The BBC’s Nick Robinson said that Conservatives think of Reform leader Nigel Farage as “a kind of Sunday roast with all the trimmings” while Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is “a quinoa salad”.
The latest YouGov U.K. poll on June 25th has Labour leading at 36%, followed by Conservatives 18%, Reform 17% and Liberal Democrats 15%. Based on these, their modelling projects Labour winning 425 of Parliament’s 650 seats (65.4%), Conservatives 108 (16.6%), Reform 5 (0.8%), and Liberal Democrats 67 (10.3%). Thus Labour with about one-third of votes would win almost two-thirds of seats; the Conservatives, level-pegging with Reform in votes, would win 22 times as many seats; Reform would win less than one-third of its vote share in seats; and the LibDems, with only four-fifths of the Reform share of votes, would have thirteen times as many seats. The extent of the distortion is shown visually in Figure 1. Another poll from People Polling actually has Reform ahead of Conservatives 24-15.
The U.K. distortions reflect the quirks of the first-past-the-post electoral system used in elections for the mother of parliaments. The Australian electoral system in combination with the institutionalised practice of preference flows produces its own significant distortions. In the May 2022 elections, Labor won 77 of the 151 seats with 32.6/52.1% primary/two-party preferred votes, and the Coalition won 58 seats with 35.7/47.9% votes. The last Newspoll on June 9th had the Coalition’s primary vote at 39% and Labor at 33%, with the two-party preferred vote tied 50-50. Although one cannot make linear extrapolations, under the U.K. system the Coalition would have won the last election and would be on track for a landslide victory next year.
Whither representative democracy? With parliamentary representation and government composition going off at tangents from voter preferences, Australia and the U.K. demonstrate why there’s growing disenchantment with democracy itself. On June 18th, the Pew Research Centre published its latest democracy satisfaction ratings in 12 high-income democracies in Europe, North America and Asia. In 2017, an equal share (49%) of people were satisfied and dissatisfied with the way democracy was working in their country. Now, the balance has shifted 64-36 to the dissatisfied group. When the polling was extended to 19 other countries this year, the median dissatisfaction in the 31 countries was 54-45%. For Australia it is 60-39.
In the last three years, the satisfaction ratings have fallen by 21 points in the U.K., 14 in Canada, 11 in Germany, 10 in the U.S. and 9 in France. As will be immediately obvious, the last three years were the years of the pandemic when Covid provided the trigger to the unchecked expansion and widespread abuse of state power. Climate- and pandemic-related fear-induced safetyism is being deployed to the same end to tell people which car to buy and command manufacturers and dealers which cars to make and sell; to order people how to heat their homes; and so on.
Yet another reason for the rising dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs is the relentless negativity of the noisy activists towards the legacy of Western civilisations, culture and values. To take but one example, mobs have been out vandalising artistic and statuary symbols of this legacy with respect to racism and slavery. Yet, as the exceptional Michaela Community School principal Katharine Birbalsingh pointed out in an Intelligence Squared debate on September 25th, 2019, slavery was common to all major civilisations and races; Arabs enslaved white Europeans as well as black Africans; Africans held African slaves and American blacks owned African-American slaves. Western civilisation was the only one to develop a moral revulsion against slavery and to lead the fight (often literally) for its worldwide legal abolition.
Where is the logic in agitating for the descendants of the soldiers who died in the U.S. Civil War to free slaves, to pay reparations to the descendants of the slaves who were freed, she asked? This recently posted video clip of her speech on X has garnered 29 million views.
Jeffrey Tucker, founder-President of Brownstone Institute, splits the deep state of popular imagination into three layers:
- The deep state of security, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that operate mostly in the world of shadows with legal protections for classified information;
- The middle layer of the administrative state to which legislatures and executives have delegated powers and courts have deferred to their expertise in the exercise of these powers. Even U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell recently complained about the growing “rejection of democratic accountability in favour of the administrative state”; and
- The mostly consumer-facing shallow state that complies with but also, through extensive lobbying, shapes the edicts of the administrative state.
