The truth can be terrifying and the knowledge of having a lack of agency is one of the greatest fears of any man. Just ask any ‘freeman of the land’ and he will tell you it is the soul of his sovereignty.
The Freeman’s instinct is not wrong. He is perhaps the least conditioned of minds in England’s Kingdom, the man who looked at the architecture of projected power and refused consent without being granted the constitutional language to explain why. His method of self validation fails in the Crown’s courts because the Crown’s courts were never designed to hear the specific argument of his being — and the specific legal mechanics he reaches for, from ‘Lawful Rebellion’ to ‘Person vs. Individual’ constructions, carry a documented zero per cent success rate in those courts. The establishment’s mockery of him is not legal critique, it is the conditioning system protecting itself from the question he keeps asking. This piece is for that man. And for everyone who has felt the same loss without finding the language to name it.
There is a haunting question that sits at the heart of law and political life in England. This question remains as rare as it is foundational: not who governs England, not who represents England. Not who speaks for England in the corridors of Westminster or Downing Street. The question is deeper, simpler and more constitutionally precise than any of those:
Who is sovereign in England?
The answer to this is not what you might think or have been told. It is not what the flag-draped ceremony of the State Opening of Parliament suggests, or what the Coronation’s ancient pageantry implies. It’s not what every prime minister means when they stand at the Cenotaph and speak of national sacrifice and democratic values.
The answer, stated plainly and evidentially, is this:
The Crown-in-Parliament is sovereign in England. Not the English people. Never the English people. Not once in the entire constitutional history of the Rex Anglorum.
If you are English, those four statements deserve to sit with you for a moment, because everything that follows, everything about the political fury currently tearing through English communities, everything about the promises made and broken, everything about the wealth that was always somewhere else, follows from that single constitutional fact. If you are not English then sit with them anyway as the ripple of their impact has reverberated around the world since the trumpet fanfare proclaimed the opening of the
in 1571.
The Comparative English Sovereignty Deficit
Before examining what real sovereignty means for England, not the performative pomp and circumstance of the Monarchy, it is worth stating what it means in comparison to its neighbouring national peers.
In Wales, sovereignty ultimately still lies with the people, despite suppression through military conquest in 1282–83, statutory annexation in 1284, and unilateral legislation in 1535–42 passed by a parliament in which the Welsh had no representation. The founding instruments of that annexation have since been repealed, yet what that repeal means for Welsh sovereignty has never been constitutionally resolved — an argument this series advances, not one that has yet been judicially recognised.
In Ireland, sovereignty rests in the people. Articles 1, 5, and 6 of Bunreacht na hÉireann are unambiguous: ‘All powers of government derive from the people.’ But the founding leadership of the 32-county Republic never delivered the promise. The Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, which declared “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland” had its radical content excised before it was adopted, at the insistence of the same faction that signed for Dominion status nearly three years later. The Constitution that followed encoded the retreat: Article 45’s community ownership directive was made explicitly non-justiciable. Whilst the promise was never kept, the rights were never extinguished. That is the unfinished business.
In Scotland, sovereignty rests constitutionally and in law with the people.
The Declaration of Arbroath (1320), whilst preceded in the broader northern European constitutional tradition by the Frisian Chronicle (1232) and the Swiss Federal Charter (1291), remains the first known formal diplomatic document addressed to an international authority that explicitly conditions the monarch’s right to rule on the people’s consent — and reserves the community’s right to remove him if he betrays them. That distinction matters constitutionally. The Claim of Right (1689) confirmed it, and Lord President Cooper’s judgement in MacCormick v Lord Advocate (1953), whilst obiter on this specific point, stated it plainly: parliamentary sovereignty is ‘a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law.’ In 1989, a cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention reaffirmed it in A Claim of Right for Scotland. That sovereignty has never been legally extinguished. The Scotland Act 1998 absorbed its momentum into a parliament of avatars, calibrated to make sovereignty unthinkable, leaving the constitutional reality entirely intact.
The question these four constitutional operating systems raise, placed side by side, is the one that the Crown-in-Parliament’s apparatus has spent three centuries ensuring is never directly asked: if three of the four nations on these islands hold unrelinquished popular sovereignty as their foundational constitutional principle, and the fourth — England — does not, then what precisely is the constitutional basis on which the fourth nation’s parliamentary apparatus determines the sovereign future of the other three? The answer the Crown-in-Parliament has always given is: its own sovereignty. The circularity is not incidental. It is structural. A constitution that names itself as the gatekeeper of the question of its own legitimacy is not a constitution. It is a closed loop. The February 2026 parliamentary inquiry demonstrated this with clinical precision: every analysis of Scotland’s constitutional routes began inside the constitutional framework of the administering power. The foundational premise — that the framework itself was legitimate — was never examined. It was the water every witness swam in.
And in England?
The picture painted of England is one of a constitutional tradition that has never vested sovereignty in the English people, not once. The Magna Carta (1215) is celebrated as the foundational cornerstone of modern democracy, the rule of law and of individual liberty. It has been honoured for establishing the principle that everyone, including the monarch, is subject to the same laws, thereby supposedly limiting arbitrary power and inspiring key human rights principles. However the wider view of its practical creation confirms that it was written as a constraint on royal power extracted by barons for barons. In reality it was a feudal peace treaty between a King and his barons, not the democratic charter it is portrayed as. Its laws and clauses applied mostly to ‘Freemen’, a minority at the time, and mostly protected the privileges of the church and nobility. The reputation of the Magna Carta grew centuries after its creation when later generations misinterpreted the meaning of ‘free-men’ to mean everyone.
