In economics the whole idea of the free market as an efficient system is coming under serious attack. ibid.
A form of order and a new kind of democracy in which the market, not politics, gave people what they wanted. But things didn’t work out how the theory predicted. Adam Curtis: The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free
Positive liberty is driven by a vision that freedom is for something. The freedom to do or become something new. Out of which a better world would come. Negative liberty has no such vision. It isn’t for anything. At its heart it has no purpose other than to keep us free from unnecessary constraint or harm. And in using force to create a world based on negative liberty, the democratic revolutionaries have actually led millions of people abroad into a world without purpose or meaning. This idea of freedom is still portrayed by many politicians and influential commentators as a universal absolute. They assume it is only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the world. But this may not be true. ibid.
The idea of freedom that we live with today is a narrow and limiting one; it was born out of a specific and dangerous time: the Cold War. It may have had meaning and purpose then as an alternative to communist tyranny but now has become a dangerous trap. Our government relies on a simplistic economic model of human beings that allows inequality to grow and offers nothing positive in the face of reactionary forces they have helped awake around the world. ibid.
Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny. ibid.
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, David Graeber 1961-2020, BBCiplayer 2021
We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and American societies have become split and polarised. Not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption. And a widespread distrust of the elite. But at the same time there is a paralysis, a sense that no-one knows how to escape from it … And never a different tomorrow. ibid.
Because in the age of the individual what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world. ibid.
Often power was decaying and desperate to keep its ascendancy. These strange days did not just happen; we and those in power created them together. ibid.
In the late 1950s as the British empire was falling apart, there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong under the surface. There was a feeling of unease. Despite all the reforms after the Second World War and the welfare state, the old forms of power had not gone away. And neither had the violence and the corruption that had always been a part of that power. ibid.
Reports had started to come back from one of the last parts of the empire, Kenya, that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control. They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau. The reports said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put into special camps where they were going to be psychologically adjusted. The British were trying to manipulate what their chief psychologist called The African mind. But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness. The British used mass torture and killing as they desperately tried to hold on to power. The government in London denied all the accusations but the rumours of violence and horror continued. ibid.
Those who came to Britain from the empire were shocked at the strange country they found … a sad and frightened country. ibid.
In the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact. And not only in the Institutions. But inside people’s heads as well. The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country. Those in charge demanded obedience. ibid.
Peter Rachman was far more than the brutal gangster he was portrayed as. He had lived an extraordinary life … The English judged him: he was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil … On the surface there was the overt racism against the immigrants that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill … Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one but it was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do: he was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live … They hated him for it. ibid.
‘This is Peter Rachman: one of Britain’s big-time twentieth century racketeers.’ ibid. Panorama
Behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. DeFreitas [Rachman heavy] gave it a name: he called it Englishism, it came he said from both an anger and melancholy at the loss of their empire. Then, Peter Rachman died of a heart attack. And Michael DeFreitas suddenly found that he was the new face of evil. ibid.
For men like Robin Douglas-Home the expectation of power had been deeply embedded inside their minds. But as the world had changed around them, real power ebbed away. They were left with a terrible melancholy. But in some would turn to despair. A year after filming, Robin Douglas-Home committed suicide. ibid.
Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s from British Guyana. And he had become a best-selling novelist. What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence: the violence and the racism that had been at the heart of the European empires. Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds of those who had ruled the empires … One night Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house, poured paraffin over himself and set himself alight. He burned to death. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, BBC 2021
One evening after making a speech in Reading, Michael X [DeFreitas] was arrested. And he was sent to prison for ten months for inciting racial hatred. The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged and he carried on being an MP, which Michael X said rather proved his point. ibid.
Michael X realised that what was happening now in Notting Hill was the opposite: people were being treated as subjects to be counted and measured and managed. He became increasingly cynical about the liberals’ real intentions. Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else. The new groups might look like radicals and dance to black music but really they were the children of the colonialists who had run the empire, and they had no intention of giving up their power. That old system of power was simply mutating, morphing into a new form that camouflaged itself in radicalism but still would manage and control. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same
Politicians in the West had given large parts of their power away. What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread. When Tony Blair came to power he had immediately given control over much of the economy to the Bank of the England. But in 1998 the global financial system showed how unstable it could be. An economic crisis that begun in Russia and then spread to Asia had consequences throughout the world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
In the north of England factories began to close. Tony Blair insisted that it was a price the country had to pay if it wanted to be a part of what he called the world economy. ibid.
What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign was historically accurate, but what they didn’t know was that the opium trade had also had powerful consequences inside Britain itself. It had started to undermine the self-confidence of the British empire, and introduce a dark and corrosive fear into the heart of British society. By the middle of the nineteenth century those who ran Britain were already aware of the horrors created by the slave trade. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
A pretty awful time to live in Britain. Neil Kinnock
Heath in asking the question who rules Britain was going to get the answer from huge numbers of people – not you, mate. Neil Kinnock
There was bafflement and anger about the nature of Tony Blair’s relationship [with George Bush]. Neil Kinnock
Sod Off Sailor. Private Eye front page on Heath
We had a 14% lead in the Daily Mail the Friday before polling day. Joe Haines, political adviser to Harold Wilson
Mr Wilson’s resignation came as a shock … He secretly called two BBC journalists and gave them a scoop, what he called the British Watergate. He said that as prime minister he had been unable to run the country; instead, powerful sections of the establishment had been working so hard to get rid of him we had come within an inch of our very own military coup. The Plot Against Harold Wilson, BBC 2006
‘Democracy as we know it is in great danger … Dirty tricks have been going on …’ ibid.
What dark forces had driven the former prime minister into the arms of our journalist? ibid.
He criticised the stranglehold on power exercised by the British establishment. ibid.
The establishment really felt Wilson hitting them below the belt. ibid.
Wilson had been a frequent flier to the Soviet block. ibid.
Wilson was right: he was being bugged and someone was looking for something. ibid.
The coup was aborted, partly because the Conservatives were confident they could beat Wilson at the ballot box. ibid.