My attention has been caught by a recent tweet from a Brexit Party MEP previously unknown to me:
My colleague in the European parliament @MagicMagid arranged a charity dinner in support of @RefugeeRescue saving refugees in the Mediterranean. I could not attend the dinner but have instead made a donation. I urge you to do the same!
At first, I thought that that tweet was a fake and/or a parody, or perhaps tweeted in a spirit of satire. No. It is real and it is meant to be taken at face-value. The bastard really is urging Brexit Party members, supporters and voters (of which I am not and have never been one, by the way) to give money to one of the organizations ferrying migrant-invaders across the Mediterranean from North Africa to civilized Europe.
When many people who support —or did until now support— Brexit Party criticized Nielsen’s support for this people-ferrying soi-disant “charity”, the new MEP’s response was textbook System-politician:
For all those who made racist remarks in response to my earlier tweets about a charity I have supported- you have no place in the Brexit Party. We are an open, diverse and inclusive party with no space for discrimination or abuse. Get on board, or get out.
The thread of further comments on Twitter is worth reading. All UK political life is there, from well-meaning but stupid ladies (sitting in suburban or rural comfort) who just want to emote about “saving children”, and the sort of basically malicious “anti-racist” idiots (Jewish or otherwise) who want as many non-Europeans as possible to invade the EU and especially the UK, to more sensible people who see that the UK’s population has increased from about 55 million in the 1980s to about 65 million or even 70 million now, most of which is via immigration and from births not only to immigrants but also now to their children and indeed to those children’s children (a demographic time-bomb: experts now say that European-race, i.e. white, people will be in the minority in the UK by 2070 at latest. My guess? 2040. Already some British cities are minority-white).
That does not, it seems, alarm Henrik Nielsen.
Nielsen was born in 1959 in Copenhagen, is 60 years of age and was at one time the head of the anti-EU campaign in Denmark. Why he opposes the EU I do not know. He seems rather at home as an MEP.
Nielsen is married to one Sharon Ruth Bierer, also a dentist, born in London and who has been a director of dental-oriented companies in London. The name Bierer is often of Jewish origin, but not always. Nielsen and his wife have two adult children, Jacob and Laura, the latter of which is, remarkably, the policy director of Labour Leave, the Labour Party pro-Brexit organization.
Nielsen and his wife own a rather pleasant-looking villa in Puglia (Apulia), southern Italy, which they rent out at £300+ per day.
I agree there with tweeter “Reimer Bard”. Brexit Party is faux-nationalist even as compared to its previous incarnation, UKIP.
Finally, the person that Nielsen is supporting in his tweets is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magid_Magid . A Somali immigrant who claims to have funded a “gap year” by working for only 9 weeks (at 12 hours a day). I suppose that it is just about possible.
Brexit Party
I have blogged several times before about Brexit Party, about its stellar explosion onto the UK political scene, about Farage’s impressive public meetings, about its possible impact on the Conservative vote etc; its EU elections success. I have also chronicled its lack of direct success so far in Westminster by-elections: Peterborough, and then Brecon and Radnorshire. That “close but no cigar” aspect has deflated the Brexit Party bubble somewhat, as has the noise around the person I am pleased to call Boris-Idiot and around the whole current Brexit hullabaloo.
Let’s look again at Brexit Party. It is or is owned by a private company itself controlled by Nigel Farage. In that it has similarity to Momentum, the Labour Party group, which is, or is owned by, a company itself controlled by a couple of Jews.
I have blogged before about the fact that Brexit Party is a party without policy (save for leaving the EU). That is both its strength (i.e. a clear message) and its weakness (the voting public has concerns other than just the EU and Brexit).
I have blogged about not only the strange policy-free nature of Brexit Party but also about its strange mixture of candidates. No less than three out of the Brexit Party EU elections candidates were former Revolutionary Communist Party members (one, Claire Fox, a defender of the IRA Warrington bombing, is now a Brexit Party MEP). Some Brexit Party candidates were of non-European ethnicity, and some of those are now MEPs, including a couple of Jews and a Pakistani.
It is hard to see the ethnic, cultural or ideological ties binding the Brexit Party MEPs inter se. Even the faux-“libertarian” “small state”-ism of many of them does not seem to fit all.
There seem to be more than just a few links between Brexit Party and the Trump set-up.
What is really behind Brexit Party? There is already a Brexit Party Friends of Israel organization. What is the gameplan? To offset any real nationalist upsurge by containing it in the Brexit Party box? Possibly. It worked with UKIP…
Brexit Party electorally
To my mind, the Brexit Party upsurge bubble has been, if not burst, then somewhat punctured, and so partly-deflated. Farage has made the mistake of sitting on the fence between outright support for Boris-Idiot’s supposed Brexitism, and opposition to the Conservative Party. That has weakened Brexit Party to some extent. All the same, and crucially in a situation where is is no real social-national or even small-c conservative-national party, voters in England and Wales are going to have the usual false choice in the next general election: the System parties, or joke candidates such as Monster Raving Loonies and tiny socialist or other parties, or…Brexit Party. It may be that, in desperation, many will vote Brexit Party.
At present, Brexit Party is not breaking through re. Westminster. The latest two polls (published today and yesterday) put the figures as:
make a Conservative majority of either 38 or 46 (I have taken the Scottish results as 50% SNP).
This is frightening. It means that, were there no significant change in the polling, there could be a Boris-Idiot ZOG/NWO [Zionist Occupation Government/New World Order] dystopian regime, an elected dictatorship, in place by the end of the year. If that happens, democracy in any real sense will have died and only determined non-electoral resistance will be able to fight against it.
Having said that, polling often narrows before an election, but Labour is going to have to pull its socks up “majorly” (to use a Trump-ism) if it is going to keep even its present complement of MPs. I suppose that the silver lining would be that many pro-Zionist Labour MPs would go, but that would be little comfort to the British people ruled over by a ZOG dictatorship.
What about Brexit Party itself? Its polling is running between 10% and 15%, which is nowhere. At present, it has no prospect of getting MPs and would have to raise its game to about 25% across the board before getting even a small bloc of MPs. That is not impossible, but if British people see Brexit Party MEPs (who may not even be British by origin…) lecturing them on the supposed “goodness” of supporting migration-invasion etc, the polling will not improve and may even decline in percentage terms.
No social-national party, no conservative-national party, the Conservative Party a ZOG/NWO regime in the making, Labour the party mainly of the blacks and browns, the LibDems supporting both finance-capitalism and migration-invasion, and fake-nationalist Brexit Party joining the multikulti “celebrations”…
The Remainers’ intellectual dishonesty, exposed in a tweet from an emeritus Professor of Government, no less; nailed by Andrew Neil…
Both sides fought the referendum on the basis they would regard the result as binding; and it was on that basis that people voted. Show me any Leaver or Remainer who said it was just a big state-sponsored opinion poll and could be ignored. https://t.co/ElwoARYP9X
“If you look at the more genuinely Welsh areas, especially the Welsh-speaking ones, they did not want to leave the EU,” Dorling told the Sunday Times. “Wales was made to look like a Brexit-supporting nation by its English settlers.”
I wonder what The Guardian would say about any analysis of UK voting patterns (in general elections, as well as referenda) that called areas with huge numbers of blacks and browns etc “not genuinely English”? Or described the blacks, browns, Chinese etc as “settlers”…For that matter, what about any analysis of voting patterns in North London that referred to “its Jewish settlers”?
A few more tweets
The real problem here was that direct populist democracy, i.e. the 2016 Referendum, was grafted onto the longstanding system of representative democracy (elected MPs, political parties, Parliament). It’s like a train trying to run on lines of the wrong gauge. Or to put it another way, trying to graft a pear to an apple.
WATCH | "There has been an active conspiracy by the political class to stop a real Brexit. There was a clear majority for Brexit in the referendum, however we have a House of Commons that was 75% Remain" – legendary historian David Starkey hits the nail on the head! pic.twitter.com/F1LX5Y4ICa
Some Tory MP's feel picked on for being shamed for stealing £30 a week from cancer sufferers. So here's ALL of them. pic.twitter.com/DxMor8CdXe
— Rachael Swindon #WeAreCollective (@Rachael_Swindon) March 13, 2016
It will be noted that among the names on the above list is that of Therese Coffey MP [Con, Suffolk Coastal], recently appointed as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The role has been held by deadheads before, idiots such as Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and Esther McVey.
So who is Therese Coffey?
Therese Coffey was born in Lancashire, to parents about whom neither Wikipedia nor her own website say anything at all. She was brought up in Liverpool, according to Wikipedia, which however says that she was at school both at St. Mary’s College, in the small North Wales town of Rhos-on-Sea, and at St. Edward’s College, Liverpool. Both were at the time private Roman Catholic schools. Coffey is a name of Irish origin.
Therese Coffey was awarded a B.A. degree by Oxford University (subject unknown), she having gone up to Somerville College; then (oddly, on the face of it) she acquired a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCL. Therese Coffey is often referred to as “Dr” Therese Coffey.
[Update, 21 May 2020: since writing the above, I have discovered that, while Oxford’s usual Chemistry degree is a 4-year course leading to a Master’s degree (M.Chem), the University does offer other chemistry-related 3-year science degrees
[Update, 7 September 2022: Wait a minute… it now turns out that Therese Coffey was asked to leave her Oxford college because she was not up to the course academically, and/or failed her exams! See update at foot of this blog post for more]
In England (though not in some other countries, notably Germany) it has always been considered infra dig to use the title “Doctor” unless one is either a medical doctor or some sort of working academic, scientist or clergyman. Unfortunately, there has fairly recently developed in the UK a strange affectation, of people insisting on referring to themselves as “Dr” when all they have is a doctorate in something (other than whatever they do professionally or whatever). So we have “Dr” Julian Lewis MP [Con, New Forest East], who holds a doctorate (D.Phil) in Strategic Studies. Another is “Dr” Louise Raw, “antifa” type prolific on Twitter, who holds a Ph.D. and whose special subject is one particular industrial strike in 1888. Now we also have “Dr” Therese Coffey.
Therese Coffey was awarded her doctorate in chemistry in 1998, at the age of 28. Her own website says that she was at one time a “management accountant”. She worked for Mars, the confectionery company, and for a subsidiary of the same, at which latter she was apparently Finance Director. She also did some work for the BBC. I think that we can assume that Therese Coffey’s non-political career was far from stellar.
Therese Coffey failed to become a Conservative MEP at the EU elections of both 2004 and 2009. She was, however, selected for the Conservative candidature at Suffolk Coastal (despite having been born and brought up in the North West of England, later living in Andover, Hampshire and having no obvious connection with Suffolk or East Anglia).
The expenses claimed by Therese Coffey in her first 6 months as MP were more than double those claimed by MPs in some other nearby seats. She seems to have kept her house and flat in Hampshire, which (it has been said of at least one) are being let.
Therese Coffey was one of the 72 MPs (almost all Conservatives) who both have an income of over £10,000 p.a. from rental property and voted out a bill requiring landlords to ensure that their properties were fit for human habitation! In other words, Therese Coffey is a parasite.
Therese Coffey voted to sell off woodland and forests in public ownership to private interests (the bill was dropped after a huge public outcry).
Therese Coffey has written a position paper recommending that pensioners pay National Insurance. She is a member of the extreme Free Enterprise Group within the Conservative Party.
Therese Coffey has been in favour of both Rupert Murdoch and gambling interests in the past.
