If I had to sum up the UK in terms of movies, I’d point to two mostly-forgotten, second-rate SF-action blockbusters: The Running Man and V for Vendetta. The first is a typical ’80s Schwarzenegger schlock without the Paul Verhoeven genius that made Total Recall one of the most philosophical movies ever made. The latter is a pedestrian, 1984-wannabe taradiddle that is mostly interesting because of how assiduously its makers (ludicrously overrated comic-book writer Alan Moore and one-hit-wonders the Wachowski brothers) failed to look in the mirror.
Let’s deal with V for Vendetta first. The totally original and never-before-tried plot is a near-future England under the heel of a totalitarian regime that ruthlessly controls the media and population, locking up anyone who breathes even the faintest whiff of dissent. Moore being a typical hippy tosser, his regime is a literal comic book ‘right-wing fascism’.
Somehow, though, the pudgy LARPers who briefly aped the film by wearing Guy Fawkes masks and shaking their flabby little arms at rent-a-protests, back in the 2000s, are nowhere to be seen now that an actual police state has come to Britain.
Retired special constable Julian Foulkes is one of the latest targets of police officers who seem more eager to crack down on free speech than fight crime. The 71-year-old Spectator reader was detained for eight hours in November 2023 before being interrogated and given a caution after he referenced an anti-Semitic mob storming a Russian airport, in a reply to an activist threatening to sue then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman for labelling the pro-Palestine protests ‘hate marches’. While Foulkes’s tweet was first flagged to the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Command before being raised with Kent Police, it appears the discovery of a number of copies of The Spectator magazine at the ex-constable’s home persuaded officers to double down on his detention.
Raiding a non-law-breaking citizen’s home over a literal ‘non-crime’ is bad enough. In the sort of scene you’d only expect to see in a second-rate dystopian thriller, police bodycam footage shows them rifling through the contents of Foulkes’ bookshelves. Then they pounce! A Douglas Murray book!
In some rather bizarre video footage, police can be seen ransacking Foulkes’s home and making comments about the literature he possessed. Of particular interest to the Kent force were Douglas Murray books and editions of The Spectator magazine, including ‘Harry’s crusade’ and ‘Identity crisis’. ‘Very Brexity things,’ one perturbed officer whispered to her colleague. Spotting a Eurosceptic tome on Britain’s entry to the common market, another remarked: ‘That’s a little odd.’ Heaven forbid their man happened to be one of the 52 per cent of Brits who backed Britain’s exit from Brussels, eh?
Hat tip to Brits: hide your copies of Murray and the Spectator inside hollowed-out copies of Capital and The Antifa Handbook. They’ll never suspect a thing!
On Tuesday, Kent Police eventually admitted that the caution issued to Foulkes was a mistake – confessing it was ‘not appropriate in the circumstances and should not have been issued’ before the chief constable of Kent Police personally phoned the retiree on Sunday to offer a ‘personal apology for the ordeal’. But this isn’t the end of the matter, with the Free Speech Union helping Foulkes take legal action against the force for wrongful arrest and detention.
Now, to The Running Man. The basic plot is, surprise, surprise, a near-future America overtaken by a fascist regime. Where does Hollywood come up with these astonishingly original ideas? In said ‘fascist regime’, enemies of the state are used as public entertainment in a murderous survival game show, which is not quite as funny as Idiocracy’s “Monday Night Rehabilitation”.
But it’s the setup that’s pertinent, here: Captain Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is arrested after refusing orders to open fire on an unarmed food riot. When his fellow officers go ahead and massacre the protesters anyway, the bodycam footage is deceitfully edited to frame Richards as the ‘Butcher of Bakersfield’.
What does this have to do with modern Britain? Because such deceit and manipulation is exactly what the Starmer government did, in the wake of the unrest after the son of African immigrants massacred a dance party of little girls. According to the government, the unrest was solely the work of ‘far-right thugs’, who used ‘misinformation’ to whip up hysteria on social media.
Even Department for Education guidance from late August followed this narrative. In a post suggesting how to how to talk to schoolchildren about what had happened, the department wrote that, ‘rioting coordinated by right-wing extremists was initiated by the spread of misinformation about the perpetrator of the Southport attack resulting in violent, racist and Islamophobic attacks on our communities by extremists’.
A new report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) exposes this for the lie we all knew it was.
Yet this police inspectorate report has brought that narrative spectacularly crashing down. The HMICFRS finds ‘no conclusive or compelling evidence that the 2024 disorder was deliberately premeditated and co-ordinated by any specific group or network’.
Moreover, ‘most people who took part in the disorder lived locally’. Far from being hardened EDL skinheads, few had been convicted of disorder before, and their ages ranged from 11 to 81. ‘The murders of three young girls in Southport triggered these events’, it notes. But, far from being down to far-right organising, ‘they turned into widespread and often serious disorder because of many other complex factors’.
Should those factors not have been obvious? Hadn’t we been hearing for years that those towns and cities that saw riots – among them Middlesborough, Blackpool, Hull and Rotherham, all of which have endured the horrors of rape gangs – were downtrodden, ‘left behind’ parts of Britain?
But those rioters were the ‘right kind’ of rioters. Consequently, police and even the future PM wittered sympathetically and ‘took the knee’ before the rioters.
The post-Southport rioters, though, were the most despised class in the eyes of the modern British left-elite: white and working class.
For the prime minister, who had kneeled after violence at BLM riots, it was ‘not protest’ and ‘not legitimate’.
If there was any ‘misinformation’, it was from police and the PM. It was they, after all, who deliberately withheld vital information that they knew within hours of the murders. Information that indeed framed the attack as terrorism. The British public have heard these lies so often that they are acutely attuned to obvious signs of official cover up. Is it any surprise that rumours immediately began to circulate?
Why were rumours about the real identity of the attacker swirling online in the first place? Initially, after all, we had only been allowed to know that the suspect was ‘a 17-year-old male from Banks in Lancashire, who is originally from Cardiff’, and Merseyside Police had insisted absurdly early on that there was ‘no evidence’ that this horrifying mass stabbing constituted terrorism […]
The report even quotes Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s terrorism adviser, who for his part lays the blame pretty squarely on the lack of information disclosed by the authorities: ‘In the digital era, if the police do not take the lead in providing clear, accurate and sober details about an attack like Southport, others will. Social media is a source of news for many people and near-silence in the face of horrific events of major public interest is no longer an option.’
As the mini-series Chernobyl stated, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
In the UK, it’s not the liars who pay, though: it’s the lied-to.
The state roared into action off the back of this political narrative. Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that much of this narrative was false – yet people have gone to prison because of it. Lucy Connolly, who is appealing her 31 month sentence this week, is the most prominent example, but there are many others who have been treated very harshly for very little. Grandfather Peter Lynch held a sign and shouted ‘racist and provocative’ remarks at a protest at a Rotherham asylum hotel which later turned violent. He was sentenced to two years and eight months for violent disorder, and in October he was found hanging in his cell.
Where are the Guy Fawkes mask crowd, now?
