Morning music
Saturday quiz
Well, this week I return to winning form: 8/10, compared to the 6/10 scored by political journalist John Rentoul. I did not know the answers to questions 7 and 10.
Tweets seen
Cameron-Levita in his usual bubble of total unreality. The idiot who brought us the war on Gaddafi (result— millions of Africans flooding Europe), fake “austerity” (result— misery for millions, as well as lower economic growth than anywhere in the then EU, USA etc), and other misconceived policy choices, most recently the increased support for the brutal and shambolic dictatorship of Zelensky in Kiev.
Ursula Haverbeck— arguably the bravest person in Europe.
She thinks that she is terribly clever, and making the old lady seem outdated, “bigoted”, “gammon” etc. Ha. Laugh now if you want to…
The pendulum may start to swing back now that pine martens are being reintroduced in several parts of the country; pine martens prey on grey squirrels but not (much) on red squirrels.
“The Tories are unlikely to attract many Reform UK voters given…
– Only 36% would vote Tory if a Reform UK candidate wasn’t standing
– 61% are voting Reform despite thinking they won’t win in their seat
– 75% say the Tories and Labour are as bad as each other
– 74-76% dislike Rishi Sunak and the party.“
Desperate. I had not heard of that MP. Looks a bit of a careerist; tried to become a Police and Crime Commissioner at one point (came third in the election): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Moore_(MP).
Keighley has, with 2 exceptions, been a “bellwether” constituency since 1959, so is likely to fall to Labour this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s.
I cannot think that those attempts at confusing the voters (of High Peak and also Keighley) will work. After all, most people vote according to party label, so when the voter is faced with a ballot paper, the “X” is placed by the party more than the candidate’s name.
I have to admit that the Italian woman “brushes up well”, as they say…
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgia_Meloni].
Clacton
Had to look that one up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakanda.
Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, Labour candidate, seems to come out of a black activist (African; Ghanaian) background in Nottingham: see https://heartofthenation.migrationmuseum.org/stories/sylvia-owusu-nepaul/.
About 25. Never had a non-political job, in fact has never had any job except a couple of p/t “internships”. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jovan-owusu-nepaul-3a95b17b/.
The candidate’s aunt has also been socio-politically active: see https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/7138/1/Owusu-Kwarteng_Between_Two_Lives_2010.pdf.
This Labour candidate is a kind of less-prominent Femi Oluwole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femi_Oluwole
Labour has, since 2010, when the present constituency of Clacton was established, never scored higher than 25.4% of the votes cast there; that was in 2017. The lowest was 11.2%, at the by-election of that year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacton_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s.
Labour has no chance at Clacton, a famously “left behind” and white British area. To choose an African “eternal student” as candidate is almost insulting to the voters there. Moreover, one whose social media posts make clear his hostility to the real people of the UK.
Despite Labour’s overall “popularity by default” in the nationwide campaign, I should not be surprised if its vote-share at Clacton were to dip below 10%.
The frightening thing is not that such a candidate is standing in Clacton, where Labour has little or no chance; it is that, across the country, similarly-hostile individuals are likely to be elected next month for Labour. God help the poor English people of these islands.
Late tweets seen
Not quite what I want to see: too many Con MPs. A couple of unexpected wrinkles too, such as Reform UK with 7 seats, and the SNP with 37, more than twice the number predicted elsewhere.
While the Con Party is toast pretty much whatever happens between now and 4 July, in some respects the General Election is quite open. A substantial minority are either undecided as to for which party they might vote, or are undecided as to whether to bother to vote at all.
That may mean a better than expected Con Party performance, a better than expected Labour (or even LibDem) performance but, most intriguingly, perhaps an even better than expected Reform UK vote, either as a targeted anti-Con vote, as a serious “I am dissatisfied” protest vote, or an angry “F.U., System parties!” vote.
The election is shaping up to be both interesting and important, perhaps even historic.
So will you, probably!
As people, from what I have seen online etc, ex-officer Mercer and his lady wife seem like a pleasant couple, but we are talking serious politics here.
Mercer has increased his majority steadily and considerably since first elected in 2015, but the general unpopularity of his party, his poor performance as a minister, and his personal moneygrasping would seem to leave him exposed. Also, Reform UK may well eat into his 2019 vote. Well, we shall soon know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Moor_View_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 
Anyone with half a functioning braincell recognises that Enoch Powell was speaking the unvarnished truth. Sadly, his own party turned their backs upon him and disowned him nearly entirely. Mrs Thatcher was was of the very few who paid him some heed. Others, such as the notorious liberal globalists Heath and Heseltine preferred to insult someone of far greater intellectual quality than them.