Therese Coffey has from time to time bunged her own sister some money out of Parliamentary expenses for work (presumably) done.
Therese Coffey likes a “rock band” called Muse, it seems. I had never heard of them until now. Her interest in rock music seems bizarre, looking at her photographs and thinking of what can be gleaned of her personality (not very much). She certainly looks more like Patricia Routledge’s portrayal of the retirement-age Lancastrian private eye, Hetty Wainthropp, in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. However, Ms. Coffey’s liking for real ale (she is a member of CAMRA) is rather plausible. In fact, Ms. Coffey is only 47 years old, surprisingly, she having been born in November 1971.
I would have assumed that Therese Coffey is a lesbian, looking at this tank-like, Guinness-drinking, cigar-smoking person who likes football, but there is nothing I have found on the Internet to support such a conclusion directly; and she voted against “gay marriage” (and in that alone I support her, inasmuch as I feel that “civil partnership” provided whatever socio-legal comfort was necessary to deal with the inadequacies of the English law as it was in the previous century).
What disturbs me most about Therese Coffey is not so much what she has said, written and done, though that is bad enough, but what I have not seen from her: I have seen no intellectual curiosity that goes outside the box, for example any discussion of the need for Basic Income; neither have I seen anything else of intellectual interest from her. Admittedly, I have only been looking since her elevation to Cabinet (she was only a non-Cabinet minister earlier in 2019, and before that only one of the Conservative whips, traditionally a role for plodders…). If my view changes, I shall update this article, being by nature fair and just.
Therese Coffey may be the Cabinet minister with the lowest public profile. She is unknown to the general public. How long she will remain in Cabinet, I have no idea. If Boris-Idiot falls, “not long” is my guess. It may be thought unfair to dub someone with qualifications in both chemistry and accountancy a “deadhead”, but from the socio-political point of view I think that she well merits it. At any rate, as MP she is not going away, in that Suffolk Coastal is one of the safest Conservative seats.
Obscure Minister moans about duff advice from scientists https://t.co/VZdf6j9gzu Downing Street says she is being 'unhelpful' . I'll say she is. The recognition that scientific advice can be wrong and ministers are responsible for following it or not, is dangerous to this lot.
Just as well that she does not have the power to give DWP benefits claimants an electric shock via a dog collar…
Update, 6 October 2021
DWP Secretary Therese Coffey singing ‘I’m having the time of my life’ at Tory conference just an hour after the £20 Universal Cut came into force. pic.twitter.com/lspuFKGs4Q
I could comment, but my words would probably be regarded either as “grossly offensive” or as “incitement” to…something or other…
One thing is for sure— standing outside the Conservative Party Conference holding up placards asking for this kind of political criminal to be nicer to people just does not work…
(and what about this?)…
5.5 million families woke up £1040-a-year worse off as their universal credit was cut.
While they were sleeping, the secretary of state for work and pensions was doing karaoke. pic.twitter.com/8OSEN5lwNc
Jesus Christ! Could it get any worse? Do you call for its nurse, or just put it out of its misery?
Update, 6 September 2022
Well, whether you call it “the irony of fate”, a concatenation of unexpected events, or just madness, Therese Coffey has not only survived the fall of “Boris”-idiot, and stayed in Cabinet, but has been effectively promoted to two new positions— Secretary of State for Health, and Deputy Prime Minister.
It seems that —unknown to me until today— Therese Coffey and the —it seems strange to use the words— new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, are rather friendly. I suppose that, in that snake pit, Liz Truss would rather have a few friends around her rather than potential backstabbers who might, however, actually be competent at the jobs occupied.
The Twitterati have not been kind:
The fact that I have put Therese Coffey in charge of the NHS tells you all you need to know about my government. pic.twitter.com/2ioREL9tC5
Thérèse Coffey's reward for kicking thousands of disabled people off Universal Credit ahead of a major cost of living crisis is promotion to health secretary. Be very afraid.
Therese Coffey who hid 9 reports that apparently detailed wrong doings and cruelty in her last department is Health Secretary, Deputy PM – She is also best friends with Truss. https://t.co/XOoGOZRljv
Thérèse Coffey advised the covid unemployed to 'spend their savings', and told victims of Sunak's £20 a week universal credit cut to 'work another two hours'. She's now Britain's deputy prime minister.
Therese Coffey is an absolutely woeful politician. For her to be given such important roles is @trussliz treating them with contempt. Only been Prime Minister five minutes and already making nonsensical Johnson like appointments.
So there it is. Those who follow my blog, or read it regularly, will know or perhaps can guess what I think (inter alia, that tweeting, blogging, or complaining and protesting, will not rid our country of incompetent, corrupt, or evil politicians). Let’s leave it there…
Update, 7 September 2002
Wait a minute… it now turns out that Therese Coffey was asked to leave her Oxford college because either she was not up to the course academically, and/or failed her exams.
So how did she get even a BA degree from Somerville? Or is that a total fabrication, like Iain Dunce Duncan Smith’s notoriously fake CV? Other MPs also have faked or partly-faked CVs.
To my mind, Therese Coffey warrants further and deeper investigation. She may be, or may have been, involved in other fakery, fabrication and/or fraud.
Still, it seems now, more than ever, that she fully deserves the title “deadhead“.
Well, there they are— the stupid and ignorant “ho”, Liz Truss, already living on borrowed time as (and merely posing as) Prime Minister, and equally-ridiculous “Secretary of State for Health”, Therese Coffey.
The completely decadent and broken (and Jew-Zionist dominated) British political system, 2022, in a single photograph.
Free school meals extension -Not interested Obesity campaign -Not interested Tobacco control plan -Not interested Benefit uprating -‘No definitive statement can be made about uprating’#BBCR4today
R4 today. Therese Coffey absolutely hopeless. Sounds patronising, out of touch and somehow unpleasant. Horrible listening to her. What an absolutely detestable Government we have …. I believe they are Tories.
— #gotyourbackNHS. #BrexitbrokeBrittain (@lynwis) October 11, 2022
One wonders about the psychology of Therese Coffey, looking at her, and looking at the state of her. A fat and ugly woman, prematurely aged, who gets drunk, spills beer over herself, and smokes cigars while doing it. “Multiple frustrations” would be my armchair psychologist diagnosis.
What does it say about our system of “democracy”, and our system of MP and ministerial selection, that a ghastly and quite possibly evil woman of that sort can become, by a series of “chance” events, a Deputy Prime Minister?
The same goes, of course, for the stupid and ignorant “ho” presently posing as Prime Minister.
Just watched a snippet of Kay Burley interviewing Therese Coffey. It gets more disgraceful every time you see it. Coffey could not give two shits. What a criminal state of affairs having a thing like that as Deputy Prime Minister. No wonder she pretends to be unaware. Horrendous!
Interesting, but not surprising. My assessment of the bitch, from 2019, implied as much.
‘It’s news to me,’ Deputy Prime Minister Therese Coffey says, when asked about UK financial market instability on Sky News this morning. Surely that’s not the line.. https://t.co/j7nx2rrw9R
Had one not seen what has been going on in the governance of Britain since at least 2010, one would perhaps be surprised that someone as totally inadequate, dim, and also amoral as Therese Coffey could ever climb higher than the backbenches.
How will the government pay for the £60 billion black hole?
Therese Coffey says she can't get into "hypotheticals" but growing the economy is essential and the Chancellors will share his plan at the end of the month.
— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5% 🇪🇺🐟🇬🇧🏴☠️🦠💙 (@g_gosden) October 11, 2022
Look at the bitch! Look at her friend and boss, “ho” Truss, too. They are both embarrassments to this country, as are woolly-head Kwarteng and half-caste thicko James Cleverly.
Update, 23 October 2022
Cuts, closures, DIY dentistry: welcome to the NHS in Thérèse Coffey’s seat https://t.co/8zZwXYOO80
Indian money-juggler Rishi Sunak may now have taken over as bad-joke “Prime Minister”, but Therese Coffey has survived in Cabinet, unbelievably, and still sits there, stupid, incompetent, but immovable…
I’m sorry, but if you’ve been put forward to do the morning media rounds, it’s literally your job to know the fucking details!! Typically useless, arrogant Coffey dodging difficult questions with lazy, well worn responses. https://t.co/FhUgifRC2W
The failure of the so-called “political class”, aka Westminster Bubblers, is manifest more clearly every day. We now know, if we did not already know, that the government of this country is in the hands of incompetent chancers, that the Opposition is in the hands of bad jokes, that the British Constitution is not a finely-tuned machine but a broken bit of clockwork, and that the Queen is about as much use as a human rubber stamp.
Brexit looms, but the fact is that now it either will not happen at all or will happen only in some very vague way (Brexit In Name Only). The only way that it can now happen as a real thing is if Boris Johnson, for reasons of blatant self-interest, manages to get it over the line, and that is looking increasingly unlikely.
In the law, a saying was always “justice delayed is justice denied”. Apply that to the 2016 Referendum.
Now no-one expected that the UK would leave the EU the very next day. There are processes, procedures, timetables etc. However, the British Government, or what passes for it, should have within a short space of time triggered the Article 50 process, which (under the Lisbon Treaty) gives a state wishing to exit the EU two years in which to complete the leave process. In fact, Theresa May did not even send the triggering letter for nearly a year after the 2016 Referendum; she then asked for extension of time when the process should already have been completed.
Had the 2-year process (it can be less— 1 year, 18 months, whatever) been started soon after the Referendum result, the whole Brexit process would have been finished by the Autumn of 2018 at the latest. Now here we are, more than a year later, and with no obvious closure in sight.
I always said, right from the start, that a huge campaign would be waged by the international conspiracy to keep the UK in or tied to the EU. The EU is a major building-block of the New World Order strategy. The UK is a major building-block of the EU. You get my meaning.
I favour the UK getting out of the EU, I favour Brexit, but the Brexit process has been so criminally mishandled that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that that mishandling was done deliberately.
Whatever the truth of all that, the fact is that the sheer duration of this whole process, which has now gone on for over three years, has not only delayed democratic decision from being implemented, but has denied democracy itself. Now it is said by the Remain partisans that it is so long since the 2016 Referendum that huge numbers of people have changed their minds or even just died, and so it is bizarre to implement the Referendum decision.
That view is not without force: the process has dragged on. People may well have a different view now, but that is in part why the process should have been expedited and handled properly. If a general election were called and held and if then the results were delayed in being implemented for 3 or 4 years, I daresay that many people would start to say “I have changed my mind!”…
So here we are, still in a state of uncertainty. I cannot say whether the UK will leave or (in the Remainers’ propagandistic “transformational vocabulary”) “crash out” of the EU “without a deal”, i.e. on basic WTO terms, or whether some “deal” not very dissimilar to Theresa May’s one(s) will be accepted both by the person presently posing as Prime Minister and by the UK Parliament. It is an open question as I write.
What about the next election?
It now appears that any general election will not be called until October (assuming that Parliament is not recalled until October) and so may not happen until November, or even later.
Boris Johnson wanted to make the next general election all about Brexit. That way, fervent pro-Brexit voters would join with those who would vote Conservative-label whatever, giving the Conservative Party a Commons majority fuelled by Brexit anger. That has now been denied to him.
As time goes by, the inadequacies so obvious in Boris-Idiot will become ever more apparent. That is a major reason why Boris needs a swift election. Time is not on his side, in my opinion.
