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As Steve Forbes warned in a blistering column this week, the latest moves out of Westminster are not the isolated missteps of a struggling government but a pattern: higher taxes, expanding state power, and a steady erosion of liberties that made Britain once the beacon of free government. For those who remember the country that minted the Magna Carta and inspired our founders, watching a once-great nation deliberately trade liberty for bureaucracy is heartbreaking and instructive.
The budget unwrapped by Labour’s Treasury is, in plain language, a tax hike dressed up as prudence — freezes on income thresholds, new levies on property, cuts to pension allowances, and fresh charges on savings and dividends that will hit middle-class savers and entrepreneurs hardest. Independent coverage shows tax receipts set to climb to record highs as a share of GDP, with the burden projected to reach roughly 38 percent by the end of the decade, a French-style tax trap that chokes growth. These are not mere numbers — they are the slow strangulation of incentives that create jobs and prosperity.
Conservatives should be blunt: raising taxes and expanding spending in the name of fairness while growth stalls is a recipe for long-term decline. Instead of cutting red tape and rewarding work, London is doubling down on punitive measures that punish success and reward dependency, ensuring stagnation and out-migration of talent. American patriots ought to study this as a cautionary tale — prosperity dies when governments reward politics over production.
What truly chills the blood is the proposal to strip ordinary citizens of the right to jury trial in all but the most serious cases, replacing 12 peers with a bench of judges or hybrid panels to clear backlogs. Legal authorities — not just ideologues — are alarmed that sweeping away juries in huge swathes of criminal law undermines the people’s check on state power and risks tilting justice into technocracy. When the government argues efficiency over fundamental rights, we should all stand up and say no.
The outrage is not hypothetical: polls and practitioners from the bar to the bench are nearly unanimous in warning against these reforms, warning that judges alone can never replicate the community legitimacy of a jury and that the cure will be worse than the disease. Over 90 percent of practicing barristers and leading legal figures have signalled opposition to scrapping jury trials for mid-level offences, calling instead for proper resourcing and common-sense reforms that do not hollow out democratic safeguards. Britain’s legal profession is telling the government to stop using constitutional erosion as a quick-fix for mismanaged courts.
Meanwhile, the steady criminalization of online speech and the surge in arrests for “offensive” posts show a country increasingly comfortable with policing opinion instead of crime. Reports indicate thousands of arrests a year under vague communications laws for posts deemed offensive or distressing, a trend that chills speech and hands bureaucrats and police discretionary power to silence dissent. That is a slippery slope Americans should watch closely: once censorship by statute becomes normal in an allied democracy, it becomes easier for similar impulses to take root here.
Let this be a sober warning to hardworking Americans who love liberty: Britain’s decline did not start overnight, and it can be prevented here only if we recommit to constitutional protections, lower taxes, and civic institutions that respect citizens rather than manage them. The right course is obvious — stand for free speech, defend trial by jury, and reject the politics of envy that finances itself by pillaging the productive. If patriots do not act, history shows that liberty will be lost not in one dramatic seizure but by a thousand small concessions dressed up as common sense.
