“The young are the barometer of a nation”

The barometer Trotsky talked about has fallen off the wall and smashed. Now real people are about to cut their feet on the shards of glass.

Anyone who has read my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick knows I have misgivings about an inordinately large franchise. And I’m not the only holder of this subversive thought.

Edmund Burke wrote that in his contemporaneous Britain there were only about 400,000 people capable of voting responsibly. Adjusted for population growth, today’s number would be about five million. Hence, since the actual size of our electorate is closer to 50 million, one has to infer that the requirement for responsible voting has been dropped somewhere along the way.

The reason is obvious. Ever since government by divine right was replaced with government by manipulation, politicians have depended on a silly electorate easy enough to manipulate.

The quickest way of achieving this devious goal is to lower the voting age. The young, so beloved of Trotsky and other tyrants, are so beloved specifically because, while their gonads are at their most active, their brains aren’t yet even wired properly.

This is an ideal combination for expert manipulators to take advantage of, and they’ve always done so in spectacular fashion. Every revolution in modern history featured mature gentlemen inciting murder, but the young actually perpetrating it.

Everywhere in the West the voting age is being pushed down, which is illogical. After all, in Burke’s time the average life expectancy in Britain was 41. Hence, arithmetically speaking, 18-year-olds were middle-aged then, and one could have understood allowing them to vote.

Today’s 18-year-olds are children physiologically and, typically, infants intellectually. Easy to organise into a rioting mob, they’re incapable of passing mature judgement on even trivial matters.

If you work for a company, would you feel comfortable if the entire management team were made up of scrofulous adolescents? Yet, though managing a business is child’s play compared to running a country, we feel that children ought to have an equal say in how the country is run.

The folly of this is being demonstrated even as we speak. A couple of days ago a gaggle of teenagers were asked on TV how they liked being excluded from voting in the referendum. They were aghast.

“We’re the ones who are going to live with this, so we should have a say,” was the general consensus. By the same logic, 2-year-olds will live it for even longer, so should they vote too?

The demographic break-up shows that the young went for Remain as solidly as the mature people went the other way. Fair enough, but now they’re acting not just like harebrained adolescents, but like babies throwing their toys out of the pram.

A mob of predominantly adolescent idiots are demonstrating in Westminster, demanding that we hold another referendum because they don’t like the result of the first one. And almost three million similarly handicapped persons, again most of them young, have signed a petition to that effect.

Even more bizarrely, many have also signed a petition for London to split away from Britain and enter the EU on its own. Admittedly, though the de jure aspect of this would be hard to work out, de facto London already doesn’t look English.

Descendants of those who made Britain great number a mere 40 per cent of the city’s population, which partly explains London voting to Remain. Most of its denizens must feel they’ve left England already.

There’s no legitimate reason to complain about the referendum. The turnout was the highest of any election since 1992, and Leave got more votes than Yes to Common Market in 1975, Major in 1992, Blair in 1997 and Cameron in either 2010 or 2015.

But the young don’t ponder, nor can they understand, such incidentals. Given the odd prod here or there, they’ll be happy to exert their pedocratic rule by mob action.

And prodders, foreign or home-grown, aren’t in short supply. That slimy fish Sturgeon is threatening to veto our exit in Scottish parliament. Lawyers and their hangers-on pontificate on the referendum not being legally binding. Assorted MPs, past and present, roll on the floor frothing at the mouth.

The stage is set for the EU, in cahoots with our governing spivs, to pull the same trick they’ve pulled so many times before. They could change the EU charter cosmetically, possibly allowing us to soften some of the social provisions, to regain some token control of our borders, perhaps even to repudiate a move towards a closer union.

After that they’ll claim that the deal has changed enough to invalidate the referendum – the EU the British voted to leave is no longer there. Then our own MPs, barely a quarter of whom supported Leave (contrasted with the 52 per cent vote in favour, this shows how out of touch our governing spivs are with the very demos in whose name they govern), will grasp the proffered straw with alacrity and then…

I don’t know what will happen then. All sorts of possibilities are on the table, including street battles and a likely disintegration of social order. What I do know is that we shouldn’t hold our breath. Leon Trotsky may not yet have said his last word.