The Union Jackal
Summer 2025  

3,415 words

Sign from the protests in Epping.

A Very Civil War

With Britain inching closer to mass civil unrest, it is worth dusting off the only sensible thing 1990s Conservative Prime Minister John Major ever said. Major was placed in Downing Street to placate a Tory Party – and a seething public – after Margaret Thatcher was seen to have gone beyond her brief and started actually acting like a Conservative. Asked to define Englishness, Major said an Englishman apologized when you trod on his foot, apologized again if this was repeated, and knocked you down the third time. Today, the British people may have had their foot stomped once too often.

Mass immigration does not have humanitarian values at its center, or economic necessity, or refugee status, or even the Great Replacement. Immigration has mathematics at its center. For once, it’s a technocrat’s dream. Figures, numbers, stats…all easily manipulable, like the people the mandarins of Whitehall prepare and curate them for. But mathematics will out. Immigration, particularly illegal immigration (or “informal”, or “irregular” immigration, both of which terms are starting to be used officially) is a zero-sum game: space and resources versus immigrant numbers.

Immigration into Britain is not approaching some event horizon the other side of which is civil strife. It is already there, and it can’t pull back. Instead of taking the bull by the horns, the government on both sides of the uniparty deny there even is a bull. The Conservatives have a hollow voice because the acceleration of immigration started on their watch, and remained unchecked. Labour are simply completing the job, importing Muslim military materiel and placing it in barracks up and down the country, while simultaneously weakening the army and the police, and attempting to muzzle the public.

What should have been one of the biggest British political scandals of the decade came and went in the news cycle recently like a pop star’s divorce. Again showing the reality of the uniparty, the Conservative government agreed to take at least 15,000 Afghans who had fought, or at least served, with the allies in Afghanistan, and who had relocated to Pakistan. Some estimates are as high as 25,000. The government applied to the courts for, and received, a so-called “super-injunction” preventing any press coverage of the deal, and thus any public knowledge, barring whistle-blowers. There weren’t any. This only came out last month.

Labour took the baton – and kept the super-injunction in place – when they came to power, but they didn’t release that information. What a wound they could have inflicted on the old enemy! The secret importation of thousands of Afghan fighters! They could have buried the Tories with that. But the Tories are no longer the enemy for Labour. The British people are.

It is fascinating to watch the media, both mainstream and alternative, gradually coming to the realization that their government hates the native British people. This dawning of consciousness is like watching some old oil tanker turning by inches in the Panama Canal. It is hard to take, admittedly, the notion that those you have been taught were elected to serve and protect you actually wish you harm. For the English, in particular, this represents an existential betrayal that takes time to register. It’s like discovering your nanny is treasonous and murderous, and has gone from being Mary Poppins to Scary Poppins.

And so the civil unrest which is brewing like a nice cup of English tea is not simply anti-mass immigration (or “anti-immigrant”, to use the press term), but is also anti-government, and that beleaguered government are all too aware of this mutiny in waiting. The protests, focused on in Epping but taking place countrywide, are being held by ordinary, white, concerned parents. This is the group the government despises most: the white, civically Christian, law-abiding nuclear family. There are a few older men at the protests who just like to shout, but these are not the “far right” ogres the press paint them as. Just to provoke the good burghers of Epping a little more, the police escorted some antifa counter-protestors from the station into the heart of a peaceful protest. When it was time to go home for this rent-a-mob, with their identical, brand-new “Stand up to racism!” placards, the police took them back to the station in police vans, or “buses” as one officer described them.

Epping is part of the overspill from east London, a mini diaspora which began when the Jews, and latterly the Muslims, began to take over the old East End. They are tough, Cockney stock, and they will not tolerate their foot being trodden on for a third time for very long. In Canary Wharf, the financial center of London, protesters at the 4-star Britannia Hotel were told to leave and not to return to the site for 28 days. This dispersal order (known as “Section 42”) was first put into place to counter the freedom of assembly of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and this is in line with the image of the protesters which suits the government and its media courtiers.

