This short video comes from the David Starkey Speaks channel on YouTube. I’m well aware that Starkey is an extremely controversial figure because of his ill-considered and offensive comments on Black responsibility for the 2012 riots and that slavery wasn’t a holocaust because ‘there are too damn many of them’. I dislike his conservatism and hostility to the welfare state. But I think that when he speaks as an historian on matters like democracy, the rule of law and the British constitution, he is well worth listening to. Even necessary.
Here he argues that Britain is only just learning that the rape gangs aren’t gangs in the western sense, but networks of cousins. And these gangs come from a culture which has, contrary to the west, a collectivist attitude to responsibility. In the west the individual is responsible for their actions, their position before the law, and the way they vote. Not so with the rape gangs. They come from a culture where, if a girl is raped, the injured clan may avenge themselves by raping someone from the offending clan. And now this system has become enmeshed in British politics. The Labour party have exploited this clan system because it has brought them a bloc vote, although they are in danger of losing it because of the establishment of Muslim parties. He states clearly that the British state has spent 800 years trying to eradicate this because of its danger to settled authority and the rule of law. But it has been undone in the last two decades.
Starkey is right about the strength of the Pakistani clan system. Back in the 1990s I cane across an academic paper that described how the biraderi Pakistani clans acted as trade unions when it came to protecting the rights of Pakistani factory workers. I’ve also heard from former diplomats that in Pakistan, jobs and posts are viewed as position which the employee can exploit for the benefit of his family. Hence there is a culture of corruption and nepotism. The rape culture he describes is that of the Mirpuri region, a very backward province whose inhabitants are recorded as rural hicks by more sophisticated Pakistanis. There were several notorious instances there where individuals from feuding clans were raped, and when a girl tried to get justice for her brother, one of the victims, she was raped on her way to court. In Britain there have been instances of Pakistani elders telling their communities which way to vote, and even following them into the voting booth to make sure they do so. This was a major issue with Lutfur Rahman’s leadership of the Labour party in Lambeth, and in his subsequent break-away Aspire party.
At its most extreme, it has led to political violence erupting into the legislative chamber itself. In the 90s Private Eye reported that there had been some kind of fight in the Turkish parliament between two MPs. One of these came from an extensive and powerful clan, whom he mustered to descend on the Turkish parliament to sort out his opponent. Sociologists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq also noted the existence of a ‘clan class system’, where members of the ruling class all come from Hussein’s own Takriti clan. The Pakistani clan system therefore presents a real threat to British individualism and liberal democracy.
You can go much further than 800 years in tracing the origins of the western attitude that service to the state comes before clan. The ancient Greeks also had a clan system, but Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle took it as absolutely true that the interests of the state came before those of the clan. This view was taken over by the Stoics, and then introduced into Christianity by St. Augustine. And from there it became part of the public school ethos in the 19th century.
Now obviously very many Muslims utterly condemn the rape culture and the grooming gangs. Indeed, there was an open letter published in one of the newspapers doing so signed by hundreds of mosques. But the collectivist attitude of the Islamic clan system is a challenge to western democracy and has produced a dangerously corrupt political environment in certain areas.
Tomorrow, voters across England will head to the polls.
Over 1,600 council seats, six mayoralties, and a crucial by-election in Runcorn and Helsby are all in play. It’s the first major challenge for Starmer’s Labour government, an early proving ground for Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of the Conservatives, and the first serious examination of Reform UK’s new political machine in action.
But scanning the landscape of polls and projections, one trend stands out above all:
The real winner looks set to be political distrust and discontent.
Is Two Party Politics On The Way Out?
The dominance of Labour and the Conservatives – unchallenged since the postwar days of Clement Attlee – is eroding fast. We saw the cracks form at the last General Election, which was the least two-party election in British history.
Of course, our First-Past-The-Post voting system produced a massively disproportional result. It didn’t allow for the increased political diversity that Brits want to see.
The two establishment parties are up for another major challenge tomorrow.
In Runcorn and Helsby, a seat that Labour took comfortably last year, Reform UK threatens to sweep up their disillusioned voters.
But it’s not just Farage. The Greens and Liberal Democrats actually look poised to sway twice as many Labour voters as Reform, indicating a wholesale fragmentation of the party’s core support base.
The Conservative vote, meanwhile, is also breaking off in both directions. The party is not only haemorrhaging support over to Reform UK, but also defending even true-blue corners of the country from insurgent Liberal Democrats.
The old party loyalties are crumbling. In their place, we’re seeing a volatile, anti-establishment mood that cuts across traditional political lines.
Voters Want Political Renewal
Yes, the egregious scandals of the Conservative era – and the milder lobbying fiascos of Starmer’s early tenure – have undeniably fuelled public anger. But something deeper is driving this charged political moment: a sense of national decline, political stagnation, and institutional failure.
If people have taken one resounding message from Westminster in recent years, it’s that politicians don’t care about them. We’ve shown previously that Brits associate politicians primarily with corruption and self-service. Trust in politics has fallen off a cliff, and continues to trend down.
