Morning music
Reform UK
“Tim Montgomerie’s leap from the Tory ship to Reform UK? Now this is a statement. Thirty-three years of loyalty to the Conservatives, yet even he’s had enough of the dithering, U-turns, and wet centrism. Reform UK is becoming the island for those sick of the Westminster circus, a home for patriots tired of compromise and careerists. The Tories should be terrified—if stalwarts like Montgomerie are walking away, what does that say about the state of the party? Reform UK isn’t just nibbling at the edges anymore; it’s carving out a proper movement for common-sense politics and sovereignty. Watch this space, lads. The political realignment is only just beginning.”
Naturally, for anyone social-national, Reform UK is only a step forward, rather than any giant leap. Many of its expressed policies are wrong, and many of its candidates non-European. It is also pro-Israel etc.
Reform, however, may help to kill off the System parties over the next few years.
As for Tim Montgomerie, I have of course never had any time for him. He supported the fake “compassionate Conservatism” of David Cameron-Levita and George Osborne (both part-Jew) and the cruelties inflicted on so many by their policies, and by “welfare” (social security) “reformers” Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, the Jew “Lord” Freud etc.
Still, Montgomerie’s defection is an interesting commentary on the possible upcoming demise of the Conservative Party.
Reform UK is polling at around 20%. It has been there before, just about, but fell back to score only 14.29% at GE 2024. In my opinion, though, the fact that Reform UK was able to have 5 MPs elected (in contradistinction to other small parties of the past half-century and more) is more important than appears superficially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_election#Full_results
To look at Reform UK’s underwhelming (in themselves and in terms of numbers) 5 MPs and say (as many Labour Party partisans, pro-EU drones etc, have done, expressly) “ha ha! You lost!“, totally misses the point.
For any small political party, under the UK electoral system, to get even one MP elected is huge; to get 5 elected at once is, well, massive.
That especially applies once one realizes that it was only the FPTP voting system, which since the 1960s has gradually ceased to reflect the real levels of political opinion in the country, which prevented Reform UK having about 93 MPs (14.29% of 650).
Under a (full) proportional representation system, Reform UK would have been awarded 93 MPs, the LibDems 79, the Conservative Party 154, and Labour 219, on the voting numbers at GE 2024.
In reality, were the voting system proportional, many more voters might have voted for Reform UK anyway, because not put off doing so by the perception that not voting Lab, Con, or LibDem is “a wasted vote”.
As can be seen from the graphic above, the present system of voting in England (particularly) is skewed against the smaller parties. Not Reform UK alone; the Green Party, under a fully-proportionate system, would have been awarded, at GE 2024, 42 MPs (6.39% of 650) instead of the 3 who were actually elected. Even George Galloway’s Workers’ Party would have 5 seats.
Some proportional-voting systems have a “threshold”, 1%, 5% etc, below which a party gets no seats.
We now have a Labour government which was voted for by a third (33.7%) of the actually-voting electorate, and by a mere 20% of the eligible electorate. It has only marginal legitimacy.
Having said all that, we are where we are. At present, the main two System parties still stand opposed to reform of the electoral process.
The case of the SNP, as blogged previously, is interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_National_Party#History.
The SNP was founded in 1934, but only had its first MP elected in 1945, in a by-election, and he lost his seat only 3 months later. The next SNP MP won her seat in another by-election, in 1967, but lost it in 1970, though another SNP candidate won in another seat. At that time, there were 71 MPs holding Scottish constituencies.
The SNP did well in 1974, getting 11 MPs at one of the two general elections, but fell back to 2 in 1979. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the SNP increased its support but even in 2010 had only 6 MPs out of the 59 then available in Scotland.
Then, in 2015, the SNP had its electoral miracle, based on a “Conservative” Party government at Westminster supported by relatively few Scottish voters, and on a Labour Party which had been supreme in Scotland since 1945, increasingly so since 1964 and then in the early 21stC, but which was perceived as being useless (particularly so in the Blair/Brown years (when Labour was in power at Westminster) and thereafter, when Scottish Labour was headed by the egregiously poor Jim Murphy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Murphy]. Murphy had been an unsuccessful university student for 11 years, and never did graduate, but became a Labour MP at the relatively early age of 29.
