The secret ballot obliterated. An essay on how a cornerstone of a fair, authentic and proper democracy has illegally been circumvented with Brexit and in the UK democratic system for very destructive purposes.
The secret ballot is a somewhat forgotten aspect of the demands for full manhood suffrage in Britain. The secret ballot was one of the demands of The Chartists on their People’s Charter. The Chartists were the political movement in the mid Nineteenth Century who demanded full manhood suffrage amongst the height of the oppression of The Industrial Revolution. The secret ballot was passed into British electoral law in 1872. The only demand of The Chartists which was not eventually made into law was the demand for annual Parliaments.
This is a remarkable achievement for a largely working class movement, who were disenfranchised in terms of the vote at the time. Chartism collapsed before all but one of its demands were passed into law by Parliament, in the seventy or so years after its demise as a reforming political force. This is something to give hope to any movement demanding new liberties, constitutional change or protections now, make your demands, if those demands have merit or are sufficiently righteous, it may take time, but they can become the law or accepted conventions.
Why was the secret ballot a key demand for those who desired full manhood suffrage and an authentic democracy and politics which would be free from elite, landed gentry or industrialist control, close on to two hundred years ago?
The reason why was that up until it was implemented, people voted in the original Athenian way of standing in a crowd and raising your hand in public. The way you cast your vote would be known to everyone and anyone who witnessed it, this meant that your employer might know how you voted, your landlord, your neighbours and key figures in the community.
This left the electorate open to bribes, intimidation, undue influence, inducements and threats. Bribes or threats could be made to individual or groups of voters to vote for a certain party or candidate. The Chartists knew, as did unscrupulous actors or agents in society too, that this meant that democracy could be corrupted and manipulated through targeting specific voters using undue influence, to get them to vote for special or certain interests. Through this corrupt practice, democracy could be managed to particular outcomes.
Threats of many kinds could be made, threats of violence to individual voters or their families; threats of bankruptcy, economic ruin, eviction or social exclusion. Conversely bribes of money, employment, food and booze were common around a ballot before this act, especially the venal. Although, when the franchise was first extended, predominately it was to those sympathetic to the interests and concerns of the wealthy, industrialists, landed gentry and the elites, these practices of undue influence, however, were still regularly employed.
The Chartists and others saw this as an unacceptable corruption of democracy. As ideas or proposals were not considered on their merits, justness or qualities in terms of how they serve the population. Democracy stops being a rational debate about policies which or politicians who best serve society at large. Instead, certain interests, largely those of wealth, the elites and property, they could just manipulate the outcome of any vote to get the votes required for their preferred outcome or candidate by employing when necessary: improper inducements, undue influence and intimidation.
The secret ballot was introduced for people to vote in secret, in the secrecy of polling booths, so that they could not be corrupted or interfered with as a voter by these means. This would protect the integrity and authenticity of democracy, as the debate of which proposals serve best, how policies or Parliamentarians serve or protect the national interest or how they will attempt to resolve the challenges, problems or issues society or communities face now and into the future.
There has a lot been made about our law and British law in the Brexit debate, so, let us see what British law says in the Secret Ballot Act of 1872.
‘No person whosever, shall interfere with or attempt to interfere with or attempt to obtain in the polling station information as to the candidate for whom any voter in such station is about to vote or who has voted’; ‘No person shall directly or indirectly induce any voter to display his ballot…to make known to any person the name of a candidate for or against whom he has so marked his vote’ where those voters influenced by ‘bribery, treating or undue influence’, their vote is to be struck off the register and does not count, if ruled in a court of law to have been influenced in this way.
So, attempting to secretly find out how someone intends to vote at a polling booth, to target specific voters or groups of voters with undue influence, to interfere improperly with that vote or to find out how they voted is illegal. Especially, if you are obtaining it by secretive or manipulative means or that vote is to be discounted if won through ‘any agent’ using spurious interference, improper influence, bribes or threats.
This law has been broken with data profiling through social media platforms, the internet and micro-targeting; the targeting of voters using psychological profiling and manipulation through political focus groups. All the ways used to determine who and how people will vote online or by other secretive or not obviously transparent means, is breaking the secret ballot laws on the grounds of interference, as will be explored in more depth later, this has often been done through using illegal undue influence too.
