Alan Bickley

Confidential: For Attention only of Stuart Ingham, Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit

I have been asked to produce this draft memorandum of advice for Stuart [Ingham], who will then suggest changes for passing directly to the Boss [Keir Starmer]. For obvious reasons, this is more confidential than usual, and it has been produced three times on a manual typewriter. Each copy has slight typographical differences, so that unauthorised photocopies can be traced back to their source. Alastair [Campbell] has given useful advice on how to deal with identified leakers to the media.

The Problem

Our problem as a Government is that, from the outset, we face a crisis of legitimacy. Eighty per cent of the electorate did not vote Labour. Half a million fewer people voted Labour in 2024 than in 2019, when everyone agrees the Corbyn Leadership led the Party to disaster. We were able to get our crushing majority of two thirds of the seats in the Commons entirely because of a Conservative collapse and an electoral system that achieves proportional results only when there are two hegemonic parties. There are voices in the Cabinet and in the wider Labour community raised in favour of moderation – that we should try to move the country forward no faster than the Conservatives did. However, the Boss disagrees. His opinion is that, whatever the electoral arithmetic, we have been given the unexpected chance to finish the transformation of Britain into a leading player in the international community of the twenty-first century. He is also concerned by the large threats to this rules-based international order posed by the military aggression of Russia, China and Iran, and the risks inherent in a second Trump presidency. He believes that our duty is to move as quickly as if we had all the genuine electoral legitimacy of the first Blair Government in 1997. Nothing must be allowed to stand in our way.

Even so, a problem we always knew would be chronic has become acute in the past few weeks. Our positive support among the electorate as a whole is only twenty per cent. Among the white majority population, this support may be as low as ten per cent. Some private estimates put it lower. We probably have less positive support among the white majority than the East German Communist Government had in the middle of 1989. The riots in themselves are not a serious problem. The rioters have no leaders and no agreed objective – certainly no objective that can be achieved. Thanks to our previous outreach – in which the Conservatives have given useful support since the 1980s – there are no autonomous white institutions from which any community leaders can emerge. The mainstream churches are all on-side with the Project. Except in Northern Ireland, there is no evidence of sympathy for the rioters among the police. All we probably need to do is wait for the rioting to subside, and then carry on with completing the transformation.

The riots are not in themselves a problem. But they may bring about the emergence of a problem. Despite two generations of education and informed comment by the media, there are millions of what the Boss in private calls Far Right White Racist Thugs (F-RWATs). These remain hostile to the idea of a society without a white majority. They remain committed to outmoded ideas of British or English particularism. They are not convinced that the Climate Emergency requires them to accept changes to their standards of living and lowered expectations for their children. Despite years of persuasion, most of them do not seem committed to a large war with Russia or China or Iran, or with all three.

The riots so far have not amounted to anything like a revolution. They are closer to peasants’ revolts. But, given the body of F-RWAT opposition to the Project, any collective action has the potential for creating a revolutionary movement. The attack on the Bastille in July 1789 did not have as its objective an attack on the Monarchy. That is what it became. The Russian Revolution began as a hunger march that got out of hand. Whenever large groups of angry people are allowed to gather, thoughts move rapidly in unexpected directions.

In his first public response to the riots, the Boss made threats of swift and terrible punishment. I can understand his concern. However, I suggest that any traditional process has the danger of hurrying forward the growth of a revolutionary consciousness among the F-RWATs. After the Easter 1916 Dublin Uprising, the captured rebels were spat on by the crowd after they were arrested. It was the example of their punishment that created a separatist consciousness among the Irish masses. However fast and scary the Boss can make them, we cannot afford the danger of a reaction to trials and long prison sentences. At the same time, we cannot afford to show weakness by letting any of the rioters go free without memorable punishment.

The Solution

What I suggest is that we should use and build on existing laws made by Labour and Conservative Governments since the 1980s. So far as possible, we should avoid public trials. We should certainly avoid prison sentences wherever possible. Instead, we must do the following:

1. Name and Shame the F-RWATs. The Home Office should set up a website to publish the names and addresses and photographs of all arrested F-RWATs. This will enable all activists of goodwill to impose their own social pricing on the rioters. It will enable banks and other regulated financial services providers to refuse their business. It will enable employers to sack or demote these people at work, and local authorities to refuse accommodation or to evict them from public accommodation. It will enable schools and colleges and social services to apply the usual safeguarding treatment to their children. Though it may need primary legislation, it will allow the NHS to refuse routine treatment to them.


