‘Last year, voters in England and Wales cast their votes in local elections. When it comes to our right to vote, the results are trickling in and it’s not looking good, David. [1] Voting shouldn’t be difficult. But we’re already hearing story after story of people being denied their right to vote and it’s estimated that across the country, the new rules stopped many from voting. [2] The millions of missing voters, and those most often turned away are more likely to be from already underrepresented groups. [3]
At the next general election, the whole UK will be subject to Voter ID. The Government knows this isn’t working, even Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted it. [4] But they’re not committing to do anything about it. So it’s up to us, David. A HUGE number of politicians, democracy organisations and election expert insiders have already called for a different approach. [5]
We’re not just saying no to voter ID. We’re providing them an alternative – one that has been proven to work in encouraging people into registering to vote, not putting them off. [6] Anyone with the right to vote in this country should be able to do so.
That’s why we’ve joined forces with the UK’s leading democracy organisations and expert insiders to encourage politicians to scrap the unworkable voter ID laws and instead introduce an easier alternative, like Automatic Voter Registration. Will you join us? It only takes 30 seconds to sign:
Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) is already used in dozens of countries around the world and has proven itself to be effective in improving registration rates. [7] AVR would automatically register eligible citizens through interactions with public services, removing the need for separate registration processes.
This simple approach ensures that everyone who is eligible to vote is registered, removing unnecessary barriers to participation which are denying people their right to vote. [8]
Our 38 Degrees community votes for all parties and none, but we’re united in our belief that every eligible voter should be able to make their voice heard.
So today we’re asking if you’ll join us in calling on politicians to make voting easier, not harder to make sure that no one is locked out at the next election?It only takes a few seconds to sign:
It was St George’s Day yesterday, the day dedicated to England’s patron saint. There were parades in various parts of the country. I think most of the time these went very well, except in London where the right-wing demonstrators were involved in clashes with the police. They’ve been claiming on the net that, contrary to what the Met police have been tweeting, ’twas the cops that started it. Given that the Met police also have form starting fights with some left-wing protesters, such as during the Poll Tax riots back in the ’90s and against the miners during the miners’ strike, I can also believe that they may have started by attacking the rightists, even if I don’t agree with the protesters’ views.
The day was also accompanied by various bods arguing whether or not it should be celebrated on GB News and elsewhere. Femi Oluwalde popped up on GB News a day or so ago to argue against displaying the flag of St George because of England’s history in the slave trade and colonisation, while ignoring the fact that other countries also were involved in this long before England. But it also reminded me how the Tories under Maggie Thatcher draped themselves in the mantle of British patriotism. The 1987 general election featured Battle of Britain Spitfires zooming around the sky while an excited voice declared ‘It’s great to be great again!’ And there was a headline in the Torygraph quoting Maggie as saying, ‘Don’t call them boojwah, call them British!’ Well, it’s nearly forty years later, and there’s precious little great about Britain. Oh yes, I’ve seen the headlines announcing that Britain is the second most powerful country, but
1. Our public utilities are owned by foreigners,
2. An ever increasing number of working people are suffering real poverty, resorting to food banks because their not getting the welfare benefits they need, or their wages are too low to cover the costs of food and/or heating.
3. The NHS and dental services are being decimated due to Tory underfunding and privatisation. As a result, many people are pulling out their own teeth because of shortages of NHS dentists.
4. Rishi Sunak and the rest of his party of knaves and brigands has announced they’re going to stop GPs giving people sicknotes and cut Personal Independence Payments, because Tory ideology and the Heil say that everyone on benefits is a scrounger and malingerer.
5. Meanwhile, the Tory party is more than happy to received dodgy donations from the mega rich while doing their level best to reduce genuine democratic accountability by placing restrictions on the Electoral Commission.
6. And then there’s the issue of the Tories’ own personal corruption. Rishi Sunak has given public monies to his wife’s companies, the party also gave PPE contracts, for equipment that didn’t work, to companies with which they were personally linked, and BoJob handing out a computer contract to the woman with whom he was having an affair.
