I have blogged in the past about a few MPs in the present House of Commons who stand out even in that —at best— mediocre ensemble for their stupidity, deadheadedness and general uselessness. My most recent targets have been Kate Osamor MP and Fiona Onasanya MP. I move now to examine Scott Mann, Conservative Party MP for North Cornwall.
Scott Mann has made so little impact in Parliament since he was elected in 2015 that I was entirely unaware of his existence until today, despite the fact that, in the years 2002-2004, I myself lived in the North Cornwall constituency and had a lease of one of the largest country houses there [seen below in a 1940s photograph]
The North Cornwall Constituency
The constituency is largely rural, though it contains some fairly small towns (Launceston, Bude, Wadebridge, Padstow); it has a significant, mostly coastal, tourist industry. It was held by the Liberal Democrats from 1992 to 2015. The national collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote in 2015, which continued in 2017, was reflected in North Cornwall. The Conservative, Mann, increased his vote share from 45% in 2015 to 50.7% in 2017. It can now be considered a safe Conservative seat.
Scott Mann
I am not someone who is biased against those who drop out of school or education; after all, I myself did! (and then had to do it all myself later). There are several possible reasons (apart from sheer lack of ability) why someone gets a university degree late or (as in Mann’s case) not at all (and in any case the “degree” label is so devalued these days anyway), but Mann’s background, like those of so many MPs now, does not inspire confidence.
Mann was educated locally before becoming a postman, working out of the sorting office in Wadebridge (Cornwall), the town in which he had been both born and brought up.
In 2007, Mann was elected as a county councillor. In 2016, he resigned after having been criticized for poor attendance. He remained a postman until he became an MP.
Mann employs his girlfriend as “part-time secretary” via Parliamentary expenses (she gets about £30,000 a year for a part-time job). Apparently, they do not live together. He also claims, or has done, for other personal items, such as Amazon Prime [see Notes, below], and for his London accommodation. Well, after all, he lived for years on a modest Royal Mail pay-packet, and the opportunities to make hay, as a county councillor, are far more limited than those open to an MP.
Now Mann has come to public attention as the idiot who says that all knives should be fitted with GPS (!) and that anyone carrying one should be severely punished unless hunting, fishing or shooting! P.G. Wodehouse meets Common Purpose? I have some sympathy with the tweeters who asked “how are you even an MP?”
“Scott Mann admitted his idea was “s—“, but added: “ultimately we do have a problem, and no one’s coming up with any solutions, we need to sort it out.”” [Daily Telegraph]
I fear that the answer to the above question (as to how this idiot ever became an MP) is the same as applies to all other “deadhead” MPs (and they are many) in the Westminster monkeyhouse: they get through a selection procedure which is often a joke, or rigged, then get “elected” in circumstances where only one candidate (sometimes two, very occasionally three) has a realistic chance, because of FPTP voting, dominated by 2 or 3 System parties.
The tweet that exposed Scott Mann MP as a deadhead…
Every knife sold in the UK should have a gps tracker fitted in the handle. It’s time we had a national database like we do with guns. If you’re carrying it around you had better have a bloody good explanation, obvious exemptions for fishing etc.
It's not at all cool. People who opt for idiotic & unworkable solutions to complex/deadly problems shouldn't be allowed anywhere near law making process. Doubly so when they vote thru huge cuts in police funding. He's pretending to look for solutions whilst being part of problem
Unusually, especially for a Cornishman (I would suppose anyway), Mann cannot swim. He nearly drowned in 2016 and had to be saved by fellow-MP Johnny Mercer:
The General Election 2019 confirmed Mann as MP for North Cornwall. In fact, Mann received the votes of no less than 59.4% of those who bothered to vote, the largest winning percentage in the history of the constituency if one leaves out the unopposed victories of Liberals in 1918 and 1923.
In 2019, Mann managed to more than double his 2017 majority to 14,752; he also doubled his majority in percentage terms. Interestingly, the LibDem candidate’s percentage share (30.8%) fell not only compared to 2017 (36.6%) but even as compared to 2015 (31.2%). Another sign that the LibDems are on the way out even in former strongholds.
Seems that deadhead MP Scott Mann is now odds-on to lose his seat to the LibDems. Five years ago, and in fact until quite recently, I thought that “LibDemmery” was dead, but it has revived as a result of the total incompetence of the present Conservative Party and its ministers and MPs, and may be set to actually get 40, 50, maybe even 60 or 70 seats at the 2024 General Election. Who would have thought it? Unmerited, of course, but unmerited benefit is, after all, so UK 2024…
As for Scott Mann himself…well, my opinion is that, for someone with his very underwhelming academic and work background, he has been very lucky to have had a pretty well-paid near-sinecure as MP for 9 years.
Indeed, in 2022, he was even appointed to a minor ministerial position (as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, or PUS) by Liz Truss. That was after he was “shifted” says his Wikipedia entry (probably edited by Mann himself) in 2021 after a few months being a Government Whip (paid) to being an Assistant Whip (unpaid). Translation: he’s useless.
Mann will now have to forgo the MP salary (now over £90,000 p.a., plus pretty decent expenses), and that also means that the London flat will go, as will (at least as paid “part-time secretary”) his girlfriend.
In fact, MP salaries are not paid while Parliament is not sitting by reason of a General Election, so he may already be feeling the pinch.
Mann could, I suppose, go back to being a postman, a far more socially-useful job than being an MP, at least one of the type Mann has been. Otherwise, unless his friends can find a job for him, he may soon start to learn from personal experience how hard life can be in contemporary Britain for the unemployed, especially at his age (46).
That should not come as too much of a shock to him, though. After all, he himself voted for all of the anti-“welfare” nonsense put through from 2015-2024, and approved of most if not all of the Dunce Duncan Smith nonsense of 2010-2015.
My attention is caught by a Daily Mail report, which claims that “allies of” Tom Watson MP are confident that Corbyn will “be forced to” step down as Labour leader, after which Watson would face John McDonnell in a leadership contest which Watson would win. Watson would then take Labour back to its “Centrist” Blair-Brown supposed heyday (Watson preferring Brown to Blair, perhaps), after which the voters of Britain would cast their votes for the reborn “moderate” Labour Party and sweep Watson into Downing Street.
Where does one start, in unravelling such nonsense? I suppose, with the fact that Corbyn, having become leader of the Labour Party by some kind of miracle (speaking objectively and meaning a series of events not easily explicable in terms of materialistically-influenced logic), then was challenged and again won very convincingly.
It is necessary at this point to understand that the opposition to Corbyn has come, from the start, almost entirely from the Jewish or Jewish-Zionist element both within and outside Labour, from Jews and from persons who, while not all Jewish or part-Jewish, are completely under the control of that Jewish-Zionist lobby. A few examples? Sex-pest depressive John Woodcock MP (who left Labour once an inquiry was announced into his personal behaviour; ethnic status not entirely certain), Wes Streeting MP, Ruth Smeeth MP (Jewish, former employee of the Israeli lobby and propaganda organization called BICOM; “confidential contact” of the US Embassy in London —“source” according to Wikileaks), Rachel Reeves MP (ethnic status not completely certain), Angela Smith MP (now not in Labour), Joan Ryan MP (not now in Labour), Margaret Hodge MP (Jewish), Luciana Berger MP (Jewish, a poisonous Zionist; not now in Labour), fathead Chuka Umunna MP (half-Nigerian; not now in Labour), Jess Phillips (ethnic status not entirely certain), Liz Kendall MP (ethnic status not entirely certain) etc.
There are many others in the anti-Corbyn cabal. Most if not all of the MPs in that group belong (or did while members of the Labour Party) to Labour Friends of Israel.
The Labour “anti-Semitism” storm is entirely the creation of a “claque”, an organized body of cheerers and booers, mostly of Jewish and/or Zionist origins and connections. It is being pushed constantly by the Zionist-permeated “British” mass media. The aim is to get Corbyn to resign. That is the only way in which Corbyn can now be unseated.
This weekend, Watson was on the “controlled” mass media, eg the Andrew Marr Show, pushing the Zionist line:
Marr himself is of course completely signed-up to the “System” and to the “multikulti” society. Ecce the great “liberal”…
The Zionists used to control both main System parties. They have, since 2015, lost full control of one. They wish to get that control back. However, their fallback position would be to make Labour seem (or be) “unelectable”. In that event, the misnamed Conservatives would succeed electorally and so continue to form the government (which would be fine in the view of the Zionists: only about 5% of Jews now vote Labour).
Moving to the Daily Mail hypothesis: why should Corbyn step down? No-one can force that. The aim seems to be what is now termed “gaslighting” of Corbyn, to destroy his confidence and increase a sense of powerlessness. I think, though, that Corbyn’s enemies are underestimating his resilience.
Corbyn may be no intellectual, nor a particularly good speaker (though there are plenty of worse ones in the Commons), but he has resilience in spades, and the hide of a rhinoceros (he has had to have had that, over the past 4 years). He probably does feel like Julius Caesar in the Ides of March, with so many Labour MPs who hate him and plot against him surrounding him (including his own Deputy, Watson, whom Corbyn has no power to remove). I doubt, however, that Corbyn will step down while there is a chance that he might become Prime Minister. Don’t forget that Corbyn put himself up for Labour leader when no-one in the msm, no-one in the Westminster bubble, no TV or radio talking head “expert” thought that he had a chance.
Let us see what would happen if Corbyn were to step down: surely McDonnell would beat Watson? After all, Corbyn has so far beaten all “moderate” opponents easily:
In 2015, Corbyn won with a vote of 59.5%, beating Andy Burnham (19%), Yvette Cooper (17%) and Liz Kendall (4.5%);
In 2016, Corbyn beat Owen Smith MP 61.8%-38.2%, others having dropped out in ignominy (Smith is now so obscure that I have seen nothing of him in the msm since he was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet two years ago);
Were the contest to be a straight McDonnell/Watson one, I have little doubt that McDonnell would win. The Corbyn loyalists who are now the bulk of the membership would see to that. The Daily Mail suggests, surely risibly, that thick-as-two-short-planks Angela Rayner might contest and win such election. If she did, that would finish Labour almost as effectively as would the anointing of Diane Abbott! (Married name “Rayner”; unsure what her position is re. Jewish-Zionist lobby).
I myself come to this as an uninvolved though (as some would say) not entirely disinterested observer. I have never been a Labour member, supporter or voter. My main interest in Corbyn and Corbyn-Labour is in its having become a fairly strong anti-Zionist caucus, though terribly weakened by the cognitive dissonance of having to believe that those suffering under Jews/Zionists in the Middle East are right to fight them but, at the same time, (brainwashed into) believing that those exploited by Zionists in Europe (or who refuse to allow Zionists to control them or to destroy the European ethno-cultural stock) must not fight them (certainly not literally) because that would be “antisemitic“!
I also see Corbyn-Labour as one stepping-stone to a social-national movement not far down the line.
