(To listen to this article in audio form, please visit my YouTube channel. Article first published 23/03/23)

"Rape may as well be legal in London," a high-ranking Met Police officer said, and as the national newspapers reported this week.

"I wouldn't report my own rape," another female officer added, commenting on the wholescale failures of London's police force to appropriately investigate sex crimes.

These are some of the most damning and cataclysmic statements it is possible to make about an institution ostensibly designed to protect us, and some of the most irrevocable and indicting evidence that the UK has become a failed state. A key determinant of a state that has passed the preliminary stages of "fragile" and "crisis" and has reached the final destination of "failed" is the inability to provide basic securities and protections to its people.

To say that rape "may as well be legal" in the capital city of a first-world, democratic country (we're not talking about some barbarian, backwards medieval village here, after all, but one of the most cosmopolitan and affluent cities in the world) is to sign that country's death warrant: the capital sets the cultural tone for the rest of the country, and if rape is now effectively legal in London, it won't be long until that fans out into the rest of the country, too.

Of course, this is by design. If it wasn't, there is no way this terrifying news, a huge threat to national security and the safety of women everywhere, would ever have been put on a siren blast across the nation's headlines, for what are surely fairly obvious reasons.

The law acts as a deterrent to would-be criminals. Not everyone has a perfectly functioning moral compass, sadly, but almost everyone is afraid of being apprehended by the police and going to jail. That rape has always been seen as one of the most despicable crimes, second only to murder, acts as an effective deterremt for people who - were the law more lax - would be likely to offend in this way.

So, advertising the fact all over the nation's newspapers that rape is now effectively legal, and the chances of rapists being prosecuted are almost zero, is a big green light to would-be sex offenders to start attacking women with impunity. Obviously. If the UK's security services were in any way invested in protecting women, they would have kept this news entirely out of the newspapers - if ever there was a case for the papers being slapped with a D-Notice, surely it's this - and would instead have quietly worked behind the scenes on rapidly reforming police culture.

So, the obvious reason this has been plastered all over the papers is explicitly to undermine the UK's security infrastructure further, all as part of the planned, controlled demolition of our current culture - and all Western, liberal democracies all over the world. Don't forget, also, that the UK is currently importing thousands of single young males from countries which have medieval attitudes to sexual consent and women's rights - countries that believe, for instance, that if a woman is out in public without being covered head to toe and with a male chaperone, she's a whore (thus: fair game to be assaulted).

Therefore, the purpose of the "hey rapists, rape is now legal" newspaper advertorials is the same as the "bumbling, incompetent politicians" news stories (Alexander "Boris" Johnson having now publicly declared that, "I'm not a liar, I'm just a moron".). It's to make us utterly lose faith in all existing structures so they can be demolished entirely and replaced with something new ("6uild 6ack 6etter").

A very timely piece was published in the Daily Mail (the country's second most widely read newspaper) this week, in concert with the "legal rape" stories, headlined:

"The DEATH of democracy: As Xi Jinping declares 'change is coming that hasn't happened in 100 years', expert explains how inept Western leaders are paving the way for autocrats to take over the world by failing to tackle domestic issues."

I strongly recommend reading the article in full (though you may want an extra-strong, possibly Irish, coffee first), because it's one of the most succinct and plausible summations of where we are likely headed, and why, that I have read for some time. That the mainstream media is publishing it suggests it is a form of predictive programming - not an "if" but a "when".

Quoting the new book 'Defeating the Dictators', by political expert, Charles Dunst, the article states:

"Victory will not belong to whoever has the biggest army, [Dunst] argues. It will be won by whoever can prove their system works best.

In his doomsday vision, America loses to China not because it lacks weapons - but because it lacks conviction in its own way of life.

Mr Dunst, an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said: 'We've seen this kind of clash of ideals before during the Cold War. But the challenge we face today is more severe than it was against the Soviets.

'Nobody going to Moscow in the 1980s came home and thought "I want my city to be like that". But there is a danger of people going to the likes of China today and seeing their skyscrapers and their highways and coming home thinking that.

'That has weakened support for democracy around the world. The military is important, but our focus cannot only be on defence, it needs to be good governance - that is ultimately more important.

'How can we stand up for democracy abroad if it doesn't work for people at home?'

And therein lies the crux - how can we fight to defend our democracies if they are so manifestly not working? The article continues on to say:

"Two decades ago, democracy looked like the best system of governance because all the richest and most powerful countries, with the best living standards, used that system.

But in 2020, life expectancy in the UAE overtook that in the US for the first time. The same year, the World Economic Forum ranked Singapore - which has lived under a one-party system since 1959 - above the UK for social mobility.

China - which has outstripped the West in terms of economic growth for decades - now spends more on infrastructure each year than the US and Europe combined. It also pioneered the roll-out of technologies such as 5G.

Perhaps that helps to explain why The Economist's yearly 'democracy index' on the strength of the system worldwide has seen a decline every year since 2015.

The largest fall on record came between 2020 and 2021 to hit an all-time low since the index was first published in 2006, and it has stagnated since then."

The concluding point the author makes is that, ultimately, most people value security over freedom, and when democratic freedoms fail to protect their most basic security needs, people are happy to opt for autocracies instead.

We in the UK have been a liberal democracy for a long time now, with an attendant focus on personal liberty, and a separation from institutions seen as antiquated and oppressive, such as religion, tradition, and "old-fashioned" family values. The narrative spun since the 1960s has been that these outdated, musty old superstitions oppress people, and what they really need is to be liberated from such things, so they can "find out who they really are". It was assumed that untethering people from the shackles of tradition and obligation would make them happier and more fulfilled.

It hasn't.

