As someone from a British Pakistani background, it is deeply troubling to see how the far-right in this country, who once championed Brexit under the guise of sovereignty, now eagerly submit to the influence of figures like Elon Musk. When Musk undermines our Prime Minister and Parliament, he disregards the hard-won sovereignty that defines Britain. It is a stark reminder of how quickly some are willing to hand over our national integrity to those who have no stake in our history or values.
Musk’s support for figures like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate highlights the dangerous path the far-right is taking. Robinson, notorious for mortgage fraud and for jeopardising legal proceedings, represents a fringe that thrives on division and fear. Andrew Tate, who aspires to be Prime Minister but couldn’t spell it correctly, has a history of promoting controversial views and faces serious allegations of human trafficking and sexual assault.
The issue of grooming gangs is deeply personal and crucial. It’s important to remember that such heinous acts transcend race or religion and must be universally condemned. Statistics show that grooming and sexual exploitation are pervasive problems that cut across all communities. It is disheartening to see these crimes used as fodder for divisive rhetoric by those like Musk and his followers.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, once hailed as the “messiah” of the Reform Party, now seems more like a “naughty boy” from Monty Python. The confusion within the Reform Party only underscores their lack of coherence and vision. Farage’s fluctuating stance and the party’s failure to find consistent leadership only highlight their instability.
Britain has faced centuries of challenges, from civil wars to modern political upheavals. We stand firm in our belief that our country is not for sale, nor for foreign manipulation. Britain is already liberated; we need no lessons from those who cannot comprehend the richness of our diversity and the depth of our democratic heritage.
Statistics reveal that Britain is one of the oldest parliamentary systems, enduring and evolving over centuries. Our focus should remain on uniting as a nation, addressing our issues with British resilience and ingenuity. No amount of wealth or influence from abroad can undermine the spirit of a people who believe in justice, equality, and the rule of law.
We are a proud nation, and our sovereignty is not up for debate. Britain is not turning, and we are certainly not for sale.
* Mo Waqas is Chair of the Lib Dem’s Stockton branch and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
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23 Comments
Thank you for a heartfelt article!
Might it be that the U K has been a member of the unstated empire of the U S A since their troops came in World War 2?
Might it be that the recent antagonistic statements of Messts. Musk and Trump make clear the American “deep state” policy of unipolar, world domination by the USA?
Might we now consider the likely consequences of a unipolar world or a multi-polar world and what we might do and restrain ourselves from doing in response to this question?
Possible nightmare scenario? President Musk in four years time?
Steve Trevethan is spot on.
After the Suez escapade the French took the attitude that they wouldn’t trust the US at all. We on the other hand decided that we had to tie ourselves as tight as possible to the US… and we’ve been there ever since.
I think we’re so deeply intertwined now that separation in all but impossible. Our military, intelligence community, our business, even our civil service. Anyone who doubts the latter btw should read Rory Stewart’s book about his time as Minister of State for International Development, and the run around he was given when trying to ensure that foreign aid to rebel held areas of Syria didn’t go to Al Qaeda. We are now effectively a 51st state – only without any of the constitutional protections that US citizens have.
I think Trump just promoted Canada to 51st. We’re now 52nd.
@ Peter
Oh yeah… forgot that.
@Peter – I think we are also now behind Greenland and Panama…
One question that I see no one is currently putting into words is: if Trump really decides Greenland is part of the US, who is going to stop him?
Steve Trevethan might be onto something, the US isn’t taking to kindly to being challenged over its position as the world’s economic and military superpower…
@Kevin Hawkins
No danger of a President Musk; he was born in South Africa and all US Presidents must be natural-born citizens. Just worry about President Vance instead.
The funny thing is, we’ve been here before… take a trip to Wikipedia and look at “War Plan Red”.
@Laurence Cox 8th Jan ’25 – 3:13pm
No danger of a President Musk; he was born in South Africa and all US Presidents must be natural-born citizens. Just worry about President Vance instead.
The US Constitution has been amended 27 times…**
An amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose. The amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the State legislatures, or three-fourths of conventions called in each State for ratification.
“all US Presidents must be natural-born citizens”.
Didn’t Trump make a fuss about whether Obama was qualified to stand? Obama was born in Hawaii. But it was already a state of USA when he was born.
@expats
And the last successful amendment, the 27th, took a mere 202 years and 223 days to get 3/4 of the states to ratify it. There are enough Blue States that Musk is more likely to reach Mars than be elected US President. There are literally hundreds of proposals to amend the US Constitution every session; the US Constitution still doesn’t have an amendment allowing the Federal Government to ban child labour (originally passed by Congress in 1924) and the famous Equal Rights Amendment of 1972, although now ratified by 38 states, was declared in court to have lapsed in 1979. Of course, where the Federal Government doesn’t have a specific power to act, under the 10th Amendment that power remains with the States. Federalists beware what you wish for.
@Steve Trevethan
The problem challenging American hegemony is the lack of appealing alternatives.
Currently, only China fills the main challenger role, but very few states that are secondary powers (advanced economies like the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and Australia) want the world order to be reshaped by Beijing. As such, most of the advanced economies of the world will support the US, with the hope that things will go back to “normal” after four years.
Moving beyond US hegemony will require a palatable option, one that has many of the same attributes that rallied most of the world’s advanced economies around the US after WW2; commitments to freedom of navigation, democracy, the rule of law, national self-determination, and a market economy. Only the EU could fill this void, but I doubt even the Gaulists in Paris are up to the task.
@ Nonconformistradical
I know Trump often gets the blame for the Obama birther theory, but it was actually Hillary Clinton who first started it when the two of them were competing for the Democratic nomination.
