FOREVER & EVER, AMIN
Whatever the result today (and the one clear signal from the polls is that not one of the companies involved has a clue which way it will go) it will not have been democracy in any recognisable form.
Proper democracy and genuinely free voting can only be said to have taken place when:
- The electorate is genuinely informed about the issues and their relative significance
- The voters have not been threatened or bullied in any way
- The vote has been called willingly by the Government of the day
- All the previously agreed rules and regulations have been observed by those on either side of the argument(s).
If anyone still believes the electorate knew which way was up on this, the second Referendum to be held about Britain’s EU membership, then they simple aren’t informed about just how uninformed the average voter was.
I have sighed, slapped my forehead, sworn at the television, and at times laughed out loud at the opinions expressed – and cynically encouraged – about, for example, how the UK will be frozen out of trade, how the EU can be reformed from the inside, why we must be safer attached to the biggest basket case outside Brazil, and how we should not be voting in the same way as people we dislike. Some of the ludicrous hopes and laughable aspirations have suggested that a great many Brits simple cannot extrapolate or discern conclusions from general events and governance behaviours any more.
And of course, the cancer of our age – ideology that was past its sell-by date long before best-before was invented – evokes denial on a delusional scale.
But the real culprit dissuading any exercise of rational assessment or emotional identification has, as always, been the disinformation dished out by mass market media. I have always found it amusing that while hacks call my profession ‘hidden persuaders’, the facts we used to persuade consumers had to be stood up using field tests and research data. No such onerous insistence on the Truth exists to worry the Fourth Easte: “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” as one apocryphal journo is alleged to have long ago asserted.
Nobody on either side of the debate has so much as managed to attach any glory to itself on this dimension….let alone be covered in it. I could, right now, pull out seventeen completely misleading articles and ‘news’ items quite deliberately glossing over contrary evidence in order to suggest bogus outcomes and malign motives. Twas ever thus, people say – but today no more than half a dozen reprobates with varied business agendas control how some 80% of all Western editorial is filtered. The abolition of Net Neutrality will make that situation even more distorted; but nobody gives a monkey’s about it, so I long ago gave up posting on the subject.
The spread and digestion of information in 2016 is nothing more than the reassurance of the somnambulant by the sociopathic. It causes direct democracy to change, imperceptibly over time, into passive bondage.
Bullying threats have been, above any other feature, a one-way street during this referendum. Whereas the Leave camp had nobody to threaten – it was (and is) a motley crew of people out for more independence, engaged in a mass revolt against Big Process – the Remain Empire of Dissuasion stretches far beyond these shores: it has been Rome to the Spartacans, and is motivated by the same fear of freedom contagion.
The forces aligned against an independent and entrepreneurial Britain have included Wall Street, Washington, the US State Department, Brussels, NATO, Frankfurt, the Whiteminster Establishment, multinational business, the CIA, and all three sets of security services involved.
Over the last six weeks alone, those in favour of Brexit have been subjected first of all to the sort of cajoling usually reserved for kids who insist that playing with matches can be fun; then a fear campaign of such patronising idiocy it may yet do for several senior political careers. This was in turn followed by thinly veiled threats from Barack Obama, Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and (latterly) Wolfgang Schäuble….and topped off with a naked threat from Chancellor Osborne to immediately put up taxes if we didn’t behave ourselves.
Once this had all backfired, MP Jo Cox was slaughtered in broad daylight….so the Remain campaign plus its media chose to blame ‘Brexit estremists’, ‘racist’ UKip….and then harrass canvassing Vote Leave staff with feral screams of “Murderers”. It was about as clear a case of mob bullying as one could hope not to see.
Time will tell where the real blame lies for the murder, and hopefully produce a more balanced examination of some of the players involved – minus the Princess Diana deification fest that followed the heinous act. The only certainty at this stage is the profoundly disgusting way in which Remaindeers chose to exploit and mislead in its immediate response to Cox’s death.
Demands for democracy that come from lobbyist pressure always evoke a suspicious response from me, because at least some of the agendas remain hidden. The reason they stay unnoticed in the penumbra is their selfish nature, designed to advantage one group at the expense of society as a whole. I have always said – and, in the absence of contrary evidence – stick to my conviction that, for example, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove foresee a British future largely opposed to the one I’d like to see.