McDonnell and Corbyn both give lip-service to the “holocaust” narrative, play along with all that farrago of fakery and contrived emotionalism etc. They do not seem to see (may be too stupid to see) that such lip-service opens the door to Zionism. Witness the way in which Corbyn has been forced to start expelling loyal Labour members and supporters because they are judged (initially by the online Jewish-Zionist claque/cabal) to have tweeted or said something “anti-Semitic”! Labour also adopted the Zionist-drafted “international definition” of “anti-Semitism” (only in fact “adopted” by about 35 states out of 200). Why? Weakmindedness? Laziness? Was it the work of Zionist agents in Labour?
At any rate, the damage has been done and the “claque” (led by the malicious “CAA” cabal) is already crowing online. Corbyn should have felt his own power and just told the Zionists (“international definition”, “holocaust” nonsense and all) to get lost. He did not do that and now the evil pack is again baying for his blood…
The situation is not beyond repair. If Corbyn wins out, then good, the political situation will develop and the so-called “Overton Window” will have moved. If Corbyn loses and especially if Watson or someone under his sway becomes Labour leader, then that could be good in another way, by disgusting Corbyn’s most committed supporters and by rendering Labour even less “electable” than it now is (perhaps so opening up the political waterfront generally).
After all, “moderate” (hardy ha ha) ZOG/NWO tool Gordon Brown lost a general election, as did Ed Miliband. Corbyn so far may have “lost” one general election, but that 2017 “loss” has weakened the Conservatives greatly.
Do Watson’s supporters really think that he could lead the Labour Party to victory? I suspect that that is not the priority for “those behind the curtain”. “They” want rid of Corbyn and a pro-Israel leader installed. Whether Labour does well electorally is of little or no interest to them.
below: Chris Williamson MP doing exactly the wrong thing! Giving in to the Jew-Zionist lobby instead of speaking out clearly against it! Thick dork! Does he really think that he buys any credit from the Jews? They will still hate him whatever he says! If only Labour MPs had the guts to “just say no” to “them”!
A personal message and sincere apology from me regarding my recent remarks on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. pic.twitter.com/2qaNCOVqGk
and here, below, we have the result of not coming out clearly and decisively against the Jew-Zionists! Labour is now far behind the misnamed “Conservatives”…and all because Corbyn, McDonnell and (eg) Chris Williamson are incapable of really hitting the Jew-Zionist lobby hard! You have to be clear and decisive! Also, Corbyn should bin the blacks and browns in the Shadow Cabinet and start again (he will not do that, though, and seems oblivious to the fact that most voters do not want Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and other deadheads ruling them)
Plenty of water has passed under the bridge. The General Election of December 2019 was lost. The Conservative vote (percentage) scarcely increased, but the Labour percentage vote collapsed (though still at a higher level than it was in both 2010 and 2015: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn#2019_general_election_and_resignation.
At time of writing, the ineptitude of the Rishi Sunak “Conservative”-label government has led to Labour being high in the opinion polls, about 50% to 25%.
In 1997, I moved back to London after having spent an interesting year in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Almaty was, even then, a quite large city, was at the time the capital of Kazakhstan, and boasted green spaces, tree-lined streets, pavement cafes, pretty girls in short skirts (or furs, depending on the season), a city as hot as 40C in high Summer, sub-zero and snowy in Winter.
[immediately above, Pushkin Street, not very far from where I lived at one time]
[above, Almaty in Winter]
On returning to London after 12 months, in late September 1997, I found that it was easier to be “offered” another overseas position than to actually get one. In the world of the headhunters, words are cheap. I found myself rapidly running out of funds in a London where the weather became wet and then cold and wet; in fact, my very first day back in London, it became necessary to visit Knightsbridge to buy a raincoat (unnecessary in Almaty, where it rains heavily for only a few days in the year). I went on holiday to Minorca and then, after a number of fruitless meetings re. possible contracts (everywhere Russophone from Moscow to Moldova to Baku and back to Almaty) sat down to decide where to winter, in the hope that a new contract might be offered in the upcoming new year; it was by now already early December.
It had to be somewhere both reasonably warm and reasonably (if not very) cheap. I considered the Canaries, Asmara (Eritrea) and a few other locations, before settling on Egypt, partly because I had been there before (only briefly though, a short break at the Luxor Hilton a few years before), partly because I knew that it could be cheap if one did not stay at a luxury-grade hotel, partly because it would be pleasantly warm even in December. There had also just been a terrible massacre at the Temple of Hatshepsut in the Valley of the Kings (across the river from Luxor), which led me to consider that there might be cheap flights and hotel rooms on offer.
What spoiled the flight part of the plan was that after the news media reported the massacre, the package tour and cheap flights people immediately cancelled all flights to Egypt. However, I had already decided by then to go, my resolve hardened by a pointless breakfast meeting at 0730 (!) with a couple of American “emerging markets” hucksters at the Mount Royal Hotel near Marble Arch, after which I got an overpriced taxi back to Little Venice in the pouring rain and chill.
Olympic and Egyptair were still flying, so I bought a ticket to Aswan via Athens and Cairo.
Egypt
Cutting through the detail of my first weeks in Egypt, I stayed in subtropical Aswan (it’s 1 degree North of the Tropic of Cancer) for 2 weeks before spending a couple of dull weeks at an almost deserted, beautiful and undeveloped beach (living in a large tent) near the then almost uninhabited and tiny settlement of Marsa Alam on the Red Sea. Served by one bus every day or two, it was hard to get to and harder to escape from… (now, over 20 years later, that almost derelict area is very different, has luxury hotels and even its own international airport!). From there I went, not without difficulty, to Alexandria, a journey of at least 12 hours by both what in Tunisia is called voiture de louage (a 6-seat car shared by 5 customers and driver) and long-distance bus via Port Safaga, al-Quseir and Hurghada.
I had already selected a small 3-star hotel on the Corniche in Alexandria, thanks to my Lonely Planet guidebook. Walking distance from Ramla, the central place in Alex. However, unknown to Lonely Planet, the buses no longer terminated at Ramla for reasons of traffic control, so I ended up pulling my heavy (thankfully, wheeled) suitcases (inc. portable typewriter) miles along the Corniche (seafront).
After a day or so, I decided to stay in the supposedly good semi-gated beach suburb of Mamoura Beach, at the Eastern extremity of Alex. If possible, I would then rent a flat there via a local agency.
As anyone who has spent more than a brief holiday in Egypt will tell you, organization is not to be expected, chaos is the norm…
At the railway station, which was not busy, I got a local train. It terminated at Abu Qir, which was the place where, in the bay of which, Nelson defeated a French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 (the westernmost mouth of the Nile itself is now a few miles to the East of that bay).
I had bought a ticket to Mamoura. The train would then continue only for two or three stops until it finished its journey. The seats were polished wooden benches and the train’s journey passed at a snail’s pace. Eventually the train reached Mamoura. I disembarked. It was still mid-morning.
I was not entirely expecting the typically Egyptian scene outside the small station. Crowded streets, traffic, donkey-carts carrying aysh (flat and usually very tasty Egyptian bread), schoolchildren in uniform (this was the first day of Ramadan, so they had probably been sent home early). I had been expecting a quieter sort of place.
What I did not understand at the time was that I had got off at the wrong stop. I had assumed that the nearest station to Mamoura Beach would be Mamoura, whereas in fact the latter was a suburb to the East of Mamoura Beach. I should have disembarked at Montazah.
I had a map, but not a good one. I walked through a couple of crowded residential streets going North, in the direction of the sea. I came upon an Islamic cemetery, the wall of which had a gap on the other side. A small boy was climbing through it. I assumed (wrongly, again…) that he must have been going to the beach, so I followed. When I arrived on the other side, the boy had gone and I found myself in a large open area with some buildings in the middle distance. I saw some soldiers doing road repair on an unused roadway. Their sergeant, when approached, directed me (thanks to my Arabic phrasebook) to where there was the hotel (the only one) on Mamoura Beach, and where I had thought that I might stay. He helpfully wrote the name of that hotel (as I thought) on a scrap of paper, in case I needed to ask anyone else.
I carried on but was surprised to see that the beach, cut off by barbed wire, appeared to be mined. The skull and crossbones motif and a warning in Arabic and English made that plain. As for what I thought was some kind of disused military camp, it appeared now to be, well, an in-use military base. Oh dear…
I walked on and found myself next to a large ground-to-air missile battery, with 4 missiles in place, pointing upward at about 45 degrees.
Realizing that I had to get out, I moved across cut grass towards a distant wall, only to find that a small pack of what seemed to be wild dogs, sunning themselves near the wall, had noticed me. I slowly moved away, tracked parallel to my course by one of those dogs. This was not a military base as known in the UK, USA or even (where I had been in 1977) Rhodesia.
It was at that moment that an officer spotted me and sent over a young sergeant to me to see who was this European wearing chinos, climbing boots and a tweed-style jacket. After I had dropped the half-brick I was carrying (in case the dog attacked), the sergeant escorted me to the officer. A short conversation later (in which I tried to thank them for their help and to walk out of what I could now see was the nearby guarded exit from the base), ended with me taken a few steps to a nearby low building, which turned out to be the Officers’ Mess. Half a dozen curious officers came out, one with a wooden chair, which was placed in front of me. I was gestured to sit. The officers were not unfriendly (several shook hands with me), but just very curious. It felt like being treated as were the shot-down fliers of the First World War. The only thing missing was the bottle of champagne.
Minutes later, a car rolled up, which turned out to contain a major and a captain, who turned out to be the security officer (major) and intelligence officer (captain) of the base. The major searched me, including my boots (while still on my feet), then I was placed in the car and driven away. Thus began a boring but not uneventful day.
The major and captain (the latter more pleasant and I thought probably from a more cultured background, though that was just an impression) questioned me over some Arab coffee (which I like). The captain spoke English, the major none or almost none. There was no rough stuff, no violence or obvious threat. However, they went over my reasons for being in Egypt, in Alex, in Abu Qir and, most of all, on their base.
It turned out that the address in Arabic scrawled by the sergeant I had encountered was not the Mamoura Beach Hotel but a special Soviet-style hotel for officers only, just by the base. Why did I have this in my pocket? Why did I have a Swiss Army knife? Why did I have a map, a small torch, a phrase-book? And so on. One officer casually remarked that, the year before, they had caught an agent of MOSSAD. I have no idea whether that was true, or if so what happened to him, and I decided not to ask, or to appear too interested in what happened to spies in Egypt. I just evinced what I hoped sounded like polite slight interest.
Several times, I asked for the British Consul. The responses were almost amusing, but it was hard to see the joke: “the Consul? Oh, no, the Consul is only for the most serious cases. You don’t want to be treated as a serious case, do you?” or “the Consul will be busy. We just need to ask a few questions more.” When I said that I needed access to the Consul because I was under arrest, the answer was “No, no! You are not under arrest. You are very welcome in Egypt!” (“Ah, so I am free to leave?” “Once we have asked a few more questions…”).