Not long after the 1872 law was introduced, it was bolstered with The Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of 1883, which, was another law to prevent the corruption of ballots through the use of bribery and threat. The stipulations of that law are that anyone using these practices or breaking the secret ballot laws is to be banned from holding public office or being allowed to vote.
The use of threat where ‘threatening to inflict harm….to induce him to vote or refrain from voting’ is considered an illegal practice in an election. This is particularly interesting when applied for instance to propaganda circulated before the referendum vote in 2016 and since on the EU Army, with the claims UK citizens would be conscripted into it against their will, as that is a threat of inflicting harm. It is saying that the life of your children, family and you are under threat. It might be doing it through an unwitting third party but it is a threat of harm, one that has no truth to it, but still a clear use of a threat, with an implied added further threat, that some sort of war is imminent through continued membership of the EU.
The 1883 law ruled that interference using bribery or the offer of bribes is unlawful in a ballot too and identified a ‘valuable consideration’ as a bribe. The definition for a valuable consideration in law was derived rather fittingly from a case not long before the act. A valuable consideration in the sense of English law ‘may consist either in some right, interest, profit or benefit accruing to the one party, or some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility, given, suffered or undertaken by the other’.
The propaganda and rhetoric used by Leave in 2016 about how there would only be upsides to leaving the EU, Brexit dividends and money for public services. That through Brexit a world of new trade deals, investment, government spending and new untapped markets would emerge, that old industries would be rekindled. That new growth would happen: breathing life into marginalised places and a new era would arrive to liberate the economy and people of the UK, with better employment, prosperity, freedoms or justice, whilst simultaneously, the EU would suffer, decline and lose out.
That all sounds remarkably very much like the English law definition of ‘a valuable consideration’, which, according to this law is a bribe and is illegal as a way to manipulate a vote through targeting voters, using undue influence or interference in this country.
In the digital age this allows bribes and threats to be sent directly to voters online to interfere illegally with their vote, the secret ballot is being circumvented, ignored and corrupted to a very sophisticated regional, community or individual level through the use of social media and focus groups. Employing some of the same or similar tactics of undue influence the secret ballot was passed into electoral law to prevent and in a way that is more pernicious than anything The Chartists, other political radicals or movements demanding authentic citizen focused democracy could have foreseen.
Why is it more pernicious? One reason is the narrowness of margins which determine who or what has power in our democracy, what that power is being used for and that the secret ballot as being a vital element of having a free and fair democracy or elections has been destroyed to manipulate outcomes, when it is still the law, it is British law.
The narrowness of margins for victory and power is a really damaging issue for democracy in terms of consensus in this country. In the Referendum vote in 2016, the difference between Leave and Remain was approximately 1.2 million votes. These were very opposite views and with Leave having no clear detailed proposal for what Brexit would mean, something which is undemocratic as well, it is hardly a large amount of people determining the course of action for Brexit between Leave and Remain, when compared to the whole voting population at approximately 45 million.
The difference between the two main parties in the 2017 General Election was around 700,000 and in 2019 the difference between the party who won a majority and those who did not, a superficially more plausible three million, but, and this is very significant, this was only an increase of Conservative Party votes of 1%, when people voting for a party proposing a second referendum had a majority in terms of vote numbers, in an election supposedly about one issue.
With First Past the Post, however, this meant a huge Parliamentary majority for the Conservative Party, they received almost 14 million votes, though that is still two million fewer than those who voted Remain in 2016 and those who did not vote Conservative in 2019 in a ‘one issue’ election.
This voting mathematics is something that was clearly known a long time before the vote in December 2019 and the 2016 referendum too. That a small increase in the Conservative votes in the Midlands and the North would return a large Conservative majority in Westminster, a 1% vote increase in this case is approximately just 140,000 people, yet electorally, that was the difference between a hung Parliament and an eighty seat majority in Westminster. These seats and voters have been deliberately targeted for interference, as were voters in 2016.
It will be argued that Brexit was a vehicle through which to achieve this majority and is a necessary illusion of reform, with the EU as a convenient scapegoat, threat or something to bribe against, used to secure power.
People may counter argue that a majority for Brexit in 2016 and in 2019 in the General Election were won in terms of the systems that are in place, the voting mechanisms of the UK, but the margins that made the key difference between winning and losing, approximately 140,000 or 1.2 million, are by comparison to the whole population, a small amount of people.
