What Exactly Do Voters Expect?
If we tried to invent new methods of creating governments, it's hard to believe anyone would come up with those we are already using. Some very important questions about elections are never answered. For example, why is voting allowed at the age of 18, instead of 12, or 30? Why is the UK government free to choose when elections are held, instead of serving an exact fixed term? Why are electronic voting machines used all over America, although they are simple devices, easily hacked?
As soon as you look closely at the electoral pantomime, questions pile up. What exactly are voters thinking when they go to do the deed? How many have any idea how government really works; how many know anything worthwhile about the person for whom they are voting? In Britain every 'member of parliament' is supposed to represent the specific group of people in his/her 'constituency'. (A 'costituency' is a geographical area drawn on a map by anonymous crooks using a secret selection process Albert Einstein couldn't explain.)
But in reality, many of the most ambitious politicians -the ones who will become cabinet ministers and prime ministers- are complete strangers to their 'constituents' and couldn't care less for their wishes. Having secured a place in the government, these characters vanish from whatever obscure spot on the map they pretended to represent, and focus instesad on getting rich quick down in London. Voters appear curiously indifferent to this phenomenon, although the societal disasters that follow are inevitable when don't-care won't care go-getters are handed the keys to the kingdom.
This existential gulf between governors and governed became cartoonish during the sequence of Conservative governments Britain has endured since 2010. Elite-spawned top-tier politicians of this era were elected as MP in places where they were conspicuously...well, alien is the word that springs to mind. A procession of outsiders were helicoptered into areas where a tortoise would win if it wore the correct rosette. These MPs were not elected but anointed and their performances in office were predictably gross. [READ our two-part coverage: THE VISITORS WHO STOLE BRITAIN - click HERE and HERE]
There is no better example than RISHI SUNAK - the current UK Prime Minister whose political career began when he entered parliament in 2015, as MP for Richmond, North Yorkshire, aged 35. Let us see how much Mr Sunak has in common with the good people of Richmond, Yorkshire.
The population of the Richmond constituency is 96% white. Rishi Sunak is 100% Asian, from a family of globetrotting Pakistanis. Of course, he "identifies" in his own very personal way:
“British Indian is what I tick on the census, we have a category for it. I am thoroughly British, this is my home and my country, but my religious and cultural heritage is Indian, my wife is Indian. I am open about being a Hindu.” he told the Business Standard magazine in 2015.
So, the all-too familiar claim to be British/not British then.We shall return to this statement shortly.
Rishi Sunak was born and raised in Southampton : a shipping town on the south coast of England. Population over 250,000.
Richmond, Yorkshire, is 280 miles away : inland, very rural, a farming region in the north east. Population 53,000.
Britain "is my home and my country" said Rishi, in his debut year as an MP. But is it really? What exactly was Rishi up to between leaving college and becoming an MP for Yorkshire?
In 2001 Sunak left Oxford University and went to work on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs (the infamous "vampire squid" of finance). The he moved to "The Childrens Investment Fund Management" -a ridiculously-named hedge-fund operation described in the Guardian as "the world's top-performing hedge fund." - one of the most aggressive activist investors on earth (per Wikipedia). The Childrens Investment racket is controlled by TCI -a holding company in -guess where- the Cayman Islands.
RISHI'S GOLDEN YEARS
In 2006, aged 26, Rishi Sunak became a partner in the above hedge-fund operation. Five years out of college, he was ramping up the offshore millions hand over fist. Demonstrating a rare gift for multi-tasking, that same year he attended Stanford College in California, collecting both a "Master of Business Administration" degree and a billionaire's daughter named Akshata Murty, who he married three years later.
2009 was memorable for more than his marriage into a 100 billion-dollar family, however. A man in a hurry, Rishi hooked up with some former finance-chums in California to create a new hedge fund: Theleme Partners, which launched in 2010 with a paltry $700 million under its control. Still, not too shoddy for a 29 year-old. Considering he's actually a British Indian and all.
In 2013, Rishi's glittering new father-in-law rewarded him with a directorship in Catamaran Ventures -a family-owned investment firm. Catamaran is one of those gloriously non-specific creatures that thrusts its tentacles into all sorts of pies, and has a hole at each end where money goes in and out on its way to who knows where. As in...
But as British Indian Rishi knows, "diversity" is a British thing, not an Indian one. So that's alright.