After a couple of hours of such light diversions, including my asking about whether the base had been once a British one, which was me trying to lighten the atmosphere as well as genuine curiosity (they said no), I was informed that I would be leaving, but only because some civilian colleagues needed to speak to me. This was not good news. The Mukhabarat (security police, secret police) is a ubiquitous and feared organization in Egypt. I had entertained a slight hope that the Army might just release me as innocent tourist with a warning not to stray in future. Vain hope.
I was escorted out of the office into a larger reception-style office crowded with ordinary Egyptian soldiers, many of whom were plainly there to catch a glimpse of me, though none said anything. There was also a very sinister body, a civilian, in a light brown leather jacket, with dark glasses and heavy stubble, who absurdly —in that situation— pretended not to have noticed that a foreigner was in the reception area. One of “them”, of course.
I was taken by car out of the base in a car driven by the young sergeant, my fellow passengers the captain and the major. Alexandria is about 20 miles long but only a mile or so deep. It runs along the coast. We were driving now from the edge of the city, past vegetable allotments and near the sea towards central Alex. It was not long before we were in one of the suburbs of Alex not far from the centre of the city (as I thought; I did not then know the city, of course). I thought that we were possibly in the Chatby neighbourhood. The car stopped by a quite high wall. A door was there. We were admitted. On the other side, there seemed to be a fine looking white house, like a small palace, amid luxuriant gardens. There was a little white painted waiting building by the entrance. We waited. The captain left. I lightened the atmosphere by asking the young conscript how come he was a sergeant at such a young age. He blushed as the major asked what I had said! When the sergeant translated it, the major laughed.
A civilian with a long scar down his cheek came to take me into the house. The soldiers left, the major shaking my hand. In a way, that seemed ominous.
Inside, the house was all marble, white and gold. I was shown into a glitz-palatial room, with white and gold chairs around a long low coffee table. It was the very image of the rooms in which Saddam Hussein used to receive his visitors.
Already gathered there were my new interrogators, several Mukhabarat officers. The only one who said nothing was Scarface, presumably there to provide the muscle in case the dangerous spy tried to escape or to kill those present with his bare hands.
A boy came in to take orders for coffee. Displaying all the confidence of my dozen words of phrase-book Arabic, I requested “aqwa mazboot, min fadlak” (loosely meaning Arab coffee with a little sugar please) and one of the Mukhabarat people jumped on it: “oh, so you speak Arabic?!” “I have a phrasebook, that’s all”. “But you ask for coffee with a good Egyptian accent…” and so I nearly became the first man hanged (well, not really, but halfway there) because I owned a good phrasebook. Thanks, Berlitz!
I tried the ask-for-British-Consul thing again, with the by-now-expected response: “The Consul will be busy…You are not under arrest…You are welcome in Egypt…We just have to ask a few questions” etc.
Then the polite but persistent questioning resumed: why was I in Egypt? Why was I on the military base? “What do you think of Israel?”; “I have always opposed Zionism”; “Oh, why would you answer thus to an Egyptian intelligence officer?” Smiles all round, mine by far the most nervous.
Another strange question: “what do you think of Princess Diana?” [who, as mentioned above, had died about 3 months previously]; “I have no particular view of her”; “Really?” [incredulously]…”all Egyptian people love Princess Diana”. Now it was my turn to respond “really?”. “Yes…I myself met Princess Diana here in Alexandria.” I supposed that that was plausible, Mohammed Fayed (father of her lover, Dodi Fayed) having originated in Alex.
Yet another strange question: “why do British government not clear the mines that they put on the beaches of Egypt?”, this a reference to the thousands, maybe millions, of landmines placed under the sands of Egypt (beaches and inland) by the British, Germans and Italians during the Second World War. There are even some on Red Sea beaches. The barbed wire with the warning symbol and English/Arabic “Beware Mines” is everywhere in some regions. I could only nod sympathetically and indicate that I had no influence or power over the British Government or its actions… All in all, this was a very odd little tea party or, rather, Arab coffee party.
In the end, after a couple of hours, it was decided that I had to return to my hotel on the Corniche to get my passport (I carried around only a photocopy). Scarface, a younger officer and a driver accompanied me.
The expressions on the faces of the staff at the hotel were telling: they were petrified. They knew at once who my “guests” were. The officers examined my baggage, my passport etc. They were most interested in the typewriter, my snorkelling equipment (especially the very large “professional”-size fins) and my sole reading matter: Barbarossa, by Alan Clark.
I was surprised that we did not return to the villa, but went to another, possibly more central neighbourhood (not knowing the city, I was trying to see clues to where we were). The driver was a professional, the only one I ever encountered in Egypt who did not use the horn incessantly. It was now drizzling as darkness fell, and as we drove slowly down a street of tall pre-WW2 houses, rather reminiscent of Paris (Alex having been effectively under joint Anglo-French control in the decades up to the late 1940s), the streetlights showed a steel barrier ahead, guarded by a phalanx of uniformed security police with submachineguns, the rain glistening on their short capes, again reminiscent of old Paris. They were ready for trouble, wearing not caps but steel helmets. As our car approached at a snail’s pace, the driver signalled twice using his headlights. The barriers were parted for us.
The car stopped. I was asked to disembark. The air was fresh and cool, as it often is at night in the Alexandrian winter. I was not restrained in any way. After all, to where would I run (even if I were not shot in the back)?
We were outside what had obviously been the townhouse of some wealthy merchant of the late 19thC. Depressingly, the windows were all barred. At first, I thought that I was going to be actually imprisoned in that place.
Above the door, the coat of arms of the Mukhabarat, incorporating the Egyptian all-seeing eye and a hawk or eagle (I think hawk: Horus was “the Hawk of Light” in ancient Egypt; that eye was his eye, “the Eye of Horus”). Also, the words, in Arabic and English, “State Security Headquarters, Alexandria”.
I was led in. At one time in the mists of history (well, pre-1945 anyway) the entrance hall must have been quite grand. A very high ceiling, a wide curved staircase leading up to the next floor, a crystal chandelier, a generally white and gold ambience. An entrance hall for a Hollywood film, perhaps one starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Or some version of Anna Karenina. The effect was spoiled, however, by the general lack of maintenance and cleanliness, the long sofa with its dirty fabric badly torn, and the battered old wooden table, at which sat a scruffy middleaged fellow in a warm jacket, his revolver casually in front of him on the table, together with a clipboard and a landline telephone.
Once I was left there, this individual struck up a conversation as I sat on the sofa that the Mukhabarat might have taken from a skip, so old and used was it. There was no-one else around. Kafka-esque. The “receptionist” told me that I was waiting to see the general in charge of all state security in Alexandria. He would then order my release. I had little confidence in that, having been given the run-around all day and knowing that Egyptians can have an odd sense of humour (and a certain streak of sadism, somehow, too). Still, I had no choice but to wait.
At one point, around 1900 hrs, some people arrived and ascended the staircase. The night shift? Or do secret police personnel find the night more congenial for their work? One fellow, dressed in what looked like an expensive suit, was obviously important, because the scruffy receptionist actually got off his rear to greet him. The new arrival looked rather comical to my mind, in that he seemed almost as broad as he was tall, like the British advertising cartoon seen on posters and TV in my childhood, “Mr. Cube”, who was the face of Tate & Lyle sugar. There was something slightly sinister about this man, though. He stopped part-way up the grand staircase and turned round to look at me briefly. His gaze was or seemed quizzical.
I was later escorted by the scruffy fellow upstairs and through quite bright, well-appointed corridors to a small but comfortable office occupied by, as the reader may have guessed, “Mr. Cube” and a colleague, the largest person I ever saw in Egypt. They were friendly enough, and Mr. Cube (aka General Cube, who introduced himself only as the head of state security in Alexandria) explained that before I could be released, he would have to be satisfied that I was not a spy. So we ran through all the same stuff all over again. Mr. Cube was not unfriendly and had some Turkish or Arab coffee brought in, the best I have ever had, served in exquisite tiny china cups. Very welcome after a foodless day (I had not even had breakfast).
At the end of our talk, Mr. Cube did a strange thing (but one I later read about in relation to both the Soviet and British intelligence services). He just looked at me, straight in the eye, and his friendly demeanour turned into something so chilling and indeed evil that it has stayed with me to this day. His gaze seemed to be penetrating deep into my consciousness. The word which came to mind later was “pitiless”. This was a man who might be capable of anything and quite probably had tortured and killed people. Then Cube turned off the terror as easily as he had turned it on, and pronounced that he thought that I was not a spy, but that he had to get clearance from Cairo before releasing me. He busied out of the office and his large assistant clapped me on the back in a friendly way (which felt like the blow from a large bear must feel).
Half an hour later and Cube was himself driving me back to my hotel in his own (very modest) little car (I think that it was a Fiat). It was almost midnight, about 2300 hours. He wished me a pleasant stay in Egypt (in fact I did stay, for another 2 months) and I entered the hotel again. Again the faces of the staff said it all. They obviously had not expected to see me again. The waiter even raised his arms in the air and quietly cheered, as if a goal had been scored.
Well, I did many other things in Egypt but that’s enough for now. If anyone ever asks me about my longest trip to Egypt and what happened, I just say that I was “not” arrested…
Alexandria, San Stefano (now redeveloped)
Early morning sea view from the Corniche at Alexandria
above: the main residential road in Mamoura Beach, Alexandria, where I rented a flat a few days after the events described above; I lived there for a month
above: Mamoura Beach. When I was there it was off-season, January, but quite warm in daytime, though cool and often wet at night.
above: Old Montazah Station, near both the Montazah Palace and Mamoura Beach where I lived for a month.
The short 1946 film below shows mainly the grounds of the Montazah Palace in Alex, not far from where I lived for a while; it also shows the Corniche.
Alexandria was much better under European rule and/or influence!
[above: scenes from pre-Nasser Egypt: Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere]
[below: old Alexandria]
[below: amateur film from, at a guess, a few years ago. It shows some places I occasionally frequented, such as the Brazilian Coffee Stores in central Alex, mentioned in Lawrence Durrell’s books known as The Alexandria Quartet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alexandria_Quartet]
[below, a critical look at Alexandria as it is now]
Below, another view of Alex as it is now:
Another (less impliedly critical) film, below:
above: scenes of Alex, the one immediately shown above being the Montazah Gardens, surrounding the Montazah Palace. Easy walking distance from my one-time temporary refuge at nearby Mamoura Beach. I was there a couple of times. An oasis of tranquility.
below: amateur video from the city
A few further thoughts…
When I was first in Alex (as every foreigner calls it before long), my impression was of a kind of Miami Beach, or as such a place might be after large-scale devastation and/or long-term neglect. Ironically, one seafront part of Alex is actually called Miami! Maybe that’s where the more famous one got its name, but [see Note, below] apparently not.
Despite the acreage of decaying concrete there, despite the nuisance of a goodly part of the population, despite the traffic (and noise thereof), despite despite despite, there is something compelling about Alexandria, at least to me. The sea is a large part of that. The sea at Alex is so beautiful that not even the decaying concrete and the often-ghastly people can ruin it. I was there in winter, and it may be that winter, or perhaps slightly earlier or later, is the best time there. In any case, the 5+ million population swells even more in summer, and Alex must be unbearable then. When I was there, in 1998, the settled population was “only” 3.5 million, so has grown by about 50% in just 20 or so years! Before the Second World War, the population was below 1 million.
