It’s night. A blonde woman stands on Westminster Bridge, staring out across the water. In the background are the Houses of Parliament. We hear the bongs of Big Ben as the woman turns to face us. She speaks. ‘There’s a darkness coming. It’s already swallowed America, and now it’s coming for us, too.’
It could be a trailer for a BBC dystopian drama series. In fact, it’s a piece of political propaganda, timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s UK state visit last week. Zoe Gardner, the ubiquitous migration activist, narrates this two minutes of lurid fantasy. We see American soldiers marching, white British men with Union and St George’s flags. And we are warned that Trump is ‘spreading global fascism’. Welcoming him to Britain ‘drags us further into the abyss’, we’re told. There’s brief footage of Elon Musk doing his ‘Roman salute’.
There are also strange fantasies about what might happen to the UK in 2030. It’s all delivered with utmost earnestness, despite the laughable dialogue. We’re warned about a future in which ‘residents along the Thames woke this morning to find a giant banner draped across Tower Bridge’. The ‘banner’ consists of England flags emblazoned with the message, ‘Send them home’.
Then there’s a mock recruitment film for something called the ‘British Defence League’, which features a black-clad paramilitary talking about ‘purity’. Another campaigner plays a newsreader reporting that ‘Liverpool and Birmingham are in flames tonight as masked BDL officers detain hundreds
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