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
So this was Rishi's wonderful life between 2001 and 2015. Awarding him adulthood in 1998 at the traditional age of 18, we see that up until his sudden lunge into politics, Sunak's adult life was almost entirely spent in America, and there is no sign whatsoever that one penny of his fabulous wealth turned up in anywhere in the UK for tax purposes. (I am thoroughly British, Britain is my home, my country...) His wife is American, his employers were French and American, and his personal worth is a mystery sat on a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
Less mysterious is his Sunak's enthusiasm for the company of dedicated tax-evaders. At the "Childrens Investment" hedge-fund company, Rishi's boss was the French-born financial wizard Patrick Degorce. A few words about this chap seem appropriate.
In 2017 Degorce was found guilty of running a massive tax-avoidance scam through the British film industry and ordered to pay the HRMC a whopping £7,500,000 in unpaid revenue. Degorce's tax-evasion scam dated back to 2006 -coincidentally, the very same year when he made Rishi a partner in the (Cayman-Islands based) hedge-fund.
As it happened, in 2010, Rishi Sunak's co- founder of the hedge-fund Theleme was -you guessed it- the crafty mister Patrick Degorce. Also by pure chance, in 2011, Degorce was one of the earliest investors in the pharmaceutical company Moderna, who would later secure a huge payoff from the UK government during the Covid hysteria of 2020. And as luck would have it, at that time his old pal and business partner- chancellor Rishi Sunak- was the man dishing out the UK taxpayers' dosh for Moderna jabs like there was no tomorrow. Small world at the top, is it not? I cannot tell you what -if any- stake Degorce still holds in Moderna, but you'd imagine it's not peanuts, considering Moderna trousered 18.4 BILLION dollars in covid vax-sales in 2022 alone. [CLICK HERE for details] Smart cookie, that French fellow.
HOME IS WHERE THE CASH IS
The Sunak family itself is nothing if not resourceful where taxes are concerned, as Rishi's Indian/American wife demonstrated when ducking out of an estimated £30 million UK tax bill by stumping up just 30 grand for non-domicile status. This terrific wheeze was rumbled in 2022 (after Rishi's chums in Westminster decided to make him Prime Minister) whereupon his wife apologised and promised to sort things out. No problem there, then.
But let's remember that this fellow -the amazing Mr Sunak- represents (don't laugh) the people of Richmond, North Yorkshire. Much in the way that I -a Scottish blogger- represent the interests of Tucson Arizona, i.e. not at all. The Sunaks do -bless them- own a large property in Yorkshire, as well as two wildly expensive homes in London and a penthouse in dear old Santa Monica (memories...). There is not a chance in a million of the post-political Sunak settling in North Yorkshire.
But that is hardly the point. Sunak has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of Yorkshire or the place; never had and never will. He popped in there because Richmond, North Yorkshire, has sent a Conservative into the British parliament after every election held in the last 116 years. They never elected Sunak, merely the rosette he wore and the party he pretended to represent.
This is just part of the ghastly truth underpinning the pointlessness of British elections. Tens of millions of voters -a critical mass- are bound by ties of history, family or misguided ideology to the two main parties. Like hypnotised sheep, these men and women are prisoners of a binary choice that exists only in their heads. Adults with goldfish brains, they refuse to admit the phony left and phony right are nothing but a consolidated talking-shop that will always promise change and unfailingly deliver betrayal. Next time will be different they tell themselves, like children wishing on a star.
And there will always be another rising star -another Sunak or Blair, another grasping cuckoo preening in the political nest, when the votes are counted and the game begins again. What these strange migratory birds say before the vote has all the substance of sparrowfart. But in this cursed century of hi-tech horrors, what happens after the vote has become the stuff of societal, geopolitical nightmares.
After the two "shock results" when voters demanded Brexit and Trump, both were trampled flat by their respective deep-state opponents. Britain was swamped by foreign intruders while American cities burned. For an encore -to remind us who is really in charge- the unelected global governors staged the Covid pandemic and crushed all bold dissenters into dust. What on earth are voters expecting to experience after the elections of 2024?
As I was completing this article, news emerged from America than an attempt is bring made to forbid any future President from withdrawing the USA from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress -things that could be near impossible for any President to achieve. [ CLICK HERE TO READ] A transparent attempt to decapitate the possibility of a re-elected Donald Trump taking America out of NATO, this is a full-frontal mockery of the concept of democracy. In what kind of democracy does one regime get to dictate the policies of the next? I address the same question to our American cousins: what on earth are voters expecting after the 2024 elections?
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