Revealed: ConDem ‘vendetta’ against citizens it believes are livestock

"Fascist Britain, 2013. Everybody knows you can't beat the system. Everybody but...?"

“Fascist Britain, 2013. Everybody knows you can’t beat the system. Everybody but…?”

It has been rumoured that V for Vendetta ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks are to be banned from large-scale public demonstrations in the UK.

They have already been banned in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The masks were adopted by the loosely-affiliated protesters Anonymous as a clear indication of members’ feelings towards a Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition government whose actions, they believe, have been increasingly fascist.

These people have a point.

Has anyone read V for Vendetta lately? An early chapter, ‘Victims’, provides the historical background to the fascist Britain of the story – and provides very disturbing parallels with the current government and its policies.

In the story, there is a recession and a nuclear war. Fortunately, in real life we have managed to avoid the war (so far) but the recession of 2007 onwards has caused severe hardship for many, with average wages cut by nine per cent (in real terms) due to government policies.

In the story, the line “Everybody was waiting for the government to do something” is notable. Isn’t that just about as British as you can get? As a nation, we seem unwilling to take the initiative; we just wait for someone else to do something. We queue up. And then we complain when we don’t find exactly what we wanted at the end of the queue. But then it’s too late.

Does the government “do something”? Well, no – not in the story, because there isn’t any government worth mentioning at this point. But then… “It was all the fascist groups. The right-wingers. They’d all got together with some of the big corporations…”

Here’s another parallel. How many corporations are enjoying the fruits of the Conservative-led (right-wing) government’s privatisation drive?

Look at my IDS (I Believe) video on YouTube – which features only a tiny minority of those firms.

The NHS carve-up signified huge opportunities for firms like Circle Health and Virgin, and Bain Capital (who bought our blood plasma supplies). Care UK, the firm that famously sponsored Andrew Lansley while he was working on the regressive changes to the health service that eventually became the Health and Social Care Act 2012, no doubt also has fingers in the pie.

The Treasury is receiving help – if you can call it that – from the ‘big four’ accountancy firms – PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG. They have written the law on tax avoidance. By no coincidence at all, these are the firms that run the major tax avoidance schemes that have been taken up by businesses and rich individuals who are resident in the UK. For more information on the government’s attitude to taxing the rich, see Michael Meacher’s recent blog entry.

The Department for Work and Pensions has employed many private firms; this is the reason that department is haemorrhaging money. There are the work programme provider firms who, as has been revealed in previous blog entries, provide absolutely no useful training and are less likely to find anyone a job than if they carried on by themselves; there are the IT firms currently working on Universal Credit, about which Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith lied to Parliament when he said he was having to write off £34 million of expenditure – the true figure was later revealed to be closer to £161 million, almost five times as much; there are Atos and Capita, and probably other firms that have been hired to carry out so-called ‘work capability assessments’ of people claiming sickness, incapacity and disability benefits, according to a plan that intentionally ignores factual medical evidence and places emphasis on a bogus, tick-box test designed to find ways to cut off their support; and there is Unum Insurance, the criminal American corporation that designed that test, in order to push British workers into buying its bogus insurance policies that work on exactly the same principle – this is theft on a grand scale.

So we have a government in cahoots with big business, and treating the citizens – the voters – like cattle. We’ll see more of this as we go on.

“Then they started taking people away… All the black people and the Pakistanis…” All right, these social groups have not been, specifically, targeted (yet) – but we have seen evidence that our government would like to do so. Remember those advertising vans the Home Office funded, that drove around London with a message that we were told was for illegal immgrants: “Go home”?

“That is a term long-associated with knuckle-dragging racists,” said Owen Jones on the BBC’s Any Questions.

“We’re seeing spot-checks and racial profiling of people at tube stations. We have a woman on the news… she was born in Britain; she was told she was stopped because she ‘didn’t sound British’. And we have the official Home Office [Twitter] account being used to send gleeful tweets which show people being thrown into vans with a hashtag, ‘#immigrationoffenders’.

“Is this the sort of country you want to live in, where the Conservatives use taxpayers’ money to inflame people’s fears and prejudices in order to win political advantage? Because I don’t think most people do want that to happen.”

This blog’s article on the subject added that not only this, but other governments (like that in Greece) had created an opportunity to start rounding up anybody deemed “undesirable” by the state. “Greece is already rounding up people of unorthodox sexuality, drug addicts, prostitutes, immigrants and the poor and transferring them to internment and labour camps,” it stated.

Note also the government’s response to criticism from UN special rapporteur on adequate housing Raquel Rolnik. Grant Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith and their little friends tried to say that she had not done her job properly but, when this was exposed as a lie, they reverted to type and attacked her for her racial origin, national background, and beliefs – political and personal. You can read the lot in this despicable Daily Mail smear piece.

Back to V for Vendetta, where the narrative continues: “White people too. All the radicals and the men who, you know, liked other men. The homosexuals. I don’t know what they did with them all.” Well, we know what Greece is doing with them all, and in the story, such people also ended up in internment and labour camps. We’ll come back to that.

