APRIL 19 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington in Massachusetts, the first battle of the American Revolutionary War. On the morning of April 19, 1775, around 70 of Lexington’s town militia faced down 800 British troops on their way to the town of Concord where they planned to confiscate a quantity of firearms which they expected to be used for rebellion. In the ensuing musket fire, eight colonists died and the American Revolution began.
Serious discontent with British rule had been at the root of the Boston Tea Party, the American political and mercantile protest which took place on December 16, 1773. Colonists believed that the passing in the British Parliament of the Tea Act in May of that year violated their rights as Englishmen. ‘No taxation without representation’ had been the Englishman’s birthright since Magna Carta. The American colonists, mainly English by birth or ancestry, felt disenfranchised, with no say over important aspects of their lives, ruled by a remote power over which they had no direct or indirect control. Sound familiar?
Just over five years ago, I was one of Nigel Farage’s 200 or so Parliamentary candidates; I stood for election in the City of York. At the time, I believed that in the Brexit party, now Reform, ‘Change Politics For Good’ was a genuine and realistic possibility. Once Farage stood down all the candidates in Conservative-held seats, we knew it was all over. A few months later along came the covid madness and by the time of the General Election last July party politics in Britain seemed so much less relevant. Labour and the Conservatives were, in Neil Oliver’s words, ‘two cheeks of the same arse’. Then with a huge Labour win came the most blatant example in modern British political history of a governing party breaking their pre-election promises to an extent that the word ‘liar’ seems inadequate to describe. A six-month descent into totalitarianism has seen foolish but genuinely outraged people jailed for social media posts, convicted criminals released early to free prison space, but no such speedy conviction and sentencing followed the assault on police at Manchester Airport by two Rochdale men. ‘Orwellian’ is perhaps an overused term, but it does seem to describe the state-directed policing of thought and prayer, draconian sentencing for improper use of social media and the re-writing of history to reflect current political ideology. It was just five years after the ending of World War Two that Orwell wrote these prophetic words:
‘There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’
Today, however, there may be cause for hope. The political status quo in Britain may be about to change for the good, and the man responsible for that is the genius tech billionaire and restorer of a free speech platform, Elon Musk.
As a Christian, I have often considered how the American Revolution was in reality the shedding of English blood by Englishmen, that this was an avoidable tragedy of brother fighting brother. Though France joined the American colonists in their fight against the mother country, over two centuries later we still have so much in common with a nation separated from us by 3,000 miles of ocean, a kind of brotherhood we do not share with our closest European neighbour just 20 miles from our Dover shores. Despite their hard-won independence, it was to Britain’s aid that the Americans came when in January 1942, some 4,000 combat soldiers of the US Army’s 34th ‘Red Bull’ infantry division safely landed in Belfast after running the gauntlet of German U-boats across the North Atlantic. So began a historic military and industrial endeavour by the United States, without which Britain may well have become a vassal state of the Third Reich.
Today, our brothers over the Atlantic are looking on with pity and a degree of shock at what is happening to Britain, the nation which gave the world its primary language and a system of democratic government, a pioneer of free speech, of law and order, a nation known for fairness, wisdom, strength and gentility. The mass gang-rape of girls below the age of consent and the abject failure by those in power to deal with it and instead wherever possible conceal it seems to have been the last straw, and the world’s wealthiest man has taken it upon himself to get seriously involved. It is hard to imagine that President-elect Trump is not fully aware of what Musk is doing. Is Trump trying to topple Sir Keir Starmer using the rape-gang issue which is seen as Starmer’s Achilles heel? Last October, Starmer said that Labour party staff going to the US to campaign for Democrat candidate Kamala Harris were volunteers ‘doing it in their spare time’. Keir Starmer, David Lammy and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who once described Trump as ‘an absolute buffoon who has no place in the White House’, have much to fear from the forthcoming Trump administration. Amongst Monday’s tweets from Elon Musk was a poll: ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. Of 49million voters, 58 per cent said yes.
Musk has also politely called for King Charles to dissolve Parliament after Labour rejected calls for an Oldham grooming gang inquiry, and has described the scandal as ‘state-sponsored evil’ accusing Starmer of failing victims during his time as CPS chief. Nigel Farage has also come under fire with Musk claiming that he ‘doesn’t have what it takes’ to lead the Reform party. Farage suggested this was due to a disagreement over Musk’s support for imprisoned Tommy Robinson.
If the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, an anglophile, wants to change the destiny of a brother nation, some of whose people are clearly in distress, it may be that his colleague Elon Musk has just ignited the first rocket under the Labour government. Who knows where it will land?
