There was an interesting comment on the X platform recently written by Alistair Mellon the Social Democratic Party candidate for Coventry South at the last General Election. Mr Mellon came seventh in this contest on the SDP’s first outing in this seat. However even though Mr Mellon didn’t come close to winning this seat, it went to the awful student-type Labour Party politician Zarah Sultana, his experience of canvassing for votes brought him into contact with voters who expressed their fears and worries about the state of the nation to him.
Mr Mellon was writing in the context of the media manufactured furore over rumours that the CEO of the X platform, Elon Musk, would donate a significant amount of money to the Reform Party. The main real issue as Mr Mellon said is not where Mr Musk throws his money but the disaster of mass unchecked immigration.
I find myself in full agreement with Mr Mellon over the issues of the damage that mass migration has created which includes the erosion of what was once a very high trust British society. I agree with him on the danger of major social unrest created by lunatic migration and multicultural policies and on the laudable achievements of Mr Musk. Where I depart from agreement is on the subject of electoral reform. This is because although there are undoubted faults with Britain’s First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system and its very high barrier to challenger parties, proportional representation might be much worse. PR could give small far left or even Islamist parties undue and outsize influence on British politics just as small parties do under other PR systems such as those that operate in some continental European nations and in Israel. Under PR any party that wanted to govern would have to recruit support from the smaller parties which could lead us to some very bad or misguided people having an undue and unrepresentative influence over the nation’s politics.
However apart from the niggles I have about Mr Mellon’s enthusiasm for PR, this is an excellent article that I believe well deserves taking the time to read.
Mr Mellon said:
*People are losing their minds over Elon Musk and his interests in the politics of various European Countries. Some thoughts. We have irresponsibly brought millions of people who share little by way of culture to our respective countries and oftentimes there is are so few First Nation British left in places that there is no-one there for migrants to assimilate into.
People are terrified that our leaders are largely ignorant or indifferent or both to the realities on the ground and there is a growing sense of helplessness which if not addressed energetically could lead to communal unrest. Although I lost in the general election in Coventry South I had more than 3,000 one to one conversations and even though I was broadly aware of the level of discontent and dissatisfaction before the election even I was taken aback at the level of anger and resentment that is brewing unchecked in the country outside a few privileged postcodes. If we don’t address this issue we will face civil strife in the next ten years on a level barely imaginable by most metropolitan based observers.
In the last election the voting public picked up the most effective cudgel to beat the Tory Party to a pulp. In the next election they will do the same to Labour. The only question is what weapon they will use? In my estimation the Tory Party will be rejected as milquetoast. To my chagrin, I am guessing that their preferred tool will be Reform. As most people are not paying detailed attention to Farage’s party management or policy framework and won’t recognise a thatcher tribute band when they see it the results will nevertheless be brutal. They know that the establishment hate Farage and that’s going to be enough to put him in Downing Street. He’ll fail but maybe just maybe we get PR out of what surely will be a debacle.
The public understandably wants change. They know that we’re no longer a high trust society. They reject the collapsing standards they see all around them. And they reject the constant erosion in GDP/capita and they’re increasingly aware that countries like Poland are imminently going to surpass us by this measure. Meanwhile the establishment clings to a status quo that technology is rendering redundant but it’s in their interests to resist the tectonic forces as long as possible or see their power evaporate. Our first past the post protects the incumbents and prevents new ideas emerging.
This brings us onto Musk. I’ve followed his career since 2012 and been on site visits to Tesla Austin and Space X in Boca Chica and have had hundreds of conversations with people who’ve worked there including a dozen Brits who all confirmed to me that he is across the details of vast tracts of his businesses bringing his focus to the nub of the problem with the certainty of a sleepwalker. His radar for problem identification and problem solving has been described to me by engineers & metallurgists, software designers & tunnel bosses as variously uncanny, otherworldly and astonishing.
Like him or loath him to pretend that he is responsible for the faultlines in our society that have been festering for decades is to confuse the message with the messenger. That he has demonstrated an unerring ability to see what’s coming down the turnpike cannot be denied. From the emergence of the Internet (he built the New York Times first website) to PayPal to Tesla and the EV revolution to Space X and the advent of a new space industry enabled by his reducing by 1,000 X the cost of taking a kilo of payload to orbit, to Neural-link, The Boring Company to X & XAi to Trump we’d be foolish to imagine that one accumulates $450Bn by repeated accident - it’s simply not statistically plausible. To suggest that absent the great accelerator that social media has proven to be, our problems wouldn’t exist seems to me to deny reality.*