Block Voting

Voters are slowly being sidelined from the democratic process.

They can smell the blood in the water.

Seven years on from Britain’s largest ever democratic vote for anything ever, and the calls for rejoining the EU have never been stronger.

The never silent Remainers have morphed seamlessly into Rejoiners.

Relentless, they circle the studios of the BBC and the pages of the Guardian, nip nipping away at the rancid whale corpse of Brexit as it wallows unloved in the chop.

And who can blame them?

According to the polls, Brexit has lost its sheen, even among those who voted for it. The Remainer Old Guard sense weakness, and with a Labour government almost inevitable, they know their time has come.

Of course Labour leader Keir Starmer claims to want to respect the Brexit vote, he says he has no plans to rejoin, and that he will instead, ‘renegotiate’ Brexit with our EU friends, and make it work.

Yes. Sir Keir, the Labour party’s second referendum point man. Who can forget this doughy faced herald, suited and booted, shuttling back and forth to Brussels in 2018 to scupper this country’s Brexit negotiations, desperate to reassure his Brussels buddies that the votes of 17.4 million people could easily be overturned if only they hang in there, just a little bit longer.

So yeah, I believe him.

But this isn’t another re run of the arguments, pro, and anti Brexit. Or even about why a Brexit voter like me has become so disillusioned by the whole pointless spectacle. I recently wrote a piece about how Brexit has in part failed because it is like Playstation. One helpful commenter on Conservative Home told me in no uncertain terms that it ‘doesn’t cut the mustard’. So it’s definitely worth a look.

However, it is worth dwelling on the Brexit vote a moment. Because that was the moment the mask really slipped. And the elites wriggled out of the woodwork to question the very legitimacy of democracy. And if not democracy as a whole, then at least the part that we, the little people, have to play in it.

Somehow they had taken their eye off the ball and allowed the low information voters, the thick, the uneducated, the prejudiced, the xenophobic Empire obsessed racists of Brexit Bloody Britain, to make a decision, and it had not gone well. It had not gone well at all.

But not to worry, mistakes had been made, lessons had been learned, and given the opportunity for another go, a second referendum, the elites would make sure that the wrong type of votes would be sidelined, and this time a ‘correct’ result could be guaranteed.

That’s why Sir Keir and his Tory chums were so keen on a do over. Because they were 100 percent guaranteed, without a shadow of a doubt, and no margin of error, that next time, they would win it.

The problem with the first vote, as they saw it, is the basic problem of democracy.

It gives too many of the wrong type of people, too much of a say.

But all they wanted was another Brexit referendum. Surely the results would be the same as the first one? Right? Well no.

Firstly it was the question of the question. The referendum asked exactly this:

Should The United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

It was balanced, thoughtful, and neutral.

Big mistake.

You can be sure that any second referendum would have asked a better, clearer, more direct question, something with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer that even the pond life couldn’t get wrong. Maybe something like

‘Do you think that the UK should continue to benefit from a continued membership of the European Union?’

‘Yes’. Or ‘No’?

A little clunky maybe. But you get the idea.

Then there were those voters. As we’ve noted, first time round they were simply dismissed as muddle headed, gammon faced xenophobes, almost too thick to hold a pencil and just one football chant away from a race riot. A nasty caricature for millions of good faith voters, who simply didn’t like the direction their leaders were taking their country, and wanted a say in its future.

You can be sure that the voting demographic would have been tweaked in a second referendum to deliver a more favourable result. Voters would have included 16 years olds, ostensibly because ‘it’s their future at stake’, but actually because they were overwhelmingly pro EU. Also European citizens living in the UK would be allowed to vote ‘because it directly affects them’ but mainly of course since turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

This, plus a big push for postal ballots so the students didn’t need to, you know, get up, and a renewed campaign from an awakened ruling class, and hey presto.

52-48, a marginal vote at best, and an almost negligible, barely credible win for Leave would have turned into 52-48, a stunning landslide, an unequivocal, resounding endorsement of the status quo, a clarion call, and legally binding instruction, to Remain.

Hurrah!

Now obviously this a counter factual. Narrowly avoided but avoided nonetheless. For now.

But it does illustrate some of the tactics than can be used by governments to sideline the wrong type of voter and make sure they get the results they want.

And expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future.

There are big changes coming. Not least as we stumble icily, like shivering legions of White Walkers, toward our Net Zero future, and a culture of ceaseless digital surveillance. It’s coming whether we want it or not. But our bosses need at least the fig leaf of democracy to make it happen.

Now just to be clear here. I am not suggesting, on any level, that there is a secret cabal intriguing in some anti democracy war room, intent on taking away your vote. I am not suggesting we need to Stop The Steal.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s just a moment to notice the direction of travel. The increasingly technocratic nature of our national governments, and increasingly, their supra national counterparts. And correspondingly the ever smaller part we voters play, in shaping their decisions. We’re becoming less significant, just at a time when those decisions are becoming fundamentally more impactful, and will undoubtedly change our world, and way of life forever.   