“They made me go and work in a factory with a lot of other kids. We were putting matches into boxes. I lived in a hostel. It was cold and dirty…”

Last month this blog commented on government plans for ‘residential Workfare for the disabled’, rounding up people with disabilities and putting them into modern-day workhouses where someone else would profit from their work while they receive benefits alone – and where the potential for abuse was huge. If that happens, how long will it be before every other jobseeker ends up in a similar institution?

A while ago, a friend in the cafe I visit said that a Tory government will always see every class of people other than its own as “livestock”. That’s the word he used – “livestock”. From the above, with descriptions of people being treated like cattle, or being herded into the workhouse for someone else to profit from their work, it seems he has a very strong case.

So let’s go back to these internment and labour camps – in V for Vendetta they’re called “resettlement” camps. A later chapter – The Vortex – reveals that inmates at such camps are subjected to unethical medical experimentation. The doctor carrying out the trials notes in her diary that the camp commandant “promised to show me my research stock… they’re a poor bunch.”

Her research stock are human beings who have been subjected to conditions similar to those of the Nazi concentration camps. Notice the language – this doctor considers the other human beings taking part to be her property. And they are “research stock” – in other words, she does not see them as other human beings but as livestock – exactly as the friend in the cafe stated.

And jobseekers in today’s UK are being coerced into experimental drug trials, disguised as job opportunities, according to the latest reports.

V for Vendetta‘s tagline – the blurb that set the scene – was: “Fascist Britain, 1997”. It seems the only part that its author, Alan Moore, actually got wrong was the date.

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19 Comments

  1. Debbie Rushton September 15, 2013 at 1:31 pm - Reply

    “Toys” by James Patterson is equally disturbing and appears almost prophetical! It’s a scary World at the moment in my opinion.

  2. victhemike September 15, 2013 at 2:13 pm - Reply

    Alan Moore says “Called it…”.

  3. H Deniz September 15, 2013 at 2:42 pm - Reply

    There are 50 such camps being built on salsbury plain RIGHT NOW! Supposedly for training the army to train for raiding compounds in Afghanistan. One, yeah, two? Maybe. But fifty? Each big enough to hold say 2-3000 people. And they are referred to as Civilian Population Compounds. Something rotten here.

    • Florence September 17, 2013 at 12:05 pm - Reply

      Have you got any source for that information? Was it in the local press or MoD press releases? How do we find out about MoD projects, that use civilian contractors?

  4. Ash Martin September 15, 2013 at 2:45 pm - Reply

    Wearing the mask is merely our way of saying “I am Spartacus”. We are everywhere, and we do not need a figurehead. Go figure….

  5. jeffrey davies (@jeffrey33333) September 15, 2013 at 2:53 pm - Reply

    well its happening but those 99percent who are poor are leaving them treat us so yet one day I had hoped they would wake up from their dread before there isn’t any sick disabled left or the unemployed one day theyl open them but then il be gone jeff3 of the dwpexamination.org

  6. nick September 15, 2013 at 3:14 pm - Reply

    It is very scary and all i can do is to pass on to my contact in the UN of what’s going on and hopefully be able to work out the end game plan of the conservatives

    The labour party also have a game plan which is very similar to the conservatives so the bottom line is if your standing on your own two feet and have a mortgage and a good job then in going forward your ll be fine

    well that 30 percent of the population sorted as for the rest then this needs very careful consideration in how you vote at the next election

    my advice would be to vote labour if everything at home is good and has been good the past 3 years

    if however things have not been good then you need to vote with caution as the main object in which you should be thinking is to how to destroy the conservative once and for all

    because if we don’t they will destroy the lives of millions of people in a way both seen and unseen on a scale that the EU will never have seen before

    the conservatives are like a cancer not only here but worldwide

    they kill more of their citizens then all other political parties put together worldwide so you need to think hard because getting it wrong will cause the deaths of many of the younger generation in the future years as well as all the sick and disabled that are not self sufficient

  7. […] It has been rumoured that V for Vendetta 'Guy Fawkes' masks are to be banned from large-scale public demonstrations in the UK. They have already been banned in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The masks w…  […]

  8. Thomas September 15, 2013 at 4:47 pm - Reply

    I can sort of see both sides. Obviously, on one side, masked protestors will be more likely to commit crime and fight police.

    However, it does make this government look cartoonishly evil and there may be non criminal reasons why people want to protest in masks. Some may fear being made redundant by their bosses, others might fear police harassment because they protested, still others might just want to look good in the news.

    Can’t a compromise of some sort be worked out that protects public safety whilst allowing masked protest in some situations?

    • Mike Sivier September 15, 2013 at 5:30 pm - Reply

      I doubt it; my intention in starting with the mask was to ease the reader into the comparison with the backstory to ‘V for Vendetta’ by using a current news story. My personal feelings about using the mask are mixed; probably the best way to use it would be in co-ordination, so that a whole crowd of people who were not masked suddenly put on the mask in a symbolic gesture.

      • Vicky Ellis September 15, 2013 at 5:49 pm - Reply

        Or the gesture at the end of the film, when the crowd all remove their masks at once.

