The Quiet Coup
- Jim Chimirie
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
"Add up the constituencies and timeframes, and you reach the blunt fact: millions of citizens are being stripped of the right to cast a ballot until the government chooses to permit it."
Jim Chimirie
December 10, 2025
There's a quiet coup under way in Britain, and it's not being led by mobs or tanks.
It's being carried out by a government that has found a cleaner route to power: remove the public from politics, shutter the ballot box, and rule without interruption.
Starmer's administration has delayed four mayoral elections for two years, on top of the previous postponements that already pushed votes back by a year. Add up the constituencies and timeframes, and you reach the blunt fact: millions of citizens are being stripped of the right to cast a ballot until the government chooses to permit it.
The excuse – "local authority reorganisation" – is the bureaucratic fig leaf regimes have always used to hide naked political self-interest. Labour claims it needs more time to "streamline" councils, as if democracy can be put in storage while Whitehall rearranges its paperwork.
Yet if reorganisation were the real aim, the delays would be months, not years. Two years is not "administrative delay." It's a quarantine imposed on the electorate so the public cannot punish its rulers. This is how democracies rot in the West. Not through force, but through rulers learning they can govern without consent.
Starmer and his ministers talk endlessly of "restoring trust." They do the opposite. They extend councillors' terms from five years to seven. They install new super-authorities with no mandate. They insist votes can wait until the government has finished imposing reforms no one ever voted for. The pretence that this is about "cost-saving" insults the public.
Britain's ruling party has found £40bn for tax hikes, billions more for boondoggles, consultants and pet schemes, but claims it cannot afford elections because boundaries are "in transition." The truth is simpler: elections are expensive for governments that are losing.
They cost legitimacy. They cost power. They cost heads. What is corrosive is the normalisation of this power. Postpone one vote, then another, then a third, and the right to elect local government becomes conditional, subject to political convenience.
A former Labour minister has admitted that trust has been "squandered." That is polite language for a colder truth: this government has decided the public must not interfere.
Britain isn't a dictatorship – yet. But the road bends that way.
Centralisation. Mergers. Extended terms. Elections pushed into the long grass. A government that promised competence has discovered a harsher creed: power, once taken, will not be surrendered. They claim to be reorganising councils. In truth, they are reorganising the people who vote for them. The public is being told to wait, to shut up, and to accept rule without voice.
Labour isn't reorganising democracy. It's rationing it. And once a government learns it can suspend elections without paying a price, it will do it again. And again. Until voting becomes a novelty, not a norm. Democracy delayed is democracy denied.
Britain is now learning how easily both can be done – with a press release and a shrug.
© Jim Chimirie, 2025
Image via Author
Once again Jim Chimirie has hit the proverbial nail right on the button. Yet I am bound to ask (as many others have and are); how have we come to this? The United Kingdom has stood like a beacon to the rest of the world. Not for nothing does it have 'The Mother of All Parliaments."
We got here very simply and as with almost all catastrophic events, a combination of things;
first, apathy on the part of the people. Too many today do NOT vote, and for a number of years have thought that politics has nothing to do with them. "What's the point? They never listen," is a now-old remark but to hold that view means that those who do vote become a minority. The direct result is that the majority do not elect a government - a minority do.
Second is that the most dedicated voters are on the left and many of them are at best, socialists, at worst communists - and the UK has been under an assault by the latter for decades. Yet such people know fine well they would never win a general election outright and on their own. So they hide. Behind the voluminous skirts of Labour, the Trades Union movement and especially education.
Related article here -
A third point is everybody's comfort zones. For nearly seventy years many have prospered, had the easy life and in the last couple of decades, seen the growth of the internet, home deliveries and almost everything within a comfy reach. Its so easy now to have a rant on social media but without actually doing anything else. Put another way, too many have got lazy. That easy, laid-back lifestyle of course, is now being shaken up a bit and the ways so many have got used to are under threat.
There are other factors but the most striking of all is that Labour had never won more than one election. They had always been one-term governments. Until...the arrival of Tony Blair.
For the first time ever, Labour had three consecutive terms. So the left had time to get to work - and they did. With remarkable effectiveness.
And here we are - on the verge of a Communist takeover.
Kevan James
"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power."
Anna, Esq
Exactly, Anna. That line isn't fiction anymore, it's diagnosis. When a government starts treating elections as obstacles rather than obligations, you see the same logic at work: the belief that power is its own justification and that the public exists to legitimise it, not restrain it.
Labour isn't trying to win consent, it's trying to outmanoeuvre it. It cancels votes, stretches terms, rewrites structures, and calls it "reform" because it's easier than facing an electorate that has turned against them.
That's the point Orwell nailed: tyranny in a modern state doesn't come dressed as violence or ideology. It comes dressed as administration – paperwork, timetables, regulations – all pointed toward one outcome: power without risk, rule without interruption.
And once a ruling class learns it can get away with that, it stops bothering with the pretence of serving anyone but itself.
Jim Chimirie
Starmer isn't intelligent enough to be coming up with all these authoritarian ideas, and definitely none of the front bench. So there must be hundreds, if not thousands of sociopathic minions toiling away somewhere, willingly devising methods to ruin our lives by the day!
BillyTheSkid
"Starmer isn't intelligent enough..."
Oh yes he is.
That's why he is so dangerous and why he surrounds himself with those who fit your description.
And the minions? Yes they're there but you have Blair to thank for their presence
Kevan James
They've done this in such a short time. They are trying to stop our democratic votes.
Linda Lovell
Actually not in a short time.
Hiding behind Labour are those who want to see a Communist, one-party UK and they've been there for decades.
What they haven't had is more than one term of office - that changed in 1997 with Blair.
Blair and Brown's three consecutive terms gave them the time needed an they've been at it ever since.
Kevan James
Related article -
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