I also wonder about their personal commitment to this country and its people. Sunak, before he got the go-ahead for his political ambitions, was all set to get his green card and emigrate to America. Boris Johnson was born in America, and although he also became Prime Minister, showed precious little interest in actually doing the job of governing. He didn’t turn up to the COBRA meetings about Covid, and seemed to spend every available moment either off home for the weekend or having a holiday. He fancies himself as a statesman in the mould of Churchill, but his aptitude and abilities are, whatever we make of Winnie, in no way comparable.
I see precious little genuine patriotism amongst the Tories.
They have consistently betrayed the interests of this country and its great working people, of all ethnicities, while declaring the opposite.
They represent solely the interests of the global rich, and are impoverishing ordinary Brits in order to give vast tax cuts to their corporate paymasters.
Whatever party you decide to vote for, get them out at the next election!
I found this on the Net this morning. I’m not a member of the Rejoin EU party, put I’ve been advising people on this channel to look at the alternative parties if they’re unsatisfied in the direction Labour has gone. By which I means Starmer’s transformation of the party into another version of the Tories. Steve Bray and SODEM, the video tells us, have been campaigning around the country against Brexit for the past eight years. Rejoin EU’s man asks Bray what he has noticed change in this time, and his reply is a sharp reminder how democracy and the right to protest has been undermined by the Tories in this time. Bray states that it began under Johnson and is now worse with Sunak telling the police to arrest protesters. The attitude to protests vary from police force to police force. In London they’ll arrest protesters, but in Liverpool they won’t. But they will in Manchester. The Rejoin EU fellow and Bray joke about that grand city being the next place the Tories will hold their conference. Bray states that the government has been telling the police to crack down on protests. This isn’t democracy, but authoritarianism.
This is all true, although I think the attacks on public protests began under David Cameron. Cameron passed legislation against them under the pretext of protecting residents from the noise and nuisance caused by demonstrations in their areas. And both Blair and Cameron have supported the legislation setting up courts where you can be tried in secret without knowing the evidence against you if this is considered necessary for national security. Open Britain has also described the way the Tories are nobbling the Electoral Commission to allow their infractions of the rules governing elections and the conduct of political campaigns, as well as the pernicious influence of corporate donations and dark money.
As for the EU, despite the attempts by right-wingers like Michael Heaver and Jacob Rees-Mogg to present it as a glowing success, Brexit has done much to wreck this country’s economy. And despite the claims of the anti-migrant Tory lobby that it would it would halt mass migration, it has clearly done no such thing as the continuing arrival of the Channel migrants shows.
One of the issues regarding hate speech and racism that is particularly worrying some Christian groups is the definition of islamophobia that has been taken up by Labour and the other left-wing parties from the Lib Dems to the Greens. It’s been adopted by something like 62 local authorities, and with the Labour party apparently set to win the general election later this year, there are fears that they will make it national policy. This declares that ‘islamophobia is rooted in racism’ and seeks to ban prejudice or hostility towards Muslims based on their religion or ‘expressions of Muslimness’. The concern here is that it’s a blasphemy law by the back door as it does not distinguish between prejudice towards Muslims and dislike or criticism of the religion. I’ve said before now that I believe all ideologies and religions should be open to reasonable debate and criticism. But this is sharply curtailed in Islamic countries by blasphemy laws, such as that in Pakistan that carries the death penalty.
Mahyar Tousi in one of his vlogs has stated that islamophobia was formulated by the Ayatollah Khomeini when he was busy turning Iran into an Islamic republic. He could ban criticism of Islam there through the imposition of blasphemy laws, but was also determined to stop in the non-western world – what medieval Islam called the ‘dar al-harb’ or the Zone of War, as well. Hence he developed the idea of islamophobia as a form of racial prejudice. This was taken up in Britain by Trevor Philips, who now says he regrets having done so. I’ve more than enough problems with Tousi. He’s very right-wing, and seems to think that anyone to the left of the Tories is a Commie and is another who’s been telling the world that everyone supporting Gaza is an anti-Semite. But he is an ethnic Iranian and so I take some of what he says about Iran very seriously.
