Britain Turns to Laws Comparable to Hitler’s

by Mike Robinson

[Print version of this transcript]

This is an edited transcript of the remarks by Mike Robinson to the Manhattan Project weekly internet program of The LaRouche Organization, Saturday, July 16, 2022, hosted by Dennis Speed. Mr. Robinson is the editor of the UK Column. Subheads and embedded links have been added.

I think everybody knows by now that the UK at the moment no longer has a Prime Minister. Boris Johnson has been ousted, and there are five people left in the show as potential replacements. The question is, are any of these people likely to take a more positive, optimistic view of the world and the universe, or is it going to be more of the same, or potentially worse?

[Robinson then named the five candidates then running, which have, as of July 20, been reduced to two—Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary. The Conservative Party members nationally will now vote for one of these two, with results to be announced Sept. 5 —ed.]. So, the question is, is one of these going to make any difference to what Britain is doing, to what Britain’s policy is, particularly its foreign policy, and so on? If one of these happened to end up as the Prime Minister, could they actually make any changes, even if they wanted to?

A Plethora of Nazi Legislation

We’ll come back to those questions in a second, but first of all, I’d like to have a look at what’s really going on, because, with respect to the election itself, a lot of it is distraction. In the meantime, in the UK, we have seen a legislative program over the last two years, and looking forward to the next two years, which is really quite draconian, dictatorial in its position. I realize this is a bit of a cliché perhaps, but I’d like to start off by comparing what’s happening in the legislation arena in the UK with what led up to the Second World War, just to give an example of the type of thinking that we have in the UK at the moment.

I’m not taking these in any particular order, but let’s just have a look at what happened in Germany in the 1930s:

The shutdown of free speech in Germany—that happened. Here in the UK—we’ve talked about it on this program before—we’ve got the Online Safety Bill going through at the moment. Its next stages have been delayed ’til the autumn, but it’s still going through. They’ve now decided to link that up with the National Security Bill, which is a new piece of legislation. This is going to create a new offense with respect to so-called “disinformation” that is being driven by foreign governments. It’s undefined how broad this is in scope. It is inevitably going to bring in people that are countering the UK’s narrative, so the UK decides to suggest that they are, for example, pushing a Russian narrative.

Then, we’ve got the Counter State Threats Bill, which is really going to have a chilling effect on the potential for whistleblowers and investigative journalists and for free speech.

Another thing that happened in Germany was the criminalization of protests. In the UK, this is happening now. They’ve already passed a piece of legislation called the Police, Crime, Courts, and Sentencing Act, and they are now bringing up the Public Order Bill, which will have a further restriction on public protest.

Free and fair elections ended in Germany; it’s similarly going on here, mostly because they have decided to completely break the independence of the Electoral Commission, which is the regulator for elections in this country. The Electoral Commission will now effectively be controlled by government.

The German government was not accountable to law in the 1930s; this is happening again, in the UK. The Judicial Review Bill means that people will not be able to challenge government decisions in the courts. But worse than that, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, which allows government agencies to break the law with impunity. We’ll come on to that a bit more in a second.

Then, we’ve got human rights removed, because they’re bringing through a new British Bill of Rights, and potentially removing Britain from the European Convention of Human Rights.

They’re taking upon themselves, as Germany did, the power to strip citizenship through the Nationality and Borders Bill.

And of course, they’re taking control of education through the Schools Bill, and absolutely bringing a very tight control of the type of material that can be taught in schools. For example, there will be no more possibility—even though there is already a national curriculum in the UK, it will be even more tightly controlled—no more possibility for anybody in the schools to challenge climate change policy, and so on. This gets very dangerous indeed.

So, if we just move back for a second to the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act. This Act makes provision for and connection with the authorization of criminal conduct in the course of, or otherwise in connection with, the conduct of covert human intelligence sources.

