A new party has entered UK politics. Take Back Power seeks to ‘tax the rich and fix Britain’ and they’re planning a revolution that will replace parliament with ‘a house of the people’. Once the regime has been overthrown, Take Back Power will divide the country’s wealth in favour of the poor. About 300 supporters showed up at their launch event last Saturday in a semi-derelict municipal building in Tower Hamlets. Their media game is pretty good. The hall was dominated by a big screen that beamed pithy slogans and memorable statistics to the crowd.
‘James Dyson hoovered up £13.3 billion.’
‘John Ratcliffe is hoarding £17.04 billion.’
Their marketing team know that precise figures are more persuasive than rounded-up sums. To inflame the crowd against press barons, they displayed this soundbite.
‘Five billionaires control 80 per cent of the media.’
Take Back Power like to indulge in the kind of harmless buffoonery loved by news broadcasters.
And to make the case for open borders, they paraded a picture of a superyacht captioned, ‘Stop Their Boats’.
Take Back Power like to indulge in the kind of harmless buffoonery loved by news broadcasters. On 3 December the rebels dumped faeces outside the Ritz Hotel and posed with a sign reading ‘inequality is shit’. They set up a mega-projector that beamed ‘the rich are killing us’ on to the side of parliament. On 6 December last year, their stunt team custard-bombed a glass cabinet at the Tower of London’s Jewel House. The yellow dribbles have been viewed more than 60,000 times online.
The day-long event was opened by Ella Wilson, who warned that ‘the police may rock up at some point but this is something we’re prepared for’. She momentarily dropped her objections to capitalism when she thanked the crowd for raising £50,000. And she encouraged the audience to spend more money at the craft stall.
‘There will be time to look over the merch. Please go to the back,’ she said.
The first speaker, Jonathan Porritt, also genuflected to capitalism as he plugged his latest book.
‘I’m glad to be here thanks to the limited royalties of Love, Anger and Betrayal,’ he said. Then he delivered his standard rant about planetary meltdown which, like the weather, hasn’t changed since the 1970s. He took a swipe at Robert Jenrick, whose defection has turned Reform into ‘a dumping ground for self-serving sub-fascist Tories’, he said.
The next speaker called for the crowd to applaud five recently arrested activists. ‘Let’s hear it for Miriam, Toby, Arthur, Tom and Zara.’ The demographic of the room, as you can imagine, resembled a Crouch End aerobics class or a ski lodge in Austria.
A firebrand speaker outlined the pre-revolutionary actions that will foment a national revolt. ‘No one is coming to save us – except ourselves.’ Direct action in March will target supermarkets on behalf of starving Britons. ‘Food is locked behind sky-high prices,’ he said. ‘We have to take back the food and redistribute it. Go to your nearest Waitrose or whatever.’ And he called for ‘more stunts to get everyone talking about us’. He worked the crowd into a frenzy by calling for the uprising to start immediately. And they chanted like votaries at an evangelical church yearning for their messiah.
‘What do we want?’ he cried.
‘Revolution!’ they shouted.
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
But the timetable is pretty flexible. ‘Now’ is not ‘this minute’ or even ‘this year’. The next speaker said that Take Back Power intends to bring 10,000 supporters to London in 2029 and to spark a national revolt alongside the general election. So the mutineers are conforming to the parliamentary calendar of the state they seek to destroy. Why such timidity? They’ve probably read the signals. A revolution is impossible unless a majority of the population has spent decades enduring hardship and despair. In Britain, revolutionary fervour is quelled by benefits and free healthcare. Even those on low earnings are well fed and quiescent. And there’s no reason to overthrow a system that grants a lifelong income to anyone who can simulate a mental health problem.
A speaker called Ray attacked the ills of capitalism while wearing a designer tracksuit labelled Thomas Hilfiger. He spoke of his emotional struggles, which have improved since he got involved with Take Back Power. ‘Depression is the opposite of expression,’ he said. And that made a lot of sense. Perhaps the delegates are just unhappy misfits who want to compensate for their personal woes. Calling yourself a ‘global revolutionary’ sounds more impressive than ‘bartender’ or ‘benefits claimant’. And if you fail, you can blame the fascist billionaires who thwarted your dreams. A revolutionary enjoys plenty of social status but incurs no risks and takes no responsibility. It’s the ideal side-project.
The final speaker expressed his enthusiasm for the moribund Labour government of the 1970s. ‘The top rate of income tax was 83 per cent. Now it’s 45 per cent.’ A gasp of shocked admiration spread across the room as they imagined a return to the golden age of punitive taxation. Perhaps they didn’t realise that many British millionaires paid zero tax in the 1970s. They moved abroad. Huge wealth is an automatic tax-avoidance scheme because a billionaire can easily outrun a revenue-hungry treasury official. And any party calling for wealth taxes in Britain is helping to create new financial havens overseas. Take Back Power are boosting the appeal of low-tax regimes in the Caribbean and the Arab world. And they support their enemies in other ways. ‘The tech bros want to make us slaves,’ says one of their favourite slogans and yet their website includes links to Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok. They’re publicising the tech bros for nothing. And they supply free content to mega-rich corporations like the Daily Mail and the Murdoch empire. Their membership fees are processed by Stripe Link, which is valued at $5.1 billion according to Wikipedia. Take Back Power are working for the system they claim to despise. The billionaires are laughing at them.
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