Don’t vote

As the reader will probably know, the leader of the Labour Party was electioneering ahead of polls in May when he had his own “bigoted woman” moment – made worse, because at least Gordon Brown’s security detachment didn’t lay hands on Gillian Duffy as did the gorilla who manhandled [assaulted] the publican Rod Humphris. However, the incident won’t do Starmer or his colleagues any harm.

The UK Government – which is the City of London and military intelligence amalgam above and beyond the puppet show that is the Commons in Parliament – would surely be looking to manipulate the public so that at the next General Election it votes to remove the Tory executive which must be, going forward,  irredeemably damaged goods due to the dismay and hurt caused by the economic blockade for which the Coronahoax was a pretext. Allegations of Tory sleaze, so the playbook would inform, would be the ideal grease to apply for dislodging incumbent Conservative Party executive branches, and this must be why there is a proliferation of stories at the moment in respect of the subject, culminating at this time with Starmer accusing “the government of ‘sleaze, sleaze, sleaze’, during a PMQs debate”.

As such, the upcoming local elections will be about creating a perception of Labour potential to win a national vote, and thus UK Government will be counting on the people who participate in these things to cast votes for a Labour candidate more times than they do for a Tory one. Proof of the pudding of this is how corporate-media turned the Humpris incident into a joke by encapsulating it with a reference to a catchphrase used by a fictional pub landlady in a soap opera – even though Humpris’ criticisms are more fundamental than Duffy’s, getting to the crux of the disease of UK politics as they do (he attacked the conspiracy between parties in opposition and in government to enact an agenda that isn’t truly related to the problem that is said to have elicited it). The long and the short of it is that Starmer’s run-in with a member of the public doesn’t fit UK Government’s agenda, and so only “Bigotgate” gets elevated into a pivotal career (Brown’s) breaking moment.

UK Government, perhaps, has leeway in which it can afford to be relaxed, as it probably understands that the automatic, undaunted Tory voter contribution will be less than its Labour equivalent, and the difference between the two will be enough by which to establish the appearance of Labour good performance. On the other hand, voter turnout reduced to the bare bones participation of the fanatical – which local elections almost fully constitute by the usual standard – is potentially highly embarrassing at this juncture more than ever before, because it will come in the midst of a great abuse for which large scale boycott could only ever signal a rebuke.

That’s why, although it has been argued at FBEL before that there might be case-by-case justification for voting in a local election – as opposed to in a general election or by-election for a parliamentary seat, where there is no such thing – the time has come where it should be recognised that general participation in local ballots, whether they be held at significant moments in the course of destiny or not, if they are of the system designed specifically for the purpose, merely empowers UK Government all the same. This system won’t accommodate the means to its own demise, so it’s pointless to dream otherwise. The solution must be the grass roots creation of commonwealth “moots”, courts and self-defence capacity at local level, and it must be born outside of the system, to oppose the central legislative hegemony, and its enforcement agents – and these things are outlaw in nature from the central power’s perspective.

But, in fact, none of this constitutes the adoption of a new position – as can be seen when looking back at several FBEL articles, which is what this piece is actually created to encourage the reader to do (because nothing new can be written on the topic).

To begin, there is what might be called the definitive FBEL article on the topic, Local Elections Explained: A Clique Elects Its Own, The Public Think About Ramifications For Westminster, from which the following extract is taken:

It remains to be seen what can be done; at the moment, with the normalcy bias in the UK as it is, there is a danger that all local political parties can boil down to is “save our NHS” politics – i.e. opposing central government decision making within the parameters that need to be challenged, but which won’t be.

And then, there is the thorny issue of artificial or faux representation and the same dynamic in elections that defines local government exactly the same way it does at a national level: the fact that a majority never votes for the party in office. It could be argued that any “minority” local party in office is different in that it constitutes people taking control of government where they live. The right of this sort of minority to take measures to defend themselves is argued in another FBEL article†, English Civil War, American Revolution, Catalonian Independence, Brexit. The idea expressed in that piece is that the right to self-defence can translate to a right to force a solution that impinges on a majority. Local voters who elect a LibLabCon candidate and facilitate the central power of Government, by definition provoke the necessity for acts of self-defence by people who otherwise would suffer.