The most obvious criticism about the definition of islamophobia is its claim that prejudice against Islam or Muslims is ‘rooted in racism’. Islam isn’t a race. It’s a religion. The global nature of the religion means that there are White, Black and Asian Muslims, and the religion is not itself immune to racism. Although the adoption of Islam by African kings led to a positive attitude by the Arabs, as shown in books with titles like On the Excellence of the Blacks, the enslavement of Black Africans also created racial prejudice against them, very similar to the racist stereotypes that arose in the Christian west following the emergence of transatlantic slavery. During the war in the former Yugoslavia Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were racially extremely close. They were all White, as shown by a photograph of a group of blonde Bosnian Muslims leaving a mosque. Further north in Russia and, I think, the Baltic states, there are Muslim communities that have been there since the Middle Ages. I think they’re descended from central Asian Turkic tribes, who were pushed westward by the expansion of the Mongols. They’ve now been racially assimilated to the Slav and Baltic populations, as shown by a photo in one of the genuine Fascist rags back in the ’90s of a Lithuanian mullah. This man had blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as a splenetic hatred of the Jews, and so got glowing praise from Aryan supremacist nutjobs publishing the rag. One female Fascist in Mussolini’s Italy was heavily into Sufi mysticism, and so converted to Islam. In the ’90s there was a group of Fascists around Robert Pash, who were very impressed by Gadaffy’s Libya. In this century the BNP’s fuehrer, Nick Griffin, held a debate with the Islamist Anjem Chaudhary. To his surprise, Griffin got on very well with Chaudhary, as they both had similar views about the Jews. Islam got the legal status of a race in Britain following a ruling designed to protect the Sikhs from similar prejudice. The Sikh community, although very definitely largely South Asian, is composed of a number of different ethnic groups, all of which were vulnerable to prejudice because of their religion. After the Sikhs won their legal recognition as a single ethnic group based on their religion, the Muslims applied for a similar status. This is possibly based on the doctrine that all Muslims are members of a single ‘umma, or nation or community.
I don’t deny that Muslim people do need to be protected from prejudice and harassment, but the simplistic formulation of anti-Muslim prejudice makes genuine, necessary criticism of the religion and the behaviour and attitudes of some of its followers difficult. The burka is a case in point. It comes from a time and culture that stipulated that women should be confined to the home. They were not to mix with men who were not close relatives, and if they ventured out they should have to be accompanied by their husbands or another close male relative. Not all Muslim sects accepted its validity. I’ve read that the clause in the Quran demanding the veiling of women actually only demands that the bosom be covered. Nevertheless, when Boris Johnson wrote a piece in his newspaper column years ago attacking it, and comparing the women who wore it to ninjas and bin bags, he was justifiably accused of islamophobia, not least because abuse of women wearing it increased following its publication. On the other side of the Atlantic, a Canadian cartoonist was sued for islamophobia under the country’s hate speech laws because of a caricature he’d drawn a notorious female Islamist. He’d drawn in her in burka with only her eyes and glasses showing, declaring that she was going to sue someone else for prejudice so her husband could yet another Islamist training event. The subject of the cartoon sued on the grounds that it portrayed her in an islamophobic stereotype. This was despite the fact that whenever she did appear in public, in court or on television, she was always dressed in a burka.
And then there’s the issue of that mosque in Kethley, Yorkshire, whose members were sending death threats to a 14 year old autistic boy who scuffed a copy of the Quran. This, they declared, was islamophobic. It wasn’t. It showed disrespect for the Quran, and would have been a horrendous blasphemy in their eyes, but it was not a comment on Muslims as people. The shrieks of islamophobia served as an accusation of blasphemy. The police complied, and so turned up at a meeting of the mosque in question where the boy’s mother basically pleaded for her son’s life. The cops didn’t act on the mother’s side, and neither did the local authorities, possibly from fear that this would cause mass rioting across the Muslims world as happened when a Swedish man burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in fury at the Turks refusing to allow the country to join NATO. I’m also concerned for the safety of Christians from Muslim majority countries, who have moved here to escape real persecution in places like Pakistan. In the 1970s there was an influx of Christian Pakistanis, who allegedly came here to escape rioting against them in Pakistan after one of the newspapers printed a story about texts from the Quran being used on the wallpaper in a British restaurant. It’s unclear whether this story is true or not, as the sociologists who reported it weren’t able to verify it. But it seems more than plausible to me, given the religious rioting that has occurred more recently against Pakistani Christians.
