A New Year: We Do Not Consent

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has ever woken suddenly in the night, when the mind grasps something it has long refused to see. The evidence was always there. The conclusion was always obvious. But some protective mechanism kept it at bay, softening the edges, suggesting explanations, urging patience. And then, without warning, the mechanism fails. The truth arrives whole and undeniable. And everything after is different.

Now is such a moment. Not through revelation of secret knowledge—you already know everything written here. But through the simple, dangerous act of saying plainly what we have all been trained to leave unsaid.

We do not consent to how we are governed.

We have not consented for decades. Our votes have been ignored, our preferences overruled, our objections managed rather than addressed. We have been administered, processed, handled. We have been governed the way a rancher governs cattle—efficiently, impersonally, with occasional provision for our comfort but never consultation about our destination.

And we have accepted it. Year after year, indignity after indignity, we have accepted it. We have grumbled and complained and made dark jokes and voted for whichever party promised most convincingly to change things, and when nothing changed we shrugged and carried on. What else was there to do? The machinery was too vast, the alternatives too frightening, the effort too great.

The new year offers what every new year offers: permission to begin again. We treat this as a personal matter—resolutions about exercise and diet and finally learning Spanish. But the permission extends further than we allow ourselves to imagine. Nations can begin again. Peoples can shake off what has accumulated and remember who they were before the accumulation began.

This is such an invitation. Not to revolution—the British have never been revolutionaries, and thank God for it. Not to violence or destruction or any of the catastrophes which attend the collapse of order. To something older and more native to these islands.

The simple, peaceful, implacable withdrawal of consent from those who never had the right to assume it.

On the Particular Genius of the British, and How It Has Been Turned Against Us

We did not storm the Bastille. We did not guillotine our aristocrats or drown our priests or declare Year Zero and rename the months. When Europe convulsed, we watched from across the Channel with the horrified fascination of people who understood where such things lead.

This restraint was not cowardice. It was civilisation.

The British genius—perhaps our only genius, but sufficient—was the discovery power could transfer without bloodshed. The vote replaced the sword. The hustings replaced the barricade. Grievances which elsewhere demanded revolution could here be addressed through the ballot box, peacefully, finally, without recourse to arms.

This was our gift to the world. Not empire, not industry, not language—those were consequences. The gift was the demonstration free men could govern themselves without periodically slaughtering each other. The gift was the proof legitimacy flowed upward from consent, not downward from force.

And this gift has been turned into a weapon against us.

Because we will not riot, we can be ignored. Because we will not revolt, our objections need not be addressed—only managed until the next election, which will change nothing because the people we elect do not govern. Because we queue politely and accept defeat gracefully and believe tomorrow offers another chance, we can be fed tomorrow indefinitely whilst today continues unchanged.

Our patience has been mistaken for permission. Our civility has been read as consent. The virtues which spared us the Terror have been exploited by those who understand we will absorb any imposition rather than abandon the lawful methods our ancestors built.

But patience is not infinite. Permission can be withdrawn. And lawful methods include more than mere voting.

What We Were Before They Told Us What We Are

There is a version of Britain which exists now only in fragments—in old photographs, in half-remembered stories, in the strange ache which accompanies certain songs and certain places. A version in which people built things meant to last centuries. In which craftsmen signed their work and expected their great-grandchildren to see it. In which beauty was not a luxury but a duty, and even railway stations were constructed as temples because the public deserved no less.

This Britain was not perfect. Romanticising the past is a trap for the unwary. Poverty was brutal, disease was rampant, and vast populations lived lives we would find intolerable. The past should not be recreated. But it should be understood.

What characterised the Britain we have lost was not wealth or power but something harder to name. A certain confidence. A willingness to act without guaranteed outcomes. A tolerance for risk which made possible everything from polar exploration to parliamentary reform. An assumption, so deep it was never articulated, free people should be left alone to succeed or fail according to their own efforts, and this freedom—however uncomfortable—was worth more than any security the state could provide.

This confidence has been systematically dismantled.

We are now a nation of forms and permissions. Of risk assessments and compliance frameworks. Of health and safety protocols and equalities impact analyses. Every human activity has been enclosed by procedure, fenced round with liability, supervised by someone whose job is to prevent anything from happening which might produce consequences.

