Trump Breaks International with Venezuela and Threat to Invade Canada; Starmer Stays Dumb

Mike over at the Whip Line, his new political blog that replaces Vox Political, has posted about the hypocrisy of Starmer over the American kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Maduro is a genuinely nasty piece of work, and very few Venezuelans are sorry to see him go. But the kidnapping is a violation of international law. Hence the protests from the left. Except Starmer. This is despite Starmer having stood up and said he will defend international law. So that’s another broken pledge to go along with all the others.

But if Starmer was merely silent, anti-Muslim activist, thug and fraudster Tommy Robinson was actively calling on X yesterday for Trump to abduct Starmer because he was letting the Muslims and all the other immigrants in. Of course, if Trump did, it would be a violation of our sovereignty and make Tommy Robinson a collaborator. So, not very patriotic of the man whose the figurehead, or one of them, of the patriotic movement.

Trump is also demanding Greenland, because he claims that it’s vital for American national security. Strange that he’s saying this now, when no-one said anything about it during the Cold War. His spokesman, Stephen Miller, gave a television interview about it, and the dulcet toned Irish YouTuber Maximilien Robespierre has put up a video commenting on it.

Miller repeats the claim that it’s vital for American national security, and then claims that its annexation by Trump would benefit the rest of NATO, because they’d get increased American protection. He questioned the Danes’ right to the country, and said that there wouldn’t be any resistance to America marching in and taking it.

Robespierre points out that this completely ignores the wishes of the Greenlanders and the Danes. 87 per cent of whom don’t want to be part of America. Why would they, when they have all the benefits of a modern European country like state healthcare? Now I thought a country’s desire for self-government against foreign invasion was enshrined in international law, though I may be wrong. It’s certainly been a reason for nations calling on others to help them resist a foreign aggressor. As for the Danes’ right to the country, it was colonised by the Vikings in the early middle ages, but the colony was wiped out in the 14th century in the little ice age that created a harsher climate and famines across northern Europe. The Danes then re-colonised the country in the 19th century. Its population is a mixture of Danes and indigenous Inuit. It’s never been part of America, which has zero claim on it.

As for Greenland not resisting a military invasion because it’s so small, don’t be so sure. Sometimes tiny countries with much smaller populations have put up determined resistance to foreign invasion and occupation lasting decades. Libya is a case in point. It’s another nation with a small population, but it resisted the Italian invasion and occupation for about two decades, during which it lost a third of its population to Fascist butchery. I doubt that would happen in Greenland, but Trump might find any invasion much more difficult than he realises.

According to a Double Dose of Democracy, the Danish president has stated that if Trump does invade Greenland, he will invoke article 5 of the treaty. This will call on all the other members of NATO to join them in resisting Trump. It would, of course, be up to them how they respond, but it would destroy NATO.

This puts Britain and Starmer in an awkward position. Brexit means that we would have difficulty allying ourselves with the EU, because we are dependent on Trump’s goodwill and our connections with America. Furthermore, British politicians of both parties are fully behind the Atlantic alliance and supporting America thanks to the efforts of BAP, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. This was an organisation launched by Reagan all that time ago to train the promising politicians of the future into backing America. It provided trips to America with talks and seminars. You won’t be surprised to know that one of the beneficiaries was Tony Blair. For more information on BAP, go to the website of the conspiracy magazine Lobster and look them up.

This is why I believe that if Trump invades Greenland, Starmer and Britain will remain silent. And I don’t doubt that the right-wing press like the Times and the Torygraph will lie and actively promote it.

Here-s the video by Robespierre laying into Miller.

Putin Bans Ursula Le Guin’s SF Novel as Attack on Marriage

More anti-LGBT clampdown from Russia’s dictator. Ursula Le Guin is one of the truly stellar figures in Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s probably best known for her children’s fantasy, The Wizard of Earthsea, which contains many of the tropes that turn up in subsequent fantasy novels like Harry Potter. This includes schools for child wizards and witches, which I think also feature in The Worst Witch books. But she also wrote a series of groundbreaking, highly regarded SF novel expressing her radical left-wing and feminist views. The novel The Dispossessed is about an scientist from an alien moon, Anarres, travelling to its main planet, Arres. The moon was originally settled as a mining colony, but has undergone a revolution and become an anarchist society. Religion is banned, there are no prisons and the very idea of their existence is absolutely abhorrent to the moon’s inhabitant. Males and females are equal, ,and perform the same job. Clothing is kept to minimal, all-purpose wear for both sexes. There is no marriage, but in practice people form longstanding domestic partnerships. There is a defence force of a kind in the syndics, a guild for soldiers-cum-police. I don'[t think there’s much in the way of official punishment for murder, but the family and friends of the murderer are free to inflict whatever revenge they choose on the murderer. There is no animal life on the land, so people live on fruit, veg and fish.