I do not want genuine asylum seekers persecuted for their religious beliefs over here through religiously intolerant legislation passed under the guise of protecting Muslims from prejudice.
This is another 38 Degrees petition I’ve had no hesitation in signing. At the moment the House of Lords is massively overstaffed. It has more members than the Supreme Soviet or whatever the totalitarian pseudo-parliament of Communist China is called. Parties have been packing it with their supporters since at least the days of Lloyd George. It really does need reform.
There are two alternatives that I’ve seen. One is transforming it into an elected senate as in America. The fear there, as discussed in an article years ago in Private Eye when Blair was enacting his reforms, is that such a plan lacks popular enthusiasm and would end up attracting little interest from the electorate and only second-rate candidates.
The second suggestion I’ve seen comes from the Nat Cons and is based on the writings of Edmund Burke, the founder of modern Conservatism. This consists of paring it down to a small number of hereditary peers. Burke was involved in the political manoeuvering of his time to stop the Prince Regent packing parliament with his supporters and so forming a prince’s party, and so it’s possible that if this were done properly it still could be a genuine bulwark protecting traditional British liberties despite the aristocratic nature of the institution.
As for corporate donors, a report by Harvard University nearly a decade ago claimed that America was a pseudo- or quasi-democracy thanks to its influence. American politicos were far too interested in providing political benefits to the rich corporations and individuals that had contributed to their campaigns than their constituents. Blair over here was fully behind this corporativism, giving his donors positions in the various regulatory bodies that were supposed to supervise their industries and government contracts to their firms. People are heartily sick of it, and not just those on the left. An American Republican-supporting businessman over ten years ago put up a position calling for politicians to be compelled to wear their sponsors’ badges in the same way as sportsmen. And on this side of the Pond the Tory grassroots complained a few years ago that they were being sidelined in favour of that party’s donors.
‘Dear David,
Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson are stuffing the House of Lords with major Conservative party donors. [1] Liz Truss’ appointees had their first day on the life-long job.
On the ex-PM’s list is a Conservative party donor who has given over £700,000. [2] And just weeks ago Rishi Sunak added two more party donors who’d given over £200,000 between them. That’s not all: Boris Johnson made *14* party donors Lords when he was Prime Minister. [3]
Sticking party donors in the Lords turns the whole institution into a joke. Access to our political systems should not be for sale, but as long as any Government feels it can give out peerages for a fee, the corruption will only get worse.
Labour have said that if they come into power they will reform the House of Lords. [4] BUT there’s already rumours that they might drop it. If we can join together, in one HUGE petition, we can show Labour, as well as all the other parties, that the public want to eradicate a pay for access political institution.
So, David, if party donors getting a life-long peerage makes you as angry as us, will you demand future governments BAN party donors from being nominated to the House of Lords? Click add my name:
The House of Lords is one of the biggest legislative bodies in the world. [5] Last year it was revealed that £51.8m was donated to political parties by Lords appointees. [6] If access to our political systems is up for grabs to the highest bidder, then our democracy collapses.
It might seem like an uphill battle, but we’ve taken on unfair Lords appointments before. Last year, we projected a message from more than 270,000 to Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak around Westminster, telling them Truss’ nominations shouldn’t count. Just days later, at least two people turned down her nomination because they thought it would be humiliating to accept. [7]
So David, if you think it’s unfair that politicians can appoint party donors, employees and mates to the House of Lords, will you sign the petition? It only takes 30 seconds to sign…
Right before our eyes, the UK is becoming a place where dissent is not permitted. We’ve been warning of this creeping trend for years now, as various new laws (the Policing Act, the Public Order Act, the Online Safety Bill, etc) have broadened the government’s crackdown on democratic debate and increased the state’s power to spy and censor. Ideological adversaries of the government – those who voice dissent on everything from public sector pay to climate action to foreign policy to social issues – are being silenced by draconian laws and authoritarian decrees.