There are two ways to push back. You take to the streets, or you take to social media. Or you do both. It is the combination which frightens the government most. People don’t need to gather at the church anymore for a rabble-rousing speech and a decision to confront the Sergeant-at-Arms. The first thing British agitators HOPE Not Hate stressed after the Southport riots was something called “decentralized organization”, a fancy way of saying “using the internet.” So, the streets of the United Kingdon, currently seriously disunited, are getting closer to boiling point, and the police have already voiced concerns about their ability to cope with large-scale civil unrest. The government’s response is to ensure that if you can’t arrest your political enemies on the streets, you can snare them on the net. The government are all out of arguments. Now it is time to use the law to enforce its plan.

Think of the Children

Why truth? wrote Nietzsche. Why not rather untruth? The British Government certainly has no problem with that arrangement, and seems to find the truth a bit overrated, a little passé. So, as Solzhenitsyn suggested in satirical mood, if the truth is no good, then away with the truth!

The UK’s Online Safety Bill became the Online Safety Act (OSA) in July, and it is a Trojan horse of epic proportions. I wrote about the Act here in 2023 when it was still the Online Safety Bill, making its way through Parliament. Now, it has arrived, and it’s every bit as threatening to British liberty as it seemed at the time. It’s hard to overstate what is happening to freedom in the land of John Stuart Mill, who wrote in 1859’s On Liberty that:

[I]t is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government… will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.

As noted, after the stepping on the collective British foot for the third time already noted, the “general intolerance of the public” is something with which government is likely to become increasingly familiar. The OSA, largely ignored by the MSM but trumpeted in the alternative media, is not going to help matters.

If you wish for further proof that Britain is run by a uniparty, you need simply note that the hard work on the OSA was done by a Conservative government, while its execution was left to the uniparty’s other wing, the Labour government. Neither party had any quarrel with the other over the implications of the Act. They just wanted to get it done.

And, in good technocratic style, the Act is ambiguous, both in its application and in its wording. For the first, the ambiguity is that, although the Bill purports to be for the protection of minors, the way is open for the persecution of majors. This is a relatively recent tactic of Parliamentarians and involves the using of children as virtual human shields. Thus, anyone opposing the OSA by implication wishes harm to children, at least in the new, Lego-style inductive reasoning that now dominates politics. Nigel Farage has already been compared with Jimmy Savile for questioning the wisdom or applicability of the OSA, not by any loyalist media but by the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Innovation, Peter Kyle. If you know who Jimmy Savile is – Britain’s most notorious celebrity pedophile – then you can appreciate the Rabelaisian system of equivalence employed by the political class.

The other ambiguity is in the wording of the Act itself. The list of illegal content provider platforms will now be obliged to remove on pains of large fines (I wonder where that money goes) includes the usual offences you would expect. It thus becomes illegal to post content relating to child sexual abuse, fraud, drug-dealing, inciting violence, terrorism and so on. But in at number 8 on a list of 13 is “illegal immigration and people smuggling.” Taken to its extreme, which Labour will surely do, this means any footage deemed connected with illegal immigration may now be illegal, including hotel protests. Once again we hear the echo of the politician in A Clockwork Orange; ”Soon we will be needing all our prison spaces for political prisoners.”

In fact, Labour have managed to make the original Bill even more draconian by making one or two adjustments after the Act became law. The government has set up a unit snappily titled the National Internet Intelligence Investigations Team (NIIIT) to monitor social media. It’s actually an efficient use of resources, as something similar was set up to monitor social media during what has been called the “plandemic”. They’re just reviving it. In fact, government has monitored British mail for 50 years, it’s just that up until now they were looking for trigger words such as “Islam” or “bomb” or “Republican.” Now, they are looking for mention of illegal immigration, “two-tier policing”, and Islamic terrorism (not the committing of it, but criticism of it). They are also looking for impertinence. A meme featuring Starmer mocked up as a baby was blocked. The proud devil, as More noted, cannot endure to be mocked.

