Burnham faces an insurgent Britain

In the BBC’s 1975 Panorama documentary on Sandhurst — now on iPlayer, perhaps through a scheduler’s sense of mischief or apprehension — we follow officer cadets as they train to impose order on a near-future Britain, where the civil order has collapsed. “Economic and political chaos is reigning in Britain, due to the failures of consecutive Labour and Tory minority governments,” runs the outline of the training exercise, “and Scotland has already seceded.” In the gently undulating downland of Ogbourne St George, the cadets attempt to separate the opposing factions, the one led by a socialist rabble-rouser, the other by the “neo-fascist Conservative MP for Ogbourne”, a golf club bore in a straw hat. The tactical scenario is obviously drawn from the contemporaneous situation in Northern Irel