BS Summary: This article contains 40 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 43.3% saturation with 1,000 hits. Analysis detected 7,548 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,310 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 71.8% and a BS Rank of 79% (3,613 of 17,099 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 78.90% of the article peer group.
In the BBC’s 1975 Panorama documentary on Sandhurst — now on iPlayer, perhaps through a scheduler’s sense of mischief or apprehension — we follow officer cadets as they train to impose order on a near-future Britain, where the civil order has collapsed.
“Economic and political chaos is reigning in Britain, due to the failures of consecutive Labour and Tory minority governments,” runs the outline of the training exercise, “and Scotland has already seceded.”
In the gently undulating downland of Ogbourne St George, the cadets attempt to separate the opposing factions, the one led by a socialist rabble-rouser, the other by the “neo-fascist Conservative MP for Ogbourne”, a golf club bore in a straw hat.
The tactical scenario is obviously drawn from the contemporaneous situation in Northern Ireland, as the then-cadet and future-MP Patrick Mercer observes in the post-exercise seminar (contrasting, perhaps unconsciously, the unhappy province with “this country” in the process).
Yet Irish lessons were explicitly being applied to British concerns.
The conclusions drawn from that conflict, based on the controversial counterinsurgency doctrine of General Frank Kitson, then overseeing military intelligence operations in Northern Ireland, were clearly directly intended to apply to the British mainland.
As Kitson predicted in his 1971 book on counterinsurgency, *Low Intensity Operations*, the spread of communications technology, particularly the “small cheap wireless sets” the man of the near-future would be glued to, meant that in the decades to come, “social discontent and racial ferment will be more important, and disturbances arising out of dissatisfaction with society, often allied with racial problems which have not yet been mastered”, would present a threat to the stability of societies even as cozy and placid as provincial England.
“It is difficult for the British with their traditions of stability to imagine disorders arising beyond the powers of the police to handle,” Kitson warns, “but already there are indications that such a situation could arise, and this at a time of apparently unrivaled affluence.”
We are not there yet, though the murder of Reform’s justice spokeswoman, Ann Widdecombe, appears, if no more plausible motivation arises, to be the country’s third assassination of a prominent politician in just over a decade — a tally comparable with that of the Northern Ireland conflict.
Writing in 1991, for the reissue of his book, Kitson remarked that the controversy it aroused among the Labour opposition at the time — the party’s defense spokesman, Roy Hattersley, asked angry questions of it in Parliament — was the product of its turbulent era, aswirl with fears of revolution, civil disorder and rumors of deep state interference in electoral politics.
“Indeed,” he wrote, “the heat generated at the time would be incomprehensible in today’s climate of opinion, but is of interest as an indication of the very different situation that existed in the early 1970s.”
We may observe that the current state of British politics is more heated still.
Reform’s spokesman for home affairs, Zia Yusuf, who last year declared that “the Prime Minister and his Cabinet are engaging in stochastic terrorism” by inciting violence against Nigel Farage, this week laid the blame for Widdecombe’s murder on Labour politicians whose alarmist rhetoric may have inspired the killer “to eliminate that supposed threat through lethal violence”.
We may ask what happened to the broadly pacific, affluent and content mainland Britain of the Nineties, but no answer that does not include the consequences of Labour rule can suffice.
We live in the country Blair dreamed up, which the Tories reified.
A heatwave is now as regular a summer occurrence in Britain as a communal riot, and the conjunction of the two presents a predictable strategic risk to a Westminster government.
If the incoming prime minister can get through August without a mainland repeat of last month’s Belfast disturbances, he can count himself lucky — or luckier than Starmer, at any rate.
Whether it is all doom and gloom is a matter of perception.
There is, unlike the early Seventies, no fear of destabilizing industrial action, because there is now little British industry to speak of: in establishing the conditions for today’s faltering economic settlement, Thatcher’s cure has proved worse than the disease.
