‘useless eaters’ out of existence. But that would be playing with fire.

This is a race in time. The globalist oligarchy is rapidly developing a technocracy that will ultimately have no means of escape for the masses. But Rome was not built in a day, and the shadowy regime that appears to control all democratic governments and institutions remains vulnerable. You can see what is most threatening to the powers-that-be in the swift and harsh reaction to anyone calling that the emperor has no clothes.

One of approximately a thousand protestors jailed after the unrest following the Southport killings last summer was Peter Lynch. He was unlike any other protestors, he revealed truth about the looming new world order. His crime, during a rally outside a Rotherham hotel housing migrants, was no more than swearing at riot police as they pushed him with unnecessary aggression. The newspapers dutifully described Lynch as a thug propounding conspiracy theories. Judge Jeremy Richardson chastised him as ‘disgraceful example of a grandfather’.

His home-made placard stated: –

‘All corrupt: PMs, MPs, police chiefs, TV media, judiciary, Deep State, WHO, Davos, Vanguard, BlackRock’ (etc)

And that is why, I believe, Lynch (aged 61) was the only protestor to die in prison. That may seem far-fetched conspiracy theory to some readers, but to continue believing that events happen spontaneously is to follow coincidence theory. The latter could be true, but the odds are lengthening.

A big difference between the revolutionary seventeenth century and now is that whereas in the past there was a real divide between ordinary people and the powers-that-were, the present establishment has created a split within the populace. A massive influx from Muslim regions has fooled patriots into treating the incomers as the enemy, when the real perpetrators are the globalists who treat the people beneath them as pawns.

Peter Lynch’s placard said nothing about Islam, but hinted at who is really turning the world into a dystopian nightmare. Like John Lilburne of the Levellers, his name should be remembered in history.

Niall McCrae is a social commentator and an officer iof the Workers of England trade union. He was previously a senior lecturer in mental health at King’s College London. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016), Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020) and Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm (2024).  He writes regularly for The Light newspaper.

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