The Charter of the Forest, which was issued two years after the Magna Carta in 1217, remains to this day the closest England’s people have ever come to holding popular common rights or the right of true constitutional expression. The Forest laws that were theirs, the peoples, were then systematically destroyed over the following seven centuries by those meant to represent their interests. History it appears continually echoes in the halls of Westminster.
England has never had a parliament that expressed the will of the people, and the people alone, never not once in its 800 years. Westminster as an institution emerged from De Montfort’s 1265 convening of barons and clergy, which was later consolidated under Edward I’s 1295 Model Parliament. This ‘convening’ of powerful and influential figures was the medieval equivalent of elite corporate capture, institutionalising propertied consent for taxation while laying the foundations for the expansionism that would ultimately be required to service the English elite’s debt. What England has never had in its faux democratic parliament is a true and constant expression of the will of the people above all other interests. The English people themselves unlike their forbearers have never tasted the sovereignty of their ancestral struggles.
The Buried Commons
To understand what that means in practice, you have to go back to the land, to the grave, to the very soul of England’s ancestral small holdings.
Before the systematic enclosures, approximately one third of England’s agricultural land was held as commons, open to the communities whose subsistence and very existence depended on it. Common rights were not charity, they were ancient entitlements: the right to graze animals, gather fuel, fish, cut peat, collect timber. Communities had exercised these rights continuously for centuries, in many cases for longer than living memory could trace.
Between 1604 and 1914, the rights of England’s ‘commoners’ were systematically extinguished by 5,200 individual Acts of Parliament, each one transferring common land into private ownership, each one passed by a parliament in which landowners sat in judgement on their own interests. Between 1786 and 1816 alone, the number of independent landowners in England fell from approximately 250,000 to 32,000. Three million acres of common land were enclosed in the eighteenth century alone.
The Charter of the Forest which protected, from the crown, common rights and two thirds of the land for 754 years since 1217, confirmed repeatedly alongside Magna Carta, called by Sir Edward Coke one of ‘the Charters of England’s Liberties’, was effectively swept aside by the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act 1971. Not abolished through a great constitutional moment. Quietly replaced, with no public debate, no referendum, no acknowledgement of what was being extinguished. The Mother of All Parliaments is in effect the Mother of all Corporate Headquarters, an extractive beast then and now.
This is not ancient history dressed up as grievance, this is the documented historical record of the largest transfer of ‘common wealth’ to private hands in English history, accomplished through the very parliament described today as England’s sovereign democratic institution.
The ‘enclosures’ were not the ‘agricultural modernisation’ as framed and still reproduced in school curricula. This is nothing more than the Victor’s narrative performing its primary function: making dispossession feel like progress.
The ‘efficiency’ narrative conflates two distinct mechanisms: ‘improvement’ is a technical process; enclosure is a political one. One increases yield through rotation and breeding, innovations that historian J.M. Neeson (Commoners, 1993) proves were already operative in open-field systems before enclosure, while the other simply transfers the title of that yield and the ownership of the land from the community to the individual. Neeson’s primary records demonstrate that open-field systems were actively innovating through collective resource management long before parliamentary enclosure arrived. Enclosure did not unlock productivity. It transferred ownership, and in doing so, created a wage-dependent labour force where independent commoners had stood. Even the most recent causal econometric study of parliamentary enclosure — Heldring, Robinson and Vollmer (NBER, 2022) — confirms a 22 percentage point increase in land value inequality alongside any yield gains. The commoners did not capture the upside. The receipts confirm it.
What the ‘enclosures’ actually were is straightforward: the English ruling class, (Elites to use the modern term) were sitting in parliament, legislating the commons out of existence at the expense of the English people (commoners) it purported to represent. Parliament’s sovereignty was the weapon used against the people it claimed to represent.
The enclosure of common land was not a uniquely English tool of subjugation, the same mechanism was operated across Europe, from France’s agrarian revolution to the Flemish polder enclosures. Westminster however deployed the same mechanism as a colonial weapon in numerous outposts such as in Scotland through the Highland Clearances, driving communities from land they had worked for centuries to make way for sheep and profit. What was specific to England’s deployment was that the Westminster parliamentarians chose to enact it domestically throughout the counties and shires: 5,200 individual Acts were passed by the same ‘ruling’ class that benefited from them, in a constitutional system that placed no popular sovereignty in the way. Whilst the mechanism was globally deployed via Empire, the parliament that passed 5,200 individual Acts over three centuries, with landowners sitting in judgement on their own interests, was not.
The Architecture of the Crown-in-Parliament
‘English’ Parliamentary sovereignty, the doctrine that Westminster can make or unmake any law, that no parliament can bind its successor, that courts cannot override legislation, is, as Lord Cooper confirmed in 1953, a distinctively ‘English Constitutional’ principle.
It is not a universal principle of democratic governance. It is not a natural law. It is the self-serving constitutional operating system of a dominant state, developed through specific struggles between specific self-serving interests, and it is a system that has never in its history included ‘popular sovereignty’ as a foundation for democracy or equality.
The year 1689 is instructive. In England, the Bill of Rights moved power horizontally, from the person of the King to the King-in-Parliament, from one set of elite hands to another. The propertied classes in Parliament gained the pin; the commoner gained nothing. In Scotland, the same year produced a fundamentally different instrument. The Claim of Right declared that James VII had forfeited the throne by violating the fundamental rights of the people, not a transfer of power between institutions, but a vertical assertion that the people held prior and superior sovereignty over any monarch. England’s elites chose their institution as its anchor, whilst Scotland’s people exerted their power. That choice, made in the same year, on the same island, produced two entirely different constitutional operating systems that have never been reconciled, and cannot be, within England’s Crown-in-Parliament framework.
