The Tories will pay for turning Britain into a police state

How did it happen? How did Britain, while having the courage and resolution to break free from the oppressive empire run from Brussels, simultaneously sleepwalk into the domestic servitude of a police state? Britain has not been invaded by a foreign power since 1688, nor lived under a dictatorship since the death of Oliver Cromwell. In the collective memory of people still living, we have feared for our freedom twice, in 1940 and during the Cold War; but those were foreign threats, we never expected to be enslaved from within, least of all by a Conservative government.

But that is what has happened, and while the Tories cannot escape punishment by unprecedented electoral annihilation next year (the vengeful impulse to destroy them is widespread and strongest among conservatives), the evil they have wrought will, in Shakespearian terms, live after them.

In the meantime, during the half-life of this dying government, the Tories are pressing ahead with every piece of legislation they can devise to extend the power of the state and its allies to intrude into the most intimate areas of citizens’ lives, to abolish privacy and bring every sphere of activity, even recreation, under the scrutiny of the killjoy woke fanatics to whom anything that brings innocent enjoyment to others is a primary target for suppression.

When the Government published its long-deferred white paper on gambling last April, few people paid much attention. That was a mistake: this document proposes a level of intrusion into people’s personal finances that is beyond Stalinist.

In 2020, the National Audit Office brought out a badly written report that claimed gambling in Britain had increased by 57 per cent. This was totally misleading, as it simply reflected the fact that, since 2014, a large number of gambling facilities that had not previously required a licence had been granted one. The Audit Office admitted this and issued clarification.

But it came too late. By then, the usual suspects, the All Party Parliamentary Group of Busybodies and the BBC, had seized on this misleading figure and were demanding action against Britain’s gambling “problem”. The irony of this was that Britain stands out as one of the few countries with a vanishingly small and constantly diminishing number of problem gamblers. Even non-problem gamblers are a shrinking breed: in 2012, 64.5 per cent of the population of England participated in some form of gambling; by 2018, that figure was down to 54 per cent.

As regards problem gambling, an Institute of Economic Affairs study of 26 countries, including some in the EU, found that the standardised rate of problem gamblers ranged between 0.5 per cent and 7.6 per cent, with an average of 2.3 per cent. England’s rate, according to the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), was then 0.4 per cent; today it is down to 0.3 per cent. Yet it is in this almost uniquely responsible nation that the nanny state dictators are proposing restrictions that, in terms of human rights, would be intolerable even in a country with a huge gambling problem.

The white paper proposes that anyone who loses more than £125 over a period of a month should be subjected to “financial vulnerability”, i.e. bankruptcy, checks; anyone losing £2,000 over a period of 90 days could be faced with a bank probe into their income. These figures are totally insane. Who, out of the 54 per cent of people who gamble, is not likely to lose £126 over a period of one month, if not in the first month of wagering, certainly before the end of a year? In other words, the majority of the population over the age of 16 is virtually guaranteed to be referred to their bank.

That is where the real mischief will kick in. Woke banks (which is all of them) may have had to pull in their horns over de-banking “politically exposed persons”, but that will only make them more greedy for other victims. What could be a more useful label than “problem gambler” (i. e. a monstrously prodigal spender who contrived to lose as much as £126 over 30 days) to provide an excuse to close a client’s account? Pause to remind yourself that this outrageous imposition is being introduced by a Tory government.

Who is going to continue gambling under those joyless and bank status-imperilling restrictions? How much longer does Jeremy Hunt imagine the gambling industry would be paying £3bn a year in tax revenue? But the most appalling aspect of this Marxist-Leninist programme is the way in which it dovetails with all the other attacks being made on the financial autonomy of citizens.

Money deposited in a bank is no longer the client’s money: parts of it will grudgingly be doled out by the bank, if it approves of the purpose for which it is being used. The drive for a cashless society is aimed at total control of everyone’s financial transactions (“Sorry, you may not purchase that Harry Potter book – J. K. Rowling is a blacklisted Terf”).

The catch-all excuse of “money laundering” is being used to take control of clients’ money and intrude aggressively into their private business. The regulators must step in, is the feeble cry of ministers. The regulators have already stepped in – that is precisely the problem. It was the woke Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that imposed the ESG and DEI policing regime that inspired Coutts to de-bank Nigel Farage.

Sheldon Mills is the Executive Director, Consumers and Competition, at the FCA. He joined the executive committee of the FCA in March, 2020; the following month, he became chairman of the board of Stonewall, in which he had been an activist for years and where he played a leading role in bringing the transgender movement under the Stonewall umbrella. Although he has now demitted the Stonewall chair, at a time when banks are closing the accounts of clergymen for feeling uncomfortable with their business premises being festooned with rainbow regalia, is it possible to conceive of a worse conflict of interest than this man’s occupancy of a senior position at the FCA?

The FCA cannot clean up a mess it created itself. It should be abolished and a new organisation set up with a clear remit to eliminate political considerations from the financial services industry. Again, remind yourself that this politicisation of the UK finance industry by the ultra-left occurred under a Conservative government. As did grooming of children in schools by transgender activists under the pretext of sex education, which the Tories made compulsory.

Across Britain, in increasing numbers, people are losing their livelihoods for refusing to “affirm” the anti-scientific lie that people can change their sex. In Scotland, you could soon go to prison for calling someone “a grumpy old man”. But at the apex of any police state is the police and Britain’s forces have become a Stasi-style mechanism of repression of ordinary citizens, while they have effectively legalised crimes such as burglary by refusing to pursue them, in favour of “non-crime hate incidents”.

Today, in England and Wales, just 5.7 per cent of crimes are solved by police. Such abysmal failure would not be tolerated in any other profession. Yet West Yorkshire Police, with a lower than average rate of 5.2 per cent of crimes solved, can afford to send seven police officers to drag an autistic teenage girl from a cupboard in her family home, where she is apparently committing a “homophobic public order offence”.

Why have steps not been taken to dismiss those seven officers, clearly a bigger threat to public order than any teenage girl? Why is John Robins, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, still enjoying his salary of more than £190,000, when his force has failed to solve 94.8 per cent of crimes in its area and his officers are clearly out of control? His official biography states that he specialised in community policing and crime reduction. Is someone having a laugh? What happened to the principle of an Englishman’s home being his castle, or the concept of warrants being required for intrusive actions?

It is significant that the girl was being arrested not for any actions, but for something she said. Britain is no longer a free country and the change has happened under Tory rule. It will be for future historians to unravel the conundrum of how this came about: the Theresa May speech to the 2005 Conservative conference “There is no place for you in our [sic] Conservative party”, with its grandee entitlement, denouncing those who had not kept pace with the changing party line, is one obvious early symptom.

The whole “modernising” project, the centralised imposition of “A-List” parliamentary candidates, David Cameron’s marginalisation of traditional marriage – all of these were successive milestones in the degeneration of Conservatism. Stockholm Syndrome gripped the “modernising” Conservative Party, so that it has effectively abdicated social policy to Stonewall. The Civil Service is out of control: this month a homosexual lobby group within its ranks provoked a diplomatic row with Poland, a frontline ally in the Ukraine war. And towering above all the Tories’ other delinquencies is the betrayal over immigration.

The Tories have no philosophy, no beliefs, no integrity, no moral compass. In little more than a decade they have abolished freedoms painfully won over centuries. The cynical defence that Labour would be worse no longer cuts any ice with real conservatives. They are already looking ahead, to the government that will follow Labour’s car-crash regime and which will be conservative, which means it most definitely will not be the forsworn Tories – now just so much roadkill to be swept off the route to the future.

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