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.
Curtailing a Centuries-Old Right
In an ostensible bid to reduce court backlogs, Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor David Lammy has announced plans to limit people’s right to trial by jury in England and Wales. If the plans are enacted, a new tier of “swift” courts will be created to replace jury trials for most offences that carry a likely jail sentence of less than three years as well as complex fraud and financial cases.
Speed and expediency are the goal. Under the proposed changes, only the most serious offences — murder, manslaughter and rape — would continue to be heard by a jury of one’s peers. Despite the fact that English Common Law draws upon the ancient right of trial by jury rooted in Magna Carta, Lammy asserted that “we must never forget that [Magna Carta] implores us not to deny or delay justice.”
Bearing the Orwellian title “Swift and Fair Plan to Get Justice for Victims”, Lammy’s proposal, which is presumably not his own, is extremely controversial. As writes Daniel Alge, senior lecturer in Criminology & Criminal Justice at Brunel University of London, the right to be tried by one’s peers has deep roots in the legal tradition of England and Wales:
Its origins trace back to Magna Carta in 1215, which promised that no one would lose their liberty or property without “the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land”.
The judge and legal philosopher Lord Devlin described trial by jury as “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. It is a symbolic cornerstone of justice in England and Wales.These proposals go far beyond the recommendations put forward in Brian Leveson’s independent review of the criminal courts, published in July 2025. Leveson proposed trial by judge alone where the defendant requested it, or in particularly lengthy and complex trials. But Lammy’s proposals appear to be a watering down of leaked MoJ plans to restrict the use of jury trials to only “public interest” cases with sentences of over five years.
In practical terms, jury trials already form only a small part of the system, accounting for around 2% of all criminal cases. Ministry of Justice data shows that most criminal cases are resolved in the magistrates’ courts, in which three magistrates (who are volunteer lay people rather than professional judges), determine guilt as well as sentence.
In other words, this will probably have a limited impact on the court backlogs. There can be no doubting that the criminal courts are under extraordinary pressure, with a record backlog of over 78,000 crown court cases. However, the main cause of that backlog, according to Alge, is “years of budget reductions, court closures, maintenance backlogs and limits on the number of days courts were permitted to sit.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of Lamy’s proposed changes is their potential political implications. For centuries juries have served as a democratic check on government power. In fact, that is exactly why the barons approached King John in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta, requesting the right to trial by jury — as a check on the unruly king’s power.
The renowned English jurist, justice, and Tory politician William Blackstone (1723-1780) wrote the following about trial by jury in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which (according to Wikipedia) became the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law:
“Trial by jury ever has been, and I trust ever will be, looked upon as the glory of the English law… So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate; not only from all open attacks (which none will be so hardy as to make), but also from secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial.
In the House of Commons on Tuesday, Labour MP Diane Abbot left Starmer with egg on his face by reminding him of what he himself had said about trial by jury in 1992: “the right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the State and the power of the individual.”
"The right to trial by jury is an important factor in delicate balance between the power of the state and the power of the individual" – Keir Starmer (1992)
What changed? pic.twitter.com/6nY3c593jH
— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) December 2, 2025
As Steve James writes for WSWS, one of the real targets of the proposed legislation is something called “jury equity” or “jury nullification”, which can be particularly important in trials of a political nature:
This refers to the right of a jury to determine whether a crime has been committed at all, regardless of the opinion of the trial judge.
Jury equity was famously exercised in 1985 by the jury in the case against civil servant Clive Ponting, who leaked details of the then Tory government’s misinformation over the circumstances surrounding the 1982 sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by the Royal Navy, with the loss of 272 lives.
Ponting was acquitted after a two-week trial, despite admitting that he had leaked the documents in question and the trial judge’s insistence that he had no defence in law. Ponting claimed, and the jury agreed, that releasing the documents, which exposed government lies over the circumstances of the sinking, was in the public interest.
The principle has become an irritant to governments ever since, particularly following a series of cases in which members of climate and anti-genocide protest organisations such as Extinction Rebellion and Palestine Action have been acquitted despite instructions from the bench.
