Speech to the Property and Freedom Society Conference
Bodrum, September 2024

 

Well, thank you, Hans, and thank you everyone for your patience. You have a double helping of me this weekend. Today I want to talk rather tangentially, I must confess, but I do want to talk about what is happening in Britain. I normally say England, but today I should talk about Britain.

On the 29th of July this year, 2024, in a rather pleasant northwestern seaside resort called Southport, there was a children’s dance party. Somebody broke into this party wielding a knife and murdered three little girls. The suspect and whatever the evidence may be against him, he is a suspect. He is legally and morally innocent until proven guilty. But the suspect arrested for this horrible crime was of Rwandan heritage.

On the following day, the 30th of July, people gathered in Southport to protest. The police tried to break up the protesters and the protests spread over the weekend that followed. Process spread through a number of northern cities, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham. Not quite northern, but northern enough for me. And the process continued until about the 11th of August when the police began to believe that they had gradually brought things under control.

The legacy media described the protesters as thugs, as far right thugs, as hooligans, as criminals. This is somewhat of a change from the descriptions applied to the last set of serious protests in my country in 2020, when there were actual riots involving some damage to life and a great deal of damage to some rather valuable property – when the police on one occasion knelt down before the protesters and where the leader of the Opposition, Kier Starmer, was photographed in his office kneeling down. Not before the protesters, I will confess, but there is a photograph of him taking the knee.

Our new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, then made a broadcast on television in which he denounced the protesters in the strongest terms possible and threatened them with severe and memorable punishments. And severe and memorable punishments have so far been dispensed. The wheels of British justice sometimes, indeed mostly, move very slowly. On this occasion they were put on fast forward. People have been sent to prison for very long spells. Some people have been sent to prison for up to two years for posting tweets and on Facebook, not necessarily approving of the protests but making statements which the authorities believed might encourage an environment of protest.

It is probably unconnected, but the prisons in my country are always somewhat overcrowded. It was convenient that room was found in prison for these gaoled protesters by releasing a large number of career criminals, sometimes violent career criminals. Seventeen hundred were released last week and there is television footage of some of these people shaking open bottles of champagne outside the prisons as they were driven off. Another seventeen hundred will be released next Tuesday and I’m told that as many as ten thousand prisoners will have been released by the end of this year.

Now to get into prison in my country you normally need to do something rather serious, apart from posting on Twitter and Facebook. And so most of the people released from prison are not people who have been put in prison for evading their television licence fees or for shoplifting. Most of these people are hardened criminals. The British state does not like to lock people away and in order to get into prison in Britain you need to do something rather serious, and the government has decided that prison is not the best place for these people; and so ten thousand will be released. This is a policy that is entirely separate from the other policy of putting people in prison for their Facebook and Twitter activities. But it is undoubtedly very convenient that the government now has almost unlimited space in prison for the protesters and for people who may seem to give some public sympathy to the protesters.

Not surprisingly, our new Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been nicknamed Two Tier Starmer, which is entirely justified. Indeed, if I could make a personal comment, the man is a far left thug with all the charm of a Post Office fraud investigator.

But that is the limit for the moment to all that I have to say about the process directly. What I want to explore – and that does not mean to explain – is the circumstances in which these riots happened. This was not simply an explosion of outrage at the vicious murder of those three little girls. And those of us who are parents will fully appreciate the horror to be encountered when you read about how they were butchered like so many animals in an abbatoir. It was not wholly caused as a reaction to those murders. It’s something that came at the end of what you might call a long train of abuses and usurpations.

I made a name for myself, a very small name. In the earliest of the century, by publishing a book called Cultural Revolution Culture War, in which I wrote about the rise of a new ruling class of educators, administrators, police officers, politicians and associated media and business interests who had an interest in the total transformation of England into something that could no longer be described as England. I don’t withdraw what I said in that book, but what I would do now is to add to my list of villains the very rich.

