Irony is simple truth with nuance and complexity mixed in, and the great irony of Britain's EU membership was that, along with "straight bananas" and increasingly jackbooted Brussels-centered integration, the EU also introduced an element of much-needed democracy into British politics.
That might sound a little odd to some ears, especially Anglocentric ones, but the fact is that there are few systems less democratic than a single-member-constituency-based two-party system like the one that chooses Westminster governments.
Think of it as a forest where the big trees never fall down, while new political growth on the forest floor languishes and finally perishes in perpetual shade below. Britain's dirty, little, undemocratic secret is that almost nobody actually votes for the government—or has ever voted for it.
For example, in the 2017 general election, only two thirds of the electorate actually voted (68.8%), with another third not even bothering to show up. But what about the majority of voters who did vote? The truth is that most of them were voting negatively against one of the two main parties that actually had a chance of forming a government.
Nothing makes this clearer than the swing at that election. Instead of being from one main party to the other, the swing was from smaller parties to both main parties. The Tories, despite supposedly doing badly and fighting an abysmal campaign, were up 5.5 percentage points from 36.9% of the vote in 2015 to 42.4% of the vote. Labour meanwhile gained an enormous 9.6% percentage points from 30.4% to 40% despite being led by Jeremy Corbyn, an actual anti-White racist.
Very, very few of the voters for either party were actually voting positively for Labour or for the Conservatives. Why would they? Just look:
The so-called "Labour voters" were voting to keep the Conservatives out, while the so-called "Conservative voters" were mainly interested in keeping Labour away from the levers of power.
In 2015 the big parties gained a total of 15.1 percentage points at the election, basically squeezing the smaller parties—the parties that people actually wanted to vote for.
UKIP, which scored 12.6% of the vote in 2015, only got 1.8% in 2017. Did that segment of the population just suddenly decide that they hated UKIP? No, but based on the zero MPs UKIP had got with over an eighth of the vote that segment of the voters quite logically realised that their only input into British democracy in a Westminster election would be a negative one. Accordingly they voted as individuals to either keep Corbyn or May out of Number 10 Downing Street, in the process appearing to validate the Labour and Conservative parties.
What happened in 2017 has long been the default position of Britain's undemocratic system. But the fact that the system was challenged at all—and is still being challenged by the ongoing Brexit chaos, which involves some rather shocking polls for next week's European election—is all down to the EU.
Yes, the main infusion of real democracy into Britain's fake democratic system has been entirely due to Britain's membership of the EU, something that most British people see as a coercive and undemocratic system that has been imposed on it by its political class and the media, which, yes, it is.
So, how did this come about?
As the EU increasingly centralised under Germanic influence in the 1990s and the Zeroes, that institution increasingly felt the need to seek democratic legitimacy. The form this took was to transfer some minor powers to the European Parliament. More significantly, in an attempt to signal "democracy," European elections were based on a system that allowed more real choice to the voters. This started in 1999, when the UK switched from a single-member constituency system to multi-member constituencies.
Ironically this change was imposed on the UK—like so much else—by the EU. In the 1992 Maastricht Treaty it was agreed that that European Parliamentary elections would be held in accordance with a "uniform procedure," basically every country using the exact same voting system. After that proved unworkable due to disagreements, this was switched to a policy of adopting "common principles," including a commitment to proportional representation.
Instead of echoing the Westminster single-member constituencies, European elections in the UK now divide the country into just twelve multi-member constituencies, which elect 73 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). For example, the South East England constituency now elects 10 MEPs, Scotland six, and so on.
This means that there is little chance of shutting out the party you hate the most, as in the Westminster elections. But it also means that voting for a reasonably popular independent or small party candidate is no longer a "wasted vote," as the 3,881,099 votes cast for UKIP in the Westminster election of 2015 were.
The result of this change was that voters were able to vote positively for parties they actually liked, instead of negatively against the major party they hated more than the other one. The effects of changing the voting system soon showed. In 1999 UKIP managed to get 6.5% of the vote at the European election. In a Westminster vote, such numbers would have resulted in absolutely nothing, but this time the party got three MEPs with all the salaries, grants, funding, and media access which that involves. This enabled them to build up the party even more and raise their banner higher as an effective positive choice. With the UK media concentrating on demonising the BNP at the time, UKIP also got a much easier ride from one of the key anti-democratic forces in the British political system.
The next European Parliamentary elections saw the party's continued rise: 2004 - 12 seats, 2009 - 13 seats, 2014 - 24 seats. (The big leap from 13 seats to 24 was probably due to the destruction of the BNP vote, following their own European breakthrough in 2009, when even they won two seats).