The child who once roamed freely until dark now requires structured activities and supervised play. The entrepreneur who once started businesses on a handshake now requires licences and registrations and regulatory approval. The builder who once constructed according to craft and judgement now requires inspections at every stage from officials who have never lifted a trowel.

We have been made safe. God help us, we have been made so safe we have forgotten what safety costs.

It costs adventure. It costs discovery. It costs the particular thrill of attempting something which might not work, with no guarantee of rescue if it fails. It costs the self-respect which comes only from genuine achievement—not achievement validated by credential, certified by authority, approved by committee, but achievement which stands because it stands, requiring no external endorsement.

The administrative state cannot permit such achievement. Ungoverned success implies governed failure. If people can thrive without supervision, supervision loses its justification. The whole apparatus depends on the belief ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own lives.

And so we are taught not to trust ourselves. Taught to seek permission before acting. Taught to wait for instruction, to## follow guidance, to check whether our instincts have been approved by those who know better. We have been domesticated so gradually we did not notice the wildness leaving, and now we mistake the enclosure for the world.

The Tyranny of the Reasonable

Nobody set out to build a cage.

This is important to understand. The administrative state was not imposed by villains twirling moustaches and cackling about oppression. It was built by reasonable people solving reasonable problems through reasonable means.

Children were dying in factories. Reasonable to regulate. Food was adulterated with poison. Reasonable to inspect. Workers were maimed by unsafe machinery. Reasonable to require standards.

Each intervention made sense in isolation. Each solved a genuine problem. Each was supported by people of goodwill who wanted only to reduce suffering and increase fairness. The cage was built one bar at a time, and every bar was forged with the best intentions.

This is why it is so difficult to oppose. To object to any single regulation is to appear monstrous—in favour of child labour, adulterated food, workplace death. The reasonable person accepts each measure individually because each measure individually seems reasonable. Only when the accumulation is viewed whole does the horror become apparent.

We are buried in reasonableness. Smothered by good intentions. The cumulative weight of a century of sensible interventions has produced a society in which nothing can be done without permission from someone, in which every activity is supervised and every outcome managed, in which the space for genuine freedom has been compressed to the margins and labelled dangerous.

The reasonable people did not mean to do this. But they did it nonetheless. And they continue doing it, day by day, regulation by regulation, guidance note by guidance note, because the logic which drove the first intervention drives the hundredth and the thousandth. If supervision is good, more supervision is better. If safety is valuable, more safety is more valuable. The machine has no stopping point. It will continue until everything is enclosed and nothing is left wild.

This is not a conspiracy. It is something more dangerous: a system which produces tyranny without requiring tyrants. The reasonable people go home to their families and sleep soundly, having spent the day building the walls of the cage a little higher. They are not evil. They are doing their jobs. And their jobs, taken together, are the destruction of human freedom.

Why None of the Arguments Matter

You will hear many arguments for how things are.

Mass immigration is economically necessary. Net zero is scientifically required. The administrative state is too complex to dismantle. The European treaties served our interests. The quangos provide essential expertise. The regulations protect the vulnerable. The speech laws prevent harm. The surveillance keeps us safe.

Engage with none of them.

Not because they are wrong—though most are, and those which are not are overstated. But because they are irrelevant. The arguments are designed to trap you in a debate about means when the question is about legitimacy.

Did we consent?

This is the only question which matters. Not whether the policy is wise or foolish, beneficial or harmful, supported by evidence or opposed by it. Whether the policy was chosen by the people it governs.

If the majority consented, the policy is legitimate regardless of whether it is good. Democracies have the right to make mistakes. Free people have the right to choose badly. The vote of a fool counts the same as the vote of a sage, and this equality—frustrating as it sometimes is—represents the foundation of everything we claim to believe about human dignity.

If the majority did not consent, the policy is illegitimate regardless of whether it is good. The wise dictator is still a dictator. The benevolent despot is still a despot. Government without consent is tyranny even when it produces desirable outcomes, because the desirability of outcomes is itself a matter for the governed to determine.

