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I am glad that I live nowhere near that factory.
The brutal and corrupt Zelensky regime is having to use press-gangs to enforce conscription, there are no more volunteers, and the Kiev regime is running out of cannon-fodder. The front is almost a death sentence; many are deserting.
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Upcoming by-elections
Somerton and Frome
The by-election was triggered by the standing-down of the Conservative Party MP David Warburton, following multiple allegations (some admitted) of misconduct: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Warburton].
In 2019, Warburton received nearly 56% of the vote, with the LibDems in second place on 26%.
Labour has no chance here and, on paper, this would normally be another easy win for the Con Party, but the manner of departure of the last MP, added to the anger across the country aimed at the Con Party government of Sunak, may mean a LibDem by-election upset, particularly as this is merely a by-election.
In 2019, only 4 candidates stood (Con, Lab, LibDem, and Green); at the by-election, there are also Christian People’s Alliance, UKIP, Reform UK, and an Independent.
The bookies’ favourite is the LibDem, a lady from a local farming family who is also a local councillor. She seems to hit all the buttons, even the sex one, being female after the defaults of male MP Warburton (sex pest allegations, and connected cocaine abuse).
The bookmakers have the LibDem, Sarah Dyke, as even-money favourite, with the Con Party candidate on 20-1, and Labour at 250-1. The rest are not even quoted. You could probably get 1000-1 against any of them.
Experience shows that bookmakers are a poor guide to by-election results, but the LibDem looks pretty sure to win this, especially when many Labour supporters will be voting tactically, and many former Con voters displaying apathy and/or unwillingness to vote for the present Government.
Uxbridge and South Ruislip
The by-election of course triggered by the standing-down of “Boris” Johnson.
The 2019 election attracted 12 candidates, because the seat of the sitting Prime Minister is always popular. “Boris”-idiot won with 52.6% in 2019, with Labour garnering 37.6%. Only one other candidate had a saved deposit (the LibDem, on 6.3%).
The by-election has 17 candidates, among them the TV actor, Laurence Fox, for Reclaim. The bookmakers only rate two seriously— Con and Labour. The Labour Party candidate is quoted at just better than even-money, with Conservative Party candidate at 9/1. The Labour price has not altered much, but the Conservative has gone out from an opening 3/1 to 9/1, and the LibDems are now at 1000/1. The third-placed runner is now Reform UK (but only on 300/1).
“A nurse sitting with her husband drinking coffee said: “The biggest issue is ULEZ. I’ve retired from the NHS after 49 years. What about the carers who can’t make visits any more?”
People in Uxbridge tend not to conform to media stereotypes, for example that the NHS is in an unbearable state of crisis. The nurse said: “If I had my time again I’d do the same job again. I love my job.” As she walks round Uxbridge she is often greeted by her former patients.
How will she vote in the by-election? “Up until Jeremy Corbyn I was a Labour person,” she said. “Labour looked after the schools, the hospitals and the elderly.
“But the party has changed now and I’m afraid I have no confidence in them. Keir Starmer wouldn’t come out and actually go against Sadiq Khan [on ULEZ] in a television interview, when he was asked about him.“
[Conservative Home]
“‘It can’t be any worse’: In Boris Johnson’s back yard, Britons are desperate for a change.
Uxbridge, like Britain, is in a rut.
The town is where the capital’s westward sprawl ends. Two Tube lines serving central London finish their journeys here, as picturesque shades of green mingle with the gray and brown hues of suburban developments. But its high streets are shrinking and the local hospital is one of the worst in Britain – rated “inadequate” by the sector’s watchdog.
And nationwide, soaring inflation, public sector strikes and the aftermath of Brexit have left families poorer and services creaking to the point of collapse. Renewing a passport, taking a train, buying groceries, seeing a doctor – virtually everything is more difficult in Britain than it once was.
Change is in the air, and Labour is set to benefit. Opinion polls confidently predict the party, led by Keir Starmer, a former senior prosecutor, will win power in a general election expected next year.
