Britain’s soaring migration-driven population would never have been permitted to happen if the country’s democracy wasn’t so broken, Brexit leader Nigel Farage reflected as he looked forward to this year’s general election which he says holds little hope of meaningful change.
Whether Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour or Rishi Sunak’s Tories win this year’s general election, the outcome will be basically the same said Brexit leader Nigel Farage on Monday, noting the country would be better served by a Swiss-style hyper-democracy where the public are empowered to call their own referenda and — crucially — the results are legally binding.
Speaking to an audience of newspaper subscribers staged by The Daily Telegraph in London on Monday Mr Farage said self-serving reforms of elections during the time of the last left-wing British government under Iraq War architect Tony Blair in the early 2000s allowed a debasement of the British system, permitting corruption to seep in. Walking through a laundry list of fundamental issues with British democracy that should be addressed, Mr Farage said “the left will always win” at the postal voting, ballot-harvesting business because they feel no moral compulsion against it, seeing it as part of the “game” of politics and fair in the face of conservatively-minded politicians who they see as not worthy of fair play.
He said: “I’m suggesting [all elections with postal votes] are corrupt. Every single election that is fought in cities in this country cannot be trusted to be a totally accurate and fair result… scrap postal votes, go back to the pre-2001 system… The biggest users are ethnic minorities who don’t even speak English. And they’re signed up to it.
“Helen Pidd, who was the northern correspondent for [left-wing newspaper] The Guardian, in the [Oldham West, 2015] byelection said ‘I went down a street in which nobody spoke English. Very few had heard of Jeremy Corbyn, but through the interpreter I learnt they had all voted Labour’. That is how open this is.”
Farage compared British elections where postal votes — meant for the elderly or infirm but he says actually abused for political ends — can decide elections, and the American where digital voting machines undermine trust to Presidential elections in France, where votes are made in person on paper, and a traditional system of hand-counting observed by independent monitors sees results determined quickly and without controversy. “Not one of you can give me an example in your lifetimes of there being a contested result in a French election”, he said, noting “That is how elections should be conducted.”
The fundamentals of British politics needs to be changed to bring the centre of gravity of political decision-making closer to the British people themselves, Farage said. Part of this would be adding an “element of proportionality” to the British election system, saying the “absolutism” of the present system of winner-takes-all constituency votes was better suited to an earlier age. Others have made similar arguments, that the era of mass communication and instant digital engagement makes the half-millennia old system of individuals delegating total political power to a member of parliament could be refined.
Farage praised the direct democracy system of Switzerland, where referendums are frequent but small but legally binding. In the United Kingdom a petition that gains 100,000 signatures “are considered for debate” — which essentially promises and achieves nothing — while in Switzerland, 100,000 signatures triggers a popular referendum.
He said: “I look at Switzerland which is probably the most democratic country in the world… if the Swiss people want to call a legally binding referendum on an issue, because they feel that Parliament is out of step with the country, they can constitutionally call that referendum and it is a legally binding result. I think if we had that ability in this country, we would never have seen a population increase of ten million. Some question somehow would have been put on a ballot paper.”
On the immigration question, this has actually happened in Switzerland where referenda have been fought and won on the matter, although there as in the United Kingdom the political class have attempted to resist the democratically expressed will of the people. A new referendum supported by 114,600 signatories was submitted just last week, stating the permanent total population most not be permitted to exceed 10 million by 2050, and this would be achieved by severely limiting migration.
The proposal stipulates that if other measures failed to curb migration then Switzerland would have to suspend freedom of movement with the European Union, which was the pretext the government used to block progress on implementing the outcome of the last referendum. Leader of the Swiss populist party backing the initiative Marcel Dettling said: “Today, too many foreigners are arriving, and not the right ones. We need controlled immigration that benefits our country and our population”.
Far from having referendums on immigration in Britain, the country isn’t even having an “honest conversation” on the matter yet, Farage said of UK politics today. Reflecting again how this year’s election promised no meaningful change in Westminster, he said:
…the first thing we need to do is have an honest conversation about the population explosion, the fact we simply have to stop it. We cannot allow it to go on the way it is. Given that 85 per cent of that rise is directly down to immigration. This isn’t about controlling how many children people have or anything like that.
I also think it’s very unlikely that anything will change at all if we carry on with our law-making bodies being made up in the same way… Whether you get Rishi back, or Keir Starmer. The differences are pretty marginal. I don’t quite go down the uniparty conspiracy theory route but really you’ve got two forms of social democracy, a first past the post electoral system that buttresses both sides.
We don’t have the ability as British citizens to have referendums on key issues because if we did the country would be very, very different, as the Brexit referendum proved. Had the European issue been left to Westminster we’d still be members of the European Union… the reason I chose the name ‘Reform’ in the first place to be a successor to the Brexit Party is we need wholesale change in terms of how we make these decisions. The honest truth is on the NHS, regardless of whether the Conservatives were to win again, or Labour win, nothing much will change.