Giles Udy@GilesUdy
As a Soviet historian who has spent years writing about the extreme, repressive control Soviet Communism exercised over its unfortunate citizens, I find it really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.
But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid that conclusion.
We have no Gulag or death penalty, admittedly, but what Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to the total control over all those who do not share their worldview.
And like the Soviets of old their tools of control are the same…
- legislation and co-opted courts and civil service to apply it
- the policing of dissent, by hate crime orders, arrests (@glinner), the long term seizure of electronic appliances (@CF_Farrow) to intimidate even those against whom no charges are finally brought.
- controlling free speech (12,000 arrests annually for social media posts in 2025). George Orwell’s ‘thought crime’ persecution has become a reality under Labour.
- framing dissent (the Unite the Kingdom participants) as racism and far right fascism (Stalin started that in the days when Labour was his captive party, the 1930s, and ‘fascist’ has remained their favoured mantra ever since)
- attacking and weakening the family (because the family is so often a place where small ‘c’ conservative values are transmitted down the generations), including the promotion of trans ideology to confuse children in their understanding of the roles of men and women, mothers and fathers. In their eyes women can have penises and ‘heteronormativity’ must be ‘smashed’.
- education, wrested as Marx decreed, from the middle class (private schools and VAT), and used as a vehicle for the state propagandising of children and youth at their most vulnerable age.
… and much more.
In short, I can reach no other conclusion. Under Labour, Britain is becoming a repressive state which is, incredibly, echoing the very characteristics of repression that any former resident of the Soviet Union or its satellite states would recognise today (and they do and tell us so)
And with every opportunity Keir Starmer has to rein that in, he instead doubles down. Month by month things get worse.
This is 2026. I can’t believe what I am seeing. Or what I’m saying. But, yes, it is going on. And only a majority government of either Tories or Reform (and I do have reservations about both) of a coalition of two can reverse this.
… or we are sunk