There is, or was, something indefinably romantic about Alexandria, despite everything (concrete near-ruins, street nuisances, general chaos, tasteless redevelopment —the most egregious example since I was there being the huge excrescence now at San Stefano). I am not sure that I have any wish to return to Alex, but I cannot say that I never shall.
We are beginning to hear news of a UKIP revival, in which the party appears to have lost some of its older, more conservative and ex-Conservative (Party) stalwarts, but gained younger members who are more social-national in inclination. The Guardian has published reports on this:
I have tweeted (before that platform saw fit to expel me) and blogged in the past about UKIP, in particular how UKIP peaked in 2014 and has since then been declining. As the Guardian noted, the nadir came with the pathetic joke leadership of Henry Bolton, but the seeds of failure were always there, embedded in UKIP’s “conservative nationalism”, when what UKIP required was to get rid of nuisances and entryists such as Douglas Carswell and go all out for social nationalism.
The 2015 General election finished UKIP as an electoral force. The absurdly unfair FPTP voting system was to blame: UKIP got nearly 4 million votes (12.6% of votes cast), yet finished with only 1 MP, “libertarian” political idiot Douglas Carswell, who had been a Conservative MP for the same seat for years. By way of contrast, the Green Party received somewhat over 1 million votes and also finished with 1 MP. More absurd yet, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein and the DUP all got only around 180,000 votes (0.6% of all votes) and got 3, 4 and 8 MPs respectively! Indeed, the SDLP got 0.3% of votes and finished with 3 MPs, while the UUP got 0.4% and finished with 2 MPs! So the SDLP got three times the number of MPs as UKIP, despite UKIP having been voted for by THIRTY-EIGHT times the number of voters!
The British voting system, and in general political system, is completely unfair, unjust, rigged and broken.
Having said the above, we are where we are. The System parties will not give up their unfair privileges, and that leaves UKIP, in colloquial language, totally screwed.
The 2017 General Election found UKIP floundering under yet another joke leader, Northern lecturer Paul Nuttall; in fact Nuttall, armed with his “university” Certificate of Education degree, only lectured for 2 years (aged 28-30), apparently the only non-political work he has ever done in his life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nuttall#Teaching_career
The 2017 General Election left UKIP on its knees: fewer than 600,000 votes (a twentieth of the number of UKIP votes in 2015), no MPs (the egregious Carswell having gone to make money in business, and his seat having reverted to Conservative). Again the electoral unfairness: the SNP got about 977,000 votes (in, admittedly, its more limited pool of seats) and ended up with 35 MPs. The Green Party polled again lower than UKIP but retained its 1 MP.
Various “alt-Right” (aka “alt-lite”) personalities have joined UKIP recently, including “Prison Planet” Watson, “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin and “Count Dankula” Mark Meechan. I do not see any of these as social national in orientation. I instinctively distrust them all, and not one of those bothered to post a single tweet supporting me in my persecution by the Jew-Zionists; neither has any one of them posted anything in support of Alison Chabloz nor (as far as I know) those persecuted overseas by the Jewish lobby and/or ZOG, eg Ursula Haverbeck in Germany. They are wastes of space, as are other similar tweeters, bloggers and vloggers.
So what now for UKIP? We hear that Batten has formed a close alliance with the activist who uses the nom de guerre “Tommy Robinson”. The msm and the pervasive Jewish press and general lobby is concerned. Why? Tommy Robinson has always bent over backward to gain the favour of the Zionists, as has UKIP. Despite the new supposedly “far right” (i.e. social national) UKIP stance, an active member has apparently been expelled for tweeting or posting something adjudged “anti-Semitic”. UKIP is still running scared of the Jews, it seems: Farage also always kow-towed, and Douglas Carswell was actually a member of Conservative Friends of Israel (as well as being an expenses-blodger and a complete waste of space).
Until you face the Jewish-Zionist problem squarely and honestly, you cannot pretend to be a political solution for the UK or anywhere in Europe.
Naturally, Europe is facing a two-pronged invasion by Muslims and others, meaning actual migration (whether by speedboats across the Channel or by “legal” means) but also (and equally-important) “invasion by births” or “invasion by breeding”. UKIP is alive, at least more or less, to those dangers. It however is not alive to the fact that European culture and civilization is being eaten away by the Zionist element and/or by those (in Parliament, mass media, decadent cultural strata) under the sway of the Zionists.
We read that the UKIP membership has increased recently by 50%, thus giving UKIP maybe 30,000 members (it reached about 50,000 at peak). Electorally, however, and despite UKIP’s opinion poll support having recently surged from about 4% to around 7%, that is nowhere near enough to get MPs elected, bearing in mind UKIP’s evenly-spread support in England and Wales.
The reason that young and often social-nationalist young persons are joining UKIP is surely because UKIP is the only game in town on the nationalist side. It may only have received 600,000 votes in 2017, but that compares with 5,000 votes for the BNP (the only other broadly nationalist party to contest the 2017 General Election, leaving aside the Scottish and Welsh faux-nationalist SNP and Plaid Cymru). Where else can young activists go? The stupid “Britain First” is no longer a registered party and has imploded; “For Britain”, the anti-Islam one-trick-pony led by an Irish lesbian ex-secretary, is tiny, a joke in every way and destined to get nowhere; Generation Identity is of more interest but is not a political party as such.
The positives? At least the UKIP umbrella is keeping alive a corps of broadly nationalist persons and attracting others. UKIP itself will not get anywhere electorally or otherwise, but might yet prove to be a useful reservoir of support for any properly-led and organized party which might yet emerge.
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.
Update, April 15 2019
There has emerged to minor prominence the Brexit Party, a vehicle for Nigel Farage. 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.
Update, 15 August 2022
Well, we know what happened next: Brexit Party reared up like a pantomime horse, looked like it might really amount to something, and got ready to contest the 2019 General Election. In the meantime, it contested the 2019 European Parliament elections, winning 29 seats and so becoming the largest single party in the European Parliament.
Nigel Farage, the “controlled opposition” snake-oil salesman, might have parlayed that success into Brexit Party getting a real bloc of seats at the 2019 General Election. Instead, fearful of Corbyn-Labour, or bought off, he stabbed his own party in the back, withdrew most of its candidates, and so gifted Boris-idiot an 80-seat Commons majority.
Some political leaders are destined for victory, and are of world-historic importance. Others, like Farage, even though they may have a range of talents (in Farage’s case, public speaking ability and a way of connecting with at least some of the public— English people over 50, mainly) just never make the right decisive moves.
The scale of Farage’s treachery was epic:
“On 11 November [2019], Farage then said his party would not stand in any of the 317 seats won by the Conservatives at the last election.“
[Wikipedia].
Farage thus all but ensured that Johnson and the Conservative Party would get a majority in the Commons; the slide of the Labour Party magnified that. Result? An 80-seat “Conservative” majority and, arguably, the worst government for a century or more.
Farage’s 2019 treachery broke Brexit Party, which failed to win any seats, though a few of its remaining candidates did well, in a few cases getting around 30% of the vote.
As for UKIP itself, its one-time membership numbers of 50,000+ had declined, by late 2020, to 3000-4,000, and now (August 2022) may be in the low hundreds rather than low thousands.
Those who read my blog regularly will know that I am far from being an unalloyed fan of Jeremy Corbyn. I think him wooden and not a genuine political thinker, someone who is stuck somewhere between the crypto-Communism of the Michael Foot era and the ideological madness of the contemporary self-described “Left” (I myself never use terms such as “Right”, “Left” as useful descriptors), the crazies who have rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of old-style socialism in and after 1989.
You get the idea.
Corbyn is, in short, a bit of a joke. I have blogged about him, and what I call Corbyn-Labour, in the recent past. He and his party are also in favour of, or not opposed to, mass immigration and the “multikulti” society.
I have little time for Corbyn as a political leader, as such. His poor intellectual level and Lego-brick level of understanding of society and international politics and geopolitics give little confidence.
On the other hand, there is or was something not entirely unpleasantly familiar about Corbyn. As I have blogged and (before I was expelled from Twitter) tweeted about him, he is a recognizable 20th century English type: the bearded “socialist” from the provinces (in Corbyn’s case, transplanted aged about 22 to London), wearing his Lenin cap, reading the Morning Star, Tribune and the Guardian, protesting against 1980s South African apartheid or Israeli West Bank settlements etc, supporting Castro-Cuba, “revolutionary” 1980s Nicaragua, “socialist” Venezuela etc.
Corbyn’s type, with variations, could be observed from around the time of the First World War, and up to the present day, in its “natural surroundings”: the Durham Miners’ Gala, the Tolpuddle Martyrs annual event, the conferences of the Labour Party and TUC, local constituency Labour parties, CND marches, steam rallies, heritage railways, allotments. So much of a “type” is Corbyn that he could easily be imagined included in a series of “English types” in the Edwardian cartoon tradition, complete with outsize head and a little descriptive caption.
Corbyn’s elevation to the Labour leadership was, as I have also blogged, little short of miraculous. Since 2015, Corbyn has also managed to fight off repeated Jew-Zionist attempts to unseat him. What do “they” want? They want Corbyn gone so that Jew-Zionists, lobbyists and placemen can once again control Labour. “They” already control the misnamed “Conservative” Party and have done since at least the end of the Thatcher era; until Corbyn’s accession, “they” controlled Labour too. They want that control back.
We have seen recently how some of Corbyn’s enemies in the Commons started to capitulate and leave the Parliamentary Labour Party, committing political hara-kiri
At the same time, however, Corbyn-Labour has made the mistake of trying to conciliate, making concessions to the Jew-Zionist element. It did that before, when it surrendered to “them” over the so-called “international” “definition” of “antisemitism” (in fact, adopted by fewer than 40 states out of about 200). Now Corbyn-Labour has given in on Chris Williamson MP and has suspended him.
Chris Williamson MP occasionally (maybe two or three times only) retweeted my tweets when I still had a Twitter account. However, when the Jew-Zionists noticed that fact, they criticized him for it, after which he stopped retweeting me and may have (I forget) blocked my account. Weak. It showed weakness in relation to the Jews. I have not forgotten that.
Now Corbyn, John McDonnell and some of their closest allies (as well as swathes of “useful idiots”) in Labour labour under the same cognitive dissonance problem: Corbyn and many of his supporters see what the Jewish-Zionist lobby is trying to do, want to fight against it, but at the same time tie their own hands behind their collective back by saying that they oppose “antisemitism” and are only against Israeli depredations and behaviour rather than being in any way hostile to Jew-Zionist lobby activity in the UK (or France etc).
