Reading the media this last weekend, you may be forgiven for thinking that the most important news item concerned Jo Biden and the Presidency of the United States. That is understandable. But there was a far more significant issue reported by Sky news on Remembrance Sunday, November 8th.
Of that, more in a moment. But first just a comment on electoral events in the USA.
The result was pretty close and remains disputed. Until the legal process is completed and the electoral college meets next month, the matter has not been resolved.
But the media treats the vote as done and dusted, invariably caveating Trump’s claims with assertions that there is no evidence of fraud. Well, that is a matter for the American judicial system; that is why you have courts of law. To settle disputes one way or the other.
I have just done a quick test of my own. The critical state of Michigan has an officially recorded electorate of 5,559,186 while the recorded total number of votes for the presidential election is 5,519,348 ie a turnout of 99.28% ….
I then turned to the website for another key State, Wisconsin and managed to find a page stating that “The State of Wisconsin had 3,684,726 active registered voters on November 1, 2020” I looked in vain for presidential election results on this site, including the News and Notices page. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the Presidential election of 2020 as at 11.10 UK time on 9th November 2020, 6 days after the poll.
So, turning to the NBC webpage for results, I find that with 99% of the expected vote in, Biden has 1,630,569 votes and Trump 1,610,030 with various others around 40,000 gives a total of 3,280,659 votes cast of a Wisconsin electorate of 3,684,726 ie a turnout of 89%…
Such turnout figures are simply not credible in developed western democracies. Both States have Democrat Governors.
Then there is the high % of postal votes. The media in France, Britain and in the US have repeated the same comment almost verbatim, namely that there is no evidence to support the contention that postal ballots are open to fraud.
Now, anybody with an ounce of commonsense knows that cannot be true. And anyone who has been involved in the process of electoral campaigning and ballot scrutiny knows that postal voting is wide open to abuse – and that it is abused.
Which brings me to my last comment on this election. Namely electoral deadlines. I have never in 50 years of following politics encountered the notion that it is legitimate to include and count votes received after the deadline of close of poll on the day of the poll.
It is particularly remarkable as the entire world knows that every 4 years, by close of play on the first Tuesday of November, Americans vote for their President. You cannot miss the fact that a Presidential election is coming. The idea that you don’t have time to get your vote in by close of play on election day is preposterous.
But we now live, of course, in a woke world where everything is subject to whim, especially when the government made crisis of Covid 19 is deployed in justification.
Whether Jo Biden or Donald Trump is sworn in next January as President of the United States, it will make little difference to the geopolitical challenges the US President will face. Neither man can remove the deep, deep divide which now exists in America and in the western democracies generally, namely the chasm between those who inhabit the ideological World of Woke and those who live by the realities of our humanity.
Which brings me to my other significant news item.
The UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter gave an interview to Deborah Haynes of Sky News. In it he signalled concern about the risks to world peace in view of the global tensions now emerging, especially following the economic and social consequences of government responses to Covid 19.
The motive for the CDS’ exceptional intervention is no doubt perfectly explicable: namely to get a multi-year budget settlement out of a Treasury which wants to limit departmental budgets to annual agreements because of Covid 19 measures. Carter is simply promoting the Defence case for exceptional treatment.
Undoubtedly.
But his intervention does remind us that the risks to world peace are now higher than during the years of the cold war which ended 30 years ago.
30 years ago, both Russia and China were economically and therefore militarily weak compared with the West. They were in no position to treat with the western democracies on equal terms, either economically or militarily.
That situation is now rapidly reversing. Western governments like the USA, the UK and France have unprecedented levels of national debt and serious balance of payments deficits in international trade – the problem Trump was facing up to with China.
30 years ago, the problem with a militant and fundamentalist Islamism was a possibility on the horizon. It is now a pressing, persistent and growing threat. Simultaneously, the West’s moral conviction in its own identity and purpose has been cancerously undermined by political correctness. As any military Commander will tell you, the most critical priority is morale. Without it, you are finished before you start.
The state of western morale and military capacity is revealed by its response to the crisis in Hong Kong. China has torn up the 1997 International Treaty and the West just turned away. There is one difference between Hong Kong in 2020 and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, trashing the Treaty of Versailles: German forces had orders to retreat if they encountered any military resistance from the Democracies; China today has no such reservations.
China believes that her time has come. Her ambitions are global in every domain. Her attitude is one of utter superiority – and she has old scores to settle with the West … Her willingness to use military force is patent.
Erdogan’s Turkey is ideologically convinced of Islamic superiority and global destiny.
The Western Intelligentsia just doesn’t get it.
Woke World is another planet. Time to return to planet earth.
Ray Catlin
P.S.
The USA should abandon this outmoded Electoral College system. It encourages interference because it is easier to corrupt the results in a few key States than for the entire nationwide poll. It also creates resentment. On the reformed basis Biden wins, as would Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Conservatism Institute 