At present, most of the opinion polls put the Conservatives well in the lead, by 3, 5, 10, even 14 points over Labour. Neither the LibDems nor Brexit Party are at 25% in the polls, though a recent outlying poll had the LibDems close to 20%. A national average below 25% will not change political history.
In 2005, the LibDems got 22%, then increased that to 23% in 2010. In 2015, the LibDem vote declined to 7.9%, and in 2017 to 7.4%, but the LibDems’ propensity to embed themselves in particular seats meant that they retained 8 seats in 2015 and (by reason of Britain’s mad and unfair FPTP voting system) won a total of 12 seats in 2017.
At present, the Conservatives are polling generally above 30%, in one outlier at 35%. Labour is in the doldrums, somewhere in the 23%-29% range. That is very poor, bearing in mind the overall situation.
Present polling would place the Conservatives in Commons-majority territory, though the size of that majority could be anywhere from single figures to triple figures.
The Jews have been on Corbyn’s back for years, and he has (perhaps typically) chosen to ignore the threat from them rather than take the war to them. So he has chosen (along with John McDonnell) to parrot “holocaust” nonsense and the like (eg on officially-marked “holocaust” days), rather than fight the lies and fakery of the whole “holocaust” scenario and mega-scam. Meanwhile, Tom Watson, Corbyn’s supposed deputy, someone completely in the pocket of the Jewish lobby, has chosen this crucial time, of all times, to highlight yet more “Labour antisemitism” propaganda!
In other words, Labour remains a house divided and in fact divided in more ways than one. That does not attract voters. Also unattractive to much of the electorate is the fact that so many Labour MPs now are blacks and browns. The Labour core vote now is really the black-brown part of the population, together with public service workers (notably NHS) and others paid or supported via State monies of one kind or another.
The white British voters are mostly not voting Labour now: the Scottish ones mostly vote SNP and Conservative (about 70% in all), whereas the English are voting primarily Conservative (42.4% in UK in 2017, but that figure disguises a higher percentage in England itself). It is not that voters generally like or respect the Conservatives, but that Labour is a complete turn-off for many. A vote not for, but against…
Labour however has some good cards to play in terms of policy: rail nationalization, utilities regulation, rights of tenants and employees. It is just that it is not being allowed by the pro-Conservative/pro-Israel msm from putting that message effectively to most voters. There is also the point that, despite the complete unfitness of Boris Johnson for public office, his age and vigour (albeit misdirected vigour) helps him vis-a-vis Corbyn, who is presented in the msm as old and (by implication) useless.
I do not see Labour as coming back, in electoral terms, in most of England and Wales outside London and the West Midlands/Northern rustbelts. Could anything change that? There is one thing. Breakdown of public order and/or resupply of basic goods.
The Yellowhammer report, if accurate, indicates the possibility of shortages of fuel, medicines, even fresh food, if the UK leaves the UK without a “deal” of some kind. If that were to happen, then people would rapidly turn, not to Labour, as such, but against the Conservative government.
There are other nuances: Brexit Party has deflated from its stellar start, and the Conservatives have rejected an electoral pact, but if the UK does not fully leave the EU in reality, Brexit Party, like Antaeus, would contact its native earth and be reinvigorated. That would cut into the Conservative vote. On 15%, Brexit Party weakens, but not mortally, the Conservatives’ chances; on anything over 20%, Brexit Party would cull dozens if not hundreds of Conservative MPs even if Brexit Party itself were to win few seats.
Another Con Coalition?
Jo Swinson, entirely in the pocket of the Jewish lobby, has now said that she would never “work with” Corbyn (because of “anti-Semitism”, she says; but she is completely pro-finance capitalism anyway). That would seem to rule out a coalition or arrangement with Labour (so long as Corbyn heads it); it does not rule out a coalition with the Conservatives.
Conclusion
I should say that, at this stage, despite most polls showing the Conservatives many points ahead of Labour, the next general election is quite open. It is unlikely that Labour can win a Commons majority, but it is just about possible that, if chaos or the appearance of chaos soon rules, Labour could, if largest party, come to an arrangement with the SNP and smaller parties (Plaid, Greens, some Northern Irish) to form a minority government.
A Boris Johnson government with a real majority would be a catastrophe. You might as well relocate the UK government to Tel Aviv.
Much depends on whether Boris Johnson makes major mistakes between now and then. Apart from that, the election may well be dependent more than usually upon…events.
Economists at world’s biggest banks now scoping out fiscal/economic/ sterling/ market response to a snap General election…
eg Citi, a surprise to some, say base case for Johnson win now No Deal, Corbyn now second ref & remain, and have GDP 1.5-2% higher under Corbyn-led Govt: pic.twitter.com/0TKaLFkrAT
…which would give the “Conservatives” a Commons majority of as much as 92.
On the other hand, ComRes has published this (see below), which might see Labour as the largest party in the Commons (265 seats as against the Conservatives’ 261) but about 61 seats short of a majority, in which case the only way in which Corbyn could rule would be via an arrangement with the SNP (Jo Swinson having already ruled out the LibDems, who on this showing might have 45 MPs), with Plaid Cymru, Green and Irish MPs in the mix. What would the SNP want as an inducement? Probably more funding for Scotland, and the right to call another Independence referendum whenever they like. I imagine that the Kremlin will be taking a keen interest, in view of, inter alia, the nuclear submarine bases in Scotland.
The two latest polls indicate the political uncertainty about: the YouGov poll might mean a Conservative plurality in the Commons, but no majority (perhaps about 6 short of a majority, so not so different to the present situation); the Opinium poll, in a general election, would give the Conservatives a Commons majority of around 156!
> Voters (52%) say they would support the Brexit deal if the EU removes the Northern Ireland backstop. > Plurality (49%) opposed to delaying Brexit. 42% are in favour. > Majority of Tory and Brexit Party voters support an election pact. pic.twitter.com/dL7Op9cJqo
The Brexit mess has become entangled with the straight party-political fight. There are many who despise the Conservative Party who are quite hard-line Leave/Brexit partisans. Me for one. To be pro-Brexit is not necessarily to be pro-Conservative Party, and still less to be in favour of Boris Johnson.
The most recent polling (even more recent than that shown above) shows that most voters oppose the tactical prorogation of Parliament, a higher percentage than those who simply oppose (or support) “no deal” Brexit.
This prorogation feels like a coup d’etat even though, in strictly factual or logical terms, it is not one. This may be because the prorogation does not stand alone. At about the same time as the prorogation has been announced, the eminence grise in Johnson’s wake, Dominic Cummings, has taken it upon himself to sack a Special Adviser (SpAd) even though said SpAd worked to Sajid Javid, who was not even informed until the matter was a fait accompli.
There’s more. Boris Johnson is apparently “considering” preventing Conservative MPs who do not show complete loyalty to him over the Brexit matter (or otherwise?) from standing as MPs in a future (perhaps even the upcoming) general election.
These actions display a mindset which could be called dictatorial or even tyrannical. There are some people who should never hold power, not even so much because they might exercize it in a dictatorial way, but because they would misuse it in a tyrannical way.
The mindset of Boris Johnson is basically tyrannical. When he was Mayor of London and (co-incidentally) large-scale riots erupted, he veered between complete panic and a kneejerk tyranny which included his decision to buy water-cannon, which weapons in the end were never used and in fact could not be used (because not approved by the Home Office for use on British streets). Boris-Idiot is useless in a crisis.
People of Britain….beware. This rootless, part-Jew, part-Muslim-origined narcissist, born and largely brought up overseas, will say, or do, or promise, anything at all to get what he wants, which is (and is only…he has no real ideology or ideals, or even plans) to be in the spotlight.
One can only dread what might happen to this country if Boris Johnson is actually able to have and exercize real power, actually able to pass laws directly affecting the people of the UK and their lives. He is unrestrained by any feeling or understanding of, or for, law, ethics, religion, or even simple decency.
Only one thing stands in the way of Johnson— his non-majority in the House of Commons. It now looks as though Johnson’s plan is to use Brexit to achieve a (misnamed) “Conservative” majority in the Commons. Typically, the msm has got it wrong. Johnson does not want a majority to enforce “no deal” or other Brexit. Au contraire; he wants to use the Brexit situation to gamble on getting that Commons majority, after which he and his pro-Israel, pro-Zionist, pro-finance-capitalist Cabinet of criminals and agents of Israel will start to destroy what is left of the freedoms, rights and public decencies left in the UK.
Not long ago, a few months ago, even a few weeks ago, it was possible to think that the Labour Party might become the largest party in the House of Commons after the next general election. I do not think that that is at all likely now.
The Conservative Party can only get a majority in the Commons if Labour is unpopular. That binary choice —Conservative/Labour— was axiomatically the way things were in past decades. The three-party and four-party politics (if the SNP is included, five-party politics) of the past 10-20 years altered that binary, but have not replaced it.
If Brexit Party, or the LibDems, or any other party, could get above (about) 25% of the popular vote, then whichever party did that would reach the FPTP tipping-point and would have a large bloc in the Commons. Below that imprecise level, and the party concerned either gets no MPs or a handful, depending on the degree of concentration of votes in particular constituencies rather than across the board. The Germans, as always, have a word for such concentration, the Schwerpunkt. In 2015, UKIP had no Schwerpunkt anywhere, “only” 12.6% of the popular vote. Result: only 1 MP.
The record low vote-share registered for a successful candidate in a Westminster election was that achieved by Alasdair McDonnell of the SDLP at Belfast South in 2015: 24.5%. That illustrates rather well the problem faced by non-main parties. The Green Party has only ever had one MP, Caroline Lucas. She was elected for Brighton Pavilion in 2010 on a vote-share of 31.9%. The national vote for Green Party was below 1%. In fact, at the General Election 2017, the Green Party still got only 1.6% (a decline from the 3.6% won in 2015), but Caroline Green’s own 2017 vote went up to 52.3%. In 2005, the Green Party candidate at Brighton Pavilion got a 21.9% vote but that was not enough to win (he came in 3rd).
Leaving aside unusual circumstances, exceptional candidates, fairly equal 3-way or 4-way splits in a constituency etc, a party needs about 25% or more across the board to succeed. The recent polls (meaning those taken since Boris Johnson became leader of his party) all put the Conservatives well ahead of Labour, in one or two cases 11 points ahead. Not that voters generally like Johnson, but even fewer rate Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn not only scores below Johnson on every indicator (except “is he ‘caring’?”), but Corbyn, as “potential Prime Minister”, scores even below the LibDem leader, Jo Swinson! JO SWINSON! What can one say? Yes, of course the Jew-Zionist termites in the msm have trashed Corbyn for 4 years, but that is not the whole story. The anti-Corbyn propaganda has been able to hugely amplify Corbyn’s real deficiencies.
Labour is now a point or two behind, not the Conservatives (they are, incredibly, miles ahead of Labour) but the LibDems! The figures differ slightly, but tell similar stories. The most significant fact of all, though, is not that the Conservatives are ahead of Labour, nor that the LibDems are ahead of Labour (the latest poll, from DeltapollUK, in fact has Labour ahead of the LibDems) but that both are below that 25% Rubicon (Con 35%, Lab 24%, LibDem 18%, Brexit Party 14%).
The above poll would, even without any Con-Brexit Party electoral pact, give the Conservatives a Commons majority of somewhere in the region of 124. If that were to happen, there could, somewhere down the line, be actual civil war breaking out, bearing in mind the kind of policies the Cons would implement, e.g. getting rid of State pensions for the under-75s (the first State old age pension brought in by Lloyd George in 1911 was from 70 years of age).