Corbyn and most of Labour also go along with the largely-debunked “holocaust” narrative as well. It all just plays into the hands of the Zionist lobby, which controls or near-controls many Labour MPs. Yes, some have left (Luciana Berger, Joan Ryan, Angela Smith, Ian Austin, Chuka Fathead) and their political careers are finished. However, there are many like them still in place and reporting back: Stella Creasy is just one example. Mary Creagh, Rachel Reeves and Liz Kendall also come to mind, inter alia, as do the outright Jewish Zionists such as Margaret Hodge.
Since Chris Williamson was suspended, the whole Jewish “claque” on Twitter and in the Press (in fact, in the msm generally) has gone mad again about Corbyn, “anti-Semitism” in Labour etc. It’s odd: we are told constantly that there is no “Jewish lobby”, and that individual Jews tweet or scribble purely as individuals, yet when something like this crops up, they all go the same way instantly, like a shoal of fish.
Corbyn-Labour, for all its flaws, is the only game in town right now for striking against the enemies of our British and European future. It can pave the way for social-nationalism down the road.
This is a crisis for Corbyn and his allies. They must either fight back against the encroaching, whining, pleading, manipulating and angrily-demanding Zionist lobby, or be “cribbed, cabined and confined”, imprisoned in a Zionist-constructed box made out of “antisemitism” allegations, “holocaust” fakery and a raft of trickster-drafted “definitions”, “regulations” and inhibition of free speech. Just say no!
Here we see the Jewish anti-Corbyn “claque-storm” in its “tweetstorm” mode, exemplified by this tweet, in which a Jewish woman wants the Labour Party to either disenfranchise its Sheffield Hallam branch (by putting it into “special measures”, i.e. ruling it from London), or to remove (or remove the rights of) the 40 members who voted for a statement (only 1 person voted against). You see the problem: the 40 English people count for less than the one Jewish or pro-Jewish one…If Labour did that across the country, it would be left without active members, the footsoldiers that win elections.
A good typical example of how, if you give “them” an inch, (((they))) take a mile: the Jew-Zionist lobby gets what it wants re. Chris Williamson, but then whines or blusters about how it is too little too late. Their next demand will soon be uttered…
Fiona Sharpe, spokesman for @LabourAgainstAS, said: ‘The decision of Labour's NEC ruling body not to allow Chris Williamson to stand as the Labour candidate for Derby North is too late in coming and totally inadequate. 3/6
When I wrote the above article, I thought that 30 or 35 states had “adopted” the “IHRA” definition of “antisemitism”. In fact, and as I now know, the true figure is only about 15, out of 200 states.
On 4 April 2019, a by-election will be held at Newport West, the former seat of Labour MP Paul Flynn, who died recently.
Paul Flynn was generally well-regarded, except by the Jew-Zionists, who deplored his principled opposition to Israel and to, in 2013, (the then) H.M. Ambassador to Israel appointed despite being a Jew and admitted Zionist (and so perhaps having dual or conflicted loyalties: see Notes, below). Flynn retweeted my tweets once or twice, I think, when I still had a Twitter account, but also criticized me once. Well, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, so we’ll say no more of that.
Newport West
The constituency was created in 1983. It was won that year by the Conservatives, who received 38% of votes cast (Labour 36.6%, Liberal Party 24.2%, and Plaid Cymru 1.2%). That result turned out to be anomalous, in that Paul Flynn won for Labour in 1987 and held the seat until his recent death.
This is a Lab-Con marginal. The Liberal Democrats peaked in 2005 at 17.9% (third place), plateaued at a similar figure in 2010, slumped to 3.9% in 2015 (fifth place) and collapsed further (to 2.2%, again fifth-placed) in 2017.
Plaid Cymru is irrelevant here, peaking at 7.2% in 2001 but usually found at or near the bottom of the poll at under 2% (and sometimes under 1%).
UKIP peaked here in 2015 at 15.2% (third) and again achieved a third place in 2017, but on a miserable 2.5%.
Other candidates have stood occasionally over the years (Green, Referendum Party, BNP and Independents), but are not even marginally significant (BNP 3% in 2010, beating UKIP).
As to the only significant contenders, Labour and Conservative, Labour’s vote peaked in 1997 at 60.5%; its lowest ebb (apart from 1983) was in 2015 (41.2%). So much for the “personal vote”. After Corbyn replaced Miliband as Labour Leader, Labour’s vote increased, in 2017, to 52.3%.
The Conservative Party vote stood lowest in 1997 (24.4%) and highest in 1987 (40.1%). Its 2017 vote, at 39.3%, was the Con best since 1987, though the Con vote has held up above 30% (perhaps surprisingly so) since 2010.
Opinion
There are several reasons to think that the Labour vote will sink back: a new and untested candidate, the death of a fairly popular longstanding MP, Labour’s perceived pro-mass-immigration stance. Also, the fact that Labour is sending out mixed messages about Brexit in a constituency which voted Leave more heavily than the UK average (nearly 54%). The “Corbyn factor” seems, so far, to have been a positive rather than a negative.
If I were putting money on this, I should probably still back Labour to win, though the Conservative candidate may do well and might just do it. As to the others, they can probably all easily be written off. The interesting side-bet will be how high or low UKIP scores. My guess? Under 5%, anyway (if UKIP stands at all; if not, the Con candidate will be boosted, probably).
Notes
The 2016 EU Referendum results were not directly voted for or collated by constituency, and in Wales the vote was arranged by reference to local authority boundaries, in this case designated as “Newport”, not “Newport West”. I have taken the Leave vote relating to Newport West as standing at or about 54%, but other estimates have it as about 56%.
Candidates have not yet declared. It is unknown whether any candidates of a broadly “nationalist” character will stand. UKIP is a possible but not inevitable contender. What would be significant would be anyone standing for the “Independent Group” of MPs. That group is not yet registered as a party (and may never be); until it is, it cannot put up candidates under “Independent Group”, but only as “Independent”. Having said that, if a candidate were to be endorsed on TV etc by the rebel MPs as the candidate, in effect, of the Group, then that would have an effect. It would split the Labour vote and almost certainly let in the Conservative candidate, though it is just on the fringe of possibility that, in a 3-way split of main candidates, the (in effect) IG candidate might just win. Hard to see it happening but not totally impossible.
My guess is that the “Independent Group” will not put up a quasi-IG candidate, because
voters would not know what his/her policy views might be (except pro-EU Remain, which is the minority view in Newport West);
there would be little time in which to select a candidate and, because of the disorganized way in which IG has been established (step up, Chuka Umunna…), there are no selection procedures in place;
any IG candidate (in all but name) would be likely to go down in flames, so this is a battle that the IG MPs will probably sidestep.
Update, 4 March 2019
The candidature listing is still open. So far, 6 candidates have declared: Conservative, Labour, Plaid Cymru, Green, and two wild cards, “Renew” and “Abolish the Welsh Assembly”. The obvious non-declarers, so far, are the LibDems, UKIP and anyone adherent to the “Independent Group”. However, as stated, there is still time in which to declare.
Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party – Richard Suchorzewski
Renew – June Davies
SDP – Ian McLean
The For Britain Movement – Hugh Nicklin
Democrats and Veterans Party – Phillip Taylor
I see no reason to alter my view of the contest as expressed in the blog.
Update, 30 March 2019
I was just considering to what extent, if any, the meltdown of the House of Commons over and around Brexit will affect this by-election. The obvious protest vote would be for UKIP, which as noted above only scored 2.5% in 2017, though it managed 15.2% at its 2015 peak. Both were 3rd places. To win, UKIP has to beat both main System parties. On paper, that is near-impossible, but we are in interesting times.
The result was that Labour won with nearly 40% of the vote, but less than 38% of those eligible could be bothered to vote. Labour’s candidate was thus endorsed by only about 15% of those eligible.
The Conservatives came a fairly but not very close second. UKIP came third (again). “For Britain Movement” got less than 1% and came right at the bottom of the list of 11 candidates.
I interrupt other blog writing to address an immediate issue. The activist known as Tommy Robinson has now been banned from Facebook, he having already been barred from Twitter. That news highlights again something that I have been writing about, blogging about, speaking about (at the London Forum in 2017) and tweeting about —before I myself was banned or rather expelled from Twitter in 2018— for years, the privatization of public space.
In past ages and, indeed, until about 20 years ago, public space was literally that: the agora of ancient Athens, the forum of ancient Rome, the barricades of revolutionary France, the brief outbursts of free speech in the Russia of 1917 or the early 1990s, and Speakers’ Corner by Hyde Park in London, where a youthful Millard (aged about 21) spoke to fickle crowds a few times in the late 1970s.
Today, the traditional fora of free speech, eg in the UK, are very restricted. Jez Turner (Jeremy Bedford-Turner) made a speech in Whitehall in 2015. He mentioned Jews a few times. That alone was enough (triggered by the malicious Jewish Zionists who denounced him, the supine police who are now so often in the Zionist pocket, the wet CPS who are not sufficiently resistant to the Zionists’ endless whining demands, a Zionist-controlled System-political milieu, and a Bar and judiciary which are frightened of their own shadows and even more of those of the Zionists) to have Jez Turner imprisoned for a year. He served 6 months and was only recently released to live for months more under considerable restriction.
The “public space” which is now most significant is online space. Twitter, Facebook, blogging platforms etc.
I myself was expelled from Twitter last year. I had been the target of both the Jew-Zionists and mindless “antifa” (aka “useful idiots” for Zionism) for about 8 years. I have also had my freedom of expression taken away in other ways, as well as having been interrogated by the police (again at the instigation of malicious Jew-Zionists) for having posted entirely lawful comments on Twitter. I was also disbarred, quite wrongly, for similar reasons.
Alison Chabloz was persecuted, prosecuted and convicted for singing satirical songs in the manner of 1920s Berlin. She is appealing her conviction and the result of her first-stage appeal. She has also been expelled from Twitter (as well as being made subject to a court ban from social media, which bars her from posting until mid-2019).
If Twitter or Facebook ban you, you may have some limited right of appeal, if they so choose to extend it to you. You have no legal right to stay on Twitter or Facebook despite the fact that, in real terms, they are near-monopolies. Yes, I am now on GAB, but GAB has only 500,000 users, if that, whereas Twitter has perhaps 500 million! The fact that, as I believe, Twitter is largely a waste of time, is beside the point.
The point is that, beyond your very limited contractual or other rights qua customer, you have no rights in respect of Twitter or Facebook (etc). Qua citizen, you have no rights at all. You have no right to post, and if the owners or executives of those companies decide to bump you off, off you go, whether you have 50 followers, 3,000 (as I did) or a million.
The Blair law of 1998 [nb: 1998 = 666 x 3…], requiring political parties in the UK to be registered, all but killed any semblance of real political-party democracy in the UK. Now, free speech both online and offline is being, on the one hand, criminalized or subjected to other State repression (at the instigation of the Jewish-Zionist lobby), and on the other hand choked off at source, by companies (under Zionist control or influence) barring dissidents or known activists from even posting dissenting or radical views online.
As to Tommy Robinson, I am not personally one of his supporters, and I deplore his attempt to play the sycophant for Israel and Zionism, but he has some views which are valid, in my opinion.