The latest rowover the definition of “extremism” appears to be yet another example. While it’s obviously right to tackle genuine extremism and target real threats to national security, Communities Secretary Michael Gove is weaponising the definition to silence some well-intentioned and well-known civil society organisations. And, ironically, his announcement may well define his own government as radical extremists.
Gove’s new definition refers to extremism as the “promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:
negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or
undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or
intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).”
At first, that might sound perfectly reasonable. But two problems quickly emerge.
Firstly, the list of condemned organisations that fall under that definition published today is a hodge-podge of different groups that do not belong in the same category. White supremacist Neo-Nazi groups like Patriotic Alternative and the British National Socialist Movement – which quite literally endorse ethnic cleansing – were placed alongside advocacy organisations like MEND (a civic engagement NGO focused on tackling islamophobia) and CAGE (which campaigns against the illegal incarceration and torture of terror suspects). This announcement was more political than practical.
Secondly, by its own definition, this government is itself extremist. Was Boris Johnson not “undermining liberal Parliamentary democracy” when he illegally prorogued Parliament in 2019? What about when Dominic Raab tried to take away fundamental human rights in 2022 by ditching the HRA – or when Conservatives routinely slag off the ECHR? All of the exclusionary and anti-democratic policies blocking certain voters from the polls and neutering the Electoral Commission? What about former Conservative PMs endorsing Donald Trump, who just three years ago tried to illegally overturn an election when he didn’t win it? I could go on.
When extremists gain power, they force their radical minority beliefs on everyone else, cracking down on anyone who dares voice opposition. They resort to cruel and oppressive measures to ensure that no one else gets to have their voice heard. Michael Gove isn’t protecting us from extremism – he is showing us what happens when extremism gets the upper hand.
Despite all of us in the democracy and civil liberties sectors raising the alarm, the British public continues to sleepwalk into a terrifying Orwellian future. We’re running out of time to stop it. This country needs democratic renewal right now, and we’ve got a plan to get it done. Please help us fight back before it’s too late.
There was a piece on the internet yesterday – I can’t remember whether it was from one of the papers, from a YouTuber or GB News, asking why the Labour party was going after Kemi Badenoch. This message, which I also got yesterday from the pro-democracy organisation Open Britain shows why. Badenoch has gained more than a little support from the anti-woke crowd because of her attacks on the ideology, especially over the trans issue. But this piece is a salutary reminder of how untrustworthy she is as well as her support for the government’s bills attacking democracy. Open Britain are, by contrast, cautiously optimistic about the future Labour government because they are considering an independent ethics commission. I’ve no doubt that after the Tories’ flagrant violations of the code governing parliamentary ethics, such as a commission is needed. But I don’t trust Labour to deliver it, not with Starmer’s record of ditching every decent or left-wing policy that he initially embraced and they also have their very-well founded doubts.
‘Dear David,
Delusional Brexit fantasies. Gross misconduct. Shameless lies. Kemi Badenoch scored a hat trick this last week, hitting every note of the Tory trifecta in quick succession. But will she be held accountable?
Badenoch is not just some rogue backbencher. She is – somehow – this country’s Minister for Business and Trade. And she’s also tipped to lead the Conservative Party in the future. This aspiring Prime Minister (or, perhaps more likely, leader of the opposition) is openly perpetuating the toxic legacy of Boris Johnson – and once more exposing the desolate void where political accountability should be. This week alone, she:
Pretended to be engaged in trade talks with Canada (in a likely effort to show off those very real Brexit “wins”), until Ottawa diplomats pointed out that no such negotiations took place.
Engaged in a public battle with recently terminated Post Office chair Henry Staunton over the handling of the Horizon Scandal. Based on their exchange, Badenoch has been credibly accused of misleading Parliament in breach of the Ministerial Code.
Got called out for a lie in December that she had “engaged extensively” with LGBT groups as Equalities Minister – an FOI request revealed that she hadn’t met a single one.
Sunak is, at the time of writing, backing Badenoch to the hilt. In doing so, he emulates his predecessor, Boris Johnson, who dismissed complaints against her in 2021 when she lashed out at a Huffington Post reporter for sending her a request for comment. So the answer so far is no, she will not be held accountable. It seems that Badenoch, like other figureheads on the Conservative right, is more or less untouchable. For now.
