Starmer's Britain is no longer a democracy

Yahoo

12-02-2025

What happened? When did we finally lose the plot? When did Britain decide to replace our experiment in democracy with a tyranny of the human rights lawyers? I didn't see any of this in the Tory or Labour manifestos.
The immigration tribunals may as well be trolling the public; their rulings are incendiary. Palestinians living in Gaza have been granted the right to live in the UK despite applying through an online scheme designed for Ukrainians. An Albanian criminal has escaped deportation in part because his son dislikes the 'type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad'. A Pakistani previously jailed for child sex offences has been allowed to stay in the UK because it would be 'unduly harsh' on his children.
These UK decisions push the ECHR's strictures to new extremes, and seem designed to mock the law-abiding majority, to signal that a new juristocracy is in charge and that the public has no choice but to suck it up.
Writing in The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, the Canadian psychologist Gad Saad provides my favourite explanation of how this madness has come about.
Just like people's physical brains can be hijacked by brain-worms, their bodies reprogrammed to serve the parasites' interests, our minds can also be infected by 'ideological neuro-parasites'.
These 'idea pathogens' – wokery, relativism, communism – can cause as much damage as the physical variety, and lead to an outbreak of 'suicidal empathy' of the sort crippling Britain today.
An ability to understand the feelings of others is useful, but in this case empathy is pushed to an extreme and weaponised against the host, namely Britain. Victims are tricked into self-sacrificial and self-destructive behaviour by the canny ideological parasites that have taken over their minds, as with seemingly intelligent immigration judges willingly granting asylum status to criminals on the flimsiest of grounds, impoverishing Britain further at a time when Rachel Reeves has already run out of money.
To make matters worse, suicidal empathy is a classic case of what Rob Henderson of the Manhattan Institute calls a luxury belief: supposedly avant-garde (but in fact idiotic) ideas that confer upon those who loudly profess them upper class status while harming ordinary people. These inane opinions are highly contagious, especially among naive, trendy or weak personalities; proponents tend to be insulated from their consequences, unlike the public as a whole.
Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer and his gang of vandals are held in high esteem by the virtue-signallers, while the normies pay a catastrophic price in higher crime and taxes. The result is a gigantic and unforgivable Trahison des clercs, as the philosopher Julien Benda put it, a betrayal of ordinary folk by the clerisy.There ought to be a simple solution to this nonsense: a democratic revolution. The public hates ridiculous rules that put criminals before the law-abiding. They are aghast at the latest stories from the immigration tribunals.
There are moments in history when populism is dangerous, when it leads to mob rule, demagoguery and fascism, but these days ordinary folk are, by and large, more liberal-minded and less prone to irrationality and hyper-emotion than the hyper-educated, such as your average human rights lawyer.
The average punters' views on gender, immigration and welfare are more sensible than those of the elites; this is a benign populist moment. People power is thus the only possible vaccine against suicidal empathy, the only way to inoculate the body politic against the spread of idea pathogens.
The problem is that we no longer have a functioning democracy: too few politicians see their jobs as representing the interests and views of the electorate. The government is no longer in control of the apparatus of state, and many ministers are content with belonging to a Potemkin cabinet, to pretend to rule while officials, European human rights, ICC or ICJ judges, international bureaucrats, the OBR, the Bank of England or the Climate Change Committee take the real decisions. A permanent and unreformable bureaucracy pursues its own ends.
Voters are furious at stories such as the chicken nuggets case, but the Government refuses to do much about it. Nothing changes, regardless of who they vote for. The ECHR is sacrosanct, a pseudo-constitution, outside of the political sphere, with anybody who dares to question the status quo beyond the pale. The ongoing Blairite project of the past 28 years helped empower a Blob that governs in the same way regardless of who is in office.
The situation in America is similar to that in Britain, but Donald Trump gets it and has a plan to fix it. He appointed judges keen to return to a more literal reading of the constitution during his first term, forcing elected state and federal politicians to start taking responsibility again.
Trump II will turn his sights onto the second, great pathology eating away at democracy: the emergence of an administrative state, replete with agencies and quangos, that believes that it is morally and legally entitled to ignore the entreaties of the executive. It is an unconstitutional fourth branch of government, and Trump wants to subsume it back into the executive branch he runs.
The reason he hired Elon Musk to take a chainsaw, Javier Mieli-style, to the federal government wasn't just to save money: it was also a declaration of war against the Blob.
Musk put it perfectly: 'If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, then what meaning does democracy actually have?'
Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage need to learn the right lessons. Badenoch has been too cautious on the ECHR. She needs to commit to leaving – and also to quitting other international bodies, including various UN conventions and the ICC. The Government, not the courts, must be able to choose which immigrants are let in.
Farage's challenge is to demonstrate that he could conceive and execute a Trump-style plan to destroy the Blob on Day One, and that he would be able to recruit senior outsiders to help with the gargantuan task of purging and reconstructing the state.
We will soon find out whether we are living through the last gasp of a dying, authoritarian, elitist technocratic regime, or whether Britain's democracy is truly finished.
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