Does it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than two million signatures within a few days?
Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm
Conventional analysis would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors who detest any government. Millions of bitter Remainers signed petitions calling for a second referendum to overturn Brexit for all the good that did them, as Sam Leith points out.
And yet it is the very artlessness of the way a man called Michael Westwood has set out his cause which tells me that his petition on the official parliamentary website does betoken something significant.
“I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election,” the petition says. It’s that simple: the accusation is that Keir Starmer was elected on a deliberately false prospectus and that his administration therefore lacks basic democratic legitimacy.
Whether it comes to axing the winter fuel allowance for 85 per cent of pensioners, sticking inheritance tax on farms, putting up student fees, increasing the use of hotels for illegal migrants rather than abolishing it, presiding over rising domestic energy bills rather than the cheaper ones promised, puling the plug on free speech on university campuses, or generally whacking up taxes to cover a programme it claimed was “fully funded”, there is no disputing that Labour in power is a very different beast to Labour during the election campaign.
Did anyone expect the Chagos Islands sovereignty surrender or the opening of a “dialogue” about UK taxpayer-funded reparations for slavery to grifting Commonwealth regimes, either? I certainly didn’t.
Yet I think that something more than simple voter rage at being hoodwinked is going on out there. Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm sustained both by Labour and the Tories in power since the turn of the century.
Sky-high legal immigration, crude multi-culturalism, moronic homage-paying to the “strength” of diversity, the absence of citizen preference in access to taxpayer-funded public services, the foreign aid bonanza, law and order which is soft on determined criminals but hard on traditional opinions, Islamo-fascism permitted to run rife, the collapse of public sector productivity, cap-doffing to a global asylum system which facilitates illegal immigration, the explosion in the grant-aided NGO “charitable” sector, ever-more outlandish attempts to make certain democratic outcomes – Brexit, scaling down spending on carbon net zero – actually illegal, indigenous white people being given a hard time and then being invited to confess to having unmerited privilege: these are just a few key features of a rotten system which has failed. The administrations of Blair, Brown, Cameron-Clegg, May, Johnson and Sunak are all to a greater or lesser extent culpable for the advance in Britain of this broken “progressive” paradigm which has left western populations in general more fearful, less prosperous and increasingly as mad as hell.
And we aren’t going to take it any more, are we? That is why Donald Trump won a clean sweep in America, why Geert Wilders won in the Netherlands in 2023 and Giorgia Meloni in Italy in 2022. It’s also why a pop-up Nigel Farage entity for the first time actually won a cluster of seats at a British general election run under a first-past-the-post system that sustains barriers to entry so high as to have always previously proven insuperable.
I expected Kemi Badenoch to give the Conservatives a significant opinion poll bounce on the back of her own punchy political persona and various in-built advantages that the official party of opposition possesses. So far, that hasn’t happened and instead Mrs Badenoch has struck a very conventional Tory tone, focusing narrowly on legitimate economic concerns rather than emphasising the catastrophic social recession that voters can see unfolding. Last week Starmer deprived her of the pulpit of PMQs by being absent on another of his increasingly frequent foreign trips. This week she must really blow him up.
Because right now Reform UK is the party in the middle of a purple patch, appearing to connect with a growing public rebellion against the entire the establishment. Farage himself is on the brink of a brilliant policy coup, having apparently convinced the incoming Trump administration to oppose Labour’s planned Chagos Islands surrender.
If the US does indeed formally object to the giveaway, which includes a proposed 99-year-lease for Britain over the island of Diego Garcia where the US has a key military base, then it is almost inconceivable that Keir Starmer can plough on with it. Instead, he and David Lammy will have to U-turn and retain UK sovereignty to the delight of millions of patriotic British voters.
A radical populist tidal wave is brewing
The personal friendship of Trump and Farage, as well as some similarities of style, put the latter in an especially strong position should ever-bigger swathes of the British electorate find themselves looking around for a Trump-like figure to take on the establishment over here. Yet the Tory frontbench thinks, speaks and dresses as conventionally as ever, stuffed as it is with Tobias Ellwood clones like Alex Burghart and Jesse Norman or earnest-browed nanny staters on the distaff side.
A lesson of Trumpism, surely, is don’t be Mitt Romney – the pro-system, “old rules” GOP guy who has just exited US politics a broken man.
The bookies’ odds on which party will win the highest number of seats at the next UK general election suggest that the Tories and Labour are basically tied at just longer than evens. But the longest price you can get on Reform is 9-2. For comparison, the Lib Dems are rated a 50-1 shot.
A radical populist tidal wave is brewing: an uprising of the common people, if you like. Michael Westwood’s petition has another few million signatures in it yet, I’ll venture. Of course, it won’t “work” in its own narrow terms: Starmer will not be forced to call a fresh election anytime soon.
But is it significant? Does it matter? Only those whose political punditry is about as good as the 1987 hurricane-prediction prowess of Michael Fish will tell you “No”. They are largely the same people who scoffed at the very idea of Brexit, depicting it as a fringe obsession with almost zero traction until the referendum was upon us. Pay them no attention.
A version of this article appeared originally on Patrick O’Flynn’s State O’ The Nation
Comments