As a result, voters increasingly want something bigger than a reshuffle. They want renewal, and they don’t believe the status quo parties can deliver it.
The System Is Broken. Voters Know It.
Amid all this flux, one thing remains depressingly stable: Britain’s broken electoral system. First-Past-The-Post politics simply isn’t built for the kind of political diversity that voters want. It locks in two-party dominance, even as voters try to break free of it.
That’s the quiet tragedy of this moment. The appetite for change is real, deep, and growing. But the system institutionally sidelines alternative voices.
Instead, it threatens to create a new (and, in my view, even worse) two party dynamic with Reform UK occupying the right flank of UK politics. That means more toxic rhetoric, more juvenile mud-slinging, and more two-way competitions for tiny slivers of the electorate.
Those of us outside swing-seats will continue to be sidelined. And the real issues that people care about – whether it’s their bills or the climate or their stagnant wages – will take a backseat to Reform’s hysteria and distractions.
Tomorrow’s results look set to confirm it: Britain wants a different politics. The question is whether we can rebuild our democratic system to accommodate it.
Our purpose now is to mobilise our government into doing just that. We’ve given them the way forward – createa National Commission for Electoral Reform(NCER).
In the wake of these elections, we’ll be ramping up our calls for Starmer to get on it.
I’ve signed the petition and I do believe that constitutional reform to make this country truly democratic is urgently needed. Young people have lost so much faith in democracy that a majority think only a dictatorship will bring the change this country needs and deserves. But I doubt there will ever be any such commission because Starmer, the Conservatives and Reform are authoritarian anti-democrats who care only for what the elite super rich want.
The front page of France’s Libe couldn’t have been more clear this morning: Marine Le Pen is guilty of embezzlement, and it is possible for corrupt politicians to be held to account.
Le Pen, who heads up France’s far-right National Rally party, has spent her career rallying against the European Union, viciously attacking immigrants, and stirring up culture war divisions with tirades about “le wokisme.”
Her bid for the Presidency has been rendered moot, as the politician was found guilty of illegally using European Union funds to fund her own political party.
The irony of Le Pen benefitting financially from an institution she’s railed against for years is not lost on anyone. But the importance of this verdict goes far beyond the National Rally’s hypocrisy:
🔵 The French justice system issued an independent ruling on a critical democratic issue – Liberté
⚪️ The ruling enforced French citizens’ democratic right to participate in fairly funded elections – Egalité
🔴 Le Pen’s inability to run for office for the next five years will hamper the authoritarian National Rally’s ability to attack France’s democratic institutions – Fraternité
Britain and America could both learn a lesson. Our disgraced former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was handed a cushy job at the Daily Mail on his way out the door. And as Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Predictably, the far-right always play the victim whenever basic accountability rules are enforced on them. Le Pen is doing it right now, claiming France is now a “tyranny” under “tyrannical judges.” Unsurprisingly, The Telegraph and The Spectator’s editors seem to agree.
But real justice doesn’t cater to the victim complexes of demagogues or right-wing tabloids. It holds up the most basic tenet of democracy, that we live in a society, that society has rules we all agree on, and that anyone and everyone who breaks them should face the music.
The rule of law lives on in France today – Vive La République!
This is another petition I’ve had no hesitation whatsoever signing, especially as SLAPP lawsuits have been used in America to shut down the BDS campaign against Israeli ethnic cleeansing.
‘This is terrifying, David. Right now, the rich and powerful are using controversial lawsuits to stop journalists and others from exposing corruption and wrongdoing.
These legal threats – known as SLAPPs – have been used to silence those uncovering the Post Office Horizon scandal, reporting on sexual harassment allegations against the owner of Harrods, and even covering the war in Ukraine. [1]
That’s why journalists, legal experts, and MPs from all parties are demanding urgent action to stop these lawsuits from being weaponised. [2]
But what’s missing? The voice of the public. If we can show the Government that people care about this, we can force them to act. Together, we can stop those with money and power from using the legal system to silence journalists, whistleblowers, and campaigners – like us.
So David, will you sign the petition calling on the Government to protect free speech and stop this ‘lawfare’?
David, this is bigger than just journalism. Take the shocking case of Eliot Higgins, an investigative journalist sued in a London court by a UK-sanctioned Russian warlord. And after a two-year investigation, regulators have just ruled that the British law firm who represented the Russian mercenary chief did nothing wrong. [3] If this isn’t an abuse of our legal system, what is?
It makes a mockery of our legal system, threatens free speech, and protects the interests of very dangerous people. Laws designed to protect people from false claims are being twisted into tools of censorship – this is called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). [4]
These lawsuits aren’t about winning in court. They’re about intimidation, making it too costly, stressful and risky to speak out. This should NEVER be allowed to happen.
So David, will you sign the petition calling on the Government to fix these legal loopholes and protect those who expose the truth?