As I have blogged previously, the Labour Party is now, at core, the party for the ethnic minorities, the NHS and other public service workers, and those dependent on State benefits (excluding pensioners). That is why it struggles to get beyond 30% in elections (eg the recent Peterborough by-election).
The Labour Party, at this time of national importance, is almost invisible. I do not entirely blame Corbyn. The previous ZOG/NWO “Labour” governments of Blair and Brown betrayed the (white, esp. English, Welsh) British people in various ways. Corbyn-Labour has tried to reconnect, but how can it when Labour puts up deadheads such as Kate Osamor and Fiona Onasanya as MPs? How can it, when Corbyn expresses support for Irish tinker “traveller” riff-raff and “Roma” thieves and scavengers?
This is not just me talking. Look at those polls, such as the Survation graphic at top of this blog article. Boris Johnson, Conservative Party leader, a part-Jew, of cosmopolitan origins, who attended Eton and Oxford, where he even belonged to the Bullingdon Club, scores better than Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on “does he have the common touch?”! You really could not make it up.
It pains me to have to say it, because Corbyn is at least anti-Zionist (though cringingly half-heartedly when it comes to the Jewish lobby in the UK and France), but I think that Labour is unsalvageable now, whether under Corbyn or not.
Labour is “socialist” now, at least more than at any time since 1997 or even 1992, but that is not enough. It is not “national” in the sense of “nationalist” (neither is the Conservative Party, but Johnson pretends to be, sometimes). What the voters really, unconsciously, want is social nationalism, but there is no party offering that in an acceptable way, and no major party offering it at all. Hence voter apathy.
Can Labour do anything to salvage what might be a general election as soon as November or even October? It could. Whether it will, who knows? My points:
If Labour really hit hard on how the Conservatives intend to attack pensioners via sharp and swift increases in pensionable age, via cuts to old age care, via other cuts to pensioners’ incomes;
If Labour really went all out to save its white English vote;
If Labour made, harder, the points where it has voter support: railways, old age care, utilities; NHS funding, education;
If Labour really went into all-out attack on the Jewish Lobby, especially in terms of msm coverage of Labour itself, but also in terms of attacking exploitation of British workers by horrible predators such as Philip Green;
If Corbyn stops being or seeming invisible and inaudible.
I have no confidence that Labour can do any of the above effectively. It is in a ghetto of blacks, browns, NHS employees, and people reliant on State benefits. However, these are its core support areas. If it is thought to have abandoned them, Labour might well do even worse.
Brexit Party is proving to be a damp squib so far. It too is not social-national, in fact it is the mirror image of Labour— “national” without being “socialist”…
Brexit Party is now languishing in the polls, around 15%. Good for a “new” party (really the UKIP snake without its old skin), but unless BP can get voter support somewhere well above 20% soon, it will sink the way UKIP did.
Polls usually narrow before Election Day. If they do not, we could be looking at a very solid Conservative Party majority and so a government which, even in advance, is making some of its own MPs uneasy… However, if Labour can somehow recover from 21%-24% to somewhere around 30%, then we may be back to more or less where we are today, a minority Conservative government.
There is an outside chance that, from the desperation of the 30% of eligible voters who do not vote, there might come a surprise anti-Conservative upsurge at the last minute.
Meanwhile… a fine example of the Westminster Bubble: a few thousand (thousands, or hundreds?) of demonstrators make noise around the Palace of Westminster, achieve nothing, change nothing, but go home with the delusionary warm feeling that they have…and ITV News reports on it as if at the Storming of the Bastille!
These people would, most of them, never throw a stone, let alone a Molotov Cocktail, and they think that they will rattle what is now a near-tyrannical Boris-Idiot government? They will not even rattle the windows of the nearest Waitrose cafe!
Look again at that tweet, above, by one Paul Brand of ITV [nb: since posting of this article, apparently deleted]: “Traffic has been brought to a standstill.” No! Traffic brought to a standstill? At one roundabout in Central London? Call out the Preobrazhensky and Izmailovsky Guards! Notify the Tsar!
More. Here is Katie Hopkins, making a good point about how unrepresentative the Remain side is, though her point about the ethnic minorities could be made equally in relation to the Leave side. Also few blacks and browns. That, in a way, is why the international conspiracy (NWO/ZOG) is encouraging mass invasion of white Europe by blacks and browns (The Great Replacement), because most of the ethnic minorities cannot organize and will not stand up for what we have known as civil rights and freedoms.
Boris spent most of his press conference at 6pm talking about a new EU deal. It is not a deal, it is an EU treaty. We Are Ready for a clean break Brexit. pic.twitter.com/SjzljPNM9B
My attention was caught by this tweet [below], posted by the political scientist Matthew Goodwin (who used to block me on Twitter, I think, but we’ll say no more about that for now).
Eurozone economy slows to 0.2% in second quarter while trade between eurozone states just contracted at fastest pace for more than 6 years pic.twitter.com/9oubRSKAyq
In Germany, the economy is contracting. For the first time (as far as I know) since 1945, Germany is doing worse economically than the present Eurozone states as a whole are doing (and they are not doing well either). In Italy, the League (formerly Northern League) has a plurality of support. Italy is now actively standing against the attempt of the international conspiracy to flood Europe with blacks and browns.
Meanwhile, in Italy & amid delay to confidence vote latest poll puts #Salvini League on 36% — up from 17% at election last year. Alliance with Berlusconi + far right Brothers of Italy could be on cards. Would be even harder right coalition on continent drifting right …#EUpic.twitter.com/6iZHz8V8KB
A few years ago, it seemed possible that the EU was going to collapse politically:
Now, that seems less likely, at least in the short term and on the surface, if only because the System parties and politicians across Europe are hunkering down to protect “their” project (the EU-superstate NWO/ZOG project) out of which those parties and individuals have done so well for themselves. In addition, most of the insurgent parties are at present trying to destroy the EU from within, or to alter it radically, rather than pushing for their home states to exit the EU.
Britain is a major part of the EU not only because of its economic strength (even now), but also because the UK is the ideological, attitudinal, military halfway house between the mainland of Europe and the USA.
If Britain leaves the EU on WTO terms, the economic damage to the UK will be real, but do not underestimate the damage to the EU itself. The EU project is on a knife-edge both politically and economically. Brexit might well push the EU over the edge, especially now that the world economy as a whole is slowing. The EU may not “officially” fall to pieces for a while, but in reality it is like a tree, the trunk of which has been cut through, but which has not yet crashed to the ground.
Conclusion
We are looking at the resurgence, not far down the line, of the core peoples of Europe. I am not talking about “civil war” as experienced by people in recent decades or centuries. We are looking at culture war, socio-economic war, race war, religious war, all tied up together, entangled. This may continue for decades once it starts. Out of it may emerge, in the end, a society of a different kind altogether. God mote it be!
Afterthought
As far as the UK domestic political situation is concerned, we see attempts within the pathetic and incompetent British “political class” to stop “no-deal” Brexit. If one or other such attempt succeeds, then the major System parties are toast, first and foremost the Conservative Party. Brexit Party will challenge all Conservative MPs at the next, perhaps very soon, general election. That must unseat many of them, perhaps most of them. A Conservative Party of little more than 100 MPs is now a realistic possibility. As to Labour, its core vote now cannot be much higher than 25%. Brexit Party may not get more than a few dozen MPs in the short term, but it has the possibility of changing the face of British politics forever by weakening and perhaps destroying the two main System parties, now seen as colossi on legs of straw.
Well, now we know that there was a General Election (in December 2019). In that campaign, Nigel Farage stabbed his own party, Brexit Party, in the back, by standing down all Brexit Party candidates who were standing against Conservative candidates. This all but guaranteed a Conservative Party victory.
It now seems even less likely than before that the UK will leave the EU in reality. We have the much-discussed BRINO, Brexit In Name Only, maybe for years, in most respects. However, we now have an unexpected aspect: Coronavirus. This, or rather the panicky shutdown of several countries’ economies by their own governments, has placed the EU in even more of a pickle. Watch this space.
In the Notes, below this article, is the text of a Guardian piece by the well-known expert on the British Constitution, Vernon Bogdanor. Worth reading, but what struck me apart from its detail was that one possibility mooted as a way out of the Brexit impasse is a so-called “government of national unity headed by someone such as Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper“. YVETTE COOPER?! You mean (he means) Yvette Cooper the expenses cheat and greedy careerist freeloader? Yvette Cooper the “refugees welcome” hypocrite, who thinks that British people should all have to put up with culturally-backward hordes invading their country, their neighbourhoods, even their own homes? (Needless to say, Yvette Cooper and her equally greedy, cheating, freeloading husband, Ed Balls, have somehow avoided sharing their own comfortable large home(s) with the migrant-invaders). Yvette Cooper, the total doormat for the Jewish-Zionist lobby?
That sounds to me more like a government of national disunity!
In fact, though it may be largely factually correct, the Guardian piece shows to what extent the mainly London-based chattering classes and msm milieux are out of tune and in fact completely out of touch with what I take to be the majority of the population.
A “government of national unity”? In order to deal with a crisis entirely inflicted upon the people by the political class and more particularly the Conservative Party? It is not so much about Brexit itself as about the way in which persons governing despite being unfit to govern have criminally mishandled Brexit. I myself favoured Leave and Brexit in 2016, and still do, but (in the immortal words of Johnny Mercer MP), this is “a shitshow” and most of it has been and is a Conservative Party shitshow.
I expect that many will see my view as unnecessarily apocalyptic. I disagree. Many opinion polls have shown how very disenchanted the voters really are, to the point where many are willing to vote for Brexit Party, a party which, apart from the UK leaving the EU, has no policies at all. That willingness, to vote for a new party without any real policies (even in outline) also supports my view that voters at present are voting against the parties they oppose, rather than for parties they support.
There is no social national party for people to support (obviously I do not bother to examine again the bad-joke “parties” of recent years: Britain First, For Britain, the rumps of the old NF and BNP etc). UKIP too, which —as I predicted since 2015— is now so “yesterday” that I almost forgot to include it. There is a political vacuum.
As it is, the voters are left, at present, with the LibLabCon parties, i.e. the System parties, and the Brexit Party. Anyone (meaning anyone white and English, or Welsh, the Scots having the faux-“nationalist” SNP) and discontented with the way the UK is, can only either refuse to participate or can vote Brexit Party as a protest (or vote of hate against the System parties).
How has it come to this, that instead of the UK leaving the EU in a fairly orderly fashion, the government and msm are now talking in terms of food shortages? This is unbelievable! Those responsible are mainly the ministers and MPs of the Conservative Party, who after all have been in power now for over 9 years, including of course the 3 years since the 2016 Referendum. It is they who have messed up the negotiations, they who have blithely said that everything will be all right, they who have been the Government. Not Labour, not the LibDems, not Brexit Party.
Now we come to Boris-idiot. Boris Johnson as Prime Minister is, to me, no more acceptable or believable than food shortages as a result of Brexit. To me, he is not a legitimate Prime Minister of this country. He is totally unfit to be a prime minister of anywhere. He is only there because of the flaw in the UK’s constitutional arrangements, by which flaw a prime minister can resign without that prime minister’s successor having to call an immediate general election. In the case of Boris Johnson, he is also there because spineless Conservative Party MPs thought (I doubt rightly) that Boris-idiot was or is more “electable” than any of his opponents in the Conservative Party leadership contest, and so would give all Conservative Party MPs a better chance of electoral survival.
