Dispatches from Soviet Britain

The year was 1981 and Marina was excitedly filling out her application to join the Chemistry Faculty of Moscow State University. For a girl from an industrial city in rural Ukraine, the opportunity to study at the best university in the Soviet Union was a dream, although her ambitions were met with suspicion by many around her. But Marina was bright and seemingly destined for the top. Little did she know she was seconds away from destroying her chances of a successful application.

“What the hell are you doing?” her brother-in-law asked, peering over her shoulder as she went through the form. “What do you mean ‘middle class’?” he said, exasperated.

Marina may have been smart academically but she was young and naive. Clueless about the social realities of the communist society she lived in, Marina was proud that her parents had managed to secure good jobs, despite coming from peasant farmer stock. Her mother was a teacher while her father worked in a factory.

“Listen to me very carefully,” her brother-in-law implored in an authoritative tone. “Your family is working class and so are you,” he said with the air of someone imparting wisdom to the next generation. Dutifully, Marina scrubbed out her previous answer and wrote in the only correct response in the “class background” field: workers and peasants.

If she hadn’t, she almost certainly would have been denied entry into Moscow State University, never met my father and given birth to me a year later. The Soviet Union was a society which believed in uplifting the oppressed and tearing down their oppressors, and it was willing to do as much social engineering as was necessary to achieve these lofty goals.

This week, Britain’s Labour Government announced that civil service internships will only be available to those from a working-class background. Thanks to the genius of Sir Keir Starmer, the child of a self-employed plumber or train driver making £80,000 a year will finally have the opportunity to join the civil service, while the offspring of nurses, teachers and junior doctors who make half that will be rightfully denied the unjust expansion of their ill-gotten privilege.

By coincidence, this same week, the Online Safety Act began to make its presence known. Introduced by the last Conservative Government and implemented by the current Labour Government, the Act purports to protect children from harmful content. Meanwhile, Section 179 of the act makes it a criminal offence to say something false that causes “non-trivial psychological harm,” while Section 44 gives a government minister the ability to change censorship rules without Parliamentary scrutiny. Online platforms will be legally forced to abide by their decisions.

Videos of protests outside migrant hotels and other “harmful content” are already being censored by social media platforms, as the law stipulates fines of up to 10% of their global turnover and criminal prosecution for their staff.

WhatsApp and Signal have warned that the British Government is also seeking access to your encrypted chats.

Children are, of course, not remotely protected by any of this. Demand for VPN apps, which allow users to pretend they are accessing the internet from a different country, has surged this week as people seek to circumvent the restrictions. Far from protecting children, the Government is, in fact, pushing them into the unregulated internet with gusto, as this article explains.

In the meantime, the Government is launching a new police unit to monitor social media for early signs of protest activity and dissent.

While the Sovietisation of Britain continues at a rapid pace, one area appears to have been neglected. The one good thing about the communist society my mother grew up in was that it at least came with the benefits of authoritarianism: stability, safety and the prevention of disorder.

In modern Britain, by contrast, petty crime is effectively ignored, while tensions caused by large-scale illegal immigration and the perception of two-tier policing are at fever pitch.

Few remember this now, but shortly before the riots last summer, a brief clip of a police officer stamping on a suspect's head in Manchester Airport was released on social media. It was - we were told - a case of police brutality, and since the suspects were Muslim, it was also racist. The usual suspects in the media and on X went into meltdown about our terrible country.

It was only later that the full video and details of the incident were released, which showed that the two men had, in fact, assaulted armed police officers, breaking a female officer's nose. The man who did this has just been found guilty. I don't expect he will get anything like the prison time most British people would want him to - but my point is something else.

We keep being told that some mythical far-right is stoking tensions in this country. But who actually is it that lies about the police being "racist" when they are just trying to detain incredibly dangerous and violent people? Who is it that covers up racially-aggravated (i.e. racist) crimes like grooming gang rapes? Who is it that thinks people should be treated differently because of their skin colour, religion or social class?

Social engineering is a disaster that has proven to destroy social solidarity and cohesion the world over. Britain must return to the pursuit of colour-blind, class-blind meritocracy and justice for all. If it does not, no amount of social media censorship can stop the ugly consequences of dividing the country against itself.