Keeping this altogether is the Centre, a computer complex tasked with coordinating the economy. This is a society that takes Marx’s dictum that in the age of true communism, the government of people will be replaced by the administration of things. The Centre also prescribes people’s work for them. The hero, Shevek, has been given the task of creating an ansible, a faster than light communication device. He defects to the main world, a capitalist hellhole, to continue his work when it is taken away from him. He is highly critical of this world and its throw-away-society. It’s an ecologically aware book, critical of the devastation capitalism haw wrought on the environment. He meets the human ambassador, who comes from an Earth reduced to a mineral-poor desert, where the consumption of what resources survive is very strictly controlled. A revolution breaks out, Shevek becomes a hero and inspirational figure to the anarchists and their socialist allies, before departing back to his anarchist moon. It’s very much a product of its time, when scientists were worried about the Earth running out of resources and the Club of Rome and nascent ecological groups, such as Friends of the Earth, were warning about the threat of extinction to so much of our wildlife. I still remember the campaigns to Save the Whale and the Tiger. The idea of people being taken away from one set of work and given other tasks was a part of Maoist ideology. In China at the time, intellectuals were taken away from their established work and set to perform manual labour as an attack on the bourgeois class system.

Clearly this is a book that would make Farage and his supporters’ eyes bug with hatred quicker than you could say ‘cultural Marxism’.

I don’t think it’s aged terrible well, as the experience of the Communist bloc has shown that these societies rapidly became horrific dictatorships unable to compete with capitalism in the provision of goods and services, beset by shortages and a whole slew of economic and social problems. But as I write the free market capitalism of Maggie Thatcher is rapidly failing as well.

Le Guin said that she was a feminist, and wanted to express this but not so that it would upset anyone. The novel in question, The Left Hand of Darkness, is one such. It’s set on an alien world, which suffers extremely severe winters. These are too harsh for reproduction, so for most of the year the humanoid inhabitants are sexually neutral. This changes in the meeting season, when they become individually male and female. But there is no continuity with the sex they were the previous year. Males one year may become females another, and vice-versa. It’s been praised by feminists and their male supporters, like Neil Gainman, for showing that men and women are basically the same.

Putin and his goons have decided to ban it as an attack on marriage. They’ve based this on a series of anti-LGBT legislation and have raided bookshops.

I think it’s similarity to current trans-ideology may be at the heart of it though. Clearly the idea that individuals can change their sex, and that fundamental identity does not always equal biology anticipates some of the fundamental doctrines of queer theory. Russia and many of the other former Communist bloc countries is very hostile to homosexuality. It’s not banned in Russia, and there is a thriving gay scene in St. Petersburg. The Beeb showed this years ago in a travel programme about modern Russia with two presenters, a man and a women. The lady went to St. Petersburg, where as well as piloting a boat through the city’s canals, she danced the night away at a gay disco. The lad, meanwhile, went east, me3ting a pair of tough backwoodsmen who very definitely did not like homosexuality. Russia and countries like Poland and Hungary have banned the promotion of homosexuality, particularly in schools. Back in the 90s amongst the profusion of small press magazines covering just about every topic or interest under the sun, there was a magazine for transpeople, Eon: The Magazine of Transkind. It took it’s name from Eonism, an absolute term for transvestism, after the Chevalier d’Eon, A French spy and transvestite. In one edition they went to the former Soviet Union to cover how transpeople were victims of persecution and assault in the new, post-Communist society.