In 2015, Scottish Labour lost 41 of its 41 Westminster seats, while the SNP held or gained 56 (out of 59).
How does that relate to Reform UK in 2024 and perhaps 2029?
We have seen how the SNP took over a decade to get 1 MP, and 40 years to get a cadre of MPs, and how the SNP only surged to power 81 years after its foundation.
Reform UK, dating from only 2021, is however the same, in effect, as its previous persona as Brexit Party, founded in 2018, and a lineal descendant from UKIP (though that still exists as a small rump), founded in 1993.
Reform UK is now aiming to do in England, as well as in the UK as a whole, what the SNP did in Scotland in 2015, i.e. catch the wave of popular support. For Farage, Tice etc, there has to be that FPTP tipping point, the point at which the illogical, unfair etc FPTP system, instead of impeding Reform, starts to work in its favour.
Reform’s slightly underwhelming result at GE 2024 was purely the result of its support (and votes) being spread so thinly. Reform had considerably more actual votes than the LibDems, but few concentrations of votes. Where the concentration was dense enough, Reform got MPs.
The msm commentators, and the Labour and Conservative Party partisans, have not fully taken on board why Labour won so many MPs, and so won the election.
Labour won because the Conservative Party lost. Trite, yes, but the point is that —as can be seen from the percentage voting for Labour, only 33.7%— rather few people actually voted Labour, and most of those who did, did so in a wholly negative way, i.e. because in this or that particular constituency, the fight was perceived as being only between Lab and Con, or Lab and SNP in Scotland, and people desperately wanted rid of 14 years of “Conservative” misgovernment.
What, then happens when Labour, Starmer-Labour, Labour Friends of Israel Labour, is hated and despised as much as the Conservative Party was 5 months ago? Well, actually, that has already happened, but of course Labour is going nowhere, insulated from dissent, protest, and even riot by its very large majority (presently 156: see https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/government-majority).
It has taken Starmer only 5 months to put Labour down where the Cons were, in popular estimation, after many years, arguably 14 years.
If the voting patterns of several years continue, i.e. people voting against rather than for candidates and parties, then I think it entirely possible that, in voting against Labour, Reform might be the receptacle for those “anti” votes, more than the Conservative Party. In fact, I can see at least the possibility that both Lab and Con will slump, Lab to maybe 200 seats, and Con to somewhere below 100. If that were to happen, there would be about 350 seats going to others, in England maybe 250. Reform could be the main beneficiary of that.
It may be speculative to suggest that the next general election could see Reform UK as the party with the most Commons seats, but it is now not impossible.
How many seats could Reform get? I do not know. Anywhere from 50 to 200, if they continue to gather support. Reform came second in 98 seats at GE 2024; on the other hand, UKIP came second in 120 seats in 2015.
The only gamechanger I could see for the Cons would be if “Boris” Johnson were to come back into direct politics, take one of the few “safe” Con seats left, depose the Nigerian woman, Kemi Badenoch, then appeal to the public, “cosplaying” his favourite role as an am-dram Winston Churchill.
As regular readers know, I myself despise Johnson, and hold him in utter contempt. However, many voters do not. Stupid, maybe, but we must look at the realities. In fact, Johnson is not terribly popular with the voters; just more popular than Kemi Badenoch ever will be.
I have often wondered why Johnson was not granted a life peerage. He could have had one, had he wished. There is only one answer— he wanted to keep his options open. Were he to return as Con leader, he could not do worse than Sunak (or Badenoch) electorally, in my view. A “Boris” general election might steal much of Reform’s thunder. The Cons might even become the largest party again. Hateful to me (as is Starmer-Labour) but it might just happen.
At GE 2024, parties and individuals other than LibLabCon got a record 30.4%. That means that, already, if taken with the 40.2% of eligible voters who did not vote, 70.6% of people did not vote for the so-called “three main parties”.
