GILES UDY: I have spent decades studying Stalin’s Russia – and Starmer’s Britain is more similar than you’d think…

When Rachel Reeves’s Treasury floated the idea of ​​capping the cost of everyday food items sold in British supermarkets this week, the proposal was met with outrage.

Detractors included Marks & Spencer’s chief executive (“utterly ridiculous”), Ocado’s former chairman Stuart Rose (“stupid” and “dangerous”), Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey (“unsustainable”) and City guru Clive Black (“astonishing”).

In the face of such an attack, the Chancellor stepped back. But it would be a serious mistake to think that this marks the end of the Government’s adoption of measures more reminiscent of the totalitarian Soviet Union than of modern liberal democracy.

A few years ago I published a book called The Worker and the Gulag, which highlighted how the British Labor movement suppressed criticism of conditions in Stalin’s camps.

Although this Labor administration does not imprison dissidents in labor camps or shoot their opponents to death, what they share with Russia’s Cold War-era hatchet-faced gerontocrats is the arrogant belief that they alone have the moral high ground.

This feeds into the belief that they must have complete control over those who do not share their worldview. Our rulers have adopted the same tools as Soviet leaders: draconian laws enforced by elected courts and a politicized civil service, policing dissent through hate crime verdicts.

Just as Lenin believed that it was up to leading intellectuals to instill revolutionary consciousness in the working class, the Labor Party high command thinks that only a cabal of North London bienpensants know what is best for the people.

And so we see unbalanced policies and a hands-off approach to illegal immigration, such as Net Zero, which aims to reduce the country’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

As a result, a country that produces only 1 percent of the planet’s carbon emissions has energy prices that are among the highest in the developed world; This means companies’ profitability and cost of living.

While cabinet ministers welcome ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ with open arms in their ivory towers, it is the poor masses who have to live with the consequences of this influx – feeling the strain it puts on the housing stock and public services.

If ordinary people voice their discontent, they are condemned by the ruling elite, who despise the working classes, just as Stalin hated an entrepreneurial class of landowning peasants known as the Kulaks.

Dissent is suppressed by framing Russia’s ‘Man of Steel’ as ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’, a term used by Russia’s ‘Man of Steel’ to condemn his opponents for murdering millions in the 1930s and has since been used as an insult by the British Left. But more concrete measures are also being taken. The concept of ‘false speech’ was coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.

In Orwell’s fictional dictatorship, dissenting expressions were punished by the ‘thought police’. And in Labour’s Britain, investigations into crimes against the prevailing orthodoxy took place on a massive scale. In 2025, 12,000 people were arrested for social media posts deemed to have crossed the line approved by the regime.

Not only silence but also obedience is demanded. The KGB were old masters at using dissidents as an example to control wider society, and our Government has taken a page out of their playbook.

Arresting innocent people, locking them in cells, and seizing their laptops and phones before they are released on bail creates a chilling effect. Even more chilling is the apparent lack of consistency in the treatment of suspects at different ends of the political spectrum.

Why did Southport rioters get sentences of up to 31 months while police dropped all charges against Palestinian protesters who drove in London shouting ‘Fuck the Jews, rape their daughters’?

Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Machin says Rachel Reeves’ idea of ​​imposing a price cap on the cost of everyday groceries is ‘completely unreasonable’

Nowhere is this double-think more clear than in the trans debate. Seemingly intelligent men like Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have all declared that ‘trans women are women’.

Some went further. ‘99.9 per cent of women… of course don’t have a penis,’ Starmer once said. Justice Minister David Lammy went on record as saying that a man’s cervix could enlarge. Radical trans activists even accuse lesbians who refuse to have sex with trans women of transphobia.

But there is a wider campaign to dismantle ‘heteronormativity’, and to be successful the indoctrination needs to start in the early years.

If the traditional roles of men and women in society are to be effectively overturned, the more children are confused by talk of women with penises, the sooner this will be achieved.

This brings us to another battleground: our schools. Marx decided that education should be taken away from the middle class and used as a tool for state propaganda aimed at children and youth at the most vulnerable stage of their development.

According to the Independent Schools Council, Labour’s choice (unique in the Western world) to add VAT to private school fees has therefore already led to the closure of more than a hundred institutions.

So where do the vast majority of these displaced students go? Why, it is under the control of the State. The declining proportion of children being educated in independent schools is consistent with the Left’s attack on the institution of the family, as it is often a place where lowercase ‘c’ conservative values ​​are passed down through the generations.

Another goal of our Labor Government is to make the workforce economically equal. Under Starmer and Reeves, this is due to a tactic called ‘pay compression’.

By increasing the minimum wage at one end of the earnings spectrum and reducing income through a series of tax increases at the other end, the gap between rich and poor is narrowing.

It cannot be said that those in power are suffering. Like Russia’s communist apparatchiks, who always have access to contraband that the public cannot buy, Labor’s big beasts enjoy the benefits of power.

Starmer was given a suit and glasses, as well as tickets to football matches, by media mogul Lord Alli. Reeves also enjoyed various freebies, such as a VIP pass to the Sabrina Carpenter concert. And Ed Balls, husband of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, was given four tickets to a Taylor Swift concert after pressured the star to get a police escort.

In the spirit of nothing being too good for workers, Labor leaders seem to have no qualms about being swamped with gifts.

Under ‘people’s party’ rule, Britain becomes so oppressive that former subjects or satellite states of the Soviet Union would recognize their distinguishing features here today.

But every time Keir Starmer is given the chance to rein in his ‘Keir Stalin’ instincts, he instead doubles down. Things get worse month by month. Only a majority government of the Conservative Party or Reform UK (both of which I have reservations about) or a coalition of the two can reverse our descent into full English totalitarianism. If they fail, we’re all screwed.

Giles Udy is an author and historian who is the author of They Came at Dawn – Soviet Terror and Repression 1917-1953.