I have become aware that, when I leave a pertinent comment on a political YouTube video, for example on GB News or TalkTV, it usually disappears very quickly. Often, it is gone the second time I look, even when I order by “newest first.” Happily, this particular comment was still there 15 minutes after I submitted it. But I squirreled it away anyway.
This is the comment I left on Nigel Farage’s video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hZuVXKmbys. I think it summarizes fairly well my view from the radical wing of the Reform UK party.
* * *
Nigel, for me immigration is not the major issue today. (1) Getting rid of “net(t) zero” and other green insanities. (2) Sane and sensible energy policies (fracking!). (3) Cutting taxes. Hugely. (4) Shrinking the state and its “public sector” by at least an order of magnitude, including sacking a lot of civil servants and county and local council CEOs. Those are my top four. Immigration comes a poor fifth.
But that said, you are right that immigration into the UK today is a major problem. But the people in boats are just a side-show. The real problem is not that massive “legal” immigration is “uncontrolled,” but that it has been planned. By whom, and for what purpose? My local council were told a decade or so ago to plan for a 20 per cent population increase inside 20 years. When did we ever vote for this? And why were we never allowed a chance to oppose it?
You are, of course, right about the consequences. Many people falling off the bottom of the housing ladder, and many more having to accept far less space and privacy than they have a right to expect. Decaying infrastructure, worsening quality of life for everyone. Companies having their premises taken for housing, so people then need to travel further to their jobs.
I think a good question to ask is: Who did this to us? And why? For many years, I answered this with: The statists are trying to establish a tax base for the future. So they can kick the welfare state can down the road for a decade or two, and it doesn’t fall apart till after they’re dead. But recently, I find myself contemplating a more sinister motive: They are seeking to destroy cultural cohesion. As a step, perhaps, towards ending all pretence of sham “democracy.” And then, towards what?
As a Reform party member, I really do think that you and the party need to focus away from minor issues like the boats, and towards the things that really matter. This video is a half decent start, but there is so much more we need to do.
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Can anybody on here give me an example of any current or past society that for longer than six months was:
– a democracy? or,
– stateless?
Perhaps someone will be able to come up with one or two isolated examples from history, but I think that democracy is a fiction and always has been. It is just like communism (socialism): it has never existed in its true form in reality, and that is because it most probably cannot except in highly contingent circumstances. If you are in a small ethno-tribes of like-minded people, with complementary skills, not exceeding 150 or so, propertyless socialism and democracy, or a stateless private property utopia, are both feasible.
My argument:
(i). Mass societies are inevitably authoritarian, and in the context of a mass society, democratic mechanisms are indistinguishable from totalitarianism, indeed mass democracy IS totalitarianism.
(ii). Authority is an axiom of human social life and in anything other than the very particular circumstances of small tribal groups, it must take the form of a state (or pre-state or soft state formations). Even a democratic communist committee in an anarcho-socialist utopia is still a ‘state’ if it can tell you, the individual, what to do.
(iii). It perhaps follows from this that all representation is statist (or pre-statist or quasi-statist), and even anarchy is authoritarian in its lived experience. The closest possibility to true human political freedom would be an arrangement based on pure individual autonomy, but this is next-to-impossible due to the inevitable social reality of human existence. The nearest that a human society can come to expressing ideal political freedom is in family-based society or small-scale tribal living.
I do not believe there has been a sustained, organised society in all human history that lacked a political state or some equivalent or precursor of the concept.
Can anyone gainsay me?
“…even anarchy is authoritarian in its lived experience…”
That phrase looks to me like a pretty good definition of an oxymoron.
@hugo miller
It’s not an oxymoron, though, not even in a literary sense. Anarchy has various definitions, but essentially means two things: first, it’s a political strategy involving the removal of coercive institutions; second, it’s a society without coercion, in which all social relations are voluntary. On the face of it, that would be anti-authoritarian – a common misconception that it does, even amongst handsome, intelligent, educated millionaires like yourself. In reality, there would have to be authority, even if it took on a soft or tacit form, otherwise whatever arrangement or system is in place would eventually break down and be replaced by overt authority.
My point is that, other than under very particular circumstances, a society based on voluntary co-operation only is likely to be all-but impossible. (That does not mean I think such a society is undesirable, only that I think it is likely to only work in textbooks and essays, it can’t be sustained in the real world).
Stateless is a hard one, but some of the Greeks came close to meaningful democracy. The Athenians came very close for about three hundred years. It was a matter of keeping the rich under control, and of making sure officials were chosen by lot rather than election. Attica had a population of about a quarter of a million – though this modest number was offset by slow and imperfect communication.
If you lower the bar to take in a strong element of democracy, both England and America managed that until the 1970s. Most Western states before the past few generations have had some element of accountability. States may be inevitable, but they don’t need always to be unaccountable monsters. They don’t always need to be based on pervasive authority that ignores the wishes of the governed.
I agree that states cannot ignore the wishes of the governed, but I would argue for a paradox: that, the less overtly democratic a state becomes, the more the state has to listen to the people-at-large. Mass democratic mechanisms seem to be a tool for coercion rather than consensus because they allow elites in control of states to ignore the broad wishes of the wider public while justifying their actions behind sham legitimacy.
It could also be argued that ‘democracy’ itself is inimical to liberty because it sets up the very collectivist culture that people like Neil Lock rage against – and on this point I somewhat agree with them, my issue is with the practical realism of dismantling such a system without having a strong sense of shared identity. We are individuals but we can’t live only as individuals and if the individual is set against a collective, that is surely undemocratic. An elected people’s committee in charge of coal production is just another state in all but name. Likewise, a kritarchy that rules on the delineations of private property relations in stateless anarcho-capitalist society is, in effect, a state and will most likely evolve into an actual bureaucratised political state, given enough time.
The problem is not “Immigration” per se. It is the government’s total inability to do anything at all to implement what it says is its immigration policy. We have had threats to send the Navy in to patrol the Channel; we have had the barges (or rather the barge); we have had Rwanda. And yet, still they come.
The reality, of course, is that open borders to the Third World, and especially the Muslim Third World, is in fact the government’s un-stated policy. I am amazed they have been able to maintain the pretence for so long that they actually WANT to ‘Stop the Boats’. It can’t last much longer before they are rumbled.
I’d add a 5th one which at the moment is terminal for Reform as long as it keeps its current leader. (5) Declare neutrality in the current conflict in Ukraine (and similar conflicts). See Richard Tice’s recent junket to Kiev and associated comments on TV / Youtube.
You say that it looks like this uncontrolled immigration has been planned. The answer is that of course it has been. It is part of a deliberate and co-ordinated policy of a certain group. Which group? Only the blind, the deaf and the stupid need to ask that question.