Here, in my occasional series about those I am pleased to call “deadhead MPs”, I now feature Justin Tomlinson MP [Con, North Swindon]. Tomlinson is unique —so far— in terms of this series, in that he has actually achieved junior ministerial rank (appointed junior minister at the DWP). [*Note: I have previously written about Kate Osamor MP, but until she resigned she was only in the Shadow Cabinet and has never been in government].
As on previous occasions in this series, this MP’s academic and work background do not inspire confidence. His family origins seem obscure. Having been born in Blackburn, Lancs, in 1976, he attended a comprehensive school in Kidderminster, Worcs, before reading History and Politics at Oxford Brookes University (the former Oxford Poly).
Arguably bizarrely, Tomlinson’s only known employed position was as manager of a small nightclub known as Eros, in Swindon: see Notes, below (the photographs show scenes every bit as ghastly as expected, a strange mish-mash of provincial, cheesy, decadent and humdrum. Forget Cabaret, think The Office).
It must remain a mystery as to why Tomlinson, a son of either Lancashire or Worcestershire, and then a student in Oxfordshire, relocated yet further South to Wiltshire. Was the Swindon job (as manager of “Eros”) the only one he could get?
We are asked to believe that Tomlinson also “ran a small marketing business” called TB Marketing Solutions Ltd at the same time (c.2000-c.2010). It must have been “small” indeed. The Companies House accounts summary shows the company’s net worth in 2011 at only £66,000. It seems to have had, at any one time, only one director other than Tomlinson, as well as a company secretary, and to have operated from a privately-owned or rented flat in Swindon. It was dissolved in or shortly after 2011. Still, something to add to the CV, I suppose…
Tomlinson may be short on background but he is certainly not lacking self-confidence, having when a student placed a bet on himself to become Prime Minister!
“Chris Kelly and Justin Tomlinson stand to collect £500,000 from William Hill should either become prime minister before 2038. Tomlinson placed two £50 bets at 10,000/1 when the pair were at university. Both are already Conservative MPs.” [BBC, in 2012]
Chris Kelly stood down as MP in 2015 (returning to his family’s Midlands truck-rental business), which is a pity in that he might have made a good “deadhead MP” for this series, were I able to find anything even slightly interesting to say about him.
Back to Tomlinson. He was a local councillor for several years prior to being selected then elected as MP for North Swindon, one of the two constituencies in the town.
Some highlights from Tomlinson’s Parliamentary career
“In May 2015, it was reported by The Huffington Post that his appointment as Minister for Disabled People was controversial as he had previously voted against protecting the benefits of disabled children and those undergoing cancer treatment.” [Wikipedia];
“Tomlinson faced calls for his resignation in October 2015 after it was reported that he had leaked information from the Public Accounts committee regarding regulation of short term high cost credit “payday lenders” to Wonga.com back in 2013. Tomlinson accepted he had broken the rules and apologised, stating that his “strongly-held belief that action needed to be taken on payday lenders” had caused his “judgement to be clouded”.[13] Tomlinson arranged £30,000 of sponsorship for Swindon Supermarine F.C., a local football team by the same payday lender wonga.com. The football club’s chairman, Jez Webb, has made donations of £30,218 to both Tomlinson’s and local Conservative Party funds since 2014. Webb stated that he donated in a personal capacity and that the very similar amounts “were coincidental.”[14] Tomlinson was subsequently accused of trying to remove references to previous links to Wonga from his website, including the arrangement of a sponsorship deal with Swindon Supermarine F.C. in 2011.” [Wikipedia];
Tomlinson, 42, employs his personal partner, Katie Bennett, 28, as his office manager, on a salary of £50,000 p.a.; Tomlinson was married from 2012-2016 to another lady but is now divorced;
“Tomlinson leaked a draft of a public accounts committee report on the credit industry to someone he knew who worked for payday lender, Wonga. And when that person emailed four suggested amendments back, Tomlinson had forwarded them virtually word for word on to the Committee as if they were his own.” [The Guardian];
“In November 2018, Tomlinson again sparked controversy, this time by suggesting that families facing penury under the Universal Credit scheme initiated by the Conservative governments of 2010-2018 should “take in a lodger.”
“Tomlinson was apparently unaware that [even discounting the fact that few such families have spare rooms], both private and other (e.g. local council and housing association) leases prohibit any form of sub-letting.” [Evening Standard].
North Swindon
Considered to be a “bellwether” constituency, North Swindon has, since its creation in 1997, always followed the national trend. Tomlinson was elected for North Swindon in 2010, receiving a 44.6% vote share (Lab 30.5%). In 2015, the Conservative vote share was 50.3% (Lab 27.8%) and in 2017, 53.6 (Lab 38.4%). In other words, Labour are creeping back but were still well behind in 2017.
Tomlinson has consistently voted for Leave/Brexit, which may help him hang on.
Tomlinson’s vote in numbers was just under 30,000 in 2017, and his majority about 8,000. If, as a recent opinion poll claimed, half those who voted Conservative in 2017 are not going to vote Con in any 2019 General Election, that would reduce Tomlinson’s likely vote to about 15,000 and render the election of another candidate, probably the Labour one, likely. Labour got over 21,000 votes in 2017.
Conclusion
Well, there he is, voters of North Swindon— your deadhead MP. If you want to kick him out, the only lawful way is to vote for Labour or, if it stands, Brexit Party, next time.
In the end, Tomlinson held on at North Swindon rather easily. Nigel Farage stabbed his Brexit Party and its candidates (and supporters) in the back; Brexit Party candidates in Conservative Party-held seats (even where the sitting MP was a Remain partisan) were all stood down so that the Conservative Party could win the General Election of late 2019. Tomlinson thus faced no danger that much of his vote would defect to Brexit Party.
Not that the absence of Brexit Party materially altered the result. Labour’s vote slid substantially, and Tomlinson was re-elected by a majority double that which he had achieved in 2017, both in absolute and percentage terms (majority in 2017 was 8,335; in 2019, 16,171).
His vote share in 2019 was 59.1% (2017: 53.6%); pretty convincing by any standards.
Tomlinson continues as Minister of State (i.e. junior minister) at the DWP, the post he has held since April 2019.
Update, 9 August 2022
Tomlinson was sacked as junior minister in a Government reshuffle of September 2021.
“In February 2022 Tomlinson was accused of bullying and sending inappropriate “unprofessional” and “belittling” messages to employees at Conservative Campaign Headquarters.[32]“
[Wikipedia].
Tomlinson must have blagged plenty of money since 2010 in terms of pay, expenses, and “consultancy fees” from Wonga etc. He may need those monies. On present opinion polling, the bellwether seat of Swindon North may jettison him at the next general election.
Update, 5 July 2024
As expected, Tomlinson was binned at GE 2024. Time for him (and girlfriend/wife?) to get employment of a more useful type.
This is the latest in my occasional series about those whom I consider to be “deadhead MPs”. The lucky politico this time is Karl McCartney, MP for Lincoln 2010-2017.
I would not usually bother with someone who is no longer an MP and who is very unlikely to be returned to the House of Commons. In McCartney’s case, I have decided to make an exception. The reason is because McCartney’s combination of brash overconfidence, unpleasantness, personal moneygrabbing and expenses blodging, lack of interest in the poorer part of society and unimpressive academic and work background is now, and has become, over the past decades, almost typical of MPs (and by no means only on the Conservative side of UK System-politics). That such people can become MPs is an indictment of the selection and election procedures in place in the UK.
Lincoln is considered to be an “ultra-marginal” and a “swing seat”. In 2010, McCartney and the Conservatives won with 37.5% of the votes cast, as against 35.2% for Labour and 20.2% for the LibDems (BNP 3%, UKIP 2.2%, English Democrats 1.3% and an Independent on 0.5%).
In 2015, McCartney was re-elected: Con 42.6%, Lab 39.6%, UKIP 12.2%, LibDem 4.3%, TUSC 0.7%, Lincolnshire Independent 0.6%. The key points were the collapse of the LibDem vote by 16 points, the non-appearance of the BNP and English Democrats, and the rise of UKIP —by 10 points, though that was modest bearing in mind that the BNP and EDs did not stand. Both Con and Lab increased their percentages.
In 2017, the result was Lab 47.9%, Con 44.7%, UKIP 2.6%, LibDem 2.6%, Green 1.2%, and two Independents (0.6%, 0.3%). A pattern seen in many constituencies: UKIP slumping back to a 2010 or pre-2010 level and the LibDems failing to recover from the 2015 debacle and indeed slipping further. While the Con vote percentage did slightly increase –2 points– in 2017, Lab did far better–8 points higher. That despite the UKIP slump, despite McCartney favouring Leave/Brexit, despite the appearance of a Green candidate likely to impact the Labour vote. It is hard to escape the view that the Con loss was the result of popular judgment on McCartney himself.
McCartney was exposed from 2010-2017, in various ways, as unsuitable.
A lecturer at the University of Lincoln blamed McCartney’s laziness and complacency for the loss (see Notes, below) and was too polite to mention McCartney’s alleged porn-trawling (though that was, admittedly, in 2014), his employment of his wife at £50,000 a year via Parliamentary expenses, or his expenses generally.
“On 28 February 2013 McCartney apologised to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) for the content of notes he had sent to staff. The notes were described by IPSA Chief Executive, Andrew McDonald as ‘abusive’, ‘offensive’ and ‘condescending’. McCartney’s apology stated, “I apologise unreservedly to IPSA for my comments” [Wikipedia]. and
“The following month he claimed that IPSA’s incompetence had forced MPs from all parties to borrow money and that he had had to ask his parents for financial assistance.[30] McCartney also said that he had been told by a “senior IPSA official” that the organisation intended to “damage MPs as much as possible,” a claim that IPSA said was “wild ..simply untrue.” [Wikipedia].
The readers’ comments section under that newspaper report was harsh:
“Poor old Karl. He really needs to wipe away those tears and get on with his life. He is an arrogant, rude and bitter loser. And they are his good points. Lincoln and the Conservatives are better off without him. Ignore him Karen.”
and
“Happiest day last year was when he walked away in a huff and refused to speak to anyone or congratulate at the election result which pretty much summed everything up.”
As to what McCartney is doing now, I think that the answer may be “very little”. I notice that, as I write this piece, around 1800 hrs, he has already tweeted or retweeted 29 times today, so far. His website seems to say that he will be the Conservative candidate at the next general election. It is hard to know why. One can only speculate as to why the local Conservatives have chosen him. He was a lay magistrate at one time; he is a Freeman of the City of London (see Notes, below), having “worked with”, his website claims, more than one Lord Mayor in the late 1990s. Freemason? I do not know.
McCartney obviously did pretty well financially in his 7 years as MP: salary of (then) about £70,000 pa, and wife’s salary (paid out of his expenses claimed) £50,000 pa; also possible other (outside) sources of income (I do not know about this). His overall expenses alone over his time as MP totalled well over a million pounds. He does not appear to have a job at present (there is nothing mentioned on his website); perhaps his wife has found another job, now that her well-paid work as her husband’s assistant has gone.
Readers of The Lincolnite (online newspaper) were as harsh as those commenting on Lincoln Live (above):
“A totally useless MP, more concerned about himself and his expenses than he ever was about Lincoln – amazed that they’ve reselected this waste of space.
John Bercow (Speaker, House of Commons) summed him up nicely with this in a parliamentary debate when McCartney let himself (and us) down yet again:
“Mr McCartney, calm yourself. Be quiet, young man. We do not need to hear from you. You add nothing and you subtract from the proceedings.”
