Do you remember when, one by one, as the terrible grooming scandals were exposed, MPs walked the plank in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Newcastle? After all, they had let down a significant demographic of their constituents in the most terrible way.
How much more offensive can you get than to be regarded as a piece of meat? To be used, raped and discarded like tissue paper? Surely the daughters of the salt of the earth, the people whose ancestors built the Labour Party, would figure very highly in that party’s priorities?
Of course you don’t: the brutal truth is that those poor girls do not matter at all. As the saying goes, “if you want to see who has power over you, see who you can’t criticise.” The endless pandering towards Islam and reluctance to talk about the terrible, rebarbative subcultures that it spawns has many reasons, not least rooted in politically correct ideology. However, it is also a symptom of the fundamental rottenness of purely “representative” democracy – where all votes are equal, but some votes are far, far more equal than others.
The reason Sarah Champion had to walk the plank is because the Muslim vote is of vital importance to Labour and, of course, will continue to be so as that demographic rapidly grows. Crucially, for cultural reasons that stem ultimately from Sunni Muslim theology, many Muslim communities vote as a collective block on the say-so of community elders. This is capable of producing huge swings in voting patterns, as we have seen in many constituencies where Muslims are a substantial proportion of the electorate.
Although Muslims are just under 5 per cent of the population, this gives them enormous disproportionate power, particularly with regard to the Labour Party. It is almost certainly this consideration that led Jack Straw and Tony Blair to change the Primary Purpose rule in 1997, which greatly contributed to a huge increase in Muslim immigration, much of it from areas of the Islamic world with backward social attitudes, and greatly exacerbating the sectarian problems in society we have today.
It’s the same in other areas: white working class girls may not matter much to politicians, but the votes of professional middle class women – a demographic that is more likely to vote and more likely to be swing voters than practically any other – matters a great deal. Hence the hugely disproportionate influence of feminism in our society and the skew in government policy it produces.
All over the Western world, representative forms of government have presided over the fragmentation of societies, which are now more atomised, more uncertain and confused than ever before. Fixated on their careers, politicians are highly sensitive to target demographics that can swing an election, rather than the health or cohesiveness of society as a whole.
No system is perfect, but it is nonetheless difficult to escape the conclusion that so-called “representative” democracy can never restore true cohesiveness to our society. It has become – and will remain – the plaything of a corporatist elite. Thus, as time goes on, we become ever more fragmented – chopped up, sliced and diced and herded into buckets of identity politics for their convenience. Instead, we must move towards a system of voter-driven direct democracy where politicians will be forced to confront sensitive issues rather than suppress them.
(Image: Piet Theisohn)
