ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, TEN YEARS ON

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I read Rupert Lowe’s Facebook post this morning and the Daily Mail front page came back immediately. November 2016. Three judges rule that Parliament must authorise Article 50. The Mail fills its front page with their photographs and the words: Enemies of the People.

That headline did something specific. It did not argue that the judges were wrong in law. It did not engage with the constitutional question at all. It designated a professional class as a legitimate target, by name, with photographs, in the most-read print newspaper in the country. The lawyers and the commentators who objected were told they had no sense of humour, or no sense of proportion, or that they simply did not understand what the British people had voted for.

Lowe’s post today is the same move with a prison sentence attached.

The target is identical. The judges. The lawyers. The administrative class that operates the legal system. What has changed is the proposed consequence. The Mail said these people were enemies. Lowe says enemies go to prison. The decade between those two statements is not a mystery. It is a process, and it has been running in one direction.

Notice who is absent from the post. The migrant appears only as the instrument through which the real targets are identified. Lowe is not threatening people who crossed the Channel. He is threatening the state. A party with serious intentions on immigration talks about policy: detention capacity, returns agreements, the legal architecture of removal. Lowe skips all of that and arrives directly at the incarceration of judges. That is not a more aggressive version of immigration policy. It is a different project entirely.

“Defraud the British people” is where the mechanism is. That phrase converts a legal determination, the assessment of an asylum claim, an Article 8 right, a judicial review, into a criminal conspiracy. The lawyer mounting a human rights challenge is no longer doing law. She is defrauding you personally. The judge who finds in the appellant’s favour is no longer applying statute. He is an accomplice. Once that reframing holds, the imprisonment threat does not read as extreme. It reads as proportionate. Which is precisely what Lowe is building toward, post by post, document by document.

The press will call this hardline. Controversial. Further right than Farage. Those words are doing political work on Lowe’s behalf. What is actually being described here is creeping fascism: the incremental designation of a professional class as a criminal conspiracy against the nation, paired with the promise of state punishment. The increment matters. Nobody wakes up in a fascist state. They wake up in a country where last year’s outrage became this year’s common sense, and where the people who said stop were told they were overreacting.

What the Daily Mail did in 2016 was designate the targets. What Lowe is doing in 2026 is specifying the sentence. The woman applying the law in a courtroom is not, on this account, a professional doing a difficult job under rules she did not write. She is a fraudster. And fraudsters, Lowe has been careful to explain, go to prison.

The road between those two moments was not inevitable. But it was built, deliberately, by people who understood exactly what they were constructing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​