Matt Ridley, who retired from the House of Lords in 2021, drew on his parliamentary experience to write recently in the Spectator that no matter who the citizens vote for, the blob – the network of mighty quangocrats, technocrats, activist NGOs and unelected and unaccountable judges – always wins. The three principal characters in the 1980s hit TV series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister were Jim Hacker as the PM, Sir Humphrey Appleby as his departmental and then Cabinet Secretary and Bernard Woolley as his Private Secretary. Referencing that ever-popular and still-relevant series, Ridley writes:
Today, when Hacker suggests a policy, Humphrey reminds him that he has devolved responsibility to the National Paperclips Authority, or it’s not within his power, or judicial review will stop it, or it’s against human rights law, or he’s bullying Bernard by asking him to turn up to work.
In the U.S., even Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former Governor of New York who was a fierce and popular Trump critic, said recently that “if his name was not Donald Trump, and if he wasn’t running for President”, the sex case in which he was convicted “would have never been brought”. Cuomo explained that he was speaking as a former Attorney General of New York.
On June 16th, a long, glossy spread in the New York Times described several progressive groups that are apprehensive of the threat to democracy from a potential second Trump administration, including the American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigration Law Centre, Reproductive Freedom Alliance and Democracy Forward. “A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans” is gearing up to neuter the anticipated agenda by deploying lawfare as the weapon of choice and drafting several lawsuits that could be filed early in his second term.
The vortex of the above developments explains why there is a spectre haunting the West today, the spectre of a New Right challenging and displacing the Left-liberal consensus on migration, Net Zero and identity politics. Described variously as far-Right, hard-Right and radical-Right, the protest movements (for example by farmers) are morphing into nascent political parties and alignments. They are better understood as the New Right that is on the march across the West en route to becoming mainstream.
What began as a drift to the Right is threatening to turn into a stampede. In another extraordinary poll, 46% of all U.K. voters, including 24% of Conservative voters from 2019, believe the party deserves to lose every seat. The Tories have lost ground since 2019 among every voting group by gender, class and age.
Similarly, in Canada, Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberal Party lost one of its safest seats in a by-election in Toronto on June 24th. The extent of the swing to the Conservatives was on a scale to suggest that after the next General Election, due by next year, the Liberals could be reduced from 155 to just 15 seats, according to Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategy. Don Braid, a weekly columnist with the Calgary Herald, went even further: “Liberal defeat is now possible in every single riding across Canada.”
This is white hot rage territory. The recent European elections represent a political earthquake. The European Parliament itself has limited powers. The elections’ real significance is that, as proxy referendums on national politics, they will shape national policies in Europe’s most consequential countries (France, Germany, Italy). The aftershocks could rattle the U.K. next week, the U.S. in November and even Australia next year. In these places, too, citizens have had enough of the uniparty’s progressive-green-globalist agenda to dissolve their rich civilisation into a relativist and mushy quinoa salad.
All ‘right-thinking’ people are assumed to subscribe to the consensus and be on ‘the right side of history’. The prospect of the ‘wrong-thinking’ people from the ‘wrong side of history’ emerging victorious at the ballot box is provoking an epidemic of conniptions. For they are viewed as not just wrong, but positively evil. Thus all who opposed the Voice referendum in Australia last year were bigoted racists. Critics of mass immigration from countries with cultures deeply hostile to Western values, who want to domesticate the Israel-Palestine conflict in local politics, are Islamophobes. Opponents of the jobs and growth-destroying Net Zero are climate-denialist Neanderthals. Advocacy for gender realism is hate speech.
You get the picture.
‘Reactionary’ views are firming on fossil fuels, gender wars, immigration and, in an increasingly darkling world, national security. The scorn-spewing elites own the outcome of the European elections. History is full of examples where, when the elites lost touch with the people, they were pitchforked into oblivion. That’s the fate of elites who end up on the wrong side of history. But, of course, like all who are liberal until mugged by reality, liberals support revolutions in every place and time except their own.
The old Left-Right divide has become obsolete. Instead, the new divide is between the international technocratic elite in alliance with national elites against the interests, values and policy preferences of national populations. This came to a head during the pandemic years that pitted the laptop Zoom class against the working class, enriching the former and immiserating the latter. The fear porn used to impose Covid-era restrictions broke the citizen-state social compact and peoples’ trust in almost all public institutions.
‘We the people’ are fighting back. ‘Populist’ is commonly used by commentators pejoratively. Yet the word comes from the notion of the popular will to describe policies that are popular with large numbers of voters who have come to believe that their concerns are derided and disregarded by the established policy, cultural, corporate, intellectual and media elites.