But Uxbridge is a test case for that theory, and tensions are high. “You can see the national polls, just like I can see, but these are real votes,” Steve Reed, the party’s shadow justice secretary tasked with running the local campaign, told CNN on a hot afternoon on the high street. He predicts a “tighter race” than some media have suggested.
A handful of media outlets, including CNN, were denied the chance to interview Labour’s candidate or join a canvassing session, an unusually skittish move from a party tipped to win a by-election.
“People are not stupid. People understand the challenges facing the country,”
Some voters are more blunt. “They’re basically saying we’ll carry on business as normal,” says Mick, 61, who runs a food stall near Uxbridge station and has voted Labour his entire life. “So why are we voting?”
“I’d like to think [Labour would] like to do more for the working people,” Tracy Peabody, a dental nurse and mother of three young boys, told CNN on a high street in Ruislip Manor. “But I can’t help thinking it’s two wings from the same bird, all singing from the same song sheet,” she added of Labour and the Conservatives.
Just three-and-a-half years after one of the party’s worst-ever electoral defeats, the outcome of Thursday’s vote in Uxbridge will indicate how far Labour has come.“
[CNN]
Maybe not so obvious as at Somerton and Frome, but here too it looks as if the Conservative Party is facing an uphill struggle. Uxbridge is a more typical contest though, maybe, compared to Somerton and Frome, and one in which many voters despise all the System parties, and particularly Con and Lab. A battle of apathies?
Selby and Ainsty
The Selby and Ainsty constituency is unusual in that it has been represented since creation in 2010 by only one MP, a Conservative, who seems to be abandoning ship in the moral certainty that the national unpopularity of the Sunak government will wash him away at the next general election.
I do not know why the departed MP, Nigel Adams, chose to stand down in 2023 rather than wait until 2024 and the next general election. Maybe he did not want the opprobrium of having been voted out. Rumour has it that he wanted a peerage and, when not given one, resigned in order to lash out at his own party. Maybe.
Adams won his four elections convincingly, and increased his vote share steadily from 49.4% in 2010 to 60.3% in 2019.
Labour scored about a quarter of the vote in 2010, 2015, and 2019 but, interesting to see, managed over a third of the vote in 2017, when Corbyn was still Labour leader.
12 candidates are contesting the by-election, but this will be between Con and Lab. The bookmakers have Labour just better than even-money, but Con on about 13/2. A few weeks ago, the result seemed more speculative.
Political websites and newspapers have taken an interest in the Selby contest, perhaps because it may give a clue as to the Northern “Red Wall” seats.
“I’d like to think they’d like to do more for the working people,” Tracy Peabody, a dental nurse and mother of three young boys, told CNN on a high street in Ruislip Manor. “But I can’t help thinking it’s two wings from the same bird, all singing from the same song sheet,” she added of Labour and the Conservatives.
Just three-and-a-half years after one of the party’s worst-ever electoral defeats, the outcome of Thursday’s vote in Uxbridge will indicate how far Labour has come.“
“Labour and the Conservative party may have found a tougher opponent than one another as they prepare to fight a by-election in Selby and Ainsty this week: entrenched despondency among an electorate that’s tired of Westminster drama and the challenges posed by the cost of living crisis.”
“Selby local Rachel Young paused while walking around the shops to watch the candidates for Thursday’s poll take part in a televised hustings for the BBC in the town centre last week.
She told PoliticsHome that she still has not decided who to vote for, but thinks that many people she knows will simply not bother at all.”
[Politics Home]
See also: https://unherd.com/2023/07/westminster-has-failed-selby/
For me, what will be most interesting will be to see whether Labour wins because people have voted out of enthusiasm (unlikely) or simply because former Conservative voters have given up bothering to vote (more likely). The numbers will tell the story.
My guess is that the LibDems will win Somerton and Frome; a meaningless protest vote. As to the others, Labour will probably score in both, but by default only, because former Conservative voters will just stay home. Only very silly people believe that Labour-label in government will be much, if at all, better than the present shambles.
More tweets
I agree with the second tweet.
All the stuff in the msm about barges and cruise liners is flim-flam designed to obscure a few basic facts, such as that one barge can “house” 500 migrant-invaders. On many days, twice that number arrive in 24 hours! So you would need about 400-800 or more barges extra even in one year.