Then there were the abusive notes (for which he had to apologise) he sent to the parliamentary expenses staff when they queried his expenses.”
and
“Unvelievable! [sic] A sure fire way for the Conservatives to lose votes.”
and
“It’s not what you know but who you know ,Roll your trouser leg up, funny handshake and fancy apron crowd.”
What are McCartney’s chances of getting back as Lincoln’s MP? Very slight. I have blogged elsewhere about the impact of Brexit Party (and slightly revived UKIP) on the Conservative vote, assuming that Brexit Party contests a general election. That alone would sink the Conservatives in an ultra-marginal such as Lincoln.
Another point is that present Labour MP, Karen Lee, who worked in shops for years before spending 14 years as an NHS nurse, still puts in some shifts at a local hospital, donating her NHS earnings to charity! What a contrast to greedy, moneygrasping and “entitled” McCartney! His work in the City of London in the 1990s was obviously so unimportant that even his own website says almost nothing about it (neither does he seem to have done much outside Con politics in the decade up to his election in 2010).
In addition to all that, Karen Lee is local in origin, whereas McCartney was born in Birkenhead, “Murkyside” (Merseyside), and was educated there and in Wales.
Well, there you are. My latest “deadhead MP”, who is hoping to resume his place at the trough soon. Over to you, voters of Lincoln…
“In England, the most established borough freedom is that conferred by the Freedom of the City of London, first recorded in 1237. This is closely tied to the role and status of the livery companies. From 1835, the freedom “without the intervention of a Livery Company” has been bestowed by a general resolution of Common Council, by “redemption” (purchase), at one time for an onerous sum. Now the Freedom can be obtained by servitude, by patrimony, by nomination, or by presentation via a Livery Company. Freedom through nomination by two sponsors is available for a fee (known as a “fine”) of £100, but is free to those on the electoral roll of the City.” [Wikipedia]
Update, 1 May 2019
I am writing this update just after 1400 hrs. McCartney took to Twitter today at about 0600 and, by my reckoning, has, in the intervening 8 hours, tweeted or retweeted at least 52 times (I think that I have left out a few retweets). Quite a few of his tweets and retweets seem to be about “anti-Semitism” in the Labour Party. McCartney must have been part of the “Friends of Israel” crowd (like 80% of “Conservative” MPs). He obviously wants to remain (((onside))). I have no idea whether Lincoln’s deadhead former MP actually has a job at present. I doubt it. He seems an extremely unpleasant person either way.
In the article above, written for The Lincolnite (local online newspaper), McCartney again obsesses about “anti-Semitism” in the Labour Party, saying that Labour peers have raised the issue again. Well, about 50 or 60 have, out of 179…
I wonder whether the voters of Lincoln share McCartney’s obsession with speaking out in favour of the Jewish lobby? I doubt it! As for the rest of his article, the Lincolnite needs a sub-editor to correct spelling errors (“buses” is right, “busses” is not) and grammar.
Some of the few readers’ comments on the above article have been unkind:
Why are you giving this failed Tory a voice he spent 1000s on a letter folder, and employed his wife as an assistant on 45k a year. He doesnt give a toss about us he just wants his expenses back…“
I am assuming the Lincolnite has decided to join his very early election campaign hence the article. I assume we will get more of the same until a General Election. As it stands he is a nobody and yet has got 3 times more space than the sitting MP who represents which Party? Well blow me“
Seems that McCartney and his wife, a local councillor, are living rather well off the hump, despite having had their joint income reduced since his 2017 election failure:
Well, it seems that McCartney’s leech-like tenaciousness in Lincoln might (against the odds and all reason) pay off. Corbyn-Labour is suffering a crisis of public confidence, while (by reason of that) Boris-Idiot and the misnamed “Conservatives” are riding high in the opinion polls.
People vote (mainly) according to party label and national trend rather than for or against the individual candidate. That plays to McCartney’s advantage here, however unfair that may be. At present, the Conservatives are favourites in the betting to retake Lincoln (1/2) whereas Labour is on 11/8:
If I myself say so, it was rather prescient of me to have included Karl McCartney in my Deadhead MPs series, inasmuch as the tides have turned, at least temporarily, in his favour, which means that he may well be back as MP for Lincoln (well, MP for His Own Benefit, His Wife’s Benefit, and, maybe, Lincoln) by 12 December.
The betting odds have McCartney favourite to retake the seat on Polling Day. That must reflect the general/national public sentiment against Labour, mainly, as well as McCartney’s pro-Brexit stance in a Leave constituency.
Brexit Party is standing, but is probably of no great significance now, Farage having shot his own party in the head (now at 3% or so in the opinion polls). UKIP stood at Lincoln in 2017, but only received 2.6% of the total vote.
Well, the voters of Lincoln have evidently eaten too many potatoes. McCartney has been elected again as MP. He must be celebrating his return to paid “work”, generous (whatever he says) expenses, and perhaps to getting his wife back on the gravy-train (£50,000 pa as “assistant” or whatever, yet again via expenses), though the rules were changed for MPs elected in or after 2017, so it may be that he at least will be prevented from blodging in that way.
McCartney was elected this time because the Brexit Party candidate withdrew on his own initiative. What an idiot…his (guessing) several thousand intended votes probably did it for McCartney, who beat the far better Labour candidate, Karen Lee, by about three and a half thousand votes.
After McCartney lost his seat again in 2024 (he scored 23% as against the Labour candidate’s 43.8%; Reform scored 18%, so even had Reform not stood, McCartney would still have lost), he tried to be selected as Conservative Party candidate for the Greater Lincolnshire mayoral contest, but did not make it onto the shortlist; in any event, the ex-Con Party ex-MP, Andrea Jenkyns, standing for Reform, soundly beat the Con Party candidate, by 42% to 26.1%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Greater_Lincolnshire_mayoral_election
McCartney is now 57. His loyalty to the Jewish lobby and the Israeli cause may have helped him stay as MP for a total of 12 years, but his political career, such as it was, is now at an end.
A recent ComRes poll indicated that only about half of those who voted Conservative in the General Election of 2017 are intending to vote that way in the next general election, which might come any time between Summer 2019 and early June 2022. I have been thinking and blogging etc for a year or so that 2019 might be the year. Mainstream commentators have recently been gravitating to the same view.
The Brexit chaos has highlighted the incompetence of the Theresa May and other Conservative Party governments stretching back to 2010: roads, rail, social security/”welfare”, the migration-invasion (mass immigration), crime etc.
As I have more than once blogged and (before I was banned in our “free” country, tweeted), the choice for many may be between a Labour Party government which may well prove to be incompetent, and a Conservative Party government which has already, time and again, proven its incompetence.
Labour, Conservative, UKIP, Brexit Party
Labour is now slightly ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls, probably because
UKIP, though effectively washed-up as an electoral force, has managed, under its latest leader, Batten, to halt its downward slide;
Brexit Party now exists and is taking votes mainly from the Conservatives;
also, Theresa May is now finally seen almost universally as the disaster she is.
No-one expects UKIP to win seats in any general election this year; after all, 1 in 8 voters voted UKIP in 2015, but the rigged/unfair UK electoral system deprived it of its merited success. On strict PR voting, UKIP’s 12.6% popular vote would have given UKIP about 80 MPs. Indeed, had many not seen a vote for UKIP as a wasted vote, that number could have been doubled or even trebled. In Mrs. May’s now-famous screech, “nothing has changed!” as far as that is concerned.
UKIP will probably get a few percentage points of the vote in English and Welsh constituencies, maybe even 5%, but that will not win any seats. What it will do, though, is deprive the Conservatives (mainly) of those votes (nearly 600,000 in 2017). Many constituency seats are won and lost by less than a thousand votes.
Now we have Brexit Party, which I had thought would fight only the EU elections, but which, it seems (see Nigel Farage’s comments in Notes, below), now intends to fight the next UK general election.
My initial skepticism about Brexit Party has been proven wrong, at least in the opinion polls. Brexit Party is now running at anything up to 30% re. the EU elections, and, in initial polling, 14% in respect of Westminster elections. That latter polling may already have been superseded by events, but even 14%, at a general election, is huge, inasmuch as it means that Brexit Party and UKIP in aggregate may take away from (mainly) the Conservatives as much as 20% of the votes in any given English or Welsh constituency. In an average constituency with average GE turnout that works out at about 8,000 votes!
As usual, most of the Twitterati get it wrong. Look at the tweets below by one Tom Clarke, who seems to be a fairly typical Remain and anti-nationalist tweeter. He says, probably correctly, that 27% is not enough to “take power” but fails to see the side-effects in terms of depriving others of power…He also bleats about “mandate”. What about the 52% who voted Leave in 2016?
And there’s the problem for the Brexit Party in a nutshell. Set up for something that won’t happen, for which there has consistently been no appetite and no desire to compromise on anything. That is why they’ll never get above 30-odd %
In fact, Twitter is a poor guide to elections and popular votes. The twitterati voted Remain in 2016 (losing side), thought that Trump had no chance of becoming US President (wrong again), and are (or often seem to be) almost all pro-immigration, virtue-signalling idiots etc…
Core votes
The Labour core vote, though no more than 25% of eligible voters, is solid because it is composed of those unlikely to be enticed by other parties presently around, and particularly by the Conservative Party: almost all “blacks and browns” (and other ethnic minorities, except for Jews); almost all of the poorly-paid, unemployed, and disabled. Others, while not “core vote”, add up to possibly another 10% of the eligible electorate: those 18-24 (only 4% favour Conservative), voters under 35 (only 16% favour Conservative). Increasing numbers of persons in their 30s, 40s and older are victims of buy-to-let parasites and bully landlords, or are not getting much personal or social benefit from their work. Labour’s policies speak to them. The Conservatives have nothing to say to such people except “pay up or get out! And don’t complain about repairs!” and “poor pay? Get a different job!”
When one thinks “who today would vote Conservative?” the answer, in broad brush terms must be
the wealthy
the affluent
buy to let parasites
those who own their homes outright and are financially stable
those elderly who are stick-in-the-mud creatures of frozen voting habits
That is the 25% or so core vote, to which must be added
those who hate Labour or Corbyn enough to vote Conservative simply in order to keep Labour and/or a Labour candidate out.
Here is an important point: the Labour core vote may be and probably is growing; the Conservative core vote is shrinking.
The Brexit Party and UKIP strike both at the Conservative core vote and the potentially-Conservative non-core vote.
Would Boris Johnson make a difference?
Doubtful. I concede that I am as anti-Boris as almost anyone could be, but my antipathy is matched by many voters: Boris is apparently the choice for Con leader (and so, unless there is a general election, Prime Minister by default) of about 70% of Conservative Party members (if one can believe sources such as the Daily Express), but even if correct, that is 70% of (at most) 120,000 Con Party members, i.e. 84,000 voters out of at least 40 million (in 2017, about 32 million voted).
In polls of the wider public, Boris Johnson is only a few percentage points ahead of other possible Con leaders.
Conclusion
Since 2017, I have thought that the most likely result of the next UK general election is Labour to win most seats, but not enough to have an overall majority. Now, for the first time, I am questioning that and wondering whether a strong general election campaign by both Brexit Party and UKIP might weaken the Conservative vote to the point where, nationally, the Conservatives might get as little as 30% (could it drop even to 25%?) as compared to 42.4% in 2017 and 36.9% in 2015.