Through manipulating and targeting a relatively tiny fraction of the electorate in comparison to the whole population to one side of a cause over another, a party or an issue: a huge constitutional changing power can be achieved. When constitutionally Parliament is there to serve the national interest and that has to mean everyone, future generations too, that is what democracy as a political model is supposed to do: serve everyone and the posterity to the best of its ability. Otherwise, Parliament is not serving the national interest but it is instead serving a special, narrow, factional or exclusive set of interests.
As how can the national interest be that of effectively and mathematically, a minority of people, in a very small time frame or period? That would be by its very action unconstitutional and undemocratic.
It would be more akin to a new kind of ochlocracy than a democracy. Where one party who may have the majority of votes amongst parties, but is outnumbered by the wider voting population by about two thirds, has a dominant and disproportionate hold on power in our parliamentary system to use to their desired ends and how they see fit, with no clear explanations of how Brexit serves the national interest.
Ochlocracy or majoritarianism, was described by the very earliest democrats in Greece as one of the worst forms of government. The reasons being that it creates long term instability and corrosive societal problems, if one group rules with their interests as paramount to those of the population of the whole nation and the future generations of the state. It allows damaging short term selfish interests to be appealed to and serviced, which, has inherent dangers for the stability of the nation going forward.
With Brexit: through the persuasion, manipulation, cajoling and more disturbingly in relation to the secret ballot, the threat or bribing of a comparatively small number of people, a ‘majority’ can be won for a party, outcome or movement. Then they can implement, constitutionally and in terms of our international position, pretty much what they wish in mostly an unrestricted fashion under our current system, whilst sidestepping proper Parliamentary scrutiny and our democracy more definitively than ever, moves position from a democracy to a managed ochlocracy.
This has been achieved through destroying the secret ballot with a combination of micro targeting on social media and the internet and through political focus groups, alongside more traditional propaganda techniques.
The destruction of the secret ballot is crucial in all of this for a number of reasons. The Great Hack exposed through journalists like Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Jukes, how online psychological profiling, micro targeting and manipulation of voters on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is being employed to influence the outcome of elections. Through using very personalised and bespoke propaganda; and that this propaganda has been funded by dark corporate and political money using companies like Cambridge Analytica. Internet data can be used to create a psychological profile of users and that profile can be used to manipulate, threaten or induce voters to vote in a certain way, using weapons grade psychological propaganda techniques and through using undue influence and knowledge of how voters previously voted obtained online, sometimes illegally and how they could or may vote in the future.
This is in direct contravention of the secret ballot, as it is interference and is illegal in this country according to the original law, as you are interfering with voters using techniques other than rational arguments, in order to manipulate a voter to vote in a certain way in a polling booth and this is ‘any agent’ according to the law. Nowadays, that means the agent that is in your pocket, your mobile phone, what is contained on it and the services on them.
Keep in mind, only a relatively small number of swing or key voters need to be persuaded to win a mandate to have complete governmental power, without requiring consensus. This knowledge of who or how people will vote or how they could be manipulated with undue influence to vote in a certain way in the future: this ability becomes all powerful.
Furthermore, alongside these illegal techniques: the use of disinformation, misinformation, fake histories and falsehoods on social media or the internet can be used by nefarious actors too. This allows a vote to be manipulated with untruths, lies, ad hominin attacks or through knowledge about psychological triggers within that voter to induce them to vote in a certain way or to think a certain thing about a party, policy, societal group or political figure. When democracy is supposed to be about rational arguments and clear proposals about what serves the national interest or the public good, not misleading lies, images, videos, propaganda and falsehoods which are designed to exploit the psychological traits of people to manipulate electoral outcomes.
Democracy has to convene around the truth and operate with the public good principle or it cannot be considered legitimate and is in the realms of the tyranny of the majority. This is a clear illegal corruption of democracy, this is exactly why the secret ballot was a demand of The Chartists and others, who desired to prevent the corruption of democracy to serve special narrow interests through using undue influence, corruption and demagoguery.