Also, the number of migrant-invaders coming “legally” is ten times the number arriving in rubber boats.
The UK was doomed as a decent place to live once the proportion of non-whites went beyond about 5% (and we are already at about 20%). The same goes for much of western and central Europe.
The above two tweeters might like to consider whether or not our advanced world civilization, which is 95% or even 99% based on white European-origined people, “works” (overall) when compared to the sorts of societies ruled by blacks, such as most of Africa, Haiti, Jamaica etc…
“Deluded” hardly covers it, but it seems that many blacks believe the same as those two, and their crazed beliefs are facilitated by anti-white non-blacks, either white European-origined or (usually) Jewish.
The people are right— a majority of them are of the view that a Labour government under Starmer will make their lives no better (or that they do not know).
Meaning— the present Government is trash, and Labour is also trash.
Late tweets
That should read “1 billion” not “1 million“, of course.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 
If Somerton and Frome votes in a Lib Dem MP that can’t be entirely dismissed as a meaningless protest vote. The result would mean one less Tory MP in the Commons thus demonstrating to Tory MPs how fundamentally unpopular they are with this, most embarrassingly, being the case amongst people who should, in theory at least, be inclined to vote Tory still ie ‘Right-wing’ patriotic people who they have spent the last thirteen years basically telling to get lost in a futile effort to win votes in places like Southall, Slough, Brixton, Tottenham etc.
Also, a lost Tory seat even one won by the Lib Dems means Labour will find it just that little bit easier to win an overall majority of their own. As Somerton and Frome does have a tradition of voting Lib Dem ( it was a seat of theirs from 1997 to as recently as 2015) I expect them to win it in this by-election and due to that tradition a better chance than normal of retaining it in the general election of 2024 or 2025.
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The most interesting of the three are in West London and particularly in Selby and Ainsty. Labour should be expected to win in Johnson’s seat as the swing required to gain it isn’t that large.
To be frank, I know the Tories are understandably desperate but it is a bit rich of them to try and turn the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election into a referendum on the proposed extension to the Ultra Low Emissions Zone as it was an idea that Boris Johnson originally came out in favour of a few years ago.
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Selby and Ainsty will be the most fascinating for by-election watchers. In theory, the Tories should retain it not only on account of its huge majority but because Labour and not the Lib Dems are their major opponents.
Labour has a poor record in by-elections competing against the Conservatives. Infact, the largest numerical majority in a Tory seat Labour has overturned was one of just 14,000 or so in Mid Staffordshire at the high point of public protest over the poll tax in 1990.
This seat in North Yorkshire has a Tory majority of 20,000. Labour needs a massive swing of over 17% to take it. If the Tories lose two out of the three that will be very bad but losing Selby and Ainsty to Labour on the same day as well will be an unmitigated disaster.
An interesting page for UK By-election records:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_by-election_records
As one can see there only five general election numerical majorities of 20,000 votes or more have been overturned at by-elections and Labour hasn’t achieved one of them.
If Labour manage this huge feat I suspect it will be due to Tory voters abstaining en mass and a larger than average fall in the Tory vote share rather than Conservative voters turning to Labour in a particularly big fashion.
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John:
As you say. Voters not voting as such but “voting with the feet”, i.e. staying at home, this time former Con voters, just as former Lab voters did in 2019.
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The Tories have a real problem enthusing those parts of the electorate that are most inclined to potentially vote for them as the three recent by-elections starting with Chester have already shown and, of course, the recent local elections.
The last parliamentary by-election in West Lancashire wasn’t quite so bad from a Tory viewpoint. Their vote held up a bit better than at Chester and the Manchester constituency before Christmas. Perhaps this might have been due to West Lancashire having many Tory-inclined farmers?
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John:
There is the point that, under Corbyn, Labour was something to vote *against* for many non-Labour voters, given the relentless anti-Corbyn propaganda barrage laid down by the Jewish lobby —and so msm— for years. Starmer is so lacking in interest, people cannot even be inspired to vote against him!