Added Legal Protection for Financial Criminals?
The fact that complex financial and fraud cases, which are defined as those involving “hidden dishonesty or complexity outside the understanding of the general public”, will also be exempt from trial by jury if Lammy’s proposed bill is enacted is also deeply troubling, though it seems to be getting less traction in the media.
Without trial by jury, the legal process could be further tilted in the favour of the UK’s financial and business elite. After all, it’s easier to corrupt one judge than 12 (angry) men and women. And this is the UK we are talking about, the country that arguably perfected the art (if you can call it that) of financial crime.
However, an alternative perspective was offered in the comments section by NC reader Anonymous 2:
If you use mathematical models to commit fraud with complicated algebraic formulae and place them in front of a group of ordinary English men and women and start arguing about the merits or demerits of particular pricing models (e.g. options), then you be can be completely sure that they will glaze over mentally very quickly.
At the very least the jury should be made up of genuine peers in such cases – i.e. people with a high level of mathematical and financial skills, not the average man or woman in the street. Otherwise I am comfortable with a smaller panel of suitably qualified experts supporting the judge, who should also be a specialist in trying advanced financial fraud.
The present system is an invitation to fraudsters because if they make their frauds sufficiently complex there is not a snowball in hell’s chance the jury will convict as they have to be confident that they understand the issues and in such cases they won’t.
The drastic curtailing of jury trials would be concerning enough if it were being done by a government that had shown itself to be more or less worthy of the voters’ trust. That is not the case here.
In fact, Keir Starmer is the most unpopular prime minister since records began in 1977 — a feat he managed to pull off in little over a year. His Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is also apparently the most unpopular chancellor on record.
It’s not hard to see why: they have broken just about every promise they made to voters. As the veteran journalist Peter Oborne warned before Starmer’s election, “it would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer says — he has a long record of making promises which he then goes on to break.”
“It would be very unwise to believe a word that Keir Starmer ever says.”
~ Peter Oborne.
Keir Starmer has to be the most unlikeable Prime Minister in my lifetime. And he’s got some stiff competition. He’s a compulsive liar, drunk on power and a sanctimonious hypocrite. pic.twitter.com/SKu7ZiqAtg
— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) December 1, 2025
Laying the Foundations of an Authoritarian State
Starmer also has extreme authoritarian impulses. As The Guardian‘s George Monbiot warned in February, his government is laying the foundations of an authoritarian state that could be used by an even more extreme government in the future — perhaps even one led by Reform leader Nigel Farage:
Here are three of the consistent features of authoritarian states: the extreme persecution of dissent, the use of parajudicial measures to shut down opposition movements, and the selective application of the law. All three are already widely deployed in the UK. Though they were introduced in their current form by the Tories, they have been sustained and defended by Keir Starmer’s party.
What this means is that if a hard- or far-right government starts doing what they always do – persecuting minorities and opponents, ripping into public services and the enabling state – and if good citizens take to the streets to defend the people and institutions under attack, the government will be able to round them up and throw them in prison, without the need for a single new law or statute.
Freedom of speech is under constant attack. As the Times of London reported in April this year, police officers made 12,183 arrests in 2023, when the Tories were in office, the equivalent of around 33 per day, under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
The acts, which make it illegal to cause distress by sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character” on an electronic communications network, are being applied on an ever-broader basis. We don’t yet know how many arrests were made in 2024, when Starmer came to power.
What we do know is that hundreds of people, including many pensioners, have been arrested for simply protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The recent prosecution of Natalie Strecker for writing and sharing tweets calling for resistance against the genocide revealed just how twisted the UK’s legal system has become.
From former UK ambassador Craig Murray’s blog post, “The Terrifying Case of Natalie Strecker”:
Strecker is charged with eliciting support for Hamas and Hezbollah, based on 8 tweets, cherry-picked by police and prosecutors from an astounding 51,000 tweets she sent, mainly from the Jersey Palestine Solidarity Committee account….