The rich are always ex officio members of the ruling class. The very rich. I’m not talking about the moderately rich. I’m talking about the very, very rich. The seriously rich. These people are always a very influential part of the ruling class. They’re the people to whom we, the humble sheeple, are taught to look up with admiration. We read about their doings, we read what they say. We are encouraged to emulate them, or, if we can’t emulate them, just to adore them. They will always have a very strong influence on the moral tone of a society, and the humbler members of the ruling class will often take their tone from that of the very rich. About a hundred years ago there was a fundamental transformation in the nature of the seriously rich in Britain until about 100 years ago. It may have been somewhat earlier than a hundred years ago, but let’s go back to 1914. That’s a nice date at which to begin the story of the transformation. Until about a hundred years ago, great wealth was generally associated with the hereditary ownership of land. Land owners, hereditary land owners in particular, always have a strong interest in the welfare of the nation in which they own their land. They own the land, they derive their wealth from the land, or at least they derive their status from the ownership of their land. Even if they derive their real wealth from other activities, they have a natural interest in ensuring that, when they handle that lands to their children, it is in a country which is reasonably unimpaired. For that reason, the British ruling class until about 1914 was fairly conservative and very much involved in the preservation of the national ways of the English and of the other constituent nationalities of the United Kingdom.

During the past hundred years, a new class of the seriously rich has emerged. These are people who have no necessary connection with my country. They may be the descendants of those people who were seriously rich and who were land owners in the past, that there may be a genetic connection, but the nature of their wealth, the means by which they derive their wealth, has brought about a great change in their attitude to this country.

I’m talking about a purely monied elite, people who derive their wealth from doing things in the City of London that I do not pretend to understand, but from which unimaginably vast amounts of money are routinely derived. These people have, as I’ve said, no particular connection with the country in which they live and in which they operate. For them, leaving aside a sometimes residual ancestral connection, for them, Britain is not a nation. It is a trading platform. It is a trading platform plus shops. It is a place where they do business. So long as it is a place friendly to their business activities, they will remain in Britain. If for any reason Britain becomes a place unfriendly to their activities, they will leave, they will go somewhere else, and they will continue making money in some other part of the world.

Their only interest in the law and politics of the country where they operate is to ensure that the taxes and the regulatory environment are friendly to their business activities. That involves making sure that those laws which directly touch their activities are entirely conducive to their interests. It also will mean making sure that any actual or potential challenge to the way in which. They derive their wealth is forestalls or prevents it.

I will not accuse the very rich of promoting open borders, or of promoting political correctness, or of the general turning of my country into an open air lunatic asylum. But it is certainly a set of transformations congruent with their financial interests. The destruction of the working classes was obviously welcome to these people after the troubles of the 1960s and 70s. I won’t romanticise the British working classes. They’re continued striking, their working to rule, their resistance to perfectly reasonable changes in working practices and the introductory of new technology – entirely stupid, entirely to be blamed. But the ruling class chose eventually not to try reasoning with these people, but simply to destroy them.

I do accept that changing patterns of comparative advantage meant that mass manufacturing was less economically viable in Britain from the late 1970s than it had traditionally been. But I do not believe that the collapse of mass manufacturing in Britain and the mass exportation of factories and jobs to elsewhere in the world was an entirely unforced, an entirely organic economic event. I just don’t believe that. I believe that it was a deliberate policy of deindustrialisation in order to destroy the political power of the working classes.

In the same way, open borders have been obviously congruent with the interests of the very rich. It lowers the price of labour in those jobs that remain in the country. It also tends to balkanise the population. Something much to be blamed, but also in its own way impressive, was the immense solidarity of many sections of the British working classes in the 1970s and 80s. Their sympathy strikes, their mass secondary picketing, the great fortitude with which I think, particularly the coal miners in their strike of 1984 to 1985, held together to the very end, until they were starved into surrender. That is something which could not happen now because the solidarity of the working classes has been brought to an end. You now have an entirely balkanised workforce who have no particular commonality of feeling within themselves.

Political correctness – a very useful frame of mind to spread among the humbler officers of the ruling class, to prevent the growth of any kind of national feeling or to destroy any existing national feeling.

All of these things have been encouraged. I believe all of these things have been welcomed. And perhaps, though I don’t have the evidence, all of these things have to some extent been funded by the seriously rich. To the cast of villains I described in my book Cultural Revolution, Culture War, you must add the seriously rich. They may have nice houses, they may have servants, they may look and sound and behave in their output, conduct like characters in Upstairs, Downstairs or any of those other period dramas where you think, “Oh, England is still the same.”

No, it isn’t the same. It’s a pose. They are simply putting on fancy dress to play at roles which no longer exist.