Hence the revolt of the masses against the homogeneous political establishment and against the scolds and sneers who are their cheerleaders in the commentariat. Their lack of humility is matched by a surfeit of arrogance. The ‘deplorables’ find nothing to apologise for in cherishing their own culture, practising and defending the values they have inculcated to live by in a cohesive and closely knit community. They reject the concerted effort to deny space to anyone who gives voice to the fear that to import the third world is to risk becoming the third world.
If a minor or new party strikes a chord with the base of one of the major parties with respect to the central organising principle, economic philosophy, constitutional values, energy security and affordability and individual rights, from which the major parties are seen to have departed, then votes will haemorrhage from the major to the ‘populist’ party. But all this means is that the party, not the voters, has deserted core values.
The message from the European voters can be summarised thus: Europeans don’t want to become African, Middle Eastern, South Asian or Muslim. They don’t want to import the third world’s pathologies of slums, sectarian conflicts, violent street crimes, rapes, crumbling infrastructure and lack of affordable high-quality public education and health care. They do wish to preserve their own heritage, culture, lifestyles, peaceful communities, public safety and good governance.
Their tolerance has been tested to breaking point. They have had enough and they are not going to take it anymore. They would like their countries, stolen from them in fits of absentmindedness, back, thank you very much.
Ironically, the prestige of democracy and commitment to liberal democracy as a political project has plummeted also in the global South as a result of the obvious grave dysfunctionality of Western democracies. Westerners are bankrupting themselves with green policies and tearing themselves apart with identity politics, much to the bemusement of people in the global South despite their own multitude of serious problems.
Political parties need to forge a new consensus on climate, immigration and gender and racial identity policies, and find the sweet spot between the excesses of the Left (for example climate extremism and antisemitism) and the Right (e.g. Islamophobia), and between inward-looking nationalism and sovereignty-destroying globalism.
One of the great strengths of democracies is the self-correcting mechanisms against excesses. This is how I interpret the results of India’s recent General Election in which PM Narendra Modi was reduced to a minority Government reliant for survival on a group of regional allies. The results amount to an all-round win-win outcome:
- Modi gets to lead a third consecutive Government to consolidate his party’s transformative agenda
- Coalition allies will have more say in governance
- Congress and other opposition parties have given a respectable showing and will form a credible opposition and be better positioned to hold the Government accountable
- The return of regional parties means the prospect of over-centralisation, which would constitute an existential threat to India’s unity, has receded
- The potential for mining anti-Muslim sentiment to mobilise the Hindu vote has been exhausted
The long overdue correction of Western democracies is now in train. The slow and painful process of restoring trust in public institutions might just have begun. If not, troubles could intensify and multiply.
Marking the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress on March 13th, 1962, President John F. Kennedy said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” If voter preferences continue to be disrespected instead of implemented as policy, how long before violent explosions erupt and civil wars return?
Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published in the Brownstone Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The ‘Be Kind’ left in Australia attacks a busker for not playing along with their protest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TStBz0aykt0
Watched this. Deeply shocking. The Left has to be defeated.
Then they should go and get it from Africans who sold their own people into slavery to Arab traders and then European/American traders.
I thought the alternative was death.
On a long enough timescale everyone’s chances of survival is Zero.
The offshore banks, that our Commonwealth friends use while looting their countries, will be delighted at the thought of reparation millions/billions heading their way.
Excellent idea! And the English should receive reparations for the Barbary slave trade, among others: white skin was always highly appreciated by our African neighbours.
I wonder if the Commonwealth will collapse when the UK tells them to jog on?
But sstarmer won’t tell them to will he? He’ll starve a few more pensioners, sack a few thousand more steel workers and bung’em all the dosh they ask for.
Quite possibly and this sharp article explains why…
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-lefts-insatiable-appetite-for-cruelty/
Kneel and his treasonous bunch of evil-doers are basically committed to cruelty and any form of it will do.
I wonder if the immense amount of foreign paid to these pseudo-states and their insatiable ruling castes shouldn’t perhaps count for something. Or investing these ruling castes with their pseudo-states to begin with. If the Brits hadn’t subdued all the tribal rulers and created provinces from their territories, these guys wouldn’t nowadays celebrate themselves for “getting elected” (or so) there. They’d probably rather be busy with fighting for their lives with spears and clubs.