Tweets seen
I agree with Montgomerie on the euthanasia bill.
Exam grade inflation
Happened to see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-level_(United_Kingdom)#England,_Wales_and_Northern_Ireland.
In the early 1980s (when I took A Levels, studying for a few months alone in order to be able to get onto a law degree course, having dropped out of school a decade before, at age 16, in 1973), about 8% of candidates were awarded a Grade A. By 2009, that had grown to nearly 27%, despite the increase in the number of candidates.
In 2009, the concerns about grade inflation resulted in a new category being established, the A*. Look at the statistics. From 2009, about 8% were getting A* grades, but the ordinary A grades were, from 2009, running at around 18% or more. B and C grades were inflating even more.
As with the currency, grade inflation simply means that, in the end, the piece of paper becomes almost worthless.
Israeli war crimes— Genocide in Gaza
““My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence. And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide. A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people – more than 800 of them civilians – were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage. But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide. But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide. It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words. But there does need to be a clear intent. And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders – including the prime minister and the minister of defence – and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there. A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here. Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership. Lemkin – that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ – described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements. And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it. But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world. But reality cannot be denied. So yes, it is a genocide. And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.” – Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024 – Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024.“
Powerful.
That statement certainly puts the UK and US-based Jew-Zionist “human rights” lawyers in their place, the ones constantly tweeting about how what has been happening in Gaza is supposedly not a genocide because… [how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?].
More tweets seen
What really matters politically, though, is not the Westminster Bubble blame-game but what is actually happening on the streets. A million or more invaders every year (last year 1.2M) (yes, one or two hundred thousand leave, as do about a hundred thousand disenchanted Brits), and a steep slide in terms of public services, a decent society, crime, incomes, housing provision, and much else.
If things go on as they now are, there will be either a quietly-British form of social-national revolution somewhere or somewhen down the line, or (and/or) a kind of civil war mixed with a social war and a race war. A confused mixed picture, though, not a sharply-delineated and two-sided one.
In contemporary Britain, the truth is “inflammatory“…
I argued, in my long-ago talk at the London Forum in 2017, that people charged with such essentially political offences should never plead guilty.
Pleading guilty is understandable in ordinary criminal cases, in that it reduces the sentence where the evidence is overwhelming, but I consider it the duty of social-national and other nationalist defendants to plead not guilty. To plead guilty is to validate the prosecution. Also, in a jury case especially, you never know your luck.
I followed my own advice in my 2023 free speech trial.
Yes, I was still convicted, after a process that started, from my point of view, in February or March 2023, and ended with my sentencing hearing on 14 March 2024, but my “9-month community order” (probation, by any other word) ends in about a week, technically, and in reality finished in mid-September 2024; my “community order” sentence of “15 rehabilitation days” turned out to be half a dozen or so meetings ranging in duration from about 30 minutes to a couple of hours each.
Would I have been handed down a more lenient sentence had I pleaded guilty? I doubt it.
It does not even much matter that Reform UK would probably be poor at governing. The main thing is to smash the “two main parties” scam, and—to intrude a metaphor from the world of chess— to open up the board.
Clive Myrie
Happened to catch 10 mins of a TV jaunt around the Caribbean, presented by Clive Myrie. Needless to say, the black TV presenter focussed, when in Jamaica and Barbados, mainly on slavery, “reparations” for slavery, and on “racism” etc.
There was an amusing moment when Myrie met relatives in what I took to be their not unpleasant large villa, set amid a profusion of flowering plants. One of them mentioned how Myrie’s father had, after having moved to the UK, encountered “racism, not like you today“, but Myrie demurred. He obviously has that chip on the shoulder, despite being paid hundreds of thousands a year by the BBC and (as, co-incidentally, I just saw in the Guardian) large extra amounts moonlighting as well: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/04/clive-myrie-apologises-for-failing-to-declare-at-least-145000-in-outside-earnings-bbc.