But how far will this new elite squad go to silence those it is supposed to serve? Their first task, as they see it, will be to remove any obstacles that more wily, tech-savvy commenters may be thinking of using to access newly banned sites. Now, the average British politician is male and 55. They don’t really get tech. But their younger advisers do, and it can’t be a coincidence that the number of governmental advisers has climbed exponentially in the last two decades. I would love to see a comparative graph with the rise of IT in governmental communication. Westminster’s new religion these days is known as “Comms.” And these new unwatched watchers are already getting ahead of the game.

An example: Proton is a Swiss-based email provider, double-encrypted and secure. I use it myself. You can always trust the Swiss with your details, hence Swiss bank accounts. Proton also provide Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and noted a 1400% rise in demand a few days after the Online Safety Act came into law. But is a VPN the answering to avoiding censorship in the post-OSA UK? Just in case it is, the Government is considering banning them.

And perhaps they might come for AI. One of the growing band of low-key citizen journalists (on the op-ed side) reports that he asked ChatGPT the comparative costs to Britain of the Ukraine conflict, and the approximate cost of ending homelessness in the UK. ChatGPT merrily replied that while fixing homelessness would cost approximately £1 billion, Vladimir Zelensky, surely the richest Jew in Eastern Europe, has received £13 billion to pay for his unwinnable war. Now, there is no need even to check to see if these figures tally with reality. If they do, or at least are believed to be true and pass into online chatter, then the government will soon take notice, if they haven’t already. Americans in the UK have reported visiting the UK immediately after the Act and finding that familiar American sites were no longer available to them.

The United Kingdom is a tragedy in need of a hero in government. Fortunately, they have one. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, admittedly, but they have one, and he was just in town.

Alpha Male Masterclass

A recent growth industry within the media has been the rise of the expert in body language. It has become common to watch someone decoding Macron getting slapped by his “wife”, or telling us what someone is thinking based on how many times they cross and uncross their legs in an interview. But these gestural gurus had a special day out when President Trump visited the UK, partly to check on his new psychological punchbag, Sir Keir Starmer. This was really enjoyable to watch, and Trump is a master of non-violent, alpha-male, dominance behavior. He looks and talks like what he is, a rich guy who owns golf clubs. But the viewer is constantly aware that this is the President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world (at the time of writing). Trump shows, he doesn’t tell. Biden often mentioned the fact that he was President. Trump does so very rarely. Most of the body-language decipherers were watching the wrong fighter, however, as Starmer stepped into the ring. They concentrated on Starmer’s defensiveness, his craven interjections, the pathos of his status as a statesman. They should have been watching the champ.

Trump’s first move wasn’t body language, it was body politic language. No receptions at Downing Street for 47. Mohammed doesn’t go to the mountain. He entertained Starmer at his golf club in Scotland, as quintessentially British a gesture as you could wish for. It’s the sort of thing David Niven or Sean Connery would have done (Connery was once a surprise voice backing Trump over a golf course held up by planning objections). The message from the White House was clear: President Trump doesn’t miss fairway time to come to London to see you. You travel halfway up your own country to come see him. Round one to Trump.

The second round began when a reporter asked Trump about freedom of speech, and Trump managed to turn this into a piece of cheeky yet subtle provocation of Starmer. He asked the PM if he thought the reporter had anywhere special in mind, and Starmer was forced to rehash the lie he told in the Oval Office about the UK having a proud tradition of free speech. Right verb, wrong tense. The UK had a proud tradition of free speech until Starmer gimped into town. Round two to Trump, easily and on points. Starmer sounded and looked petulant and immature, with Trump as the avuncular elder. And it got worse for Britain’s PM.

