Labour is stealing your country
Leo McKinstry says that Tony and his cronies are rigging the ballot by restructuring the nation and lavishing money on the government's natural supporters W e're going to build
the Tories out of London,' proclaimed Herbert Morrison, the leader of the London County Council in the 1930s, boasting that Labour's vast council-house programme would ensure that the Tories never returned to power in the capital. The present Labour government has not been as blatant about its ambitions. Yet, under the cloak of moderation, its use of public policy for political ends has been far wider in scope and more cynical in execution. Morrison confined his social engineering to London. This government is trying to restructure the entire country to ensure the permanent defeat of what Tony Blair calls 'the forces of conservatism'.
The disastrous performance by the Tories in last week's two by-elections in Leicester and Birmingham has provoked another outburst of soul-searching within the Conservative party, most of it focused, understandably, on the appeal of current policies and leadership. What has been ignored, however, is the changing political landscape of Britain, which makes it exceptionally difficult for the party to make any progress outside its heartlands, no matter how dazzling its performance. Our civic institutions, welfare system, democracy and even the very fabric of the nation are being systematically rebuilt in the image of the Left. Like Stalin, New Labour is fond of talking about fiveand ten-year plans for its policies; only last week there was another one, promising a 15 per cent cut in crime by 2008. But by far the most sinister programme has been the creation of a new Britain where Toryism becomes obsolete.
There are a number of planks in this operation. The first is the vast expansion in the public payroll, thereby establishing an army of subservient centre-left voters who rely for their livelihood on the largesse of the state. Between 1997 and 2003, the public-sector workforce grew by about 500,000, taking it to 5.45 million employees. And despite Gordon Brown's fraudulent claims about cutbacks in the Civil Service, the truth is that, according to the government's own figures, another 360,000 public employees are to be recruited by 2006. Because of their suspicion of enterprise, their dependence on public funds and their membership of trade unions, public-sector workers are far more likely to be supporters of the Left than those in the private sector.
What is even more disturbing, though, is the way that all public employees are now ruthlessly indoctrinated in left-wing propaganda. In the name of promoting 'diversity', challenging 'oppression' and tackling 'disadvantage', recruits are now forced to undergo training to root out the slightest sign of 'prejudice'. To ensure that this Maoist re-orientation is maintained, every public body is now filled with bureaucrats such as 'equal opportunities advisers' and 'anti-racism co-ordinators' to check that staff hold the correct thoughts. It is now impossible to gain an appointment in the public sector, even in a traditionally conservative organisation like the police, without pledging obeisance to the new, subMarxist dogma of equality and cultural diversity. In the British public sector of 2004, a prison officer can lose his job for making a joke about bin Laden.
The concept of creating a client state can also be seen in the unprecedented growth of welfare spending over the past seven years. Labour came to power pledging to 'think the unthinkable' on social security. All that has been unthinkable has been the size of the increases in expenditure, up from £95 billion in 1996-97 to a projected £141 billion in 2005-06, a rise of 50 per cent. This money, paid for by a host of clandestine tax rises, has been used not only to lavish money on Labour's natural supporters but also to drag a vast number of new claimants within the enervating embrace of state dependency. For all Gordon Brown's rhetoric about getting people off welfare and into work, the fact is that there are now about 5 million people of working age living off benefits, including 2.7 million on incapacity benefit, though most are perfectly capable of holding a job. Even more depressing has been the establishment of so-called 'tax credits', which in reality are just another handout. There are no fewer than 5.8 million recipients of these credits, many of them awarded thousands of pounds a year by the state. The government, for instance, now meets 70 per cent of all childcare costs up to £200 per week. So extensive is the system that it is possible for a couple earning up to £64,000 a year to be eligible for means-tested benefits from the state. No wonder, in this spendthrift socialist madhouse, there is still perceived to be a feelgood factor under Labour.
Another key move has been the deliberate creation of multiracial Britain by virtually abandoning any border controls, with the result that more than 500,000 immigrants, including students and those on work permits, are coming into Britain each year. Net migration into Britain from outside Europe stood at 44,000 in 1991 Ten years later it had reached 233,000. The result has been a social and ethnographic revolution in Britain, with a huge political dividend for the Left, since newcomers are far less likely to vote Conservative. Already more than a third of London's population is made up of ethnic minorities, while in boroughs like Newham and Brent nonwhites are now in a substantial majority. In such circumstances, it is inconceivable that the Tories could ever again be the largest party in the capital. Similarly in the Leicester South by-election, the Tories never stood a chance in a constituency where over 40 per cent of the population is Asian, particularly not against the shameless, pro-Muslim, anti-West posturing of the hypocritical Liberal Democrats.
The widespread resort to postal voting, in the name of boosting turnout, has been a further boost to the Left, partly because Labour supporters are more likely to stay at home than Tory ones, but more importantly because it provides greatly increased opportunities for electoral fraud. Already four police forces in the north of England are investigating a number of serious cases of abuse. Again, the problem of multiracial Britain raises its head; as the Labour MP for Keighley, Ann Cryer. has bravely pointed out, this kind of fraud is prevalent in the Asian communities: 'People are going to homes demanding that voters give up their ballot papers; that is what they are doing. It is the sort of thing I was anxious about in the early stage of the Bill to have an all-postal ballot but I did not mention it because you are accused of being racist.' The switch to postal voting has also encouraged the widespread creation of false identities on the electoral register, because so few checks are carried out. The consequences of such abuse are even more serious because our electoral map is so heavily weighted against the Tories, since urban constituencies tend to have fewer electors and therefore each individual vote is worth more. Personally, I have little faith in an electoral system run by local council officials and postal workers whose allegiance is to a progressive British state and who have been indoctrinated in the belief that conservatism is a dirty word.
The Tories can derive no comfort from the fact that the government's political manipulation appears to be backfiring, in that the Liberal Democrats, now even more welfarist, spendthrift and antiBritish, seem to be gaining at the expense of Labour. All that shows is how far the axis of British politics has shifted to the Left. And, on present trends, it only looks like moving further in that direction. Dame Shirley Porter almost went to prison and was recently forced to pay a £12 million fine because of her gerrymandering when she was leader of Westminster City Council in the 1980s. It is a pity that some members of the current government are not facing an investigation for their activities on an even bigger scale.
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