Today we start a regular series on the decay of Representative Democracy in the globalist age and the need for more Direct Democracy to redress the balance between the people and the establishment elites. It will comment on current news and opinion from this perspective.
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Ireland’s Heart of Darkness
Ireland is in the wars these days, almost literally. As most readers will be aware, a week ago last Thursday a terrible attack in a Dublin school, leaving three children and two adults injured, led to widespread rioting. The riots were blamed – of course – on ‘far-right agitators’. The alleged perpetrator, described as ‘an Irish citizen’, was later revealed as a man of Algerian origin who had been due for deportation 20 years ago, fought the order for five years and eventually obtained an Irish passport.
To whatever degree all this is true, if seems fairly clear the riots were the product of escalating tensions owing to recent mass immigration and extremely rapid demographic change in what was until very recently an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society. Rather than confront the issue, the Dublin elites doubled down and in response are proceeding with a deeply sinister hate speech bill which could see any political content, even unshared, deemed to be offensive leading to a jail sentence.
Ireland has a long history of censorship, previously at the behest of the Church. That said, the rapid cultural transformation from a deeply Catholic country to a highly authoritarian, super-woke globalist colonial outpost is a terrible wonder to behold. Its zealotry can only really be matched by Mark Rutte’s now thankfully defunct administration in the Netherlands and the proposed mass sequestration of Dutch farms.
This raises the question – could there be an inverse correlation between country size and the adherents of its elites to globalism? In all Western nations, the political class increasingly regard national politics as merely a stepping stone to greater things, and in relatively small countries such as Ireland or Holland the domestic opportunities post-politics are presumably fewer compared with the international sinecures one could hope to land for playing the globalist game. Either way, in Holland the madness of the elites provoked widespread civil disobedience, in Ireland outright violence, showing how unstable the failing representative model of democracy is becoming.
Still, for those of us of a pro-Brexit and British Unionist persuasion, some gallows humour was to be had in this grim business. Ulster men and women were put in the bizarre position of watching buses burn in Dublin rather than Belfast over essentially sectarian tensions. To cap it all, graffiti appeared in strongly republican West Belfast stating that ‘Irish Lives Matter’, presumably aimed at the government of the ‘Free State’ to the south. Meanwhile Sinn Fein, who some time ago foolishly junked their anti-EU, Irish Catholic ethno-nationalism for globalist wokery, have faced an almighty backlash as sell-outs and traitors. One’s heart bleeds.
All that remains is for some enterprising Unionist politician to reach out to nationalist voters and, with as straight a face as possible, state how much he empathises with the Irish need to protect their identity and explain this as one of the benefits of both Brexit and the Union. In the South, by contrast, it seems it will soon be illegal to be Irish at all.
The discomfiture on the faces of the Shinners would be truly glorious to behold.
Frost Needs to Understand the Power of the Network
Lord Frost writes in the Telegraph that the web of international treaties and institutions is undermining national democracies. David Frost is the hero of many Brexiteers, including myself. He is also one of the most interesting thinkers in the Tory Party (talk about being damned with faint praise, but there you go). However, on this occasion he has to some extent confused cause and symptom. Although international bodies and treaties have long existed, their proliferation in recent years is primarily as legalistic outgrowths from the extremely powerful networks of communication which have developed between the trans-national elites, and so tightly bond them together.
A consequence of the information age, these new global networks are so powerful precisely because they are organic rather than designed. They allow for decentralised agency, variability of scale and no single point of failure. (Despite what many believe, a vast, co-ordinated globalist conspiracy is a practical impossibility, as conspiracies rely on secrecy and therefore scale extremely badly.) The relationships between the international treaties we see and the networks of communication which underlie them are akin to the sprouting of mushrooms on the forest floor and the vast mycelium network which underlies it: yes, you could chop the mushrooms, just as you could leave an international treaty, but in both cases the underlying networks will remain eternal.
This is why Frost’s solution of hacking away at international treaties is not sufficient, because the largely subconscious alignment of global elite thinking, values and actions would still persist. We have already seen how destructive and malign this groupthink can be during Covid, when ruinously almost all governments, whether bound by treaties and obligations or not, acted in a rigid lockstep with each other.
What needs to be strengthened are the vertical mechanisms of accountability between the governors and governed through Direct Democracy and Right of Recall to bring the system back into balance. Until that happens, our democracies will continue to fail in their duties.
They Shall Not Pass
Some have mournfully remarked on the depressing contrast between the blocking of fascist marchers during the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and the inability to curtail the pro-Palestinian protests in London and other cities which have been tinged, to put it mildly, with grotesque displays of anti-Semitism.
No one to my knowledge has yet commented that a reason for our pusillanimity, or indeed when tackling Islamism in future, may be due in part to our reliance on Qatari gas, itself a consequence of our banning of domestic fracking to appease the immensely powerful international green lobby.
Not for the first time we see a vicious circle where globalism and elite sinecurism in one area of policy undermines the nation state in another.
