Social unrest in an age of hyper-surveillance and hypersensitivity
The Labour-branded government has announced sweeping cutbacks in social welfare and core public services at a time of rising unemployment and on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. You could hardly choose a worse time to wean the most vulnerable in society off welfare dependence. With hundreds of billions squandered in recent years on lockdowns, military misadventures, hairbrained energy transition schemes and accommodating record levels of net immigration, something had to give. One week the government announces cuts in winter fuel payments with savings of up to £1.5 billion, but the next it announces £3 billion more to help Ukraine’s war effort. After years of championing the disabled, the Labour administration is telling a million incapacity benefit claimants to get a job, inadvertently admitting that the UK’s watered-down definition of disability has hidden the true scale of worklessness. No wonder, many Labour supporters are angry, but the pipe dream of endless state generosity could not go on forever. The old arguments that Keynesian economics can boost growth and equality no longer holds sway when many WEF-endorsed policies aim to fast-track the transition away from the carefree mass consumerism of 1990s and early 2000s to the new virtual economy offering abstract services we never used to need.
On the surface, away from overseas conflict zones and inner-city crime blackspots, all seems quiet in the suburbs and small towns where most British people live. The homicide rate has declined since its postwar peak around the turn of the millennium. People have by and large retreated to their humble abodes, preferring to binge-watch Netflix movies than head out for a night on the town. More people die through substance abuse and personal neglect at home than in pub brawls or street fights. In Scotland alone deaths attributed to alcohol or recreational drugs has hovered around 2500 since 2020, while the total homicide rate for 2023-24 was just 57 with 36 outside the home. The lockdowns of 2020 and 21 only accelerated this trend. Yet emotional insecurity and underlying internecine tensions may have hit an all-time high, at least since records began, due to a breakdown in trust and social cohesion. Low-level crime remains rampant among the Island’s diverse communities. The police have given up trying to stop burglars, drug-dealers, grooming gangs and money-launderers. They also apply very different standards to different parallel communities, but always seem to have time to monitor social media activity and arrest critical thinkers for daring to contradict official narratives. In 2023 over 3,300 UK residents were arrested for social media posts alone and that was before the infamous Online Safety Act had time to kick in.
Just in case you were under the mistaken impression that laws against alleged hate speech and misinformation only affected xenophobes, antivaxxers and transphobes, London’s Metropolitan Police dispatched 20 armed officers to handcuff and arrest six women at a Quaker meeting house in London during a peaceful gathering on the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, because they were planning non-violent direct action against fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers. This comes after Hertfordshire Police dispatched 6 officers to arrest a couple for daring to criticise the appointment of a new head teacher at their daughter’s primary school.
Slowly but surely, the post-millennial social contract between the self-styled progressive managerial classes and the atomised consumer classes is coming apart. The sheer hypocrisy of the condescending illiberal intelligentsia has never been more undeniable. The exact details hardly matter, but affluent trendy lefties are now blaming the selfish misbehaviour and perceived ignorance of the settled working classes for all our societal and environmental problems. A toxic mix of woke identity politics and green zealotry has succeeded only in sowing the seeds of distrust and widening the gap between haves and have-nots by creating rival groups of impoverished strivers and welfare dependents.
One week the prime minister affirms his support for Israel’s counter-insurgency operations as it resumes bombing civilian targets in Gaza. The next week the deputy PM, Angela Rayner, joins public celebrations of Ramadan and promises stronger laws against Islamophobia. Come June, woke officialdom will be promoting Pride Month again and yet schools and businesses are busy downgrading Easter for fear of offending non-Christians. Meanwhile much parliamentary time is devoted to Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, despite the opposition of all traditional religions. The sanctity of life is the one thing Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics could agree on. Nobody dare mention that these policies conspire mainly to destabilise social cohesion and empower the surveillance state to suppress rational critique, inviting us only to express our emotions.