The prosecution case is that these tweets, both collectively and individually, amount to an invitation of support for Hamas and Hezbollah resulting in up to ten years in jail in Jersey, or 14 years in jail on the UK mainland.
The prosecution explicitly stated, and the judge notably intervened to make sure that everybody understood, that it is the offence of supporting terrorism to state that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance in international law.
Judge John Saunders interrupted the prosecution to ask whether they were saying that he would be guilty of support for terrorism if, in a lecture, he told an international law class that Palestinians have the right to armed resistance in international law.
After some kerfuffle when faced with such an awkward question, the prosecution replied that yes, it could be the offence to tell law students that.
“A Fledgling Police State”
While Strecker was eventually acquitted, her case reveals a very disturbing truth about the state of lawful speech under the Starmer government, notes the journalist and author Jonathan Cook:
The British state considers it unlawful to repeat what international law explicitly states: that occupied peoples like the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal occupation.
That means:
a) The Starmer government openly rejects international law.
b) The Starmer government can scrap free speech and the right to protest – the bare minimal foundations of a democracy – whenever it chooses. We must conclude that we now live in a fledgling police state, that the number of political prisoners is going to grow rapidly, and that the room for dissent is going to shrink further and further.
The fact that this is all happening under a prime minister who before entering politics was a senior human rights lawyer makes it all the more disturbing.
“Facial Recognition” in “Every City, Town and Village”?
At the same time, the Starmer government is planning to unleash live facial recognition cameras across the UK’s urban landscape, completing a project begun some years ago under the Tories.
Police have been using facial recognition technology absent a democratic or legal basis for a decade.
Today, the Government has introduced a consultation which is long overdue.
Join our fight to #StopFacialRecognition – donate now⤵️https://t.co/7WxldldTMC
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) December 4, 2025
The Daily Telegraph reports that facial recognition technology could be used in “every city, town and village”. Under the plans, the Police could also be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects against the images of 45 million Britons stored in the passport database.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, warned that the expansion would transform the UK into an “open prison” and that passports would become “mugshots for a giant surveillance database, putting the British public at risk of misidentifications and injustice”:
“Every search through this harvest of our personal photos puts millions of innocent citizens through a police line-up without our knowledge or consent. Sir Keir Starmer’s Government is committing to historic breaches of Britons’ privacy that you might expect to see in China but not in a democracy.”
The scheme is already hitting resistance among some local councils. A cross-party group of independent, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors on Woking Borough Council is calling for the scheme to be suspended, warning that it “risks residents’ right to privacy” and disproportionately impacts ethnic minority communities.
The mass roll out of facial recognition systems goes hand-in-hand with the government’s proposed digital identity system, which in turn goes hand-in-hand with the online age verification system launched in the summer as well as the central bank digital currency (CBDCs) — the so-called “Digital Pound” — that the Bank of England is currently developing.
Digital identity is the keystone of the digital control grids governments around the world are rapidly erecting to keep their restless populaces in check. Without digital identity, the programmable CBDCs that would give central banks and government unprecedented ability to track and control our spending would be unworkable, as the Bank for International Settlements admitted in 2021.
So far, almost 3 million people have signed a parliamentary petition calling on the Starmer government to scrap its plans to launch a de facto mandatory digital identity system. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, the digital identity systems being created by governments around the world are “fundamentally incompatible with a privacy-protecting and human rights-defending democracy”:
It potentially leads to situations where state authorities can treat the entire population with suspicion of not belonging, and would shift the power dynamics even further towards government control over our freedom of movement and association…
In a country increasing the deployment of other surveillance technologies like face recognition technology, this raises additional concerns about how digital ID could lead to new divisions and inequalities based on the data obtained by the system.
EFF is one of 13 rights groups, including Big Brother Watch and Privacy International, that will be urging Members of Parliament to “oppose measures that risk turning the UK into a Checkpoint Britain” at this coming Monday’s petition debate. [For interested UK-based readers: click here to use Big Brother Watch’s speedy tool to call on your respective MPs to attend the debate]
Of course, as we noted in the first post in this series, most of the dystopian policies and practices highlighted in this post — particularly the crackdowns on protests and free speech — represent a continuation, and at times intensification, of policies and practices already well under way under the Tories.