I am of course no psephologist, but using online tools etc, it seems not unlikely that, if the Conservative vote falls to 30% and Labour is five points ahead, Labour might end up with about 300 seats and the Conservatives about 250. Others, about 100. No overall majority.
If, though, the Con vote were 25% and the Lab vote five points ahead, the Conservatives would end up with perhaps 225 or fewer seats, while Labour might get about 320. Yet again no overall majority for Corbyn, but closer.
However, we are uncharted territory, and in the “glorious uncertainly” of the British electoral system, it is not impossible that, in dozens and perhaps hundreds of constituencies, the Conservatives might come in second rather than first, their vote sapped by voters voting for UKIP, Brexit Party and others.
The ComRes poll cited at the start of this article said that only just over half of 2017 Con voters were planning to vote Con next time. In 2017, about 13,600,000 or so voted Con. If that is reduced to about 7 million, then the Conservative Party is toast.
In that event, the parliamentary Conservative Party would be reduced to a half, even a quarter of its present strength, and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn might actually be elected with a considerable majority. After that, anything might happen.
In my concluding sentences, above, I explored what might happen if Brexit Party (and/or UKIP, but Brexit Party is plainly taking off in a way that UKIP now is not) were to take away a large number of votes from the Conservatives. I examined what would happen if, nationally, the Conservatives went from 35%-45% down to 30% or 25% (or even lower).
Nigel Farage has made comments indicating that Brexit Party might make inroads into the Labour vote too, especially in the North where Labour was once monolithic in its supremacy in most constituencies.
The polling percentages and national vote percentages can only take you so far. In 2017, Theresa May led the Conservatives to inconclusive victory-defeat and 317 MPs, despite getting 42.4% of the national vote, a level not achieved by any political leader since Mrs Thatcher in 1983. In 2015, David Cameron-Levita’s Conservatives only got 36.9% of the national vote, yet 330 MPs. Only in an electoral system as Alice in Wonderland as that of the UK could that make any sense.
In other words, predictions are tricky when it comes to exact or even inexact numbers.
However, in my view, Brexit Party (and what is left of UKIP support) will hit the Conservatives harder than Labour. Indeed, some voters in seats where Labour never wins may vote tactically to unseat Conservatives, even if the result is that a LibDem or other may get in as a result. One can easily imagine seats fought until now as effectively a two-way split which may now be fought as a three-way or even four-way split.
If Brexit Party can go up from its 14% polling (Westminster voting intention; in EU elections the figure may be as high as 30%) to 25%+, that raises the serious possibility of Brexit Party MPs being elected. If about half the 2017 Conservative voters are not going to vote Conservative (as ComRes reports), are they going to abstain or vote elsewhere? The fact that they bothered to vote before seems to suggest that they will vote again. That means that even in the handful of seats where the Conservatives won in 2017 with over 60% of the vote, the Conservative share of the vote might go from 60% or so to 40%. (the safest Conservative seat is North East Hampshire: 65.5% in 2017).
In the circumstances above, defending a 60% vote share and ending up with perhaps 40%, the Conservatives would still win in most cases, but that would not be the case in more typical constituencies, where the Conservative MP won in 2017 with 50%, 40% or an even lower percentage of the votes cast. A Con MP who got 40% in 2017 might end up getting 30% or even 20% next time.
If Brexit Party can maintain momentum, it (with UKIP’s effect added) will cripple the Conservatives, who will lose swathes of seats. For example, in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson received about 50% of the vote in 2017. Most of the rest (40%) went to Labour. Were half or even a quarter of the Conservative votes to be cast elsewhere, Labour would win (even if the votes “cast elsewhere” were not cast for Labour). In that example, Boris would end up with less than 40% and (if Labour’s 2017 40% vote were to hold up), the Labour candidate would win. That could be replicated in hundreds of seats, in theory. Most would fall to Labour, a few might go to or revert to LibDem, but it is also possible that some would fall to the Brexit Party. At present, unreal though it feels, it is not totally impossible to foresee Nigel Farage’s Frankenstein coming to life (energized by the Brexit hullabaloo itself) and actually ending up as a bloc of anywhere between a few MPs and as many as 50.
Times columnist Iain Martin tweeted on 27 April 2019 that “Disintegrating Tories need a leader who can get the Brexit Party to shut up shop.” It is clear to him, quite evidently, that Brexit Party, even if only as a “super-protest”, has the ability to smash the Conservative Party forever by reducing a typical Conservative vote in a marginal or even hitherto “safe” constituency by anything up to 8,000 votes…
The corollary is —almost— equally true: if Brexit Party (and UKIP) either did not exist or were not popular, the Conservatives would be well ahead of Labour for the next general election.
27 April 2019
Interesting analysis from 2017: had Labour won 7 more seats (requiring only 2,227 votes!), Corbyn might now be Prime Minister!
and here is John Rentoul, writing in The Independent, saying outright part of what I have been saying (I think that he is the first msm commentator of importance to have done so), that is that the Conservative Party is a dead duck (he says “smoking ruin”!) and likely to run only third after Labour and Brexit Party at the next UK general election:
If that polling is right, the combined Brexit Party and UKIP vote at the possible/probable 2019 General Election is now running above 20%. Today 21%, tomorrow 25%, even 30%? Anything above 10% (as in 2015—UKIP got over 12% that year) is pretty bad for the Conservatives; anything above 20% will kill them stone dead. They would lose not even 100, but 200 MPs.
Update, 1 May 2019
With only 1 day to go before the UK local elections, I saw this tweet:
This is incredible! I am not a “supporter” of Farage or “Brexit Party”, but this is the sort of reception that few get! Reminiscent of the Fuhrer (though without the depth or substance, of course). Brexit Party is on a roll! Only three weeks to go before the moment of truth (EU elections).
The Brexit party turned up in Newport, south Wales last night. A true Labour heartland. Usually. https://t.co/NoBovPxNCv
I have in the recent past posted a few analyses of the Labour and Conservative defectors who called themselves the “Independent Group of MPs”, which has now become the new party Change UK. I concluded that, if it became a party, it would have even less success than had the Social Democratic Party [SDP] in the 1980s: see Notes, below.
Change UK is now putting up candidates for the EU elections. As far as I know, it missed the boat for the UK local elections and in any case would have had few candidates available.
My attention was caught by the tweet below. The tweeter is “Senior Political Correspondent” for the online news outlet BuzzFeedUK.
This morning's new Brexit Party candidates: environmentalist, Afghan vet, charity director, entrepreneur, nurse
This morning's new Change UK candidates: Boris Johnson's sister, two former Tory MPs, that BBC guy and QC who tweet a lot…
The tweet makes the point readily enough. Change UK is the unalloyed party of Remain. It is also, as Wickham’s tweet suggests, the party of the Westminster Bubblers, and of the cronies and families of existing MPs and others who, like “Tricky Dicky from Billericay”, have been “doing rather well” out of the existing political and socio-economic system. I notice, as one does, that Change UK also seems to be the party of (some of) the Jews and (both Jewish and non-Jewish) Zionists. Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Gavin Esler etc.
Only this morning, Change UK launched its EU election campaign. 3,700 people wanted to be Change UK candidates. 70 were chosen. Some “celebrity” new candidates were announced: Gavin Esler, Rachel Johnson (one-time Editor of The Lady, and sister of that idiot who wants to be Prime Minister and whose comic am-dram reprise of Winston Churchill is apparently admired by a few people who have dined too well at the golf club).
“Esler added: “I have never been a member of a political party but I am now. “I have never been a candidate in an election but I am now. I have never been seriously worried about the future of our country but I am now. Our political system is a joke. It is a worldwide joke. They are laughing at us – not with us, at us.” [The Guardian]
Those who have read my blog posts about The Independent Group/Change UK will not be surprised to be told that I rate the chances of the new party as being somewhere around zero. This is not in fact a party at all, but a dustbin into which has been thrown unwanted rubbish from the Labour and Conservative benches of the House of Commons.
The Interim Leader of this party without policies is Heidi Allen MP. She has made it very clear that Change UK (which has 11 defector-MPs now) will not bring down the present Conservative minority government:
“Asked if Change UK MPs would back the government in a no confidence vote, Ms Allen told the BBC: “I can’t say wholeheartedly that we’ll vote for the government, or indeed would we ever be a confidence and supply partner in any coalition type government. You need to see what the offer on the table is at the moment….Do I believe however that a general election is a smart thing right now for our country? Absolutely not.” [Daily Mirror]
Does Heidi Allen believe that statements like that fool potential voters? If she does, she must be even more stupid than I had imagined (despite her degree in astrophysics: I only ever met one person with such a degree, and that woman was as thick as two short planks…).
It is obvious to everyone, surely, that the “Change UK” MPs are unwilling either to precipitate a general election (which they probably could, given the numbers of the parties in the House of Commons) or to hold by-elections in their own seats, because they must know, in their hearts, that most of them have little or no chance of retaining those seats.
There are several reasons why I think that Change UK has no chance: its MPs, its palpable Hampstead/Highgate/Blackheath and also affluent provincial air, its paucity of policy, its apparently chaotic organization, and its connections with Jewishness and Israel (those latter being, though, the least of its problems).
Then we look at those MPs again….Heidi Allen, does anyone, anyone at all in the UK, see her as Prime Ministerial material? Fathead Chuka? Ha ha! He has a meltdown trying to decide what scent to wear and which nightclub to attend! What then about Anna Soubry, MP for Broxtowe, or should that be “for Plymouth and Angostura”?…
There is another aspect: the British people are not moving toward vague ZOG-approved “Centrism” (ZOG/NWO/EU-ism, if you like), but toward the so-called “extremes”, meaning that they actually want to be helped and not oppressed by their government, and they also want a government which can accomplish concrete results.
There is something doomed and even pointless about Change UK.
She is correct, @ChukaUmunna. Change UK is losing traction. I could have remedied that for you, even prevented it. I applied for the social media position but didn't receive a reply. Your social media presence is staid, at best. Why hasn't it improved yet?
Change UK literally is the face of everything that is wrong with politics, people who look like the frame of a david milliband, cameron, clegg, may, are just copy and paste robots in a suit the idea is dead. If centre ground new politics looks an ex tory i aint buying it. https://t.co/VQseOiLnk1
It isn’t clear what #ChangeUK want to actually change.
They want to stop Brexit, stay in the EU and apparently won’t even vote to bring down Theresa May if Labour bring another confidence motion forward in Parliament. https://t.co/OU0r94yTGP
Why didn't you call yourselves 'The Remain Alliance' Party instead of Change – which is @Change organisations name.?They mean real change – your party does not mean change at all. @brexitparty_uk are the real political party for change. Leave means leave. https://t.co/V8inLOHu7D
— Grace Mason 😇🇬🇧🙏✝️♥️ (@Gracefulgrace10) April 23, 2019
"Change UK are a single-issue Party with no coherent policy platform… This is a re-branding exercise for former Conservative and Labour politicians who presided over cuts to public services and the relentless growth in inequality." https://t.co/tycslU2R0e
The funding of “Change UK” is opaque. It seems that it is funnelled via offshore trusts in at least two jurusdictions. Panama is one. The second part of the video below shows Joan Ryan, now a Change UK MP, at a time when she was still a Labour MP, conspiring with Shai Masot, an Israeli intelligence operative, and talking about using a million pounds in Israeli funds to suborn or corrupt MPs, presumably Labour ones. Does some of Change UK’s funding come from Israel or from secretive non-governmental Jewish sources?