Under the Crown-in-Parliament:
In the ‘palace’ of Westminster the Monarch signs legislation, Not ‘ceremonially’ but ‘constitutionally’. The act of ‘Royal Assent’ is a legal requirement of operation for the mechanisms of state. The Crown is not decorative, it is the constitutional pin holding the entire colonial operating system together. An unelected ‘English’ monarch wielding power of dominion greater than any of its European cousins.
Each year at the State Opening of Parliament, the Monarch arrives wearing the Imperial State Crown, not a ceremonial prop but the literal symbol of Crown sovereignty over the assembled legislature, and the door of the House of Commons is ceremonially slammed in the face of Black Rod, the monarch’s personal representative, a ritual re-enactment of the Commons’ independence from royal power, performed annually at the Crown’s own invitation, scripted by the very institution it purports to defy. The performance has run since 1642. Meanwhile, between 2004 and 2010, the then Prince of Wales sent a series of private letters to government ministers lobbying on matters of policy, letters the government fought a decade-long legal battle to suppress. When the courts finally compelled their release in 2015, the Cabinet Office argued that disclosure would damage perceptions of royal political neutrality. The neutrality, it turned out, was the performance. The lobbying was the reality.
The Privy Council, an executive body of the Crown whose membership and deliberations operate in near-total secrecy, with significant connections to the British State’s security services, retains significant residual powers including; Orders in Council that can bypass parliamentary scrutiny entirely and the power to establish influence and control the public inquiries system. The Official Secrets Acts of 1889, 1911, and 1989, extending to the National Security Act 2023, provide the statutory spine of that secrecy, each iteration tightening the colonial grip, criminalising disclosure, narrowing the space between what the Crown knows and what its subjects are permitted to.
The House of Lords retains delaying powers over primary legislation and an effective veto over secondary legislation, yet none of its members face the electorate that produces the legislation they scrutinise. The lords are by design not answerable to ‘commoners’ and act on behalf of crown (state) interests, whilst each Lord draws a daily ‘attendance allowance’ of £361 simply for turning up to exercise their undemocratically elected powers as appointees of the Crown to whom they swear allegiance.
The English first-past-the-post electoral system, selected by Westminster and imposed UK-wide, produces false majorities by design. Notably Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each adopted proportional representation for their own devolved assemblies, selecting systems that more accurately reflect the actual distribution of public will. Westminster’s insistence on retaining FPTP for UK-wide elections is not an oversight, it is the mechanism by which the Crown-in-Parliament overrides the democratic preferences of every nation on these islands simultaneously. In the 2024 general election, Labour won a parliamentary supermajority on 33.7% of the vote. The system did not malfunction, it functioned exactly as designed, concentrating power regardless of whether that plurality represents the actual distribution of public opinion.
In 2016, Scotland voted 62% to Remain in the European Union. The British State removed Scotland from the EU regardless, not through oversight, not through malfunction, but through the same colonial mechanism of false majority rule. The democratic will of an entire nation, expressed clearly and recorded precisely, was simply overridden. The pattern repeated in Wales with constitutional precision where Welsh-speaking communities voted Remain, Anglicised areas voted Leave, the referendum result mapping almost exactly onto the depth of colonial cultural penetration. Westminster’s sovereignty doctrine does not accommodate inconvenient pluralities. The 2016 referendum was a systemic shock that the Crown-in-Parliament was never wired to process; the three-year paralysis that followed, culminating in the 2019 Supreme Court ruling in Miller (No 2), was the Westminster machine revealing its own wiring diagram as the judiciary was forced to define the legal limits of the Royal Prerogative to prevent the executive from silencing the legislature.
The English Crown-in-Parliament machine’s self-revelation did not stop there. As recently as February 2026, the Scottish Parliament’s own Constitution Committee published an inquiry into Scotland’s constitutional routes. Its witnesses — drawn exclusively from English and ‘Northern’ Irish universities, steeped in the constitutional tradition of the administering power — produced a document that managed, without apparent awareness, to describe the condition precisely whilst proposing no remedy equal to it. The Committee found, and recorded in its official conclusions, that the current arrangement creates a democratic anomaly: it is the UK electorate that chooses those with the power to trigger a referendum, whilst the electorate whose wishes are to be respected is Scotland’s. Having named the anomaly with that precision, the report immediately redirected its own finding back into the frame that produced it — recommending negotiation with Westminster as the remedy for a democratic deficit Westminster created and Westminster maintains. The machine, examined by its own instruments, produced its own indictment. Then filed it.
The Human Rights Act 1998 is frequently cited as a constitutional constraint on Parliamentary Sovereignty. Proof, some argue, that universal rights now sit above the Crown-in-Parliament. They do not. The HRA has materially altered judicial reasoning and created real political constraints on Parliament — the Belmarsh case (A v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2004]) demonstrated genuine judicial check on executive power through its provisions. But it remains a statute of that same parliament, repealable by simple majority, and has been threatened with exactly that on multiple occasions by multiple governments. It is a concession of the colonial operating system, not a re-anchoring of the sovereignty pin. The pin remains where it has always been.
The same colonial machine that concentrated empire extraction was subsequently forced to enable the 1945 welfare settlement when sufficient working-class pressure shifted the lever the other way. That is not vindication, that is evidence of what communities had to fight to extract from it, and what they lose the moment organised pressure relaxes. Which is exactly what has happened since 1979.