Yet the result of her handiwork is that both the aggrieved proletariat of the Sandhurst scenario, and the disgruntled petit-bourgeoisie huddled around its firebrand Right-wing MP, can now be comfortably chalked up as Reform voters.
Not too far from Ogbourne St George’s fictional disturbances, the equally bucolic-sounding Oxfordshire village of Piddington, a Liberal Democrat stronghold, voted last week for a symbolic referendum on secession from the United Kingdom, angered by the presence of a migrant facility in its disused military camp.
It is, as Reform’s dubious signing Nadhim Zahawi declared, “the beginning of civil disobedience & rightly so”.
The British electorate has become too political for its politicians’ comfort.
“The system will break.
The UK is broken,” Zahawi warns, as if he had no previous hand in the matter.
And so, to stave off whatever Reform represents, Burnham must be foisted upon us.
Having cycled through a decade of occasional murders, hurried elections, plots and coups to oust calamitous leaders and install new ones, and a referendum so destabilizingly democratic to Westminster’s functioning that it is unlikely to ever be repeated, we are treated on Monday to an unimpeded coronation, as an ailing political system attempts to save itself from its voters.
Like Phoenix Nights and ITV1, Burnham’s popular appeal may be more narrowly regional than his courtiers hope.
Yet for all his claimed antipathy to Westminster, and even as he threatens to strip it of its dominance, it is the capital that will prove most quiescent to his project of taming provincial Britain.
The Burnham project, like all enthusiasms of the current Westminster state, is fundamentally a conservative one.
It aims to shore up the Fabian experiments of its predecessors, like a bucket-hatted covers band recapturing the magic of Labour’s greatest Nineties hits, and add some extra of its own — though the restive audience seems unlikely to welcome his new material.
Government by Radio 6 dad is as doubtfully appealing a project as rule by Matrix Chambers: the people are already moving elsewhere.
But rule by wonks may at least be better than rule by activist lawyers.
In neutering an insurgency, Kitson observes that, practically speaking, “there are two possible alternatives, the first one being that the Law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public”, a tactic that requires that “the member of the government responsible for law, either sits on the supreme council or takes his orders from the head of the administration”.
The other, preferable option for Kitson “is that the Law should remain impartial and administer the laws of the country without any direction from the government”.
One man’s rioting, or unwisely worded tweet, in this approach, would not be treated more harshly or leniently than that of his political rivals, for it is the role of the police and judiciary — of the state as a whole — to act as an impartial arbiter of justice between the opposing sides.
“As a rule,” he notes, “the second alternative is not only morally right but also expedient, because it is more compatible with the government’s aim of maintaining the allegiance of the population.”
To do otherwise would be to invite a situation in which an aggrieved section of the population, having lost faith in the state’s neutral benevolence, would come to distrust the police, the judiciary, the entire political system, and wish to see it all razed to the ground.
It is a clearly apparent fact that for Reform, its supporters, and the Conservative media sphere which is increasingly coalescing around the party, the first of Kitson’s two options is the state in which we now live.
The indignant accusations of two-tier justice, and of Lord Hermer as a particularly vengeful and politicized Inquisitor-General, are now axiomatic for Reform.
Farage himself, justifying the quixotic drama of his resignation and re-election campaign, declares that “the Establishment have now decided that they can’t beat us fairly, so they’ve chosen to use foul means”.
Indeed, “perhaps Dominic Cummings was right,” Farage continues, “when he said Whitehall will break the law to stop Reform winning power.
We’ve been subject, in the last few months, to the use of illegally obtained information.
Firm evidence of computer hacking.
And now leaks from government agencies.”
Whatever the truth of the matter, Farage’s allegations of dirty tricks and hidden agendas, and of nefarious collusion by the security state, are a new development in Westminster politics, if not in Kitson’s old stomping-ground.
Kitson’s dire reputation among Northern Ireland’s Nationalists rests upon both the above accusations, and the perception that he treated the community like the troublesome inhabitants of more distant colonial outposts.
The latter is a complaint increasingly heard in mainland Britain, a country of mutually suspicious tribes in which an anthropology degree now appears a better grounding for governance than one in PPE.
