Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become? (Part 2), by Nick Corbishley

There are two types of totalitarians in the U.S. There are those who admire Chinese totalitarianism, and there are those who admire Britain’s emerging totalitarianism. From Nick Corbishley at nakedcapitalism.com:

Scaling back trial by jury, further attacks on lawful speech, the nationwide deployment of deeply flawed facial recognition systems… The list just keeps growing longer. 

We first asked this question — Just How Dystopian Could Starmer’s Britain Become? — just over a year ago. At that point in time, with the  government just four months in office, all we could offer as an answer was: how long is a piece of string? Now, 13 months later, it is clear that said string is very long indeed, and is getting longer by the day.

On his election, in July 2024, Starmer promised that his Labour government would “tread (stomp?) more lightly” on the lives of voters. It is one of a growing multitude of pledges Starmer has broken during his 17 months in office. In this particular case, it took just two months for Starmer to change course, telling delegates at the 2024 Labour Party Conference that the State would, in fact, take greater control over people’s lives.

In the months that followed, plans were unveiled to, among other things, launch “non-mandatory” digital identity (more on that later); expand the use of live facial recognition technology (ditto); resurrect an old Tory policy to grant inspectors at the Department of Work and Pensions increased powers to snoop on claimants’ bank accounts; and intensify the British State’s crackdown on lawful speech.

That, it turns out, was just for starters. For the main course, the Starmer government is now setting its sights on trial by jury, a legal protection that has existed in England for almost a thousand years and forms one of the bedrocks of democratic legal systems.

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