When you see Boris-idiot, you have to factor-in to everything that he says or writes that his primary and often only purpose is his own selfish interest.
Now we are told that Johnson is set on either leaving the EU on bare WTO terms or (if he can frighten the EU enough) getting a better “deal” than did the absurd bad-joke PM, Theresa May.
Boris-idiot’s calculation is very very obvious: if the EU makes even a slightly better offer, Boris “Tribune of the People” and “Conquering Hero” presents that to the House of Commons, which then either accepts it (so anointing Idiot as “great statesman” who would probably then win a general election if held fairly soon thereafter), or rejects it (so casting Idiot as “heroic but conspired against”).
On the other hand, if the EU refuses to make a better offer, Boris The Poundland Churchill can shake his fist at Brussels, take or try to take the UK out of the EU on WTO terms, and if that is blocked in the Commons, hold a general election, casting himself again as that “Tribune of the People” against Remainer (especially Labour, LibDem and SNP) MPs and Brussels eurocrats.
Whatever happens, keep eyes focussed on the fact that Boris Johnson is doing whatever he is doing for short-term political advantage. Having supported the fake “austerity” of his fellow part-Jews David Cameron-Levita and George Osborne, Boris Johnson now flashes the cash everywhere: NHS, police, whatever. Shallow 18th Century style largesse-politics.
Is Boris-Idiot correct in his calculations? Will be be borne back to power on a wave of anti-EU anger? I doubt it.
Let us say that there are food shortages (whether caused by Brexit, hold-ups at the ports, miscalculations by the large supermarket chains or panic-buying by the urban masses in the British cities). Who will be blamed? The EU? Perhaps, partly, at first. However, I believe that the people will also and in any event before long start to blame (and with reason) the “Conservative” government.
If the UK does not leave the EU on 31 October, then government remains paralyzed by its lack of a Parliamentary majority. If an election is then held, Brexit Party will stand in 650 constituencies and so enable the slaughter of dozens and even hundreds of Conservative MPs.
Boris Johnson is probably calculating that, if he can take the UK out of the EU on 31 October 2019, the voting public will see him (however ludicrous that may be to you and me) as a strong leader (when he is neither) who has kept to his word. He can then in effect call a general election and hope to win a Commons majority because either Brexit Party will fade away or not stand candidates, or will be sidelined by the electorate.
No doubt Johnson will hope that, like Pacific salmon who die after spawning, Brexit Party will expire, having reached its goal of a UK exit from the EU. Such a calculation may be misplaced. How Brexit Party would present itself if the UK really does leave, at least on paper, on 31 October, I am unsure. Perhaps by saying that the exit is not sure, not definite or that Brexit may possibly be reversed by an incoming government.
One thing is certain: Brexit is about more than Brexit and, that being so, Brexit Party itself, should its leader Farage so decide, could morph into a party of general faux-nationalist discontent. That sounds vague, but what is more vague than a party with neither policies nor ideology?
There is more going on than Brexit, of course. All the problems the UK has will still be there on 1 November: mass immigration (which will not stop after Brexit, far from it!), NHS decline, social security and housing defects and shortages, the increase in violent crime, social decadence and decline; and so on.
The msm and TV talking heads, the metro-“liberal” journalists, lawyers, media folk etc, all insulated by affluence, mostly London-centric, were shocked by the 2016 Referendum result, by the 2017 election results, by the immediate failure of their briefly-cherished “Change UK” pro-Jewish joke party, by Trump’s election too. In a word, these people are out-of-touch. Their experience of the years 2010-2019 is not the same as that of well over half the UK population.
My view is that a coming general election might produce a big shock again. The only thing preventing a landslide for a social-nationalist party is that, quite simply, no social national party exists.
In the no doubt upcoming 2019 or possibly early 2020 General Election, I believe that neither of the main System parties will do well. I believe that both the LibDems and Brexit Party could do well, if only as a reaction against the main two.
The two main System parties have both been losing not only loyal voters but their own raisons d’etre, and their heart.
Labour will keep the votes of the blacks and browns generally, as well as those of the public service workers and those dependent on State benefits. It may not keep the votes of those it has taken for granted for a century: the British (i.e. white) poorer people as such. They are now either voting with their feet (i.e. not voting) or voting desperately elsewhere. In 2005 or so, BNP; 2010-2015, UKIP. Now they vote, some of them, Brexit Party. I put the Labour vote as likely to be around 30%.
The Conservative Party cannot now appeal to Thatcherite-style “aspiration”. That was something real back in the 1980s. I remember sitting in a branch of Wheeler’s (fish restaurant) in Blackheath in 1986 or 1987. At the next table, a young plumber (the tables were not far apart and he was a little loud) and his girlfriend talking about his income, his house-purchase plans etc. Afterwards, my then girlfriend and I mused about the social changes then in train (a young tradesman and girlfriend eating at Wheeler’s and buying a house). Could that happen now? Perhaps, but it would be unusual, I think.
The Conservative vote nationally is now mainly that of the rich and affluent (nothing new there), which would be no more than 5% to (at most) 20% of the population. There are some older but not affluent people who still vote Conservative out of long habit, even against their own interests, but they are a dwindling stock. That is why the Conservative MPs backed Boris-idiot as their leader, because they hoped that this part-Jew public entertainer could jolly along enough unthinking voters to make up the numbers. All the same, I should not put the Conservative vote now much above 30%, and that might fall back to 20% if the UK experiences significant disruption or economic dislocation soon.
The LibDems may soon be able to corner the Remain vote in the South of England.
Brexit Party might just be the recipient of any further or renewed “roar of rage” from an electorate in pain. If that happens (meaning if Brexit Party gets at least 20% of the popular vote), then the Conservatives will soon be “an ex-party”, at least so far as government is concerned.
Many might say, so you get rid of a Conservative MP and put in a small-c conservative Brexit Party MP, what’s the difference? Well, it’s not that simple anyway (because LibDems and Labour might capture more Con seats than does Brexit Party), but the good thing is that many many evil Conservative Party MPs will be out of UK politics, many for good. Connections and career paths will be ruined. I don’t much like Champagne, but if that happened, I might make an exception. If the damage were great, I might even drink Bollinger instead of mere champagne-type such as Sekt.
A similar picture might emerge in the North as regards Labour (if Conservative voters vote Brexit Party to keep Labour out), but one thing at a time! The main thing is to cull the hundreds of Conservative Friends of Israel. And it could soon happen.
The way lies open, not far away, for social nationalism on a scale never before seen in the UK.
My analysis was right, but my prediction not right as far as the chances at an election of the Conservative Party were concerned. I failed to foresee that con-man Nigel Farage would stab his own candidates and Brexit Party members in the back, and stand down virtually all Brexit Party 2019 General Election candidates, thus gifting the Conservative Party and Boris-idiot an 80-seat Commons majority.
The LibDems won fairly decisively, but with a smaller majority than the betting might have been suggesting. I have posted several informative links below.
Why did the LibDems win, why did the Conservative Party not win?
For me, the most important aspect beyond the headline result is the fact that the Conservative ex-MP, Christopher Davies, would have won, perhaps even handsomely, were it not for the candidature of Brexit Party, which received 3,331 votes.
The LibDem majority over the Conservatives was only 1,425. In other words, had Brexit Party not been standing, the Conservatives would almost certainly have won, and probably by nearly 2,000 votes. The Brexit Party received a vote-share of only 10.5% (LibDems 43.5%, Conservatives 39%), but that was more than enough to sink the Conservative candidate.
The Labour vote has suffered a general decline in the constituency over the years (all-time high was 57.69% in 1964), but this was its lowest-ever vote-share (5.3%). I attribute that partly and perhaps mainly to tactical voting: Labour supporters voting against the Conservatives (mainly) in a situation where Labour had no real chance anyway (the Labour vote here has not exceeded 20% since 2001 (21.4%). However, the 5.3%, barely enough to retain the deposit, does tend to support my view that Labour is now the party of the blacks and browns, the public service workers and those mainly dependent on State benefits.
The Sky News Political Correspondent tweeted something interesting about the Labour vote in Brecon and Radnorshire, which had been in the 10%-18% range since 2005 and until this by-election’s collapse to 5.3%:
Lib Dem source tells me Labour vote is in freefall: “Lab vote in deposit losing territory. We will have been massive beneficiaries of that. Lots bringing up Corbyn as a reason for switching to us on the doorsteps – more than just a tactical squeeze.” #BreconByelection
Brecon and Radnorshire is almost entirely white British in demographic terms (Powys, the county in which is situated the constituency, is said to be 99.3% white British). In white British areas, Labour increasingly has no chance. Labour scarcely speaks to or for white British people now. This has implications that go far beyond Brecon and Radnorshire.
The Conservatives and Brexit Party down the line
Brexit Party is one of two parties that emerged in 2019 despite having no real policies (the other being the pro-EU, pro-Remain, pro-Jewish lobby party, Change UK, which sputtered to a halt almost immediately and now scarcely exists).
There is no doubt that the early promise of Brexit Party has somewhat blunted since its great 2019 EU elections success. The recent Peterborough by-election was nearly won, but not quite, Brexit Party losing to Labour by a mere 683 votes. Now we have another, though less unexpected, disappointment. Nigel Farage and his large meetings held before both the EU elections and the Peterborough by-election built up a head of steam and a head of expectation, but so far that pressure has just tooted into the void, at least as far as Westminster is concerned.
The political landscape has just suffered an earthquake. Boris Johnson (aka, to me, “Boris-idiot”) is now, incredibly, Prime Minister (or Fool posing as “King for a Day”), having been put there by about 92,000 Conservative Party members (out of about 50 MILLION voters, in other words by about 1 out of every 500 or so eligible voters). He has “pledged” (for what little his pledges are worth) to leave the EU “deal or no deal” by 31 October 2019. If that seems about to happen, I am assuming that the anti-“no deal”/WTO MPs will block it and/or vote for a no-confidence motion. That might in turn cause Boris Johnson to trigger a general election.
Alternatively, the EU might offer Johnson a form of words that he can present to the Commons as a workable “deal” (in the now familiar vulgar terminology). The UK can then pretend to leave the EU but in reality stay in, or kick the can down the road by means of an extension, which Johnson himself seemed to find acceptable recently. The Commons might block the former, but probably not the latter.
An extension (as mooted) might last until 2021 or even 2022. In 2022, new electoral boundaries will be in place in the UK. MP numbers are set to be reduced from 650 to 600. Those changes will hit both Labour and the LibDems hard.
If the Conservatives can hang on until 2022, their chances of survival (as individual MPs and as a party of government) look better. In the meantime, Boris-idiot can go on posing as Prime Minister, and his Cabinet of Conservative Friends of Israel, enemies of the people, can (with the help of their Labour Friends of Israel accomplices) pass more repressive laws to destroy (real) “democracy” and (real) civil rights in the UK…
That, at least, could have been the scenario had the Conservatives a majority or at least a working majority (reduced by Brecon and Radnorshire to 1 MP vote) and so able to continue as a government. As it is, whatever happens on 31 October, it cannot be long now before Labour moves a no-confidence motion. If not in November, then surely in December or early next year.
Brexit Party has not yet proven that it can win Westminster seats, but it has proven that it can prevent the Conservative Party winning. In Peterborough, the successful Labour Party candidate got 10,484 votes (30.9%). The Brexit Party got 9,801 votes (28.9%). The Conservative got 7,243 votes (21.4%). While it may be that not all of those who voted Brexit Party would, in lieu of that, have voted Conservative, most would have done; hardly any would have voted Labour, in my opinion anyway. It is clear that, without Brexit Party, the Conservatives would have won Peterborough. The same is true in Brecon and Radnorshire.