It is also true that these policies and practices form part of a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” — as broad economic conditions deteriorate and AI-enabled technologies advance, the temptation among governments to exploit these new surveillance and control systems is irresistible while the potential benefits for Big Tech are huge.
It is a trend of which Starmer’s Britain is most definitely at the sharp, leading edge.
Consider linking part 1 at the top of the article for those who haven’t read it.
Just did it. Thanks.
The added link appears to link to this very page instead of to part 1.
Had a rummage in your back catalogue and couldn’t find an article titled “Just How Dystopian Could Starmer’s Britain Become?”.
Dang! My apologies. This should be the right one:
Looks good!
Last nit (sry): missing link in “[For interested UK-based readers: click here to use Big Brother Watch’s speedy tool to call on your respective MPs to attend the debate]”
Sending coffee…
Thanks for the article, good round up of a saddening subject.
Thanks. Link fixed.
The current Labour Party is not supported by anyone—not the right, not the left, not employers, not workers, not the wealthy, not the poor, not white people, and not minorities. So, who does the Labour Party represent?
Why are we so sure that the wealthy do not support the policies of the current Labour government? I mean, the proposal to exampt financial crimes from trial by jury seems an explicit give-away to a very particular jet-set of people, for example.
Similarly for the budding police state discussed in the post here. Suppression of dissent directly benefits the extant socio-economic elites. Mind, these elites see the unpopularity of the Starmer government in the polls, and will not mind a government change, provided that the next government continues to serve their interests. It’s the “common people” who, quite rightly, feel neither the Tories, nor Labour, nor Farrage represent their interests – well, that’s how oligarchical rule works!
The WEF
It is beyond obvious that the only reason for this brazen overreach is that Starmer’s government and the present Labour party in general are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Israeli government. Their mission is to turn the UK into a managed middle eastern security apparatus in service first and foremost of the greater Israel project and its needs. The native population be dammed, and the devil take any immigrant and especially muslim citizens-now-come-denizens who dare dissent.
Here is a very good interview with Paul Holden who has investigated the takeover of the Labour party during the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn from 2017-2019, paid for by large sums of undeclared money coming ostensibly from pro-Israel businessmen, managed by Starmers chief manager McSweeney. The ‘reforms’/purges of Labour after Starmer’s took the leadership have paved the way for the authoritarianism pit the UK is now digging itself into. Obviously on behalf of foreign powers.
Similar crackdowns and lock-downs and losses of rights, freedoms, institutions and dignity are happening in the US also, again to shore up support for Israel. But the UK is really an egregious case. The US has some internal explanatory causes, it has a sizeable jewish zionist population, substantial christian zionist populations, as well as large imperial interests to manage in the middle east. The UK has none of these. No internal reasons exist, none of population support these measures, and there is no foreign policy gain to enacting them, especially given the loss in reputation which is happening even in the US!
The cold reality is the UK now more resembles a 2nd or 3rd world Arab regime, like Jordan or Egypt. A poor country with little economic prospects, ruled by an unpopular political class with a large security state to quell dissent, caring more about pleasing foreign interests than domestic discontent, with the mores of its leadership increasingly divorced from and hostile to those of its own population. If the UK enters another IMF bailout, then likewise the state will similarly be supported by foreign aid, of course conditional on even more obedience to foreign whims.
It’s hard to see the English putting up with this. They are losing what they have been explicitly raised to see as their holiest birthrights. For nothing. Even their colonial offspring in the US, in the US government, are disgusted enough to be openly scorning their domestic crackdowns. The situation is that absurd. Is the UK a new Jordan, or the Shah’s Iran, time will tell.
While I disagree that the UK govt is a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the Israeli govt (rather I see that the American, British, and western European ruling classes identify with the Atlanticist imperial project, which includes Israel’s, and by extension, their hegemony over the Near East), I think your comparison to the regimes of Jordan and Egypt is spot on, especially regarding the pecuniary and moral distance between the ruling class and the rest of us. It’s been like that increasingly for a while now, but what’s separated the “liberal democracies” is the lack of a mukhabarat, a not-so-secret police force to openly squash dissent. Let’s hope you’re right about what the English will put up with.