The Daily Mail also has the story: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14157255/bbc-star-apologises-failing-declare-external-engagements.html.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Myrie.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 
Richard Tice is deeply unpopular.
Farage is rapidly going down in the estimation of the Tommy Robinson types due to his refusal to condemn Muslims.
On the other hand the Tommy followers love Rupert Lowe, who is very outspoken on X about immigrants and Muslims.
I personally wouldn’t vote Reform because I don’t know what they stand for, neither do I trust Farage or Tice.
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1864203022013767766
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I must admit I am a bit unsure about what they stand for as a whole. However, they do have at least two good policies one of which is getting Britain out of the often farcical European Convention of Human Rights so that we can prevent loony-left, out of touch, snobby, Tory judges living in ‘nice’, leafy Tory areas stopping the deportation of fake asylum seekers, foreign criminals etc and they support fair votes/Proportional Representation unlike the profoundly undemocratic Labour and fake Conservatives.
It is an absolute national disgrace that in the 24th year of the 21st Century Britain still uses the decades out of date, undemocratic, unfit for purpose, stand alone First Past The Post electoral system which prevents the proper representation of the people’s democratic will. Only Belarus which is Putin’s single ally in Europe uses this system apart from us in its national lower house parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_Representation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk
It would be more honest for Britain to have a miltary dictatorship like South Korea once had than to have our largely fake ‘democracy’ underpinned as it is by this stupid electoral system.
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To those who think stand alone First Past The Post is still a wonderful electoral system and it does not need to be dumped, I ask them if that is the case then why did ALL the countries which emerged from under the ‘Iron Curtain’ and became democracies in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991 AND South Africa after Apartheid came to an end NOT choose our system?
Also, can they explain why every country that has our system have campaign groups that want to end its use and replace it with Proportional Representation whilst those countries already using PR do not have campaigns to switch to stand alone FPTP.
As one can see in this Wikipedia article on electoral systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system
electoral system experts rate stand alone FPTP as one of the most flawed systems.
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We need a party like Germany’s nationalist/national-conservative Alternative Fur Deutschland (AfD)
https://www.afd.de
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Have to admire Musk for this. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1864251129426792544
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The draconian Labour party.
https://x.com/recusant_raja/status/1864284119259050259
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Not just draconian but also fanatically undemocratic and EVIL. No one with any form of respect for democracy, this country or basic common decency/moral values should vote for that rabble.
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I can imagine that what Two Tier Keir said about Kemi is correct. It is certainly true about that fat, useless lump of Indian ghee, Priti Patel. No one with a shred of decency/moral values or patriotism should vote for the fake Conservative Party either. It is now two occasions in a row that the so-called Conservative Party has had ethnically foreign leaders. It is time the party died.
When push comes to shove, these ethnics put the British last and their own people first as Kemi has done according to Starmer and Patel certainly did when she was Britain’s worst ever Home Secretary.
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Yes, Farage is not very trustworthy and Tice is basically a libertarian Tory still. Perhaps, Rupert Lowe sould be leader instead?
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John:
I do not like Lowe either. Basically a “free market”-type “Conservative” with mild nationalist leanings. Very hostile to the State helping citizens down on their luck.
Reform, for me, is a means to an end. It is, though, anti-national in most respects— non-European members and officials, pro-Israel, pro-Jewish lobby etc.
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Not as bad as the simply evil, bigoted and very stupid Iain Dumbo-Smith I would hope. Any decently run, wealthy country should be able to provide a welfare state for people who fall on hard times which can happen to ANYONE including Dunce-Smith eg someone becoming disabled after a car crash.
Let us, as a country, get away from this libertarian belief that the state can only be a force for evil and is always too large. That is nonsensical rubbish. What is important is not how big or small the state is but whether it is effective and the fact is the state can be a force for good not just evil.
Complete free markets do not work. Japan did not become an economic superpower by allowing free market forces to let rip. The government of that country had a paternalistic attitude to free enterprise and guided the country’s economic development through mildly interventionist policies eg tariffs at its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
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Does he want to reform the police so they are real police forces concerned about real crimes instead of acting as they do now as the Labour Party’s and Conservative Party’s thugs in uniform harrasing ordinary citizens for non-PC thoughts and opinions? It is time to have non politicised police forces and not Poundshop PC Stazi/PC Gestapo forces.