This continues the discussion on this blog about the Pakistani grooming gangs and their motives. It’s a video of an interview on the Heretics channel on YouTube between the host, Andrew Gold, and Raja Miah, a former counterterrorism officer, who started investigating the grooming gangs. In doing so he claims to have discovered that the leaders of the gangs were, or were connected to, the leaders of the Muslim communities in their areas and that these leaders were active drumming up votes for the Labour party. Hence their immunity from prosecution by the authorities.
I realise that many readers of this blog don’t share my opinions on the gangs, and two of the great commenters here posted their objections to my last video on the subject, in which I stated that the gangs were aided by an institutional anti-White racism. I’m still very much of that opinion, as the victims stated that they were racially as well as sexually abused by their molesters. One of the female Muslim councillors stated that these crimes were racially motivated because she came from a Muslim home that had the same negative views of white women and girls: that they were, essentially, promiscuous whores who deserved no better. I strongly believe that multiculturalism is failing as the anti-racist institutions were set up to protect – rightly – ethnic minorities from racism but fail to recognise it when it is directed against Whites.
I am not, however, blind to the fact that sexual abuse it not by any means confined to Pakistani Muslims. Neither are the ‘Patriots’ who vlog about this. One of them put up the statistics for the many tens of thousands of unsolved cases of sexual abuse in this country. Several of my relatives and friends work in the care sector, and they’ve told me about the instances they’ve encountered where they or the police have reported cases to social workers because of fears that someone was in danger, only to have the social workers handed back to them. While I was in hospital this week I spoke to a former teacher, who had taught in Tower Hamlets. She stated that teachers there had reported various cases to social services, but they were so overworked they didn’t get round to investigating them, or took years to do so. And yes, there have been cases where individuals were protected because of their political connections.
One of these was that of Mark Trotter in the 1980s. Lambeth or Brent council, according to Private Eye, were desperately searching for the 200 or so boys Trotter had raped and abused when working as a social worker before dying of AIDS. Despite being a paedophile, Trotter was a very active member of the Labour party and gay rights group, and so was protected from prosecution by his comrades. If Miah is to be believed, the Pakistani Muslim gangs were similarly protected because of their connections to the authorities.
The Interview
MIah begins the interview by saying that he has been researching the grooming gangs for six years, after a twenty year career in counterterrorism. He had left this job as his relationship with his partner had broken down and he wanted to have as close a relationship as possible to his daughter to show that she actually had a father. He stated that he believed that his finding of people who looked like himself becoming increasingly sectarian and hating Britain was due to the failure of multiculturalism. He started investigating the grooming gangs after a friend contacted him to say that the leader of her local mosque was a convicted sex offender and was afraid for her children’s safety. He got in touch with the local authority’s dedicated officer for these cases, only to be bluntly told, ‘We know, the police know, we don’t care’ in an email. The chairman of the local Bangladeshi community carried the Muslim block vote and the community’s leaders were members of the local Labour party, and used public funds to build their mosque. He stated that everything he said is documented and in the public domain, a statement he regularly repeated throughout the interview. He thus campaigned against the local Muslim leader, forcing him to resign. The leader then retaliated by sending his thugs to assault Miah. The Muslim leader was also a a candidate for the Labour party, paired with Secretary of State Jim MacMahon at the general election.
The Telegraph noticed that there was a surge in postal voting against Farage in one mosque. Miah states that this abuse of the postal vote takes place across the country and that the Labour leadership know this. Miah stated that he would like to reform the legislation regulating the postal vote because of electoral fraud. Islamist gangsters have infiltrated the Labour party. There is a relationship developing between the British Left and the Islamists similar to that in Lebanon and Gaza, where the Islamist initially were aided by the left before turning on them. British Muslims are now wondering if they need the left’s help in campaigning for Gaza. An example of this is they way they turned on Jess Philips. And all this is bound up with the exploitation of the voting system. Young Muslims increasingly see Brits as the enemy, and the grooming gangs exploited people they see as inferior or vulnerable, like White working class girls. But these girls are also let down by the White middle class elites who saw their abuse as the price of staying in power. This horrifies Muslims like Miah, but their voices are fewer than those of the exploiters as the Islamists come for you if you speak out.
New public records show that the grooming gangs are real, and that these gangs are all connected through family connections, as Kemi Badenoch admitted when she was secretary of state. And the Islamists delivering the block votes to the Labour party were people like Shabin Ahmed in Rochester. Miah states that a figure in the Oldham establishment contacted him about such figures. They were in and out of Michael Meacher’s office while others were in the local council. A local Lib Dem politico recommended that he get in touch with Warren Bates, a UKIP politician in Angela Rayner’s constituency. Bates was a former miner who had joined five different political parties, but not the Tories. Bates gave a dossier of emails showing that the grooming gangs were operating in Oldham from the BBC. On the list of corrupt politicians were Kevin Fitzpatrick and Jim McMahon, who had made an agreement to cover up the gangs for fear of upsetting community relations, using the terrible murder of soldier Lee Rigby as a distraction.