We did not consent.

The record is clear. Election after election, poll after poll, the British people have expressed preferences which were systematically ignored. Mass immigration continued against public opposition. European integration deepened against public opposition. The administrative state expanded against public opposition. Cultural transformation proceeded against public opposition.

Those who imposed these changes believed they were right. Perhaps they were. The question is not whether they were right but whether they had the authority to impose their rightness on an unwilling population.

They did not.

Their arguments—however sophisticated, however well-evidenced, however endorsed by expert consensus—are irrelevant to the question of legitimacy. A policy enacted without consent cannot be legitimised retrospectively by demonstrating its benefits. The consent must come first. Without it, there is only power.

The Wonderful Britishness of Dissent

There is a peculiar irony in the accusation resistance to the administrative state is somehow un-British.

The British invented resistance to administrative overreach. It is our defining contribution to political thought. Every document in our constitutional tradition—from Magna Carta through the Petition of Right to the Bill of Rights—is a record of Englishmen telling their government it has gone too far.

We did not submit to King John. We did not submit to Charles I. We did not submit to James II. At every point when power exceeded its mandate, the British pushed back—not through revolution in the continental manner but through the assertion of ancient rights against novel impositions.

The rights were always described as ancient even when they were not. This was part of the genius. Change was presented as restoration. Innovation was framed as recovery. The radicals spoke the language of conservatives because they understood English liberty was best defended by appeal to English tradition.

We are the heirs of this tradition. The assertion we do not consent is not a departure from British history but a return to it. Our ancestors would recognise immediately what we face: an overreaching power claiming authority it was never granted, imposing burdens which were never approved, treating the people as subjects to be managed rather than citizens to be consulted.

They would recognise it because they faced it. And they resisted. Not through violence—or at least, not primarily—but through the stubborn, implacable insistence government requires consent, consent must be genuine, and power which operates without it is power which has forfeited its legitimacy.

We have forgotten this tradition. We have been taught resistance is foreign, compliance is patriotic, the truly British response to administrative overreach is to queue politely and wait our turn. But this is a lie told by those who benefit from the forgetting. The truly British response to overreach has always been resistance. Peaceful, lawful, constitutional resistance—but resistance nonetheless.

The Personal Is Not Political—It Is Prior to Politics

Before there were policies, there were people.

Before there were debates about immigration and carbon and administrative structure, there were men and women who wanted to live well. To raise families. To build homes. To practise crafts. To worship according to conscience. To love and be loved. To die having mattered to someone.

These desires are not political. They do not map onto left or right, progressive or conservative, any of the categories by which we are taught to sort ourselves. They are human. They pre-date every ideology and will outlast every ideology. They are what politics exists to serve.

The administrative state has forgotten this.

When everything becomes political, nothing remains personal. The food you eat, the car you drive, the words you speak, the thoughts you are permitted to think—all have been annexed by ideology, all are subject to supervision, all must be justified in terms acceptable to the governing consensus.

This is not governance. It is totalitarianism with a human face. The totalitarianism of the reasonable, the well-intentioned, the expert. The totalitarianism which does not send you to camps but merely makes every aspect of existence contingent on compliance.

We did not consent to this either.

We did not consent to the politicisation of everything. We did not consent to a world in which raising children, buying groceries, heating homes, expressing opinions—all require navigation of ideological terrain we never asked to enter. We wanted to live. We were given instead a requirement to perform.

The withdrawal of consent is not primarily political. It is personal. It is the assertion vast areas of human life are not the state's business, were never the state's business, and will no longer be treated as the state's business. It is the recovery of a private sphere which has been invaded and colonised by the administrative apparatus.

This recovery requires no legislation. It requires only the decision—individual, repeated, spreading—to stop asking permission for things which require no permission. To stop seeking approval for things which require no approval. To stop performing compliance with demands which have no legitimate authority behind them.

The state cannot govern people who have remembered they are free. It can punish them, inconvenience them, make their lives difficult. But it cannot make them comply in their hearts, and without interior compliance the whole machinery eventually fails.

What Would Freedom Actually Feel Like?

We have been administered for so long we have lost the capacity to imagine the alternative.