These acts have not been repealed, which, makes the practices of anyone acting in this manner now, a lawbreaker of British law. This means those involved in Leave, who are now in the Executive, those companies using social media, the social media companies themselves or those involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they broke British electoral law and according to subsequent British laws they should be barred from holding public office. Furthermore they should have their right to vote removed and those manipulated to vote for them where interference or undue influence has been used, those votes should be struck off any electoral outcome.
Breaking The Secret Ballot Act according to the original law is punishable by six months in jail, with or without hard labour. Would Mark Zuckerberg, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or Dominic Cummings survive six months of hard labour? It is probably best for them hard labour has been abolished as a punishment.
Social media, internet data and services: the nefarious groups, agencies or people using those platforms often know how people are going to vote but more importantly who and how voters can be manipulated to vote differently. So called ‘swing voters’ and specific target groups of voters can be determined and identified online through tracking or identifying their preferences, prejudices, desires and their psychological traits in their internet data. The kind of rhetoric or language to place in speeches that has an impact can be identified. How voters can be manipulated to vote for a candidate who weakens the opposition to a preferred candidate or to not vote at all occurs as well, through using tested language, rhetoric, disinformation, propaganda and images.
This psychological profiling and targeting of subsets of voters is something that has been ascertained and facilitated through political focus groups too. Political focus groups are a personal favourite of Dominic Cummings the top advisor to Boris Johnson and a key leader of the Leave campaign. Political focus groups were something first used by Reagan and Thatcher over forty years ago, they have been employed ever since as a method in politics and should be considered illegal under the 1872 and 1883 acts too, as focus groups circumvent the secret ballot through means of interference. They similarly attempt to manipulate specifically targeted voters or support, through means other than rational argument and clear transparent proposals.
Focus groups were first used by corporations and business to work out the best way to market or sell a product through using psychological profiling and techniques to manipulate a purchase. This was through identifying a psychological appeal that could be used to sell a product, this was not selling necessarily through the qualities of the product itself, but how the consumer could be manipulated by psychological means to buy it.
Then it was realised these methods could be used to win support for political parties too: to test slogans, rhetoric or language, to psychologically profile and manipulate people to vote for a certain party through identifying subsets of people and what rhetoric or what else would appeal to the voters on a psychological level. Similarly, this is not really discussing the merits or values of policies or their implementations with things like evidence, the truth, and rational argument or whether policies are right, moral or just. Instead: what words, rhetoric or language would induce or illicit a positive response in terms of a vote on a more psychological level, or, that of a desire, discrimination or prejudice in the voter.
This, like the use of micro-targeting on social media and the internet, this is the practice of demagoguery not democracy, this is manipulating voters through their prejudices, desires, their psychological traits and their irrationality, not through using rational arguments, sets of transparent open proposals or policies which are designed to serve the wider population or deal with societal issues. It is, also, a space where threats, inducements, bribes and intimidation can be employed.
People may balk at the suggestion that threats have been used in the rhetoric, propaganda or campaigning regarding Brexit, but, they very much have been used as a way to manipulate people to vote for Leave online and through focus groups, through targeting specific parts of the electorate. This was then used to facilitate the further manipulation towards voting Conservative in 2019.
Focus grouping and internet profiling allows impactful rhetoric or propaganda to be determined, which has an undue influence in the offline world too, people can probably very easily guess what some of that rhetoric was.
Who or what has been threatened in the propaganda for Leave? In answer to that question the EU will be personified, as it often was deliberately in the propaganda for Leave in 2016.
There are many instances of threat especially online, beginning with animals. Threats to polar bears, wildlife, bulls because of bullfighting in Spain and whales being under threat, were all used in the imagery and rhetoric of Leave propaganda, in order to entice and manipulate people to vote for Leave in 2016. The EU was cast as threatening and hurting animals or wildlife and that a vote to leave would somehow stop or save vulnerable wildlife or punish those doing it, as otherwise the EU was going to kill them through its policies or actions.
Through voting Leave this threat to the animals would be removed or they might be saved or that the EU was some sort of animal murdering organisation which needed to be stopped. All rather wide of the mark in terms of the comprehensive reality of the situation but a threat to animals in order to get people to vote Leave was used, through association or implication at least.
