The UK is a dictatorship now – that won’t change until we admit it

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British democracy has been under under attack since the post WWII Labour government championed the working class. Every Conservative government since has strained to roll back those gains, restore the advantages of the wealthy and erode democracy.

Tony Blair’s New Labour helped the owning class more than Thatcher had dared and became the kind of imperialist warmonger that the war generations sacrificed so much to defeat. The entrenched political duopoly became a neoliberal lock out, a Hobson’s choice of blue or red Tories.

The brief hope offered by Corbynism has been stamped out by the right wing media, Israel and elements from within Labour itself. Tony Blair has been replaced by Phony Blair (Keir Starmer) and the status quo restored.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”  

Goethe would surely see the UK as a dictatorship – all the more so because most of its brainwashed citizens believe they have choices.

Political narratives are ruthlessly policed by the establishment media. Those trying to tell the truth must embrace career suicide and risk imprisonment, heterodox opinions are marginalised and excluded. Fighting a hopeless battle on independent websites and social media – alternative journalists have less than 1% of the reach of the mainstream media.

Sodium Haze occasionally has about about 7,000 visits a week. Most of what we write about isn’t particularly clever or that hard to find out – it is noteworthy only because it contradicts the approved neoliberal techno-progressivist narratives of the mainstream.

The Guardian Media Group gathers £225 million a year and their in-house opinionators and churnalists are handsomely rewarded – by contrast I effectively have to pay to write this site (despite a trickle of heart warming donations).

Sky News has an operating profit of over £1 billion, the BBC has an income of £5 billion – the UK print media is owned by a handful of billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, Alexander Lebedev, Viscount Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers. 

Yes, I may be free to wave the tiniest of flags for morality and critical thinking, free to post memes and links on Facebook – but with no way to reach a mass audience I am no threat to the establishment’s control…and what do you think might happen to me if I were?

I am surely on the radar of various surveillance agencies, quite probably listed as an ‘extremist’ – but the truth is, alternative media sites are not big enough to warrant harassment – indeed, we contribute to the illusion of freedom. 

Dictatorships have shades of grey and I don’t risk jail or worse as I might in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria or China – but that doesn’t mean that speech is free or uncontrolled in the UK. 

The UK establishment’s obsession with controlling narratives has recently been highlighted by the antics of the Tory party’s ideological guru Dominic Cummings who has been extending the influence of right wing politics into areas previously thought to be less partisan.

Cummings attempts to brow beat the civil service via the imposition of a central policy unit staffed by cut-throat enforcers, has echoes of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell. Recent revelations that he directly influenced the secretive governmental scientific body SAGE into adopting his broadly eugenicist ‘herd immunity’ ideas are deeply worrying.

Science has always been vulnerable to undue influence based on career prospects and funding and it appears as if the gap between politics and science is narrowing in the UK (and elsewhere).  The conquest of science and the betrayal of truth in service of political expediency are old calling cards of dictatorships.  

Perhaps the most dispiriting sign that the UK is sliding deeper into despotism is the Tories arrogant disdain for the truth – an attitude surely based on the media establishment’s ever growing capacity to sell the masses almost any lie they choose.

From Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, the poor and vulnerable scapegoated for the 2007 financial crash,  the £350 million ‘Brexit bonus’ that we will never receive, the idea that Jeremy Corbyn was an antisemitic terrorist sympathiser: these lies were all swallowed by a very large number of people.

The UK has failed to contain its Covid-19 outbreak – but despite Brits being 8 times more likely to die of the virus than Germans, 20 times more likely than South Koreans, and 2000 times more likely than those safely in New Zealand: a majority still think the Tories are doing well. Even when presented with a football stadium full of dead bodies – most people still believe the spin.

I have no silver bullet for how to roll back the despotism that we already have, or how to stop a slide into something even darker  – all I can say is that to bring down a dictatorship you have first have to bear witness and call out oppression for what it is. 

So as a gullible and comfortably brainwashed nation settles down to watch BBC News and to send donations to The Guardian, I call upon those still awake to stop calling the UK a democracy. We live in a neoliberal dictatorship and until we admit that it won’t change.

Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.

I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.  

If you found this article useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.     

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