I’m not a fan of Le Guin. I respect her as one of the great figures of SF and Fantasy, but her work doesn’t appeal to me. But I haven’t seen any reason to ban her either. Not in a society where you are free not read an author if you disagree with them, and where also you should be free to write and argue against them if you so wish. As for the way marriage has been undermined in the developed societies of the west and the former Soviet bloc, this is due to far greater factors than anything written by Ursula Le Guin. Marx and Engles decried it as a slavery for women in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. As well as later attacks by feminists in the 60s and 70s, it’s been undermined by the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the liberalisation of the divorce laws. Before this was passed by Roy Jenkins in the 1960s, couples could only divorce for reasons of adultery. Which meant that couples who couldn’t stand the sight of each other were bound together for better or worse, for richer or poorer, forever. John Mortimer, lawyer and the author of the Rumpole of the Bailey novels, recalled the case of one man, who hated his wife so much that he used to come home from work in different clothes in the hope people would think she was having an affair and he could divorce her.

Put simply, I find it astonishing that Putin and his supporters are so insecure about the state of marriage that they want to ban the book, quite apart from this being yet another attack on literature and free thought.

Open Britain Asks ‘Who’s Buying Reform’

This is a long piece explaining how Reform really aren’t a political party led by the grassroots representing the silent majority of ordinary Brits, but a private corporations led and run for its CEA, Farage, senior management and corporate donors. Who are actually a tiny group of three people.

‘Dear David,

Nigel Farage wants you to think he’s leading a grassroots rebellion. A party of ordinary people finally rising up against the establishment. But when you follow the money, the truth is a lot less romantic: in many ways, Farage is the establishment.

75% of all donations since 2019 have come from just three men: Christopher Harborne, Jeremy Hosking, and Richard Tice. Not three million ordinary contributors. Three millionaires.

It might be reasonable to bankroll a party because you like the cut of its jib. But when a party is reliant on a flood of cash from wealthy donors, the obvious question arises: whose interests does that party end up serving?

When you look at what these men are known for, and you look at what Reform UK’s leadership has been saying and promising, the overlaps are hard to miss.

Let’s start with Christopher Harborne. He’s a major cryptocurrency investor, with reported interests linked to Tether, the ‘stablecoin’ giant. He gave Reform UK a record £9 million,the largest political donation from a living donor in the history of British politics.

What strings came attached?

Byline Times reports that Nigel Farage has been talking up Tether, urging Britain to “embrace” it and to become a global trading centre of stablecoins – mocking calls for caution from the Bank of England as the work of “dinosaurs.”

That’s the leader of a political party – currently in pole position for Downing Street – publicly advocating for a product and a sector directly related to his biggest donor’s financial interests. It was also revealed in November that Tether was used to facilitate the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine and assist Russians in evading Western sanctions.

Then there’s Jeremy Hosking, who has donated £1.7 million to Reform UK. He’s a wealthy investment manager, whose company Hosking Partners has at least $134m invested in the fossil fuel sector. Unsurprisingly, he has strong negative opinions about net zero.

Reform UK says it will scrap net zero and related subsidies, fast-tracking licences for North Sea drilling and test sites. That would be a complete 180 shift from Britain’s policy direction, and it just so happens that donors like Hosking stand to benefit tremendously.

While you can’t prove a quid pro quo – that Hosking donated to secure that policy – it does at least mean that Reform UK’s climate programme is perfectly tailored to the interests of fossil-fuel investors rather than voters.

And then there’s Richard Tice, a property tycoon and Deputy Leader of Reform UK, worth a reported £40 million.

Property and planning may sound less dramatic than crypto or oil and gas, but it’s where many fortunes are made in Britain. Planning policy determines who gets to build, where they get to build, and what they can extract from the public realm in the process. It’s also at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis we face today (the longest such squeeze on record).

Reform UK has plotted a major overhaul of the planning system, including fast-track planning for brownfield sites and a “loose fit planning policy” with pre-approved guidelines.

That’s certainly developer-friendly language. Britain needs to build far more homes, faster, and there is little denying that the current system is broken. But the issue is that when the party’s internal power structure and donor base includes a major property figure, the “Is this in the public interest?” question becomes inseparable from “Who stands to profit?”

The greater picture is clear: three wealthy men, operating in sectors where Government has always picked winners and losers, lining up with a party that explicitly plans to change policy in order to make them the winners.

Reform UK stands as the most dramatic example of how this broken system actually operates. A system where a handful of mega-donors can effectively underwrite a political project, and where the rest of the country is then asked to treat that project as the authentic expression of popular will.

While none of this is necessarily illegal, it exposes a very real problem: how power really works and the urgent need to fix our democracy before it breaks entirely.

