Britain's "none of the above" election
Nigel Farage has pinned a bull's eye to the Tories, but it's Labour that should be feared
There’s been some excitement in Britain over an opinion poll putting Nigel Farage’s Reform party one point ahead of the Tories, some three weeks before the general election on July 4. A YouGov poll puts Labour on 37 per cent, Reform on 19 per cent, the Tories on 18 per cent, the LibDems on 14 per cent and the Greens on seven per cent.
Farage claims that Reform is now the principal opposition to the presumed imminent Labour government. He has seized on this poll to bolster his declared aim to destroy the Conservative party and lead a proper conservative movement that arises from the ashes.
What’s been mostly overlooked in this poll, however, is an interesting straw in the wind. The Tories’ polling numbers have remained static. Labour, however, is down one point. Reform has jumped by two points. This suggests that Reform is picking up votes from Labour voters.
I suggested this might happen here, as soon as Farage stormed back into frontline politics on June 3.
Traditional Labour voters — the blue-collar workers of the famous “Red Wall” — are socially conservative. They are attached to family, community, the nation and its traditional values. Their identity is wrapped up in all these things.
They believe in the difference between men and women dictated by biological reality. They are appalled by the anarchy and incitement to violence and jihad on British streets. They are horrified by uncontrolled immigration transforming their country into a place they don’t recognise. They want to uphold a country they can recognise as home, with others whose values they share in a sense of common national purpose. They want to defend that nation through properly policed borders. And they are prepared to die in its defence.
These people, feeling betrayed by the un-conservative Conservative party, are rightly suspicious of the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer. They understandably think that someone who is so reluctant to say what he would do on so many issues has something to hide.
They have every reason to fear a Labour government under his premiership. Here’s why.
Culture war
Labour promises to turn on the full powers of the Equality Act and introduce a “landmark Race Equality Act”. This threatens “wokery” on speed. It will put rocket fuel behind the coerced conformity of “hate crime”, enforcing the racist libel of endemic “white privilege” and the chilling effect of the “Islamophobia” canard. It will green-light speech policing, political indoctrination and vexatious claims against employers. And never forget that Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, took the knee to Black Lives Matter and proudly tweeted the picture.
On transgender, Labour will put into reverse the slow progress that’s been achieved towards sanity, women’s interests and the protection of vulnerable children from the abuses committed against them through ideological zealotry. Labour’s proposed ban on “conversion therapy” will make it positively risky for adults to question a young person’s decision to take devastating puberty blockers and undergo even more devastating gender reassignment surgery. It will also reduce safeguards against ideological child abuse by reducing from two doctors to one the medical authority required to approve a gender change.
Immigration
On immigration, the manifesto is singularly opaque and vague. It says Labour will set up a new Border Security Command with new counter-terrorism powers to tackle the people-smuggling gangs across the English Channel — but without addressing how it will actually stop this traffic. Similarly, it promises to “properly control and manage” net migration “with appropriate restrictions on visas and by linking immigration and skills”. But what does this waffle actually tell us? Only that Labour doesn’t want to tell us what it will actually do and whether it even wants to reduce net migration at all.
A better clue was provided in a leaked letter signed in 2020 by Starmer — the former human rights lawyer — in which he promised to close down immigration detention centres, liberalise family reunion, allow asylum-seekers to look for work and give foreigners the vote. And he boasted of having sued the Government to increase benefits for asylum seekers, and complained the system aimed to “deter, not support” migrants who came to Britain illegally.
Constitutional change
Labour is threatening to continue the profoundly destructive “year zero” onslaught upon Britain’s constitutional structure started by Tony Blair. It says it will replace the House of Lords by “an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”. This appears to be Gordon Brown’s 2022 proposal for an Assembly of the Nations and Regions. It threatens to hand power from Parliament to local power brokers who, it appears from Brown’s template, would be able to veto parliamentary legislation backed up by input from the Supreme Court. It’s a far-reaching and profoundly anti-democratic proposal that would diminish parliamentary accountability and replace it with factionalism, rule by politicised lawyers and constitutional paralysis.
Climate
On the already ruinous commitment to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2060, Labour would more than double down by aiming to completely decarbonise the system by 2030. Quite, quite bonkers.
Middle East
On the neuralgic issue of the war against Israel — promoted so viciously by so many Labour supporters and others whom the party hopes will vote for it — the language in Labour’s manifesto is deliberately ambiguous. Stating that “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people” and that it is “not in the gift of any neighbour,” it commits Labour to recognising a Palestinian state “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” This leaves up in the air the question of whether a Labour government would recognise “Palestine” unilaterally — as demanded by so many of its Israel-hating activists —thus negating any negotiated solution and imposing upon the Jewish state an entity designed for its destruction. The ambiguity means that a Labour government may do just that.
European Union
On Britain’s relations with the EU, Labour will relitigate Brexit while pretending it isn’t doing so. The manifesto states that Labour won’t rejoin the EU’s single market or customs union or allow once again free movement between the UK and EU. But when “Remainer” Starmer was asked how far his desire for a closer relationship with Brussels would go, he replied: “Everything is going to have to be renegotiated”.
As for free movement, Labour would “do whatever we can to make it easy for people to travel on holiday, get in to the continent and back”. But as has long been crystal-clear, there’s no such thing as a two-way street with Brussels. The EU will use any deal with the UK to weaken the independence of Brexit Britain and destroy its ability to further its own interests.
Of course, the great irony is that, with the rise of what Labour regards with horror as the “far right” in the EU — and especially if France now gets a “far right” prime minister as a result of the election called by a panicked President Emanuel Macron after the victory of Marine le Pen’s National Rally in the European Parliament elections last week — Starmer might become somewhat less enthusiastic about snuggling up to Europe.
But Labour’s direction of travel is nevertheless clear: to find ways of neutralising the UK’s independence from Brussels and thus betraying the referendum decision taken by the British people without being seen to do so.
Votes for juveniles
Finally, there will be little prospect of a different government reversing any of this because Labour will reduce the voting age to 16. Thus juveniles will be able to ensure that the ruinous ideological transformation of Britain will never be reversed, as the public is denied the power of democratic choice by Labour’s gerrymandering of democracy itself through the deniable instrument of age.
In short, a Labour government would be a menace: a threat to parliamentary democracy, a threat to Jews, a threat to women and psychologically disturbed children, a threat of capitulation to Islamist and anti-white extremism, a threat to tolerance, rationality and freedom of speech, and a threat to Britain’s hard-won national independence of action.
It remains to be seen whether Farage will be knocked back by the discovery that a number of Reform candidates have unsavoury views and allegedly even more unsavoury links. Even if some of these claims turn out to be distorted, it’s clear that his eleventh-hour decision to re-enter the political fray by taking over Reform means he hasn’t done what Starmer did with the Labour party— purge it of the demonstrably undesirable who could destroy its reputation and authority.
Populists come to power when the political establishment comprehensively fails the people and democracy therefore cannons into a brick wall. The outcome is the emergence of political parties which, while meeting this profound democratic need, may nevertheless have unsavoury or otherwise indigestible elements. That’s what happens when the centre fails to be the centre any more.
Much may yet happen before Britain goes to the polls. Over both the rise of Reform and the likely prospect of a Labour government, we have the Conservative party to thank for having abandoned the national interest along with the very notion of conservatism.
The Tories don’t deserve to win. But the country doesn’t deserve a Labour government.