In a complex world with competing demands, it’s almost impossible to keep everyone happy. One person’s concept of emancipation or self-expression may harm someone else’s privacy, dignity, safety and livelihood. As a victim of teenage bullying myself, I can empathise with confused adolescent boys identifying as girls because they fail to meet classic male stereotypes. I had a different kind of identity crisis, which thankfully did not lead me to believe I may have been born in the body, but I can understand how gullible troubled teenagers can succumb to the trans cult and blame their alienation on reactionary transphobes. But what about shy teenage girls who feels threatened by the presence of a biological male undressing next to them in the changing rooms?
In times of plenty with boundless opportunities for expansion, it may be easy to open your heart to the plight of refugees fleeing extreme poverty or tyranny and welcome them into your land. It’s not so easy when newcomers not only compete with the settled population over access to services, affordable housing and jobs, but transform the cultural landscape limiting everyone’s freedom. Numerous social attitudes surveys across Europe have found a distinct pattern, the more affluent you are, the more relaxed you are about the consequences of rapid demographic change. However, among the lower classes, settled communities tend to be more critical of mass migration and ethnic minorities more socially conservative on family issues.
Fear of Islamic or Zionist Fundamentalism
Two divergent critiques of global imperialism compete to explain the growing powerless of the working classes. One blames radical Islam and the other blames Israel for the destabilisation of viable societies. Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France are both fiercely pro-Israel. GBNews talking heads, with the honourable exception of Neil Oliver relegated to weekly online videos, regularly conflate the Muslim role in the grooming gang scandal with animated protests featuring Hamas flags against Israeli war crimes with sporadic reports of antisemitic hate crimes. Pro-Israel lobbies have succeeded in winning over much of the European nationalist right, with Netanyahu receiving a warm welcome from Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, amid calls from other European leaders for his arrest. Yet Israel would never gotten away with such as scale of death and destruction in Gaza without the logistical support of the United States and EU and our collective wilful blindness to a grotesque imbalance of power. In theory, a truly independent European superstate could break ranks with the US and demand an immediate ceasefire, enforced by a naval blockade and trade sanctions. However, they did no such thing. Frightened politicians, wary of the Muslim vote, distanced themselves from the excesses of Israeli military operations, but were powerless to stop the slaughter.
Hundreds of thousands of mainly white working-class girls would not have fallen prey to mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi grooming gangs if they had grown up in stable two parent families in tight-knit communities able to defend themselves against predators who could easily take advantage of vulnerable and lure gullible girls with flashy cars, drugs and booze. While many victims could recount vile ordeals with unspeakable levels of depravity, it’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming a literal interpretation of ancient Quranic teachings, such as "...who guard their chastity except with their wives or those whom their right hands possess..." (Quran 23:5–6 and 70:29–30) for the behaviour of sexually frustrated men from South Asian communities transposed to the British Isles. Most Islamic scholars condemn concubinage today. More scandalous were the coordinated efforts by the police, social workers and local councils to suppress crimes committed against one atomised group to placate another community, setting the stage for a turf war with one community screaming rape and the other playing the race card, usually in the guise of Islamophobia. In this spat, the morally superior managerial and media classes have tended to downplay the scale of the grooming gang phenomenon either to further their careers or signal their repudiation of xenophobia. Often, they rely on counter-narratives to blame the settled working classes for their own demise. In recent weeks Labour politicians and their allies in the establishment media have been at pains to promote the Netflix series, Adolescence, about a white teenager, Jamie Miller, from a stable family obsessed with incel culture and the Tate brothers, charged with killing his female classmate, Katie Leonard. The only trouble is that it is a complete fiction and was only inspired by a real world of an emotionally disturbed Ugandan-born Hassan Sentamu who killed 15-year-old, Elianne Andam, after his ex-girlfriend had dumped him. Sentamu’s case stems largely from a chaotic upbringing marked by alleged abuse, family breakdown, time in foster care and fatherlessness from an early age. His violent behaviour appears rooted in personal trauma and instability rather than falling prey to online radicalisation or incel culture. If anything, the real-world teenage murder in Croydon, South London, highlights the challenges of cultural integration rather than its success.
