One state, one party, one leader

What’s going in Britain isn’t a matter of parochial interest. All Western countries are making giant strides towards political uniformity, which validates the not-so-subtle hint in the title above.

Political uniformity is an inoffensive term for an offensive concept: tyranny. Any government, no matter how benign, must be held accountable. And the existence of an effective opposition is the only way to hold the government to account in a democracy.

This is so obvious that one is amazed to see how few Western countries can boast that kind of accountability. They all have different parties vying for power. But that’s just a distinction without a difference if all the main parties proceed from the same principles and have the same aspirations.

In most European countries social (which is to say socialist) democracy reigns supreme. In Britain, for example, we have Labour Full Strength, Labour Lite (aka the Tories) and Labour Extra Duty (aka the LibDems).

Whatever the issue, they all try to do more or less the same thing, which is maximising state control over the individual, a system otherwise known as socialism. The state acts as a father to the people, assuming the paternal functions of hectoring, providing, guiding – and ultimately dictating.

But at least we have two, or even three, parties of different genealogy, proclaimed principles and, at times, demographic strengths. This leaves the door ajar for genuine pluralism suddenly to kick it open. That happened in Britain in the ‘80s – whatever anyone may think of Margaret Thatcher, no one can say her brand of government was a slightly diluted version of Labour.

That illustrates my point: opposition parties may offer more or less the same policies at any given time, but as long as they exist so does the ‘potentiality’ of genuine accountability, to use Aristotle’s term.

It’s that potentiality that Keir Starmer’s policies aim to destroy. In yesterday’s interview, the Labour leader, widely expected to form the next government, outlined some policies guaranteed to turn Britain into a single-party tyranny riding roughshod over our entire constitutional history.

Sir Keir, according to his acolytes, has set out to “strengthen our democracy”. That’s what creating a tyranny is called in Orwellian.

The general thrust is to expand the franchise in a way that would push conservative voters not just to the margins but beyond them. That’s to be achieved in two different ways, with a third one looming on the horizon.

First, Sir Keir (isn’t it wonderful that the leaders of our two openly socialist parties are both knights of the realm?) says “common sense” demands that EU citizens who have worked and paid taxes in Britain for a long time should be allowed to vote in general elections.

That was a hint at the Lockean fallacy of an unbreakable link between taxation and representation. That can work as an incendiary revolutionary slogan but not as a sound idea.

To begin with, every major Western country has millions of people who don’t pay any taxes and can still vote. And the same countries welcome millions of foreign visitors who pay sales tax with no representation anywhere in sight.

Such qualifications for representation as taxation or, in the past, freehold on property only matter not in se but for what they reflect: a vested interest in the country’s destiny, a sense that anything that happens in the country is your personal business.

The country is you, you are the country – this self-perception may not be a sufficient qualification for voting, but it certainly is an essential one. And citizenship is a way of formalising it into a bilateral compact.

Being born in a country may be advisable but, as I can testify from personal experience, it isn’t necessary. I wasn’t born in Britain, but I’m a British subject not just formally but also in self-perception.

Britain is my country, and my allegiance to her comes from visceral feeling, not just passport. This though I spend almost half my time in France, a country I like a lot, in some aspects more than Britain. But I don’t have the same sense of kinship with France. It’s a great place, but it isn’t mine. That’s why I wouldn’t feel entitled to vote there even if I could.

For the same reason, incidentally, I never voted in the other two countries whose citizenship I had: the Soviet Union and America. The former I hated, the latter I quite liked, but I never felt at home in either. That’s why I had no desire to vote in either Soviet sham elections or American real ones.

So what about those EU citizens who have lived here for years, bending under the same burden of taxation as the rest of us? Do they have the same sense of visceral kinship with Britain?

I don’t think so. If they’ve lived in Britain for many years (‘decades’ was the term Starmer used), they’d qualify for British citizenship if they applied for one. Since they never have, they clearly don’t regard Britain as their country. That’s why they shouldn’t have a voice in deciding who governs it.

You only have my word for it, but I’d feel exactly the same way even if I thought that those two million potential voters would solidly support conservative policies. As it is, every poll I’ve seen shows they are predominantly socialist. Moreover, they tend to support Britain’s re-entry into the EU, thereby spitting on the very same democracy Sir Keir professes to “strengthen”.

The other ‘strengthening’ policy he favours is lowering the voting age to 16. The usual – and spurious – argument in favour of that idiocy is that such children have more of a vested interest in every policy because they’ll have to live with its effects longer than grown-ups.

By the same logic, the franchise should be extended to new-born babies. In fact, an Oxford don seriously advocated lowering the voting age to six, a self-refuting argument if I’ve ever seen one.

Again, Starmer supports this policy for the same reason he wants all foreign residents to vote: 16-year-olds are even likelier than their elders to vote for socialists. That would greatly enlarge Labour’s electoral pool.

As it is, the polls show that, though Labour’s lead is significant, it’s still not enough for an overall majority. That means a Labour-LibDem coalition is likely.

Now, the Liberal Democratic Party is Labour’s ideological twin, except for two ironclad commitments. One is return to the EU, ideally de jure but at least de facto. The other is ditching Britain’s ancient first-past-the-post voting system in favour of proportional representation (PR).

That would destroy what has always been in effect a two-party system, increasing the influence of marginal parties, such as the LibDems themselves, the Greens, the nationalist separatists and any other you could think of. Most of them are solidly socialist, which means British conservatives would never again be represented no matter how much tax they pay.

The LibDems will demand PR as payment for their entering a coalition with Labour – that’s for sure. They may also demand another referendum on EU membership or, barring that, at least chiselling in stone all the EU laws we still must obey even though we can no longer vote on them.

If such a coalition is voted into power, it will be democracy upheld but pluralism murdered. Britain would become a single-party tyranny. Such is the “strengthening” of democracy that Sir Keir’s “common sense” demands.

Citizens of other countries, take notice: the same can happen to you. In fact, in most places I look at, it’s already happening.