Boris Johnson may have shot Brexit Party’s fox by going all-out (supposedly) for a “no deal”/WTO Brexit if the EU does not play ball, but he has not killed that fox, just wounded it. If the UK leaves on a “no deal”/WTO basis, then Brexit Party probably will deflate to nothing, though it may reinvent itself even then. However, it seems unlikely that the majority of MPs of all parties will not block such a departure. If that happens, then Boris Johnson, however much he tries to play the Leave “tribune of the people”, will be seen by Leavers as a waste of space, “all hat and no cattle”. In that scenario, the anger of the Leave-preferring voters will devolve upon both Remain MPs and Boris-idiot. Brexit Party will then, like Antaeus treading on his native earth, be revived and take on new strength.
What Boris Johnson and the Conservatives would like is for Brexit Party to just disappear, thus leaving the Conservatives to trample all over the hopelessly-split Labour Party and the LibDems. What is more likely is that the UK will not leave the EU on any real basis by the beginning of November. Brexit Party will thus put up 650 MPs and the Conservative Party will be slaughtered. Most hard-core Leavers will vote Brexit Party, most hard-core Remainers (especially in the South) will switch to the LibDems. For Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, a two-front war. Apart from Brexit issues, anyone who believes in the Welfare State, in decent public services, in animal welfare, will not vote Conservative. Anyone hostile to Jewish Zionism, likewise.
The Brexit Party may only get 10%-20%, so say 15%, nationwide, but that alone all but destroys any hope for a majority Conservative government. My own efforts at working it out using Electoral Calculus [see Notes, below] indicate Conservative Party as largest party in Commons, but without a majority and quite possibly worse off than now.
Much depends on the LibDem vote. At present, the opinion polls show intended LibDem vote somewhere in the 15%-25% range, with latest educated guess (via Ipsos/MORI) at 20%.
That might give a Conservative majority of as much as 74. However, even if that poll is accurate, it is unlikely that the Conservatives will actually maintain a lead of 10 points over Labour. If Labour were able to achieve 30% instead of 24%, which is well within the parameters of reasonable possibility, then the Conservative Party would be 20 MPs short of a majority, i.e. worse off than now.
There again, even if Labour were still on 24%, but if Brexit Party could reach to 15% at the expense of the Conservatives on 29%, the Conservatives would be no less than 57 MPs short of a majority.
On the other hand, If Brexit Party can get 20%, LibDems 20%, Labour 25% and Conservatives 30%, the Conservatives would be about 35 MPs short of a majority.
It is a game one can play for hours.
Conclusions
The LibDems are back in the game, if only by default. They have much of the Remain vote, they have a (notionally) fresh and energetic leader, they have the votes of those disliking the other two main System parties as well as those of persons wishing to vote tactically. They have at least the possibility of a 50-seat bloc (again) in the Commons.
Brexit Party is not looking good as a potential party of government but it is looking effective as a way of blocking Conservative Party ambitions. A general election resulting in 30% Con, 30% Lab, 20% LibDem, 15% Brexit Party and 5% Green comes out with Labour as largest party, but 46 MPs short of majority, the Conservatives not far behind and the LibDems with perhaps about 50 MPs. On that basis, the LibDems could, as in 2010, be once again the kingmakers. Plus ca change…
Andrew Rawnsley predicting the demise, quite soon, of both Boris-idiot and the Conservative government (and party):
“As he [Boris-idiot] points the country at the cliff edge and depresses the accelerator, does prime minister Johnson have any idea where this will end? It is a mistake to think that he does. No one knows what he is really up to, including himself. In one breath, he tells us that this is “do or die”; in another, he sets the odds on a no-deal Brexit at “a million to one”;
“He [Boris-idiot] has to know that there is a strong possibility that it will mean an autumn general election. The least credible message from Number 10 is that it is not contemplating this outcome”;
“Tory strategy for winning an election makes some very big and risky assumptions. One is that the gains harvested by the Conservatives at the expense of Labour among Leave-supporting voters will outweigh Tory losses in Remain-supporting constituencies. Nearly every top Lib Dem target is a Conservative seat, while Scottish Nationalists are hoping to scalp Tory MPs north of the border. The other perilous assumption is that Nigel Farage’s party will fade away or fold up. The leader of the Brexit party is enjoying being the object of renewed attention and displays no signs of wanting to retire again. He declares that he does not trust the prime minister and he has a bitter history of mutual loathing with Number 10’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings.”
“One lesson from the Brecon & Radnorshire by-election is that the Brexit party doesn’t have to do all that well – it polled barely a double-digit share on Thursday – to hurt the Tories. If the Conservatives could have added the Brexit party vote and that of Ukip to their tally, they would have held the seat with just over half the vote, rather than narrowly lose it to the Lib Dems. They’d hope to put a harder squeeze on the Brexit party in a general election, but couldn’t be absolutely confident. All the hazards of this strategy will be multiplied many times over if an election takes place after 31 October. In one scenario, we would still be in the EU, breaking the Tory leader’s “absolute commitment” to his party that Britain will be out “under any circumstances” and hugely boosting the Faragists.”
“In the alternative scenario, Britain has tumbled out of the EU without an agreement. That is no longer a threat or a promise. The countdown has reached zero and no deal is a reality. Even in the less chilling versions of a crash-out Brexit – the ones that don’t involve supermarket shelves being stripped bare by panic-buying and children dying for lack of life-critical medicines – I wouldn’t want to be a prime minister trying to make a case for his re-election when the country has just suffered a big economic shock and the currency is collapsing.”
“My suspicion is that the Armageddon Clock isn’t really there to count down the seconds to Brexit day. It is there to remind Boris Johnson how long he has left before it becomes too late to avoid his own doomsday.“
Of course, I myself have made, in the above and previous blog posts, similar points to those now made by Andrew Rawnsley. He, however, has the inside contacts (and public profile) which I do not have. I, perforce, have to use simply my own knowledge and powers of reason (also, I am doing this unpaid, pro bono publico!)
I should say that there is little incentive for the Brexit Party to form a pact with the Conservatives unless the Conservatives in effect gift Brexit Party at least 50 winnable seats in return for Brexit Party standing down in the other 600. Such a pact might backfire for the Conservatives in that it would
deprive the Conservatives of a number of seats which, even with Brexit Party standing, the Conservatives themselves might win; and
create a bloc of up to 50 “fourth party” Westminster MPs for the first time, so
making Brexit Party far more electorally credible in subsequent elections.
If Brexit Party candidates give up their candidature in seats where the Conservative candidates might lose if there is a Brexit Party candidate, then not only has the Brexit Party given up what might be good chances of winning in those seats, but it has restricted itself to standing only in seats where it has, arguably, little chance of winning.
In other words, a one-way electoral pact with the Conservatives almost wipes out Brexit Party’s reason for existing. It might confirm as MPs a few Conservative Eurosceptics, but no political earthquake is going to happen just because of that. The better strategy is to fight all 650 seats and see what happens. If it should be that 200+ Conservative MPs lose their seats, then good.
Update, 23 June 2020
My analysis was not too bad (as good that of Andrew Rawnsley, anyway), but nexpected events happened, as they often do: as we now know, duing the General Election campaign of December 2019, Nigel Farage, for whatever reason, decided to stand down all his Brexit Party candidates standing in Conservative-held seats. That killed Brexit Party stone dead and ensured a Conservative Party victory by default. 2017 Labour voters did not, most of them, vote Conservative, but some did, in some seats. A relative few defected to the LibDems or what was left of Brexit Party, but almost as many as all of those simply decided not to vote.
Result: a Conservative Party majority of about 80.
We are where we are, in the now-ubiquitous phrase. The prime-ministerial chair once occupied by the likes of Pitt, the 1st Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher etc is now occupied by a public entertainer of mixed ethnic and cultural origins, born in New York City, brought up partly in the USA and Belgium, and until recently a dual passport-holder. A rootless cosmopolitan playing out a performance as an “upper-class” “Englishman” caricature. Am-dram Churchill. Poundland Churchill.
Boris Johnson, Boris-idiot, Boris the clown. More to the immediate point, Boris without a majority, soon. As a child of eight years, Boris Johnson wanted to be “world king” and has for decades schemed and cheated and lied in order to get to the nearest position (outside the monarch’s own ambit) that England allows: the rank of Prime Minister. However, he has not become “King of the World”, but “King for a Day”, the traditional role, in the Revels, of the Jester or Fool (“…for who but a Fool would be King for a Day?”).
The Conservative Party elected Boris Johnson its leader. Conservative MPs voted to reduce the field to two. Conservative Party members, some 140,000 of them, voted and 66% of them, about 92,000, preferred Boris Johnson. It is not my purpose of this article to rail more than en passant against the absurdity that allows a prime minister to resign and for her successor to be, in effect, elected by 92,000 (mostly very elderly, mostly rather well-off financially) Conservative Party members (out of about 50 million voters generally). This article is for the purpose of examining electoral chances.
First of all, we have the Brexit chaos. I favoured Leave. I still favour Brexit. However, the whole process was criminally mishandled by the Conservative government of Theresa May.
How will Brexit affect a general election? I assume that the House of Commons will not allow a WTO or “no deal” Brexit, and so any general election that is then called will see Boris Johnson parking his tanks on the lawn of Brexit Party and trying to go all out for, effectively, the Leave vote of 2016. There are dangers for the Conservative Party in that.
Brexit is not the only issue in a general election. Some more affluent voters may vote Conservative for tax or other reasons even if they oppose Brexit. Also, many in the population will never vote Conservative even if they favour Brexit. Many despise Boris Johnson and will never vote Conservative as long as he is the leader. This is, if chess, three-dimensional chess.
However, now that the Conservatives under Johnson present themselves as the “Leave”/Brexit party, it can be assumed that a sizeable number of former Conservative voters who favour staying in the EU will migrate, at least temporarily, to the only significant Remain-supporting party, the LibDems. Where else can they go? It might be argued that many Conservative MPs favour Remain, and that those MPs will receive a special vote based on that. Don’t count on it. The label is the primary motor, and if Conservative means Leave, many Remain voters will leave…the Conservative Party.
If the next general election is called without the UK having left the EU, or having left on terms dictated by the EU (Brexit In Name Only), then Brexit Party will be waiting to snap up the hard-core Brexit vote.
Brexit Party intends, at present, to contest all 650 seats. Its mere presence ensures that dozens, maybe even beyond a hundred, Conservative MPs will lose their seats, in some cases to Brexit Party, but in more cases to the LibDems or Labour.
There has been talk of a Conservative/Brexit Party electoral pact, but that carries the danger of gifting the Brexit Party a bloc of seats. which might challenge the Conservative Party more strongly later.
Labour, though now called by msm commentators a Remain party, is more nuanced. Corbyn’s fence-sitting tactic, though much criticized, is all that he can do in a circumstance where Labour-held seats were more often (about 60%) Leave-voting, though most Labour voters voted Remain (because, as I blogged recently, Labour votes are increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer seats).
It may be, anyway, that Labour voters have concerns other than, or as well as, Brexit: low pay, the Conservative attacks on the social welfare and benefits system, the burgeoning crime and disorder problem etc.
The composition of the Boris-idiot Cabinet and government will not attract many former Labour, LibDem or floating voters.