Miah fought back by standing as an Independent at the local election. He was threatened with libel action by Labour. He was shown an additional series of emails by Hughie McDonald, who had blown the whistle on the gangs to the local Children’s Safeguarding Service, for which he had been suspended and sacked from the Labour party. Tony Lloyd was brought in as Police and Crime Commissioner for Rochdale, eventually becoming a Labour MP. He told critics to shut up for fear of losing Muslim votes. Miah knew McDonald through working for the Anglian charity with White working class kids. McDonald was the Chief Magistrate, and got out and show Miah another dossier, which again the press won’t touch. He had asked questions of the local Labour party and had written an article about the matter for Medium, but the online magazine had taken it down. He then began to post pieces on Facebook. He was then contacted by a group of elderly White ladies, who wanted his help about asking questions about this to council members. He gave them the advice they requested. When it came to their turn to ask this question at a council meeting, they were told that time had run out. The meeting was stopped and the councillors were led out, and the police were called to prevent anyone answering the women’s question. The council leader also responded with a barefaced lie. He had contacted respectable people and their lawyers online in an attempt to get them sacked, and launched a smear campaign against Miah.
The next piece of information was about Shabin Ahmed. There was a rumour that he was arranging for people to see children after seeing him. The police missed nine opportunities to arrest him. Miah feels that the police were both controlled and partners in this affair, as Ahmed also sat on the board of the CAB.
The question of White grooming gangs naturally comes up in the discussion. Miah states that these are different from the Muslim grooming gangs and their motivations are different. Miah asks rhetorically how we can stop the buying and selling of our children. He also states that Secretary Fielding launched an internal inquiry to stop the launch of a proper inquiry. It was given to Andy Burnham and Jim McMahon, who were both implicated in the scandal. Burnham commissioned a toothless inquiry, and the police identified 97 men associated with the attacks. But the police and council shut down the operation as the men were politically connected and the minutes of the decision to prosecute the men were lost. This infuriated the campaigner Maggie Oliver. Malcolm Nevison asked of the review for Oldham and Tilton how you could have a review when it is controlled, telling you who you may see by the people being investigated. Those under investigation contacted the witnesses. The review took three years, and hardly interviewed a single survivor. The only one who was, was due to Maggie Oliver. Schools were also removed from the review’s frame of reference, which also referred to Operation Hexagon. This was a joint operation between the police and OLdham council to go after Miah. Miah agreed to testify against the gangs provided the transcript was included. He was then told that they would only take selective notes. One individual, Kaiser Raymond, withdrew from the review claiming that they had lied about his witness. The report claimed Miah had lied and there was no cover up. One of the girls in the review contacted Miah because of the inaccuracies about her in the review. Burnham then launched Operation Sherwood, and the first thing it did was threaten the girl for speaking out.
Miah called for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs and described how he took out Arood Shah, whom he states was affiliated to the gangsters, at the ballot box. Shah was linked to the getaway driver for a cop killer. She came after Miah. The police told him they would have to intervene and put in security measures. However, Jim MacFarlane, one of the few decent cops, left due to political pressure. Arood was leader of Oldham council, but this didn’t stop her car from being blown up. Jim MacMahon told the Daily Mail that Miah had incited such violence, whereas in fact Miah had just written an article about Islamists using the Israel-Palestine conflict to radicalise young Muslims, which was actually published after the explosion. The Mail still published this libellous article but with Miah’s name removed, so readers could still put two and two together and see it was him.
The conversation then moved to questions of how electoral fraud could be combatted. Should Britain make voting compulsory, as was mandatory in some countries, in order to counteract the influence of the mosques? There was also the problem of apathy in local elections, especially in White working class areas where voter turnout was low, and so the Muslim block vote correspondingly more powerful. Miah was afraid that we are losing our country because of the underlying causes behind the gangs and powerful politicians in our country. Miah discussed his grandfather’s patriotism. He served in the Second World War, and was loyal to this country, as were the second generation of British immigrants. The third and fourth generations are much more conservative or Islamic. Miah stated that when they support radical Islamism, they have no idea what they are really buying into and would probably run a mile if they had to live under sharia law. He compares them to the incel culture in attracting young people.
Despite this, Miah was optimistic because of his own triumph over adversity. For three years he had endured such things as dawn raids while he was still in bed, going out lobbying for votes and taking down the councillors connected to the gangs. His opponents had fast tracked a prosecution to prevent him taking down Amanda Cheriton. Debbie Abraham had doctored correspondence between herself and Miah, but he had kept the original. Miah also writes a blog, Red Wall and the Rabble, stating that the Labour Red Wall was kept up by the green monster of Islam.