Update, 26 April 2019
A tweet or two that caught my attention:
Anyone else noticed how the candidates for @brexitparty_uk are young, old, black, white, mixed race, working class, middle class. And the candidates of Change UK @IndGroup_UK are all from the cafe in Waitrose?
Meanwhile, away from the pathetic defector MPs and their Israeli links, Brexit Party is storming forward, over the bodies of the already-dying “Change UK”:
This is incredible! I am not a “supporter” of Farage or “Brexit Party”, but this is the sort of reception that few get! Reminiscent of the Fuhrer (though without the depth or substance, of course). Brexit Party is on a roll! Only three weeks to go before the moment of truth (EU elections).
The Brexit party turned up in Newport, south Wales last night. A true Labour heartland. Usually. https://t.co/NoBovPxNCv
While Brexit Party is holding large meetings, rallies almost, all over England (2,000 people in Peterborough, where the by-election is due on 6 June), Change UK is holding tiny gatherings, promoted by typical msm “journalists” (almost all pro-Israel, pro-Remain, anti-Brexit).
Change UK London Rally vs Brexit Party Peterborough Rally. One made lead story on BBC News, the other didn’t even feature. That’s right. The tiny one made the front page, the massive one didn’t. Why’s that I wonder? pic.twitter.com/0MVGwgUoly
Ironic! Lying Jew Zionist Mike Gapes MP (MP until the next general election…) well and truly put in his place by LBC’s Iain Dale (who usually bends over backwards for Jews)! If it had been any other presenter, Gapes would be screaming “anti-Semitism!” by now!
An interesting tweet (see below), from a week ago but just noticed: Change UK is less popular than Brexit Party even in metropolitan, cosmopolitan London!
and now Chris Leslie, one of the Change UK MPs, i.e. a political careerist elected under the Labour banner and who, facing deselection from his very safe seat, defected to the “Independent Group” which is now Change UK, decides to comment on the contrived Jess Phillips “rape” storm in a teacup:
Unfortunately for deadhead Leslie (who belonged to Labour Friends of Israel….quelle surprise…), “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) is a UKIP candidate and not a Brexit Party one! Leslie wrong again. Thousands of replies later (see the thread), Leslie has still neither deleted his inaccurate tweet nor apologized. Incompetent little chancer, who has never had a job outside politics. A drone.
So now it turns out that some of the big donors to “Change UK” are a pack of Jews who are also behind finance-capitalist projects designed to snoop on British people. The names are enough…Isaacs, Sugarman, Agioff…
EXC: Who is behind the controversial facial recognition software used by the government to register EU citizens post-Brexit, which has been condemned by Remainers and privacy campaigners?
You really could not make it up! Change UK (appropriately known as CHUKUP) is an “organization” of donkeys which is also “led” by donkeys! I have nothing against real donkeys (charming little friends of humanity who are more worthy and more beautiful than any of the CHUKUP MPs) but I prefer not to vote for human ones to rule over us!
One of Change UK's top candidates has defected to the Liberal Democrats a week before European elections https://t.co/auNeLQjJcv
Meanwhile (see below), faux-revolutionary poseur Owen Jones interviews Anna Soubry MP, who appears to have been on the sauce again, judging from her mannerisms and words. Or maybe she just has mental problems. Or both. She conflates freedom of speech (which she claims, falsely, to support) with freedom of movement inside the EU. Of course, she is a bit thick anyway, and certainly not educated or cultured. She says that the “white working class” are against immigration because they have never seen non-whites! She’s either cuckoo or drunk (again)! She also says that she does not want the votes of any Broxtowe voters who are anti-immigration. Bin her. Evil old bitch.
I hope that she loses her Commons seat and subsides into an alcoholic stupor somewhere.
Update, 18 May 2019
Some of the ex-Labour Change UK idiots now try to worm back into the Labour Party! Ha ha! I bet that fathead Chuka is one of them!
Imagine this: fathead Chuka was once spoken of (in the corrupt msm) as ministerial or even prime ministerial material! They said the same about airheaded Heidi Allen! Imagine idiots like that at the head of affairs! It might be even worse than the present bunch of idiots…
…while in Liverpool, Jewish couples meet to shoot the breeze while they shop…oh, no, wait, it’s Zionist MP Luciana Berger and her few supporters
Good to see you found the 4 other CUKs in Liverpool, so sweer
I have to say, Change UK are certainly doing politics differently! Don't think many people have seen this level of organised incompetence from a political party,,,,,,,,,,, ever! Truly Historic!
In the opinion polls, Change UK are now at or under 2%. Looks like this blog foretold the future accurately (again). Only 5 days to go before “Change UK” sinks permanently.
I just noticed this “blast from the past”: Zionist Kate Godfrey thought that she had a freeloading “Labour” political career set up, no doubt with the help of Common Purpose drones, but people saw through her careerism and Zionism, with the result that she never did become an MP, and later resigned from the Labour Party in a fit of pique, relocating from West Midland to East Midlands. Now she tries to become an MEP for Change UK! You couldn’t make it up! Ha ha! She made the wrong call yet again! She used to tweet nonsense about me to other Zionists in their Twitter echo-chamber, a few years ago. Looks like “the Curse of Millard” is still working!
Change UK holds a “rally” (5 members of the public and 5 reporters)!
Now we’ve seen the enthusiasm of the people for Chuka and Soubry’s great party I assume we’ll be seeing less of them on #marr, #bbcqt and #BBCR4today… but I won’t hold my breath pic.twitter.com/TlZ9uVgCAT
Well, I was there a month ago, but the msm is now finally catching up with me!
“Change UK is dying before it even learned to walk. Its MPs know it. Its candidates know it. The public knows it. Change UK never really wanted to change anything. What it wanted most of all was for things to stay the same. For the UK to remain in the EU and for the extremes of both the Tory and Labour parties to shut up and go away” [ The Guardian]
So here we are, EU election day, and “Change UK” is tweeting (see below) that the problems of the UK are all because of “the lies” supposedly told by “the far right”, UKIP and Brexit Party (none of which have ever had any power in the UK)…
Meanwhile, I sincerely hope and believe that Change UK is being slaughtered at the polls.
Update, 26 May 2019
Votes being declared in the EU Elections. The BBC interviews Heidi Allen MP, the ex-Conservative defector now in Change UK. She says that CHUKUP is only “at the start of something”. Asked “where does Change UK go from here?”, she answers with waffle. CHUKUP is not even contesting the important Peterborough by-election. It’s finished.
Update, 27 May 2019
Oh, no! Looks as though Anna Soubry has been hitting the bottle again, following CHUKUP’s terminally poor European Elections results…
Even in the Broxtowe area, in which Anna Soubry’s constituency is located (the boundaries are not exactly the same but almost the same), CHUKUP only managed 4.7%. Anna Soubry should just open another bottle and try to forget what is left of her unimpressive political career.
Broxtowe (East Midlands) result:
Brex: 35.9% (+35.9) LDem: 20.9% (+14.5) Grn: 13.5% (+5.7) Lab: 12.1% (-14.4) Con: 8.9% (-15.2) ChUK: 4.7% (+4.7) UKIP: 4.0% (-27.0) Looks like Broxtowe rejects your opinion Anna & the CHUKs 😂 No wonder you do not want a by election 😂 😂
Well, Change UK (I call it CHUKUP) is still notionally in existence by polling at statistical zero. As I predicted on 18 May, Fathead Chuka [Umunna] has indeed had a meltdown and defected, though to the LibDems rather than back to Labour (they wouldn’t let him rejoin). He lasted a month or so in CHUKUP, so anyway rather longer than the day or two he lasted as Labour leadership candidate! What a total waste of space Fathead Chuka is! I suppose that he hopes that the LibDems will find him a seat to contest. Not Streatham, which has been safe Labour since 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streatham_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
Meanwhile, “Interim Leader” Heidi Allen clashed with drunken creature Anna Soubry. Allen advised a merger with the LibDems. When Soubry attacked the idea, Heidi Allen walked, and now sits as am Independent. That leaves Anna Soubry as “leader” of this waste of space “party” and its 5 MPs, none of whom will be MPs as soon as a general election is called.
As I predicted pretty much from the start, finished.
Update, 4 July 2019
I missed this: Change UK is now called The Independent Group for Change. The third or fourth name this dead-parrot “party” has had in its few months of existence.
I do not think that most newspapers even reported the above. Maybe a small paragraph on some obscure page. A sign that The Party Formerly Known As Change UK is on life-support, which with the next general election will be turned off.
Chuck Anna Soubry into a vat of alcohol and go home.
Update, 28 January 2024
The post had a few hits today, the first for a long time. I was idly wondering whatever happened the Blair-Brown “Labour” drone Chris Leslie, at MP until the 2019 General Election.
Well, seems that (((they))) rewarded him— he is now the chief executive of a trade body representing the organized debt and debt collection industry. How pleasant…
There has been a see-sawing between the two main System parties for several years. At first, say in 2014-2015, it looked as though Labour was about to go into possibly terminal decline. I have no doubt that, had any of the pro-Israel, pro-EU candidates in the first post-GE 2015 Labour leadership contest (Liz Kendall, Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper) won, that would have come to pass. As we know, Corbyn won that contest, and Labour, though it came in second at the 2017 General Election, reduced the Conservative government to minority status. Since then the parties have generally been close together in the opinion polls, with the Conservatives usually slightly higher.
Since the 2017 election, the only difference between the two is that Corbyn has been favoured by fewer as a potential prime minister. Theresa May had the edge but no ringing endorsement (a typical result was Corbyn 25%, Theresa May 35%, Don’t Know 40%). I have not seen a recent poll about the System party leaders, but there have been recent polls vis a vis the upcoming EU election and re. Westminster voting intentions (the next general election might in theory only be in 2022, but there seems to be an acceptance that it might in fact be this year, as I predicted was not unlikely).
Here are recent poll results (questions asked about 3-8 days ago), collated by Britain Elects. The position of Nigel Farage’s pop-up Brexit Party is volatile, but it is plainly one of the two most favoured; UKIP is evidently some way behind all of Brexit Party, Labour and Conservative Party, but the important point is that both Brexit Party and UKIP will take votes mainly from the Conservatives in the EU elections (always assuming that the UK participates) and (if Brexit Party and UKIP put up candidates) in the general election of 2019 (if it happens). There are also local elections coming (2 May 2019) but the beneficiary there will be Labour, UKIP not being able to fight most seats and Brexit Party not standing at all.
It can be seen that YouGov is more bullish on Brexit Party’s chances than is ComRes, and that BP’s ratings vary daily or so even from a single pollster. However, there is some reason to believe that Farage’s new vehicle is riding even higher now (some estimates put its reach at over 30%).
An amateur or perhaps semi-professional psephologist has come up with this seat prediction for the EU election in the UK (based on a YouGov opinion poll):
Well, that’s for the EU Parliament. What about Westminster? The msm consensus now is what I have been predicting for a couple of years, Labour probably the largest party, but without overall majority. Where does that leave the Conservative Party? Quite possibly up a certain well-known creek without a paddle.
As I said here above, only a few years ago Labour looked like collapsing into becoming a niche party with maybe a 25% popular vote. Now things look very different: Corbyn has bent like the bamboo before the wind as the Jews (and the heavily Jew-influenced msm) have accused him of “anti-Semitism” (the Circuit judge in the Alison Chabloz appeal hearing recently confirmed that “anti-Semitism” is not a crime in England anyway…pass it on…).
