David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 5

Representative democracy works only for as long as the elected representatives are ready to respect the wishes of the electors. There may sometimes be a tension between the wishes of the electors and the conscientious beliefs of the elected ~ the great Edmund Burke was among those who argued that a Member of Parliament was not a mere mouthpiece to repeat unthinkingly what his electors told him, but also had a duty to his (or her) own honest sincere convictions. But Burke would also have agreed, of course, that MPs are obliged to serve their electors to the best of their ability, should strive, at least, to represent their wishes, and in any case should always respect them.

If politicians deliberately ignore their electors~ if they promise one thing and then turn round and do another ~ then what is the point of voting? In the United States many people say that in many respects, anyway ~ Mr Trump may have broken the mold! ~ both Republicans and Democrats are essentially the same ~ a Uni-Party. ‘No matter whom you vote for you always end up with John McCain.’ Much the same thing could be said of many other countries.

But if there is no point in voting; if our representatives then ignore our wishes, then what other courses of action are open to people but violence? Edward Gibbon described the constitution of the Eastern Roman Empire ~ Byzantium ~ as ‘autocracy tempered by assassination’. The Emperor held absolute power; he could, by the proper forms, do just about anything he liked. Yet if he went too far, someone was bound to murder him.

But this is surely a universal rule. Even the French and the English have overthrown kings, murdered some, and eventually made it quite clear who is the boss. Violence, in fact, can be forced upon the people by the refusal of the governing elite to listen.

Who is the boss now? It is not elected politicians. I am prepared to believe that current National Party Ministers of the Crown wanted to do rather more on certain fronts than they have, but they just encountered entrenched resistance everywhere. (On Treaty issues, of course, Nicola Willis has just told us that National by itself would have done far less, and that it was only New Zealand First and ACT who have compelled national to do even the little it has. Our current Prime Minister, of course, found absolutely nothing he agreed with in David Seymour’s Treaty Principles bill.)

But if not elected politicians, are we, the people, in charge? Hardly. One might perhaps be able to muster some mainstream medical opinion for compulsory vaccination; but what about the compulsory adoration of the Treaty, now imposed upon us by the news media, every professional body in the country, every officious bureaucrat, our unelected and arrogant judges, and incompetent teachers who cannot even teach our children to read but who evidently know all about history’s rights and wrongs? What about the creeping imposition of computers, internet banking, looming digital currency? The insanities and petty tyrannies of local councils and the Resource Management Act? What about the whole trans thing? This is a prime example of patent nonsense; but it has already got to the stage where the wonderful experts on the New Zealand Law Commission are recommending amending the Human Rights Act ‘to include new protections for transgender, non-binary and intersex people, explicitly including gender identity and innate variation of sex characteristics as grounds for anti-discrimination...’ In other words, if this change were to be made, it would, in many situations anyway, actually be against the law to hold what are quite unfairly called ‘traditional views’ about the nature of men and women.

Our supposedly neutral Electoral Commission did not see any problem with featuring propaganda for separate Maori electoral wards on its own website.

I think we are the famous frog in the pot of water over the fire. Our official ideology ~ that is not too strong a term ~ is run by lunatics who believe and want to enforce patent rubbish. They believe that they are so right that they quite entitled to ignore and override serious public sentiment; that they can do whatever they want and nothing will ever go wrong.

From among numerous examples perhaps the most vivid is the rapidly increasing publicly expressed anger in parts of Western Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, against illegal refugees. We all know the stories about what is happening. The news media lie about the size and nature of protests. The United Kingdom police are arresting thirty people every day for nothing more than resending tweets. People are charged with a criminal offence for waving their own country’s flag. (This is considered ‘racist’!) Sooner or later the country will explode.

The United Kingdom, once our own land of hope and glory ~ dear old Blighty., the ancestral home of so many of us ~ a byword for stability, phlegm and common sense ~ the UK is now facing the actual threat of some sort of civil war ~ because the morons in the ruling class have for the last generation pursued immigration policies which, if they were not originally so, certainly became unpopular a long time ago. They are, moreover, policies which go against the grain of human nature. They were doomed to fail. Both the unpopularity and the obvious failure have been obvious for some years. Do our rulers admit they got it wrong, and change the policies? No. They double down on them.

This is the mystifying thing. Why do governments persist in policies so obviously unpopular and so obviously doomed to failure? The failure is obvious. It is not as if there was a good chance that these policies would be successful if given a fair run. Why do governments despise their own citizens and favour undeserving outsiders?

What does not register? Somehow, our messages are not getting through to their ‘brains’. Have they not noticed the consequences of their policies? How can these people be so stupid, or so blind, or so convinced of their own enlightenment, that they cannot see where we are heading ~ where we are very shortly to arrive? Or is it a globalist plot? What precise mixture of stupidity and wickedness are we dealing with here?

They say that there are some ideas so stupid that only really intelligent people can believe them. It would be fairer to say that people who believe obvious nonsense are not intelligent at all. An American wrote recently that he would rather be ruled by the first two thousand people in the telephone book than by two thousand Harvard graduates. I take his point.

The same question arises in our own country, of course, where our own stupid ideologues foster and feed nonsensical racial resentments. What is planned for us if we continue to refuse to swallow our indoctrination? Already we have gone past finger-wagging and lectures to varieties of legal enforcement. If lectures do not work then more direct and brutal methods may be necessary. If we were to resent that, it would merely prove how bad we are.

Loyalty cuts both ways. We are loyal to the king, and to his duly-elected and appointed governments; but they in return have a duty to be loyal to us. They have to serve our interests. If they do not, then our loyalty to them is at an end. This was the principle laid down openly in the American Declaration of Independence, but it is the ancient feudal principle which underlies our constitution, and it is, indeed, the basic law of common sense underlying all civilised societies. Nothing is free in this world. Everything comes at a price. The price which governments pay for the loyalty of their subjects is their own loyalty to their people’s welfare and to their own election promises. Once governments ignore the people they serve, any duty of obedience and loyalty which we might once have owed them comes to an end.

Any government that arrests you, for example, just for waving your own country’s flag, has forfeited any duties you may have to it.

And if there is a ‘multicultural’ society, where large groups of citizens have completely incompatible interests? One part demanding Maori sovereignty, say, or Sharia law, and another part not wanting it? Well, we have it on good authority that a man cannot serve two masters. Which ever faction a government chooses to serve, it forfeits all claim to the loyalty of the other. Genuinely multicultural societies simply cannot work.

To be continued…

David Round, a sixth generation South Islander and committed conservationist, is an author, a constitutional and Treaty expert, and a former law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.