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