Now, what about the Conservatives? What has been the role of the Conservative Party in this transformation? They came to power, or rather, they were elected to office in 2010, promising to undo the more unpleasant changes brought about by the Blair and Brown regimes that came to power in 1997. The Conservatives did nothing.

Indeed, I now have a personal anecdotes with which to lighten this narrative. In 2010, just before the general election of that year, I was called to a meeting with somebody I’d known for twenty five years. I won’t give his name. He was somebody with a rather chequered past which involved shoplifting from John Lewis in Oxford Street, but he’d been employed to procure whores and to arrange for shipments of cocaine to members of the Conservative leadership. From that he progressed into an adviser on policy, and from that he progressed to a somewhat more exalted, though private, position. He called me to a meeting and suggested that I might like to tone down my strong public denunciation of the Conservative Party.

Those of you who were at the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in 2006 may remember that I seemed to be a man on the rise. I was a successful novelist whose books were translated and published in many other languages. I was continually on the television and on the radio, and I was writing articles for newspapers like The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. I was perhaps the most famous public libertarian in England – and I was a strong and relentless critic of the Conservative Party, predicting that if they were ever reelected to government, they would do absolutely nothing to reverse the changes of the Blair and Brown regimes.

So in April 2010 I was called to a meeting and I was told to tone myself down somewhat. I was told that – yes, indeed, the Conservatives would not do very much to change things, but there’ll be some changes and after 5 or 10 years I would notice that things had improved in unexpected ways. I didn’t believe that. I continued criticising For that reason, in 2011 I was suddenly switched off. All of my novel contracts were cancelled. My books were remaindered. I nearly lost my teaching position. Nearly lost – but didn’t because it is rather difficult to find teachers of Greek and Latin who can read and write those languages on sight. And so because I’ve had some rather specialised skills that are very difficult to find. I survived. I survived by my fingernails. The denunciations continued until just before the lockdown in 2020. Since when they died away, I rather expect that, now the Conservatives are out of office, they will not begin again. But you can never be too sure where these people are concerned.

The Conservatives, in the fourteen years that they were in government, did absolutely nothing to reverse the changes that I’ve mentioned. Indeed, they hurried them along. It does seem that the Conservatives made a deal. They made a deal with all of the usual suspects. They would be allowed to enrich themselves through bribes and insider trading and various kickbacks, in return for which they would leave the actual government and administration of Britain to the usual suspects. The Conservatives kept that promise and the usual suspects kept their promise. And so, although the Conservatives won more and more votes at every election between 2010 and 2019, there was absolutely no change in policy. At every election the Conservatives came before us promising “Vote for us this time, and this time it will be different.” And it never was. This year, there was a general election and the Conservatives melted away. They lost very badly – not as badly as I hoped they would. I was hoping they would get South of 100 seats. In fact, the nearer to net zero we could get the Conservatives, the happier I’d have been. They still did worse than at any election since 1832, which is something.

I have grown resigned to the changes that are happening in my country. But you see. I’m rather elderly and I’m also middle class. I have the mental and moral and financial resources to avoid the worst effects of what has been done to my country. The white working class does not have those resources, and you might see this summer’s riots as a snapping of patients. They had had enough. If they had not been the white working classes, I’m sure that the usual suspects in the legacy media would describe the process as a cry of pain, a cry for help. “We must try to understand the causes of these troubles.”

No, no – that sort of treatment is for other protesters. Kneeling down in front of the protesters is for other protesters. For the people who protested this summer, it was full riot gear. The police were dressed up like characters from some dystopian science fiction film.

Now, is this the end of the protests? They died away after the 11th of August. Is that the end of the matter? It may be. It’s very hard to say. I don’t think it will though. I think there will be a renewal of protests. Indeed. I suspect. I can only suspect. I can’t say anything for certain that involves the future, but I suspect that my country is drifting into what we can call a pre-revolutionary situation.

When I was a boy I read Crane Brinton’s book Anatomy of a Revolution. Does anyone know it? It’s a very fine book. It’s very convincing. It’s a comparative analysis of four revolutions, the English Revolution of the 1640’s, the American Revolution of the 1770s, and the French and Russian Revolutions. And it tries to draw commonalities from those and to derive from those commonalities a theory of revolution. I found it a wholly convincing analysis of revolutions when I was a boy, and I used the analysis to predict the course of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. I am convinced that Crane Brinton has got to the heart of revolutions.  Brinton says that revolutions have a number of necessary causes.

