Extremism

Because I do not own a rifle
My loaded words must serve as bullets
And when you tell me they’re not legal
I’ll know exactly where to shoot it.

Under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, a statutory duty was placed on U.K. police, education, health and local authorities to prevent terrorism by identifying citizens they believe hold extremist views counter to what the Government referred to — but did not define — as ‘fundamental British values’.

In February 2023, 7 months after I wrote this short poem, it was revealed that the Government’s flagship counter-terrorism scheme, Prevent, had identified, as indicators of such ‘extremism’, the reading of Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson and Kipling — the author of the poem voted ‘The Nation’s Favourite’ in 2009.

This week, the Government introduced a new legislative definition of  ‘extremism’ that will come into force under UK law next week, and which includes the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance that aims to: 1) negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or 2) undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or 3) intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).

As examples of the above, I would cite: the UK Government selling arms to criminal regimes like the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, supporting apartheid and colonial ideologies like Zionism, or passing legislation that censors and criminalises disagreement with the orthodoxies of woke; 1) enforcing lockdown restrictions on our movement and association for 2 years, imposing experimental mandatory gene therapy as a condition of employment for care workers; creating a surveillance state of CCTV and ULEZ cameras, enclosing UK citizens in 15-minute cities, or introducing bans on consumptions on the justification of stopping global warming; and 2) ruling the UK between March 2020 and March 2022 under a de facto state of emergency during which 537 coronavirus-justified regulations were made into law without parliamentary approval, or implementing authoritarian technologies for our surveillance and control, including facial recognition, a system of Digital ID and Central Bank Digital Currency, without a mandate from the British people; and 3) subjecting the UK population to the rule of unelected transnational technocracies, including the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty, the obligations to which infringe on the national sovereignty of the UK and the human rights of UK citizens.

Under this new definition, our Government, Parliament, civil service, municipal and local authorities, military, police, financial and business sectors, media, medical, education, entertainment and culture institutions are all extremist — and the definition is correct. The UK is a fascist state.

Simon Elmer