>> It’s hard to see the English putting up with this. They are losing what they have been
>> explicitly raised to see as their holiest birthrights [emphasis added].
There is the nub of the whole matter, as in it all boils down to ‘whose ox is gored?’ I mean, all the present hand-wringing and pearl-clutching notwithstanding, it’s not like Starmer’s latest outrage is without precedent. Irish people remember all too well the notorious Diplock courts.
The UK has always been an authoritarian police-state. Oppression levels can wax and wane in authoritarian societies, but just because oppression is increasing doesn’t mean they’re “about” to become authoritarian. It means the ruling class is tightening the screws on an already-unfree, authoritarian society.
Free nations don’t have unaccountable leaders, and they don’t have widespread selfishness and corruption. Any British person who thinks they have liberty because they have a court system that sometimes offers trial by duty clearly doesn’t know what liberty is like. Here in the US, Americans have the same problem. 98% of federal trials in the US end in plea-bargaining with no trial by jury. So long as we’re trapped with unaccountable leaders imposing laws on us, we will never be free.
Americans and British people can only think they have liberty or freedom because they don’t know what free societies are actually like. Free societies consistently encourage and reward generosity and strongly discourage selfishness, to the extent that selfishness essentially doesn’t exist. I got to witness it with my own eyes once in 2015, and it was astounding being in a nation where sharing was simply normal. The utter lack of police, prisons, and crime was equally astounding.
Selfishness is at the heart of almost every negative article here, from plastics pollution to political corruption to pesticides in food. Any society with a ruling class has an economy that rewards selfishness, as well as endless corruption. Free societies don’t allow any corruption to start with. In order to have meaningful political change, I believe we have to be clear on what freedom would actually look like, based on studying free societies that don’t have corruption and greed. They can show us what our tyrannies are like, and what could be done to free ourselves.
“Swift and Fair Plan to Get Justice for Victims”
As soon as I saw this, I thought, yes, that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Why did it take them so long? For the last generation, the idea of “justice” in the sense of doing the right thing has been replaced by the idea of “justice for victims” in the popular discourse. We have moved away from the modern idea of charging people with having violated laws made by Parliament, to something like a medieval concept of “victims” seeking satisfaction. I remember thinking at this rate we’d soon be back to confessions extracted under torture and trial by ordeal and combat.
And this pressure has come from self-styled progressives and part of the Left, who have with great application constructed an open goal for the likes of Starmer to kick into. Their relentless pressure to widen the definition of rape and punish “hate crimes” and “islamophobia” and such, have made charging and convicting people a lot easier. Abolishing juries, who might take a common-sense, experienced-based approach to such charges is the logical next step. Every acquittal in a high-profile case of this sort is immediately greeted as an “insult to the victims,” followed by demands that the government must “do more,” so that more people can be found guilty. So now they’ve got what they wanted, and I hope they’re happy. I don’t expect to hear any opposition from professional Goodthinkers and civil rights types. (“But what about the rights of the victim?”)
More generally, we’re seeing the results of the decline in the quality of government in Britain over at least the last decade. The government is frightened, uncertain, and has no idea how to respond to popular demands because its managerial ethos can’t cope. So it’s lashing out in all directions. Fortunately, these people don’t have the imagination to be genuinely evil.
trial by ordeal and combat
I’d love to have the option of trial by combat with Starmer…
Interestingly, the last trial by combat case in the UK was Ashford v. Thornton in 1818
>>>So it’s lashing out in all directions. Fortunately, these people don’t have the imagination to be genuinely evil.
Does it really take imagination to be truly evil especially if the fools just keep adding more repressive measures the more frightened they are as it all spirals out of control?
Baunhoffer (stupid is worse than evil) reimagined:
“Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.”
https://bigthink.com/thinking/bonhoeffers-theory-stupidity-evil/
Constitutional Rights Gone for $1000.