In any case, freedom of expression is indivisible. It is facile to make arbitrary distinction between some free speech, calling it “hate speech” and so unacceptable, and other speech which is labelled “acceptable” (politically approved) speech. That is mainly hypocrisy. Even my own relatively mild postings are and always have been targeted by the enemies of freedom, of which the Zionists are the worst.
So we have, not only in England but elsewhere (eg in France, under Rothschilds cipher Macron) the same repressive tendency. Sajid Javid, Amber Rudd, Theresa May, others, are enemies of the British people and enemies of freedom of expression. They seem to want to ban all political activity and all political or socio-political expression which does not support the existing System. It is immaterial whether you call it that or “ZOG”.
The System in the UK, in France seems to think that it can slowly turn the screw on repression, controlling the political parties (or setting up “controlled” new ones, as with Macron in France and, perhaps, the “Independent Group” in the UK), preventing free speech by putting the fix into Twitter, Facebook etc, only having controlled news on or in the msm (controlled mass media outlets).
The Soviet Union tried a less subtle form of all that, and it still collapsed in the end. What the System politicians, msm faces and voices etc, fail to see is that a head of steam is building up in the UK (and France) and, if bottled up by the State and those behind the curtain, will eventually explode.
Another example, taken almost at random from Twitter:
As well as censoring our content over the past few weeks, Twitter have now deleted all the people we were following, which in turn means we have lost a ton of followers
Please RT and follow if you’re still right behind us – we have no idea why Twitter is doing this pic.twitter.com/opwxMMr6fX
Another example. A typical pseudonymous Jew-Zionist tweeter (troll), below, exults that a very prominent pro-Corbyn Twitter account, “Rachael Swindon”, has been “suspended” (probably, like me, expelled):
In fact, Rachael Swindon has been reinstated, though only after Twitter’s vice-President for Europe intervened. Why should such people control the online public space? Again, why should the police barge in with large boots and interfere with free speech when no threats are involved? It’s all wrong.
The pro-Jewish lobby freeloader and careerist Tom Watson MP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Watson_(Labour_politician) who has wormed his way to becoming Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (with his eyes on Corbyn’s purple day and night), has attacked Tommy Robinson in the House of Commons and asked YouTube to take down Tommy Robinson’s YouTube channel, which is his last online platform of any importance.
The excuse for Watson’s actions and statement has been the apparent fact that Robinson came to the house of one Mike Stuchbery, a failed (and sacked) supply teacher who poses as both “historian” and “journalist” online, and whose main activity seems to be online advocacy of opposition (including violence, though he usually uses weasel words) to any form of British or other European nationalism. Tommy Robinson has exposed the apparent fact that Stuchbery colluded with others to visit Robinson’s wife or ex-wife at her home. Robinson’s response seems to have been to do something similar to Stuchbery. Tom Watson, in his Commons statement, referred to Stuchbery as “journalist”, based presumably on Stuchbery’s politically-tendentious scribbles for HuffPost and other, smaller, online outlets.
In the end, if someone is prevented from making socio-political expression, that person can either subside into silence, or take other action. That other action might be peaceful, it might not be. When the repressed individual is a public figure with many thousands of supporters, those supporters may also take other action. That might include, potentially, and in the French term, “action directe” somewhere down the line.
Those (of various types: Jew Zionists, the politically correct, “antifa idiots etc) in our society, who crow at shutting down the freedom of others to make socio-political expression should, in the well-worn (Chinese?) phrase “be careful what they wish for”. The Spanish also have a phrase, a proverb in fact: “Do what you will, and pay for it.” Repression of views, not “allowing” people a public platform (and anyway, who is, for example, a blot like Tom Watson to decide who should or should not be allowed to speak?) can only lead to upheaval in the end.
It will be interesting to observe the UK political scene in the coming months and years.
A few tweets seen
A tweet with a few examples of the frequent passive but malicious incitement of violence against white people by “antifa” bastard Mike Stuchbery of Luton:
@MikeStuchbery_ is the coward who Doxxed #TommyRobinson's wife and children accompanied by the Media and a Crackhead. He is a Far Left Antifa Thug who needs exposing to the Whole country.
Below: self-described (fake) “journalist” and “historian” (failed supply teacher and house-husband) Mike Stuchbery inciting serious political violence but trying to deny it…
Below: fake “historian” and “journalist” Mike Stuchbery threatens minor Northern Ireland politico David Vance with a lawsuit. Does he have any idea how much a defamation action (for example) costs? He must have got the idea of constantly threatening to “sue” from the Jewish Zionists and their useful idiots on Twitter, who are always threatening legal action, and who often invoke the “sainted” name of Israel-based “Mark Lewis Lawyer” in this regard. In reality, Lewis is a wheelchair-bound blowhard fake, recently fined by a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for his behaviour. At the Tribunal, he admitted that he often had no idea what he was doing because of his intake of prescription drugs. Oh…and Lewis’s own Counsel said that “he has no assets” and that “his sole possessions are his clothes and a mobility scooter”! See:https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/?s=mark+lewis
This individual has been proven to be an unhinged, hate-filled extremist, who has whipped-up his followers to engage in violent acts. this pathetic weasel should be charged with incitement to commit a hate crime on this evidence – pic.twitter.com/Ec2Yr9AAMM
Something called “Press Gazette” also refers to grifter Stuchbery as a “journalist” (does he have an NUJ card? I suppose that, these days, any wannabee can scribble for peanuts or for free in the HuffPost, silly little online “news” agencies, or for the (now often semi-literate) online msm “newspapers”, and then to call himself “journalist”…and in Stuchbery’s case, “historian”, too!…)
The more serious point here is that “Culture Secretary” Jeremy Wright MP thinks that he is entitled to ask YouTube to take down Tommy Robinson’s videos, Tom Watson MP having already demanded the same. Freedom? Free speech? Free country? Hardy ha ha…
Update, 11 March 2019
and still the tweets keep coming…
You are my favourite tweet thus far. Mike is just an observer? Excuse me for hooting with laughter. Mike is an extremist. It’s documented all over Twitter. He earns a living from incitement not observation. Yet he refuses to take ownership of the effect he has on others.
and Stuchbery has hit back with the piece below, posted on yet another of the plethora of new “news and comment” websites that pose as quasi-newspapers, in this case calling itself the Byline Times
Stuchbery (and many others on Twitter etc) really should refrain from using legal terms wrongly or pointlessly, eg, in that piece averring that Tommy Robinson defamed him. Well, that may or may not be the case, in the lay sense, but any actionable defamation requires publication. I have no idea whether in this case, Robinson published (meaning said or wrote to third parties) any of the allegedly defamatory material via video streaming etc. It seems not. Then there are all the other factors, such as the defences, one of which is that the statements, even if defamatory on their face, are true…
In any case, it costs vast amounts to sue for defamation, though in some open and shut cases it may be possible to find “no win, no fee” lawyers (in the old American parlance, “ambulance-chasers”) willing to take it on, with the help of specialized legal “insurance” (which in my view comes close to champerty, in the old Common Law sense)
…and here we see some supposed “comedian” (comedienne? Never heard of her), by name Janey Godley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janey_Godley , saying that those exposing Stuchbery are “a danger to free speech”:
In fact, I also must have missed seeing any support from Janey Godley for Jez Turner, imprisoned for making, in Whitehall, a humorous speech mentioning Jews and their history in England; neither did I notice the aforesaid Janey Godley (I had never heard of her in any regard until today) tweet anything in support of satirical singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz, persecuted by Jewish Zionists, then privately prosecuted by them before being prosecuted by the CPS (under pressure to take over the matter…) and then convicted, in effect, of singing songs.
An example, below, of the muddled thinking of many on Twitter and elsewhere: this idiot, calling himself/herself “66ALW88” (what?) thinks that the way to preserve free speech online is for the online platform companies to “crack down” on, er, free speech online…
Below, a tweet not at all significant in itself (there are literally thousands of unthinking, purselipped nobodies like this Irish “academic”, one Fergal Lenehan, around, all waiting for the chance to denounce people, to “report” to Twitter, Facebook or police, or wanting to ban the free speech of others not signed-up to the System/ZOG mental straitjacket). It is the trend, the existence of a large bloc of such nasty idiots that is of importance.
and here (below) is a well-funded basically Jew-Zionist organization which admits that it wants, inter alia, to stop the historian David Irving from conducting lecture tours. I think the reverse: that those who oppose freedom of speech on political, social and historical topics should themselves be stopped…
The fact that Irving has done this before does not mean that we should allow him to do it again. We have plenty of advance notice to prevent it this time.
Let’s try & stop this grotesque event from happening ever again.
— Anti-Fascism & Far Right 🥤 (@FFRAFAction) March 17, 2019
Update, 18 March 2019
Now the cowardly and mentally-disturbed grifter, Stuchbery, continues to try to claim the moral high ground, which is laughable (and note the support from a political cretin, “Leftwing Revolt”, in the thread below, who is a member or supporter of “Resisting Hate” and sees nothing wrong with someone he might disagree with being attacked with an axe! Resisting hate? You could not make it up…). I might not “support” Tommy Robinson, but I prefer him a hundred times over to Stuchbery and the “useful idiots” of “antifa”!
and (below), another little shit like Stuchbery, this time a New Zealander, who positively welcomes censorship and repression (and he is, wait for it…a “writer/director” of film and theater”!). One of the weird aspects of the present time is that those most eager to see censorship and ideological repression are “creative industries” drones, writers, film and TV people etc, and journalists.
and he retweets, approvingly, this (below) announcement of New Zealand governmental censorship. I personally have no wish to see footage of the recent New Zealand massacre, but that should be my choice, not the New Zealand (ZOG) government’s.
Chief Censor David Shanks has officially classified the full 17 minute video of the fatal Christchurch shootings as objectionable.
It is illegal for anyone in New Zealand to view, possess or distribute this material in any form, including via social media platforms.
and…again: the same little shit, one Andrew Todd, does not want the accused to be allowed to defend himself in case he says something the New Zealand government (ZOG) does not want people to hear…
Not everyone on Twitter agrees with the idea of censoring views and people being found guilty as soon as they are accused, however:
So you believe in a system where your proven guilty before your convicted by a judge and group of your piers. Let me give examples of places this has happened: Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and Uganda during the rule Idi Amin.
Here’s another one, below, a New Zealand journalist positively gagging for censorship (I had no idea that NZ was so ZOG-occupied):
FYI, more useful detail on how the big tech companies are failing to weed out hate speech videos and how they missed out on white supremacist videos https://t.co/lYdO10D2Nr
and yet another virtue-signalling “journalist” who is, it seems, an enemy of both freedom of expression and of the future of the European peoples…
I spent a good part of 2 years reporting on ISIS internet and how the group uses social media — in 2019 it's mind-boggling to me how well the coordinated cross-platform effort to remove them from the internet worked and how there hasn't been a similar one for white supremacists.
The grifter actually makes a joke out of his begging and scavenging!
