We Need A Voting Rights Act

The most effective piece of federal Civil Rights legislation ever enacted in the United States was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We need one here. The Conservative Party gained 20 seats in 2017, and it lost six of them back to the SNP in 2019. But it picked up another 58 that night, mostly from Labour, and almost all of them in Leave-voting areas north of the line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. That gives 72 Red Wall seats. 

Most of them are in the areas of local authorities that are controlled by the right-wing Labour machine, which is essentially the same political tendency that runs elections in places like Pennsylvania. That is why some of us, while having no knowledge of whether or not the American Presidential Election was rigged, have no difficulty in believing that it might have been. We have been dealing with these people forever, and we know what they do. 

The right-wing machine is now back in charge of the Labour Party, and it will be running a candidate of its metropolitan liberal elite, personified by Keir Starmer, in most or all of the party’s target seats. There, the votes are mostly due to be counted, not by the Labour Right’s brain, but by its brawn. Those people are in politics for the better council houses, for the cushier jobs with the council, for the councillors’ allowances, for the Council Tax, for the business rates, for the pension funds looking to invest, for the backhanders and other sweeteners from property developers and others, and so on.

The only certain exception is here at North West Durham, where Laura Pidcock is going to have to explain why she wanted Starmer to become Prime Minister, as well as why she wanted a Labour whip that was denied to Jeremy Corbyn. The same questions are probably going to have to be posed to Laura Smith at Crewe and Nantwich, well though one wishes that Lexiteer. But that leaves 70 Red Wall seats that the Labour Right will be wanting back.

Carrie Symonds may have taken over the Government, but few, if any, Red Wall MPs are her courtiers, meaning that they are going to have to be asked why they wanted to keep her running the country. In any case, the Labour Right is very tribal.

Primary legislation now needs to specify that in the area of any local authority that contained one or more of the 72 named Red Wall seats, if that authority were still controlled or led by Labour when the next General Election were called, then the conduct of the General Election in that area would be removed to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. “Are you saying that we can’t be trusted?” Yes. Yes, we are.

At the same time, this legislation might address the anomaly that we gave the citizens of the Commonwealth’s other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocated; two of the last five Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament.

Starmer is massively unpopular in politically black Britain, the Black Wall that could fall as easily as the Red Wall fell. You are politically black is if you do not have white privilege, and white privilege does not mean that you have an easy life, but that the colour of your skin is not one of the causes of your problems. This has nothing to do with identity politics. It goes back to the roots of Anglo-Saxon capitalism in the transatlantic slave trade, including the use of its proceeds to fund enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions who in his Labour Party Conference speech could not bring himself to mention either the Windrush scandal or the fire at Grenfell Tower, never mind the Forde Inquiry into racism among the party’s staff, an Inquiry that he had effectively killed off. He has presided over the victimisation of black women MPs. He has dismissed Black Lives Matter as a “moment”. He has identified with those who have taken selfies alongside the bodies of black murder victims. 

He has replaced Diane Abbott with an all-white Shadow Home Office team that has repeatedly been outflanked on the left by Priti Patel. He has promoted Jess Phillips. He has rejected self-determination for Kashmir. He has indicated his view of self-determination for the Chagos Islands by revelling in his role in the torture of Julian Assange. He refused to bring charges in relation to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, or in relation to the death of Ian Tomlinson. And he failed to oppose the early lifting of the first lockdown despite the far higher risk of Covid-19 to people of colour.

Boris Johnson ought to emulate Disraeli’s brilliant doubling of the electorate, the effects of which can still be felt and always will be. He should legislate so that parliamentary candidates would have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there would be no nationality requirement for voting in parliamentary elections, or for voting or standing in local elections.

Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else on earth has. 

The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more “like us” than Germans are, and that Swazis are more “like us” than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want? 

Why would people not vote for the party that had given them the vote, rather than for the party that had never done so? That worked for Disraeli, and we still feel the effects. It could work for Johnson, with effects no less long-lasting. 

Starmer’s own seat of Holborn and St Pancras could fall. Nine years ago, at the last census, Camden was 19 per cent Other White, 4.9 per cent Black African, four per cent Other Asian, 2.9 per cent Chinese, 2.3 per cent Other, 1.7 per cent Other Black, and 1.6 per cent Arab. Next year, it will be shown to be more diverse again. In the 2020s, the ageing Afro-Caribbean and South Asian grandees who back Starmer are irrelevant to BAME London and to BAME Britain.

We strictly control immigration in order to protect our hard-won jobs, workers’ rights, and public services. That is what it means to protect our culture. But within that, we do not differentiate on grounds of nationality. Within that, we welcome the world.

Let us legislate to that effect, thereby giving something to the Black Wall as well as to the Red Wall, in a fatal double blow to the right-wing Labour machine. I am a declared and active Independent candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham at the next General Election.