2. Impose civil fines on the F-RWATs. This will again need primary legislation, but it will only build on the highly successful use of ASBOs to deal with smaller threats to good order. We need to empower senior police officers to assess Social Compensation Orders (SCOs) on all arrested F-RWATs. These should be assessed as a percentage during a specified period of earnings or benefits – say, fifteen per cent or less – and collected through the tax and benefit system. These should be enough to put severe strain on the finances of the arrested F-RWATs. Some of them will lose cars and homes when they cannot keep up the usual payments. Most likely, they will not be able to afford holidays or Christmas presents for their children. The advantage here is that their family lives will be seriously disrupted, and wives and children will try in future to ensure good behaviour from the F-RWATs.


3. Limit F-RWAT Consumption. The more energetic F-RWATs are both gregarious and addicted to unhealthy vices. They like their pubs and football matches. The drink more than is good for them. They usually smoke. They enjoy saturated fats and carbohydrates. Though it will do them no harm, but much good, it will hurt them greatly if their pleasures are curtailed by the same kind of administrative action. They should be banned from football matches and pubs. We should work to enable the banks and larger supermarkets to limit their consumption. Now that cash is hardly used, and more than eighty per cent of retail purchases are through the big supermarket groups, it may not even need primary legislation to make it impossible for these people to buy drink and cigarettes, or to ration them to five rashers of bacon a month. As a matter of course, we should make it an offence to help these people to evade the restrictions – an offence of strict liability, indeed.


4. Denial of Telecommunications Services. As a matter of course, arrested F-RWATs should lose all access to the Internet and to mobile telephone use. This will not make life absolutely impossible for them, but it will impose more strains on their everyday lives. We might also consider similar limitations on all other persons living at the same address. The value of this approach is that the most dangerous F-RWATs are no necessarily those who take part in the rioting, but those who use their blog and social media postings to create sympathy for the rioters.


5. Enhanced Surveillance. The Boss has promised to introduce facial recognition technology to identify F-RWAT trouble-makers. In addition, we should increase our existing cooperation with the technology companies to monitor all potential F-RWAT dissidence. Wherever possible, we should pre-empt dissidence.


6. Public Relations Campaigns. We should ensure continual and inescapable public relations campaigns against the F-RWATs. We should take full advantage of our friendship with the Royal Family, and the mainstream churches, and every creator of public culture, plus our control of education, to delegitimise any actual or potential F-RWAT ideology. We should balance this with continual messages of unity and inclusivity, and highlighting the benefits of the Project’s reforms.


7. Legal Reforms. We need to be careful not to introduce too many new laws that will allow F-RWATs to whine about “Police State Britain” in comments on The Daily Mail Even so, we need to take stronger powers to restrict the activities of F-RWATs and other rightist groups, including limitations on their ability to organise, raise funds, and hold public events.


8. International Collaboration. We must take the initiative to strengthen alliances with other countries that face similar threats, to share intelligence and coordinate actions against transnational far-right networks.

As said, we should so far as possible avoid imposing punishments through the normal courts. Public trials are a gathering point for protesters. They give defendants the right to make inflammatory statements from the dock. When they are found guilty and sentenced, they risk being seen as martyrs. Instead, punishments should be made by administrative orders, by unnamed persons, in unnamed places. They should be sent out in brown envelopes. They should be exacted through procedures largely not understood by those affected, but able to create a penumbra of fear round any acts of dissidence, whether these remain legal or not.

I read a blog posting by one of the F-RWATs who was able to stand as a Reform candidate at the election, even though we managed to have him disowned by his party after nominations closed. “They can’t arrest us all,” he said in response to another F-RWAT who was urging caution. The answer is that we do not need to arrest anyone who is not plainly breaking the normal criminal law. We can achieve a full pacification of the white majority without the financial and potential moral costs of traditional due process. Without any formal change to the human rights laws, we really can bring these people to a world in which they will have nothing, and they will be happy.

Conclusion

I appreciate that some older members of the Government may be uneasy with the strategy I have outlined. However, we are in a race against time. As said, there is the prospect of a second Trump presidency. In this country, though already compromised, the Reform Party is not entirely filled with the human refuse who populate the Conservative Party – refuse whose financial and sexual corruption has been monitored for years by our American and Israeli friends – monitored and handed on to us. The usual means of control are not open to us in quite the same way as they were to the Blair and Brown Governments. Unless we take immediate and overpowering action, there is a chance that the F-RWATs will stumble into a revolution from which our Project will not recover. I suggest a serious reading of my suggestions, and I look forward to any comments that may strengthen them.