As highlighted on occasion some sources point to the Levellers, the Chartists, the suffragettes, the 1945 settlement as evidence that the English people did taste sovereignty. This reading of events confuses the concession with the foundation. These were moments when popular sovereignty was exercised de facto, even without constitutional expression. They were also, without exception, either crushed when they reached for the constitutional pin itself, or rolled back the moment organised pressure relaxed. The 1945 welfare settlement was extracted from a weakened colonial power under extraordinary post-war pressure. The system then spent the following three decades dismantling it. That is not vindication of the colonial operating system. That is the operational record of what it does when the pressure lifts.
Westminster is not the institution of England’s democratic will. It is the British State’s apparatus that is a Crown co-enabler and that the English commoners have been subsidising for three centuries.
1571: The Crown’s Machine that Built an Empire
England was drowning in debt and reliant on aging mechanisms to service it. Drake’s raids on Spanish shipping, Hawkins’s slave trade, the first colonial settlements were not enough and the Crown failed to project the confidence and power Elizabeth so desperately required whilst facing plots, internal rebellions, and excommunication by Pope Pius V. The seaborne liquidity the Crown could generate was barely meeting the debts of what contemporary accounts describe as a state on the edge of insolvency.
These were desperate times. England’s debt had accrued significantly and in 1558 owed over £227,000, more than half to the Antwerp Exchange at 14% interest, its sovereign borrowing capacity held in foreign hands. What followed in 1571 was the deliberate internalisation of financial infrastructure previously controlled by foreign creditors, a mechanism that would go on to become an engine of financial extraction the like of which the world has never seen before or since.
The Royal Exchange was opened by Elizabeth I on the 23rd of January 1571 and built by Sir Thomas Gresham, modelled on the Antwerp Bourse. While Gresham provided the physical capital for the Royal Exchange, the Crown provided the strategic mandate; the 1571 opening was not a mere mercantile venture but a desperate act of state refinancing, a mechanical necessity to internalise the credit control previously held by the Antwerp Bourse, where the English Crown was drowning in debt at 14% interest. This infrastructure upgrade was grounded not in confidence but sheer financial necessity. The deliberate internalisation of what Antwerp controlled, bringing the infrastructure and control of credit home to England, was a masterstroke that negated the need for foreign dependency, increasing the sovereign power of the Crown.
The Royal Exchange was not designed as an engine of empire, it was built from necessity, then captured and codified by those who benefited from what it made possible. This is how the construction of England’s colonial extraction machine was begun, not through conspiracy, but through the progressive codification of advantage by those positioned to exploit it.
The Royal Exchange soon began to metamorphosise from a State trading building into a centralised institutional hub processing the systematic extraction of wealth from every inhabited continent that Elizabeth and her privy council strategically sought dominion over. It provided the mechanisms for mobilising capital, sharing risk, and concentrating colonial profits in London, creating the joint-stock company model, limited liability, permanent corporate existence, private capital mobilised for imperial expansion, that would become the East India Company (1600), the Virginia Company, the Royal African Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Whilst Spanish colonialism dispersed its extracted wealth across regional centres, English colonialism concentrated it in one metropolitan node, London, and built financial instruments sophisticated enough to keep it there.
The Navigation Acts (1651–1696) completed the picture: Scottish merchants were treated as foreign traders, barred from legal participation in English plantation commerce, for over half a century before the 1707 Union resolved that exclusion on England’s terms.
The enclosures were the same act of empire, delivered as a series of time-spanning processes applied in multiple directions often simultaneously. Inward to English common land, and outward to colonial territories. The same ruling class, the same parliament, the same colonial machine deploying the same colonial operating system, the same result: wealth concentrated, commons extinguished, communities stripped of agency.
The Second Empire: Hidden in Plain Sight
Here is what the standard account of the empire’s end omits entirely.
The British Empire did not end. It metamorphosed.
When the visible empire, the flags, the colonies, the military occupation, became politically untenable after 1945, the Colonists’ financial operating system underneath it did not surrender. It adapted. It refined. It became more obscure. And in becoming more obscure, it became more powerful.
The City of London is not, in any meaningful constitutional sense, part of the United Kingdom as ordinary people understand it. It has its own Lord Mayor, distinct from the Mayor of London. Its own police force. Its own governance structure with ancient rights predating parliamentary democracy by centuries that Westminster has never successfully challenged. And it retains something abolished everywhere else in UK local democracy in 1969: the business franchise vote. In the City of London, corporations vote. Approximately 12,500 business votes against 6,500 residential votes. In the most powerful financial jurisdiction on earth, corporations hold more votes than residents. That is not a historical curiosity, it is the Crown-in-Parliament’s constitutional logic made visible, operative today, in the square mile at the heart of the world’s financial system.
And then there is the Remembrancer. Created in 1571, the same year as the Royal Exchange, the Remembrancer is a salaried official of the City of London Corporation whose sole function is to monitor every piece of parliamentary legislation from the under-gallery of the House of Commons and protect the City’s interests against anything that might threaten them. Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands, calls it the world’s oldest institutional lobbyist. No elected member placed him there. No public vote sustains him. No other city in these islands has one.
Around the City sits its satellite network: the Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man) and the British Overseas Territories (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, and others). These territories are not part of the United Kingdom. They are not subject to UK tax law. They operate as secrecy jurisdictions: low or zero tax, minimal transparency requirements, professional services infrastructure built specifically to hold and move wealth without scrutiny. They operate under Crown protection. Westminster cannot legislate for them without consent on domestic matters.