Even today, that old has been, Heseltine, sometimes makes insulting remarks about Powell. How is your new, PC globalist ‘Tory’ Party going today, Heseltine? It looks like it will shortly receive an almighty walloping at the election.
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If the fake Conservatives have even the tiniest amount of political commonsense left, they would hide David Cameron in Boris-Idiot’s fridge. The bloke is a totally discredited person and was an important reason the EU referendum was lost for Remain along with George Gideon Oliver Osbourne and war criminal, Tony Bliar, campaigning for that side.
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I have always thought that Sunak’s decision to bring back (((Cameron))) into the cabinet as foreign secretary was utterly bizarre.
(((Cameron))) is deeply unpopular with the British public, since (((he))) is responsible for the brutal and vicious austerity policies (more like fauxsterity, since only the working class and middle class were harmed, while (((Cameron’s))) wealthy donors got tax cuts).
Even within the Tory party, (((Cameron))) is regarded as an incompetent moron who lost the EU referendum that (((he))) expected to vote Remain.
Sunak’s decision to bring back the loser (((Cameron))) into the cabinet is utterly baffling. It certainly didn’t make the Tories any more popular. In fact, bringing (((Cameron))) back caused the Tories to lose even more popularity.
There are more than 360 Tory MPs. Sunak couldn’t pick one of them to be foreign secretary? Very odd.
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Well, someone HAD to replace James Cleverly (Thickerly) who was a total national embarrassment at the job. I once saw him on a TV interview on breakfast tv when he was a junior Foreign Office minister and the idiot couldn’t understand the most basic points about the Israel Palestine situation.
Re-appointing Jeremy Hunt as Foreign Secretary would have been a better move. Jeremy wasn’t bad at the job. Indeed, he is naturally suited for it.
Most Tory MPs are far too dim and incompetent to be His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs so there is a real dearth of decent candidates for the role.
I am afraid you won’t find many Tory MPs as suitable to be Foreign Secretary as people of the calibre of Lord Halifax, Sir Anthony Eden, Lord Carrington, Douglas Hurd nowadays.
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Get real, David Cameron, your party has ZILCH hope of winning this election and you know it. The Labour vote share percentage would have to fall dramatically to close the gap sufficiently to reduce the adverse swing against your party.
It may fall a bit further to around 34% but that is about it.
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John:
I doubt that Labour’s vote will fall as low as 34%.
34.4% in 1992;
43.2% in 1997;
41.4% in 2002;
35.4% or 35.2% (Wikipedia has the higher figure) in 2005;
29% in 2010;
30.4% in 2015;
40% in 2017;
32.1% in 2019.
As you see, the oft-maligned Corbyn managed 40% in 2017, not far behind Blair’s 1997 and 2001 successes.
Starmer is dull and uninspiring, as well as not very truthful, and his party is not only under the Israel-lobby but packed with non-European MP-candidates, *but* is the main opponent of a government and party that at least 80% of voters now want to ditch. There are now 5 primary and secondary parties with over 5% in the opinion polls, so it may be that Labour’s vote will dip below 40%, but I should have thought not as low as 34%. 38%? I am still thinking around 40%.
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I think the Labour vote is softer than it appears to be but certainly isn’t as soft as would be required for David Cameron’s fantasy to become reality. We may see a small swing from Labour to Green or even the Lib Dems once more purely anti-Tory Labour voters realise that the Tories can’t possibly win.
Labour really offers nothing other than saying ‘let’s change the captain on the Titanic and we will give you a little bit better and more comfortable ride on the ship but we are still sailing towards that iceberg and we will still be sinking’.
The Labour Party manifesto is incredibly bland and has a real poverty of ambition within it. Mind you, even if it did offer real change would anyone seriously trust Mr Flip Flopper extraordinaire to implement it? His record of continual lying to his own party is pretty shameful.
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I want to see the Tories destroyed and have less than 50 MPs (actually zero would be better!), so they can’t trick patriotic British people into voting for them anymore.
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Friend of Britain:
My thoughts exactly.
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Whatever someone’s views are on what is referred to as ‘The Holocaust’ it is clearly wrong to imprison people for failing to agree with the official story especially if they are that old. History should always be allowed to be a matter of scrutiny.
I believe that even Deborah Lipstadt subscribes to the view that ‘The Holocaust’ should be a matter of free enquiry and that no-one should be made to suffer criminal penalties for disagreeing with the ‘approved’ version of history.
