D. J. Webb
Some comment on the Oldham West by-election result may be appropriate. Despite a great deal of evidence that the Labour Party has effectively lost its erstwhile connection with the “white” working class of Northern England, it held the seat with a increased share of the vote, against widespread predictions that it would hold the seat but with a very much reduced share of the vote.
Democracy as such is not, in my view, the goal of libertarianism. Democracy can lead to majoritarian support for the imposition of greater state control and higher taxation. The real goal of libertarianism is not democracy, but liberty, a state of affairs whereby the complexion of the government is of little interest to the majority, given the appropriately small size of the state.
However, we are not in a libertarian state, and the democratic process, such as it is, does have an impact on representation in parliament, and hence the way in which we are governed. The current crop of parliamentarians are all enthusiastic supporters of state power.
For this reason, I think libertarians would do well to be concerned about the Oldham result and what is shows us about the future of our country. The Labour Party’s main challenger in Oldham was the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which has forged much higher levels of support in this country by moving on from its former single-issue obsession with the European Union (EU) to a broader range of issues, including immigration, multi-culturalism and “political correctness”.
The reason why UKIP, which took 23.4% of the vote, could not make greater headway against the Labour Party was the demographic profile of the constituency: fully 25% of the population is of South Asian, mainly Pakistani Muslim, origin. This community’s “block vote” for the Labour Party effectively takes the constituency out of play in a way that would logically imply that other parties should no longer bother going to the expense of standing candidates in Oldham.
Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, claimed to have evidence of fraud in postal votes: postal votes accounted for 25% of the votes cast, but were not all received through the post! Community organizers turned up at polling stations on election day with bundles of postal votes under their arms, which boosted the total number of postal votes received by 15% on the actual day of polling. Clearly this is disconcerting. Surely those community organizers should have been told that the clue is in the name: “postal votes” are to be posted through the Royal Mail, and not brought in huge bundles to polling stations by community representatives. Some of these bundles of postal votes were 99% for Labour.
But Labour took 62.1% of the vote, with a lead of 10,722 over UKIP. The 7,115 postal votes received added to this lead, but clearly Labour would have won the seat without them. The wider question is the behaviour of Asian community organizers able to collect signed but blank postal votes en masse from Asian voters, who are largely segregated in four wards of Oldham West, by going from house to house. It is believed the votes are then filled in by the organizers to record a vote for the Labour Party in what can only be described as electoral fraud.
Interestingly, even Helen Pidd, the North of England editor for The Guardian, tweeting under the user name @helenpidd, was dismayed by what she found in Oldham West. On November 27th she wrote “A dismaying number of voters I met in Oldham today can’t speak English despite living there a decade or more. But they’re voting Labour”. I tweeted in reply to her on December 3rd “Shh! Helen, don’t let the cat out of the bag-or you may be booted off the Guardian! Surely you mean that Oldham is more vibrant?”
As even The Guardian editor noted, the Oldham Asian community is entirely unintegrated. Yet they have the vote in our elections and vote as a block for Labour. The postal vote provision is designed to allow whole communities of people who don’t speak English to vote as a block. Despite concerns over the way in which community organizers fill in the postal vote forms for thousands of residents, it seems likely any investigation will find that those residents genuinely intended to vote for Labour. It’s hard to believe anyone handed over a blank postal vote to a community organizer was seeking to vote for UKIP. Concerns over “voter intimidation” seem disingenuous, as the Labour Party genuinely does attract the support of this community, which has every incentive to carry on voting for high welfare, mass immigration, multi-culturalism and political correctness.
In the end, therefore, any investigation into electoral fraud will go nowhere. The real point is that the Asian community itself is a cuckoo in the nest of the British population. If 100,000 migrants arrive from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia and similar countries next year, those people and their descendants will almost all, once given citizenship, vote for the Labour Party.
Immigration therefore destroys the possibility of genuine democracy in our country, and will eventually destroy any possibility of winning wider support for libertarian policies. No one should be fooled by the Labour Party’s current travails. They may be out of power for a decade, but migration trends indicate that the Conservative Party or any other generic/default English party will eventually be unelectable in England. A glance at London shows the future of the country. Larger and larger percentages of the English vote will be required for the Conservative Party to win elections, until this country emerges as a one-party state under the Labour Party, or any similar party that might replace Labour.
More and more seats will become “safe seats” for the ethnic lobby. It is interesting to note under our first-past-the-post electoral system that the ethnic minorities do not need to become a majority in the area to achieve this. As 40% of the vote is generally sufficient to win a seat under first past the post, an ethnic community of 20-25% already effectively removes the seat from contest.
