Europe’s descent into totalitarianism: II

Following my unpleasant experience at Gatwick airport last October, I wrote an article about Europe’s descent into totalitarianism. 

Now, new evidence has emerged that what I wrote was correct.

The Daily Mail published a piece on 28 January 2023 which contained an anonymous confession by a whistleblower that the so-called Brigade 77 within the British Army had strayed beyond its remit of countering malicious foreign disinformation, to surveying and policing legitimate political opponents within Britain itself, in this case on Covid policy.

This is precisely what happened to me: a piece of legislation designed to prevent foreigners entering the country with hostile intent was used, in my case, against a British national perceived to be a political opponent of a government policy.

In the cases raised by the Daily Mail, Covid critics like Peter Hitchens and Toby Young were subject to surveillance by this secretive psyops unit within the British army.  Its findings were then communicated to the government’s so-called Rapid Response Unit, whose function is to stifle unwelcome news stories and promote the government narrative.

Critics like Hitchens and Young were thus treated as if they were political subversives, whereas in fact they were behaving in a totally legitimate way on a matter of huge public interest.

This is the very definition of totalitarianism.  The whistleblower admits they knew they were the army monitoring the domestic population and that they used a ridiculous (and in fact non-existent) legal loophole to maintain the fiction that this was not so.

What the Daily Mail does not mention, perhaps because it does not realise it, is that the links between Brigade 77 and 10 Downing Street run far deeper than a rogue operation during Covid.

Brigade 77 was set up in 2015 by merging two army units, one of which bore the name “15 Psychological Operations Group” and was therefore explicitly devoted to psychological warfare.  Brigade 77 was then formally presented in public in January 2018 in a speech given to the Royal United Services Institute by the chief of the General Staff, General Sir Nick Carter.

Carter explained that it was supposed to counter Russian disinformation.  He talked a lot about “hybrid warfare” which is one of NATO’s buzz words. 

But in this context, he said something very worrying: “There is (sic) no longer two clear and distinct states of ‘peace’ and ‘war’”. 

This is very worrying because if the distinction between war and peace is abolished or blurred, then so is the distinction between civilian and military power.  It is this act of conceptual vandalism which allows a secret military psyops unit to wage psychological warfare against its own citizens in peacetime. 

Two days before Carter gave his speech in January 2018, the UK government announced that 10 Downing Street was creating a “Rapid Response Unit” to counter fake news.  The purpose of this Unit, according to its director, Alexander Aiken, was to push news from “alternative sources” off the search engines so that “fact-based” “information” from government sources was given priority and the alternative information more difficult to find. 

It is worth reading the text of his statement in full to see how explicitly Aiken describes his work of preventing the public from accessing non-governmental sources.

What Aiken does not say, and what the Daily Mail does not seem to realise, is that he was appointed an Honorary Colonel in this very same Brigade 77 in 2019.  In other words, the head of the government’s communication service is a secret service military officer. 

So the British army spies on and polices the British population to support British government policies.

This explains why when General Carter addressed the press in Downing Street in April 2020 about the army’s role in fighting Covid, he explained that one of the army’s roles was that of Brigade 77 in countering disinformation.  Carter said, “We have been involved with the Cabinet Office rapid response unit, with our 77 Brigade helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also to counter disinformation.”

As we now know, this work involved spying on journalists.  The same secret units also monitored the social media accounts of ordinary citizens, i.e. not journalists or people with a public role, who were trying to make sense of, and no doubt criticise, government policy.

The whistlewlower writes,

It is quite obvious that our activities (i.e. those of Brigade 77) resulted in the monitoring of the UK population... monitoring the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated – it was simply fear.

I developed the impression the Government were more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncovering any potential foreign interference, and I regret that I was a part of it. Frankly, the work I was doing should never have happened.

When I lectured on Brigade 77 in September 2021, some of my students accused me of being a conspiracy theorist.  Yet this is just another example of a conspiracy theory which has turned out to be even truer than I realised.

We have travelled further into the tunnel of totalitarianism than we realise.  The situation is now highly dangerous.

John Laughland is director of FVD International and a lecturer in politics and history at ICES, the Catholic Institute of the Vendée, in Western France.  He is currently Visiting Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.