Officialdom’s reaction to last July’s Southport stabbing spree followed a similar pattern of deflection. Rather than address people’s very real concerns about societal breakdown amid rapid demographic change and arrest the perpetrators of violence, the establishment doubled down by jailing social media activists and angry protesters. True to form, high-profile self-righteous opinion leaders kept pushing the line that the government needed to take swift and tough action against far-right rioters. Yet objective reality on the ground revealed a very different picture. As rival ethno-religious groups battled it out on the streets over unrelated grievances in Harehills, Leeds and Tower Hamlets, the police adopted a posture of strategic disengagement and stood by and watched, leading to accusations of two-tier policing.
Skewed Moral Compass
A form of subconscious identity-driven bias causes people to minimise or magnify wrongdoing based on the group affiliation of the perpetrators or victims, leading to a skewed moral compass. The antiwar left, often aligned with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or Jean-Luc Melanchon in France, may have a clear conscience over their opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, but they downplay the high level of violent and sexual crime committed by immigrant communities. By the same token, working-class nationalists often side with Israel over Palestine, while blaming Islam as a whole for the destruction of Western civilisation. Their conscience may be clear over the victims of grooming gangs, but they choose to ignore the innocent victims of military adventurism in far-off lands.
Both groups often fail to see how different kinds of evil, whether perpetrated by state actors, manipulated militias or degenerate commoners, may all be side effects of global destabilisation orchestrated by powerful vested interest groups. Yet we are encouraged to discount such a possibility as a wild conspiracy theory, preferring instead the Punch and Judy spectacle of Trump versus Harris or Labour versus Tories or Reform. Many on the cultural left are up in arms about the Trump administration’s expulsion of foreign students who have protested Israeli war crimes because their actions allegedly intimidate Jewish Americans and lend support to Hamas, which the US considers a terrorist organisation. Yet they were dutifully silent about Big Tech’s censorship of social conservative and naturopathic (i.e. critical of Big Pharma) viewpoints. Indeed, many on the left gave the Biden administration a free pass on its unflinching financial, military and diplomatic support for Israeli war crimes, preferring to believe a Harris administration might set a different tone.
In the past the radical wing of the US Democratic Party, embodied by Senators Bernie Sanders (although not technically a party member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voiced passionate critiques of US foreign policy, but have always stopped short of calling for an end to US military aid to Israel, which averaged $3- to 5 billion in the decade before 2023 and has been estimated $17.9 billio36n since, in addition to other military adventures that serve Israeli interests much more than US priorities focused on national defence, world peace and trading relationships.
As elements within Big Tech, most notably Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, have shifted their support to the Trump team, Sanders and Cortez, both big lockdown cheerleaders, have started a campaign against the oligarchy, which fits the theme of Russian interference in American politics. The growing concentration of wealth in a tiny cabal of tech entrepreneurs and financiers is beyond dispute. Yet the radical corporate left turns a blind eye to the toxic influence of the likes of Bill Gates and Larry Fink of BlackRock, who cleverly steer clear of pronouncements on geopolitical controversies while working in close liaison with the US military industrial complex. At a rally at the Ford Idaho Center on 14 April this year, marshals acted swiftly to expel attendees who unfurled a large banner with the Palestinian flag and the words Free Palestine. Senator Sanders later reiterated his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, despite his critique of its excesses and the verifiable fact that Israel broke the January ceasefire deal.
Narrative Dissonance
Recent news viewership trends reveal a marked shift away from traditional TV news bulletins, often consumed passively, to a wider range of corporate and indie online channels. One way or another a large section of general population has lost all trust in official sources, often completely at odds with their lived experiences. In 2020 the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, worked alongside broadcasters, newspapers, advertisers and online influencers to change some of the most basic human behaviours and perceptions. Overnight neighbours and strangers alike became bio-hazards and previously low-key scientific functionaries became deities. Big Tech stepped in to suppress counternarratives. While YouTube still tolerated flat earthers and Israel firsters, it censored dissident scientists and medics who contradicted the official WHO line. While possibly only 10-15% of Westerners openly disputed the covid narrative, with most preferring to comply in the hope of getting back to normal, they sowed the seeds of doubt in many more. If the MSM can lie so brazenly over flu variants to drive hidden agendas, goodness knows what other mistruths it has told us over the years.