The electing of LibLabCon councillors not only produces the continuation of detrimental British Government power at local level, but it’s also maintains the mechanics that influence the way people behave in elections to decide a national government. The British Establishment, as big and powerful as it is, surely cannot physically cheat at every count in the country in the same way it did at Thanet in 2015 – there has to be genuine voting stimulated by psychological manipulation, and indeed, this is exactly how modern British Democracy has been instituted to work. Local elections, in this model, are all part and parcel of an effort to manoeuvre public attitudes and influence actions at general election time.

† (link)

Two previous FBEL articles, using different approaches, deal with the matter of not voting in order to counter the power of the central government; these are Delegitimising Parliament: Why “We The People” Must Stop Voting (link) and Attorney General Funbags Says: Brawndo’s Got What Plants Crave; Voting Changes Politics For Good (link).

From the former, the following extract serves as a perfect sample in an article [i.e. this piece] that opened by reporting the performance of the actor who plays the leader of the opposition in the Commons in Parliament:

Now, Bagehot noted that there were two parts of Government: the dignified part, and the efficient part. The dignified part was the Monarch, and the efficient part was the Parliament. Bagehot said that the dignified part drew the authority of Government from the people, while the efficient part executed that authority. Of course, this was written when not everyone had a vote, because now we would like to say that it is voting that imparts authority into a Government. Bagehot meant that because vast hordes of Victorian illiterates, that presumably could not read the newspapers, (there is a case to make that the Victorian ruling class engineered this as a reaction to Georgian gentrification) suffered from a delusion that the Queen ruled Britain, it was out of veneration for her that Parliament would be obeyed. Even so, Bagehot does talk about the appeal of Parliament for those who could understand that it was the ruling power. Bagehot calls it being taught by wise men, or even by fools if theirs was a propensity to bloviate – the author would call it theatre. This is the feature that has replaced the show of royalty in modern days when all people think that they have an interest vested in Parliament via that vote that was cast. It is theatre. That it creates a drama to mesmerise people into granting authority is much more important today than it was in Bagehot’s time.

Basically, if you don’t understand that one hidden hand controls all elements of government and opposition in Parliament, then you are the modern day equivalent of the Bagehot’s Victorian illiterates.

To give the reader a flavour of the latter of the two abovementioned articles, here is the preface from it in its entirety:

In the film, Idiocracy, the practice of watering plants with a fizzy drink, Brawndo, is killing crops and creating an apocalyptic dustbowl scenario in an America set in the future. The people have become too stupid to question the rights and wrongs of not using water, not just to give to plants, but also to drink. Water is entirely associated with toilet bowls. Likewise, it is another received idea, disseminated by commercial slogans, that has seemingly established an unchallengeable concept: Brawndo has what plants crave. Moreover, this idea has evidently been constantly reinforced as a truth through uncritical usage in discourse, and therefore repeated in the population as mantra. In terms of metaphor, it is reasonable to say that the crops in Idiocracy are representative of individual liberty in real life. It follows, then, that we could say that voting in elections does the same thing to individual liberty as Brawndo does to crops: it causes death. Likewise, the idea that people must vote to produce  individual liberty is life-threatening received thinking that has become unchallengeable. Ultimately, people must understand that a major re-evaluation is required regarding the worth of the practice that they have unthinkingly observed. Indeed, they need to realise that fundamental change is required as a matter of life and death.

Other articles worthy of having the reader’s attention directed towards are Reflections On A By-Election: Another Charlatan Claims To Represent The People, This Time Of Lewisham East (link) and A Brief History Of Recent Elections Leading To The Collective Stupidity Of 2017: A Gibbering Imbecility About To Be Repeated (link), in that they deal in the history of UK Government’s relationship with the electorate, or the manipulation employed to create a false legitimacy.  Similarly, the histories featuring in the  articles, So, The British Government Is Entirely Corrupt. What Happens Next? (link) and Prohibition And Covid-19; Part Four: An Historical Context; Social Engineering For Grabbing Power  (link) are examples of the writing hereabouts on how UK Government uses its established-by-voting false legitimacy – which always can be boiled down to constant erosion of individual sovereignty, and familial middle and aspirant working class wealth, and capacity to answer the tyranny.