A Cuckoo in the Nest

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.