Even more disturbingly for the status quo, the rise of UKIP in the European elections, started to slowly bleed into Westminster voting behaviour, despite the fact that single-member-constituency voting systems continued to punish anyone voting for a party outside the big two (unless the vote is concentrated in one area, as with the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Democratic Unionists). In 2001, UKIP got 1.5% of the vote in the Westminster election—and of course zero MPs—followed by 2.2% in 2005, 3.1% in 2010, and then a massive 12.6% in 2015—which also resulted, of course, in zero MPs.
But this was extremely problematic for the Conservative Party led by David Cameron (2005-2016), because many Tory voters were strongly Eurosceptic and a growing number of them were quite willing to "waste" their votes on UKIP to send a strong message to the Conservative leadership. Cameron's great fear was not that UKIP would win Tory seats, but that by luring away Conservative voters, it would split the anti-Labour vote and allow Labour's Ed Milliband to become Prime Minister.
In fact, this is what the Brexit Referendum was all about, an attempt to decisively nail down the European question so that UKIP would no longer be able to bleed the Tories on the Right. This would then allow Cameron to sew up the right-wing vote—and forget about it—as he then moved increasingly towards the centre, with socially leftist policies, like gay marriage and the fast-tracking of female candidates and MPs (e.g. Theresa May), to take votes away from Labour and the Liberal Party.
On paper it was a brilliant strategy, as the Brexit Referendum question put the question in the most stark terms possible—IN or OUT!!!—and it was clear when the referendum was announced that few people wanted a total break.
But a funny thing happens to people when they are given real options. In fact, they may behave in ways different from what the establishment expects or tells them to do. Over the course of a lengthy campaign, Britain's deeply rooted and partially-submerged resentment against the EU started to rise up.
This was obviously aggravated by the migrant crisis that the EU's most powerful politician Angela Merkel had unleashed in her own misjudged attempt to demonise her right-wing opponents and reach towards the political centre, but mainly it was the result of EU membership, as with so much else in modern Britain (globalisation, mass immigration, homosexualisation, etc., etc.) being effectively imposed on the British people by a fake democratic system.
How delicious it was, then, that, thanks to one of the results of that tyranny—namely, ever deeper and more coercive membership of the EU—the UK was able to get a little taste of something it had never experienced in its long history, actual, positive, voting-for-what-you-like democracy.
The result has been a sea change and a semi-revolution in British politics, one that has irrevocably altered Britain's course and may yet wreck the Conservative Party and even its symbiotic partner in crime the Labour Party. Imagine then what would be possible with a real democratic system in the UK, one where the votes were proportional to the seats won and the voters had as many parties as they felt they needed to express their positive preferences on issues that concerned them.
It may be an additional political irony that Britain exiting the EU could see a resumption of the old, stale unrepresentative two-party system. But right now that somehow seems highly unlikely. So thanks for that at least, EU!
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders and, without his permission, Counter-Currents' The Alternative Right
That might sound a little odd to some ears, especially Anglocentric ones, but the fact is that there are few systems less democratic than a single-member-constituency-based two-party system like the one that chooses Westminster governments.
Think of it as a forest where the big trees never fall down, while new political growth on the forest floor languishes and finally perishes in perpetual shade below. Britain's dirty, little, undemocratic secret is that almost nobody actually votes for the government—or has ever voted for it.
For example, in the 2017 general election, only two thirds of the electorate actually voted (68.8%), with another third not even bothering to show up. But what about the majority of voters who did vote? The truth is that most of them were voting negatively against one of the two main parties that actually had a chance of forming a government.
Nothing makes this clearer than the swing at that election. Instead of being from one main party to the other, the swing was from smaller parties to both main parties. The Tories, despite supposedly doing badly and fighting an abysmal campaign, were up 5.5 percentage points from 36.9% of the vote in 2015 to 42.4% of the vote. Labour meanwhile gained an enormous 9.6% percentage points from 30.4% to 40% despite being led by Jeremy Corbyn, an actual anti-White racist.
Very, very few of the voters for either party were actually voting positively for Labour or for the Conservatives. Why would they? Just look:
 |
| You don't vote because you love them. You vote because you hate them. |
In 2015 the big parties gained a total of 15.1 percentage points at the election, basically squeezing the smaller parties—the parties that people actually wanted to vote for.
UKIP, which scored 12.6% of the vote in 2015, only got 1.8% in 2017. Did that segment of the population just suddenly decide that they hated UKIP? No, but based on the zero MPs UKIP had got with over an eighth of the vote that segment of the voters quite logically realised that their only input into British democracy in a Westminster election would be a negative one. Accordingly they voted as individuals to either keep Corbyn or May out of Number 10 Downing Street, in the process appearing to validate the Labour and Conservative parties.