Legality is a low bar. Perhaps a better metric is whether it’s utterly eroding people’s basic faith in democracy itself. Is our system about the needs and aspirations of voters, or just who writes the biggest cheques?

If a party is only viable because of three very wealthy men, then those three men and their financial interests matter. And the policies that overlap with their profits deserve vastly more scrutiny than they’re currently getting.

Ignore the culture wars, the red herrings and the dead cats thrown out to distract and derail debate. Britain has a growing campaign finance problem. And until we fix it, we’ll keep getting politics shaped by the people who can afford to buy it.

All the best

Conor

Conor McKenzie
Digital Engagement Manager, Open Britain’

There you have it: What was cynically said about democracy applies to Reform: it’s the best political party money can buy.

38 Degrees Petition Against Lammy Abolishing Trials by Jury

The other day I put up a post strongly criticising the proposal by Justice Secretary David Lammy to abolish jury trials for all but the most serious offences. A trial by one’s peers has been one of the cornerstones of English liberty since the Magna Carta, if not before. Lammy claims it will help clear the backlog of court cases that has built up since Covid. Others fear that it is another step towards authoritarianism that has become a part of just about every government’s policy since Tony Blair and David Cameron.

The internet petitioning organisation 38 Degrees has put up this petition against Lammy’s proposals. If you share my concerns about this assault on fundamental British liberties, please sign it.

‘Our justice system is buckling, David, with a backlog caused by years of underfunding, staff shortages, cuts to legal aid and crumbling courts. Yet instead of fixing the real problem, the Government wants to kick ordinary people out of the courtroom by scrapping jury trials for sentences of three years or less. [1]

Juries aren’t just tradition, they’re a vital safeguard. They let ordinary people decide guilt or innocence and bring real-life experience and conscience into the courtroom. It’s one of our oldest public rights, rooted in the Magna Carta, and protected for centuries because it stops justice becoming a closed shop for the privileged. [2]

Even David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary, once said that juries “act as a filter for prejudice” that can prevent miscarriages of justice. Now he’s proposing precisely the opposite.

Senior lawyers, civil liberties groups and even Labour MPs are sounding the alarm: the system is failing, but the answer isn’t fewer citizens in the room, it’s a Government that stops running it into the ground. [3]

That’s why we need to act. A huge petition signed by thousands of us, while the issue is high in the headlines, will show the Government that we want to save our juries, to keep justice fair, independent and in the hands of the people

So David, will you sign the petition to tell David Lammy to protect our juries?

I’LL SIGN

I’m not signing because…

Juries have defended communities and campaigners from unjust convictions for centuries. They’ve helped historically to acquit people who fought against racism, protected our planet as climate campaigners, and even those who opposed war – cases where a judge alone might never have seen the bigger picture.

Lammy believes judge-only trials will be faster, but experts say there are countless different factors at play including the increasing complexity of the law, digital evidence and cuts to legal aid. Scrapping jury trials won’t fix any of that.

So David, will you help protect fair trials and sign the petition today?

I’LL SIGN

I’m not signing because…

Thanks for all you do,

Alicia, Tom, Sophie and the 38 Degrees team

NOTES:

[1] Sky News: Jury trials will be scrapped for defendants facing sentences of three years or less, David Lammy announces
[2] The Guardian: Why Lammy wants to scrap some jury trials – and the arguments against
[3] The Guardian: Lammy’s jury trial plans are ‘massive mistake’, say Labour MPs and peers
The Guardian: Labour’s plan to slash jury trials will create more miscarriages of justice, say critics‘

Indian YouTuber Shows the Presence of Same-Sex Relationships In Indian History and Religion

Like the West, India and many other countries outside Europe are struggling and debating the issue of gay relationships and marriage. This video comes from the Indian YouTuber Keerthika Govindhaswamy, responding to the arguments of the conservative Indian right that legalising same sex relationships and marriage will somehow destroy Indian culture. As Indian culture goes back millennia, and the country has more than a billion inhabitants, I think it’ll take more than gay marriage to destroy its culture. Govindhaswamy herself has some extremely provocative views. In one video, for example, she blames the horrendous pollution contaminating the Ganges on Hindus no longer feeling any connection, and therefore any need to care for their immediate natural environment. A change of attitude which she blames on British colonialism. Another video talks about how Gandhi slept with two of his nieces as part of a supposed experiment to test his celibacy, while another one suggests Nehru may have been a British agent. Obviously highly contentious subjects.