UKIP is in an uncomfortable position. Claiming fraud will not help them, as the Asian voters of Oldham genuinely do support Labour. Their only line of attack is to point out that these voters are not British and should not have our passports. I lived in China for four years, and at no point did anyone in China indicate to me that I could or should take part in China’s political process (which does include a one-party token electoral mechanism). We cannot be a free country by handing out our passports to communities that have every incentive to support a large state and vote as a block to achieve this aim.
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This.
The Guardian, like the rest of the political left and substantially all of the political class in Britain have applauded multiculturalism and the lack of integration. They have given special favours to the new citizens and those of Asian origin even had their own assigned Minister in the Blair government.
Small wonder, then, that they see no reason to integrate. Instead that continue to follow similar life styles as they did in their former countries and to which many still hold a higher loyalty than they do to Britain.
Until only a few short years ago to write as the author did and as I have would have been dismissed as racism. UKIP was held back by systematic repression by the political class and their friends in the media. It was only when the scale of the EU and immigration issues became no longer capable of being hidden that we began to make progress.
I very much like the idea that libertarians should not be bothered who ran the government if it was as small as we would like. I like also to contrast “government” with “rule”. We accept the former but we have had the latter for a couple of decades.
Our Administration (better word than “Government” as that implies we are “governed”) now rules in much the same ways as Kings did before a degree of liberalisation took place. They award position status and income to their friends through a nomenklatura and sell the right to tax in exchange for immediate cash with which to sustain the scale of activity the tax payers refuse to fund.
Indeed. We basically have elected monarchy. The Ancient Greeks undoubtedly would have classified it as “tyrannos” and laugh derisively at us calling it “demokratia”.
Coming to a better view of the Greeks?
No, just pretending to be an intellectual.
Bah!
[quote]”Small wonder, then, that they see no reason to integrate. Instead that continue to follow similar life styles as they did in their former countries and to which many still hold a higher loyalty than they do to Britain.”[unquote]
Which is good news for those of us who did not want them here in the first place and would rather they leave. Why would we want them to integrate?
It is I think worth mentioning that the drive for mass democracy in Britain was almost entirely driven by “progressive” Statists who saw it as a means to justify expanding the power and control of the government, right back to the 1832 “Great” Reform Act, which historians accept created a far more “active” Commons. In particular, these people, mostly Liberals, wanted voting blocs who would support them to have influence. The Feminists (Suffragettes) were notable in this regard; they did not want “votes for women” to articulate the will of the masses, but to enable middle and upper class women to vote as a bloc for Feminist legislation.
So in that sense, this is more of the same. Immigrationists actively want immigrants to bloc vote to support them, which is why Labour politicians in particular find the sight of those bundles of “postal” votes positively heartwarming.
Postal votes should be abolished. Anyone who genuinely cannot attend a polling station should be visited by an electoral officer who can ensure that their vote is cast properly in conditions of privacy. Many people are just using them today out of laziness- the Telegraph journalist Emma Barnett for instance mentioned having one. She is young, fit and there is no reason that she cannot walk to a polling station. If she can’t be bothered to do that, that’s her problem.
You are quite correct, and the answer is simple: we must scrap the postal vote. There’s no point in worrying about those being denied a vote because they are unable to get the a polling station if the only way we can accommodate them undermines the very purpose of voting.
If we can’t find a better alternative, it must be scrapped.
You’ve managed to misunderstand the whole thing — quite a feat! Getting rid of postal voting does not change the fact that non-integrated communities will vote as a block.
I was actually replying to the point that Ian B made postal votes being abolished, not the wider point that you were making – which I agree with. However, we can’t really stop certain communities voting as a block, but we can stop the clear corruption of postal voting by getting rid of it.
Quite. Although David is right that “communities” will vote as a bloc, within communities there are always those who dissent, and the postal votes mechanism prevents that minority exercising their choice. Postal votes help to lock people inside their “community”.
Democracy is illiberal as it is gratuitous coercion towards others.
But even the UKIP pays lip service toward the aspects of the Labourite policy that D.J. Webb cites that he is concerned with, so democracy is no solution in any case; not Burkian representative democracy anyway.
“that the Conservative Party or any other generic/default English party will eventually be unelectable in England” – the Conservative Party is full on pro-EU / globalist paid up PC … I’ll have some of what you’re smokin’.
