Frozen Bank Accounts, Again: The Arrival of a New Tyranny (original) (raw)

Not long ago, I wrote a piece highlighting the arrival of a new form of political control, namely governments’ authorization of banks—without due process—to freeze the bank accounts of members of their citizenry. I noted that this was a form of coercion that had existed in China for some years now, and had recently been adopted by Russia, but I emphasised that it had also been deployed by the Canadian government against a minority of its population—those who participated in the ‘truckers’ protests’—with zero uproar from Canada’s allied nations. I feared that UK parliamentarians had been silent over this tyrannical quashing of the late Queen’s subjects across the Atlantic because, as I wrote then, they were likely “looking over at this innovative model of political control and thinking, ‘Golly, what a clever idea!’”

I have been vindicated in my suspicion. The UK has indeed adopted this model of political control. In fact, at the time I wrote that piece, the UK had already deployed this novel form of coercion—with no due process whatever—on a member of its own citizenry. I was unaware that this extraordinary act had been executed by the UK government because, to date, apart from a piece by Toby Young in The Spectator (which passed me by) there has been no reporting on this unlawful action by our government. Had I not watched Peter Hitchens’ breathtakingly brilliant Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture, in which he mentioned this case of gangster-like behaviour on the part of the UK government, I would probably have never learned of it.

Graham Phillips is a Youtuber who, whilst calling himself a ‘reporter’ and ‘journalist,’ is more accurately called a propagandist for Russia. He is, from all available evidence, a thoroughly dislikeable human being. Back in 2016, he made a video in which he harassed a Ukrainian prisoner of war who had lost both his arms and been blinded by a mine explosion, and Phillips can be heard mocking the man for his injuries. More recently, he interviewed Aiden Aslin, the British-born man who went to fight for Ukraine against Russia and was captured and sentenced to death (a fate he escaped through a negotiated prisoner exchange). In that ‘interview,’ Aslin is constantly pressured into saying things that he knew to be untrue, but—he has subsequently explained—he was keen to evade further tortures that would have surely been forthcoming had he failed to give the answers to which Phillips repeatedly led him.

We can all agree that Phillips is a deeply unpleasant man, but that is insufficient—one would hope—for being sanctioned by the UK government. The question needs to be answered: May the state punish people who are yet to be found guilty of a crime in a court of law on the grounds that the government has arbitrarily decided that the person should be punished? In other words, has the UK sleepwalked into a condition in which due process is no longer required? As Hitchens put it in his lecture:

He’s not a likeable person. He’s done some things which many people find reprehensible. But he has been punished quite without due process by the state, an outrage against both Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights… He cannot receive payments or make them. He cannot, for instance, insure his home or pay his council tax. He is forced by law into not obeying the law… The idea appears to be to make his life unliveable, and he is virtually powerless to oppose the measures against him, as the Foreign Office, which imposed them when Elizabeth Truss was at its head, largely ignores his communications. Now, as I have said, Mr. Phillips is perhaps not very nice. I confess that I do not especially like him. But then a lot of people feel the same way about me. And if you need to be nice to get public support against oppression and arbitrary state power, then we’ve all had it. As the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said: “Safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.” This assault on free speech and thought, and this total abandonment of due process, of the presumption of innocence, and of the whole idea of justice, seems to me to be the end.

It is important to note that this action by the UK government really is completely novel. It has never happened before. When, in July 2022, the UK government placed sanctions on Phillips and froze his assets, he became the first and only British-born citizen to be sanctioned by his own country. His bills cannot be paid by friends or family on his behalf because it is illegal to provide financial assistance to someone on the sanctions list. Phillips responded: “I didn’t have any opportunity to defend myself. No one notified me. There are no real charges against me.”

However unpleasant Phillips is, he is right, and the UK government is wrong. Phillips, as a British citizen and a subject of His Majesty, retains the right to have a trial in a court of law and to be found guilty of some crime before he receives any punishment. And yet, no such trial has taken place, and he has not only been punished, but severely punished.

The case is even more bizarre than that, however, because he not only hasn’t been tried and found guilty of a crime, but he has not been asked to attend a trial at a court of law—no international arrest warrant has been issued. Moreover, he not only hasn’t been found guilty of a crime, but he also hasn’t been accused of any crime. In justification of its actions towards Phillips, the Foreign Office released the following statement:

[Phillips] has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence of Ukraine.

To be clear, this is tantamount to saying that Phillips has been sanctioned because he has created and disseminated video material that does not align with the UK government’s position on the war in Ukraine. Phillips may be making distasteful, highly biased, even factually inaccurate material, but he has not committed a crime—or if he has, he should be told what the crime is, and then he should be arrested, tried, and punished if found guilty. Otherwise, it is not Phillips who is acting unlawfully, but the UK government.

It seems that UK citizens can now be punished at the whim of their government. The state may carry out such punishments not because you are guilty of a crime, or even because you have been accused of a crime, but because—according to its own admission—it simply disagrees with you. This is not speculation. We now have the precedent for this.

Of course, as Peter Hitchens knows so well (and alluded to this in his Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture), this degeneration of law into a rod of arbitrary power was always going to be the eventual consequence of the denial of any transcendent basis for law, and the legal positivism that is the corollary of such materialism. Edmund Burke saw this coming two and a half centuries ago:

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name a property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy of God.

By Burke’s reckoning, the present UK government is an enemy of God—although it wouldn’t take much conjecture to come to that conclusion in any case. The foundational precept of our nation, the frequent reminder of which was something we all grew up with, is that Britain is a land under the rule of law. In reality, however, for some time the UK has been a place where crime is practically legal, and people are routinely punished for non-crimes. Now, the government itself has opted to ape this trajectory of the society over which it presides by acting as a thug towards a member of its own citizenry. This cannot go unchallenged, for if it does, there is no turning back. As things stand, not one of us is safe.

One cannot help but suspect that this novel form of political control which is on the rise across the world was brought into the UK by testing it out on a person so despicable that they knew nobody would come to his defence. In this, of course, they were correct. Apart from Toby Young and Peter Hitchens, no one has come to Phillips’ defence. And, in fact, writing this does feel a bit like arguing for the liberties of the devil; we would do well, however, to meditate on the following lines from Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons:

William Roper: “So, now you give the devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Have we all departed from such reason?

Unfortunately, it seems that we are suffering from post-COVID amnesia. We appear to have forgotten that in the past two years, the government announced a state of emergency when there was no emergency, house-imprisoned its citizenry, put acute pressure on people to accept experimental drugs in order to protect others—even though it was demonstrable that the drugs did not prevent transmission, wrecked the economic health of the country, disrupted the education of the young, forced the elderly to die alone, compelled cancer-sufferers to remain untreated, plunged the country and many individual citizens into crushing debt, and refused (and still refuses) to take proper responsibility for those injured by the experimental drugs. We witnessed an extraordinary eruption of arbitrary power and the deliberate fomenting of hysteria, without which the rise of such arbitrary power would have been impossible. And now we have moved on as if none of this ever happened. In our condition of shared amnesia, we have become, it appears, a people who simply accept arbitrary power as a satisfactory substitute for due process and the rule of law. If that is the case, then the looming tyranny under which we shall soon be toiling is one we entirely deserve.