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The nuclear family is not a myth or, at least, it is isn’t totally amongst British people though legalising gay marriage (rather than the entirely reasonable gay civil unions/partnerships) and other socially liberal policies such as easier divorce could be said to have contributed to weakening it.
Blacks, on the other hand, have in many cases hardly known the concept of the nuclear family what with such a large percentage of their fathers walking away from their women soon after bringing a child into the world. No wonder so many black children turn into ill disciplined tearaways hence the numbers of drug dealers, muggers and rabid stabbers in places like ‘Stab City Upon The Thames’ formerly known as our capital city of London.😢😢😢
https://www.c4m.org.uk
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John:
Indeed. In fact, not just black women are abandoned by the fathers, often multiple, of their children. There are large numbers of stupid white Englishwomen who allow themselves to get “knocked up” by blacks, 99% of which blacks then decamp.
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Yes, that Sunderland Labour Left tweeter has it right. Starmer’s Labour really has very little to nothing to offer the British people.
They represent even more of a lax attitude to border control than the non Conservative fake Conservative Party does, more globalist open borders values, more absurd levels of political correctness, more of a PC cosh being placed upon police forces to render them even less effective than they are now etc.
His second point is the best one. Starmer has broken ALL of his supposedly sincere pledges to his OWN party so how does that record auger well for we lowly members of the electorate?
Starmer is not so much ‘Captain Hindsight’ more ‘Captain Flip Flop’.
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17 candidates in a parliamentary by-election! Independents have never done historically well in Britain itself (though the non UK tax havens and Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and and the Isle Of Man do have good votes for them) . There aren’t that many distinct political philosophies.
First Past The Post is a bit crazy even at by-elections with 17 candidates but in general elections when the vote is much more about voting for a government not an individual candidate and the party label of the candidate is a primary consideration for most electors then
having three candidates per seat of more shows how crude the system is.
FPTP at general elections when most seats have three, four, five candidates or more nowadays is absurd. The system is only really designed for ONE winner and ONLY ONE LOSER per constituency. Then it can work quite well.
It is high time this country got into the 20th Century let alone the 21st and changed it.
https://www.makevotesmstter.org.uk
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Regarding that tweet about the German government ordering more artillery shells, I would love to be a major shareholder in “Rheinmetall” 😂 😂 😂 These are wonderful times for the manufacturers of weapons. They are the only bastards who benefit from wars! 😡 😡 😡
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Claudius:
I hear what you say, but I should rather avoid the unpleasant karmic consequences of being involved with such things.
I read, about 40 years ago, an interesting book about the Krupp family:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp
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Indeed with some of those unpleasant consequences possibly being gigantic mushroom clouds forming over Germany, Britain etc.
It should never be forgotten that not only does Russia have the world’s largest nuclear arsenal some of those weapons are amongst the world’s most sophisticated, can be launched from the FULL ‘nuclear triad’ ie not just nuclear subs like we have but also land-based silos and nuclear bombers.
Also, the largest nuclear bomb which was demonstrated with truly horrific power in a nuclear test in 1961 (the terrifying footage of this is on Youtube) is owned by Russia and they still have these bombs ready to deploy.
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Yes, that is the Tory problem. They have disillusioned too many of their natural supporters so their voters are not turning up to vote at the same rate as Labour supporters are hence fairly large swings to Labour in by-elections even though the overall turnouts in them have declined significantly.
Turnouts rarely go down uniformly. It is nearly always the case that supporters of one party sit at home at a greater rate than that of the other major party and under the archaic FPTP voting system that can be disastrous for a party.
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John:
Again, as you say.
There comes a point, and I think has now come a point, where millions of former Conservative voters are just not willing to vote for an “omnishambles” such as that being presided over by Rishi Sunak (inherited from his three predecessors).
Those former Con voters will, I think, mostly stay at home, but some will vote LibDem, or even Labour, or for a small protest party such as Reclaim or (more likely) Reform UK.
Labour voters similarly, but arguably fewer, and after all the Labour Party has not been in government in the past 13 years.
This is the point at which a credible social-national party could sweep the board, but no such party exists.
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