Tell me, fellow Brits, how are you getting used to our island version of North Korea? How are you coping with life, now that we are a global pariah alongside Pyongyang? How do you feel about modern Britain having to vie with North Korea, Myanmar and Afghanistan for the wooden spoon on every international index of oppression?
For that is the country Wednesday’s Daily Mail front page insists we have now become. It is tempting to laugh off a headline that asks “When did Britain become North Korea?” as just another here-today-gone-tomorrow piece of journalistic hyperbole. That’s even more the case when you read the cobbled-up pandemonium of provocations that form the contents of the headline-writer’s charge that Britain is being strong-armed into “Starmer’s socialist utopia” – nervy bond markets, the possibility of compulsory ID cards, the arrest of the Father Ted writer for his tweets and, of course, Angela Rayner.
But there is something more at work here. The plain fact is that this list simply does not compare with North Korea’s place near the top of the global slavery index or at the foot of the international index of economic freedom. Some actions of the British state are undoubtedly annoying and wrong – even sometimes iniquitous. But there is still a gulf between the charge sheet and what Amnesty International calls the North Korean state’s untrammelled ability to “exercise total control over all aspects of life”.
These things should hardly need saying, yet the increasing reality is that they now must be said. Parts of Britain’s political debate, if you can use that word any longer, are now routinely infused with a hysterical dystopianism, of which the Mail front page or the casual use this week by a Telegraph columnist of the phrase “Starmer’s Stasi” are classic examples. Both the old and the new media facilitate this, provoking governments – Labour today but previously also the Conservatives – into poorly thought-out legislative responses to manageable problems.
The net result, however, is that overstatement and exaggeration dominate our debates, squeezing out much-needed truth, proportion, fairness, reason and judgment in politics and government. Even now, a strong dose of all five of these qualities would surely have made a better job of clarifying – and in some cases, preventing – the four different genuine problems on which the Mail based its silly North Korea comparison.
First, it is true the UK bond market moved up again this week. The UK economy is stuck. But the main cause of nerves in the bond markets is global – caused by Donald Trump’s assaults on the Federal Reserve’s independence. That is washing over into many European markets, not just Britain. The idea that the UK market is uniquely spooked is false.
Second, it is also true that ID cards are again on the UK government’s agenda. In other circumstances, the Tory press might be in favour, because digital IDs might bar unregistered migrants from working in the informal economy. But even a convert to ID cards, like me, who prefers the state rather than Elon Musk to control the digital world, needs to grasp that the system may not shrink the shadow economy very effectively. When Britain used wartime ID cards to enforce rationing, the black market still thrived.
The Heathrow arrest of the Father Ted creator Graham Linehan looks, on the evidence, a very questionable use of police time. As the Met commissioner says, the law should be redrafted to be more sensitive to legitimate disagreements. All the same, one of Linehan’s tweets did suggest an act of violence. Social media, like the internet, has to be policed so that incitement is prevented and deterred, and I would rather the police did this than the untrustworthy tech giants.
Unlike the Tory press, I have no problem with Angela Rayner’s ambition or dress sense. I also know a popular politician when I see one, and that popularity probably explains why Rayner is such a media target. Yet she herself now admits she paid less tax on a property than she should have. Few of us know the full facts, so we must wait for the adviser on ministerial interests to report.
In short, none of the four problems covers Britain in clouds of glory. None is the envy of the world. Yet none of them, either singly or in combination, justifies the level of panic and hyperbole that you read daily in the rightwing media. We all know that Britain is working badly. But what can explain something as egregiously unfair as the North Korea comparison?
The answer may lie in the right’s abject craving for a British Trump in the shape of Nigel Farage. Farage appeared in Washington on Wednesday in front of the House judiciary committee. Misbilled as the Rt Hon Nigel Farage (I trust he corrected the US committee that he is neither right nor honourable), the Reform UK leader was there to attack the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act.
Above all, though, he was there to pander to the lie, promoted by many Republicans, that Britain and Europe are intolerant enemies of free speech because they favour some degree of control of the terms of public debate rather than none. Yes, some of Britain’s and Europe’s laws on these subjects need to be rethought. But the real North Korea comparison is in places such as Russia, China and even, embryonically, in the United States itself. By their toadying to Trump, Farage and his sycophants are doing their utmost to bring to these shores the very thing by which they claim to be so outraged.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