This is the second empire: the financial empire that replaced the territorial one, operating through deliberate obscurity, protected by the Crown, functioning continuously to this day. The 1571 Royal Exchange is its founding infrastructure. The ships and flags were the visible surface. The Colonists’ financial operating system was the engine. Unlike the ships, it never had to be surrendered.
And the engine keeps running. Westminster’s Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, legislating on digital assets first, setting the jurisdictional baseline against which Scotland’s separate Act is then read, is the 1571 Royal Exchange pattern operating in 2025. The mechanism is identical, only the asset class has changed.
The third empire is upon us.
The Monarchy: Constitutional Function, Not Theatre
The Coronation is extraordinary theatre. The ancient ritual, the Abbey, the anointing, the crowning, the homage of the Lords. It is designed to feel timeless, inevitable, and natural.
It could be otherwise. It has been otherwise. Understanding what the Monarchy actually is, constitutionally and functionally, requires setting aside the theatre and reading from its draft scripts.
The Crown Estate owns approximately £15.5 billion in assets including the entire seabed around these islands, from which offshore wind revenues now flow, the majority to the Treasury rather than to the coastal communities hosting the infrastructure. The Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall are private royal estates operating under voluntary tax arrangements, not subject to the standard taxation law that applies to every other private individual in England.
The constitutional facts indicate the Monarchy’s structural effect is to provide legitimising cover for a Colonists’ financial and governance system that would not survive ‘democratic’ scrutiny if its operations were fully visible. To be precise: the constitutional facts stated here are all verified, documented and operative. The characterisation of structural effect, that the Monarchy provides legitimising cover, is structural inference, not proven intent. The effect is documented, whether it was designed that way or simply codified over time by those who benefited is the question the evidence points towards. The Crown provides the constitutional pin regardless of intent. Remove the pin and the ancient rights that protect the City of London’s exceptional status, that shelter the Crown Dependencies from democratic accountability, that keep the Privy Council’s deliberations from public view, lose their legal foundation.
That is why no Prime Minister of any party has ever meaningfully challenged it. Not because they lack democratic mandate, but because the system they operate within depends on it as do they.
The Anger Is Real but the Target Is Wrong.
Something is happening in English political life that deserves honest analysis rather than condescension.
The communities that voted most heavily for Brexit, that have driven Reform UK’s dramatic rise, that express the loudest fury about immigration and cultural change, these are not, in the main, communities of wealthy reactionaries protecting privilege. They are communities systematically stripped of economic agency, cultural identity, and political voice over four decades of deindustrialisation, financialisation, and managed ‘democratic’ decline.
The steelworks closed. The mines closed. The factories closed. The high streets emptied. The housing became unaffordable, the services deteriorated. In each case, the accounting entries for the wealth those communities generated moved somewhere else, to London, to offshore, to the Colonists’ financial ledger the Crown-in-Parliament protects.
It is not incidental that the Freeman movement is overwhelmingly male, or that the loudest expressions of this fury come from communities where men’s economic identity was most completely dismantled.
The anger is real and it is legitimate.
The question is not whether the anger is valid. It is: who is it directed at, and why?
Directing working-class anger horizontally — at immigrants, at other nations, at minorities, at cultural change — is the oldest diversion in the political playbook. It costs nothing and changes nothing for those in power who benefit from the deflection. Direct that same anger vertically, at the ownership structures, the Colonists’ financial machine, the constitutional settlement that made the dispossession possible and keeps it in place, and the consequences are genuinely threatening to the power concentrated in Westminster.
Reform UK is not a community liberation movement. Its actual policy platform, low taxes, deregulation, anti-net-zero, arguably serves the City of London and its associated interests far more directly than it serves the communities whose rage it rides. Nigel Farage did not create the anger in those communities. He captured it. Captured anger serves its captor. It does not serve the communities it claims to represent.
The same analysis applies, from the opposite direction, to the silence of the English progressive left. The disenfranchised majority that filled streets for Gaza and climate and housing, that knows something is fundamentally broken but cannot find the constitutional language to name it, this is not a small minority. It is the larger part of England, waiting for a framework that names the situation accurately and offers tools to act.
What England’s Commons Still Are
Three per cent of England — approximately 3,701 square kilometres — remains registered common land today. Not symbolic. Actual common land, registered under the Commons Act 2006, with legal mechanisms for commons councils and registered rights.
England has approximately 350 active Community Land Trusts. It has 37,000 Community Interest Companies with statutory asset locks, constitutionally unable to extract wealth from their communities. It has Assets of Community Value legislation under the Localism Act 2011. It has Community Benefit Societies. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 has recognised digital assets as a third category of personal property.
These are not marginal instruments. They are material evidence that community ownership infrastructure can be built in England within existing law, without waiting for constitutional change, without asking permission from the Crown-in-Parliament.
Consider the Granby Four Streets project in Liverpool, where a community took streets of abandoned terraced housing, established a Community Land Trust, and materially changed who owns and controls the neighbourhood. No revolution, no permission from Westminster, the Crown-in-Parliament’s colonial machine turned against itself, one street at a time. Similarly the Lawrence Weston community wind turbine project in Bristol, England’s largest community-owned onshore wind turbine, generating energy and profit for a neighbourhood failed by the Crown-in-Parliament’s machine. Housing, energy and commons, each one a different asset class and each one the same principle: community ownership as sovereignty in practice.
Reclaiming the commons through the very Crown mechanisms that buried them is not accommodation, it is the colonial machine turned against itself. Westminster can change those statutes, but it cannot legislate away the material fact of land already held in community trust, assets already locked, commons already recovered. Ownership, once established, is harder to remove than permission.
