A decade of dissent: parasites in power

In the latest part of my retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit, I look back on its content in 2017. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

“We live in a ‘representative democracy’, but whose interests do our political leaders really represent?” asked The Acorn in January 2017.

“The answer has been more obvious than ever in the UK in recent weeks, with the government’s announcement of a ‘Modern Industrial Strategy’.

“It is adding an extra £4.7 billion to the money it already bungs to its boardroom sponsors in the guise of so-called research & development funding. This ‘investment’ will go to areas such as AI, ‘smart’ energy technology, robotics, and 5G wireless.

“Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark says the strategy will ‘drive economic growth across the whole country’. In case you hadn’t noticed, ‘economic growth’ equals business profits at the expense of you and your environment.

“When the government says that Britain is ‘open for business’, it really means that it is whoring out the population and the countryside to the highest bidder”.

Compare and contrast with Keir Starmer’s hand-over of the UK to BlackRock, as covered in the first Acorn of 2025!

We had some harsh words to say about those untouchable Fat Cats who push through all this economic “growth” (of their bank accounts!).

“The vampires of industrial capitalism are entirely ruthless about the living flesh off which they feed, whether the human beings they exploit or the nature they despoil.

“They are particularly callous regarding anything to do with our culture, the people’s culture, which they regard as an irritating obstacle in the way of their never-quenched red-fanged thirst for profit and power.

“These self-obsessed social parasites simply don’t care if their schemes destroy communities, displace whole populations from their homelands, trample all over sacred sites across the world.

“And just because Britain was the country where the curse of the Industrial Revolution was first unleashed, don’t imagine these life-hating sociopaths have any more respect for our own cultural heritage.

“If they did, how could they be planning to pierce a tarmac-and-concrete hole through the heart of Stonehenge, symbol of England’s mystical past? How could they envisage inflicting the toxic industrialisation of fracking on Sherwood Forest, legendary home of Robin Hood, incarnation of the age-old fight by England’s dispossessed against injustice and tyranny?”

A shocking reflection of the grimness of a society built on industrial greed came from data released by the NHS under a Freedom of Information request, which revealed that hundreds of children in England aged six and under were being prescribed anti-depressants.

Pretty much every issue of The Acorn in that year carried reports from the frack-free frontlines and we described the fracking industry as “a corrupt mafia-like entity linked to the state”.

On the same public-private theme, we reported on protests against a controversial Cardiff event which campaigners said “totally blurs the boundary between government and the arms trade”.

DPRTE (Defence Procurement, Research, Technology & Exportability) was organised by BiP Solutions, a private company “deeply embedded within Ministry of Defence (MOD) operations, running its Defence Contracts Online, through which all MOD contracts valued at £10,000 and above are advertised”.

Established in 1984 “to facilitate business between the public and private sectors”, BiP Solutions had enjoyed a “sixteen-year relationship” with civil servants at the MOD in London.

We also covered protests against NATO in Brussels, against the G20 in Hamburg, against transhumanism in Bordeaux and against commercial logging in a primeval forest in Poland, as well as popular uprisings in French Guiana and Paraguay.

In addition, we shared the wisdom of Ran Yunfei, a Chinese philosopher and dissident who had already spent time in jail for his opposition to the ultra-industrialism of the “People’s Republic”.

He said: “The destruction of the environment in China is the doing of a disastrous government and political system. The development model is based on GDP growth, without concern over the consequences for the environment”.

The Acorn reported on the struggle for Catalan independence and picked up on one factor that might help explain the “alarming levels of repression by the central Spanish state”.

Spanish politician Juan Carlos Girauta had told The Jerusalem Post: “The independence movement is led by violent radicals who are as anti-Israel as they are anti-Spanish… An independent Catalonia would be in the hands of extreme anti-Israel groups. In contrast, the constitutionalist camp is solidly pro-Israel”.

The ongoing theft of our freedom was a matter of concern throughout the year.

We reported that local authorities in the UK were using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to gather evidence via secret listening devices, cameras and private detectives – including spying on people walking dogs, feeding pigeons and fly-tipping.

“When the law was introduced, the government said it would only be used when absolutely necessary to protect British people from extreme threats. Surprisingly enough, it was lying”.

And we highlighted a report from police monitoring group Netpol which “confirms and usefully exposes the extent to which the police act as taxpayer-funded private security for private business interests”.

Free speech and free thought were also increasingly being stifled, we warned, even within political movements that were meant to be staunch defenders of those values.