Miah also concerned that the Palestinian cause was tainted with anti-Semitism, as the activists involved do not criticise other places where Muslims are persecuted, or where Muslims kill non-Muslims. He also discussed the attitudes of the different parties towards growing Muslim political militancy and corruption. The Conservatives, he claimed, don’t understand it, while Labour had entered a partnership with it. This is shown by Starmer’s speech after the Southport murders. This was all about protecting Muslims and was, Miah claimed, a cynical attempt to make Muslims feel under threat and only Labour could protect them. However, the racial dimensions of this relationship was changing. The powerful roles in these communities previously occupied by Whites were now desired by Muslims, who want the big seat. This was all calculated, and Muslim loyalty to Labour was under thread because of the issue of Palestine. Wes Streeting was also trying to ramp up fear in the Muslim community by talking about attacks on Muslims.. But Miah described how Islamists had turned on the Left elsewhere in the world. In Iran they had lynched left-wingers. He also considered Muslim deference to White politicians as a product of a colonial mindset. Labour still feels it can manage Muslims, but the demographics are changing.
When asked who his favourite heretics are, Miah starts with Galileo as the first one he studied in school. His favourite heretic, however, is Salman Rushdie for speaking out against Islamism in the UK He was concerned about the strength of faith of those calling for the death of blasphemers in the UK as well as the definition of islamophobia as he had seen where this had led in other countries. Do we want to live in a society where we cannot criticise certain ideologies or groups? He also reminded his viewers that it was Starmer who had led the vote against the grooming gang inquiry.
If even a tenth of this is correct, then it shows that Labour is utterly corrupt, at least in those areas where the gangs operate, and the White working class is utterly disenfranchised. Labour are now neoliberals, who are as keen as the Tories on privatisation, including that of the NHS, and destroying the welfare state. As I write, Rachel Reeves is planning to start another wave of ‘welfare reform’, although she’s going to be a bit more cautious this time. The commenters have reminded me that Farage has been described as a safety valve for disaffected Tories. True. Others have called him just a Tory Essex man. He also wants to sell off the NHS and destroy the welfare state.
But Labour seems to have compounded all this with a cynical attitude that views the mass rape of White working class girls as an acceptable sacrifice for gaining power. And behind this is the wider view of White middle class liberals afraid and unable to combat ethnic minority racism because of fears they will be called ‘racist’ themselves’ and because of a fixation on White racism that makes them uncomfortable about any other kind.
Obviously not all Muslims approve of the grooming gangs. The Groaniad published a letter condemning them signed by 500 mosques. As for the issue of Palestine, Gold is a fanatical Zionist and has posted hysterical pieces claiming that anyone opposed to Israel is an anti-Semite and prophesying another holocaust. That clearly isn’t the attitude of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Labour and Palestine or the Stop the War Coalition. But Starmer’s continued backing of Israel has resulted in disaffected Muslims standing as Independents against Labour, though there have also been attempts to found Muslim parties in Britain in the past. Also, I have heard that the Tories also tried to recruit their own set of ethnic community leaders under Dave Cameron. Many of them were also gangsters, who were subsequently arrested and jailed. As should Cameron. Labour had also faced crises over corruption before, as in the 1970s when many of the local parties had very corrupt relationships with builders and property developers. The party managed to survive that scandal, and they could probably survive this.
But only if the corruption is exposed and the corrupt politicians and police officers thrown out and prosecuted along with the gangs.
There have been a number of videos put up these past few days about the Caribbean nations demanding reparations for slavery and questioning whether David Lammy is truly impartial and so fit to represent Britain at the negotiating table. I put this video up yesterday giving my own views on these issues. Here’s my blurb
The Caribbean nations are demanding £200 billion in reparations for slavery, and the current head of the Commonwealth also wants them. Right-wing commenters have raised questions about the impartiality of Labour’s Foreign Minister, David Lammy, who has made comments suggesting that he identifies himself as a Caribbean, rather than a British person, and so will favour them.
Black Conservative Thomas Sowell has argued against the payment of reparations partly because those to whom they should be paid are dead and past help. Many of those countries demanding reparations do so because of the poor performance of their economies after independence. One of the Caribbean countries demanding them has a government that has presided over a failing economy and there have been allegations of corruption. Moreover, White westerners weren’t the only people responsible for the slave trade. By and large Black Africans were sold to us by other African nations. Our strategy for stopping them included not only warfare and invasion, but also the payment of subsidies and compensation for the loss of income from the slave trade. If reparations are to be paid, then these African nations should also pay their whack. And to stop any money disappearing into the bank accounts of corrupt politicians there should be extensive strings on them so that they are spent developing these nations’ economies.’
Since writing this I’ve come across a bit more information on this whole issue. David Lammy is of Guyanese extraction, and has joint British-Guyanese nationality. He has also stood up in parliament and said not only ‘we Caribbeans’, indicating that he identifies himself with the Caribbean nations, not Britain, but also that ‘we Caribbeans have had enough apologies. We want reparations’. This demand makes his impartiality seriously questionable if it does not totally contradict it.
As for reparations, the Caribbean nations have said that they will raise it at the upcoming Commonwealth conference, but the issue is not on the agenda. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t be raised there. The British government has also said that they are not going to pay reparations, but the right is also questioning this after Starmer handed the Chagos Island over to Mauritius, which wasn’t in the Labour manifesto. It’s possible that Lammy will resist these demands for reparations, but if he does, some in the Black community will doubtless compare this with his previous demands and see him as a sell-out.