“What happens when you give up / take away the guns, Alex?”
British Upper Crust Blackmailer and _ for $1000.
“Who was Jimmy Savile, Alex?
Swift courts? I think rather than speedy they mean more of the Jonathan variety.
Just How Dystopian Could Starmer’s Britain Become? How good is your imagination? It’s not like he is doing this from a position of strength as both the Labour and Torie party are heading to oblivion. Lots of people are giving their support to the Reform party instead but if Nigel Farage is the answer to your problem, then you know that you really do have a problem. And it’s not like Starmer could call in the Army as they may not be able to shake enough soldiers loose to occupy London. Starmer knows that he is on the way out but it does not matter as he will be replaced by a Starmer political clone. So he is seeing how far he can push things to get the UK that the elites really want. How will the Brits themselves act? Hard to say. But I am reminded what young British officers were told in the 19th century. That if the soldiers were grumbling and complaining then that was OK. It was when they went quite that you really had to look out.
I have a particular perspective about complex financial fraud cases. A friend was (indirectly) involved in a complex financial fraud case forty years ago where after six months of the case being heard before a jury the judge called the case to an end because it was clear that everyone in the court room was totally confused about the matters being tried and had completely lost the plot. Nobody had a clue what was going on.
If you use mathematical models to commit fraud with complicated algebraic formulae and place them in front of a group of ordinary English men and women and start arguing about the merits or demerits of particular pricing models (e.g. options), then you be can be completely sure that they will glaze over mentally very quickly.
At the very least the jury should be made up of genuine peers in such cases – i.e. people with a high level of mathematical and financial skills, not the average man or woman in the street. Otherwise I am comfortable with a smaller panel of suitably qualified experts supporting the judge, who should also be a specialist in trying advanced financial fraud.
The present system is an invitation to fraudsters because if they make their frauds sufficiently complex there is not a snowball in hell’s chance the jury will convict as they have to be confident that they understand the issues and in such cases they won’t.
Thanks, Anonymous 2, for your alternative perspective, which casts things in a very different light. Your suggestion of having juries made up of genuine peers — i.e. people who can actually understand the complex models under discussion — certainly makes sense, as long as they’re uncompromised of course. If you don’t mind, have hoisted part of your comment into the post.
I am flattered you think my comment worth note. Thank you.
Or there should be a group of experts in every field and for complex trials involving the various tricks used to process data perhaps 5 or more could be drawn at random from the population of experts to be paid by the court which is reimbursed by the punter who loses.
Given a range of opinions from articulate experts who can reduce a few formlae to words and compare the effects of each of each on the output, most juries would be able to come to a sensible judgement. The real problem arise by the fact the expert witnesses are chosen and paid because they enable advocates to argue a particular case. In those circumstances it pays to over-complexify the arguments and confuse the judge as well as the jury.
It only gets weird when Botany Bay starts transporting Aussies accused of petty crimes, to the UK.
:-)
Well we did start with Rupert Murdoch. But he absconded from there and went to America where his crime spree continues.
Why anyone is surprised by Starmer breaking every election promise is beyond me. The man has done nothing but lie ever since he joined the Labour Party and began his secret campaign to defenestrate Corbyn, all the while pledging allegiance to a Labour programme he never had any intention of implementing.
This is what did scare me about Russia not finishing the war fast as possible, Europe and UK will use the war to turn in to fully dictatorship. People say Europe is crashing but they are wrong its going where they always wanted Europe parliament get all the power. Looking at Romania you could say Europe don’t have democasy anymore the only reason same thing have not yet happen in the rest off Europe countries is the party who is coming to power is still neoconservative
EU* and UK turning “in to fully dictatorship” was just a question of time. Russians have nothing to do with it, not should they care about it. It’s beyond ridiculous for EU citizens to expect/hope Russians would save them from themselves. Russia finishing the war fast not being a possibility is another thing (because the end requires collapse of aforementioned EU and/or NATO, which is something that only EU citizens could do fast, theoretically).