It is not just Badenoch’s lack of professionalism or integrity that raises alarm bells. As Levelling Up Minister, she was the driving force behind the recent anti-democracy Elections Bill (that Open Britain and its allies fought so hard against). She regularly fans the flames of the so-called culture wars with nonsense ‘anti woke’ statements.
In short, she is the epitome of the rot that is eating away at our political system. As our Functional Democracy Goals report made clear, we desperately need a new standards system in Parliament – one that is clear, enforceable, and ruthless in holding to account those who would undermine our democracy.
We need to make our political leaders accountable again. We need to learn the lessons of recent years and ensure we don’t repeat past mistakes in the future. We need to fix this broken system.
Rumours of what a future Labour government might do in this space are encouraging (they are reported to be considering the creation of an “independent ethics commission”) but we’re not getting carried away. We need to wait and see whether those rumours translate into concrete plans or become just the latest Starmer u-turn.
There comes a time in every government’s life cycle when the public just stops listening. After fourteen years of dysfunctional policy, unethical conduct, and inept leadership, it seems that moment has officially arrived for our Conservative government. The public wants change. No matter how much Rishi Sunak or his allies rattle on about woke lefties or small boats, there’s little he can do or say to change their minds.
The results in Kingswood and Wellingborough yesterday gave us yet another premonition of an absolute knock-out General Election later this year. In Kingswood, the opposition ate into the Conservative’s old majority significantly, claiming victory with nearly 45% of the vote. In Wellingborough, the Conservative vote fell by a whopping 37.6 points, yet another hall-of-fame electoral swing for the history books.
For many of us, it’s been clear for some time. The Conservatives’ multiple attempts to “reset” themselves have only set them up for new and calamitous failures. Boris Johnson’s scandalous premiership, Liz Truss’ disastrous 49 days, and Rishi Sunak’s embattled tenure have all completely failed to address the party’s reputation for ineptitude and sleaze.
As the party’s moderates gradually filter out, embarrassed, the Conservatives’ centre of gravity has shifted to the raucous and the radical. Hardliners like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman, and Liz Truss increasingly own the ideological core of the party today, tripling down on the culture war nonsense and the political extremism rather than conceding their own unpopularity. The pretence is barely holding anymore.
Now would be a sensible time to reflect on their failures, call an election, and spend the intermittent period solving their out-of-control identity crisis. Unfortunately, these people aren’t really the introspective types.
All of this re-affirms that our plan to influence the (likely) future Labour government – and stop wasting time trying to convince the Conservatives that democracy is important – was the right one.
We’ve got time, and we’re going to use it productively. We’ll continue to sit tight and develop pathways to meaningful policies (the ones mentioned in our report, for a start) that bring regular people back into Westminster and finally restore a semblance of trust in politics. We’ll push Labour to act for democracy rather than give into complacency. And we’ll keep an eye out for whatever mutated monsters crawl out of the ruins of the Conservative party.
To that end, our petition calling on Keir Starmer to listen to his party members and embrace Proportional Representation just hit 25,000 signatures… help us keep the momentum up by signing it if you haven’t already!
I’ve watched with interest a number of videos put up by the right-wing New Culture Forum. I don’t share their Toryism, but generally share their critiques of the woke ideologies that paint Britain and its White population as intrinsically racist, colonialist and oppressing Blacks and other people of colour. In a recent video they discussed the re-emergence of the demented Liz Truss, now attempting a political comeback with her Popular Conservatives. Someone has now asked how many Tory factions there are now. There was the launch of the National Conservatives just a few months ago, and there are various plotters and intriguers keen to put Boris Johnson back into No. 10, quite apart from whoever in the party still supports Sunak. Truss, you will remember, is the moron who took her ideas and her advisors from the Buxton Street thinktanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs, keenly promoting a supercapitalism where everything’s privatised, and the welfare state cut to the barest minimum and a very firm support for Brexit. Within just over a month she’d so catastrophically damaged our economy that even the Tories decided they’d had enough of her and she was removed in yet another coup, to be replaced by Sunak.