Just to give you an idea of the scope of this, how broad this is, these are the government agencies which are now allowed to authorize criminality. Any police force; the National Crime Agency; the Serious Fraud Office; any of the intelligence services; any of Her Majesty’s armed forces; Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs; and the Department of Health and Social Care; the Home Office; the Ministry of Justice; the Competition in Markets Authority; the Environment Agency; the Financial Conduct Authority; the Food Standards Agency; the Gambling Commission. All these agencies are now allowed to effectively break the law as they see fit. They are above the law.

This is really a key point, because effectively we are in the position that the government has brought in a legislative framework which is absolutely draconian, as I say. The point is, there’s no opposition from anyone. The Labor Party and the Liberal Democrats Party are supporting this all the way through; the only opposition is from a very small clique within the Conservative Party itself.

The question then is, if we look at the candidates to replace Boris Johnson, will any of them make any difference, and even if they were of the mind to make any difference, could they make any difference? In fact, the answer to that is No, and we have discussed that before.

Actors and Agencies Pulling the Strings

If we look at the anti-Russian narrative that we’ve heard from the UK government for many years now, there were many agencies outside of government that were pushing aspects of this framework extremely hard. One of the key ones, as we’ve mentioned before, was the Integrity Initiative, which was a program of the Institute for Statecraft. When we start looking behind the scenes and at the people involved in it, we discover that some of these same people are involved with pulling some strings behind the scenes.

The website for the Institute for Statecraft no longer has any content on it; it hasn’t had any for a couple of years. But if we look back to how it used to look, the graphics are no longer available, but there was a page that listed all the fellows for the Institute for Statecraft, so let’s just choose one.

This is Victor Madeira, who’s a senior fellow. He is a Russia expert and works for many universities, and so on. He was and still is, I believe, lecturing at the University of Buckingham. Their description of him was this:

Dr. Victor Madeira comes to us from Cambridge (where he’s been a lecturer and tutor for four years, working with Professor Christopher Andrew and Sir Richard Dearlove) and the Institute for Statecraft in London, directed by Chris Donnelly, where he’s a senior fellow working on 21st Century security architecture. He’s a scholar of high distinction with numerous awards, regarded as one of the UK’s best experts on Russia.

So, we now have a connection with [former MI6 chief] Richard Dearlove—we’ve mentioned Richard Dearlove many times on this program, but we’ll mention him again in a second.

The Grayzone recently published an article, the first in a series, based on a package of emails leaked to them. The headline on this one was “Operation Surprise: Leaked Emails Expose Secret Intelligence Coup to Install Boris Johnson.” So this is talking about events that took place around the time of Brexit and the ouster of Prime Minister Theresa May. What Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg is saying is:

Leaked emails and documents reviewed by The Grayzone have exposed the dimensions of a wide-ranging conspiracy managed by a shadowy cabal of hardcore Brexiters to sabotage former Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal … [and install] Boris Johnson….

They’re talking about a gent called “Gwythian Prins, a member of the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategy Advisory Panel,” and they’re also talking about Richard Dearlove. They mention a group called Veterans for Britain. Veterans for Britain was very much campaigning against the European Defense Union policy and the potential for the UK to be part of that policy. We were following these people very closely at the time, and we knew very well that Gwythian Prins was effectively being directed by Richard Dearlove, the former MI6 chief, who, of course, is the person who provided Tony Blair with the intelligence necessary to invade Iraq. In fact, this article goes on to say that “Dearlove’s MI6 1999 through 2004 tenure was typified by controversy, thanks largely to the deceptions he advanced to justify the war on Iraq.”

Then it goes on to talk about the Sept. 19-20, 2018 EU summit in Austria, in which member states’ leaders lined up to condemn Theresa May’s Chequers Plan [May’s proposal for the agreement to be reached with the EU after the Brexit, named after the country house of the Prime Minister —ed.], and that Gwythian Prins had emailed various people in civil service “to inform them that he and Dearlove supported a strategy to ‘put intolerable pressure on May,’ which would serve to ‘keep her in office but not in power.’ The subject line of Prins’s email read: ‘OUR ACTIVE MEASURES STRATEGY; HIGHLY SENSITIVE’.”