The Zionist storm has been ferocious around Corbyn since 2015, but he simply sways with the wind. If I had not read that Corbyn scarcely reads books (one of his ex-wives said that he read not one book during their 4 years together!), I would take Corbyn for an acolyte of Sun-Tzu.
Well, much has happened since Corbyn took over. A membership/support base of about 200,000 has become one of 500,000+, Labour no longer has financial problems, its members and supporters are often young, and its poll ratings are finally improving.
Now it is the Conservative Party that may be facing an existential crisis. We read that only about 5% of Conservative rank and file members want Theresa May to stay as Leader, that donations have completely dried up, that the median age of Conservative Party members is 51 (with many over 80 or even 90), and that the supposed 120,000+ membership number is either only a paper figure or shows huge numbers of completely inactive members who take no part in the party even locally or socially, but are signed up to bank direct debits.
Only 16% of voters under 35 intend to vote Conservative, while the figure for under-25-years is a mere 4%. True, Conservative voters have always been mainly middle-aged and elderly, but not to this extent.
The Conservatives have usually trumped Labour on competence (in public perception, but God knows why…), but that is now faltering. The Conservatives can say that a Corbyn government would be incompetent, but the voters have seen that (as with David Cameron-Levita) the Theresa May Conservative government has been proven so: the NHS deteriorating, the police incapable of stopping the rise in violent crime, the increase in Internet snooping and monitoring of ordinary white British citizens by police, MI5 etc, the numbers being made homeless or literally starved to death thanks to the incompetent “welfare” “reforms” of Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and the jew “lord” Freud etc; then there are the potholed roads, the bursting and inefficient railways, not to mention the millions of unwanted immigrants, often from backward, violent and useless ethnic groups, flooding in almost without restraint. Police stations have been closed and sold, prisons are in a appalling state, people are imprisoned for saying anything against the Jews, but given small fines for bad crimes of violence. Then there are the squeezes, over a decade, on incomes.
The appalling muddle over Brexit has crystallized such feelings about this government’s sheer incompetence.
About half the chairmen of local Conservative parties have said that they will be voting Brexit Party in the EU elections. The Conservative Party is a party which is folding. The leader has no credibility, Cabinet members have neither loyalty nor discipline, its MPs are also without discipline, and it seems that donations have dried up.
“A damning Survation poll of 781 Tory councillors today found 76% want the Prime Minister to resign – with 43% saying she must go immediately” and “One councillor questioned in the study said: “The Conservative Party is dead. It will take a strong leader to dredge it out of the mud.””
“I am embarrassed to be a member at the moment. This will be a case study of (predictable) incompetence which has made our country and party a laughing stock around the world.” and “I will not vote Conservative nationally again. I have been a lifetime supporter and a Conservative councillor for 33 years.”
[Daily Mail]
It was the early symptom of the membership demographic problem (aka “an ancient membership…”), from 2010, that led to the Conservative Party trying to plug the door-knocking gap by bussing in hordes of young Con activists and/or employees via the disastrous Mark Clarke tour, because many constituency associations had almost literally no-one willing to canvass voters, mostly because, while some constituency associations had 200 or even 300 members, all of them were either infirm or far beyond retirement age.
More generally, it can be seen that there is a move to radical and even revolutionary politics. MSM scribblers are starting to take notice:
To listen to strong “Brexiteers”, one would imagine that Brexit is the only issue. Poorly-educated and perhaps not very intelligent msm scribblers, such as Susie Boniface, the so-called “Fleet Street Fox” (a Remain partisan), make the same mistake in reverse. Susie Boniface writes that the voters of Newport West, in the recent by-election, voted for a Remain-supporting (Labour) MP despite the fact that the area (not the exact area) voted Leave in 2016. She infers from that that voters have changed their mind on EU membership. No, they simply wanted a MP who (supposedly) believes in public services, decent pay and fair benefits for those that need them. Is it so hard to understand such things? Maybe if you are a London-based scribbler making a few hundred thousand a year and writing to an agenda…
We can see, looking ahead, that people are turning away from the System parties because the needs of the British people are simply not being met on any of the issues raised above. For the moment, those for whom Brexit is all-important have the safety-valves of UKIP and Brexit Party; on other issues, for many, Corbyn-Labour will fill the gap, for a while. In the end, though, only real social nationalism can offer a future for the real British people. 2022 may be the decisive year.
Note on Voting Percentages
The “glorious uncertainty” of British politics (oddly-drawn constituencies, FPTP voting etc) makes popular vote percentages of less importance than would be the case in a system of even passing fairness.
As can be seen from the linked charts, below, the Conservatives under Theresa May got a higher popular vote percentage (42.3%) in 2017 than the party had managed since Margaret Thatcher in 1983 (42,4%), yet only 317 MPs (currently 312) as against Mrs. Thatcher’s 376! In 2015, under David Cameron-Levita, the Conservatives got a popular vote of 36.9%, yet ended with 330 MPs! That’s the British system of voting— ridiculous.
My column: With nothing to say on Brexit or the economy, the Tories now face annihilation. Will they oust May on time, or be responsible for a Corbyn catastrophe? https://t.co/JejCzSuaBs via @Telegraph
Labour has problems as well…; but it is a measure of how angry and frustrated voters are that not even the prospect of Diane Abbott (here seen drinking a canned alcoholic mojito on the Underground/Overground) as Home Secretary is (much) denting Labour’s poll rating now!
Voters of Britain. Do you really want this woman to be your new Home Secretary? pic.twitter.com/85i4vkW68j
The racially and culturally inferior are allowed to flood into the UK and the rest of Europe, and in the UK are tolerated, given housing, given food money and more if they start breeding. Meanwhile, for the British, life becomes harsher daily:
The Brexit mess, so spectacularly mishandled by Theresa May and the idiotic careerists around her, may save UKIP from immediate collapse as a party, inasmuch as many British voters will want to punish the Conservative Party one way or the other. There may be in general a “perfect storm” for the Conservative Party, pressured on two fronts by both the Leave and Remain sides.
There will soon be elections for the European Parliament, on 23 May 2019. Recent opinion polling seems to be saying that Labour will have a landslide: initial voting intentions show Labour on 37.8% (up from 24.4% in 2016); Conservatives at 23.1% (unchanged), Brexit Party (Nigel Farage’s new party) 10%, LibDem 8%, UKIP 7.5%, Change UK (the recent Lab/Con defector MPs’ vehicle) around 4%, among others.
One has to be cautious in assuming that the above opinion poll reflects the likely outcome. The same poll seems to indicate that, after discussion, many pro-EU voters prefer Change UK (which would hit Labour and LibDem levels), while anti-EU voters may prefer either UKIP or Brexit Party.
Before the EU elections (in which the UK may not participate at all if the UK leaves the UK before 23 May), there will be local elections, on 2 May 2019. The indications are that, in those elections, Labour may also sweep the poll, with Labour benefiting not only from the “pendulum” or “see-saw” effect of elections in a system using FPTP voting, but also from abstentions by usual Con voters (or by their voting for Brexit Party or UKIP).
As far as the local elections are concerned, Labour starts the campaign with several advantages. The decade of spending cuts has finally impacted even the most true-blue Conservative areas. Labour has a army of local activists, thanks to its membership surge under Corbyn. It also has funds from the same source.
The Conservatives have few local activists now and most are beyond retirement age. The party looks tired. The Brexit mess can only be laid at the door of Theresa May and her Cabinet. The Cons will be lucky to avoid a wipeout in the areas voting for local councillors on 2 May.
There are also strategic factors. The Conservative Party claims 124,000 members, which seems high (average 200 members per constituency). Most are elderly. Few are active. The median age for Conservative voters has also risen, to 52. Recent polling has shown that only 16% of voters under 35 support the Cons, and only 4% of those under 25 do so.
In respect of the local elections, I see them as a straight fight between Labour and Conservative, overall. Labour is obviously in a good position in every respect.
In respect of the EU elections (in England and Wales), Labour may start in pole position, but there is a long way to go. Pro-EU voters may vote Labour, LibDem, Change UK or even Conservative. Anti-EU voters may vote Brexit Party, UKIP, or possibly either Lab or Con. Hard to say. Many voters may just try to hit out at the Conservatives any way they can. The obvious way to hit at the Conservative Party government is to vote Labour, assuming that hitting out trumps Brexit issues.
I can see that, while the Jewish/Zionist attack on Corbyn-Labour has made a dent in Lab’s popularity over 3-4 years, the voters are now tired of the whole Labour “anti-Semitism” whining, not least because Labour is now suspending members who speak out against the Zionist prominence in the UK. People have real issues with which to contend. It is a mistake to think that Twitter is the same as the UK public, especially now that Twitter has purged so many dissident voices (including mine). Jews and their “useful idiots” have colonized Twitter, to an extent.
The Leave/Brexit vote will be split between UKIP and Brexit Party, weakening both. All the same, these EU elections are all about (in the UK) protest voting.
Whichever way one looks at it, Labour looks like doing very well at the local elections and fairly well at the EU elections.
Update, 14 April 2019
Some msm outlets are now predicting a solid Labour win in the expected General Election too
Despite having no policies beyond the UK leaving (really leaving) the EU, Brexit Party is already running at anywhere up to 15% in opinion polling for the EU elections of 23 May 2019.
It is reported that up to 56% of those who voted Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum will vote either Brexit Party or UKIP in any General Election held this year. It is unclear whether Brexit Party would contest a general election, but if not, its votes would presumably go to UKIP. So about 50% of about 52% = about 26% of votes. That might not be enough to win any seats (certainly not, if split two ways), but it would cripple the Conservatives.
#BrexitParty fighting the Brexit betrayal of a Remain Majority parliament and its enables in bureaucracy, the EU and the media European Parliament voting intention:
Brexit Party, thanks to star turn Farage, is now at almost 30% in polling re. the EU elections. UKIP cannot seem to get much beyond 8%-9%. Still, that does mean that the Cons, in particular, will crash. They are polling now below 15% re. EU elections.
As far as the UK local elections are concerned, Brexit Party is taken out of the equation (contesting no seats) and UKIP is not contesting very many seats. That must favour Labour.
Update 21 April 2019
From the Daily Mail:
“If there is any overall winner from the meltdown in British politics, it will be Jeremy Corbyn – leader of what has become by any normal standards an extremist party.
As a historian of political ideas and movements, I have studied the rise and fall of parties and ideologies in Britain and Europe.
Today we are witnessing a meltdown in British politics with no historical precedent. Both main parties are shedding their traditional supporters at an astonishing rate.
According to a ComRes poll published last week, not much more than half (53 per cent) of 2017 Conservative voters intend to vote Conservative at the next General Election.”
The mad jamboree which passes for UK democracy in 2019 continues apace. Ann Widdecombe, one of the worst Home Secretaries ever, is going to be a Brexit Party candidate (for the EU Parliament seat of South West England). She says that she will still vote Conservative in the local elections. Having just looked up her details, it seems that she is 71. I thought that she was at least 80.
The tweet below captures the mood:
the lucky voters of the South West now have the choice between Andrew Adonis, Sargon of Akkad, Rachel Johnson, the Green one who tried to shut down Brussels airport, and Ann Widdecombe. https://t.co/mZmwVaultL
At least Ann Widdecombe is an animal-lover, especially cat-lover…
Ann Widdecombe's standing for the Brexit Party now. It's like when Channel 5 reveal who's in their latest reality show. Next will be Timmy Mallet, Jimmy Greaves and the woman who put a cat in a wheelie-bin.