The enclosures buried the commons, they did not abolish them. What was buried can be recovered. Similarly what was suppressed was not conceded and can be called upon if the common will is there. The principle that communities have sovereign interest in the resources, land, and infrastructure that shape their lives was not extinguished by the Enclosure Acts any more than Scottish popular sovereignty was extinguished by the 1707 Treaty, or Welsh sovereignty extinguished by the Laws in Wales Acts whose founding instruments have since been repealed.
The fact remains that the constitutional language of English popular sovereignty was never built. Whilst England’s communities cannot recover sovereignty they never formally possessed in the eyes of the Crown, they can construct it from the fundamental rights, community by community, commons by commons, in the material fact of ownership and governance, rather than waiting for Westminster to grant what Westminster will never willingly give.
The path to meaningful community sovereignty and ownership of the current 3% commons land would be a remarkable step in itself but not revolutionary. It would require sequenced accumulation, community by community, commons by commons, each act of ownership a constitutional fact that Westminster cannot legislate away without legislating against its own statutes. The first act is the simplest: find out what common land, community assets, and registered rights already exist in your community, after all they are already your lands and have been for longer than the Rex Anglorum’s own existence. Sovereignty demonstrated through practice rather than granted through permission is as available to English communities as it has always been to any people who refused to wait for their masters to hand it to them.
The Mirror the Other Nations Hold
English communities have been conditioned to see Scotland as subsidised, Wales as peripheral, Ireland as settled. The colonial conditioning is itself part of the Crown’s machine, ensuring that the nations of these islands look at each other with suspicion rather than recognising the same extraction operating on all of them simultaneously.
Wales knows what conquest looks like from the inside. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s sovereignty was never surrendered, it was militarily extinguished in 1282, legislatively buried in 1535 by a parliament in which the Welsh had no representation, and the founding instruments of that burial have since been repealed without constitutional resolution. The Senedd exists. Welsh sovereignty has never been restored. That is not ‘devolution’, that is administration without title, in a country whose annexation instruments no longer legally exist. The full constitutional argument deserves its own reckoning.
There is a logic that runs through every constitutional arrangement where the administering power controls the terms of the question. When Scotland sought a legal route to self-determination, the same kind of institution made the same kind of argument in the same kind of language — the framework is domestic, the procedure is established, the timetable is ours. What the February 2026 inquiry named as a “democratic anomaly” and then redirected back into Westminster’s procedural frame is not anomalous at all. It is the closed loop operating exactly as designed. A constitution cannot simultaneously be the legitimate arbiter of the question of whether its own administration is legitimate. The logic does not require any particular conclusion. It requires only that the question be asked — which is precisely what the inquiry declined to do.
Scotland’s popular sovereignty — established in 1320, confirmed in 1689, reaffirmed in 1989 — has never been legally extinguished. The Scotland Act 1998 absorbed its momentum into a parliament calibrated to make that sovereignty unthinkable. It did not answer the question. The question remains entirely intact, increasingly finding expression in community ownership and land reform that Westminster’s Crown-in-Parliament model has never once permitted south of the border. What Scotland is demonstrating is not a national exception. It is a proof of concept available to every community on these islands that refuses to mistake administration for sovereignty.
Ireland’s constitution mandates what its communities have never fully claimed. The Democratic Programme of the First Dáil declared the ownership of Ireland for the people of Ireland, then had its radical content excised by the same faction that signed for Dominion status. Article 45’s community ownership directive was made explicitly non-justiciable. The rights were never extinguished. The promise was never kept. That is the longest unfinished constitutional business on these islands, and it is still open. That unfinished business also deserves its own full account.
The story unfolding across the ‘British Isles’ is not one of the nations of the archipelago against each other, it is an interconnected story about communities within 4 distinct nations — Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England — confronting the same colonial extraction machine, the same colonial empire operating continuously since before any of our grandparents were born.
England’s communities are not merely observers of this story, they are fundamental participants in what is their story too. The question is not whether Scotland should be independent, or whether Wales deserves its parliament. The question is simpler and more immediate: who owns the land beneath your feet, who takes the accounting entries for the wealth your community generates, who owns YOU and what are you going to do about it?
The Deepest Conditioning
English people have been conditioned, not conspiratorially, but structurally, through centuries of managed culture, to identify with their own subjugation.
The Crown is presented not as an institution that extracts from English communities alongside everyone else, but as England’s identity, England’s history, England’s greatness. The Union Jack is England’s flag as much as Britain’s. The Coronation is England’s ceremony. The wars are England’s glory.
Subjects who identify with their own subjugation are the most effectively governed subjects in the world. They do not need to be coerced. They police each other. They celebrate the arrangement and they call any criticism of it unpatriotic.
This is not a uniquely English phenomenon. It is the oldest governance technology in human history. But it is why the question of English sovereignty is simultaneously more urgent and more difficult than the equivalent question in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, where the Victor’s narrative has a visible external agent to point to, where the dispossession has a name that is not your own.
There is a deeper layer still. Empire did not just extract wealth from the nations it subjugated. It extracted meaning for the coloniser — purpose, hierarchy, identity, the sense of civilisational mission that substituted for genuine cultural rootedness. Scotland gave England its oldest democracy narrative. Ireland gave it its oldest colonial justification. Wales gave it its oldest conquest story. The subject nations were the architecture of English identity as much as the source of English wealth.
Without them to define itself against — what is England?
The Mother of all Empires went out and colonised lands on every continent on earth, calling it civilisation. When the colonised children came home, they called it immigration.