The chief element of unhealthy campaign content, however, derives from the fact that the Government – or to be more exact, the Establishment – has given way to demands for a Voice under extreme duress. This was obviously true of both Camerlot as an élite, and the Labour Party’s deluded belief in the willingness of Big Nanny Bertha Psychopath to stop murdering her charges, and change instead to a policy of nurturing them. From Day One, their attitude has been “Oh alright then, if we must“.
Like political correctness, radical feminism and uncontrolled immigration, secession from the EU has never been either approved or embraced by (at the very least) a sizeable proportion of the British electorate. Thus a referendum that should be solely about escape or not from the ignorant zealotry of Imperialist megalomaniacs has become an outpouring of resentment towards those with a life-mission to make the unnatural seem normal – and thus maintain their wholely undeserved power and privilege.
I firmly believe that had the referendum campaign never happened, Jo Cox would still be alive today. But the real guilt for her death, history may well show, probably lies with the insufferable superiority complex and “we know best” attitude of those who promote minority causes. Examine the assailant and his victim: a more disturbed quintessence of frustration – and a more perfect target for it – would have been hard to find.
This does not in any way excuse such a foul act: but ultimately, it does demonstrate yet again that the final outcome of feather-bed intellectual élitism will always be the violence of the trampled.
Having been forced into a sham demonstration of ‘democracy’, it never occurred to the Establishment to have it take place on a level playing field. Cameron’s opening act was to declare even Cabinet Ministers off-limits for economic, fiscal, security and foreign policy information – a move which (if we had made any progress towards the long-promised written Constitution) would have been declared illegal.
The same applies to the decision to use government funds – ie, taxpayers’ money – to fund an All Homes mailshot at a cost of some £9million. Were the CoI still in existence, this misuse of public money to underwrite a political aim would have been dismissed out of hand – especially as the leaflet was so blatantly anti-Brexit. But then Camerlot was quick to abolish the CoI – along with Legal Aid – as means of protecting the citizen.
Symptoms of other murky behaviour have been glimpsed, but remain as yet unproven. The sending of voting cards to non-British voters is one, the use of foreign marketing professionals masquerading as canvassers another. The latter practice has provided a neat way for the Remaindeers to get EC and Wall Street help without money changing hands – and don’t dismiss this as far-fetched. The case of Thanet electoral fraud in particular involves the selfsame practice used by Camerlot during the 2015 election.
The incursion of the central Bank governor Mark Carney into the fray was not just unwise and desperate – it represented yet another attempt to position the Remain case as having official backing, and perhaps even the seal of Royal Approval.
Throughout the referendum, in fact, I have been again and again reminded of the behaviour of White House staff during the 1972 Nixon campaign. That was positioned, not as an ordinary Presidential election, but as The Campaign to re-elect the President. A vote for the Democratic candidate, it seemed, was an unseemly and unpatriotic act.
Practically all David Cameron’s speeches have adopted a similar tone of “the greater British interest” lying in its role as a tug being dragged down by the multiply torpedoed EUsitania. As an example of 180° anti-Truth, it has no equal in British history.
When the referendum was declared, I half-jokingly suggested we use a heavy level of UN observation to oversee the niceties and formalities of electoral democracy.
It is with more than a little sadness I now suggest that, had that surveillance role been given to the United Nations, this entire plebiscite might well have been judged well below the standards expected of First World democracy.
The four conditions I gave at the outset of this post represent the obvious reasons why UN surveillants would have been less than impressed.
Yet even with all those pro-Establishment conditions in place, I would suggest strongly that the result declared at some stage over the weekend will be either a victory for Brexit, or a narrow scrape through by the Black Knights of Camerlot and their willing collaborators.
Both sides, I am sure, will regard the result as far from final. As with Scottish independence, the issue of a federal Europe will remain a hugely divisive issue in UK politics. The Referendum will solve nothing: but it will demonstrate without any doubt at all that in the 45 years since we joined the Common Market, no Establishment has managed to unite the British people behind European federalism.
For that reason alone – along with the 192 others to be found here – I would ask every Undecided in the land to take the safe option, and Vote Leave.
“The key consideration in elections is who does the counting” J. Djugashvili
The Slog 