In this video, she goes through the deeds and epics about the Hindu gods to show that several of them had relationships with deities of their own sex. This includes a transgender warrior, who was born a girl but brought up as a boy and had a wife. She notes that the Kama Sutra discusses the existence of of strong, independent women who pursued relationships with others of their sex. She also talks about the possible gay relationship between one of the Muslim rulers of Delhi and one another prince or official.

She ends thee video with a plea for gay marriage and marriage equality, so that gay couples would have the same legal rights and privileges as heterosexual couples.

Clearly, this is an argument for the Indians themselves, but I do find it very interesting that this subject is being tackled and discussed in the world’s largest democracy, and how there are voices in favour of it in what I always thought was an extremely conservative society.

Reform Voters in Kent Furious as Governing Party Admits They Need to Raise Taxes

Sorry I’ve been away for a little while. Some of this is illness, some of it is just having other things to do, as well as quiet exasperation at the state of Britain and its politics. But this is a story I couldn’t ignore, and though you’d all like to enjoy it.

According to the Torygraph, Reform voters in Kent have got their collective, neoliberal, low tax, small government knickers in a twist and are spitting teeth because the party they voted into office with its promise to cut council spending has in act, er, admitted that the council tax actually needs to go up.

Reform council leader Lynden Kemkanan has said that funding is already cut to the bone and that the Tories have left them a massive black hole in council finances. In order to maintain the same level of services, they will probably have to raise council tax by five per cent. She still maintains, however, that Reform are still intent on cutting taxes.

This contradicts the party’s pledge that they would be ruthless in cutting taxes, like Donald Trump’s DOGE department.

The result, from what I can see, is that Reform’s supporters are turning on the party. The rest of the Torygraph article includes brief interviews with former supporters complaining that they’ll never vote for them again and that they’re ‘like all the others’.

Paradoxically, I’m rather reassured by this.

Don’t get me wrong, Farage and his crew with their dreams of cutting taxes and ‘small government’, which always means more privatisation and deregulation, are a threat to the NHS, welfare state and public services. Mike has also pointed out that they’re a threat to the environment. They’re funded by the oil lobby, and so attack renewable and clean energy. The oil barons behind them have trashed the Louisiana swamplands with oil, and I have no doubt that let loose over here, they’ll trash our green and pleasant land as well. For this alone, Farage and the rest of them should be nowhere near government.

But I am reassured that in this case, when they actually got in government, they were mugged by reality and have had to drop the election promises they couldn’t keep.

And it’s highly ironic that a party to the right of the Tories is also blaming them for leaving financial black holes.

American Songwriter Article Commemorating George Harrison’s 1971 Charity Concert for Bangladesh

A few days ago I had an article come up on my Google news feed remembering George Harrison’s benefit concert for Bangladesh way back in 1971. It was a pivotal moment in the history of pop, as it was the very first of the massive international aid charity concerts that culminated in the 1980s with Live Aid. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find that particular article again, but I did find this piece, ‘On This Day in 1971, George Harrison Made History With The Concert for Bangladesh’. by Melanie Davis, published on American Songwriter on the first of this month. I’m putting it up because I know that some of the great readers and commenters on this blog are great fans of the Beatles and have fond memories of the concert. It’s a short article, which really just gives an overview of the event and its importance, noting that Harrison staged it in partnership with the great sitarist Ravi Shankar and that it was a great success. It also notes that it came after the country’s war of liberation against Pakistan. One of the lecturers in Islam at my old college was Bangladeshi, and remembered the bombers flying over the villages during the war, a terrifying experience. At the moment we have the war in Gaza, Ukraine and I gather that Thailand and Vietnam have started fighting each other. As if our planet hasn’t suffered enough war and bloodshed over the millennia. I hope the world’s leaders see sense, and get a bit of the spirit of Harrison and Lennon and ‘ give peace a chance’.

The article begins

‘On August 1, 1971, George Harrison made history with The Concert for Bangladesh, a two-performance event that would set off a new wave of musical philanthropy for years to come. Harrison, in partnership with sitar player Ravi Shankar, organized the event to raise funds for East Pakistani refugees on the heels of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the 1970 Bhola cyclone.

