Did you sign it, then? And if so, what were your expectations? That Sir Keir Starmer would look at the figures and say – perhaps with a tinge of remorse – ‘Yup, that’s it, I’m bang to rights, we’ll have an election?’. Or were you simply hoping to annoy him? If so, I assume you are disappointed, because Sir Keir doesn’t look very annoyed to me.
It turns out we are no better than those liberal lefties who can’t believe that other people have different views
The petition to demand a general election on the grounds that the people who didn’t vote Labour on 4 July are upset at the result so far has almost 2.7 million signatures. There are many depressing things about this country, including Sir Keir and his inept, flailing, mindless administration and the worst front bench in living memory, but the petition depresses me more than most of them. I had thought we were a little better than that. I had thought that was one of the things – one of the important things – that distinguished us from those insufferable middle-class liberal lefties who cannot believe that other people have views which differ from their own. And if they do have those views then they are not merely wrong, but loathsome. And perhaps reprehensible. And that those views shouldn’t count because they should be illegal. A kind of totalitarian mindset, as well as being the solipsistic disposition of a not terribly bright 13-year-old.
Surely it could not be further from our own state of mind, which allows for the possibility of difference, for a multiplicity of opinion, and does not go off the rails, doolally and shrieking, crying and tearing its hair out, when there is an outcome with which we might disagree. I suppose those rednecks storming the White House on 6 January 2021 should have disabused me of that notion – but I kinda made allowances for them because they were American and, as Tom Petty put it, raised on promises (which can only rarely be kept). That sort of thing couldn’t happen here, could it?
Oh yes it could. I am beginning to think that The Spectator should offer mental health counselling to readers who are still sobbing because a democratic election turned up a result they did not like, just like the editor of the Guardian offered to her staffers who were distraught at Donald Trump’s victory. I had thought that beyond hilarious. Rather less so right now. Mental health counselling, maybe some yoga and a spot of street drumming. That should ease the anguish. Or you could start a petition…
I voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, but it was a close call. Indeed one of the aspects which finally tipped me into voting ‘out’ was the odious hauteur and snobbery of the Remain campaign. But in truth, I was always a little short of being gung-ho on the actual issue – several pints short of the full Farage, so to speak. But when they tried to nullify that vote, using the apparatus of the state, using the usual gallimaufry of whoreish lawyers, using EU legislation, using anything which came to hand, just because their side lost – that’s when I was really gripped by fury, and wrote a short book about it.
The presumption of those smug but gainsaid people made me incandescent, and all the more so because I kind of expected it from them. And then the inevitable petition, with all those scumbags behind it – Alastair Campbell, David ‘Plank’ Lammy, that ghastly Gina Miller. A petition demanding we have another referendum because they didn’t like the result.
The very same arguments for reversing the Brexit result are now being advanced to rerun 4 July 2024. The people I have spoken to insist that while Labour’s majority was large, its vote is quite shallow and in any case represented a minority of people in the country overall. Back to that petition in 2019 and – check! Exactly the same argument: too slim a majority to count and a minority of people in the country.
So it is with the facile insistence that Sir Keir and co ‘lied’ to us before the election about what they planned to do. Goodness – as if they were the first party in the history of our democracy to have done such a thing. The ‘lying’ trope was central to the Remainer cause, if you remember – the complainants conveniently forgetting the mountains of disinformation laid before the electorate by, among others, George Osborne, the then chancellor.
Then there’s the argument that the disastrous consequences of a Labour victory could not have been foreseen and that therefore we need another election – check! Exactly what the Remainers said about our referendum. How could they have known, those ferret-bothering Untermensch in Hartlepool, what would transpire?
Let them have another go at voting and persuade them that this time they should get it right. In every case the arguments are identical. I suppose it’s worth pointing out that the petition to rerun the Brexit referendum secured more than six million signatures, while the one to rerun 4 July has managed less than half of that so far. This suggests to me quite strongly that anti-democratic left-wing morons are, sadly, better at organising than anti-democratic right-wing morons.
Oh – and then there are the signatories who insist it is all just a joke intended to get up Labour’s nose. Lighten up a bit, we’re just having a LAFF. It’s a joke, innit?
No, sorry. It is not a joke. It isn’t funny, unless you’re an idiot. Instead it is a betrayal – firstly and most importantly of democracy. A betrayal which is becoming more and more common, as if we were tiring of the concept of democracy itself. But then it is also a betrayal of a political disposition which respects the opposing point of view and will take defeat in its stride, rather than mewling like a spoilt three-year-old who has just had its idiotic aspirations denied. Ah, blame me for my naivety. I had thought we were not like that.
Comments