Britain spent a lot of money ending the slave trade. Buying out slave owners, having the Royal Navy patrol the slaver routes.
What is the size of our discount? Is it, adjusted for inflation, greater than any reparations? Are we owed money? I can’t see that going down at all well.
I’ve argued elsewhere that official claims for reparations, rehoming of refugees, and so on should expire after 70 years. That would cut through a lot of outrage for the sake of past wrongs.
If it’s legacy then reparations are due for the inventions and discoveries that have been made that have benefited everyone. The first to receive ‘compensation’ will be those descended from those that slaved away in the UK factories 12 hours and day 7 days a week. The slaves in places that grew sugar or cotton would not have worked continuously as there is a land clearing and growing season and then a harvesting season. As the UK had islands the land clearing would have been completed fairly quickly leaving spare time, something that was missing for the UK work force. In a little over 100 years there were 10,000 inventions that were available for all to use.
I am descended from a family of cotton mill workers, on both sides so I believe I must be up near the top of the list.
The Cotton Mill workers had famines during the US Civil War due to the stopping of cotton supplies. Karl Marx was funded by money from Engels father’s cotton mill which means Marxism is tainted and any Marxist should pay reparations.
Tainted marxists – to some tune.
In addition any reparations should mean the recipient vacating whichever tropical Island their ancestors were transported to and returning to there ancestral homelands. The islands can then be returned to UK ownership as it was British ships, navigation and effort that found the islands and cultivated them. This way every one gets something.
If they insist we must tell Chuckles that he will be picking up the tab.
Unfortunately we have a £22 billion hole in the nation’s finances so bad that we cannot afford to give our pensioners their Winter Fuel Allowance so it’s a ‘No Can Do.’
Charity begins at home.
It won’t happen but wouldn’t it be lovely if the UK withdrew from the Commonwealth and left them to it.
Race grifting trash. Colour be buggered.
Hear, hear
More trash, of a different variety, incoming! He’s being rude in Arabic so the Italian ladies don’t know what he’s on about. Seriously, how are we meant to differentiate between decent Muslims and the scummy, hateful ones? It’s no wonder people just find it easier to oppose all Islam;
”A Muslim enters a church & identifies a woman as a Christian:
“God willing, I hope you die today, before tomorrow.”
He wanted to beat the women up.”
https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1835031301767709133
I would give every black man £5 million. He would be given a Mcmansion suitably furnished with fried chicken and jerk chicken aplenty. Give a bit of that Jamaican spice and make it feel like home for heaven’s sake.
These West Indians are postively homely and lovely by comparison with what you are getting now. In a nutshell governments all over Africa and Asia have managed to offload their criminal class onto English shores because of the British love of cheap and easy labour. Believe me you will not be able to remove this element from your country. They are fitter and hungrier and sharper than you. Their knowledge of science and technology might be rather limited but they know how to skin a cat and barbecue it. I like money as well and the good things that it brings but maybe just stop and ask if your addiction has gone too fer.
They absolutely are eating the dogs and cats. Catchy;
https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1834694604211519669
Nextdoor to Springfield. There’s something about migrants and pets being on their menu;
”EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.”
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1834926318883852543
Except for our own Aussie, Kiwi and Canuk cousins, the Commonwealth has never been anything but a disaster for England and the English People.
I do hope that King Charles III will put his royal foot down at that meeting, and tell them what they can do with their endless, insatiable demands and victimhood.
The Message of the West should be:
“Dear Third World, we owe you nothing.
Stop whining and get over it!”
Mad Green King Charles 111 is part of the problem
It’s never too late to change your mind. Maybe he will change his mind about things, you never know.
To his credit, he did visit the Southport Mass Stabbing victims and their families, unlike any of our elected politicians, most of whom were more concerned about keeping Muslims safe from Britons.
It is like talking about mitigation measures after the boat is long sunk. In this regard your country and your people are finished. Surely you can see the trajectory. Can you see any impediment to it? You just need to look at it soberly and conclude that you lost the battle four decades ago. You are like those Jap soldiers on Pacific islands who defended their posts for decades after the war. I would like to say that you put up a good fight but you didn’t at all.