London’s Muslim Mayor, Sadiq – now Sir Sadiq – Khan, has been openly critical of Trump, as so many liberal politicians were when they didn’t see far enough into the future in 2016 to realize that one day they would be frightened of him. Trump dislikes Khan and said so in that agreeable language he uses to his fellows in the political and media class, the tone an adult uses to a child who doesn’t need scolding, not just yet. Khan, said Trump, is a “nasty person” who has “done a terrible job.” The pair were sitting for this round, and Starmer reached out to Trump plaintively, like an anxious wife grasping for her husband’s hand during a frightening moment at the opera. “He’s my friend!” wailed Starmer, like something out of Dickens or Tom Brown’s Schooldays. This is no statesman, this isn’t even a man. Starmer is a teen out of his depth, a pretend man, a boy trying to pull off wearing his father’s suit. And coming up against Trump, an alpha male without even trying that hard, Starmer is being shown exactly what and who he is. And so is everyone else.

As Trump went through an inventory of just how crap Starmer’s government’s policies were, and those of Starmer’s beloved Europe, he was not really listened to by the PM, who stared into the middle-distance like a librarian having a petit mal. When Starmer did speak to Trump, it was to run off a list of the wonderful things he had done, like a narcissistic schoolboy lying to his parents about all the incredible feats he has achieved at school.

Trump repeated his success with Starmer by humiliating the schoolmarm of Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen, with the president looking, speaking, and acting as though he had once written a book on the art of the deal. Even an ex-Eurocrat remarked that the trade deal Trump walked away with was a disaster for Europe. And think about what a disaster for Europe would be like, given that Europe is a disaster to begin with. It is an open secret in Australia that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is openly avoiding being invited to the Oval Office. It’s not just his own loss of face that concerns him, but the fact that he will have to tag along with Kevin Rudd, his ambassador to the US and another of the loose-lipped political hordes flinging mud at Trump in 2016. Well, Trump is all showered off now. He is turning into the best president Britain ever had, and in case Starmer thought his worries were over when Trump flew out, they were just beginning.

Things began happening immediately Trump got back Stateside. The government announced that Lucy Connolly, Britain’s foremost political prisoner now that Tommy Robinson is “on the out”, as old jailbirds call it, would be released in weeks, serving just 40% of her sentence of 31 months for a tweet. Then Trump followed up this jab with a hook. He announced he was sending in the school inspectors.

American readers will be familiar with Jim Jordan, the Republican congressman for Ohio. He was in receipt of an email informing one of his departments that the OSA would affect American tech companies. Jordan immediately commissioned a team to visit the UK – exactly the way an overseeing authority would audit an errant school – and check on what exactly is going down there. And if the British government think Trump’s people are all mouth and no trousers, they should look to Brazil, where Trump’s patent tariffs (available at all good economies) have been deployed to scold the government for suppressing ex-President Bolsonaro.

This is exemplary power-politics, and Britain has an ally in Trump who is likely to do more to protect free speech in the UK than its government.

And finally…

In this age of AI and deep fake, one can never really be sure whether or not what one is witnessing online is real. This particular clip, of the Band of the Coldstream Guards (King Charles’ own military band), playing Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, was one I had to check and check again to make sure it wasn’t a leg-pull. Brass bands often play music not usually connected with the genre, after all. I once sat in the Englischergarten in Munich listening to an oompah band in lederhosen performing hits by Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. But the Royal Band playing Sabbath? It needed confirmation, and did indeed happen as a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath’s singer who recently passed away. It was perfect, with proper rock drumming and Tony Iommi’s guitar solo note-perfect and apparently played on a cornet. Brass bands make quite a racket, and this was close enough to Downing Street for Sir Keir Starmer to have heard it. Paranoid was a good choice, under the circumstances.

The British have had their foot trodden on for a third time, and they are far from happy, but they have something of a secret weapon, as revealed by the goalkeeper for the Lionesses, the England Ladies Football team. Even the BBC were celebrating England’s victory on penalties against Spain in the European Championship final, right up until a post-match interview with the ‘keeper. What made the team fight to the end in this tense game, she was asked. Her simple reply should be a tonic for the true English as they approach a showdown with their government: ”We have English blood in our veins.”

Here’s to the Second Peasants’ Revolt.

-The Union Jackal