The Conservatives’ race to the bottom continues. Yesterday, leadership contender James Cleverly was surprisingly knocked out of the race in the third voting stage. With the most moderate competitor eliminated, the divided party is left deciding between two fanatics.
Kemi Badenoch remains the most likely victor. We in the democracy sector remember her primarily for the disastrous Elections Act, which she remains culpable for as the relevant Minister at the time.
On Badenoch’s watch, our democracy was downgraded. The UK’s elections watchdog – the Electoral Commission – was stripped of its crucial independence and powers. Our Mayoral and PCC elections were forced to operate on First-Past-The-Post. A shoddy voter ID scheme was rushed through without consideration for how many it would exclude.
Her opponent, Robert Jenrick, doesn’t exactly have a bright and shiny record either. He’s somehow survived a series of cronyism and corruption scandals. Formerly a moderate Conservative, he’s turned populist in recent years, echoing Farage’s dehumanising rhetoric on immigration and centring his campaign on leaving the European Court of Human Rights.
Both are committed to one cause above all else: fanning the flames of Britain’s never-ending culture wars. These are lazy leaders that boil complicated policy issues down to “wokeness.” They initiate juvenile feuds with students and climate scientists. Instead of laying out a functional vision for Britain, they batter the marginalised who can’t fight back.
The nativist faux populism of Farage and Trump has conquered the Conservatives. To many of us, it all may seem a silly charade, just watching a delusional party completely lose touch with the public and fade off into the political fringes.
But make no mistake, as Labour struggles to win over the public, the far-right’s easy answers will weasel their way back into mainstream political discourse.
This ideology – an unholy synthesis of radical American libertarianism, prejudiced identity politics, and illiberal disdain for democratic institutions – isn’t going anywhere.
Farage and the Conservatives will continue to toe this line over the next few years. Our job is to build a political system that prevents them from gaining an unfair advantage by forcing them to fight fair.
All the best,
Mark Kieran
CEO, Open Britain
.S. On a more positive note, listen to our new APPG members explain the need for comprehensive political reform. Please give these tweets a share and a like to spread the word!
Labour MP Louise Jones expressesconcerns in her maiden speech over low voter turnout, and argues that it is an MP’s “duty” to show that a “vote for democracy matters”;
APPG Vice-Chair and Green MP Ellie Chowns lays out the ambitious plans of the cross-party group;
Lib-Dem MP John Milne speaks on safe seats and the need for PR to make everyone’s vote count at every election, everywhere.’
It hasn’t yet been a hundred days, and Labour’s polling lead is down to just one point.
While the news may shock some political analysts, the underlying context is clear. Trust in politics in this country is at record lows, and dissatisfaction with politicians at record highs. Britons largely feel that the system is rigged in favour of the “rich and powerful”, and the vast majority believe that our system of government needs improvement.
Starmer’s strategy, so far, has been to pretend that Labour won a 1997 vote share, a massive landslide that gives him a “clear mandate in all four nations.” The reality is that he won less votes than Corbyn did in 2019, and that Labour doesn’t even have any MPs in Northern Ireland. In fact, this July we witnessed the least proportional election in British political history.
The PM, in his rousing 2023 Labour Conference speech, rallied the audience against the “shallow men of Westminster,” attacking the toxic political ecosystem polluting political discourse and decision-making. The public more broadly clearly resonates with that sentiment.
But instead of the overhaul Starmer urged for in that speech, we’ve got next to nothing on democratic commitments. If Labour continues to sit on its hands, the public will keep on regarding politicians as self-serving and corrupt. They’ll keep on fomenting distrust – not helped by silly freebies scandals and abrupt resignations.
Sometimes, a refusal to act is an action in and of itself. Starmer’s naïveté is currently carving a path for Nigel Farage and the far-right to reach Downing St, providing them with the fodder they need to exploit people’s frustrations and protecting the electoral system they need to get into office with a minority of the vote.
The UK’s political decline is not a product of any one government, but rather the water we all swim in. Until the new Government can acknowledge that – and act meaningfully to address it – this country will remain divided, defeated, and disillusioned.
All the best, Matt Matt Gallagher Communications OfficerOpen Britain Team
That point about neither Labour nor the Tories having any MPs in Northern Ireland was shown very well in another video from Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre is Irish, and takes a very strong interest in Ulster politics. It’s clear to me that he wants a united Ireland, but one where reunification is done peacefully, democratically and with the support of the Loyalist community. His video remarked on an event staged by Ulster’s DUP, who wished to promote the union and hoped to have Tory MPs from Britain to stress how important Ulster was to it. They invited four, but only one actually bothered to turn up. All four were caught on camera and asked about this neglect. They all waffled and said something about other commitments, but stressed how important the Six Counties still were to them. Robespierre commented that events in Northern Ireland don’t matter to Labour or the Tories, as they don’t have any skin in the game as they have no MPs. In fact the Labour left is sort of allied with Sinn Fein in wanting a united Ireland, and speakers from the Irish nationalist party have appeared on Arise Festival events about socialist solutions to a divided Ireland. Robespierre goes on to ask Loyalists why they’re voting for the Unionists, who aren’t taken seriously by Britain’s two mainstream parties. The implication here is that the people of Ulster, whether Catholic or Protestant, would stand a better chance of having their voice heard in a united Ireland.
