CIVIL WAR - COURTESY OF THE GOVERNMENT
Enoch Powell warned that politicians would avoid the “poisonous nettles” until civil conflict arrived. Nearly fifty years later, this satire asks whether censorship and two-tier government are extinguishing the fuse - or lighting it.
In 1977, Enoch Powell predicted that Britain’s politicians would privately admit he was right—yet publicly do nothing.
Why? Because grasping the “poisonous nettles” might cost them their careers. Far easier to let the fuse burn, retire comfortably and leave another generation standing beside the explosives.
Nearly fifty years later, Powell is declared wrong because Britain has no armies facing one another across barricades.
Apparently, it only counts as civil war when armies are fighting in the streets. But when a government uses the machinery of the state to silence, control and punish its own citizens, we are expected to pretend that no conflict exists.
Perhaps it means the conflict has already begun.
When the state increasingly treats its own historic population as an internal enemy - monitoring its speech, suppressing lawful opposition, policing comparable behaviour differently and punishing citizens for politically inconvenient opinions—that is no longer ordinary democratic disagreement.
It is internal political warfare.
The bitter irony is that the establishment claims it must suppress public anger to prevent civil disorder - while pouring the petrol of censorship and two-tier treatment directly onto the burning fuse.
It created the conditions.
It ignored the warnings.
It silenced the objections.
Now it punishes those who dare to point at the smoke.
This is an establishment increasingly at war with the very citizens it claims to protect.
Politicians may call it “keeping things under control.”
Powell might have called it the fuse burning down.
And you do not prevent an explosion by pouring petrol onto the fuse - then arresting the people shouting, “Fire!”