*EU, not Europe. There is no such thing as Europe parliament.
Who is this Nick Corbishley? I wondered when I saw this post. A financial journalist now based in Barcelona and formerly based in San Francisco. In other words, somebody with little understanding of what living in Great Britain is like. But he likes lecturing on how dystopian or otherwise this place is.
Let me explain something: Those “dystopian” aspects of British society are often a direct consequence of Americans that want to have an easy escape hatch to Great Britain. Mr Corbishley, having escaped himself from the USA, must understand that urge. Digital ID is taboo because this country has no ID cards of any sort, in order to make it really easy for Americans and other English-speaking people to come here and pretend to be locals. Starmer mainly is trying to contain the flood of American escapees that we may see when (not if) things get really ugly in the USA.
As for trying to speed up trials, it’s a must if you want to keep any sensible levels of justice while the economy goes downhill, as it must thanks to financial shenanigans that Mr Corbishley, being in the finance journalism business, could certainly explain better than me. Justice delayed is justice denied, especially in criminal cases.
On the “facial recognition” and “freedom of speech” questions, it’s two sides of the same coin, isn’t it? Oh, you didn’t know that? Let me explain. A relative of mine worked in NVidia, back in the days when people didn’t know what OpenAI was up to, but OpenAI was a preferential customer. He was tied with NDAs to the point that he would never discuss his job, and from everything he said, I’m pretty sure he was never told that somebody was using those chips for language models. His main worry, that he and his colleagues would talk about, was that the chips would be used for facial recognition in places like China. Now, how many mental jumps do you need to make to go from “facial recognition” to “sentiment analysis”? And are those ideas even closer in Chinese, I wonder? So, the government in Britain is using sentiment analysis tools? And how long ago do we know for a fact they have been used in the USA? You could point at Cambridge Analytica, but let’s be honest, Al Gore in his autobiography already described the astounding precision of his campaign manager when doing campaign ads… and let’s not forget, he did not win the election. “Freedom of speech” has for long meant “freedom to engage in oppressive behavioral abuse”, and the champions of this, the masters of dystopia that make financial journalists flee abroad, is the good old USA. Remember, it’s Facebook, not any British company, that is considered responsible for an outbreak in mental health problems among young people. Because their financial model consists in selling to the highest bidder “freedom of speech” aka oppressive behavioural abuse.
Nick Corbishley: based in Barcelona (and to a lesser extent, Mexico). Born in the UK (South Wales to be precise) and spent the first 25 years of his life living in various parts of England. Though he left the UK many years ago, he’s still a frequent visitor to the country. Never spent a day of his life in San Francisco but did previously write for San Francisco-Based WOLF STREET.
In fact, I’ve never actually been to the US (apart from the four hours I spent changing flights at Houston airport in January, 2006), which makes me wonder: how can I be using the United Kingdom, my country of birth where I’ve not lived for over two decades, as an escape hatch from the United States, a country I’ve never even been to?
Please do better research…
…will somebody please pull the metaphorical shiv out of Doly?
Why in the world would American escapees want to go to a small, rainy, cold, ridiculously overpriced island (with great tea and pints and pubs, I admit, but Norwegian fish and chips are just as good as are Ireland’s, and I am partial to Italian cuisine) with no resources, no industry, just financial chicanery and a dysfunctional repressive political system? Trust me, y’all don’t need to do nothin else to be an unattractive refuge.
No offense intended to the NC Brit commentariat.
One can honestly argue (not saying win) that China is more free and democratic in matters that actually matter – ability to walk any street at night without being scared, not just in the ‘citadels’ (freedom not to be robbed and killed), afford life (freedom not to be hungry and homeless) and die for lack of medical care, and where the government responds to citizens’ concerns not only the oligarch’s concerns in opposition to the 99.999% – the actual opposite of the definition of democracy (representing the populace).
Meanwhile the Overton window is wider in Russia than in the loudly self-proclaiming free West these years (during a time of war)!
or was that a ramble through sarcasm – hard to decipher.
The UK stopped being a free country during WW1; which it should ever have entered in the first place.