“The problem seems to be that anarchists today are forever looking over their shoulders to see if they are being watched by what is essentially an internal Thought Police, self-appointed custodians of a flattened-out and narrowed-in version of anarchism”.

This pseudo-anarchism did not approve of anyone “exposing the covert machinations of the military industrial complex, of talking about the ‘one per cent’ or the ‘banksters’, of challenging the capitalist cult of technology, of using any kind of ‘populist’ language.

“A pedantic and humourless ideological puritanism, masquerading as radicalism, limits itself to calling for the system to be made fairer, more inclusive or more democratic and is suspicious of anyone who dares to challenge the fundamental assumptions of power”.

And we asked: “Where is the passion? Where is the rage? Where is the desire? Where are the calls to insurrection, to revolution, capable of stirring up a powerful groundswell of contempt for the self-defined centrists and everything they represent?”

We identified the existence of a “Fake Left”, which we suggested was the product of a “war of ideas” carried out by the system against its opponents.

After the sabotaging from “within” of the London Anarchist Bookfair, we quoted a response on the 325 website as saying: “We’re pissed off that anarchists feel it’s so much more important to target another anarchist with unpopular views, than to attack institutional structures of our oppression”.

The author complained about certain so-called anarchists’ “ignorance of the long history of state agents using divide and rule tactics against dissidents – from COINTELPRO to Stasi ops”.

We also wrote about 77th Brigade, the British Army’s social media psyops unit whose “dark arts include destabilising opponents of the British state by starting whispering campaigns among their supporters and potential supporters”.

Incidentally, Wikipedia tells us that the brigade “was named the 77th in tribute to the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade, which was part of the Chindits, an Indian Army guerrilla warfare force led by Orde Wingate who used unorthodox tactics against the Japanese in Burma in World War II”.

And we learn: “Wingate was a dedicated Christian Zionist”.

The Acorn explored the way in which the UK was ramping up its attack on online freedom, seizing on the excuse of “terrorist” attacks.

After an incident on Westminster Bridge the state tried to outlaw encrypted messaging and was also considering legislation to force firms to “take down extremist material” from the internet.

And after the infamous Manchester Arena event, now proven to have been a hoaxed false flag “bombing”, we related how prime minister Theresa May “was very quick to ramp up the terror alert status to ‘critical’ and send the army onto the streets”.

Interestingly, the most chilling media comments came from three journalists who, during Covid, would position themselves as great defenders of freedom.

Katie Hopkins, who “was sponsored through her university education by the British Army’s Intelligence Corps”, called for a “final solution” to what was being presented as an Islamist menace, and Allison Pearson of The Daily Telegraph tweeted: “We need a State of Emergency as France has. We need internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children”.

In November 2024 Pearson was investigated by police for a post showing an image of two police officers standing next to two men holding what appears to be a flag of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.

She tagged the Metropolitan Police alongside the words “how dare they” and added: “Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters”.

“Lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel!”

Turning back to 2017, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill struck an equally fascistic note when he declared that “there is a strong justification for hate right now”.

We noted that O’Neill, like Spiked as a whole, had a particular love of industrialism and had complained that protesting in defence of the environment “contributes to the increasingly mainstream hostility to economic growth”.

We pointed out that he has also condemned the “leftish set’s warped, myopic anti-Semitism” and “the way in which attacking Israel has become a means of being derogatory about Jews”.

O’Neill’s Wikipedia entry described him as “a keynote speaker for the pro-Israel advocacy organisation StandWithUs”. That line has now disappeared from the website, though it can still be seen in the internet archives.

Meanwhile, in France, former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron had become president and within a few months his labour “reforms” were prompting strikes and protests across the country (I’m actually in this photo, by the way!).

The Acorn remarked: “France seems in some ways to be at the point the UK had reached in 1984, when Europe’s first neoliberal state, under Thatcher, deliberately took on and defeated the miners in order to break the resistance of the trade union movement.

“As in the UK in those days, the neoliberals are making a calculated bet on the physical supremacy of their power.

“They are happy to use the full legal force of their system to crush dissent, the full physical force of their police and military to attack dissidents, the full psychological force of their tame media to conceal what is happening, to spread lies and disinformation, to smear their opponents”.

We also reported that Macron had announced that he wanted to further extend the country’s State of Emergency, for the sixth time since the Paris attacks of November 2015, and bring in unspecified new “anti-terror” laws.

And we commented: “Rabid support for industrial capitalism, bitter opposition to environmentalism, anti-Muslim rhetoric, hysterical calls for ‘action’ in response to terror attacks… Funny how so many of these people seem to be reading from the same centralised script”.

[Audio version]