I don’t wish to nitpick over what is otherwise a very good piece, but two observations:
1. The problem is not a lack of integration, nor that we are handing them our passports or legal status as civically ‘British’ citizens. The problem is the fact that these communities are here at all. Had they successfully integrated, the problems would be an order of magnitude worse. Acknowledging, as I must, that they are here, we are presented with an unenviable choice, or rather, our ‘rulers’ are. I strongly favour multi-culturalism over integration, and I hope as long as these communities remain in this country, they struggle or refuse to integrate. At least with the present state of affairs, people can see clearly there is a community that is living separately and acting politically to defend its own interests. That may ultimately prove to be our salvation.
2. As we all know, the purpose of an electoral fraud investigation will be to detect whether any significant and organised electoral fraud took place. Whether the fraud affected the outcome is of no relevance. If it is found that thousands of votes were procured improperly, then the election will have to be re-run.
3. And yes, like John Pate (above), I would strongly dispute the assertion that the Conservative Party is, or has ever acted, as a generically English party. Certainly in the 20th. century, the Conservative Party was equally culpable with Labour, and also the Liberal Party up to the 1920s, in the imposition of mass immigration on the indigenous British population.
Indeed. However, they do market themselves as such, apparently as a means to give people who don’t want policy X somebody to vote for, then get policy X anyway. Sean Gabb calls them the “Quisling Right”. The argument in the USA is that the Republicans serve the same function.
The immigrant populations are a means to an end for the ruling class. You’re tilting at windmills. The ruling class in question are those who control the central banks. Everything, ultimately, is to service the agenda of the ruling class.
Not everything is economics. A lot is, but not everything.
@Ian B I’m not talking about economics. Central banking is a means to power. It’s all about power.
Power can be an end, or a means to an end. It’s not really all about anything as such. Human behaviour can’t ever be explained by a single variable.
@Ian B as a for instance George Orwell would explicitly disagree with you. It’s all about power, who has it and who doesn’t.
You could, though, take that further and ask why people want power, so potentially you end up with a circularity, but that doesn’t mean Ian B is right. For me, the question is what the circularity is, not whether we have a circularity. That one single driving force behind human behaviour cannot be isolated is, perhaps, to be expected.
Ian B and similar people, whether they realise it or not, would have us believe that the ‘will to power’ is motivated by idealistic ends. To take up John Pate’s literary theme, it would be like George Orwell changing his famous story so that, in the crucial scene, O’Brien would explain to Winston that what motivates the Party is equality, diversity, inclusivity and goodwill to all men. Of course, Winston would greet this with incredulity – he had, after all, seen through the Party’s ideology and propaganda and recorded his findings in his laconic diaries. I’m not so confident about the reaction of some of the people commenting here, though. If we adulterate Orwell’s classic again and have O’Brien explaining that tomorrow Oceania will be attacking East Asia “…so that the children of the fatherland may grow up in a world of peace and harmony…”, I rather suspect some people on here would believe that is O’Brien and the Party’s true motive. Of course, in a sense it would be, only we would be limiting ourselves significantly if we just accept at face value what motivates social actors in their own minds. Mention has been made on another thread of ‘feminists’ and how they influence things, but feminists didn’t become feminists by deciding one day to become feminists and feminism didn’t arise that way. Ideas arise out of competing interests in society, even feminism. There is nothing ‘moral’ about them.
For me, the only question is which comes first: the will to power or the will to survive and propagate. That is the circle or triangle or however you want to conceive it. I suspect it must be the latter and that pretty much everything we see around us, our entire civilisation, is just an extension of the sexual drive, but I cannot be sure, and not that it matters much anyway.
I am definitely with Tom Rogers on this topic, and I couldn’t really add more to his replies than that.
Organised Minority Advantage is something which I think is being waged here. The Muslim community keeps itself apart for a complex number of reasons, but the very nature of their faith is about establishing themselves and working to the betterment of those communities.
They believe their ways and their faith are superior to other systems. The are community builders to this end. They collectively use their own businesses more than others, where possible, to keep it in their community. They share and collect monies to buy land, build mosques, start Islamic schools.
They vote for the parties that are the softest. The ones that brought them here. The ones that look after their interests and protect them the most. The ones that give them the most stuff. The ones they can most easily infiltrate and get elected into positions of power and influence, or the ones most likely to do their bidding for them.
I live in the north, not too far away from Oldham I suppose, and the Muslim demographics now comprise just over 40% of the town. They tend to vote for Labour and Liberal Democrats, which some may say is at odds with many of their more conservative social values. Only it is not odd, when the above reasons come into account.