The first is that a substantial group of people in a country – let’s call it rather loosely and in a non-Marxist sense a class – has a strong sense of grievance. It may not be getting worse off financially, it may just be that it’s not getting well off as fast as it has been. Or perhaps it believes that the government is hostile so its most fundamental interests. Whatever the case, there is the withdrawal of consent to the existing order of things among a substantial part of the population. I think we are seeing that in Britain. We’re probably seeing it in many other countries as well. But I know Britain best. So I’ll confine my comments to my own country.

What you next have is an incompetent ruling class or a ruling class which is perceived as incompetent or as malevolent, and you certainly see that at the moment. I’ve mentioned the two-tier response to protests in my country, something which has been bitterly remarked upon even in the legacy media. However, we had a general election this year and Labour did not, except in the formal sense, win that election. The Conservatives lost it, but somebody had to win. And so Labour got an enormous majority – two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons, and yet 80% of the electorate did not vote Labour. And I’m told, I don’t know by what authority, but I’m told that Labour won that election with under ten per cent of the white votes.

With this rather iffy legitimacy, a sensible Labour government would have begun rather cautiously. A sensible Labour government would indeed have started immediate cross party talks on electoral reform, accepting that the electoral outcome was not entirely satisfactory, and trying to ensure that in future the composition of parliamentary majorities had some connection with the votes cast in the country. No, not at all. These people are behaving exactly as if they had won two thirds of a popular vote. They believe that the formal victory they obtained at the general election was a universal endorsement of a set of leftist transformations, which did not cease under the Conservatives, and which continued under the Conservatives, but are now moving ahead on fast forward. So the second of Britain’s requirements has been met.

An ideology of protest and resistance. I think it’s too early to speak of that as yet. If you’d asked those protesters what do you want, what’s your grievance, But what do you want, What do you want the government to do that will stop you from throwing stones at the police? They would probably have looked at you with open mouths, They hadn’t thought that far ahead. There is as yet no ideology of resistance, though the general reference to Kier Starmer as Two-Tier Starmer does suggest that there is an embryonic ideology of resistance.

The last thing that  Brinton says is a necessary cause of a revolution is either a group of revolutionary leaders or a revolutionary consciousness, and neither of those can be said to exist at the moment in Britain. However, if you have ever studied revolutions as historical events, there is a moment – it’s very hard to put your finger on when that moment comes: perhaps in the French Revolution it was the 14th of July 1789 – there is a moment or there is a day, in the morning of which what you have is a series of semi-coherent protesters and at the end of which there is a full-blown revolution with defined objectives.

It is very difficult to analyse the growth of a revolutionary consciousness. It is very difficult to analyse the emergence of a revolutionary leadership. These are things that can happen suddenly and they can come from completely unexpected courses. There may never be a revolutionary consciousness in Britain. Perhaps the authorities have too much control over the official narratives or one may emerge next week, next month, next year. It’s very hard to say. But I do suspect that we are heading into a pre revolutionary phase. You may say “A revolution in England – that’s impossible.” Yes it is. But you see, every revolution is impossible and so it happens. After it’s happened, everyone hurries forward to explain why it was inevitable. That is the nature of these things. If you’d said to an average Frenchman in January 1789, “By the end of this year there will have been a revolution in this country and there will be a totally new order of things in Paris,” you’d have laughed at. Possibly the same with Russians in 1917, probably the same with Americans in January 1776, though I’m not too sure about this last.

As I have said, all revolutions, like wars, are written off as impossible by all the clever people until they happen, after which the same clever people turn around and will explain to you why they were inevitable and why the signs could not simply be ignored.

I think I’ve said as much as I need to at the moment. I’ll conclude, though, by saying that these are very tensitive remarks. I wasn’t in England at the time of the protests. I don’t read the newspapers on principle. I refuse to look at the television news. Although I save myself from the possibility of brainwashing, I also deprive myself of a great deal of useful information. So I am not the best informed person to stand before you and explain what’s happening in Britain. I’m also making suggestions about the future which are inherently uncertain. But I do think that those protests last summer in the north of England were not simply an outburst of anger at the vicious murder of three little girls at some kind of children’s party. And I don’t think that, when the protests died away after the 11th of August, there will have been the end of them. I think this is the beginning of a period of growing instability in which the present order of things in my country will have its legitimacy, its residual legitimacy, drained away from it.