What happened in 2017 has long been the default position of Britain's undemocratic system. But the fact that the system was challenged at all—and is still being challenged by the ongoing Brexit chaos, which involves some rather shocking polls for next week's European election—is all down to the EU.
Yes, the main infusion of real democracy into Britain's fake democratic system has been entirely due to Britain's membership of the EU, something that most British people see as a coercive and undemocratic system that has been imposed on it by its political class and the media, which, yes, it is.
So, how did this come about?
As the EU increasingly centralised under Germanic influence in the 1990s and the Zeroes, that institution increasingly felt the need to seek democratic legitimacy. The form this took was to transfer some minor powers to the European Parliament. More significantly, in an attempt to signal "democracy," European elections were based on a system that allowed more real choice to the voters. This started in 1999, when the UK switched from a single-member constituency system to multi-member constituencies.
Ironically this change was imposed on the UK—like so much else—by the EU. In the 1992 Maastricht Treaty it was agreed that that European Parliamentary elections would be held in accordance with a "uniform procedure," basically every country using the exact same voting system. After that proved unworkable due to disagreements, this was switched to a policy of adopting "common principles," including a commitment to proportional representation.
 |
| 1999 European elections: the dawn of democracy in the UK |
This means that there is little chance of shutting out the party you hate the most, as in the Westminster elections. But it also means that voting for a reasonably popular independent or small party candidate is no longer a "wasted vote," as the 3,881,099 votes cast for UKIP in the Westminster election of 2015 were.
The result of this change was that voters were able to vote positively for parties they actually liked, instead of negatively against the major party they hated more than the other one. The effects of changing the voting system soon showed. In 1999 UKIP managed to get 6.5% of the vote at the European election. In a Westminster vote, such numbers would have resulted in absolutely nothing, but this time the party got three MEPs with all the salaries, grants, funding, and media access which that involves. This enabled them to build up the party even more and raise their banner higher as an effective positive choice. With the UK media concentrating on demonising the BNP at the time, UKIP also got a much easier ride from one of the key anti-democratic forces in the British political system.
The next European Parliamentary elections saw the party's continued rise: 2004 - 12 seats, 2009 - 13 seats, 2014 - 24 seats. (The big leap from 13 seats to 24 was probably due to the destruction of the BNP vote, following their own European breakthrough in 2009, when even they won two seats).
Even more disturbingly for the status quo, the rise of UKIP in the European elections, started to slowly bleed into Westminster voting behaviour, despite the fact that single-member-constituency voting systems continued to punish anyone voting for a party outside the big two (unless the vote is concentrated in one area, as with the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Democratic Unionists). In 2001, UKIP got 1.5% of the vote in the Westminster election—and of course zero MPs—followed by 2.2% in 2005, 3.1% in 2010, and then a massive 12.6% in 2015—which also resulted, of course, in zero MPs.
In fact, this is what the Brexit Referendum was all about, an attempt to decisively nail down the European question so that UKIP would no longer be able to bleed the Tories on the Right. This would then allow Cameron to sew up the right-wing vote—and forget about it—as he then moved increasingly towards the centre, with socially leftist policies, like gay marriage and the fast-tracking of female candidates and MPs (e.g. Theresa May), to take votes away from Labour and the Liberal Party.
 |
| David Cameron about to be hit by the door on the way out. |
But a funny thing happens to people when they are given real options. In fact, they may behave in ways different from what the establishment expects or tells them to do. Over the course of a lengthy campaign, Britain's deeply rooted and partially-submerged resentment against the EU started to rise up.
This was obviously aggravated by the migrant crisis that the EU's most powerful politician Angela Merkel had unleashed in her own misjudged attempt to demonise her right-wing opponents and reach towards the political centre, but mainly it was the result of EU membership, as with so much else in modern Britain (globalisation, mass immigration, homosexualisation, etc., etc.) being effectively imposed on the British people by a fake democratic system.
How delicious it was, then, that, thanks to one of the results of that tyranny—namely, ever deeper and more coercive membership of the EU—the UK was able to get a little taste of something it had never experienced in its long history, actual, positive, voting-for-what-you-like democracy.
The result has been a sea change and a semi-revolution in British politics, one that has irrevocably altered Britain's course and may yet wreck the Conservative Party and even its symbiotic partner in crime the Labour Party. Imagine then what would be possible with a real democratic system in the UK, one where the votes were proportional to the seats won and the voters had as many parties as they felt they needed to express their positive preferences on issues that concerned them.
It may be an additional political irony that Britain exiting the EU could see a resumption of the old, stale unrepresentative two-party system. But right now that somehow seems highly unlikely. So thanks for that at least, EU!
______________________________________
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders and, without his permission, Counter-Currents' The Alternative Right
