BRITISH politics is beginning to shatter into a thousand pieces.
This may seem like an exaggerated statement. But it comes in the context of the two main parties that have divided rule between them for over a century at historic lows in terms of support, and a time when academics such as David Betz are seriously opining that Britain shows all the characteristics of a nation about to enter a civil war. Betz identifies fragmented and oppositional demographics, failing economic performance and infrastructure, hated and failing political parties and institutions, clumsy and unjust policing and growing sectarianism as key factors that create a civil war, and he says that Britain has every one of these features in abundance.
The two-party political system and regular elections are supposed to impart both accountability from the ruling class and representation for the rest of us in ways that unite a nation. Populism emerges when the ruling political and media class and their interests seem divorced from the interests and needs of the average citizen. The 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 collapse of the Labour Red Wall which benefited Boris Johnson were warnings for the two main parties. Both were being told by many of their core voters that they were no longer trusted and supported. But both main parties had long since abandoned the ordinary people of this nation and in their different ways dedicated themselves to abstract ideology, transnational bodies and other loyalties in ways that had become more and more obviously inimical to the interests of the average citizen.
As false as the idea of a gender glass ceiling has been, the image is useful if we apply it to what caused the rise of Reform, the Brexit vote, and widespread public contempt for both the Conservative and Labour parties. Imagine the political and ruling class, largely all the same kind of people with the same attitudes, all affluent metropolitan liberals with luxury beliefs systems, being that glass ceiling. Imagine this ceiling being smooth and impenetrable. Other ideas never get a look in. Social mobility is limited. What’s presented on the bottom of the glass ceiling is a screen, perhaps the TV news, but more and more people can see through it.
They can see that only those attitudes and those people get to the top. The uniformity of the political and media class is ever more obvious. The fact that the main parties can’t listen and don’t deliver is ever more obvious. And yet nothing changes. The people below aren’t heard, and the people above keep failing collectively but succeeding individually, exposing a greater and greater gap between their capability to rule and their rewards to themselves for ruling. What do the vast majority of people who have been saying things that have been ignored for decades – like wanting to leave the EU or opposing mass immigration – do?
They start to smash at the glass above them. At first by voting elsewhere, and next by public protest. If the political class still refuse to listen, things get uglier. The fragmentation begins with the formation of populist alternatives, but rapidly spreads in a series of cracks testifying to a growing social collapse and a growing destruction of the sense of a united country of peaceable and shared interests. The ruling class is terrified of this process, but accelerates it by its efforts to prevent it.
When the current Labour administration was elected, it wasn’t endorsed. It didn’t gain a mandate in the way democracy is supposed to work. Only 19 per cent of the voting-age citizenry voted for Labour and Sir Keir Starmer. Forty per cent were so disillusioned they didn’t bother to vote at all. Yet hatred of the Conservatives combined with the vote of the right being split between them and Reform with voting on the left being far more tactical and therefore far more effective delivered an enormous Labour victory.
It was purely illusory. What got into power was not a very popular party whose massive dominance in number of MPs reflected genuine support. What got into power was a slightly less hated main party, whose dominance was wildly out of proportion to the number of people who trusted and liked them. Half as many people who supported Labour voted for Reform, but Labour won 412 seats and Reform only five. Such unjust disparities are disastrous for democracy and came just as people were already highly unsatisfied with the entire political class.
A wise incoming government would have been aware of how conditional, unlikely and frankly freakish its Commons majority was. It would have been cautious and made some conciliatory populist moves. But this government did not do that. It showed no awareness of how fragile its support was and how big the cracks in the ceiling of elite conformity had become. Instead it displayed the classic behaviours of a government just before a revolution. It was arrogant and high-handed, incompetent and clumsy. It set out to crush opposition and it was terrified of certain opinions, which it has tried to silence through mass arrests and swift imprisonments. It has done nothing about the key issues causing populist discontent, but at the same time isn’t quite as insane as its most fanatical fringe of voters would like it to be. It’s done things which many people consider unforgivable, but not enough for the extremist groups it has nurtured and pandered to.
Putting forward ‘Islamophobia’ laws and doing nothing about dinghy invasions and mass immigration has been a gift to Reform, pushing their vote beyond 30 per cent. But offering a diet of halfway house on Israel and Iran, by unfairly castigating Israel while simultaneously supplying military air support, is not the meat that radical leftists want. And so we see a further crack in the glass ceiling of conformity, a further fragmentation of the British political scene.
This fissure, this time, is a split on the left. The Labour Party have long since abandoned the working-class voter. What they have been sustained on in modern times is a very peculiar mix. They have had support from successful entertainers, teachers on the public purse, and academics and students. These have largely replaced working-class votes as Labour attitudes have become more and more metropolitan. The other group sustaining them has been earned by an alliance with Muslim interests. Many Labour MPs have become dependent on the Muslim block vote organised via mosques and ‘community leaders’.
The formation of a new party combining the radical student leftist and the disgruntled Muslim who wants even more radical submission to his faith from the party he votes for (such as outright hatred of Israel) is as existential a threat to the modern Labour Party as Reform is to the Conservative Party. Reform have already reduced the Conservatives to a rump likely to fall to their lowest-ever status at the next election. Reform have already overtaken the Conservatives as the main party of the right, despite several blundering missteps along the way.
The as yet unnamed new party due to be led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana would do exactly the same to Labour since it would draw away so many radical youth votes and so many Muslim votes. These could be pivotal to Labour chances, especially in northern areas with high Muslim populations. Despite having itself served almost as a British Muslim Brotherhood in terms of the extremist views it has pandered to and excused, Labour hasn’t been extreme enough for the people who chant Corbyn’s name or who demand total condemnation of Israel. The youth who falsely believe that Israel is committing genocide and the Muslims who see any criticism of them as Islamophobia are ready for this kind of very radical Red-Green Party. Some analysis suppose that it is the Green Party that will lose the most votes to a Corbyn-led new party, and there is an environmental extremist factor that will also be pandered to. But the key damage would be to Labour. On current polling, the new party would get 15 per cent of the vote, having reduced Labour to the same 15 per cent rating.
Let us be honest about what a Corbyn-led party would represent. It would be as much a party linked to and supportive of terrorism as Sinn Fein is. It would be the kind of party that illustrates the worrying generational extremism in the 18-29 age group. Thirty-three per cent of this group would vote for a platform which supports Hamas. Our youth have been brainwashed with the vilest attitudes imaginable, all disguised as empathy and compassion but all perfectly aligned with terrorists and savagery. Labour’s desperate lowering of the voting age to 16 would be another attempted solution that makes this situation worse.
There can hardly be a greater indictment of the Labour Party than this. Like an overly indulgent parent of a sociopathic child, they have nurtured and raised the very thing that might destroy them. Having allowed Corbyn to lead them, they may now be slain by their former leader. Having called everyone with sensible views on immigration and terrorism far-right, they became dependent on the kind of people who back actual terrorist organisations. Leftists generally have had a terrible record on political violence, social extremism, and State oppression, but having nurtured that kind of politics, they are set to be devoured by it too.
There is still the possibility that this new party won’t materialise, since at the moment they can’t even agree on a name (Arise and, hilariously, The Collective have been proposed). But if it doesn’t, something similar soon will and it will almost certainly be focused on Muslim interests. And it will show us what Labour helped create and still seems to deny – that you can’t welcome violent and radical extremism that supports terrorism into your country, or your party, or into the education of your young people, without disastrous social and national consequences.
If the fragmenting shards fall in a direction favourable to the right, there is still hope. If it’s a Corbyn-style party that determines the future, we really are finished.