While the entire process wasn’t totally hiccup-free, it was immensely successful, given its impressive size, lack of police presence, and the sheer number of stars Harrison managed to get onstage at once.

George Harrison Made History in 1971

Just two short years after the Beatles officially split, George Harrison embarked on a massive solo project unlike anything the Fab Four had ever done previously. Harrison took the initial benefit concert plans of his friend and colleague, Ravi Shankar, and elevated them further. Shankar hoped to raise $25,000 for the people of Bangladesh, who were suffering in the aftermath of a deadly natural disaster and wartime genocide.

Even if he wasn’t a Beatle, Harrison still had access to Apple Corps resources, which he happily employed for the sake of his friend and his cause. The pair scheduled the two-concert event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, and Harrison began making phone calls. Fortunately for Harrison, most of the people he called needed little convincing to hop on the bill. Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Badfinger, Eric Clapton, and Leon Russell were among the first to commit.’

See: https://americansongwriter.com/on-this-day-in-1971-george-harrison-made-history-with-the-concert-for-bangladesh/

Richard Burgon on Handing in His Petition for a Wealth Tax and Conference on Labour in Government

‘Dear Friend

I’m writing to let you know I will be delivering the 80,000-strong petition for a wealth tax to No 10 Downing Street next week and a conference this weekend where I will be calling for a Wealth Tax

I’ll be handing in my petition to Downing St on Tuesday.

The petition has nearly reached 80,000 signatures – if you haven’t already signed, please take 30 seconds to add your name here. Or share it with your friends and family.

I have campaigned for wealth taxes for years, and it’s great to finally see the call for a wealth tax rising up the political agenda. Trade union leaders are increasingly calling for it, MPs are raising it in Parliament, and even former Labour leader Neil Kinnock is backing it.

This week, I appeared on Newsnight to make the urgent case for a wealth tax – you can watch a clip here. 

Help get the petition to 80,000 signatures before the Downing Street hand-in by sharing the petition here.

This Government should not be balancing the books on the backs of disabled people. There is a fair alternative – making the very wealthiest in society pay their fair share

CONFERENCE: LABOUR IN GOVERNMENT – ONE YEAR ON

I will also be speaking at a Conference hosted by John McDonnell this weekend in London on the need for Wealth Taxes as part of the radically different direction the Government needs to take.

Labour In Government: One Year On, which you can register for here, will be taking place this Saturday, July 19th in Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9BB.

LABOUR IN GOVERNMENT: ONE YEAR ON – REGISTER HERE

Join myself and others, including…

• John McDonnell MP 
• Kate Pickett, author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, epidemiologist and activist
• Asad Rehman, prominent campaigner for climate justice
• Ellen Clifford, Disabled People Against Cuts and author of The War on Disabled People: capitalism, welfare & the making of a human catastrophe.’
• And more!

Register here.

Solidarity,

Richard Burgon MP’

Attempted Citizens’ Arrest of Thames Water Executive

I hope you’ve all had a great Bank Holiday Monday! Here’s a little video that could bring a little joy to your hearts, even though its heroine and her troops fail in the end. It’s from the Citizens Arrest Network and was posted on the 18th of last month. It shows their leader marching into Thames Water headquarters to perform a citizen’s arrest on two of their CEOs for public nuisance. The papers have gone through a lawyer, so it’s all above board. And the public nuisance for which the lady is attempting to nab them is the corporation raising their bills and pumping sewage into the waterways. Also, as the explain to the investigating policewomen and men, they sort of have official backing in that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that they ought to be arrested.

Hoo-Rah!

Of course, as you could have guessed, they get absolutely nowhere as the policewomen and men state they have no call to arrest the two offenders at this particular time. But I’m fully behind the Network and ordinary people doing what they legally can to have the profiteering scumbags arrested and charged.

Open Britain on Reform’s Victory in Runcorn and Its Implications

‘Dear David,

It’s happened. As Open Britain has predicted for weeks, Reform UK has just won the Parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby – and by just SIX votes.

This is not the news we wanted to hear this Friday morning – especially as it also appears that Reform are also on track to have significant success in the local elections. As we all know, Farage and Tice should rarely be trusted on anything – but they HAVE kept their word on delivering a seismic shift in the British political landscape this morning.