      • Alex Casale September 15, 2013 at 8:24 pm - Reply

        Yes again!

  9. Skintus Maximus September 15, 2013 at 6:03 pm - Reply

    I wore my mask at the May 4th protest, not because I had something to hide but because I had something to say. The Police ‘Forward Intelligence Unit’ got my picture because I wasn’t hiding my face. If they ban the mask we’ll use face paint, or wear the mask on the back of our heads, on T shirts, on flags and on banners. Quite simply it isn’t going away any time soon and trying to legislate away something they ‘don’t like’ is truly the mark of a dictatorship.

    • Mike Sivier September 15, 2013 at 6:14 pm - Reply

      Agreed.
      Like statistics on food banks, or death figures after ESA assessments, perhaps.

  10. […] “Fascist Britain, 2013. Everybody knows you can’t beat the system. Everybody but…?” It has been rumoured that V for Vendetta ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks are to be banned from large-scale public demonstrations in the UK.  […]

  11. beastrabban September 16, 2013 at 8:16 am - Reply

    Really interesting piece, Mike. As far as I can make out, a lot of ‘V for Vendetta’ was very much based in the character of Fascist regimes, like the Nazis, and the links the Thatcher Regime had with Fascist groups and governments at the time it was written. As for banning the ‘V’ mask, that surely places this government in the ranks of dictatorships and repressive regimes like the Gulf Arab states you mentioned.

  12. beastrabban September 16, 2013 at 8:37 am - Reply

    Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
    This is another highly thought-provoking piece from Mike detailing the similarity between the Condem regime and the fictional, Fascist Future in Alan Moore’s graphic novel and movie, ‘V for Vendetta’. The parallels include the involvement of Big Business in an autocratic regime, deliberately racist policies aimed at racial minorities, gay men and women, and the use of humans for medical experimentation. All of this occurred under Fascist regimes, and particularly and most notoriously under Hitler’s Third Reich. It is also happening in Greece today, and coming back in Hungary under the Fidesz and Jobbik parties. Much of ‘V for Vendetta’ also reflects the time it was written: the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Both of these backed extreme, Right-wing dictatorships, particularly in South America. Thatcher’s Conservative party also had extensive link with the Far Right, both at home and abroad, as extensively documented by the parapolitical magazine, Lobster. It was also the period when the use of Nazi scientists by post-War American administrations, and the knowledge they brought with them, was also being increasingly uncovered and the subject of controversy. The most famous of these were the rocket scientists brought to America under ‘Operation Paperclip’. It also included medical information acquired from the human experimentation in the concentration camps, some of which had been used for teaching purposes in British medicine. FOI releases later revealed the extent of human experimentation by American scientists and doctors in the post-War period. In Britain the prospect of anarchy and social disintegration in the 1970s saw the formation of extreme Right-wing paramilitary groups, formed to seize power and clamp down on Left-wing unrest. Francis Wheen’s book on paranoia in the 1970s, ‘Strange Days Indeed’ shows how widely this fear of a left-wing takeover was in establishment circles. The Times, for example, demanded the formation of a coalition government of national unity, formed from the middle of the road of the three main parties. Other members of the establishment openly supported the formation of the Right-wing paramilitaries and their plans to seize power. The 1970s had also seen the rapid rise of the National Front to the position where, by the end of the decade, to many people it looked set to take over from the Liberals as Britain’s third political party. This made the Fascist future described in Moore’s comic strip extremely plausible. It was Science Fiction as ‘the literature of warning’ of an all-too possible future.

  13. Florence September 17, 2013 at 12:02 pm - Reply

    We can see here the full intent and purpose of the “debate” about the Muslim veil. Like the “lobbyist” bill – a Trojan horse to clamp down on democratic dissent that has never been needed before. They are obviously seeking to have ANY covering of the face banned via the “lets’ have a nice little ConDem Englander Debate” based on the needs of the racist and misogynists in power to move further to the right, appealing the DM readers as usual.

    We are already the most surveilled country on the world, and most people think it is good to reduce crime, and are oblivious to the advances on face recognition technology. But as long as CCTV provides some of the most crass reality TV for the masses, that will be a tough one to change attitudes to.

    I think we should all stock up on masks of any sort, and if they are banned I can knit balaclavas. It’s not about civil unrest, or maintaining peace against violent agitators. It’s about being able to find anyone in public and snatch them into detention in the new gulags. They will be using the face-recognition soon as they currently use the automatic DVLA data on the roads to scan car number plates.

    No-one in the Justice Ministry (I hate even typing that crap propagandist name) has made their plans clear for the many redundant local gaols that will be left when to super Titan gaols are commissioned. They haven’t included in their business model any returns on selling prime development land in most cities, so one presumes they will already have them identified as business opportunities for G4$ and others to turn into the residential training centres, (or more likely internment camps).

    What is happening in Greece is truly shocking. We must not let this happen here too by default – as you rightly say Mike, the very British way of ignoring the truth in front of them. Please keep up your brave and clear analysis to help those of us that need help with the words to keep pushing the message out.

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