Policy decisions, once reserved for elected politicians, are handed over to unelected quangos, and other unaccountable agents of the state, and lawyers. There’s always bloody lawyers.

We’re slowly taking away powers from politicians and putting them in the hands of experts.

But, you might say, politicians are dumbos, and experts know all about stuff. So where’s the downside?

Well what we potentially gain in efficiency. (Don’t hold your breath) We definitely lose in accountability. You can vote out a dumbo, but you’re stuck with the experts.

They’re appointed not elected. Which means that all the power is transferred from the people doing the electing, to the people doing the appointing.

And ask yourself this question. Am I doing the appointing?

No. No you are not.

The most powerful collection of people in Britain over the last five years wasn’t the government, it wasn’t the military, and it certainly wasn’t the voters. It was SAGE.

A bunch of scientists who never got elected to anything,

An entire British Government fell because of the ridiculousness of the SAGE recommendations.

And for the rest of us, just questioning their dystopian vision of COVID Britain led people to have their words censored and their reputations destroyed.

Supposedly, in the relationship between the governmental and SAGE, the government were the bosses. So how did that turn out?

Boris Johnson is very much gone, (Until next time. God help us) but last I checked, Professor Neil Furgeson is still very much in place, doing his super important job, getting predictions spectacularly wrong, for Imperial College.

And off loading responsibility to an ‘independent ‘appointee, or outside authority is a great way for politicians to hold up their hands and claim they are powerless to do anything.

The Tories did it for years, blaming much of their own production line of breathtaking failure on external forces like the EU, even though similar restrictions didn’t seem to constrain the actions of other EU countries like France and Germany.

And that’s before we even consider how those in power insulate voters from democracy with their counter intuitive use of people’s panels, consultation groups and fact finding committees. Often bow wrapped in scientific enquiries and expert analysis.

As every good entryist  knows, it’s easy to take over a committee, it’s a doddle to stuff a panel. Democracy is boring, and at a local level it is really, really boring. So to get ahead, you just need unwavering commitment to a cause, and a decent cushion to sit on. People with things to do in their lives do not tend to do these things.

So once a project is set up, it’s usually just a case of keeping on turning up to the meetings to push it through. Regardless of what those annoying voters, you know the people who actually have to live with, and pay for it all, think.

For me the biggest and the best example is HS2. No one wants it. No one genuinely thinks that in 2023 a railway going to the same places already served by another (pretty good) railway is a sensible way to spend 100 billion (and the rest) precious British pounds.

As I’ve said before, HS2 costs are growing so much, I expect we’ll eventually get to a point where it would be cheaper to just knock down Birmingham, and rebuild it nearer London.

The Ultra Low Emissions Zone in London is another one.

It’s no surprise that one of the biggest cheerleaders of a proposed second Brexit referendum, and Britain’s Worst Politician, Sadiq Khan, (Soz Nicola, but he is) is now ignoring the common people when they warn that the extension of his Ultra Low Emissions Zone  will cost Londoners like them their money, businesses, livelihoods and, in some cases, thanks to ambulance blocking skills that Just Stop Oil would be envious of, their lives.

The brilliant journalist Charlotte Gill has been busy covering this un democratic car crash of a policy . A pretty lonely patch, since the story has been ignored, by most media outlets.

Khan asked the public for opinions about his frankly bonkers plan and when he got a result he didn’t like he simply discounted 5000 of the votes cast, because they had been ‘cut and pasted’ from an action group opposed to the scheme.

As far as I know they weren’t fake names or illegitimate voters, they were proper actual residents, but because they didn’t fit Sadiq Khan’s plans, they had to go.  The full story is here on Spiked.

Anecdotally a similar thing happened to my friend in Dulwich. They changed the parking rules. There was a consultation. No one wanted it. But they stayed changed.

This is the direction of travel for our democracy. Our bosses seem to be slowly edging us, the annoying, dunderheaded voters, out of the equation.

There’s a reason our governments won’t give us a referendum on net-zero, ultra low emission zones, digital currencies and rejoining the EU.

The won’t ask us to vote, because it’s not worth the hassle, and more importantly, because they don’t need to bother.

Who cares what the voters think, when governments can just off load all the big decisions to experts, civil servants, quangos and international organisations which already agree with them?

But respecting democracy means respecting voters. And whether you’re a Brexiteer or Rejoiner, an environmental protestor or white van driver, we each have a stake in this.

Because next time you demand the opportunity to vote against their plans to replace your gas boiler, ban your summer holiday, feed your kids insects, or make your life generally colder, poorer and lonelier; or heavens forbid, take away your right to strike, protest, gather, post something on Twitter, not be surveilled by a police drone, or generally make a nuisance of yourself, they’ll just throw you a shrug, and point to their shield wall of nodding, tick boxing, properly qualified, highly experienced, scientifically trained, safety experts and technocrats.

And then do it anyway.

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Thank you so much for reading this post. I genuinely appreciate your time. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing and sharing, it really helps me.

What do you think? Are voters’ rights being slowly eroded away? Or am I just pointlessly moaning in the face of progress? I’ll respond in kind to all good faith comments.

Thanks again.