In a realm where policing matters are increasingly devolved, for the sake of dampening threatened disturbances, to “community leaders”, it is striking the degree to which Farage has recently chosen to sound like one himself.
“The British state is no longer working for everyone in this country,” he tells us, “White Brits will become a minority in this country before the end of the century.
Without a voice to speak up for them, the future will be manifestly unjust.”
Railing against the police, the press, the judiciary, and the Westminster system in its entirety, the party is edging into the “conditional loyalty”, in the historian David W.
Miller’s phrasing, of Ulster Loyalists, whose wish for continued incorporation within the British state does not often translate into affection for, or acquiescence to most aspects of, its real-world existence.
The state, in this view, is of value only so far as it does not threaten the continued existence of the people.
For all that Reform is called Powellite by English observers, the constitutional romantic Enoch Powell himself was shocked by his adopted Irish faction’s notion that “Parliament’s authority might be resisted… if it were ‘traitorous to a section of its population.’”
It is a mark of mainland Britain’s political descent, since the Seventies, that this Ulster peculiarity is an increasingly commonplace tone of discourse among English voters.
When Farage warns that without “urgent action taken to remove discriminatory and dangerous anti-White policies, we will see another Belfast”, it is not Northern Ireland he is speaking of.
If Burnham recognizes the threat, he does not show it.
The Starmer government’s commitment to clamping down on internet anonymity, which is to say Right-wing political discourse, echoes Kitson’s advice on the necessity of “locating illegal enemy broadcasting stations and… jamming them”, updated for the social media age.
But so too did his government’s rhetoric on the Conservative Party’s disastrous Boriswave, and tentative support for ILR reform.
Coming immediately after the riots, and bracketed by threats of robust police and judicial crackdowns on rioters, Starmer’s approach was analogous with Kitson’s advice on “the judicious promise of concessions, at the same time imposing a period of calm by the use of government forces backed up by statements to the effect that most of the concessions can only be implemented once the life of the country returns to normal”.
In just such a way, the most recent Belfast riots — overseen by the local version of “community leaders” of whom the British state is fearful — led to an immediate immigration crackdown in Northern Ireland, to such an extent that asylum claims in the neighboring Republic have halved in a month.
The principle is well-established, even if its historical application has often been found wanting: a soldier writing bluntly for soldiers, Kitson nevertheless saw counterinsurgency as a primarily political process.
But instead, as his elevation of Hope Not Hate advisors shows, Burnham appears fated to view his political survival as a form of bloodless counterinsurgency, monitoring and punishing subversives and removing them from the body politic, while reneging on promised concessions — not, in Kitson’s book, a recipe for success.
So, the stage is already set for a heightening of Reform’s rhetoric of political persecution at the hands of state and shadowy, quasi-state actors.
The scope of the party’s grievances against the British state in its current form have widened to such an expansive degree that anything short of its total reform will count as failure.
Rather than merely installing Farage in No. 10 — we can assume only the original London branch — the driving thrust of British politics has moved inexorably to the stage Kitson posits as preceding insurgency, that of subversion, where “those involved… envisage replacing the authorities ultimately, and ruling in their stead.”
The party’s explicit pitch is, as Farage puts it, “a political revolution” to upend “the entire establishment”.
While we can reasonably doubt the party’s capacity to do so, the crucial issue in British politics seems strangely underanalyzed.
The very idea that the state, as a thing distinct from its ruling party, is a neutral, or indeed fully legitimate political actor, has been consigned to history by the British Right.
But if the odds against Burnham’s success are daunting, so are those facing Reform.
Both Burnham and Farage represent, to their respective supporters, last-ditch gambles before the abyss.
Mainland Britain is already a more turbulent country than that of the early Seventies: it is difficult to see any plausible route for Burnham to make it less so in the years, or months, between his coronation and the next election.
Long hot summers stretch on endlessly between now and then: what was once an exotic novelty now appears the combustible norm.
Analysis
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