Afternoon music
Talking point
From the newspapers
“Three people who displayed images of paragliders at a pro-Palestinian march in central London a week after Hamas militants went on a bloody rampage in Israel have been found guilty of a terror offence.
Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, were each given a 12-month conditional discharge.”
[The Guardian]
The malicious Jew-Zionist cabals such as the so-called “Campaign Against Antisemitism” are fuming, of course. They love to see people charged, convicted and preferably imprisoned because of “offences” supposedly “antisemitic”. The 12-month conditional discharge was manifestly a just as well as merciful sentence, though it is unfortunate that the court saw fit to convict at all.
The whining demands of the various Jewish organizations are now just becoming a bore for almost everyone, including the courts, it seems. The woodentopped police, and the CPS, are still doing what those cabals demand (much of the time), but at least the courts seem both to retain some independence of thought, and to be waking up to the essentially trivial nature of many such “antisemitism”-related cases.
How absurd to charge people with a nominally “terror-related” offence just for wearing a cartoon or drawing on their clothing! UK society has no resilience at all now compared to the 1970s or 1960s, let alone 1950s. Society is now very fragmented, and has little internal strength.
Tweets seen
While it is true that the retail cost of housing, particularly sale/purchase prices, is influenced by a number of causative factors, mass immigration (migration-invasion) into the UK is probably now the main causative factor in making housing absurdly unaffordable; that is especially true of the housing rental market, and especially though not solely in London and the southeast of the UK.
The opposite contention, that (since 1997 alone) an influx of perhaps 15-20 millions (including births to immigrants) has little or no effect, is just ludicrous, totally illogical, totally absurd.
https://twitter.com/DWPscumbags/status/1757731519076950488
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” [? Harry Truman].
The upcoming Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections
The Wellingborough by-election tomorrow is a contest among 11 candidates. Five are Independents or joke parties. The others are Con, Lab, LibDem, Green, Reform UK and Britain First (which last I have not included as a joke party out of courtesy, but they are not my idea of a proper social-national party.
The Conservative Party scored 62.2% in 2019, despite having had Peter Bone as the candidate. Ordinarily, this would be a shoo-in for the Con candidate. This time, though, that candidate is Bone’s girlfriend. There is also the fact that the Con Party nationally is falling through the floor in terms of, inter alia, popularity.
Labour last won in Wellingborough, though very narrowly, in 2001. It also came close in 1997. Before that, only in 1966. In 2019, Labour scored 26.5%, a very poor second place.
The LibDems have never achieved 20% in the constituency since they were founded, though the old Liberal Party occasionally reached nearly 25%.
The other parties can be pretty much written off in this contest. I shall be interested to see how Britain First and Reform UK perform.
The bookmakers (Betfair Politics) have Labour on evens. Not sure that is a value bet. The Cons, on 11/1, seem to be a value bet. Reform UK is at 25/1.
The Con candidate, however tainted, is however batting off from a favourable position, given that her personal “partner”, Bone, achieved over 62% last time, in 2019. Her positions politically seem to be quite close to those of Reform UK; has she shot Reform’s fox?
This, as far as I can see, is between the Con Party candidate and Labour (as a kind of protest vote). Reform UK may take away enough of the remaining Con support to help Labour in winning the contest, but I am far from certain. You would think that either Labour or (even) Reform UK would win this, in all the local and national circumstances, but I wonder. It could be close among all three.
One thing is for sure: if the Conservatives lose badly in Wellingborough, it’s “Goodnight Vienna” for them.
See also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-68170196.
Kingswood, just north of Bristol, is a constituency due to be abolished; it will not exist at GE 2024. There are 6 candidates: Con, Lab, LibDem, Reform UK, UKIP, Green.
The former Con Party MP, Skidmore, has bailed out (on a not-very-plausible “green” excuse), presumably in order to get a job in the “green” sector somewhere soon. Good riddance, anyway.
It appears, according to a New Statesman report (see below) that the area is —like much of England— in steep socio-economic decline.
I doubt that the Con Party has much chance. Skidmore was, in my view, not much of an MP, and his intellectual pretensions were just that. Well, he has now gone and, bearing in mind that the seat will not even exist in 6-12 months’ time, and that the present government is despised or hated by a great majority of the public, the Con candidate is a sacrificial lamb whose only selling point is his local origin (however, the Lab candidate was also brought up locally, and even attended the same school).
The Labour candidate is the former recent Mayor of Lewisham (S.E. London), though educated locally. The voters may like his local links (though he was actually born in Cork, Ireland), and may or may not be impressed by his having converted religiously from his native Roman Catholicism to Judaism (the religion, it seems, of his gay marriage “partner”). He is pro-migration, too: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Egan.