As can be seen, and with less than 28 days to go before polling (assuming that the UK takes part in the EU elections), Brexit Party is neck and neck with Labour and has the momentum. The Conservatives are rapidly becoming also-rans as far as the EU elections are concerned. It looks as though those voters who want to cast an anti-EU/Leave/Brexit vote are going with Brexit Party, leaving UKIP to flounder around near the bottom of the poll. All or almost all UKIP votes are going to Brexit Party. Most Eurosceptic former Conservative voters are also going to Brexit Party. This is going to be interesting.
Meanwhile, in less than 5 days, there are the local elections. There, the results may also be dramatic, but not to the same extent: Brexit Party not standing, UKIP not standing for most council seats (and at present has only 101 councillors out of a possible 20,712); only about a third of council seats being contested this year. Also, in many parts of the South of England, there is little “democratic choice”, with most candidates posted being Conservative, the Labour and LibDem parties not contesting all seats.
Update, 1 May 2019
8,804 local council and other seats are in contest tomorrow, 2 May 2019. The Conservatives are contesting 96% of those seats. Labour will be contesting the majority of them. The LibDems are contesting some. UKIP have 18 candidates standing. Brexit Party is not contesting these elections:
As far as the EU elections of 23 May are concerned, the latest polls show an irresistible rise for Brexit Party, which is running somewhere around 33% now; the corollary is UKIP on only about 4%, not helped by the bizarre behaviour of UKIP’s MEP candidate “Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin), the “alt-Right” vlogger standing for the South West England constituency.
Meanwhile…
This is incredible! I am not a “supporter” of Farage or “Brexit Party”, but this is the sort of reception that few get! Reminiscent of the Fuhrer (though without the depth or substance, of course). Brexit Party is on a roll! Only three weeks to go before the moment of truth (EU elections).
The Brexit party turned up in Newport, south Wales last night. A true Labour heartland. Usually. https://t.co/NoBovPxNCv
The British people were told that they and they alone would decide by referendum whether to stay in or leave the EU. Remain or Leave. No nonsense about “the Irish backstop”, no nonsense about “deals” with the EU, no ever-more complex rejigging of the UK-EU relationship, no second vote years after the Referendum (i.e. no “people’s vote”, to be held in 2019, 2020 or even later), no asking to remain in the EU for weeks, months, years after the set departure date.
Yes, the relationship between the EU and the UK is complex, but sometimes, with Gordian Knots, you just have to cut the knot. You can tie new knots later.
As I predicted at the time, Remain would immediately launch a kind of quite long term damage-limitation operation, building on the Operation Fear pre-referendum propaganda. The fear propaganda had a number of aspects:
No-one would be allowed to travel from the UK to EU states;
Before the UK was in the EU, no-one from the UK was allowed to travel to France, Germany, Italy etc without a visa;
No UK people could live or work in, eg, France, Spain, Italy, Germany before 1973;
Anyone voting Leave hates Europe and Europeans;
A vote for Leave is a vote for hate;
A Leave win would reduce most British people to poverty;
This propaganda was fuelled by even more than usually inept and wrong forecasts by hugely well-paid and hugely overvalued “erudite idiots” such as the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, a globalist Bilderberg participant of probably part-Jewish origins (see Notes, below). Ex-Goldman Sachs and carrying Canadian, British and Irish (and other?) passports, Carney and others claimed that Brexit would immediately shrink the UK economy. In reality, such forecasts did that, by causing fear and uncertainty.
Many young people, meaning loosely anyone under 30 but especially the 16-24 age group, badly let down by their pathetically poor education, really seemed to believe the above bullet-points. They really believed that a Leave result would mean that they would not even be able to visit EU countries without onerous visa requirements. In fact, listening to them (bleat) on BBC radio, one realized that many seriously believed that, if the UK left the EU, they would not be allowed entry to EU countries at all! Yes, those who believed that were/are stupid, ignorant and poorly-educated, but the immediate blame must be placed on the Remain propagandists.
There were reports in the msm and on social media about pathetic teenage girls bleating and crying because “their whole future” had been “destroyed” (by older Leave voters)! Now they would never be international models, pan-EU entrepreneurs etc! In reality, of course, 99% of the young Remain whiners never were going to get well-paid or indeed any jobs “in Europe” (as they always mis-designate the EU). The few who might, always could (I myself once had a girlfriend who, in her 1960s youth, had been on the cover of the French edition of Vogue).
The Remain fightback started immediately. Project Fear was kept going, along with new lines: “the Referendum was not really valid because it was so close” was one. Another was “turnout was only 72%, so the Leave vote was really only about 37%”…
As Leave supporters countered, what if we applied that to General Elections? Or by-elections? We have just had a by-election at Newport West. I blogged about it and later added the result details:
In that by-election, Labour won, with a vote share of 39.6% of votes cast. However, turnout was only 37.6%. In other words, nearly two-thirds of eligible voters, many no doubt disgusted by the charade of “democracy” being played out, refused to or at least did not vote. Should we say that the result is invalid, because Labour was only voted for by about 15% of the eligible electorate?…
The same is true of the vast majority of constituencies where MPs have been “elected” despite having received less than 50% of the votes. Some MPs were “elected” on votes of 30%, the result of 3-way or 4-way splits. In view of the often low turnout in elections, that means that many MPs were voted for by only a fifth or even a tenth of the eligible voters!
People who could not be bothered to vote either way in 2016 must accept the result. Leave.
We should recall that every single referendum region in England, except London, votedLeave, most by very nearly 60%-40%. In fact, in the UK only London, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain.
If you were to take out Scotland, Northern Ireland, London, Gibraltar and all non-white voters, Leave would have won, in England, by something like 75%-25%.
If there were to be another EU/Brexit referendum any time soon, Leave might in fact win all over again:
The point is that a promise was made to the British people and has been broken. Now we see that
The “Conservative” government has badly mishandled the 2-3 years of negotiation with the EU (was that deliberate? was that sabotage?);
An attempt has been made to have a “Brexit In Name Only” via a so-called “deal” which would be actually worse than just staying in the EU officially;
attempt(s) are made to revoke Article 50 and so to stay in the EU;
requests for extensions of time for departure (why?);
a House of Commons “legal coup d’etat” has been made, passing a law to all but outlaw Brexit, and passed by one vote, that of African convict Fiona Onasanya MP, who was recently released from prison and soon will not even be an MP! The Commons coup was arranged between Oliver Letwin MP, a Jew and former Rothschilds employee, and pro-Zionist would-be dictator Yvette Cooper MP.
In fact, the Rothschilds connection is interesting, because puppet President of France, Macron, a complete agent of Zionism, NWO and ZOG, also worked for Rothschilds.
Conclusions
There is effectively no or almost no real democracy in the UK now. People are waking up to that via the Brexit saga;
There is no political party, let alone one which is powerful and/or credible, which speaks for the British people;
Most MPs are useless, not even mediocre, and/or are just freeloading traitors; they are also, most of them, direct enemies of the British people. Many belong to secret groups of cosmopolitan manipulators. Many are pro-Zionist and/or have Jewish-Zionist connections, spouses, sponsors etc.
There must be a new and better society and a better system of government.
Update, 12 April 2019: a few thoughts about the near-future EU and local elections
The Brexit mess, so spectacularly mishandled by Theresa May and the idiotic careerists around her, may save UKIP from immediate collapse as a party, inasmuch as many British voters will want to punish the Conservative Party one way or the other. There may be a “perfect storm” for the Conservative Party, pressured on two fronts by both the Leave and Remain sides.
There will soon be elections for the European Parliament, on 23 May 2019. Recent opinion polling seems to be saying that Labour will have a landslide: initial voting intentions show Labour on 37.8% (up from 24.4% in 2016); Conservatives at 23.1% (unchanged), Brexit Party (Nigel Farage’s new party) 10%, LibDem 8%, UKIP 7.5%, Change UK (the recent Lab/Con defector MPs’ vehicle) around 4%, among others.
One has to be cautious in assuming that the above opinion poll reflects the likely outcome. The same poll seems to indicate that, after discussion, many pro-EU voters prefer Change UK (which would hit Labour and LibDem levels), while anti-EU voters may prefer either UKIP or Brexit Party.
Before the EU elections (in which the UK may not participate at all if the UK leaves the UK before 23 May), there will be local elections, on 2 May 2019. The indications are that, in those elections, Labour may also sweep the poll, with Labour benefiting not only from the “pendulum” or “see-saw” effect of elections in a system using FPTP voting, but also from abstentions by usual Con voters (or by their voting for Brexit Party or UKIP).
As far as the local elections are concerned, Labour starts the campaign with several advantages. The decade of spending cuts has finally impacted even the most true-blue Conservative areas. Labour has a army of local activists, thanks to its membership surge under Corbyn. It also has funds from the same source.
The Conservatives have few local activists now and most are beyond retirement age. The party looks tired. The Brexit mess can only be laid at the door of Theresa May and her Cabinet. The Cons will be lucky to avoid a wipeout in the areas voting on 2 May.
There are also strategic factors. The Conservative Party claims 124,000 members, which seems high (average 200 members per constituency). Most are elderly. Few are active. The median age for Conservative voters has also risen, to 52. Recent polling has shown that only 16% of voters under 35 support the Cons, and only 4% of those under 25 do so.
Illusion is something that many prefer to reality, as this cartoon indicates:
“They want not only their daily bread but also their daily illusion.” [Adolf Hitler, talking about many Germans during the decadent Weimar Republic of 1918-1933]
The Green Party
This blog article was prompted by a tweet that I happened to see, tweeted by one Jonathan Bartley, the “co-leader” of the Green Party.
David Davis is wrong on @BBCr4today that all parties are in a worse state than they have been for years. @TheGreenParty membership is growing, we are polling higher than our best ever general election result and have a record number of councillors on a record number of councils.
The Green Party is so large and important now that it has to have not one but two “co-leaders”. Well, jesting aside, there must be some other reason (almost certainly something very very silly) that necessitates two leaders, the other “co-leader” being one Sian Berry.
Bartley seems to have come from an affluent background. He graduated from the LSE aged 23, thereafter floating around Westminster as researcher etc until he founded the think-tank, Ekklesia. He does not seem to have done (or have needed to do) any other work of much substance between the founding of Ekklesia in 2002 and being elected as Green Party co-leader in 2016.
Deputy Leader is 34-year-old Amelia Womack, who was elected to her party position aged 29, having never been elected to any public position (not even as local councillor); neither has she ever had a paid job of any kind, it seems. She is a candidate in the upcoming Newport West by-election:
Now the facts are (i.e. the reality is) that the Green Party of England and Wales, founded 1990, has 1 MP (out of 650), 1 member of the House of Lords (out of 781), 3 MEPs (out of 64 English/Welsh seats), 2 London Assembly members (out of 25), and 178 local councillors (out of 19,023).
The Green Party is polling at somewhere around 5% nationally (it has been as low as 2% in recent years), and only has its one MP by reason of the unusual demographics and the (in 2010, when Caroline Lucas was first elected) 4-way voting split in the constituency of Brighton Pavilion:
In other words, the Green Party is like a tame rat on a wheel. Lots of activity and noise, but nothing really achieved. It’s not that I am opposed to all Green Party policies. I like some of its environmental policies, its support for Basic Income, its concern for animal welfare etc. There has, after all, always been connection between what are now called “green” ideals and social-nationalism. I have even blogged about it:
Where I cannot accompany the Green Party is in its apparent belief that open borders are good, mass immigration of inferior peoples into Europe is good, or that the EU is mostly very good for the UK.
