THE BIG READ: why the petition calling for a new general election matters very much indeed

Conventional politicians from centre-left and centre-right are about to get blown out of the water by a tidal wave of protest against failed "progressive" ideas

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

DOES it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than a million signatures within a few days?

Conventional analysis of the sort that holds most of the British pundit class in its grip would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors who detest any government. And millions of bitter Remainers signed petitions calling for a second referendum to overturn Brexit for all the good that did them.

And yet it is the very artlessness of the way a man called Michael Westwood has set out his cause which tells me that his petition on the official parliamentary website does betoken something significant.

“I would like there to be another General Election. I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election,” the petition says. It’s that simple: the accusation is that Keir Starmer was elected on a deliberately false prospectus and that his administration therefore lacks basic democratic legitimacy. 

Whether it comes to axing the winter fuel allowance for 85 per cent of pensioners, sticking inheritance tax on farms, putting up student fees, increasing the use of hotels for illegal migrants rather than abolishing it, presiding over rising domestic energy bills rather than the cheaper ones promised, puling the plug on free speech on university campuses, or generally whacking up taxes to cover a programme it claimed was “fully funded”, there is no disputing that Labour in power is a very different beast to Labour during the election campaign.

Did anyone expect the Chagos Islands sovereignty surrender or the opening of a “dialogue” about UK taxpayer-funded reparations for slavery to grifting Commonwealth regimes, either? I certainly didn’t.

Yet I think that something more than simple voter rage at being hoodwinked is going on out there. Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm sustained both by Labour and the Tories in power since the turn of the century.

Sky-high legal immigration, crude multi-culturalism, moronic homage-paying to the “strength” of diversity, the absence of citizen preference in access to taxpayer-funded public services, the foreign aid bonanza, law and order which is soft on determined criminals but hard on traditional opinions, Islamo-fascism permitted to run rife, the collapse of public sector productivity, cap-doffing to a global asylum system which facilitates illegal immigration, the explosion in the grant-aided NGO “charitable” sector, ever-more outlandish attempts to make certain democratic outcomes – Brexit, scaling down spending on carbon net zero – actually illegal, indigenous white people getting discriminated against and then being invited to confess to having unmerited privilege: these are just a few key features of a rotten system which has failed. The administrations of Blair, Brown, Cameron-Clegg, May, Johnson and Sunak are all to a greater or lesser extent culpable for the advance in Britain of this broken “progressive” paradigm which has left western populations in general more fearful, less prosperous and increasingly as mad as hell.

And we aren’t going to take it any more, are we? That is why Trump won a clean sweep in America, why Wilders won in the Netherlands in 2023 and Meloni in Italy in 2022. It’s also why a pop-up Nigel Farage entity for the first time actually won a cluster of seats at a British general election run under a first-past-the-post system that sustains barriers to entry so high as to have always previously proven insuperable.

I recently wrote on State O’ The Nation that I expected Kemi Badenoch to give the Conservatives a significant opinion poll bounce on the back of her own punchy political persona and various in-built advantages that the official party of opposition possesses.

“A straight-talking, right-wing woman who has the courage of her convictions and looks very different to the standard Tory offering has every chance of connecting,” I said.

So far, that hasn’t happened and instead Mrs Badenoch has struck a very conventional Tory tone, focusing narrowly on legitimate economic concerns rather than emphasising the catastrophic social recession that voters can see unfolding. Last week Starmer deprived her of the pulpit of PMQs by being absent on another of his increasingly frequent foreign trips. This week she must really blow him up.

Because right now Reform UK is the party in the middle of a purple patch, appearing