I thought the New Culture Forum would be behind Truss, given what I believe are their connections to the I.E.A. But they didn’t. They declared that she wasn’t really a Conservative, but a Libertarian. Worse, she was really a Lib Dem, and had as one of her advisor another former Lib Dem. She had promoted disastrous extreme right-wing economic policies. Worse, she wasn’t hard enough on immigration and definitely didn’t really support the social conservatism she claimed to be embracing. They also couldn’t work out why Nigel Farage was hanging around with her. In fact they had such a low opinion of her that they said she was fit only to be the headmistress of a junior school, as this was the only way she could talk to people on an equal level. Presumably they meant the school children, rather than the teachers, auxiliary staff and their parents.
This was surprising coming from a right-wing organisation. It shows that the New Culture Forum, as part of their rejection of wokeness, are moving close to the National Conservatives’ positions. They’ve rejected the extreme Thatcherite individualism – the kind that declared that ‘there is no society, only people’ and that people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their money. This has led, in their view, to a decline in fundamental social institutions like the family and the nation. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle laid this aspect of the social conservative right’s ideological critique of wokeness in a speech he made at one of the universities.
And it is interesting that Liz Truss is now too right-wing even for elements of the right like the New Culture Forum, and especially the rejection of her libertarianism, which I expected they’d share.
Our petition telling Labour to prioritise proportional representation has nearly reached 20,000 signatures. This action – and other public initiatives like it – send a clear message to the Labour leadership. It’s an urgent reminder that if they form the next government, they’ll be responsible for taking real action to get us out of this mess.
As you’ve probably noticed, ActionStorm allows for signers to leave comments explaining why the petition is important to them. We’ve gone through your messages and found five key reasons that people support making 2024 the last election run on First-Past-The-Post. Here’s what we found people cared most about:
1. Fairness:
As one signer, Dave, mentioned, “The current Conservative Westminster government won a landslide victory on 43% of the votes”. Real democracy means fair representation, which means that votes shouldn’t be thrown away, and candidates shouldn’t represent entire constituencies with a minority vote (as routinely happens under FPTP).
Many others echoed the sentiment that as a democratic country, we should strive for a fair system that actually embodies democratic values. As another signer, Peter, put it, PR is “The only fair way to vote.”
2. Functionality:
Anthony argued that “The pendulum approach to politics isn’t working.” Users expressed concern that the austerity, scandal, and disfunction of the 2010s and early 2020s in Britain was a product of our FPTP system. A more proportional politics would have necessitated far more deliberation and debate, and given people far more say over certain policies and certain politicians. As Julia said, “FPTP is no longer fit for purpose and belongs in the 19th Century”.
Others, like Zoe, pointed out that the very idea of “having to vote tactically rather than who you want to vote for” shows that the current system is not fit for purpose.
3. Justice:
A number of people commented on the way that FPTP enables some of the worst actors in public life, and actively marginalises the groups that suffer the worst consequences of political failure.
Laura wrote that the “current system is used as a way to marginalise those who are more vulnerable and maintain and abuse positions of power by politicians.”
4. Curbing Extremism
Others, like Paul, support PR because it “helps moderate extremism”. Turning the classic talking point used to defend FPTP voting on its head, signers pointed out that Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak are all products of FPTP, and support a number of unpopular policies many would consider to be “extreme”.
There’s concern that if Labour doesn’t embrace PR in its first term in office, the right-wing radicalism brewing across the benches opposite may come back in force in 2029. FPTP will only make it more likely for them to find a way in. As Joyce pointed out, that may be something the country “can not survive”.
5. Trust
Robert wrote that “Getting rid of FPTP could keep the United Kingdom united and restore people’s faith in Democracy.” At a time when a record-low percentage of Britons trust their government or their politicians, users see PR as a way to bring regular people back into politics.
It’s time to break free from what Adam described as “the two-party rut”, into a new inclusive and deliberative political system. PR is one major element of that transition.
See all of the responses, with more coming in by the minute, on our petition page. Is there a reason missing above that you’d like to add? Sign the petition and comment away…
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 