I got this Sunday, and since then 38 Degrees have been sending me messages asking why I haven’t signed it and would I like to. Well, I would, but I was busy with other things. But now I have, and I’m putting it up here for anyone else who wants to do so.
I think nearly everybody in the country has been shocked by the revelations about Starmer and his cabinet getting thousands and millions pounds worth of gifts and other freebies from donors like Lord Ali. And someone has also traced a line going from them to a hedge fund. This is almost par for the course from government now of both colours. They all seem to be on the take since at least the days of John Major, whose government was mired in ‘sleaze’. Blair’s government was also caught taking dodgy donations from a motor racing mogul, if you remember. They ended up having to give it back. The Tory party expressed surprise at the time at the corruption. Not that Labour were doing it, so much as how blatant it was. There are people saying Starmer is the most corrupt PM for a long time. And it isn’t just the gifts and donations, it’s the insult to the people who elected him. He and Reeves have told ordinary British working men and women to tighten their belts and expects further cuts, particularly to the disabled, while wallowing in the largesse showered upon them by the filthy rich, who aren’t going to get any cuts or tax rises at all. The last time I looked, one YouTube channel, which I think may well have been Tory but I can’t swear to it, had said that polling now placed Labour only one point above the Tories. Others have said Starmer is even more hated than Sunak. I can well believe. The Blairites are complete whores for all that corporate dosh.
‘David, MPs have taken more than £6 million in ‘freebies’ since 2010 – with half of those donations accepted in the last two years alone. [1] Recent stories – from Keir Starmer’s £2,800 Taylor Swift tickets, to Robert Jenrick’s £75,000 donation from a company registered in an overseas tax haven – have prompted calls for urgent reform. [2]
Although there’s no suggestion that rules have been broken, it begs two important questions: what do private companies and wealthy individuals with business links hope to get from their gifts and donations? And can we be sure that grand gestures like these don’t impair judgements or influence decision-making of those in positions of power?
Right now, public pressure has already forced the Prime Minister to say he’ll pay back some of the gifts received and commit to make Ministers’ declarations more transparent, and put donor Lord Alli under investigation by a parliamentary watchdog. [3] It’s a step in the right direction – but it doesn’t go far enough.
If the Prime Minister is serious about restoring public trust in politics, then he can start by looking to tighten rules that allow MPs of all stripes to take millions in ‘freebies’ each year.A huge petition that pushes for more rigorous rules on political gifts and donations, while the issue is high in the news, could force him to announce bigger and bolder reforms.
So David, if you’re sick and tired of the ‘freebies’ scandal, will you add your name to the petition today?You can add your name automatically with one-click of the button below:
Implement more rigorous rules around political gifts, donations and hospitality and stronger transparency and accountability measures to help restore public trust in our elected representatives and political institutions.
Nick Buckley is a former policeman with very anti-woke views. He’s a staunch critic of multiculturalism, and believes in stop and search as an effective method of stopping knife crime among ethnic minority communities. But he states that it has to be used with those communities’ consent. He’s been a guest talking about this tactic on the Lotus Eaters YouTube channel. In this video he and his interlocutor, whose name isn’t given, talk about the various White victims of racist murders. These include Kriss Donald, who was murdered in Glasgow by a Pakistani gang who were simply looking for a White person to torture and kill. Other victims include a lad called Everett, whose mother was forced to move from the area because of the harassment she was getting from the local Asian population. Another victims is a White girl killed by one of the Pakistani grooming gangs. The list begins with a case where one of the perps in the gang that killed him has been captured, but the others have eluded the law and the case is now closed.
The two discuss these cases because the victims of anti-White racist murders are unknown, or virtually unknown, compared with very well-known Black murder victims like Stephen Lawrence, Victoria Climbie, who was murdered by her aunt and her lover, and Demilola Taylor, a seven year old kid who was murdered by a gang in inner city London, and left to bleed to death in the stairwell of the block of flats that contained his home. Buckley and guest make the point that the Black victims are remembered and the Whites forgotten because the Whites don’t fit the narrative of victimhood. Only brown people can be victims. In the case of the Asian gangs murdering Whites – and they make the point that the murderers on the list are nearly all Asian, with very few Blacks, there is the presumption that White British society is so evil that somehow it led these young men to murder. I haven’t seen this attitude explicitly presented in reports of racial murder in Britain, but it certainly has appeared in America. It was in the case of a young Black man who murdered a White person. When the media reported it, they presented the perp as the victim of White societal oppression, which caused him to kill his victim. It’s discussed by Black American Conservative Shelby Steele in the section of one of his books covering Black racist attacks on Whites in America. But I have encountered the attitude with the very anti-racist types over here that if a White person is bullied by Blacks, it must be due to something the White child did to them first. Buckley considers that this is all due to two-tier policing, and that assaults on Blacks, Asians and women will get attention, but not assaults of White men, who are automatically villains. If an Asian or Muslim had been abused and murdered like these Whites, then they would certainly be presented as the new Stephen Lawrence. But the fact that none of them have shows that there are no White gangs looking to murder Asians.