She in turn was picking up and running with a promotional leaflet put out by by the literary agency Acton & Dystel; Obama’s publisher.
They promoted him thus:
“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist …”
It was presumably one of those good ideas for promoting their business.
Snopes have an entry about this.
“Might it be that the U K has been a member of the unstated empire of the U S A since their troops came in World War 2…..”
“After the Suez escapade the French took the attitude that they wouldn’t trust the US at all. We on the other hand decided that we had to tie ourselves as tight as possible to the US…”
There is a flaw in this line of argument. We kept out of the war in Vietnam even though there was strong pressure on the UK to send troops into the conflict. We could have done the same thing in Iraq if we had chosen to.
We have a good political and economic relationship with the US. However, there is no pressure on us to adopt US laws, no pressure to use the US dollar, they don’t tell us what our budget deficit needs to be limited to, they don’t send us directives on how we have to run our railways! We don’t even have a free trade agreement with them.
Of course, the US corporations do what they can to further their own interests in the UK but they don’t make our laws. If we, for example, feel that there is a problem in the payment of taxes by the likes of Amazon and Google, we have the power to make them pay more. All they can do is leave if they don’t like it.
Let’s not overstate the scale of any problem.
@ Peter Martin
The story I was told was that LBJ phoned Wilson, who refused to send troops to Vietnam, and that LBJ replied “in that case don’t expect to be bailed out again”.
When Heath came in he quickly reestablished relations.
How much true there is in this missive I’m not sure – though it’s always seemed very plausible.
@Laurence Cox 8th Jan ’25 – 7:25pm…expats, And the last successful amendment, the 27th, took a mere 202 years and 223 days to get 3/4 of the states to ratify it..
But the Eighteenth Amendment (Amendment XVIII) to the United States Constitution established the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919…
That makes just over 1 year…So, who knows?.
The intention of my first comment to present the currentish comments of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk as precipitating a difficult choice between staying a member of an international grouping in which the leading/most powerful state expresses a policy by which it acquires fellow member state/assets, and not staying with that grouping and facing significant uncertainties. And with both choices needing critical analyses.
Perhaps the comment of Peter Martin suggests another option which is to stay within that grouping whilst disagreeing with/opposing particular leading power policies?
Might such depend upon whether declining to be part of a war of questionable purpose and consequences is of comparable weight with “threatening” to acquire “colleague” countries?
P. S. Might the Bretton Woods arrangements have put significant pressures on the “Allies” to accept the dominance of the U. S. A.?
I generally agree with this article to the extent that the stuff Elon Musk has been saying is utterly awful, often untrue, and we do need to call him out over it. And the way Nigel Farage as well as the Conservatives have picked up on some of his comments is also appalling.
However I’m not clear why Mo has brought up the question of sovereignty? Having someone from abroad say things about the UK does not in any way affect our sovereignty, any more than us saying things about the USA or people in the USA impinges on their sovereignty. We should challenge Musk and Trump when and because they say things that are false, not because they happen to be from the USA.
I also find it strange that, in the parallel Brexit thread, people are arguing that we should rejoin the EU, which actually does mean giving up our sovereignty to the extent that it hands control of many of our laws to a non-UK organisation, yet when someone from the US merely talks about the UK (without there being actual transfer of control of anything to outside the UK), we’re suddenly waving our arms complaining about an alleged threat to our sovereignty. Double standards, anyone?
@Simon R: It’s because Trump is the President-elect and Musk a prospective key player in the Trump administration, with the implication that they would use their standing on the world stage to force us to accede to their demands. As I wrote in another thread, it wouldn’t matter if a minor US legislator or op-ed writer called for the overthrow of the UK government, because they wouldn’t have any influence. In the same way it doesn’t matter what Ed says about the POTUS or the US government because as a leader of a minor opposition party he is mostly unknown there.
The EU is about pooling sovereignty — members have to follow its rules but they also help make the rules. This is entirely different from a foreign government attempting to unilaterally instruct ours.
“The EU is about pooling sovereignty”
It’s meant to be about economics too. The Remain side constantly made the argument for the economic benefits of EU membership during the 2016 referendum campaign.
If we rejoined the EU we’d be “pooling our sovereignty” with a population of 450 million in exchange for a share of an economy worth $19.4 tn.
If we joined up with the USA we’d be “pooling our sovereignty” with a population of 350 million in exchange for a share of an economy worth $27.4 tn.
So, if it was all about “economics ” and “pooling sovereignty” the choice would be clear enough.
I don’t believe Remainers/Rejoiners have ever fully appreciated that it isn’t really about either of these. Most Brits dislike both options.
@ Peter M,
That’s an unusually inelegant comparison on your part, given that pooling sovereignty in the European Union meant that there was a collective endeavour where a common market meant that a common set of rules and regulations theoretically apply, something that the United States still hasn’t achieved. And where is there an offer from the United States that would mean anything other than absorption, as the Canadians are being “offered”?
The size of the market in cash terms may be bigger, but under current circumstances, any European Union style arrangement with the United States could hardly be described as a pooling of sovereignty, more a surrender of it.
‘Anyone who doubts the latter btw should read Rory Stewart’s book about his time as Minister of State for International Development, and the run around he was given when trying to ensure that foreign aid to rebel held areas of Syria didn’t go to Al Qaeda.’
Rory (with whom I worked in the Middle East) was being euphemistic. The programme to which he refers in Syria was designed to support groups like Al Nusra, which became HTS. The aim was to defeat Assad, and as a phrase nearly went, the ends covertly justified the means.
The likes of Elon Musk are a symptom of our weak democracy. If we had stronger rules around donations, influence and a better electoral system they would not be able to exert their opinions on the electorate. There is no substitute for a codified constitution that details the rules that determine how our democracy works.