Afternoon music
Tweets seen
[“This is the Government’s formal position: “The Government has carefully considered the risk of genocide, including when permitting exports to the F-35 global programme. The high civilian casualties, including women and children, and the extensive destruction in Gaza, are utterly appalling. Israel must do much more to prevent and alleviate the suffering that this conflict is causing. As per the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide occurs only where there is specific “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The Government has not concluded that Israel is acting with that intent”.
Why has Keir Starmer never publicly acknowledged this. Why has no Minister publicly acknowledged this. Why will no Minister simply say “Israel is not committing genocide.”]
Because Israel, in reality, is committing genocide. The Israeli Jew leadership have declared their genocidal intentions time and again, without using the actual word.
Then look at what they have actually done— killing and badly wounding over 200,000 Gazans, mostly civilians, mostly women and children, the vast majority of whom have had no means of self-defence at all, and were not even trying to defend themselves, let alone take the fight to the Jew invaders and/or occupiers.
All because Hamas killed or captured, on one day, or two days, about 1,500 Jews, many, perhaps most of whom were in fact killed via the free-fire/scorched earth protocols of the trigger-happy Israeli forces, and not by Hamas operatives.
The disproportion is ludicrous.
Starmer-stein’s Labour Friends of Israel government of clowns wants to support the Jewish state, but even Starmer’s cabal has been appalled at the behaviour of the Israeli Jews. Hence the weaselling. They, this government, stand upon a determination based on the single word “intent“…
As for Dan Hodges, he is somewhere between pathetic and disgusting. As far as I know, he is not Jewish (his mother, the famous actress and Labour politician, Glenda Jackson, was certainly not); I suppose he may be “part-“.
At any rate, Hodges seems to be, to put it over-politely, “less critical” of the Netanyahu regime than many a real Jew; many Jews even in Israel recognize the madness, evil, and extreme disproportion of what Israel’s armed forces have done over the past 2 years in Gaza.
Dan Hodges is on surer ground here.
50 people? 60? That audience, even including the deliberate bunching at the front (for the benefit of TV cameras etc), is sparse, to say the least. It includes quite a few journalists in its ranks, so the real audience there is numbered in the few dozens.
As I remarked yesterday, seeing Kemi Badenoch’s speech, fewer people by far than the audience at the London Forum, where I gave a politico-legal talk in 2017.
That photo is not showing a fringe meeting, but the speech of the Shadow Chancellor in the main hall.
On present polling, Mel Stride will probably lose his own seat at the 2029 (?) General Election.
More tweets seen
The only factor that really matters is the nuclear weapons situation.
Translates to a Commons with about 383 Reform MPs, about 106 Lab, 56 LibDem, 40 Con, and 33 SNP (Greens 6, Plaid 5 etc). What matters in that, and in the 120+ previous opinion polls, is not the exact detail but the overall picture. Reform either —as in this poll— carrying a solid majority, or very close to an overall majority, Labour cut back, and with the loss —in most polling— of two-thirds, or even three-quarters, of its MPs.
As to the Conservative Party, few if any polls now think it can get more than 50 MPs; many put the figure as low as 30, 20 or, in a few polls, below 10.
I do not think that removing Kemi Badenoch will make a huge difference, but if Jenrick takes up the reins, it might save 10 or 20 seats.
I have blogged before to the effect that British (real British) voters, will not vote for a non-white person as Prime Minister, which —in effect— is what they would be doing if voting Conservative at present.
Yes, there are, and have been for a number of years, non-white MPs. Few have impressed, to put it mildly. A Prime Minister, though, is another level entirely.
Sunak’s electoral failure was not entirely by reason of his Indian heritage and ethnicity, but it was a significant factor for sure. Not just that he looked “foreign”, but the fact that, despite having been born here, and educated at Winchester and then Oxford, he seemed not to “get” Britishness, as when he scurried back to London from the D-Day commemorations to attend a business meeting.
Kemi Badenoch has even fewer ties and bindings here. Born in London so that she could later get a British passport (the law was changed the following year; born a year later, she would have been barred from ever getting British nationality), she was taken to Nigeria by her parents, brought up there and then in the USA, and only “returned” to this country aged 16-17. Her roots are in every sense either in Africa or America, not in Britain.
No doubt the unthinking will call me “prejudiced”, but keep her as Conservative Party leader and you will see how she does at the (?) 2029 General Election. A near-wipeout is my prediction, if she stays in her present office.
The newspapers say that Jenrick and/or others are already gathering support for a leadership bid in November or December this year. I doubt that that can revive the Conservative Party, but it might make the difference between 10 Commons seats and 30.
[“My monologue on ‘Tories in the land of the living dead’ on The Times at One with Andrew Neil on @TimesRadio
As the Tories gather in Manchester for a conference they hope will rescue them from the land of the living dead one fact is salient above all others. In the general election of July 2024 they scored their lowest share of the vote ever, at 24%. Just when they thought it couldn’t get worse than that — it did.
The Tories are now around 16% in the polls. Far from challenging a deeply unpopular Labour government for first place they’re struggling to avoid fourth place, behind the Liberal Democrats.
At Manchester Kemi Badenoch is abandoning her ‘slow burn’ approach to policies with a raft of new initiatives, many of them with more than a hint of the Reform song sheet. But the Tories face a systemic problem which is not easily resolved.
Nearly everything voters dislike about the current government — high taxes, slow to no growth, mass legal immigration, uncontrolled illegal immigration, net zero, wokery — started under the last Tory government. The Tories are now in full retreat from nearly all of that. But, to use a good Scottish word, if you’re really scunnered with Starmer, why would you seek salvation in the Tories, the original source of your misery? If you think net zero was a mistake — which the Tories are now saying — are you not more likely to look to Nigel Farage, who always opposed it, than the Tories, who enthusiastically implemented it for over 14 years?
Ditto large-scale immigration or high taxes or identity politics. All matters the Tories rail about now, all prospered under a Tory government. All opposed by Reform. At least the Tories can claim to be the only party serious about cutting public spending, as shadow chancellor Mel Stride illustrated in Manchester today. Labour has given up the ghost and Reform’s fiscal plans verge on fantasy. But not that long ago the Tories were the high spenders. So is anybody inclined to listen to them now? And there’s the rub.
It’s not that voters don’t necessarily like what the Tories are now saying. It’s just that they’re not interested, not listening, don’t regard them as relevant to the current political discourse. And when that happens to a political party, there’s the real risk that oblivion awaits just round the corner.“]
[Andrew Neil]
Exactly. Also, the fact is that the “Conservatives” are really, in power, little different from “Labour”. Same or similar core beliefs, similar methods, fairly similar personnel; both parties in favour of multikulti society and globalism, and both (of course) ruled, from behind the scenes, by the Jewish/Israeli lobby cabals.
Late tweets
“Boris”-idiot and Starmer-stein are numbered among the enemies of Britain’s future.
As said earlier, there was a bigger audience at the 2017 London Forum; I think I spoke to between 120-150 people.
As I have said on the blog many times, I respect the independence or autonomy of both Poland and the pribaltika (Baltic states), and their right to run their own affairs, cultivate their own cultures etc, but they must not interfere with the destiny of Russia, or its own territorial, cultural, or political integrity.
If the System in Germany attempts to cheat the AfD by banning it or restricting it, the German people will have every right to take up arms.
Ha.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 