Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, GETTR, Truth Social, X  

On Sunday, Harriet Harman, a senior figure from the UK's governing socialist Labour Party went onto the airwaves to talk about democracy. The focus was on the lower tier of elections , that is by-elections (special elections) since July’s General election. There will be midterm style elections next May but they will be largely in rural counties, where the Conservatives still hang onto control. The last time this set of elections were fought was in 2020, when the Conservative Party were riding high. They will lose hundreds if not thousands of seats if these elections go ahead as planned.

As with the US, these elections, you would think of elections at County, or perhaps city level in America, take place on Thursdays every week. They are small, hyper local and cannot really be thought to have much impact on the national political conversation taken discreetly.

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!‘  

However, they do act as a sort of rolling tally of how the various parties are seen, about how they are performing, and as a barometer of reality, rather than opinion pollster opinion. These are, after all, real votes, with real voters going to vote in real polling districts (we call them divisions or wards).

Harman was pretty open about the fact Labour support has tanked since July. It would have been hard not to. The Prime Minister's personal ratings have gone from a Net pls 2 just after the election to a minus 26 today. The party’s support in national polling has dropped from 39% to 27%, a precipitous collapse.

What she did say and admit to was that the threat to Labour was not from the defeated Conservatives. Oh no, that threat came from the radical outsider party, Reform UK, lead by Nigel Farage, for whom I worked until September, hit over 40% last week in what had been a staunch labour area. The sort of place that until now, Labour weighed rather than counted its votes.

But she followed this acceptance by claiming, in a method resembling the democrats attack on Trump, that “Reform is a danger to democracy”.

https://twitter.com/Towler/status/1868614373029376223

Scroll forward a whole 24hrs.

The Government has announced that they are planning to cancel/postpone a whole tranche of these elections that are supposed to take place, including the counties where Reform are already winning these special elections and taking seats off Labour from a standing start.

The Government’s excuse for this is that they are planning a significant shake up of how local government will be provided going forward, a shake up that they claim will cut costs and increase. They also claim that they will have a full consultation before any change is made.

It is at this point that we can tell that they have already decided what they want to do, that they are trying to swerve elections at which they know that they will be put to the sword.

Put it this way. The elections are at the beginning of May. Only six months away. The Christmas and New Year period takes out a month. That’s five months. The election itself takes 6 weeks. That’s three and a half months left.

No full consultation conducted by a bloated bureaucracy, involving millions of people, has ever been carried out with such speed.

The Government claims that Reform is a threat to democracy. By its actions we can see that they themselves are the very real threat.

Physician, heal thyself.