It's been a challenging – and expensive(!) – couple of weeks, so if you enjoy the written pieces, the history threads, or whatever, you can always make a small tip through my Ko-Fi… https://t.co/Xd2iEmxucQpic.twitter.com/OJ7UGuAzPr
Tommy Robinson has now been banned from Twitter (welcome to the club…) despite (because of?) his being a candidate in the European elections (North West England).
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [John F. Kennedy]
Update, 5 June 20199
Another random example of how the quasi-monopolies of youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc have arrogated to themselves the right to censor and banish: [Update, 22 July 2022: the tweets etc noted have now been completely deleted]
Update, 18 June 2019
More…
A Dr Who writer @OldRoberts953 is expunged from a book by the BBC because he won’t conform to the latest transgender ideology. His views on transgenderism are probably shared by 90%+ of Brits but he’s now a Non-Person for the BBC. The net tightens around free speech. Please share https://t.co/G9fM2BK1e4
Grifter, “antifa” supporter, fake “journalist” and “historian” Mike Stuchbery is desperate to close down free speech for those with whom he disagrees politically. See his recent tweets, below. This is one of the worst enemies of freedom of expression in the UK.
YouTube shut down four major US white supremacist channels in the last 24 hours.
If they're serious about reversing the spread of radicalisation, here's four accounts in the UK they could shutter today… https://t.co/nNG4sk938a
The latest news is that some odd woman tied up with both “antifa” nonsense and Jew-Zionists has created a GoFundMe appeal on behalf of Stuchbery, supposedly so that he can sue the political activist known as Tommy Robinson.
I prefer not to comment on the proposed legal claim until I read more about the foundations for such claim. I presume that Stuchbery is doing this (the woman mentioned above may be raising funds for him but only Stuchbery himself can actually sue) because:
he knows or believes that Tommy Robinson has assets sufficient to satisfy any successful claim;
he has seen that others are already suing Tommy Robinson;
he thinks, perhaps, that a civil legal action will damage Tommy Robinson by starving him of funds;
if successful, Stuchbery will make a great deal more money than he gets at present via online begging or his part-time work in Stuttgart, where he now resides.
Were I the defendant, and leaving aside the potential substantive issues that might be in issue in the proposed case, I suppose that I should focus firstly on the fact that Stuchbery is
resident outside the strict jurisdiction (albeit still in the EU);
is a foreign national (as I understand, an Australian citizen);
has no real or other property in England and Wales;
has no means with which to satisfy any judgment on costs or in respect of any counterclaim or setoff that might be claimed by Tommy Robinson, should the Court decide against Stuchbery on one or more issues or otherwise.
I doubt that this claim will get off the ground. I certainly doubt that it will clear the probable first hurdle, as explained above, but we shall see. It appears, however, that plenty of mugs are donating to the said GoFundMe appeal at present.
Update, 25 November 2019
Stuchbery’s solicitors, Eve Solicitors (the firm is a limited company in fact, possibly in effect a one-man operation), are operating out of a rundown Victorian terrace in Bradford; several other small legal and other firms are operating nearby. The operation has only been in operation since 20 May 2019, at earliest:
The “firm” has only been at its present address since 28 September 2019, before which, i.e. from its incorporation in May until September 2019, it operated out of a tiny Victorian terraced house in a “Coronation Street” lookalike, Hudswell Street, Wakefield (Yorkshire).
The principal (and only named) solicitor is one Waseem Ahmed.
Where the name “Eve” came from, God knows. My only guess is “Adam and Eve”, as in the Cockney rhyming slang, “you wouldn’t Adam and Eve it!”
Only joking.
Having said that, when I was a practising barrister in London in the early-mid 1990s, I knew of Pakistani and other ethnic-minority solicitors (in London, in Luton and elsewhere) who used “English”-sounding names for their small firms. Some of them still owe me money! (Unpaid fees). I am sure that Stuchbery’s solicitor is not like that.
I looked earlier at the GoFundMe appeal set up to collect money for Stuchbery’s proposed legal claim against Tommy Robinson. So far, 262 mugs have donated a total (as of time and date of writing) of £5,209 to start the claim. I wonder whether they or others will donate the rest of the £15,000 asked for? Frankly, I doubt it, though the amount so far raised has been raised in only three days.
I doubt that the proposed lawsuit will either launch or get anywhere.
Further thoughts
The woman who is fundraising for Stuchbery, and who seems to have all day to tweet etc, has tweeted that “As many of you know, Mike Stuchbery is about to sue #TommyRobinson for harassment. He is backed by #ResistingHate and a full legal team.“
A “full legal team”? So that would be someone called Waseem Ahmed and…?
I do not say that “Eve Solicitors” (i.e. Mr. Ahmed) is a one-man-band (though it certainly seems to be), and I cannot say that there are no legal people offering advice etc from the sidelines (what used to be known at the Bar as “cocktail party advice”), but I do know, having been at one time a practising barrister who (in the 1990s) regularly appeared (weekly, at least) in the High Court, as well as in County Courts, and more occasionally other types of court and tribunal (both then and in the 2002-2008 period), that GoFundMe £20,000 will only serve to kick off such a case and claim, if I have understood its likely nature properly. Costs rapidly escalate.
Solicitors vary in their fees, barristers likewise. Simply to issue proceedings in a High Court action (which I suppose the proposed case would probably be) would be several hundred pounds as a minimum, and many thousands of pounds in some cases:
As a rule of thumb, a barrister will get anywhere from (as minimum) £500 a day on a small civil matter in the County Court, up to many thousands of pounds per day for almost any High Court matter, though there is no “limit” as such, and some barristers, eg the top commercial silks (QCs) will be on £10,000 a day or more. The spectrum is very wide.
As those who enjoyed Rumpole of the Bailey will know, a barrister usually gets a “brief fee” (to cover all preparation and the first day, if any, in court), then daily “refreshers”. How much are they? How long is a piece of string?
One of my own last few cases was a County Court commercial matter involving a large amount of cattle feed. Now that it is long ago since I last appeared in court (December 2007; this case was not long before that), I think that I can reveal, by way of illustration, that I was paid, that time, £5,000 as a brief fee and £1,000 a day for refreshers (in fact there were no refreshers, because the matter settled on the first day in court).
I have no real idea how much the case of Stuchbery v. Robinson might cost Stuchbery in legal fees if it is ever pursued to court, but my semi-educated guess (“semi” because I have not been involved with the Bar for over a decade) is that whoever presents it in court (unless doing it for free or on the cheap) will probably want a brief fee of perhaps £5,000 (at least) and (at minimum) £500 per day refreshers. Maybe £10,000 and £1,000 per day. It can be seen that, even at the lower estimate, a 2-week hearing (10 days in court, which this well might be) is going to cost £9,500 for Counsel’s fees alone.
Solicitors’ fees also vary widely. When I myself worked (overseas) for law firms (as an employed lawyer), the firms charged for my work at anything up to USD $500 (or about £400) an hour (I myself didn’t get that, sadly, the firms did); and that was over 20 years ago. I suppose that Stuchbery’s solicitors will not be very expensive, but will probably still charge maybe £50 an hour at absolute minimum. Solicitor case preparation might take hundreds of hours. 100 hours @ £50 p.h. = £5,000.
Then there are what solicitors term “disbursements”, i.e. the expenses of the case such as issue fees, witness expenses, whatever.
You can see how £20,000 can be quickly exhausted…
However, even if Stuchbery’s solicitors (solicitor?) can launch the proposed matter and fund a couple of weeks in court (and don’t forget that the solicitor, if in attendance, will also be charging for his time there), there is the matter of what happens if Stuchbery loses. No, that is not left to chance. The lawyers for the proposed defendant, Robinson, will in that event have to have their costs covered too. Even if they only come to the same level as Stuchbery’s (which I doubt), that puts Stuchbery (and possibly others who have funded the claim) £20,000+ in the hole. It could be a great deal more. Maybe even hundreds of thousands.
Stuchbery is an Australian citizen, maybe also a German one now (I do not know). He has no real property in the UK or, as far as I know, even in Germany, where he now lives. He has no, or no substantial, monies in the UK (or anywhere?). He does not have a substantial income or a full-time job.
On the above facts, and if Robinson applies in court for that, Stuchbery is almost certain to have to provide “security for costs”, i.e. [see above] monies “paid into court” (into a court-controlled account) to cover Robinson’s costs should Stuchbery lose his case. Likewise, on the above facts, that would almost certainly have to be the whole of Robinson’s likely outlay in defending the case. Certainly tens of thousands of pounds. Possibly over £100,000.
If Robinson applies for security for costs, if the court agrees with the application, but then Stuchbery cannot come up with whatever sum is demanded (I cannot think that it would be lower than £20,000; probably far far more), then the claim (the case) will be struck out, possibly with costs awarded to Robinson.
Stuchbery will probably have to raise £40,000+ even to start his case.
I think that my readers will understand better now why I think that Stuchbery has no chance of success regardless of the merits of his case (if any).
Presumably, Stuchbery does understand that, in a case like this, witnesses (he himself, Robinson, others) will have to give evidence, be cross-examined on that, all the while with Stuchbery staying in the UK, perhaps for weeks or even a month or more.
Once again, I am deflected from my slow and peaceful writing of a piece about my several years in Cornwall and Devon, and particularly those spent at Polapit Tamar [below, pictured in the 1940s], and which has an interesting history of its own,
by the need to write about contemporary political events. Still, duty calls…
Social Nationalism is stalled in the UK, but waking from a dormant state…
In other blog posts, I have criticized Corbyn-Labour-supporting Aaron Bastani, Ash Sarkar etc, but Bastani is surely right in tweeting that “The space for a successful far-right party in the UK is massive.” The label “far-right” I disparage, of course, but in essence I agree with him. The difference is that he opposes the birth of such a movement, whereas I support it!
The space for a successful far-right party in the UK is massive. We are fortunate that both the BNP & UKIP failed to fill it.
The fact that much of the establishment still thinks a 'centrist' politics is even remotely possible shows they either don't know this or don't care >
I have recently blogged about the “Independent Group” non-party, about how it will struggle even to get to a 2015-UKIP level of support (see Notes, below), both for “technical” reasons (FPTP voting, a likely even level of support nationwide, so insufficient to create a winning concentration of votes, a Schwerpunkt, in any one constituency etc) and because the voters are moving to the falsely so-called “extreme”. I examined also the Social Democrat Party of the early 1980s.
There is however also the point that Bastani raises in the tweet shown above (does he read my blog?): the fact that people generally are getting frustrated, and many angry, very angry, with smug, “centrist” MPs and MEPs complacently making hay for themselves as people struggle and, in not a few cases, literally starve to death in the UK (thanks to policies such as the “welfare” “reforms” which were imposed by political rats such as Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, Esther McVey, the Jew “lord” Freud and many others).
The roads are potholed, the trains are expensive and don’t even run much of the time, mass immigration has, taking the effect overall, trashed our European society, legal services, local services etc have been cut or destroyed, housing has not only become completely inadequate (mass immigration, millions of births to backward aliens, private profiteering) but threatens to become even less adequate.