Threat was used in terms of Turkey joining the EU, the propaganda map image of Turkey and its proximity to Iraq and Syria. The clear implication or subtext being: dangerous people and terrorists from the Middle East are going to arrive in the country, assisted to get there by the EU and they are going to bring terrorism with them which could kill or hurt your family or you, a vote to Leave would protect you against this threat.
Or, these people from these other countries are going to take away a job from your children or opportunities, deny your children, loved ones or you access to public services like healthcare, education and so forth. That is the presentation of a threat and what could be more emotive than a threat of harm to your family or your own health, welfare and prospects because of foreigners about to arrive due to the actions of the EU or through our continued membership? It is again using an unwitting and innocent third party, but it is still a threat!
The slogan itself, Take back control, suggests that control has been taken away from the country and given to some power who is threatening to use that control against you, your community and your family. That our own government bears no responsibility since membership began and the EU is threatening to impose its control on the country to the ruin of your family and you in the future.
Then there was the EU Army conscription propaganda, a threat to your children being blown up in some war the people and the Government of the UK would have no control over: even though the EU is a peace project. Then there was the Lisbon Treaty propaganda, a whole series of individual rights and governmental controls being taken away by the EU, another series of threats.
It was, also, propagandised that somehow the EU are to blame for flooding problems in the UK, a vote to Leave would remove this threat to homes and communities in specifically Yorkshire, which, just happens to be where a number of the bricks of The Red Wall who swung the 2019 General Election are located. There were threats to industries as well, notably the steel industry in the North of England too.
Then there was the threat to cups of tea, that the EU wants to ‘Kill our cuppa’, and people clearly thought this was a real danger. That if they did not vote Leave, their brew would be taken away and locked up in beverage prison by the EU. Tea is a powerfully emotive issue among the British especially, so, this is an extremely serious threat to make.
Threat after threat of harm being made to your community, your family, your children, your nation; threats about your rights, threats to our government over the power of veto, threats about employment, prospects for citizens; access to public services, industries and the security of the country.
Evil monsters were abound everywhere.
Due to micro-targeting on social media on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, these threats could be personalised to match your particular psychological traits, concerns, discriminations or prejudices, in order to manipulate a voter towards a party or to vote in a certain way. This has striking similarities to threats of harm to an individual, their loved ones or things, possessions or their family, in the days before the introduction of the secret ballot.
It is clear and obvious interference using undue influence, this is illegal according to the 1872 and 1883 laws and should meet with the very serious consequences of breaking those British laws outlined earlier.
The truth or otherwise of these threats does not diminish their potential to appear real to the people viewing them. This propaganda is playing on fear, irrationality, feelings or emotions of protection, the psychology of control and authority.
Fear, ideas of authority or security being a very influential determiner on political affairs, as Thomas Hobbes, one of the first English political philosophers identified in The Leviathan. Hobbes argued that protection from dangers or threats from abroad, was a powerful political idea in the minds of citizens in order to command their unquestioning loyalty.
Then there has been the venal.
Bribes have been offered to the electorate too in the propaganda to persuade people to vote Leave: investment in public services, communities and adverts with the talk of funding for the NHS. That the EU was a ball and chain on the economy and that through leaving ‘the innovation which creates and grows our economy’ would be ‘unleashed’, all very vague on details but it is a bribe in the form of a valuable consideration. As is the other rhetoric suggesting that leaving the EU ‘ensures British young people more jobs’, which is very emotive because it is an inducement based around family and children.
Different regions have been encouraged and groups of people to believe that through Brexit this will somehow mean that their region or their industry or sector will receive some sort of ‘Brexit dividend’, government led investment or private sector boom. There will be this economic renaissance through trading with the rest of the world and this will create some sort of development for their marginalised local town, region, service or industry, which, has been restricted or abandoned in some way though EU membership, these are all valuable considerations.
These notions of an economic renaissance are regularly demonstrated in the comments of those who voted Leave and this is akin to a cargo cult, the cultish belief that a radically new age will come, bringing in a paradisal age of plenty, together with freedom and justice for past wrongs: brought to the population by charismatic prophets. That this new cargo of a better world will arrive for those without or those who were wronged, the Brexit cargo is on its way here. Or, another way of describing a cargo cult: is a rhetorical and charismatic illusion to win power or influence in a society.