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Led by Donkeys were brave for displaying that statement near the profoundly undemocratic and worthy of NO respect as a consequence of that fact House of Treason. I am surprised Two Tier Keir’s Poundshop Gestapo/Stazi formerly known as the British police did not try and arrest them for it.
Due to being effectively bought by pro-Israel Zionist Lobby extremists Labour and fake Conservative alike will not call the Zionist entity’s actions genocide. Those scumbags would prefer to go on being bought and drag Britain’s international reputation through the mud.
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Yes, I also agree with you and Tim Montgomerie. The fact is that vunerable people will feel pressurised into dying via assisted suicide and parliament will not to be able to legislate for sufficiently strong safeguards against its abuse. The criteria for being allowed to undergo an assisted suicide will widen over time as has already happened in Oregon, Canada, The Netherlands and Belgium.
https://www.carenotkilling.org.uk
https://www.care.org.uk
https://christianconcern.com
https://www.christian.org.uk
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So Kemi the rather weird and abusive to David Tennant Nigerian immigrant used her governmental position to bring in more of her fellow immigrants. Well, I am not shocked. After all, the fake Conservatives have been lying about immigration for decades now.
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If I remember correctly you also are a lover of Big-Band music or swing like me. Here is a video from a wonderful channel dedicated to that type of music. I could listen to this beautiful music for hours. Thanks to my father I grew up listening to music like this and developed a loathing and contempt for the trash that was popular when I was a kid (i.e.: rock). Looking back I realise I was always a misfit, either because of my musical or political likes and dislikes.
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Claudius:
Well, up to a point.
Thank you for the link.
I remember a British newspaper, perhaps in 1970, perhaps the Sunday Express (which was just about still considered a serious newspaper back then, was a broadsheet, and had long features) publishing a photo or two of what looked like a formal dance in the America of the 1950s, but then saying that that photo was contemporary, from the 1970 Soviet Union; I think somewhere on the Volga (Samara, or Saratov).
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A fairly impressive polling figure for Reform UK but it needs to be higher still and on a consistent basis. They should rise so that they are in the lead and beat both the gormless cretins of the utterly fake Conservative Party and the profoundly undemocratic, and virulently anti-British waste of space that is personality free and no fresh ideas Two Tier Keir’s Labour Party which ‘offers’ sweet FA to the British people.
The political Establisment holds the British people in total contempt especially anti-democratic budding tyrant Keir Rodney Starmer. It is time we swept it and him away. His sickening hatred for real democracy is repulsive. If he thought he could get away with it he would turn this country into a total replica of North Korea. He is truely repellent. I am sure I am not the only person who is already utterly sick and tired of him.
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John:
I agree.
UKIP came second in 120 constituencies in 2015, but deflated to nothing. The important thing about Reform’s performance in 2024 is that it showed that Reform has a sentiment base in the “left-behind” areas of the Eastern coastal zones. Ironically, those “left-behind” areas may be leading the way…
Re. “Tel Aviv Keith”, I agree, of course.
I do not think that you are Spencer Perceval’s nemesis, though.
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The bloke is a total Grade A tosser with a supreme undeserved arrogance. Someone needs to take him aside gently and remind him that his precious Labour Party has an extremely paltry ‘mandate’ to misrule us by only obtaining a pathetic 33.7% of the vote on a poor 60% turnout. It is high time he and his rabble of a misgovernment developed some humility by recognising their abysmal showing in real votes.
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John:
Re. Tel Aviv Keith, I do not think that, in real terms, he and his Labour Friends of Israel Cabinet can even claim 33.7% support, because I believe that a substantial segment of the 40.2% who did not vote at all did not vote because they despised all three System parties and either thought Reform also no good or thought that it had little chance where they lived. Starmer’s real support is between 10% and 20%.
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