The constitutional architecture that built it left ordinary English communities with no language to process that return hence the horizontal anger and rise of ethnic nationalism.
The ghosts haunting England’s law and sovereignty are not abstract. They are the colonised empire’s minds — returning to the hub.
But the haunting runs deeper still. The colonised mind of empire is not confined to England’s shores, nor to the generations who arrived when the flags came down. It is found in the Caribbean politician who governs through Westminster’s inherited framework. In the South Asian professional whose aspiration was structured around English as the language of advancement. In the African state whose borders were drawn by strangers and whose institutions were built to extract rather than serve. In the Scottish unionist who defends the architecture that dispossessed their own ancestors. In every place and every people that empire touched — physically, financially, or psychologically — the same void was proportionally installed: the absence of popular sovereignty, the subjugation of imperial hierarchy over rootedness, the management of legitimate anger downward and outward rather than upward toward the architecture that produced it.
The colonised mind of empire is its most durable and most invisible export — present not only in the nations still under English physical occupation, but in those under its financial and psychological occupation, and in the communities everywhere who inherited the void without ever being told who emptied it.
Recognising that does not require abandoning love of place, of community, of culture, of the real things that make English identity meaningful. It requires only this: the honesty to distinguish between England and the Crown-in-Parliament that has claimed to speak for England while extracting from it for three centuries.
England is not its state apparatus. English communities are not the Crown’s subjects. They never consented to be.
England wears England’s Colonial Mask, obscuring truth, justice and humanity from realities’ mirror.
The Commons That Couldn’t Be Enclosed
There is one thing the Crown-in-Parliament never managed to enclose. Not for want of trying.
When the empire came home — in the Windrush, in the partition migrations, in the decades of arrival that followed the flags coming down — it brought something the architects of extraction had not accounted for. It brought cultures. Sounds. Ways of assembling community that had survived colonisation precisely because they were carried in bodies and voices and rhythms rather than in land that could be legislated away.
Those cultures met the English working class communities that had already lost their commons, already carried the rage, already knew in their bones that something had been taken without ever being given the constitutional language to name what. And in the cities, in the streets, in the venues and the parks and the sound systems and the protest lines, something happened that no Act of Parliament had authorised and no Remembrancer had anticipated.
A new commons assembled itself. Not in land. In culture.
The Notting Hill Carnival is a constitutional act. The sound system is a commons. The rave, the jungle, the grime, the drill, the bhangra, the garage, the soul — each one a community assembling itself on its own terms, building identity and solidarity across the lines the empire had drawn to divide, asking no permission from the institution that drew them.
The establishment recognised it. That is the tell.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 defined rave music in primary legislation — “music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” — in order to criminalise the gatherings it produced. Westminster passed a law against repetitive beats. Not because the beats were dangerous. Because the beats were assembling the commons without permission, across racial lines, across class lines, in spaces the Crown-in-Parliament could not control and had not authorised.
Sus laws. Section 60. The repeated legislative attempts to break up the street before it recognised its own power. The pattern is identical to the 5,200 Enclosure Acts. Different asset class. Same constitutional logic. Parliament’s sovereignty deployed as a weapon against the commons it was meant to serve.
It didn’t work. The commons kept assembling. It still does.
This is England’s true identity — not the Coronation, not the flag-draped Cenotaph, not the Mother of Parliaments. It is the identity that formed in the streets and the clubs and the protest lines, the one that has shown up every time England’s establishment needed the street to save it from itself: against fascism, against the National Front, against the war, against austerity. The identity that has been making England dance and fight and organise with a passion and a unity that no constitutional instrument ever granted and no legislative act has ever successfully extinguished.
The fighting spirit England mistakes for nationalism is not nationalism. It is popular sovereignty in practice — expressed through culture because the constitutional language was never built, finding in the beat and the street what the Charter of the Forest once provided in the land.
And here is the truth the empire’s architects never modelled and the Remembrancer has never found a legislative answer to:
The colonised minds returning to the hub brought their sovereignty with them. Not as constitutional argument. As lived practice. And that practice cross-pollinated with the English working class culture that had been carrying the same loss, the same rage, the same buried commons for three centuries — and produced something the machinery of division has spent fifty years trying to prevent.
A coalition that recognises itself.
The misdirection — the horizontal anger, the immigrant blame, the nation against nation conditioning — is not casual politics. It is the establishment’s most desperate constitutional move. Because if the English working class and the multicultural street ever fully name themselves as the same community, dispossessed by the same architecture, their commons buried by the same parliament, their anger misdirected by the same machinery —
The third empire’s foundations do not survive it.
The sovereignty of the people — of any people — was never the empire’s to give. It was only ever theirs to take. And what can be taken can be recovered. Not by waiting for the institution that took it to hand it back. But in the street. In the beat. In the commons that couldn’t be enclosed.
The beat was always the commons. The street was always the sovereignty. They only ever told you it was noise.
Something else is now available that was not available before. Not a political argument, not a constitutional petition, not a request addressed to the institution that produced the condition. A classification. The language to name the system precisely, from outside it, using the system’s own scholars, the system’s own constitutional record, the system’s own operative dates. Three layers. Three dates. One definition. When a thing is named accurately it cannot be unnamed.
The generational rhythm of discontent was the commons before anyone had the constitutional language to say so. The sovereignty was always there before the vocabulary arrived to describe it. The vocabulary is arriving. What comes next is not a request. It is a recovery.
None of us were subjects. We were always the sovereign.
“The power of the people is stronger than the people in power.”