Whether it will be true that the UK Government will make good on investments of this nature, to invest or lead investment into British people, goods, services, regions or sectors was entirely spurious or speculative at the time of the 2016 Referendum. These proposals, notions and pledges made by those trying to secure a Leave vote in their propaganda, the people making them were not in a position to make good on them, that is because they were not in Government and the referendum vote was not a mandate capable of doing any of these things.
The 2016 referendum was only a mandate to leave the European Union, nothing more. Any of these kinds of notions, proposals or ideas deliberately left vague, were a policy sleight of hand, the veracity of them could only ever be borne out by future real Government action, time, evidence, scrutiny and history, none of which were able to be determined, approved or verified at the time of the vote in 2016.
So, it is fair to argue any pledges, proposals or notions of investments or booms of this kind were effectively illusory, that they are better described as bribes tailored to a specific town, city, region or individual through the use of focus groups, psychological profiling, social media and micro-targeting. They are valuable considerations, something which is deemed an illegal bribe in British electoral law when deliberately targeted at specific voters using undue interference in this manner.
Yes, politicians do sometimes use the rhetoric of threats, bribes and use excessively emotive language too but that is in some ways undemocratic as well. That reality of political rhetoric does not in any way justify these practices and an amount of the rhetoric used in recent decades has been identified by this manipulative use of psychological profiling using the internet and focus groups. Politicians speaking in public where they might be scrutinised, questioned or challenged is ,also, very different to the modern age of the opaque operation of focus groups, online manipulation and micro-targeting to target specific voters, with what is more insidious and damaging for the integrity of our democracy, how voters can be manipulated to vote in the future, through using individualised or tailored undue influence, disinformation and propaganda. All of this is in order to manage democratic outcomes unlawfully and undemocratically to special or certain interests.
This is the very thing the secret ballot was supposed to prevent: the 1872 and 1883 acts of British law too, furthermore, this profiling of subsets of voters, allows the resentments of different groups within our society to be identified and used to manipulate outcomes too.
Whether that is resentment at: the elites, the political class, the professional class, the intelligentsia, the middle class, the working class, ethnic groups, cultures, movements, attitudes, sympathies or different regions in the country, just about anyone or anything, and for those resentments to be played off on one another, in an elaborate game of divide and conquer. Where clear proposals are avoided and instead a fundamental weakness of democracy is deliberately exposed through identifying and fostering resentments between groups within our society.
The weakness being it is easier to get people to vote against something, someone, a group of people or a target of resentment: than it is to get the electorate to vote for something constructive or just.
This, however, creates more problems with a political body or house divided, with a new politics going forward built on resentment, punishment, vindictiveness, malice, blame or scapegoating: what are the ramifications of that? They will be further ugliness, dispute, rebellion, retribution and disaster. Yet, these very negative ideas, sentiments and divisive attitudes are what has been tapped into and are being used to obtain or secure power.
This power is then being exploited to further malign the constructive democratic progress of society, in that democracy or politics has to be in service of the national interest and building a better society for all, this is the true meaning and purpose of democracy as a political model.
Democracy is the challenging endeavour of building a more just or better society, where policy is convened around the truth, clear or evidenced based proposals and rational arguments. Using the public good principle as its guide to improve the lot of all over the longer term to the best of its ability and where the rule of just principled law is higher than any agent acting within that society. A society which has the welfare, security, peace, prosperity and protections of the population and future generations as its guiding lights, if it is not, it is failing as a system of government and is instead managed to a faction, demagoguery or ochlocracy. Otherwise, our politics and democratic institutions have lost sight of their legitimate purposes and meaning to resolve the complex issues societies face: choosing expediency and private or narrow political desires, over more just public principles of governance.
With Brexit, a consensus has to be reached which is broadly acceptable. If Brexit is not the democratic means to build a better society for the population now and for future generations, as it was regularly sold as, with institutions or policies which genuinely and evidentially serve the population, then why do it at all?
If it is not, then it will just meet with further oppositional forces and create an ongoing dispute or schism within our society, making it undemocratic in the sense that democracy is to serve the people, the demos: not certain groups of people or special interests above others or a section of our society in a limited time frame. Democracy has to contain long term planning, thinking and strategy for the stability of the state or it will eventually lead to societal and political collapse.
