Great Britain Is Neither Great Nor Free, and Might Not Even Be Britain for Long
Benjamin Franklin, an Englishman born in the colonial town of Boston in 1706 but who chose to separate himself from the rule of a tyrannical British government as one of our American Founding Fathers, once wrote that “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”
Franklin understood well the depth of the depravity that the government of his ancestors was capable of. Very little about its current manifestation would surprise him.
But the British tyranny of Franklin’s time was at least intended to serve the interests of the British people, however that might be interpreted. It’s far more difficult to make a case that this is still true.
We speak here of an atrocity committed by the British government, that of its treatment of activist Tommy Robinson. Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison a few days ago for … making and showing a documentary film.
Bruce Bawer summarized the facts of the case quite well in Front Page magazine:
In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that.
What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources.
On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism.
Tommy Robinson must be run through kangaroo court after kangaroo court and reviled as a racist because he is committing the crime of standing up for the English, in England.
The discredited Tory Conservative Party and the abominable Labour Party have combined to create a situation where in only 20 years the native British population of Great Britain has declined from 87 percent of that country’s live bodies to only 74 percent. It’s possibly the greatest non-wartime civilizational retreat in modern world history, and it has been supervised and fueled by a bipartisan consensus of the British ruling elite over the direct opposition of the bulk of the British people.
They have nowhere to turn, unless it is to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, an upstart the Conservatives are blaming for having split the center-right vote and allowed Labour to take power in the July elections.
Farage is no fan of Robinson’s. Certainly, neither is the loathsome tyrant Keir Starmer, who currently heads the Labour government that is plunging that country into despair.
But Robinson’s current problems notwithstanding, he wasn’t made a pariah for standing up to jihadists and Muslim rape gangs by the Hard Left in his country. His legal problems, and it’s been more than a decade of his having spent stints as a political prisoner (it’s difficult to characterize his experience any other way), arose chiefly if not solely while the Tories held power from 2010 to this summer.
As has the turbocharged mass migration binge that has changed British society in ways that alarm millions and millions of its citizens.
Unlike Franklin, modern Americans can’t fully comprehend how contemptuously the British government has treated its own people. Franklin would certainly fail to understand, though, how a government could allow foreign-born individuals in service to a hostile culture to create networks by which English girls — as young as 12! — would be recruited and groomed as sex slaves, hooked on heroin, and turned out for prostitution in open view of the police, without much of any sanction placed on them.
Perhaps we’re beginning to understand it here in this country.
But this has gone on for two decades in the U.K. Everyone knows about it. The ruling class has denied the public’s right to speak to the issue, as Robinson’s experience attests. Even local police, as in the case of the massively scandalous grooming gang operating for years in Rotherham, with literally thousands of victims, wouldn’t act against the rape gangs for fear of being called “racist.”
The ruling class in the U.K. has effectively made “racism” a worse crime than rape. As it rapes the future of its citizens in the name of “climate change.”
The last coal-fired power plant in Great Britain was shuttered on Sept. 30. That was the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire. Coal used to power the British economy; now, the U.K. depends on unreliable wind energy for an utterly irresponsible 30 percent of its baseload power, with a common expectation of rolling blackouts shortly to follow. And the day after Ratcliffe-on-Soar was decommissioned, Tata Steel shut down the Port Talbot Steelworks, putting more than 3,000 Welshmen out of work and reducing an entire community to poverty.
Electricity in Great Britain costs 77 percent more than it does in the United States. Little wonder, then, that Great Britain is swiftly being deindustrialized. And in the post-industrial hellscape that remains, Starmer is busily eliminating the subsidy the government offers to pensioners to offset the greater heating costs its policies have imposed on them.
While at the same time he’s under fire for having partaken greedily from a mountain of swag — clothes, concert tickets, and lots of other goodies — from campaign donors.
Corruption and evil such as this can’t be defended in an open forum, so the forum is closed. Just ask Tommy Robinson, who is in prison for attempting to tell the truth about a Syrian migrant who made himself a threat to a community and provoked a response from that community.
He’s in jail not as a criminal. He’s in jail as an example. The tyrants who rule Britain want no more Tommy Robinsons, because eventually they will run into critics they can’t dismiss as “racists” or “Islamophobes.” And as Britain suffers under their misrule, the Tommy Robinsons will multiply. They won’t all be “working-class blokes” with an accent to match. Some might be as posh as the tyrants.
All will note that the British people are running out of time to throw off the tyrants before they become a minority in their own land at the hands of people who prefer sharia to the Ten Commandments. Somehow it’s “racist” to see that outcome as undesirable.
Americans should note what is happening in the U.K. Our ruling class is no less corrupt and no less contemptuous of our people, and its works are no less damaging. They’ve just been at it longer in Britain, and they’re descending more quickly than are we.
Free Tommy Robinson. And free Great Britain, before it’s no longer great.
Scott McKay is the author of the forthcoming novel From Hellmarsh With Love, which is based around what is happening to the UK. It’s available in eight serialized episodes here at The American Spectator; you can also pre-order a signed copy here which will be delivered ahead of those available at Amazon at publication on Nov. 5.
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