I agree with the Greens when they say that FPTP voting is unfair on them (as on, in the past, UKIP, the BNP and the National Front, among others). Even 5% of votes should give the Greens around 30 MPs, whereas they may soon struggle to retain their one (though Caroline Lucas is a known TV face and probably will stay for a while). However, to say that UK political life is unfair is really just a pathetic bleat even if true (which it is).
At some point, reality will have to dawn on the Green Party members (surprisingly, nearly 40,000 of them). Or maybe not. I think that many Green Party members probably like their nursery politics game, which they must know in their hearts can never lead to serious results; but it makes them feel good and virtuous.
The Green Party is not about to get MPs elected or sweep the country in any way. The Green Party will simply continue as it is, a virtue-signalling pressure group pretending to be a political party. However, relatively few British people will vote for a party that supports both mass immigration and UK membership of the EU; neither will voters give credence to a party which has no one clear leader and which seems to be a refuge (even in its top-most ranks) for perpetual students and/or virtue-signalling and hugely self-deluded persons.
The Nationalist Milieu
It is often said that the plethora of food programmes on TV are a kind of “food porn” for people who rarely if ever cook. Well, the so-called “far right” (I myself never use terms such as “Left”, “Right” etc) or nationalist political tendency is rather like that: the Zionists, their “useful idiot” “antifa” offshoots, the msm too, and of course the System apparatchiki such as police, all like to say that there is a huge “danger” from “far right extremism” etc. If only! In reality, what exists at present is a mixture of hobby politics, “I’m the leader!” (of 2.5 people) parties, and politically-tinged 1970s football hooligan groups, together with System politics under nationalist camouflage (as with UKIP).
People of my vintage (b.1956), will recall (the now notorious) Gary Glitter singing “I’m the leader!” in 1973, a psychology characteristic of both “I’m the Leader!” parties and, usually, “hobby parties” (though every successful political party has to have a credible leader).
The English Democrats
I am starting with the English Democrats because they seem to me to epitomize the “hobby politics” sort of party. They claim(ed) to have over 2,000 members (2015), though I daresay that even that was a gross overestimation. I personally only ever heard of one member by name (my mother-in-law’s former neighbour), and he was a very strange man, a retired pilot aged about 70 (c.80, now). I would not be surprised if that man were fairly typical of the English Democrats’ members.
The English Democrats were founded in 2002. Their best electoral result was in the Mayoral race at Doncaster in 2009, which they won. They would also have won in 2013, had the Mayor not resigned from the English Democrats not long before the election. He still stood but as Independent and lost to Labour by only 590 votes, the EDs having put up their own candidate, who received 4,615 votes.
Police and Crime Commissioner elections have been their second best (highest vote-share just over 15%). In local elections, they have reached over 10% here and there, with their leader, Robin Tilbrook, receiving 18.2% of the vote in an election for the Epping Forest District Council. In Westminster elections, all results have been below —far below— 1% (in 2017, about a tenth of 1% in each of the seven seats contested).
The English Democrats have few policies, and those so bland that they could be espoused by several other parties, including System ones. Even the “English Parliament” idea has been mooted by System MPs occasionally.
“[Robin Tilbrook’s] party agitates for anyone living in England. His notion of Englishness is akin to American notions of “Americanness” – that you can be from any ethnic background and still wrap yourself in the flag.” [from an American newspaper interview]. So someone straight off the boat from God knows where is “English”, so long as living in England, according to that idiot! Even his professed “Euroscepticism” is very muted (and is based on the disproportionate amount of EU funding going to non-English parts of the UK).
The English Democrats are the “hobby politics” party par excellence. Mr. Tilbrook will never be blacklisted by the msm, nor targeted seriously by “antifa” or the Jewish lobby. He will never be interrogated by the police. He has in fact been invited onto TV occasionally and given a polite hearing, e.g. on BBC Daily Politics. He is even a Freeman of the City of London (awarded 2011)! Members of the EDs can write letters to the Daily Telegraph and talk at the bar of their golf clubs without let or hindrance. A waste of time worthy of P.G. Wodehouse.
For Britain Movement
I have blogged about “For Britain” previously. This party, though partly on the right track in terms of policy, is basically a one-trick pony. “You can have any colour so long as it is black!” [Henry Ford, re. the Model T car]; with “For Britain”, you can have any policy so long as it is anti-Islamism. Not that I oppose that view, but it is not enough.
For Britain is not exactly a “hobby politics” party, but it is really just a one-man or one-woman band, closely aligned with the policy-free beer-bottle throwers of the English Defence League and their one-time leader, the person usually known as Tommy Robinson.
The leader of For Britain, Irish lesbian former secretary Anne-Marie Waters (“Maria” originally), certainly has some followers, and For Britain has some members, as witness the local election campaign poster linked below, but how many is unclear. Probably fewer than 100. Quite possibly only about 50.
“The party fielded fifteen candidates in the 2018 local elections, none being elected.[11] The party came last in almost all the seats it contested.[12] In June 2018, the party expelled one of its local election candidates after Hope Not Hate linked him to the proscribed neo-Nazi group National Action and the white nationalist group Generation Identity“
[Wikipedia]
So “For Britain” (which says, pathetically, to the Jew-Zionist lobby, “look, we’re pro-Israel!” in the forlorn hope that the Jews will not hate it), sacked someone at least active enough to get up from his chair and stand as a candidate, simply because the unpleasant “Hope Not Hate” crowd fingered him!
As for Anne-Marie Waters, she herself stood in the Lewisham East by-election of 2018, receiving 266 votes (1.2% of votes cast; 7th place, behind Labour, LibDem, Con, Green, Women’s Equality and UKIP, but just ahead of Christian People, Monster Raving Loony, and 5 other minor candidates). “For Britain” is no good even as a protest vote in a by-election!
Sometimes, I wonder whether this or that group, party or movement or “leader” is not a put-up-job by the enemy, but in reality the likelihood is that these people are just deluded, indulging in near-pointless political activity. Having said that, it suits “Hope Not Hate” and the other manipulators of “antifa” idiots to have something to point at and say, “Look! Nazis/neo-Nazis/Fascists!” (etc).
Who, who would join something as one-dimensional, as limited, as “For Britain”? God knows. Not many have joined, anyway.
UKIP
Well, here we are at last out of the “hobby politics” and “I’m the Leader” areas, though plenty of UKIP members are hobby politicos. UKIP, though, is the real thing: a functioning political party, conservative-nationalist, and which at one time had two or three MPs (albeit temporary cast-offs), still has 7 MEPs (out of a possible 73), as well as 1 member of the House of Lords, 3 Welsh Assembly members (out of a possible 60) and 101 local councillors (out of a possible 20,712).
UKIP might have broken through to a measure of power in 2015 but did not, and now never will. It peaked in 2014. A succession of poor leaders (the present one is slightly better than those that followed Farage) crippled already-failing UKIP, whose membership, at one time reaching 50,000, is now somewhere below 23,000. UKIP has always been semi-tolerated by the System (inc. the Jew-Zionist lobby) and has now gone over to a basically one-trick-pony policy position which is not far from the offerings of Tommy Robinson, Anne-Marie Waters and the whole effectively pro-Jew and pro-Israel “alt-Right”/”alt-Lite” crowd (the British ones of prominence have in fact recently joined UKIP: “Prison Planet” Watson, “Count Dankula” Meechan, “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. All wastes of space).
To join or support UKIP now, except perhaps as a way of protesting pointlessly in an election, is just silly. It could not get one MP in 27 years (leaving aside the Conservative few who defected briefly), not even in 2015 when it was voted for by 1 out of every 8 voters! The voting system is rigged and flawed, and that suits the System parties very well.
UKIP’s vote in 2015 (nearly 4 million votes) fell to less than a seventh of that in 2017.
UKIP too is in the realm of political unreality, at least as far as elections are concerned.
How to go toward a realistic political viewpoint
The short to medium term future is uncertain and likely to bring revolutionary change to the world. I recently blogged about this:
As far as UK politics is concerned, it is clear that the major urban areas are no-go zones for nationalist parties, at least in respect of getting MPs elected. They can only be viewed as recruitment pools at present.
To pretend that a movement or party can be founded, then play the game of System politics, is otiose. UKIP tried that —and was semi-System anyway— yet failed utterly in any attempt to gain power (though I concede that UKIP did obliquely achieve the holding of and result of the 2016 EU Referendum, which result however is now being cynically betrayed by cosmopolitan conspirators such as the Jew Letwin and the virtue-signalling hypocrite Yvette Cooper… even as I write).
The fast-breeding ethnic minorities, including mixed-race elements, are collectively only a few decades away from becoming the majority in the UK. In some cities and towns, they are already the majority. That fact alone makes ordinary democratic politics a no-win situation for social-nationalism.
A social-national movement must be built from the ground up, and on a basis of reality, even if that reality looks, at present, like the sheerest fantasy.
In fact, UKIP came third, exactly where it was in the previous two general election contests at Newport West, and while its 8.6% of votes looks good vis-a-vis 2017 (2.5%), UKIP got 15.2% in 2015:
This was just a by-election protest vote and a pretty muted one.
The Greens came 6th, with 924 votes (3.9%).
As for “For Britain Movement”, its candidate came last out of the 11 candidates, getting 159 votes (0.7%). This party is wasting the time of its few members.
Update, 9 April 2019
Judicial Review cases are never dealt with in days. We will hear next week what the government has to say in Reply but only then will the High Court list the first hearing. We are applying for the hearing to be "Expedited". We have a strong case that the UK is Out of the EU!
— English Voice 🏴 (@EnglishVoice) April 7, 2019
The EDs are claiming that the UK is already out of the EU and have launched a judicial review application to “prove” the same. Rarely has wish so directly confronted political reality.
Update, 12 April 2019; a few thoughts about the near-future EU and local elections
The Brexit mess, so spectacularly mishandled by Theresa May and the idiotic careerists around her, may save UKIP from immediate collapse as a party, inasmuch as many British voters will want to punish the Conservative Party one way or the other. There may be a “perfect storm” for the Conservative Party, pressured on two fronts by both the Leave and Remain sides.
There will soon be elections for the European Parliament, on 23 May 2019. Recent opinion polling seems to be saying that Labour will have a landslide: initial voting intentions show Labour on 37.8% (up from 24.4% in 2016); Conservatives at 23.1% (unchanged), Brexit Party (Nigel Farage’s new party) 10%, LibDem 8%, UKIP 7.5%, Change UK (the recent Lab/Con defector MPs’ vehicle) around 4%, among others.
One has to be cautious in assuming that the above opinion poll reflects the likely outcome. The same poll seems to indicate that, after discussion, many pro-EU voters prefer Change UK (which would hit Labour and LibDem levels), while anti-EU voters may prefer either UKIP or Brexit Party.
Before the EU elections (in which the UK may not participate at all if the UK leaves the UK before 23 May), there will be local elections, on 2 May 2019. The indications are that, in those elections, Labour may also sweep the poll, with Labour benefiting not only from the “pendulum” or “see-saw” effect of elections in a system using FPTP voting, but also from abstentions by usual Con voters (or by their voting for Brexit Party or UKIP).
