GORTON and Denton, the shock that (kind of) wasn’t. Anyone who follows politics could have, and did, predict many of the salient elements of that by-election in advance – the large Muslim block vote, the sectarian division between the ageing and increasingly desperate white working class and a younger, angry but self-confident and rapidly increasing Muslim minority. Voter fraud, an almost ubiquitous issue in constituencies with large numbers of Muslims, predictably made an appearance, the only new twist being ‘family voting’ at the polling booth as well as, one presumes, the hoovering up of large numbers of postal votes by the community patriarchs. In fact, the family voting had a strangely analogue feel to it given that there have been reports in previous by-elections of Muslims taking the far more digital and covert approach of snapping a picture of their filled-in ballots to prove they had voted in the approved way.
Predictably depressing as all that was, there was even more to be depressed about. Much has been written about the damage that male ego is doing to the right on British politics. Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage is the leading actor in this grim charade. Having previously dispatched both Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe for no other reason than that he saw them as a personal threat, he now faces both as competitors in the form of Habib’s Advance UK and Lowe’s still to be minted Restore Britain.
Lowe – or ‘Caesar’ as one of his more excitable young lieutenants called him – has not exactly covered himself with glory either with the high-handed way he rejected Habib’s overtures concerning a proposed merger between Advance UK and Restore, which would have at least led to a less fragmented field on the crowded right-of-centre political space.
All that said, it is time that we turned our attention away from the well-covered ground of strutting male peacocks to the equally toxic behaviours of the female of the species. Hannah Spencer, the winning Green Party candidate, is the poster child for an ultra-woke, terrifyingly deluded generation of young middle-class women who align themselves with radical Islam. On what sane basis would they wish to do so? One can only surmise it is through that supreme expression of female egotism – pathological altruism: that emotive belief at you can cure everything through boundless love and understanding, and that the resources necessary for caring for others, especially those who are defined or self-defined as victims, are somehow limitless. The most notorious instance of this was the Angela Merkel’s ‘refugees welcome’ policy – an impulsive, emotionally-led act that led directly to the mass assault of German women in Köln on New Year’s Eve in 2015.
Most ominous of all was the seeming apathy in the white working class. Yes, by-elections tend to have low turnouts, but it wasn’t as though the coverage of Gorton and Denton didn’t emphasise its crucial nature: how, if the Greens won, this election would create the template and momentum for Islamists to repeat the triumph in constituency after constituency.
Even so, only 47 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote. Remember that although about 30 per cent of the constituency was Muslim, the much younger Muslim demographic meant that disproportionately many of them would be too young to vote. This means that well over half of the rest of the electorate, overwhelmingly indigenous, simply did not turn out and this, as much as the organisation of the Muslim block vote, is what swayed the result. It was not always thus: fewer than ten years ago the Brexit referendum was won precisely because many habitual non-voters from the working class turned out in droves. That they no longer do so suggests that a huge fraction have simply given up on our so-called democracy. Ominously, as voting declines, the street protest marches are growing exponentially in size and frequency: just a week before the by-election in the same city of Manchester, a ‘Remigration March’ by the genuinely far right Britain First party resulted in clashes between marchers and Muslim protesters.
Life comes at you fast: since I first thought of penning this melancholy blog in the wake of the by-election result, a major conflict has begun in the Middle East, and as I write it is just hours after the news arrived that Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei has been killed.
These essentially sectarian incidents have occurred in little more than a week. Their frequency and drama do seem to be increasing, moving with an inevitable grim momentum. Despite the Government hesitating to back American action against the evil Iranian regime, it seems highly probable that reprisals will be taken on British soil, perhaps by Iranian Republican Guard sleeper cells who have been transported here on the small boats.
It is sobering to reflect that those who live through truly historic events often do not recognise their significance until much later. Who knows, the tumultuous events of the past few days may well be marked by historians as the point that Britain finally descended into that often predicted, but until now never realised, low-level civil war.