“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Booker Taliaferro Washington
I don’t enjoy it but you clearly don’t give a crap. That’s the issue. So don’t come to me when you have a firework and a kebab skewer up your ass.
England is still awaiting ‘reparations’ from Italy for the invasion AD43-84 and enslavement of our whole country. Let us (and indeed most of the Europeans) settle that first, before we move onto the France invasion 1066. Arguably also perhaps Denmark, Norway and Sweden to a lesser, regional extent, but only then we can move on to the C17-C18 issues.
“About 10 million people were enslaved by Britain and European nations between”
Factually incorrect.
They were enslaved by their own kind before being sold onwards.
And the Arab Muslim empires get a free pass?
On a side note, Cassius Clay renamed himself after Muhammad Ali of Egypt – a reformer but also someone that considered slavery part and parcel of the economy.
The time and energy would be better spent in dealing with the black Africans who are still selling people. Amnesty reports that a white man can be bought for $1100 in North Africa. As it was 250 years ago so it still is today; black people rounding up mostly black people and selling them into slavery. What do the Commonwealth, or any country for that matter, have to say about it? Bugger all.
For some bizarre reason most people seem to think it was white men out in the bush rounding up tribes when it really was not, it was non-whites rounding up anyone and everyone and it has not changed.
Barbary Coast slavers for example went all around the Mediterranean and Devon and Cornwall capturing people. In Cornwall there was one village where every single person was murdered or enslaved. Literally no person was left. They also raided Ireland where the same thing happened.
Why reparations? Has the price of ganja risen?
I’m looking forward to receiving my payment from the Italians.
Oh, and since I have Irish and west country ancestry, the descendants of the Barbary Pirates probably owe me a bob or two as well, so I trust Morocco, Algeria and Libya will be coughing up.
Britain is being eaten alive from the inside.
We gave them the Caribbean ffs.
So all those slave dealing states in West Africa should be paying reparations to the West Indies and the southern USA states. And can the UK claim back the costs of stopping the trade?
Harold I’s Danish mother had a nice line in business rounding up attractive English girls to sell abroad as sex slaves. Perhaps Denmark could pay reparations.
It would surely be unfair to levy any sort of reparations on UK citizens were are persons of colour, or who have some other heritage unconnected with slavery, such as the Ukrainians.
Therefore some sort of examination would have to be carried out as to each person’s heritage and ‘culpability’. After all, collective punishment – reparations have only historically been levied on the defeated, such as on the Germans for losing the Great War – must surely be a breach of human rights.
And then there’s the question of the currency to be paid. Surely it would be an insult to pay the people of former colonialised countries in sterling or US dollars, the money once used to purchase slaves. As such countries now proudly possess their own fiat, it must be appropriate to pay in Jamaican, Barbadian or Trinidadian dollars or Gambian dalasi.
Next would be the question of what rate of payment is acceptable; a vexed subject for bankrupt Weimar Germany, and perhaps one for a country that has a ‘black hole’ in its finances (though negotiators sensitive to micro-aggressions would not speak using such a questionable term in these discussions). Additionally, the rate of payment, especially if sterling is to be printed for the purpose, raises the problem of inflation.
As the UK is in economic terms like Manhattan (the City of London) surrounded by an economy poorer than Puerto Rico, it would be the south-east from where most of the money would come for the reparations if they were not levied on individual citizens. An unfair and disproportionate burden.
However, as was done with Weimar Germany to ease and guarantee payment, these Commonwealth countries that want reparations could lend money to the UK to invest in industrial growth from which would come the money for the
shake downreparations.Following that would be the question of what total amount of payment would satisfy. To avoid everyone going mad and jumping overboard, it would be necessary to avoid satisfying resentment by paying money only to become like slaking thirst by drinking seawater. The Atlantic is vast and deep but drinking it all would never soothe a parched throat.
After all that, for the sake of complete justice extend reparations to include the young woman who was trafficked around the UK as a sex slave by a grooming gang.
No.
(if you need further explanation, read a history book.)
Black politicians from Africa in favour of huge British payments to themselves! Now, that’s a surprise.
Exercise for the reader: Name a single African country which could exist without so-called “foreign aid.”
Funny how the ones ‘doing better’ today are the former countries of the Empire…
that’s what it’s all about, what did you expect?