As far as the local elections are concerned, Labour starts the campaign with several advantages. The decade of spending cuts has finally impacted even the most true-blue Conservative areas. Labour has a army of local activists, thanks to its membership surge under Corbyn. It also has funds from the same source.
The Conservatives have few local activists now and most are beyond retirement age. The party looks tired. The Brexit mess can only be laid at the door of Theresa May and her Cabinet. The Cons will be lucky to avoid a wipeout in the areas voting on 2 May.
There are also strategic factors. The Conservative Party claims 124,000 members, which seems high (average 200 members per constituency). Most are elderly. Few are active. The median age for Conservative voters has also risen, to 52. Recent polling has shown that only 16% of voters under 35 support the Cons, and only 4% of those under 25 do so.
Returning to UKIP etc, the Brexit Party will obviously have the effect of splitting the Leave/Brexit hard core.
Update, 17 April 2019
The “For Britain” “Movement” (can 50 people be a “movement”?) has posted on GAB that they are not “far right” (whatever that means) and in some ways are no more “extreme” than Margaret Thatcher and not even really “socially conservative”. Oh dear…pretty pathetic.
I don’t know why I am even wasting 10 minutes of my ever-shorter lifespan examining this fake “movement” with its 50 members, especially after its recent (latest) electoral debacle at the Newport West by-election (last-placed out of 11 candidates; 159 votes, which represented 0.7% of votes cast).
Still, it confirms what I wrote in the original blog post, I suppose…
Update, 10 May 2019
Harold Wilson was right: “a week is a long time in British politics”. In the five weeks since the above article was written, at least two matters of importance have occurred
the local elections trashed the Conservatives (who lost over 1,300 seats), but Labour more or less stood still (losing 82 councillors), which was interpreted as failure by many;
Brexit Party burst into life and now has 100,000 members (by any other name).
A couple of days ago, I needed to buy a new mouse for my laptop computer and also to ask advice on a technical issue. I decided to go to a PC World outlet about 15 miles from where I now live. The PC World store was outside a small town on the coast of Southern England. I was there by 0900 hrs, its opening time. A routine matter, of course, but I felt that I should blog, briefly, about it because it confirmed some of what I have been saying online for years.
There was only one other customer in the large hangar-like store at nine in the morning. I was greeted on going to the service desk by a youngish blonde woman who looked rather fed up. I feared that she would be surly or unhelpful. I could not have been more wrong.
The woman, who was not as young as she looked (she turned out to have a daughter aged 16; well, the police now also look young to me…) dealt with my technical question in a matter of seconds (completely correctly, it later transpired). She also directed me to the part of of the store which displayed “mice”. I chose one, brought it back and, the store now being empty, was told that I could pay for it there at the enquiries desk rather than going to a check-out. I did that.
It might be asked at this point why I am bothering to write about this? Well, I ended up having a chat with the blonde woman employee who had been so useful and helpful, and what she said was very concerning. I don’t know why she confided in me, whom she had only just met, except that people often do. They seem to divine that I can keep a secret, for one thing, though that does not apply in this case. I think that people also know that I want to help if I can.
The blonde woman worked full-time in the PC World store, but lived in a housing association property and received Housing Benefit to pay for the rent or part of the rent. That alone confirmed some of my expressed views over the years. Here she was, in a full-time job, and moreover one which actually required some skill and knowledge, which job she was doing really competently too (as I myself saw), yet was unable to pay her modest rent (after all, this was a housing association property) out of her pay!
Now this is just plain wrong. Here we have a large chain, part of a group (Dixons Carphone, formerly Dixons Group) which, in the financial year 2017-2018, made (pre-tax) profits of £382 million, yet is not paying its staff enough so that they can even pay their domestic rent! Instead, PC World relies on the State to stump up monies (Housing Benefit and also, perhaps, Working Tax Credit— I did not talk to the woman in such detail).
In other words, the profits of the employer are being bolstered by the State, meaning taxpayers (and including, at least via National Insurance and VAT etc, the employee herself in this case).
Previous visits to PC World had been far less satisfactory. That woman had made the difference, yet was struggling to survive. When will British businesses realize that they are only as good as their employees, at all levels?
There is something wrong about a system or society in which the pay received by an employee for full-time work is not enough to allow her even to pay her rent.
Further, I was told that, because the Housing Benefit was delayed by a few days, routinely, the woman had fallen into arrears and, though the arrears were always only in existence for a few days, the Housing Association had taken her to court at least once and, as a result, she had had to pay £100-something in court costs and also a financial impost of about the same to the Housing Association! This surely must be seen as unfair and unjust.
The woman also told me that her daughter was autistic (I do not know, of course, to what extent) and had been getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in respect of that. Recently, the daughter had reached the age of 16. As a result, she had been forced off DLA and forced to undertake a “test” for “Personal Independence Payment” or PIP [off-piste, someone must one day do a sketch on the vulgar cheesy names for such things: “Personal Independence Payment”, “Jobseeker’s Allowance”, “Job Centre” etc].
The daughter had, subsequently, been awarded nothing. So suddenly, this girl, long diagnosed as autistic, had now, despite the diagnosis and her previously accepted status, been cut off from State funds by reason only of a change in policy by government (Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and the jew “lord” Freud, Esther McVey, not to mention David Gauke and Chris Grayling etc).
I went away from that encounter at PC World thinking about how unjust and in fact how simply inefficient the system in the UK is, in that instead of a person being able to work and provide for herself and her daughter and/or get help from the State in a simple manner, she (a useful member of society at that) was being made anxious and being forced to jump through hoops in order to survive.
The present system is not efficient, is callous and unfair and is a complicated maze. Hopeless. Parliament is hopeless. “Democracy” (as we know it) is hopeless. The MPs and “peers” are hopeless. Business is not pulling its weight. The people are not only not being helped but are being impeded unnecessarily by the overall system in which they live and work.
First of all, there is the change happening all over Europe. The old parties and old certainties —going back to 1945— are being binned. New parties, new people, new ideas (and some older ones) are taking back the European space. We see nationalist and even social-nationalist parties arising and often meeting with popular support. The front-runners are Poland, Italy, and parts of Central Europe such as the Czech Republic. Elsewhere, too, alternative parties are gathering: the AfD and several even better parties in occupied and repressed Germany; France too, where would-be dictator and Rothschilds/Jewish-lobby puppet Macron is already as good as finished, and where a ferment is bubbling via the “Yellow Vest” groundswell.
The European elections will soon be held. The new forces will be strongly in the ascendant. Not far down the line (within 5 years) either the EU will disintegrate or it will be changed out of all recognition from the inside.
The migration-invasion of Europe has triggered a popular reaction which is huge and growing. Merkel and her like have lost all credibility. Economic downturn will soon sharpen the disenchantment.
The UK is only one component in the EU matrix. The whole of Europe is awakening too.
In the UK
It is clear that the conventional British system of Cabinet government, of Parliament, of System-rigged FPTP voting, is no longer fit for purpose. In fact, it has broken down. The people are angry and justifiably so! First of all, around Brexit, because they were told in 2015-2016 that they, the people, would decide whether UK remained in the EU or not. They were told that the matter would be decided by the public, voting by the traditional British method of First Past the Post voting; the matter would be decided on a simple majority. The result of the Referendum, in round figures, was 52% Leave, and 48% Remain.
David Cameron-Levita , then posing as Prime Minister of the UK, had already won two effectively rigged referenda: the Scottish Independence one, and the AV voting one. He thought that Remain would win easily.
Remain had far more money to spend, most newspapers and almost all journalists and TV talking heads favoured Remain and still do. The public, however, especially those not living comfortable, blase, cosmopolitan lives, were starting to wake up. Those whose children cannot take up unpaid “intern” careerist starter-jobs in London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Brussels, or Milan, those who have seen real pay and benefits cut back since 2010, those who have seen a harsher type of Welfare State emerge under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and then Cameron-Levita (all international conspirators), those who have seen Pakistani (etc) gangs raping young British girls, those who have seen their country become a “multikulti” dustbin over half a century.
They, the core British people, were all waking up. They voted Leave partly because they saw that the EU is like a lobster pot: easy to enter, but in the end impossible to leave. The UK joined a trading bloc of mutual convenience in the early 1970s, but that trading bloc has become a monstrous machine for people, with repressive “holocaust” “denial” laws, Stalinist extradition procedures, its own emergent army, and an agenda of replacing white Europeans with blacks, browns, Chinese etc. The Great Replacement.
The EU is a major building block of the “New World Order” publicly proclaimed after 1989.
The Leave vote was, however, a rare chance for the voters to kick the System, that rigged political milieu under which the people have been trodden underfoot for years, decades.
Leave won the EU Referendum against all the odds and against the stacked deck. The assassination of Jo Cox, only 7 days before the vote, was immediately and untruthfully blamed on the Leave side. Jo Cox’s husband, the rapist and sex pest Brendan Cox, was key in that wrongful attribution. Until the killing, blamed (perhaps wrongly) on a supposed “far right” Leave supporter, Leave was winning in the polls (10 points ahead and gaining). The assassination reversed the polls. However, by time of polling, Leave was again gaining on Remain in some opinion polls.
There is also the point that, if you take out Scotland and Northern Ireland from the result, if you also take out the areas full of non-Brits (eg London), Leave “really” won by about 60% to 40% and maybe more, among white English people.
I predicted that the cosmopolitan conspirators at Westminster would betray their elected office. I was right. Same with the msm. Three years of nonstop System propaganda have damaged the economy and made the public fear their own shadows.
Brexit has been betrayed. A basically simple proposition has been made to seem hugely complicated, so that the “experts” (Remain MPs, journos etc) can dominate the debate and make Leave seem so complicated that it just cannot be done…
Pushback and Resistance?
A few tweets and print news reports etc from today…
Today outside Parliament I and others were accosted by people shouting f****** traitor as we tried to get in to vote. Our staff were advised to leave the building for their own safety. There were armed police everywhere. This is not normal
No idea how demonstrators today behaved because I wasn’t there. But if they were cross to have been denied Brexit tonight after being told it would be on 29/4/19 for 2 long years, it’s not surprising is it? Sometimes civil disorder is the rational response to the abuse of power.
If democracy is trashed in this way, the public will lose faith in it very fast. The people have now seen their sainted legislature show itself as incompetent, biased, self-interested (the single worst offender, arguably, being Boris Johnson).
Not only has UK “democracy” failed re. Brexit, but in most other respects. The country really is starting to show signs of beginning to fall apart. In those circumstances, any measures taken by social-nationalists to defend our race, culture, way of life, are justified. The next few years will prove that.
Well, there we are. The System in action. “No Deal Brexit” (i.e. real Brexit) made unlawful by a coalition of MPs connected with the Jewish-Zionist lobby, ZOG and NWO: Yvette Cooper (“Labour”) and Oliver Letwin (“Conservative”) etc, all conspiring together. There is no longer even a semblance of real “democracy” in the UK and most of the MPs are enemies of the people.
It’s looking very like the scenario that I predicted a long time ago: a fear campaign, followed either by No Brexit or a Brexit in Name Only, with ZOG/NWO MPs from the System parties conspiring to keep the UK inside the EU (a major NWO building block), the farrago of nonsense possibly being approved by a stampeded UK population via a rigged “second Referendum”. There is no democracy in the UK and any means are legitimate to bring about national freedom.
This too (see below): has Labour just made the one big move that could swing the next General Election for it?
Ian Robert Millard 