That is the fundamental problem we in Western liberal democracies face, and why we will struggle so severely to mount a robust defence to the powerful autocratic forces that are targeting us - that our "way of life" is based on a lot of illusions and falsehoods. Liberalised attitudes that have released people from the "burdens" of tradition, culture, and community, have not only failed to make them happier, they have actually had exactly the opposite effect, with adolescents from liberal families far more prone to depression than those from more conservative (small 'c') backgrounds (and adults who identify as politically/culturally liberal are much more likely to be in poor mental health).

This is because, contrary to fashionable liberal dogmas, people are not born perfectly formed characters with fully realised personalities, passions, and purposes, who just need to be left alone to "be who they really are". Rather, they are born much more unformed and malleable than that, and with a deep need for rich culture, a community life, and a meaning and a purpose beyond the material. If that is not made accessible to them, and they are just given vague messages about "liberation" and "freedom" and "being who they really are" instead, then depression is often an inevitable result, because we aren't "who we really are" from birth. The impact of nurture and environment is enormous, and human adults - while they may certainly have some inborn predispositions and predilections - are ultimately made, not born. After all, when a flower fails to bloom, we don't fix the flower - send it for therapy, medicate it, etc. - we fix the environment in which it grows.

However, the liberal democratic UK - while it certainly once had a thriving and easily definable culture - now exists in a kind of "post-cultural" vacuum, where nobody really knows what our culture is. If I were to ask a hundred lifelong UK residents, "what is UK culture?", I'd get a hundred different answers. If I were, however, to ask a hundred residents of an autocratic country, such as China or Iran, the answers I'd receive would mostly be very similar.

And, obviously, being able to actually identify what your culture is, is imperative in being able to robustly defend it. Can I myself define UK culture? No, not really - I mean, I know the political and civic values we're supposed to prize (and they are good values), such as freedom of speech and equality of opportunity, but culture is a lot more than just politics. Culture is moral values, community, art, literature, cuisine, and yes, in virtually all cases, religion - it's very rare for a robust culture to exist and thrive without religion. That is not a comment on whether religion is good or bad, it's just a historical observation. Religions may become 'divisive' when pitted against each other, but within the countries in which they thrive, can act as cultural adhesives, insofar as, even if people have other disagreements (as they always do), they at least have that fundamental shared belief.

The perennial battle human beings have always had to fight is balancing the desire for personal autonomy with the need for belongingness and community, and, necessarily, the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. The UK has leaned very strongly towards personal autonomy over the post-war decades, and while that's obviously had benefits for some, it has not overall advantaged society as a whole, with most of our communities now fractured and scattered and people lonelier and unhappier than ever. So we pursued personal autonomy at all costs, believing this was the route to increased happiness and fulfillment, so any sacrifices required along the way were worth it - and we got it very wrong.

Other cultures haven't made the same choices, and so while they may ultimately be more oppressive - often obscenely so - it still remains the case that their people are often less lonely, more connected to their communities, and - as we explored at the beginning of this article - safer.

When you exist in a culture, as we do, that promotes the surgical mutilation and sterilisation of healthy teenagers, whilst performing explicit pornographic drag shows for babies, it's hard to argue that living under an autocratic system could be any worse. Indeed, a regime that promotes moral values and takes a hard line on degeneracy will, to many people, look much more appealing than what we have now. We can never "have it all" and sacrificing some personal liberty and liberal civic values, in exchange for a "cleaned up" culture with better security and protections, may look like a very attractive offer to some.

So that's the daunting future we must now grapple with: when China or Russia or whoever declare they are scrapping democratic political systems and liberal social values, and replacing them with harsh conservatism and a One World Government instead, are enough people going to object?

I suspect the answer is no, and that this has been thoroughly engineered over many decades, reaching a culmination through "Covid". In order to give democracies their final shattering blow, it must be proven to the people that they are corrupt and broken to a degree that is unfixable. The usual "incompetent / greedy politicians" line won't be enough to provoke mass calls for the dismantling of democracy altogether. It will have to be something much worse than that.

So, how about the revelation that political actors (both the current administration and the opposition) sponsored and forcefully promoted an agenda that has brutally cut short the lives of millions of people?

That the democratically elected government injected the nation's siblings and parents, husbands and wives, and even children, with a deadly serum that is currently ripping families apart as more and more healthy young individuals "die suddenly"?

When it is finally revealed on the world stage what these injections have done to people - that millions have been maimed for life, with their life expectancy cut by decades - then that will be it. The mass anger and betrayal will be so acute that nothing will be good enough except, as I saw in a recent incensed social media post, "burning it all to the ground".

And that, as I said, is by design. If your democratically elected government (and its opposition) could be so colossally, inconceivably incompetent and/or evil as to do this to you, how can this system ever be trusted again?

That is how I believe the narrative will be spun, and as things stand right now, I think it is very probable that the next UK General Election, will be the last. With voter turnout plummeting year on year, and a new obstacle introduced this year in terms of voter ID, it seems pretty obvious this system is on its last legs, not meant to have a long-term future.

Can we stop this headlong descent into explicit autocratic tyranny? We can certainly try. But in fortifying ourselves for the future, it's also important to recognise the reality that we now really are a "failed state" and that, whatever we do, the future will look very different to the past, even the very recent past. We're never going back to how we were.

Yet that is not an entirely bad thing, as I'm sure many would agree. After all, it's not like we were living in some blissful utopia which "Covid" suddenly took away. Covid was simply the culmination of decades and decades of poor planning, corrupt institutions, and cultural rot.

Whatever comes next, there is no doubt that the future will be challenging and far less "comfortable" than the lives many of us may have enjoyed pre-plandemic. But remember that in some ancient dialects, the symbol for "danger" is also the symbol for "opportunity".

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