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John:
It is funny (peculiar) that real blasphemy laws now do not exist, as far as I know, in any European states, but that a para-blasphemy law now exists in a number of European states, sub nom “holocaust” “denial”, which may quite soon, under Israel puppet Starmer, be the case in the UK as well. The only silver lining is that prosecutions of people, maybe even of me, will raise the political profile of the said prosecuted victims of the Israel lobby.
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I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Starmer did institute a Holocaust denial law. Apparently, a promise to crack down upon ‘anti-semitism’ is in the Labour manifesto so that will mean budding ‘Refugees Welcome’ tyrant, Yvette Cooper, will be sending her PC Stazi to harass anyone who has vaguely anti-ZIONIST opinions on Israel. Everyone in this country should know by now that Labour and far too many other groups automatically conflate anti-Zionism with what is referred to as ‘anti-semitism’.
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Yes, it is undeniably desperate and pathetic but I, along with many others, will not take lessons on acting in a decent manner when you, Alistair Campbell, shamelessly helped to formulate a fraudulent case for war in Iraq in which too many of our best young men and women either lost their lives or were grievously injured.
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https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
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Don’t forget that Cameron insisted upon redefining marriage to include same-sex couples which has fundamentally altered the entire basis of that historic societal institution and which has had quite a few consequences like effectively removing the notion of biological sex from society and that has led to the growth in what is called ‘gender ideology’.
He couldn’t resist doing that.
https://www.c4m.org.uk
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Civil partnerships/Civil unions for gay people were appropriate but marriage should have remained as it was.
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An interesting website explaining where the rise in gender ideology has landed this increasingly loony-left ‘country’ which has become barely recognisable to people with commonsense:
https://sex-matters.org
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Exactly. We have a CANDIDATE-CENTERED electoral system of the most basic and crude kind but, of course, 90% plus of the voters use it to indicate their favoured party despite the fact the system doesn’t give you the opportunity to vote explicitly for a PARTY as Germany’s and New Zealand’s pretty good Mixed-Member Proportional Representation systems do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_New_Zealand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-Member_proportional_representation
https://en.wikipedia.org/Electoral_system
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk
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Here in the land real democracy forgot, if you think your MP is an dedicated one who looks after the interests of his/her constituents well but you don’t like his or her party you either have to lump it and vote for them anyway, vote for an independent or the candidate of another party you don’t approve of.
As you only have a single vote there is no way of showing support for a dedicated local MP whilst not also voting for him or her as the local nominated candidate of the party he or she was nominated for.
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Their selection of that candidate just goes to prove what a viciously anti-British and racist party Labour is. No British person with even the slightest inkling of patriotism should EVER vote Labour. Voting Labour for a British person is a form of self-hatred.
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There should be treason trials for the Labour Party and those trials when Labour Party figures are found guilty after fair trials and due process should involve the use of some stout pieces of British rope formed into nooses.
How many more candidates like that have they selected in winnable seats?
https://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org
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Neither should the people of Southend East and Rochford, Alex Armstrong. The Labour Party there have selected an ethnic candidate. I wonder if that person has similar opinions to the candidate in Clacton?
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Let us hope so, Paz49. My county of Essex should be a no go area for Labour. We really don’t want that anti-British rabble
here.
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Apparently, Royal Tunbridge Wells is very close indeed in that MRP survey by Survation. If people vote Labour the Tories will retain it narrowly but if they vote for the real challenger party ie the Liberal Democrats there is a real chance it will be lost.
Wouldn’t the fall of the Royal Tunbridge Wells parliamentary seat out of Tory hands be quite something to behold on election night?
That famous saying ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ would take on a whole new meaning!
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John:
I missed the “Portillo Moment” in 1997, being resident in Almaty (Kazakhstan) at the time of the 1997 General Election and not having had satellite TV there. I also missed the Silver Jubilee of 1977 (I was in Rhodesia at the time), though I am rather pleased I did miss it, and I regret having been unable to see (on the spot) the fall of the Berlin Wall (I had been in both West and East Germany the previous year, 1988, though not in Berlin itself, and in 1989 saw only bits on other people’s TVs in London). Perhaps this time I shall have a front-row seat.
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I very much doubt whether the Tories will go down to sixty seats or less as we are talking seriously safe seats with those ones.
My own constituency of Brentwood and Ongar is an ultra-safe Tory stronghold and is currently their TENTH safest constituency. It has a numerical Tory majority of 29,145 votes, a Tory percentage vote share of 68%, a PERCENTAGE majority of 54.9% over Labour with the Liberal Democrats a further 0.1% back in third place. It would require a 27.5% ‘swing’ to fall.
https://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/defence/conservative
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