If someone proposed today adults be permitted to buy medicines without prescription, to build extensions without planning approval, to educate their children without state supervision—the proposal would seem not just radical but insane. How could such things be allowed? Think of the dangers. Think of the chaos. Think of the vulnerable people who would be harmed.

This is the voice of the cage. We have inhabited it so long we have mistaken the bars for the horizon.

Freedom would feel like danger. This is the truth we have been trained to forget. Freedom is not safe. It has never been safe. It is the permanent possibility of disaster held in tension with the permanent possibility of triumph. Remove the possibility of disaster and you remove also the possibility of triumph. What remains is the managed middle, the supervised mediocrity, the life without highs or lows in which nothing is risked because nothing can be gained.

We have chosen this. Or rather, we have permitted it to be chosen for us, and our permission has been assumed from our silence.

Freedom would feel like responsibility. Not the false responsibility of compliance—following rules, meeting standards, satisfying inspectors—but the true responsibility of facing consequences. If you build badly, the building falls. If you educate foolishly, your children suffer. If you medicate wrongly, you sicken. The possibility of failure is what makes success meaningful. Remove it and success becomes mere compliance, achievement becomes mere certification, and the deep satisfaction of genuine accomplishment disappears.

Freedom would feel like loneliness. Not the comfortable loneliness of the crowd, surrounded by others who share your managed existence, but the terrifying loneliness of the pioneer, the explorer, the person who has stepped outside the enclosure and found no path marked. This loneliness is the price of freedom. It is also its reward. The person who has faced it knows something the administered can never know: they are capable of more than the machinery assumes.

We have traded these feelings for safety. For predictability. For the assurance however constrained our lives may be, they will not fall below a certain floor. And perhaps for some people, in some circumstances, this trade was wise. But it was never put to us honestly. We were never asked whether we wished to make it. We were simply enclosed, gradually, generation by generation, until the enclosure seemed natural and freedom seemed like madness.

A Year When Things Become Possible Again

The calendar is arbitrary. January first has no special power. The year which begins tonight will contain the same hours as the year which ends, will present the same challenges, will offer the same opportunities. Nothing magical happens at midnight.

And yet.

We are creatures who live by story. We require markers, boundaries, moments when one chapter ends and another begins. The arbitrary nature of the new year does not diminish its power; it demonstrates the power lies not in the date but in us. We choose to treat this moment as significant. We choose to permit ourselves hopes we would dismiss as foolish in October. We choose, collectively, to believe beginning again is possible.

This belief is not delusion. It is will. And will is what changes the world.

The administrative state seems permanent because we see it as permanent. Its power seems overwhelming because we treat it as overwhelming. But the state—any state—exists only through the compliance of the governed. It is a pattern of behaviour, not a physical object. When enough people alter their behaviour, the pattern dissolves.

This has happened before. The Soviet Union seemed eternal until it wasn't. The divine right of kings seemed unquestionable until it was questioned. Every structure which appeared permanent to those living within it proved fragile when enough people decided to stop pretending otherwise.

We have been pretending. Pretending our votes matter when they manifestly do not. Pretending the next election will be different when the last dozen were identical. Pretending compliance is wisdom and resistance is futile and the only realistic response to an unreformable system is ironic detachment.

The pretence is exhausting. It requires constant effort to maintain—the effort of suppressing what we see, explaining away what we know, justifying submission as prudence. Beneath the pretence is something simpler and more powerful: the raw recognition we have been cheated.

Our inheritance was stolen. The freedom our ancestors built, the institutions they designed, the expectations they held about the relationship between citizen and state—all have been taken from us by people who had no right to take them. We are the victims of a heist conducted over a century, so gradual we did not notice until the vault was empty.

This recognition is the beginning. Not of revolution—never of revolution. Of something older. The slow, peaceful, implacable reassertion of rights which were never legitimately surrendered because they were never legitimately claimed.

A Casus Belli for Those Who Will Not Fight

This is not a call to arms.

Arms are what tyrants understand. The administrative state would be delighted by violence. Violence is manageable. Violence justifies crackdowns, emergency powers, the further expansion of the machinery. Violence proves what the administrators have always believed: the people cannot be trusted, order requires control, freedom leads to chaos.

