The London Mayor Presents Pyrotechnic Propaganda

The best firework displays make you catch your breath. The first dazzling explosion of colours and bangs force a sharp inhalation, followed by low appreciative ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, heard in waves throughout a watching crowd.

London’s 2023 New Year’s Eve firework display had the capital gasping for all the wrong reasons. This was the most extreme pyrotechnic propaganda ever seen in the skies above London.

And the world watched too, which is rather embarrassing. We used to do a good firework display. Even the world’s most famous despots from Kim Jong Un to Vladmir Putin must have been slack-jawed at the imposition of woke rectitude blazoned above the city’s great skyline.

Can fireworks spell doom for a country? I’m afraid that once fireworks start spelling at all, the writing is on the wall, or rather the sky.

First, Sadiq Khan gave himself top billing as the the drones formed a gigantic credit and we were informed that the fireworks were presented by his egoship, the Mayor of London. At least this makes apportioning blame for what followed quite simple.

Which was woke bingo, with voiceovers piously intoning the year’s shibboleths: the King’s coronation (that one is okay), the NHS, same-sex marriage, the Windrush arrival and ‘the environment’.

Why can’t fireworks just be pretty? And when did it all change?

Using fireworks to make events special and to convey messages more effectively and memorably is not new. After all, we stick a Guy on a bonfire every November while cooing over rockets and sparklers. Fireworks are used to commemorate Independence Day in the U.S. and spectacular displays have dazzled the subjects of kings and queens in Europe for centuries. But our own feudal lord, I mean, mayor’s heavy-handed application of propagandistic messaging is particularly blunt, and it never used to be like this.

The propaganda has been sneaking in for years. Last year, the fireworks and London Eye were themed blue and yellow in homage to Ukraine. It would be churlish to complain. Although, amid the panoply of propaganda in the skies this year, there was nothing similar for Israel which suffered the worst pogrom since the Second World War and is at war with terrorist organisation Hamas.

The 2021 New Year’s Eve fireworks referenced the Jubilee line, the Euros, women’s football specifically, and a prim voiceover told us that “players take the knee united in their stance against racism”. Be told, London. 2020 was as weird as you’d expect, with Covid, Captain Tom Moore, Zoom meetings (of all things) and Black Lives Matter in the script.

Since 2020, Khan has taken it upon himself to produce a little recap of the year and consequently impose a set of values upon us. You have to go back to before 2020 for the fireworks to be a good old-fashioned normal New Year’s Eve celebration. And therefore, I’m afraid that as much as he wants all the credit, Khan will have to share with Covid. I’ve written extensively about the propaganda and nudging that the Government got drunk on in 2020. Central and local government and government agencies have become addicted to telling us what and how to think. It’s no surprise that they even use fireworks hector us.

In auld lang syne — i.e., pre-2019 — the London Eye would be lit in the colours of the Union flag. You don’t see that anymore. We’re not supposed to be proud of our country.

To commence the 2018 festivities, an announcer cheerily exclaimed “Welcome to London!” By 2019, we were told “London is open!” Inexplicably, this year London is for “everyone”. Well, I write “inexplicably” but in fact we know — if we pause for even a couple of seconds — that the “London is for everyone” slogan is the battle cry of diversity warriors who want to promote the identities of “everyone” except, that is, natives.

These little changes happen slowly. You don’t notice the tiptoe from fun to sermon, until the transformation and ruination is complete. One of the small but telling little changes is the countdown to midnight. If you watch the archived videos of old New Year’s Eve firework displays in London, instead of a voiceover and drone countdown, the crowd used to do it alone.

This might seem like a small, inconsequential detail, but it’s not. When the crowd counted down together they were co-creators. It was fun and spirited. It felt a little bit magical. Recent drone and voiceover countdowns are a metaphor for how much life has changed in just a few years. The technocrats are in charge and everything is choreographed. These days people are not even trusted to count backwards from 10 to one, let alone wake up hungover, but happy, and ready to draft their values in the form of resolutions. Khan writes our values in the sky and does the counting for us.

The wokest fireworks display in the history of the New Year’s Eve celebrations was a depressing start to 2024. Still, we’re lucky to even have fireworks, as they are increasingly criticised as being environmentally unfriendly. If Khan sticks around you should expect more drones, perfectly controlled and reflective of the correct thinking — the model for Khan’s Londoners.

Laura Dodsworth is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A State of Fear: how the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her new book is Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it. This article first appeared on her Substack page, the Free Mind, which you can subscribe to here.