My conclusion is that the Boris Johnson government may struggle to attract the votes of more than 30% nationwide. Recent opinion polls have put the Conservatives at anywhere between 23% and 30%. Labour has been between 18% and 28%. LibDems around 16%-20% and Brexit Party 14%-20%.
If the Conservatives continue to lean towards Brexit strongly, they risk losing many of their pro-EU voters to the LibDems, but if they try to fence-sit or move more towards Remain, many of their previous voters will vote for Brexit Party or stay at home.
There is also the Boris Factor, but we see that, even though there has been a “Boris Bounce”, its effect has been slight. The Conservatives are still polling at or below 30% (as is Labour). Indeed, it could be argued that, for many former Conservative voters, especially in marginal seats, Boris-idiot is not an attraction but a turn-off. I concede that that is a guess, but it is at least an educated one.
I have fed various recent opinion poll results into the Electoral Calculus calculator [see Notes, below], and it is quite hard to come up with a Conservative majority in the Commons. Most results show a hung Parliament with either Lab or Con as largest party. Only one showed a Conservative majority (of one vote). In several cases, both main System parties were as many as 80 MPs short of a majority.
Now we all know that the “glorious uncertainty” of the Turf is carried over to the field of battle of British elections. It is hard to predict elections in Britain and “a week is a long time in British politics”, as Harold Wilson said. Also, Electoral Calculus is a fairly rough guide. Having said that, it seems clear that, at least in the short term, the Conservatives are on the back foot here. Any gamble to increase the Conservative majority in the Commons may well backfire, as in 2017. That would mean the end of The Clown as Prime Minister, but would also mean something of a political and even Constitutional crisis.
These should be fertile days for social nationalism, but we are as yet not even in the game…
David Cameron-Levita as Prime Minister always made sure that the interests of pensioners were prioritized, in particular by introducing the “Triple Lock” on State pensions. Pensions have been one of several issues taking greater prominence over the years by reason of the increasing average age of the population of the UK.
There were clear practical political reasons for this policy. Support for the Labour Party at elections is fairly even across the half-dozen usual age groups, whereas support for the Conservative Party is concentrated among the old and middle-aged: just under 50% of all Conservative votes are those of persons aged over 65 years. Hardly any young people intend to vote Conservative (in the 18-24 age group, below 4%).
The loyalty of the over 65s has been reinforced by pensioner-friendly policies. There are signs now that the Conservatives intend to, in the oft-seen phrase, “throw the pensioners under a bus”. In 2017 Phillip Hammond wanted to remove part of the Triple Lock, but the DUP insisted on its retention in part-payment for DUP “confidence and supply” support in the Commons.
The Conservative Party is already getting some flak from the elderly for the BBC’s announcement that free TV licences will be withdrawn for those of 75+ years. There are rumblings about bus passes for pensioners. Overall, it is clear that the free market crazies now in the ascendant under Boris-idiot want to target the elderly as they have already done the disabled, sick, unemployed etc.
The Labour Party is now the party of the blacks and browns, those dependent on State benefits, and of the public service workers. The Conservative Party is now the party of the rich, the affluent, the buy-to-let parasites and the like, and (many of) the elderly. If the elderly who are not particularly well-off desert the Conservatives, the Conservative Party is in big trouble, because only about 10%-15% of UK voters can really be described as rich or even affluent, certainly no more than 20%. In 2017, the Conservative vote amounted to 42.4% of votes cast. If half or more of those votes suddenly disappear, the Conservative Party is quite likely to disappear with them.
Well, we all now know that, in December 2019, Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party won a supposed “landslide” at the General Election. In fact, the Conservative Party vote was only 43.6% of votes cast, but Labour’s vote fell to 32.1%, and that decided the matter.
Key was the decision of Nigel Farage to stab in the back his own candidates and supporters by withdrawing Brexit Party from serious contention. That was the key act that ensured a Johnson/Conservative win.
Brexit Party ended up with 2% of the vote nationwide. Had Farage and Brexit Party gone all out to win from the start, Brexit Party might have got 15%, which though giving Brexit Party few if any seats, would have tipped the balance back to hung Parliament territory.
Other factors were the elderly and late middle-age voters sticking with the Conservative Party, and the relentless and mainly Jewish anti-Corbyn campaign in the msm, which helped to crush Labour’s chances.
Today, the Labour Party committed suicide. It decided both that it is going to back a “second Referendum” or “people’s vote”, and that it will be supporting Remain in that vote. In other words, the 2016 EU Referendum result will be dishonoured and quite possibly overturned if Labour has its way.
I have been predicting this System move for a long time; in fact, my first opinion published after the EU Referendum itself was that the Remain side, which is basically the System’s preferred side, would try every method to overturn the Referendum result. After all, the EU has “form” in this regard, making numerous countries re-take referenda which came up with the “wrong” result, even refusing to deal with governments which contained the “wrong” type of elected politician (in Portugal and Austria etc in the past).
The idea (held by most Remain whiners) that the EU is some kind of “democratic” and “liberal” entity is completely naive. The EU was set up by or under the influence of the sinister Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi
Part of that is the so-called “Great Replacement”, effectively the replacement of the white Northern European peoples by those of other race (blacks and browns etc) and those, in the future, of mixed-race, the outcome of mass immigration into Europe.
My view, published numerous times in these blog pages, has been that the System in the UK and EU would delay Brexit, try to keep Britain in the EU by means of various strategems, or if necessary, to give the UK a “deal” which would effectively be “Brexit In Name Only” (BRINO). Ideally, remaining or BRINO would then be falsely validated by a “second Referendum” under such name as “People’s Vote” or “confirmatory” referendum. So it seems to be happening. I did wonder how long Corbyn himself could sit on the fence.
The possibly deliberate mishandling of the post-2016 Brexit process by the Conservative Party government has now led to the position in which the pro-Remain majority in the House of Commons is determined that the UK will not leave the EU on a “no-deal” (WTO) basis.
I despise Boris Johnson as a politician: he is a charlatan and mountebank, to use old terms, and I have very little faith that he will honour his “pledge” to take the UK out of the EU on 31 October 2019 “if necessary”. However, it is possible that, to save his own skin, if he cannot persuade the Commons to accept a “deal” similar to that the EU offered Theresa May, that Boris Johnson will either cave in to the demand for a second referendum or will appeal over the heads of the parties to the electorate, and hold a general election in an effort to strengthen his hand. A gambler’s gamble.
Alternatively, Johnson may be sidelined quite soon by a no-confidence vote, which will either mean a general election or even his replacement without general election by someone else, presumably Jeremy Hunt. The British Constitution is so vague, relying as it does on a few sentences in Bagehot etc, that that would not, stricto sensu, be unconstitutional.
Labour in a general election
Labour received nearly 13 million votes at the 2017 General Election, 40% of the votes cast. In terms of percentage, that was Labour’s best since Tony Blair in both 2001 and 1997, and before that, Harold Wilson in 1970 (Labour scored over 40% in every general election from 1945 to 1970).
When it comes to House of Commons seats, however, it is a different story. In 2017, Corbyn-Labour won 262 seats with its 40% vote, not much better than the 258 seats won by Gordon Brown’s Labour in 2010, when the Labour vote-share was only 29.1%. In 2001, Tony Blair-Labour won 413 seats on a vote-share of 40.7%.
I think that something more is going on here than just the “glorious uncertainty” and illogicality of the UK First Past The Post and eccentric boundaries electoral system. It is clear that the Labour vote is becoming ever-more concentrated in fewer and fewer constituencies.
Harold Wilson in 1974 (twice), James Callaghan in 1979, and Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992, all scored well below 40% in general elections, yet ended up with more seats, considerably more, than Labour won in 2017.
As stated above, it is believed that, out of Labour’s nearly 13M voters in 2017, perhaps 3.5M, though perhaps as high as 4M, had voted Leave in 2016. In other words, about or around 70% of Labour voters voted Remain.
The inference is plain: not only are most Labour voters generally clustered in a relatively small number of constituencies, but the number of 2017 majority Labour-voting constituencies that also had a majority for Remain is even smaller, somewhere around 100.
Labour as a party has been growing distant from its roots, from its core vote, for decades. The industrial proletariat is virtually non-existent, replaced by the “precariat”, economically insecure, politically both apathetic and volatile. The trade unions, though often still linked to Labour, are likewise almost without importance now, all but powerless to help employed persons much, and focussed on “diversity”, “equality”, anti-racism” etc and on ever-more convoluted codes of conduct, politically-correct nonsense, and on support for mass immigration.
As I have commented previously, the Labour “core vote” is now not really the English and Welsh (or Scottish) “working classes”, but the post-1945 immigrants and their offspring and, after them, the public service workers generally, as well as most of the unemployed and/or disabled persons reliant on State benefits.
There are many many seats in the North of England particularly which were rock-solid Labour but which are now less-solid Labour, or are marginal. These are areas which voted Leave, where the English majority (in some cases now, minority) are sick of mass immigration, of cultural decay, of crime and lawlessness, of the patronizing callousness of the self-regarding and self-described “elite” in the msm and Westminster and in the City of London.
A recent opinion poll put Labour on only 18%. Critics said that that was an “outlier” and (perfectly true) that another poll the same week put Labour on 25%. My feeling and view is that Labour will struggle to get even 30% in any general election, i.e. where Labour was in 2017. The big question is where that 30% will be.
Labour’s new unambiguous Remain stance will alienate anyone who regards Brexit (not just Brexit, but the bundle of issues around Brexit) as important. That could be a third of 2015/2017 Labour voters, and particularly in the more marginal seats.
Fortunately for Labour, it looks as though Brexit Party will cripple the Conservative vote nationally. However, Labour too is on thin ice. There is every chance that the new Remain policy will rob Labour of the formerly solid seats in the North.
The Conservatives will fight the next general election against three enemies, but Labour will also be fighting against at least two (Brexit Party being one) in formerly safe seats.
Labour may gain votes in its new core areas, among the blacks, browns, public service people and millennials of London and elsewhere, but at the cost of traditional Labour areas of the North etc. They will not vote Conservative, but might vote Brexit Party out of pure anger. Beware.
If Labour’s new voters are fickle or volatile (as I think that many are), Labour will have lost formerly solid support in exchange for what could be fair-weather votes, leaving Labour, somewhere down the line, with next to nothing.
At present, I still think that Labour might be the largest party after a general election, if held this year or next (the Conservatives are all but on their knees) but I have the feeling that, looking at the medium term (from 2022), Labour has just committed suicide.
Update, 21 September 2019
…from the Independent, “reporting” on beach patrols at Dover; all too typical of the sort of persons now prominent in “Labour” and what is left of the trade unions:
“Riccardo La Torre, firefighter and Eastern Region Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, branded the coast patrol “despicable” and said: “These have-a-go, racist vigilantes have no place in any kind of enforcement or emergency activities and will only serve to make conditions and tensions worse.”
So “Riccardo La Torre” (que?), a regional secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, thinks that migrant invaders from Africa and the Middle East are “working class people”, who are “trying to get to safety”?!
Safety from, er, France? There you have in a nutshell, the craziness that is much of “Labour” now. Alien migrant-invaders are “working class people”, who should be allowed to occupy the UK at will (and be subsidized too)! Note the fag-end “Marxism”, trying to shoehorn the facts into some 1980s polytechnic back-of-postcard Marxism-Leninism.