These techniques of getting around the secret ballot by targeting voters to obtain mandates in a clandestine manner, using undue influence and resentment divide and conquer tactics, these are totally unacceptable. As it is often achieved through using the services of companies of other countries who are not fully under the jurisdiction of UK law, especially regarding social media.
They operate in essentially a lawless space, whilst using methods and propaganda as in the case of Facebook and in Silicon Valley, they will not fully allow UK authorities or journalists to see and who will not make themselves accountable to our Parliament, courts or citizens, through refusing to attend Select Committees in an executive capacity and by withholding evidence. There has been foreign state interference too with the propaganda machines of Russia, they are beyond the UK courts and our law system as well, but like the other agents involved, they are all as well, breaking UK and British law, which, according to many Brexiters should be entirely sacrosanct and paramount.
This is not trying to persuade people with policy or clear proposals in a transparent democratic way, it is using other tactics to win their vote, the very tactics of undue influence the secret ballot was designed to prevent. It is corrosive and corrupting for our democracy as these practices to circumvent the secret ballot are happening without full disclosure and it is demagogic, it is mostly an appeal to the desires, irrationalities and prejudices of ordinary people.
Demagoguery is the antithesis and nemesis of democracy, as appealing to desires, prejudices, selfishness, excessive emotion, irrationality or short term interests can or will have destructive consequences for any society in the longer term.
See for instance man-made climate change, ecological resources issues and pollution problems: where long term planning, cooperation and strategies are very necessary. The corporate man-made climate change deniers, polluters, dark money, elite power and the corporatists who benefit from governmental inaction on these matters, they prefer this current demagogic state of political affairs as it suits their short term but evidentially destructive agendas.
As it is far easier to manipulate ‘democratic’ elections using these sophisticated techniques of demagoguery and ochlocracy which get around the secret ballot, to serve their interests. To prevent the implementation of international or domestic laws or policies to protect against their malpractice, damage, negligence and corrosive actions for the long term health of our societies, as the debate can happily remain for them in a world of prejudices, resentments, desires, selfishness, fabricated bogeymen and distractions; in a democracy which is supposedly constitutionally obliged to serve the whole population and the national interest into the future.
These elite, wealthy, industrialist, corporate special interest groups, figures and lobbyists who seek to have their interests served above everything and anyone else in our society in a profoundly undemocratic, more like antidemocratic way, who wish to deny any proper debate or action on a green transition and a more just sustainable society, they now have the support of the ruling party in this country after this electoral saga and vice versa.
It is, also, clear that corporate and wealthy elite power has funded either directly or indirectly these getting around of the secret ballot techniques, which were used in the Brexit vote, other elections in the UK too and as has become apparent, many other elections around the world as well, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed in The Great Hack proves beyond any doubt.
To reiterate, the constitutional duty of our Parliament is to serve the national interest. The worst excesses of manmade climate change, other pollution, natural resource or ecological issues are not in the national interest: at least not in a sane national interest, nor, are they in the long term interest of any other nation in the world, the entire human race, that is a scientific and mathematical certainty, it is entirely irrational to argue otherwise and democracy has to remain in the rational world to be legitimate.
So, not only is our Parliament not serving the real national interest, it has allowed the fostering and practice of demagoguery on a huge scale to emerge in our democracy. It has allowed discourse to be based on irrationality, prejudices, selfish short term interest, discrimination, malice and hatred over rational argument or clear proposals to resolve societal issues. It has allowed reactionary, elite, wealthy, propertied, corporate and industrialist power to corrupt democracy to narrow special interests, using illegal undue interference and resentment divide and conquer tactics, to create a manipulated and thoroughly managed politics.
This is the very thing the secret ballot was designed to prevent happening all those years ago and why this circumventing of the secret ballot is so pernicious and insidious.
I am not a lawyer or a judge but we are in a very dangerous place if the Government, the Cabinet, political parties and the Prime Minister are acting above the law, especially electoral law in a democracy. If any of this is illegal, unlawful or not, is not as consequential or controversial as it being a set of conspicuously corrupt and undemocratic practices. These actions were known as being just that, almost two hundred years ago, so much so, they were legislated against by our sovereign Parliament a century before we joined the EU and before the introduction of full manhood suffrage, these practices were made illegal in our law.