We offer them no such proof.

This is a call to something they have no answer for: the peaceful withdrawal of consent. Not riot but refusal. Not rebellion but rejection. The simple, consistent, spreading decision to stop treating illegitimate authority as legitimate.

What does this look like? It looks like mockery instead of fear. Like non-compliance where non-compliance is possible. Like the building of alternatives—parallel institutions, parallel networks, parallel structures which serve human needs without feeding the administrative beast. It looks like refusing to use their language, rejecting their framing, declining to engage with debates rigged to produce predetermined conclusions.

It looks like treating the administrative state the way one treats an occupying power: with the minimum cooperation required for survival and not one ounce more. The occupied do not owe legitimacy to their occupiers. They owe survival to themselves and their families. Beyond that, nothing.

We owe them nothing. They took without asking. They governed without consent. They transformed the country without permission and called the transformation progress. They have no claim on our loyalty because loyalty is not owed to power but to legitimate authority, and their authority was never legitimate.

This is the casus belli. Not a cause for war but a cause for the withdrawal of peace. The administrative state has operated for a century on the assumption silence is consent, compliance is endorsement, the absence of revolt implies the presence of approval.

We hereby end the silence. We do not consent. We have not consented. We will not consent.

The compliance will continue where it must—we are not martyrs, and prudence is not cowardice. But the compliance will be hollow. The forms will be observed without the spirit. The taxes will be paid without the loyalty. The laws will be obeyed without the respect. And beneath the surface compliance, something will be growing: the network of those who remember what freedom meant and intend to recover it.

To Those Who Will Read This by Candlelight

The Americans, in their revolutionary moment, passed around pamphlets by firelight. They gathered in taverns and churches and private homes to read words which made explicit what they had long felt: the connection between governed and governor had been severed, consent had been withdrawn, a new beginning was not only possible but necessary.

We are not Americans. Their methods are not ours. But the recognition is the same.

Something has ended. The postwar settlement, the administrative consensus, the managed democracy in which voting was permitted but changing nothing was guaranteed—it is over. It ended not through any single event but through the accumulation of failures so comprehensive even the most determined optimist can no longer ignore them.

The question is not whether the old order will fall. It is falling. The question is what replaces it.

We have an answer. Not a utopia—utopias are for the French. Not a detailed programme—programmes are for technocrats. An answer simpler and more radical than either.

Majority rule.

The principle so obvious a child can grasp it and so threatening the entire administrative state has been constructed to circumvent it. The idea government should do what most people want. That elections should have consequences. The preferences of the governed should be transmitted into the policy of the government without interception by experts, officials, courts, treaties, quangos, or any of the other mechanisms by which democratic will is filtered into administrative nothing.

This is what we want. This is all we want. The rest—the specific policies, the particular reforms, the detailed programme—will follow from the restoration of this principle. Give us back majority rule and we will sort out the details ourselves.

The administrative state cannot survive this demand. Its entire existence depends on the belief majority rule is dangerous, experts must mediate, the people cannot be trusted with their own governance. If majority rule is restored, the quangos become pointless, the treaties become renegotiable, the regulations become repealable. The whole apparatus loses its justification.

This is why they fight so hard against it. This is why populism is treated as pathology. This is why every assertion of democratic will is met with warnings about the mob, the rabble, the uneducated masses who do not understand their own interests.

We understand our interests perfectly well. Our interest is in freedom. Our interest is in self-government. Our interest is in being treated as citizens rather than subjects, as adults rather than children, as the source of legitimate authority rather than an obstacle to enlightened administration.

We do not consent to being governed by those who despise us.

We do not consent to being administered by those who believe we need administration.

We do not consent—and the withdrawal of consent, once begun, does not end until consent is genuinely sought and genuinely given.

The year turns. The moment arrives. The choice is before us.

Choose freedom. Choose responsibility. Choose the terrifying, exhilarating, irreplaceable experience of governing ourselves.

Choose to withdraw consent from those who never deserved it.

And let this be the year when we stopped pretending and started rebuilding.

We do not consent.

We begin again.