Until 2010, Kingswood was fairly firm Labour territory. As in other parts of the UK, the decline in both industry and living standards has led to a fall in the Labour vote, perhaps counter-intuitively. There again, Labour is no longer the party of “working people”, and most of those people know it.
Having said that, people despise this “Con” government, and this by-election is a pure protest opportunity, the seat going up the chimney sometime this year, so Labour must have a very good chance here.
The bookmakers have Lab at even-money, but both the LibDems and Greens are on 2/1, perhaps indicating that many are considering a protest vote for either of those. As for the Cons and Reform UK, 10/1 and 50/1 respectively.
Bookmakers’ odds are a poor way to forecast elections, though.
Kingswood is, if anything, harder to call than Wellingborough except that, at Kingswood, the Con candidate has really no chance at all. For the Cons, their vote-share will be a pure vote on how the public see them. It looks bad for them. They received 56.2% of the vote in 2019. Now? I think that they will probably end up with around 10%.
If I had to guess the result, it would probably be a Labour win, though the LibDems may have a chance.
See also: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/02/labour-win-kingswood-by-election.
[Update, 27 December 2024: Well, Labour won the 2024 Wellingborough by-election easily— 45.9%, with Peter Bone’s girlfriend, the pretty nice-looking Helen Harrison, on a mere 24.6%, and Reform UK getting 13%; at the June 2024 General Election, Lab retained the seat with 40.3%, a different Con candidate got 27.8%, and Reform UK crept up to 21.5%, a sign of things to come, perhaps.
As for Kingswood, the 2024 by-election was won fairly comfortably by Labour (44.9%), with Cons on 34.9%, and Reform UK on 10.4%, Reform’s candidate being the businessman Rupert Lowe, now Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Lowe.
The Kingswood seat was abolished prior to the 2024 General Election. The reworked seat, Bristol North East, was then won by Egan, the former Kingswood MP (45.3%), with the Green in second place (18.7%), the Con on a mere 14.8%, and Reform UK on 12.9% (LibDems 4.7%)].
More tweets seen
“I sat next to a nurse (older) on a flight. I asked her about her experience during the Covid crisis. She said that “anti-vaxxers” had made things tough.
Then she stopped herself and said “of course don’t know if you might be an anti-vaxxer” I said “I wasn’t one, but the Covid vaccine nonsense woke me up”. I told her I knew a lot of injured people from the Covid jabs, and I couldn’t believe these highly novel, barely tested shots were being given to healthy, young people who stood to gain nothing from them, and that I was shocked that they were still being recommended.
She nodded in agreement and said the mRNA vaccines had been particularly bad, indicating she was aware of many people injured and killed by them.
Later in the conversation she told me that her husband had recently died of pancreatic cancer. And her son had been diagnosed with aggressive, metastatic colon cancer.
She did not appear to see a connection between the shots and the cancers. The timing of these tumors could of course, be mere coincidences, but I would have thought the question of a possible connection would be obvious. And given the frank medical nature of our conversation, I believe she would have mentioned a suspicion if she’d had one.
I find the whole encounter disorienting, suggesting a fragmented belief structure that I believe must be common amongst those getting their news from corrupted sources—the smoldering ruins of a collapsed mass formation event.”
Even when I spent time in New York City (1989-1993), and used the subway system, there were plenty of unpleasant and loonie types in the streets and on some of the trains. Not all black, but most were. Blacks are, of course, more susceptible to schizophrenia etc.
I mostly used trains which were considered relatively safe anyway: the No.6 train, Lexington Avenue local https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_(New_York_City_Subway_service) and, less often, the Q-train from Manhattan to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMT_Brighton_Line.
What goes around comes around…
https://twitter.com/rohantalbot/status/1757442661110186049
At least Cameron is married to an Englishwoman.
https://twitter.com/LailaAlarian/status/1757444567635251315
Anyone who wants even more mass immigration into the UK, or the rest of Europe, or who condones it, is either terminally stupid or a traitor to the future of the British people and all European people.
More from the newspapers
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/man-jailed-least-31-years-28619624
“A man has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 31 years for murdering a music manager for a fake designer watch.
Jordell Menzies was jailed for fatally stabbing Emmanuel Odunlami, 32, who was set up by a member of security at an exclusive £1,400-a-table event to celebrate the victim’s birthday in London.”
[My London]
London. Zoo.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/hare-brained-walthamstow-drug-dealer-28621043
“A drug dealer who drove his Audi down the wrong side of the road and crashed into a parked car then left crucial evidence at the scene. Omar Amar, 31, of Forest Road, Walthamstow, fled the smash on Royston Avenue, Southend, just after midnight on January 7 this year, forgetting his Nokia burner phone, a bag of Class A drugs, and some cash.“
[My London]
London. Zoo…
Late tweets
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 