Unless you live in such a place as this, it is hard to convey just what it feels like to watch everything transform and change.
Of course, many don’t care and don’t tend to see it, but for those of us who do, it is extremely depressing. You see, with their organised minority advantage, they have everything to win – whereas the traditional population has everything to lose.
They are ascending, organised, insular, expanding ever outwards. They love how things are going, they see it as improvement, they are proud of their new Islamic school opening, the new Mosque, the new community centre they have converted from a former Methodist church or whatever.
The shops reflect their interests, the businesses and takeaways are all theirs, the sweet shops, and bit by bit, you’re no longer at home in your own town. It is no longer an English town, but a town in England. It is not “sinister”, but more of an “organic” process where there feels to be no future for white society to look forward to.
Everything that is “ours” is also theirs. But what is theirs, remains theirs. There is only one final destination for this town, and the original inhabitants of it will not factor into it other than the marginalised, the extremely wealthy, or those who succumb to bonding with the Muslims via relationships, marriage, children, conversion of faiths.
It already happens, which is something I find depressing too, perhaps even more depressing than being replaced. Yet for others, this “integration” is to be welcomed as a sign of “harmony” or whatever. I don’t think so. It is our death knell.
Reading about Oldham prior to the election, on the wider point of immigration and democracy…. it was in one of the papers that they had been interviewing people on the streets about UKIP.
One person asked for their opinion was born in Oldham, but to parentage from Jamaica, either in part or in whole. They were not Muslim, gather, but they said they could never vote for anti-immigration parties – because it would have meant that “they would not have been able to be here”.
Naturally, they will not see themselves being part of a wider problem. The Muslims won’t consider themselves to be a problem either. The established order bends over backwards to extol their virtues and values, to the point of saying we would “collapse” without them all.
Yet, for the host society, these people are in some cases seen not as our salvation, but the ingredients of our end.
Here is where the other problem arises – the more it all goes on, the more people will feel that they cannot vote for parties antagonistic to more immigration, because it feels it makes them hypocrites or traitors to their own histories or ethnic groups. They believe themselves to be wonderful, worthy of being here, irrespective of any end result and what it means for the host.
This endless flow of people is therefore denying the indigenous host society the ability to rescue itself via the ballot box, even if it wanted to do so, to the point where ethnic blocks can already amount to be enough in numbers to swing a general election, never mind a local by-election.
In terms of libertarianism, the endless flow of people in this manner can only make a libertarian country a pipe dream. It is already a tough enough slog, but when “net” migration is running at over 320,000 a year, you cannot even hope to stabilise and cultivate a following.
The fundamental point is that your indigenous populations were, and are, at below replacement fertility all over the western world. It’s a fact the economies of the west liberal democracies are enormous ponzi schemes and the only way out of the hole is more digging. One may question that Britain could have got a better deal by importing Chinese via Hong Kong but, whatever, somebody’s kids have to keep kicking the can down the road.
Immigration therefore destroys the possibility of genuine democracy in our country…
Oy, you think?
I think that democracy and liberty can go hand in hand but unfortunately, not enough people have been saying how this is possible.
I truly believe that reforming the voting the system to Proportional Representation and scrapping the House of Lords would be a decent start to bringing true liberty to our shores as PR represents the true feelings of the country in terms of the fact that 37% of the votes should mean 37% of the seats in the Commons.
Scrapping the House of Lords would mean that the UK would not be held to ransom by more and more unelected bureaucrats with no sense of meritocracy and completely out of touch with the people.
This would pave the way for binding referenda as it would mean that the public would have more of a say over the issues that affect them and the whole country.
Anyone else got any ideas?
Meyer, the plural of referendum is referendums. The House of Lords is more representative of the population than the Commons — the Conservatives have around 40% of the Lords (their share of the vote in 2015 was 36.8%). so you need to engage in some thinking.
So what excuse would you have for UKIP? They had 12% of the vote in the last election and yet that number does not reflect the number of seats in the Commons or the Lords. I used the word ‘referenda’ as it has been used as a term with the word binding and it has been used in the past.
Islamics must lose the vote. And they must be allowed support for no more than one wife and two kids max. That alone would begin to turn things around.
All future migrants of any kind must not be allowed a vote for 100 years minimum. Their Great-grandkids may vote if they are judged an asset to the nation. No integration –no adopting of our ways? No vote even after 100 years.