In periods of stability, media narratives go largely unquestioned by the public. But as lived experience begins to contradict official messaging, a growing number of critical observers, once limited to a small subset of the population, begin to seek out independent or dissenting sources of information. Alas such dissenting sources can be easily manipulated and lead critical thinkers to scapegoat the wrong people or place their trust in controlled opposition.
Millions of Americans voted Trump because they hoped his team would reign in the Deep State behind the Biden administration’s authoritarian overreach and lack of empathy with the plight of settled citizens outside their metropolitan bubbles, as expressed so passionately in Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond. Early on the Trump team reversed course on covid-era biotech tyranny and gender-bending with the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Junior, heralded the end of US involvement in the Ukrainian quagmire and tightened border controls with some well publicised deportations to win favour with his base. Yet within weeks, his administration threw its full weight behind the resumption of Israeli military operations in Gaza and started bombing Houthi targets directly in Yemen allegedly to defend traffic through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea, while threatening war with Iran and simultaneously launching a tariff war against the US’s leading trading partners. The Western progressive media, outside the USA itself, is now overwhelmingly hostile to this shift in foreign and domestic policies, while Europeans are losing faith in the core institutions of the post-cold-war settlement. Some call this beginning of the end for globalism as an ideological goal, but others see it either as war by other means or as part of a coordinated implosion of mass consumerism in the next phase of the Great Reset. With high tariffs, China could lose a large chunk of its high-profit-margin exports while Americans would have to adapt to higher retail prices. In all likelihood, the move will only speed up the development of alternative high-tech hubs especially in nanotech and AI, boost bilateral trade relationships between China and other leading geopolitical blocks such as India, Russia, Africa and South America. Until recently, US-based companies had a monopoly on the development of operating systems, but this could end soon with the next generation of microkernel operating systems along the lines of Huawei’s new HarmonyOS. As the Chinese DeepSeek project proved, AI could accelerate the development of new computing ecosystems independent of US tech giants, stripping the American superpower of its last unassailable advantage following the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Combined with supply-chain disruption from the US-China trade war, this could have catastrophic consequences for the United Kingdom’s service-oriented economy, already suffering from high energy prices and the eclipse of its industrial legacy.
Will we descend into Urban Warfare?
David Betz, Professor of War at King’s College London, argues that the West, including the UK, is increasingly vulnerable to civil conflict due to collapsing social trust, rising economic hardship, extreme political polarisation, and fragmented national identities. He critiques the complacency of Western elites and notes that traditional assumptions, like wealth and democratic stability shielding nations from civil war, may no longer hold. Betz warns that civil strife may resemble past internecine wars, marked by factional violence and systemic decay, as ideologically radicalised groups on all sides exploit digital and societal fault lines in a struggle over identity, survival, and sovereignty.
The country that built its fortune on plentiful coal and gas reserves could soon experience rolling power cuts, as Spain and Portugal witnessed recently. While the chattering classes like to blame Brexit and ageing population for malfunctioning services, the working classes are increasingly blaming the mindboggling incompetence of the wishful thinking chattering classes. Why should commoners struggling to afford utility bills and essential groceries follow the advice of NetZero zealots who wasted countless billions of £ promoting transgenderism in schools? Sooner or later, when the shit hits the proverbial fan, the great unwashed may take the streets.
However, we may not see English skinheads running rampage through Muslim neighbourhoods seeking revenge for the rape of mainly white working-class girls, as a Netflix drama might portray. They are much more likely to target the posh neighbourhoods of the managerial classes only to discover the real decision makers have retreated to their secluded villas in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. While some urban blackspots may see street violence between rival ethnic communities, such as Pakistanis and Indians, a more general trend may be open defiance against incompetent law-enforcers seeking to criminalise dissent.