Eòin J Màrtainn
#IndyEngland #CrownInParliament #Colonialism #Monarchy #Republic #Empire
Evidence & Sources
All historical claims are verified from primary or authoritative secondary sources unless otherwise stated.
Verified Sources
Lord President Cooper, MacCormick v Lord Advocate [1953] SC 396: unlimited parliamentary sovereignty is a distinctively English principle with no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law
Declaration of Arbroath (1320); Claim of Right (1689): Scottish popular sovereignty, never legally extinguished
Bunreacht na hÉireann, Articles 1, 5, 6: Irish popular sovereignty constitutionally mandated
Laws in Wales Acts 1535–42: Welsh annexation instruments. Status: repealed
5,200 Enclosure Acts 1604–1914: House of Commons Library, confirmed fact
Reduction of independent landowners 250,000 to 32,000 (1786–1816): E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963); J.L. Hammond & Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911)
Charter of the Forest (1217); Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act 1971: confirmed statutory instruments
Royal Exchange opened 1571 by Queen Elizabeth I: primary historical record
Gresham’s role as Royal Agent in Antwerp and mandate to advise Crown on credit infrastructure: State Papers Domestic and Gresham correspondence
England’s debt of £227,000 in 1558, over £100,000 owed to Antwerp Bourse at 14% interest; contemporary accounts describing the state as on the edge of insolvency: State Papers Domestic, Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth 1547–1580; Gresham’s own correspondence to the Crown
Royal Exchange named by royal proclamation during Elizabeth I’s state visit, 23 January 1571: primary historical record
J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993): open-field systems actively innovating before enclosure; enclosure created wage-dependent labour force
Heldring, Robinson & Vollmer, The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures, NBER Working Paper 29772 (2022): 22 percentage point increase in land value Gini coefficient confirmed alongside yield figures; the inequality receipt is from the same study
State Opening of Parliament / Black Rod ceremony: confirmed operative constitutional ritual since 1642; parliamentary record
Prince of Wales letters to ministers (Black Spider Memos) 2004–2010: released under court order 2015; Cabinet Office v Information Commissioner [2015]; Guardian reporting confirmed
Miller (No 2) [2019] UKSC 41: Supreme Court ruling defining limits of Royal Prerogative, Crown cannot prorogue Parliament to frustrate democratic mandate
CEEAC inquiry witnesses drawn from English and ‘Northern’ Irish universities: confirmed; witness list includes Professor Aoife O’Donoghue, Queen’s University Belfast School of Law; full witness list: Tomkins, Tierney, McHarg, McEwan, Renwick, Blick, Casanas Adam, Henderson, Skoutaris, Raible, O’Donoghue, Lecours; SP Paper 1030
Scotland Act 1998: devolution settlement, Sewel Convention established
Claim of Right for Scotland (1989): cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention assertion of popular sovereignty
Democratic Programme of the First Dáil (1919): radical content excised before adoption
East India Company charter 1600; Navigation Acts 1651–1696: primary statutory record
City of London business franchise vote: City of London Corporation, confirmed operative
City of London Remembrancer: office created 1571, confirmed operative; role as parliamentary agent monitoring House of Commons proceedings on behalf of City interests: City of London Corporation documentation; Hansard Written Answers 2015 (access confirmed to under-gallery only)
Crown Estate assets (£15.5bn): Crown Estate Annual Report
Common land registered in England (3,701 sq km): Natural England, Commons Registration data
Community Land Trusts (approx. 350): Community Land Trust Network, 2024 data; Granby Four Streets CLT, Liverpool
Lawrence Weston Community Wind Turbine, Bristol: England’s largest community-owned onshore wind turbine, operated by Bristol Energy Cooperative
Community Interest Companies (37,000+): Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies, 2024
Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025: enacted Westminster legislation
Digital Assets (Scotland) Act 2026: enacted Scottish Parliament legislation
Labour 2024 election result (33.7% vote share, supermajority of seats): Electoral Commission
Analytical Conclusions
Scale of offshore wealth sheltered through Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories network: multiple credible analyses including Tax Justice Network; precise figure disputed, order of magnitude credible
The Monarchy’s structural effect as constitutional cover for the financial architecture: structurally grounded working hypothesis; the constitutional facts stated are verified and operative; the characterisation of structural effect is analytical inference
Sources consulted
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
J.L. Hammond & Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911)
Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire (dir. Michael Oswald, 2017)
Tax Justice Network, The State of Tax Justice (annual)
House of Commons Library, Enclosure Acts briefing
Natural England, Commons Registration statistics
Crown Estate Annual Report 2023–24
City of London Corporation, governance documentation
George Lockhart of Carnwath, Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland (1714): individual vote procurement payments documented with precision
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (1699): William III orders forbidding English colonial assistance to Scottish Darien settlement
Article XV, Treaty of Union (1707): Equivalent calculation, Scottish customs £30,000 pa vs English £1,341,559 pa; Scottish excise £33,500 pa vs English £947,602 pa
P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England (1967): English funded debt structure by 1706; Scottish unencumbered revenues as strategic asset
Christopher Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold (2001): Equivalent gold/paper distribution and Exchequer bill discount in Scotland post-1707
William Deringer, Calculated Values (2018): present-value discounting techniques confirmed in Equivalent calculation
P.H. Scott (ed.), The Union of 1707: Why and How? (Saltire Society, 2006), citing J.G. Pittendreigh: total Scottish liabilities at least £710,000 against Equivalent payment of £398,085; English borrowed the Equivalent sum and added it to British national debt Scotland then helped service