What should happen as a consequence of this? All sorts of things, what will happen? More than likely nothing will happen, as seemingly few people of influence or not enough people care about the integrity of our democracy or the national interest or what the real democratic national interest should be: in providing for the liberty, justice, peace, welfare, prosperity, security, fair treatment and stability of the population and posterity of the country. If democracy is not in service of these higher more noble principles, then it is open to the vagaries, vices and abuses of the tyranny of the majority, demagoguery and ochlocracy, it is no longer a democratic society or a democratic system.
Neither, do enough people care sufficiently about the rule of British law or the wishes of those who suffered and in some cases gave their lives for authentic democracy to exist in this country, those who suffered and died in movements such as The Chartists, The Suffragettes or The English Levellers.
What is more whilst mentioning democratic history: the techniques reviewed here used in Brexit, are similar to unscrupulous and damaging tactics employed in democracies going back to ancient Roman and Greek times. Throw lots of money at identifying some sort of policy, idea or thing to win support off your democratic rivals to secure your own interests: Brexit. Never mind whether these policies serve the state, the population or society or are implemented significantly, just somehow get their support with some sort of policy sleight of hand, valuable consideration, other bribes, use of populism or demagoguery to cement your own power or interests.
This politics of factional self-interest in ancient democratic history was often a sign of the emergence of a more extreme politics: authoritarianism, dictatorship or the severe destabilisation or collapse of an empire or state. One thing it is not again is democratic, as it is winning support through manipulative means, not rational argument and is serving narrow factional interests over those of the whole nation.
The population and future generations will just have to see what the consequences are of living in a corrupted unlawful democracy turned managed demagoguery and ochlocracy, and not just in this country, where divide and conquer is an acceptable means of denying a politics in service of all or a stable, sustainable society.
The worst part of this unlawful corruption of our democracy has been the disingenuous claims with feigned innocence of the agents who have benefited and secured their interests through this corruption. The outrageous lie that democracy has not been corrupted and is perfectly healthy, when they are completely aware it has been corrupted and this was always the intention of those behind these practices.
Furthermore, like other vaunted reforms in democratic history, Brexit, so very often presented as a liberating force to the nation, is in reality the preservation and consolidation of largely elite, wealthy, propertied, industrialist and reactionary power, presented as reform.
The mandate for it won through the destruction of the secret ballot: through using a series of threats and bribes (which were mostly illusory) alongside a mixture of lies, hyperbole, disinformation, fake histories, misinformation or the outright fantastical in its propaganda. This only needed to work on a small margin of the electorate to tip the balance to win power, which it has and those who do not think democratic results can be bought and managed in this manner are naïve.
Our democracy has been managed, managed illegally and unconstitutionally away from any democratic foundations,it has been bought, it is not worthy of the name democracy and our Parliament can no longer be considered constitutional or legitimate.
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I am going to do the thing of asking for money, there is a link on my WordPress page. I would encourage you to consider that money is power. If you give money to those agencies or forces you agree with in society, then you are giving them power and when it comes to writing and journalism, you are supporting freedom and giving those voices power against the powerful.
I would ask you to consider that all money is power and you give a lot of your power to institutions, which you accumulate through your endeavours. I ask you to question those institutions and question that power relationship, surely we should all have more say on what happens with our accumulated power and those institutions, actors or agencies should be compelled to act responsibly in the society and world we all live in. Where true values not price are paramount, as after all, we are all moral actors in this society and virtue and just principles have to have the upper hand over vice, otherwise we are on a very destructive trajectory.
We all need to act with the health of society and the world in mind. It is unacceptable for agencies in our society to hoard our power then gives us little to no say over what happens with it, whilst acting in damaging, corrosive and irresponsible ways. A society with powerful undemocratic forces that takes your power and uses it for these purposes: where there are no proper principled or just guidelines, moralities or laws is tyrannical and totalitarian. Especially, when in reality there are few to no choices as to who we give that power to and the sheer amounts of power we have to forfeit.
A so called freedom or freedoms which destroys and removes the liberty of others especially the posterity, that is not freedom at all,it is tyranny, no matter how sugar-coated and immediately gratifying it might be in the present day. It is an arbitrary use of power, a power placed beyond the rule of law, accountability, democracy, morality and sound principled governance.
Robert John Blog-Politics 