The British people want and increasingly will want concrete results. The Westminster game of using the corrupt electoral system to win over the “moderate” voters in the 50-100 most marginal constituencies to a “same-old” pseudo-democratic con-game is seen as the rigged system that it is.
A few years down the line, the choice will be stark: European civilization and social nationalism against “multikulti” neo or pseudo-Marxism and also against Zionist-controlled private profiteering and fake “conservatism”.
When the right time comes, our society will be changed in the right way, keeping what should be preserved, creating what is new and worthwhile, but destroying the inferior with the flame of justice.
I interrupted writing a longer article to write this brief piece. I am in fact unsure whether it is worth the effort, but I should regret not saying something about this typical piece of propaganda presented as documentary film.
I made the mistake of watching what passed for a documentary, presented by Alice Levine, a Jewish woman who has apparently (I had not previously heard of her) presented a number of TV and radio shows. Wikipedia says this about her:
I wasted an hour watching this. In the film, London-based Jewish media person Alice Levine spent a week, or at least a few days, living at the house of Jack Sen, a British nationalist activist. The house is in Southport, Lancashire.
I do not know Jack Sen, though I have heard of him. I believe that we exchanged a couple of tweets several years ago, when I still had a Twitter account. He stood as UKIP candidate in West Lancashire in 2015 and, despite being disowned by UKIP after he tweeted something of a critical nature to then Labour Party MP for Liverpool Wavertree, the Zionist Jewess Luciana Berger, achieved an honourable 6,058 votes (12.2%), and thus retained his deposit.
I have to say that I myself would never invite a Jewish (or even non-Jewish) media person into my home, let alone agree to that person staying for days. I can only assume that either Jack Sen is one of those who thinks that “no publicity is bad publicity”, or he received a fee for his participation. I cannot imagine any other motivation.
The film introduced Jack Sen’s mother (also resident there) and his charming Ukrainian wife and little daughter.
The Alice Levine person, when in bed in the room she was allocated, seemed to wear several layers of clothing. Whether that was because the house was cold, or because she did not want Sen to take “sleeping with the far right” too literally, must remain a puzzle!
There was, of course, no attempt to let Jack Sen properly explain his socio-political outlook. One of the problems with this kind of show, for the subject (“victim”), is that not only does the interviewee not know what will be raised by the interviewer, but also what will be left out of the finished product.
I found Jack Sen to be somewhat eccentric, though that was obviously deliberately amplified by the programme-makers. This was, after all, a week compressed into an hour. He seems to be a basically decent person, to my mind, at least on the personal level. I am unwilling to speculate that he is not. “The soul of another is a dark wood” (Russian proverb), in the end. I am aware that many distrust him and his motives, but I cannot comment either way.
At one point, Alice Levine “discovers” from Sen’s mother (I would bet that her researchers discovered the fact well before she ever arrived at Sen’s house) that his original name was Dilip Sengupta, Sen’s father having been either Indian or half-Indian, a fact mentioned by Sen himself to Ms. Levine. The mention of the name(s) to Sen made him angry. He did not present himself well at that point. He allowed the Jewess to provoke him. Later, she tried to give the impression that she was afraid of Sen, which I very much doubt was the case.
It was obvious that Alice Levine had no idea of life outside her comfortable careerist bubble. She went from a comfortable childhood in Nottinghamshire to the University of Leeds and straight into TV and radio. Jack Sen’s background (not much explored in the film) has obviously been more difficult.
Sen did not (out of politeness, or hospitality?) put Alice Levine on the spot about her Jewish origins, beliefs, attitudes etc. Having said that, I was surprised that she was offered pork by Jack Sen (even I found that rather insensitive!) and even more surprised that she apparently ate it.
At any rate, Alice Levine obviously lives in a bubble where everyone thinks and feels much as she does. In a word, biased. She evidently found it challenging even to think that many do not share her multikulti views. She was unwilling to be challenged on Skype or similar by Nick Griffin.
I had to laugh at it all. If Alice Levine thinks Jack Sen “extreme”, what would she make of me, I wonder?
This attempt to copy Louis Theroux was a waste of time, unenlightening. It is the sort of “documentary” that taxpayer-subsidized Channel 4 does. Dull, really.
Three Conservative Party MPs, Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston, have defected to the Independent Group. All three have cited “no-deal” Brexit (which they oppose) as the triggering fact.
I have blogged twice already about IG in the past few days and also blogged recently about possible splits in both main System parties:
The three apparently intend to sit as Independents. They could have done that without pledging allegiance to IG, so presumably they look forward to IG becoming a registered political party, so that they can fight under its banner with a greater chance of retaining their seats in the House of Commons.
Heidi Allen
I start with the least experienced but also (the one I take to be) the best of the three. Heidi Allen has shown, in her stance on social security/welfare issues, that she has a social conscience lacking in most Conservative MPs (though her actual voting record has been patchy); in other areas she has shown a certain shallowness (she seems to favour so-called “refugees”). In other areas yet, I also disagree with her views: she is pro-EU and pro-abortion.
Her constituency, South Cambridgeshire, is safe Con territory, which she has made more safe: in her 2 elections, she has garnered 51.1% and 51.8% of the votes cast, whereas Andrew Lansley, her predecesssor, only got between 42% and 48% in his 4 elections (1997-2010).
How many votes will follow Heidi Allen, I have no idea. At one time, the Liberal Democrats showed strongly in South Cambridgeshire: their vote did not collapse in 2015, despite being at half of its 2010 level, and recovered slightly to 18.6% in 2017. Labour got 27.2% in 2017.
If Heidi Allen faces a new Conservative candidate, she will probably go down unless a large number of former LibDem and Labour voters switch to her. An uphill struggle though not impossible.
Anna Soubry
The oldest (62) and best-known of the three: a former local TV face, mainly in the East Midlands region. She was a TV reporter and presenter from age 25 to age 39 (1995), after which, having graduated in Law in the 1970s, she became a barrister, doing criminal cases. As far as I know, she was in the lower ranks even of the criminal Bar, but practised for about 12-13 years until elected to Parliament in 2010.
Anna Soubry seems to be one of the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” crowd (anathema to me, of course): eg she favours both fracking and “equal marriage” (marriage of gays and lesbians).
Accused by many —and more than once— of having been drunk at Westminster (she denied the allegations), she threatened on Twitter (before I was expelled), to sue me, for referring to her as “the MP for Plymouth and Angostura”! That threat never materialized. Perhaps it was just the drink talking…
Anna Soubry is known for her rudeness of speech and for her opposition to what she is pleased to call “xenophobia”, i.e. she either supports or does not oppose mass immigration into the UK.
Broxtowe, Anna Soubry’s constituency, is a Con-Lab marginal, held by Labour 1997-2010. Anna Soubry scored 48.6% in 2017, perhaps helped by her numerous TV appearances on BBC Question Time etc. The Labour vote was 45.3%. Majority: 863. The other parties are of no importance. Anna Soubry might be able to get enough votes to win through, but the more likely result is that Labour takes the seat next time.
Sarah Wollaston
The most independent, superficially, of the three, Sarah Wollaston was selected as candidate following an “open primary” election held by her local Conservative Party branch. She was helped to election by her former occupation as a doctor (general practitioner), the profession consistently rated as “most trusted” in opinion polls.
Like the other two examined here, Sarah Wollaston is another one who is “fiscally conservative, socially liberal”, favouring “choice” (ie pro-abortion), not opposing mass immigration, supporting “equal marriage” etc (and calling its opponents “bigots”). Indeed, she is rather intolerant of opposing views: she blocked me on Twitter, without my ever having tweeted to her, but I cannot now recall whether her intolerance was triggered by my opposition to mass immigration or whether it had something to do with the “holocaust” mythus.
Sarah Wollaston is not as strongly pro-EU as the other two MPs, but seems to oppose mainly the “no deal” or “WTO” exit/Brexit path.
Sarah Wollaston’s carefully-crafted “liberalism” does not seem to extend to the poor or those in receipt of State benefits. She mostly voted for the punitive measures introduced by Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and his cohorts (eg bedroom tax, eg removal of lifetime tenancies of council housing).
Sarah Wollaston’s constituency, Totnes, is the only one of the three which I know personally. I appeared in 2006 as Counsel in the small magistrates’ court there several times (on behalf of South West Water, the utility company, which stood accused of minor corporate offences), and have many times visited the town. Totnes could be described as a town for affluent, well-educated (many bookshops, a Rudolf Steiner school nearby) and somewhat liberal-minded people.
Politically, Totnes has been Conservative since 1923 (though the present seat was only created in 1997, the previous one having been expunged in 1981), with the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats coming in strongly in second place until 2015. The LibDem vote collapsed then and did not much recover in 2017. In 2015, UKIP took second place with 14% of the vote (LibDems last out of five), while in 2017, Labour was second on 26.8% (LibDems third).
Sarah Wollaston’s vote has been consistently higher than scored by the previous Conservative MP, Anthony Steen (his father changed name from Stein), a rich Jew who had to resign during the pre-2010 expenses scandal.
Sarah Wollaston has the best chance, out of the three defector MPs, of retaining her seat. She is a truly local candidate (has lived there since the early 1990s), reflects the socio-political attitudes of many locals, and will probably be able to rely on many former LibDem and Labour tactical votes when opposed by a new Conservative candidate. However, in what could be a fairly tight 4-way split, anything is possible.
Final thoughts
These three MPs will sit as Independents until or unless the Independent Group becomes a registered party. The only one I would put any money on to retain her seat would be Sarah Wollaston. In any case, all three have a fallback position: Heidi Allen’s family has a successful motorbike paint company, Anna Soubry’s personal “partner” is a director of the Morrison’s supermarket business, while Sarah Wollaston remains a doctor (though non-practising since 2010) and her husband is an NHS psychiatrist.
The fact that the absurd, leaderless, policy-free “Independent Group” is now already running at 14% in the opinion polls tells me that the British people are getting desperate for change, perhaps any change. Social nationalism is now in with a real chance.
Twitter reaction
🧨 BREAKING: Times/YouGov voter intention poll
Con 38 Lab 26 *TIG 14* LD 7 SNP/Plaid 5 Other 11
(Weighted by likelihood to vote, excluding would not vote and don’t knows) https://t.co/3TfImvFDv4
#IsItOK#TheLastLeg have got #AnnaSoubry back on AGAIN, after her last appearance when they only questioned her about welfare reform after a Twitter outcry?
Soubry, who voted:
51x times to cut benefits 14x for the Bedroom Tax 23x to reduce corporation tax
Jeez Anna, it's not about MPs – It's only about the masses and their burden of 'austerity' under the 'hostile environment' of tory tyranny – how 'out of touch' can TIG all be ????? – think you're all a funny thingy adrift of our real world …..
— Liverpool4u – Liverpool History. A City in Time. (@liverpool4u) February 23, 2019
Well, much water under bridge in the intervening three and a half years.
As we know, the General Election of 2019 swept away the members of the “Independent Group”, which by then had changed name to “Change UK”: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_UK.
Ian Robert Millard 