What we get to see here is a little bit of the so-called British Deep State, because these are the people from the intelligence services who are attempting to decide who and how the Prime Minister of the day behaves and what kind of policies they push forward.

The article continues:

It is uncertain what this entailed, and whether it was successful. In December 2018, however, Prins met in secret with Evelyn Farr, a civil service employee who had previously been identified in UK media as a pro-Brexit activist.…

Writing under the pseudonym Caroline Bell, Evelyn Farr publicized privileged information on Brexit negotiations for outlets including Conservative Woman, as well as pro-Leave outfits like Briefings for Brexit and Brexit Central.

The Deep State Cabal Around Richard Dearlove

The point here is, this is probably in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Klarenberg’s article continues:

The cabal around Dearlove sought to influence Johnson’s thinking in other ways as well…. Dearlove described himself as “preoccupied” with “feeding briefings on national security to Boris.” Praising his student as “quick and able” and “an excellent classical scholar,” he said he felt “reasonably confident” he would succeed in convincing Johnson’s team to block Huawei’s participation in Britain’s 5G network.

They absolutely succeeded in that, but it didn’t end well, because, as the article ends,

More recent emails show Prins’s enthusiasm for Boris Johnson has considerably waned. In January of this year, he wrote to Dearlove predicting Johnson’s imminent and welcome departure, and bemoaned the premier’s lack of “stamina” to truly “get Brexit done.”

So, Dearlove and the cabal around Dearlove were involved in the background of what was going on in government in the UK. But not just in the UK. Because of course, the same Richard Dearlove very much was pushing the Russia-gate narrative in the United States through [former MI6 officer] Christopher Steele. And the same Richard Dearlove and Christopher Steele were key members pushing the Skripal narrative [the claim that Russia had carried out the poisoning of former British spy in Russia Sergei Skripal and his daughter —ed.]. These guys, along with the Integrity Initiative, have been pushing the Russian narrative, but they’ve also been manipulating government in other ways as well.

But it’s not just that. Richard Dearlove is the man who has been pushing, at least in the UK, the so-called [Wuhan] lab-leak narrative [of the origin of the Corona virus] as part of his anti-China stance, and Christopher Steele was very much getting involved in that as well. Christopher Steele was publishing a report on China, very much suggesting that the Chinese were unduly influencing British politicians, British academics, British business people, and saying we’ve got to get rid of China.

Just to bring the Integrity Initiative back into this and show that it was not just Russia these people were after: this was [British journalist] Edward Lucas, who was absolutely part of the Integrity Initiative’s anti-Russia campaign for many, many years, also pushing the anti-China narrative. One of his articles, “At last! The End of the Age of Appeasing Beijing Bullies,” appeared in the July 6, 2020 Daily Mail. It reads:

China’s plan for world domination faces a hitch. That is the upshot of our Government’s impending decision to curb Chinese technology giant Huawei’s role in our next-generation 5G mobile data network. The move—likely to be announced later this month—will signal a sea-change in Britain’s policy on China. It marks the end of decades of appeasement, naiveté and greed.…

The point here is, we have an election going on. Boris Johnson was ousted, probably as a result of games being played by this so-called Deep State influence in the background, and the people who are likely to replace him, or the person who will replace him, are not equipped to deal with that. They’re going to be in exactly the same kind of position. If they do what they’re told to do, they’ll stay at their post; and if they don’t do what they’re told to do, they will be ousted, as Theresa May and Boris Johnson have now been. This is the difficulty the UK is in at the moment.

Any idea that the UK is a democratic state—of course, we know that it has not been one, ever, really, but at least the veneer was there. But it was only a veneer. We are not going to see, I don’t believe, any positive or optimistic change, as a result of the change of government.