The results from Runcorn (and beyond) should provide a huge wake-up call to both Labour and the Conservatives that ‘politics as usual’ just isn’t cutting it anymore. But more importantly, it must be seen as a crucial reminder of what our decaying democracy can give rise to. Here’s why:

Populism has prevailed

When we visited Runcorn in April, very few of the dozens of Reform voters we spoke to could even name their candidate – now their MP – let alone recall anything about her or how she would improve their lives. Instead, their enthusiasm seemed largely based on the media talking points they had heard from Nigel Farage. They seemed particularly motivated by the issue of immigration and their faith that Reform and Farage would crack down on it.

As it happens, immigration is an issue which has very little direct impact on Runcorn – far less than on most other parts of Britain. It’s clear, then, that this Reform win is not a victory for the people of Runcorn, but for the populist propaganda and lies being pushed by Farage.

Anti-establishment anger

Alongside immigration, it is clear the result in Runcorn is also a rejection of Labour’s current performance. When we spoke to Runcorn voters, their anger and, frankly, hatred for Keir Starmer and his Labour government shone through and was the most prevalent reason given for voting Reform.

This is not how our elections should be decided – a race to the bottom where we vote for the least objectionable candidate or to give the current guy one in the eye. At a time when the established parties are performing poorly in the polls, a system that encourages this simply paves the way for bad actors and the further rise of the far-right.

Low turnout

Whilst the pattern of anti-establishment voting in favour of Reform is deeply concerning, the very low turnout is an equally significant problem. In fact, it could be seen as an even greater problem.

Only 46% of people cast a vote in Runcorn and Helsby. We know that turnout at by-elections is always lower than at general elections, but this level of disengagement in relation to a Parliamentary seat is extremely worrying. Reform have won this seat with the support of just 17% of eligible voters. This is hardly a strong mandate for anything – especially with a majority of just six votes – but they will claim their win is an endorsement of their party’s plans, including on issues of such fundamental importance as Net Zero.

Strong voter turnout is the bedrock of any democracy, and it’s very clear this is on a downward trend in Britain. We must reverse this trend and give people a reason to engage positively with the democratic system.

So what are WE doing?

Open Britain is working hard, every day, to repair the cracks in our democracy.

• We’re fighting back against the far-right and authoritarian populism, exposing the lies of Reform and Farage, and making it clear they are not the solution to the problems with Britain’s democracy.
• We’re reminding people of their democratic rights, and empowering them to use their votes effectively – in all elections.
• We’re putting meaningful pressure on the government to make our elections more representative, to give everyone a voice and make every vote count equally.

Our commitment to fight AGAINST the far-right populists, and FOR your democratic rights, is stronger now than ever before.

The result from Runcorn will set alarm bells ringing across Britain. Those alarm bells will wake more people up to the things OB has been saying for a long time now. We will work hard to ensure as many people as possible hear our message and join our movement. And we’ll continue to be extremely grateful for your support as we do that.

Thank you for standing up to Reform!

All the best,

James Patrick

Campaigns and Content Officer’

Down here in Bristol we had an election for the West of England Combined Authority metro mayor. It had been Dan Norris, who was right-wing Labour. He, however, has been suspended and forced to vacate his seat as he’s being investigated for accusations of rape and child molestation. However, the election was won by the replacement Labour candidate, though Reform came a close second. The Greens were expected to win as they won a parliamentary seat in Bristol a year or so ago, and are also the leading party on Bristol’s council. However, I suspect their chances of winning the election for metro mayor were harmed by the damage they’ve done to Bristol’s traffic system and their plans to pedestrianize Park Street, one of the city’s major shopping and dining areas, in the name of being green and expanding the Clean Air Zone. This has just caused more traffic chaos and Park Street’s businesses are understandably extremely worried about losing trade through pedestrianization.

As with Runcorn, I also expect that the turnout for the metro mayor election here was very low, as the metro mayors probably appear to most people in the Bristol area as remote and far removed from the more their immediate leaders and representatives on their local authorities. As for the new Labour metro mayor herself, she’s acknowledged that she now needs to win over and work with those who voted for her opponents. But I don’t have much optimism. I think she’s another Labour right-winger, like Norris, who will actually do precious little for the region’s constituents. Like giving them a proper, council-controlled bus service that serves all the districts in Bristol and its surroundings rather than just the ones providing First Bus with a very tidy profit.