Nearly all the victims of this racist violence were murdered by gangs. These were organised attacks, not made on the spur of the moment. They were young men defending what they saw as their territory against Whites. Whites are also patrolling their territory in packs, looking to attack racial outsiders, but Buckley argues that there’s a difference in the level of violence here between Black,, Asians and Whites. Whites rarely go so far as to kill their victims because centuries of hanging murder victims has bred the killer genes out of us to a certain extent. This is an argument Edward Dutton, the jolly heretic has made. He’s also cited the case of the Italian aristocracy in the 16th and 17th century. In the 16th century they were lawless and violent killing each other in feuds. By the 17th century they had calmed down and were much more peaceful, because, according to Dutton, the genes that inclined them to violence and murder had been removed from them as a population through the murders they had committed on each other. Theodore Beale, an American Libertarian who blogs under the name ‘Vox Day’ presented a similar argument nearly two decades ago to explain the difference between the levels of violence in Black and White communities. He believed it was much lower in Whites because Whites had centuries of civilisation behind them, which Blacks didn’t, and so were more evolved. Yes, there’s a whole slew of racist assumptions there about the difference between African and European civilisations and the level of violence historically in each. But it was also subject to criticism from people who knew rather more about evolution who pointed out that it didn’t work that quickly.
Going on to specific cases, Stephen Lawrence is very well-known because of the long struggle of the boy’s parents to get justice for their son. There was also a wider political motive, in that the police were extremely negligent and there were corrupt connections between some of the investigating officers and the families of the perps. It also became something of a cause celebre as it epitomised the racism within the Metropolitan police and the resentment this had understandably provoked amongst the Black community. Brian Burden, one of the commenters to this blog, also pointed out that the Met police had tried to smear Lawrence as a drug dealer.
However, Private Eye also published an article stating that the Met showed the same criminal lack of interest in investigating the racist murders of Whites and Asians. A couple of weeks before Lawrence’s murder, an Asian and a White guy had been murdered in separate racist incidents. But these cases were also not properly investigated. This isn’t mentioned by Buckley, but he and the other chap do mention the death of a White man, who died in a similar case to George Floyd, but who is unknown and whose death provoked no outrage or protests.
The pair are also correct when the put the reluctance to publicise cases of anti-White violence and murder down to an attitude among anti-racists that doing so would incite racism against these minorities. This was why female Labour councillor for East Glasgow on the local council was attacked as a racist and thrown off the authority because she dared to ask a question about the rise in the bully of White pupils at the local schools. And I also came across it in the pages of the magazine of the Black and Asian Studies Association when they talked about the murder of Demilola Taylor. At the time, the ethnic identity of the gang that killed the boy was unknown. I think it was later revealed that the gang was racially mixed. But the editor of the magazine jumped to the conclusion that the murders were all Black, and that was why the killing was being reported. Hence she was very much against the reporting of the murder, and demanded to know why the news organisations weren’t reporting all the Blacks murdered by White gangs instead. This attitude revolted me. I couldn’t care less what colour the murderers were. What was appalling was that a young child had died in pain and fear, murdered by a gang of children.
There was a time right at the beginning of this century when Whites formed the majority of victims of racist murders, or nearly so. This was reported in the Independent, and discussed by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown before she went back to ranting about White racism. But interest in anti-White racism and racially motivated violence has declined since. I have no doubt that it is due to the reasons Buckley and his guest say.
The video concludes with the guest wishing that the names of these victims were better known, and hopes that they will if Buckley gets some power. That’s quite an assumption. It might happen under a Reform administration, assuming that if – God help us! – Farage and/or Tice got in, they didn’t immediately dump all the issues they’d been campaigning about. Ditto for a hard right Tory administration under someone like Badenoch. But it wouldn’t happen under Labour. At the moment I think the Labour party’s entrenched attitudes towards racism are that it’s only a White problem, and anti-White and interethnic racism must on no account be discussed. See Diane Abbott’s repeated pronouncements on this.
I’m convinced that the entire anti-racist movement needs a thorough, radical overhaul and must include anti-White and interethnic racism if it is to be a proper movement against racism which reflects the reality of 21st century Britain. This would mean hurling accusations of racism at organisation like Stand Up to Racism and United Against Fascism. I think this would need a mass movement of both Blacks, Asians and Whites to make it very clear that this was anti-racism, not White racism hiding under a cause. And I think at the moment this would be very difficult.
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