A by-election is to be held in Brecon and Radnorshire constituency (formerly Brecon and Radnor, 1918-1997). Unusually, this by-election has been triggered by the conviction for (what amounts to) fraud relating to the Parliamentary expenses of the sitting MP. Christopher Davies, who had held the seat since 2015, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 50 hours of community service and a fine of £1,500.
The relative leniency of the sentence may reflect the fact that the £700 wrongfully claimed by way of expenses by Davies could have been claimed legitimately (whether approved or not); the way in which he went about it (creating two false invoices amounting to the sum in question) made it unlawful. On a kind interpretation, Davies was stupid or incompetent more than (very) dishonest. Still not very good for him, I would have thought.
The position of the MP and the calling of the by-election
The events around this by-election raise interesting issues.
The news reports say that the seat “has been vacated”, but I have seen nothing about the Speaker declaring it so, a problem which previously arose during the Fiona Onasanya case, when that MP, despite having been sentenced for perversion of the course of justice, and despite a recall petition having been approved by more than the requisite 10% of eligible voters, still sat and voted as MP for Peterborough (including, crucially, in a significant Brexit debate and vote), also getting paid for months.
Davies may or may not, at time of writing, still be an MP. Even the more serious newspapers and the specialized websites (eg Politics Home) have not clarified the position. The Wikipedia entry for Davies says that his removal as MP was “automatic” once the results of the petition were known, but such is not the case. Wikipedia also says that “the seat was declared vacant on 21 June 2019” (today). Perhaps.
The Conservatives must “move a writ” to start the by-election process. In Britain’s unwritten or (more accurately) uncodified Constitution, this is supposed to happen within (usually) 3 months of the seat being declared vacant. After that, the by-election usually happens within 27 days (of the writ having been moved).
In other words, while in theory this by-election could happen by the end of July 2019, it might not happen until late October or, if the Conservatives really stretched the Constitutional proprieties to the limit, even later. Parliament rises for its Summer Recess on 25 July, so if the writ is not moved by then, the very earliest date on which the writ could be moved would be 3 September, after the Commons return, making the earliest by-election date one in late September.
If Davies is still nominally the MP, then he is entitled to his salary and expenses until such time as he is declared (by the Speaker) not the MP.
Christopher Davies, remarkably (bearing in mind that he pleaded guilty to the charges), seems to be breezy about the matter, and has invited his constituents to his local office, in the small Welsh town of Builth Wells, to view and enjoy the 9 landscape photographs which were the subject-matter of the expenses claims in question! I daresay that many of his constituents might wonder why Parliamentary expenses cover such purchases anyway (surely he or the local Conservative Association should have paid?).
Even more remarkably, Davies says that he intends to stand again! The local Conservatives, meanwhile, have not pronounced on whether Davies will be allowed to stand as a Conservative Party candidate! One can see their difficulty: if Davies stands as Conservative candidate, their chance of success is weakened, contaminated by his candidature, but if Davies stands as Independent Conservative or some such, he may draw off at least a few hundred, maybe even a thousand or more otherwise “Conservative” votes. None dare call it blackmail?
Still, one would have thought that simple ethical standards might have come into play, but in the contemporary Conservative Party, it seems not.
Another strange aspect: one would have thought that the two contenders for the Conservative Party leadership would have condemned Davies for his offences, or at least mumbled something neutral, but it seems that both have been “very supportive”.
The constituency
Before 1939, the constituency, under its Brecon and Radnor name, had as MPs persons from the Labour, Liberal, Conservative, Unionist, National and National Liberal parties (the latter three effectively Conservative coalition candidates).
Labour held the seat between 1939 and 1979. From 1979 to 2019, the Conservatives won 3 times, the Liberals/Liberal Democrats 3 times.
The post-WW2 Labour vote peaked in 1964 at just under 58%; its lowest was 10% in 2010. In general, the Labour vote has declined over the years, having not exceeded 20% of votes cast since the General Election of 2001.
The LibDem vote peaked in 2010 at 44.8% (1st placed), since when it declined to about 28% in 2015 and about 29% in 2017; however in both 2015 and 2017, the LibDems were placed 2nd.
In 2017, the Conservative candidate, Davies, achieved a vote of 48.6%, a post-WW2 record for Conservatives in the seat.
The only other (slightly) significant party contending over the years has been Plaid Cymru, which however has rarely retained its deposit in recent decades. Its typical vote share in recent years has been 2%-3%, though it reached 4.4% in 2015 (3.1% in 2017).
A few other parties have stood over the years. UKIP got 8.3% in 2015 (its best in the seat), but slumped to 1.4% in 2017.
The joker in the pack is Brexit Party.
Conclusion
There are some uncertain factors here: will Christopher Davies really stand again, and if so will it be as Conservative Party candidate or as some type of Independent? Will Brexit Party put up a strong candidate? Whatever happens, the Conservatives must be toast here. If Davies stands as Independent, and with Brexit Party now standing, then the Conservative vote will (probably though not necessarily) be even lower than if Davies brazenly stands again as Conservative. Davies does seem to be quite embedded locally, as a former livestock auctioneer, Royal Welsh Show ring commentator and manager of a veterinary practice.
The LibDems are currently strong favourites. The only thing that would or might upset the applecart would be the Brexit Party, now (announced today) entering the fray. Looking at 2015/2017, the LibDem core vote in the seat is below 30%. Even so, the LibDems must be in pole position here. It’s their election to lose.
Further factors
It is plainly in the Conservative interest to delay this by-election as long as possible. Their notional working Commons majority, even with DUP support, is now only four. If Brecon and Radnorshire goes LibDem or Brexit Party, that will reduce to three. Some Conservative MPs are ready to abandon support if Brexit no-deal looks likely. Boris Johnson may be a very short-lived Prime Minister.
The Brecon and Radnorshire Conservatives have reselected Christopher Davies as their candidate.
Davies faces an uphill struggle. While his offence was only marginally dishonest, it was still dishonest. It also showed Davies as both lacking in judgment and as simply inept. Apart from that, there is the point that the Conservatives have rarely if ever been lower in public estimation. Also, this is a by-election and the Conservative Party is in government.
The position has now been clarified. Davies is no longer the MP and the writ is expected to be moved today, Thursday 27 June, having failed two days ago. The by-election is now or soon will be set for 1 August 2019.
In a sense, I am surprised that the Conservatives did not play this more tactically, in view of their situation re. the numbers in the Commons, but there it is.
Now that Brexit Party is standing, the chance of the Conservatives actually winning (especially with a rather discredited candidate) has shrunk accordingly. If Brexit Party gets half of the 2017 Conservative vote, that would give them about 24%. The LibDems are unlikely to get less than the c.29% they got in 2017. Labour got over 17% in 2017.
If Labour does better than it did in 2017, and if Brexit Party does well too, and the LibDems do at least as well as they did in 2017, then all four serious contenders might well get vote shares in the 20%-35% range. If the Conservative vote were to collapse to, say, 10% or 15%, then the other three parties in serious contention might well end up getting about the same vote shares as each other.
This might turn out to be quite close among LibDems, Brexit Party, Labour, and maybe Conservatives too, with the likelihood of placings in that order.
Meanwhile, minor Remain-friendly parties look like not contesting the seat, in order to give the LibDems a clear run. Green Party, Renew, Change UK (probably, if they even bother to make a statement, they are already so marginal), Plaid Cymru (maybe).
Renew has never contested this seat, though it scored about 4% in Newport West recently; Change UK is already a “dead parrot” party, marginal, negligible in support (below 1%); the Greens last contested this seat in 2015, scoring 3.1%; Plaid got 3.1% in the seat in 2017.
If Plaid get on board the non-contest train, the boost to the LibDems must be worth several points, maybe as much as 7%, though more realistically about 5%. Worth having, anyway.
There are so far 4 candidates standing (LibDems, Conservatives, Brexit Party, Labour), with less than 48 hours until nominations close. Plaid Cymru has “indicated” that it will not be standing, in order to give the pro-Remain LibDems their best possible chance. The other pro-Remain parties, meaning Greens and Renew, are both not standing and for the same reason. Any late entries are likely to be vanity or joke candidates and will not at all change the outcome of the by-election.
The LibDems must be in an even stronger position to take the seat now that the smaller parties are not standing. In the last few elections, minor parties accounted for between 5% and 10% of the total vote.
Update, 4 July 2019
My eye was caught by the latest YouGov national opinion poll, as reported by Britain Elects.
If this poll is in any way accurate (and Ipsos Mori put out a very different result only a week ago, which shows how volatile UK politics is becoming), then Brexit Party would actually be the largest party in the Commons after a general election:
Brexit Party 196 seats (130 short of Commons majority), Labour 148, Conservative 169, LibDem 66. That would mean a Brexit Party government with, almost inevitably, Conservative support; possibly a coalition government. Large numbers of both Conservative and Labour MPs would be gone, including half of those recently vying for Conservative leadership.
Thinking about how that might apply to the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, it may be that most of the 2017 Conservative votes in the seat will go to Brexit Party, but they might not. There is uncertainty. Personality often means more in rural constituencies than in urban and suburban ones. Much depends on whether voters regard the Conservative, Christopher Davies, as an “expenses cheat” and/or “fraudster” after his criminal conviction, or whether they will “forgive and forget” his sin/error because they (do they?) regard him otherwise as OK and his offence a technical one.
My view is obviously no more than an educated guess, but I should think that many locals will think that £700 is a ridiculous sum to pay out for 9 photographs anyway. Others will see the dishonesty aspect; yet others may think that the former MP should be given a second chance. Much depends on his personal vote, on his local popularity.
I find this by-election hard to call. However, it must be done. On present facts, I think that Labour has no chance, realistically. It is seen as the party of the blacks and browns now, for one thing. They are few in number in that part of the world, unless it has changed hugely since I was last there. Also, Remain voters will go LibDem here, not Labour, whereas committed Leave/Brexit voters will go Brexit Party or maybe Con.
I think that it is quite possible that at least half the 2017 Conservative vote will defect to Brexit Party. The LibDem vote will be solid now that the party is bouncing in the polls; also, in this seat, the LibDems are not seen as a wasted vote, Brecon and Radnorshire having had LibDem MPs from 1997 until 2015.
If the LibDems can build on the 29% they got in 2017, and I think that they will, then they are in with a very good chance. They might get a vote between 30% and 40%.
I doubt whether Labour will get more than 10% or so.
The Conservative vote may collapse, though I remain unconvinced that it will go much lower than 20%.
Brexit Party, if it can capture disaffected Conservative votes, might go as high as 30%. There is another point, which is whether people who prefer Conservative or Labour will vote tactically for Brexit Party. Hard to say. The LibDems must get at least 30% and may get 40%, so Brexit Party has to get around 40% to have a chance of winning.
Provisional Conclusion (with nearly 4 weeks left to run):
LibDems
Brexit Party
Conservatives
Labour
Update, 5 July 2019
With weeks left to run, the online betting market shows the LibDems as heavily odds-on (about 1/5), Labour (oddly, but the market is thin) on 2/1, Conservatives on 9/1, Brexit Party at 12/1. Political betting is a minefield. The favourites often go down. Labour on 2/1 looks like exceptionally poor value! Brexit Party, however, looks like fairly good value at 12/1. My own valuation of the odds would be nearer to: LibDems 1/2, Brexit Party 2/1, Conservatives 3/1, Labour 10/1, but we shall see.
The confirmed final list of candidates shows the four expected parties (Con, Lab, LibDem, Brexit Party) and two late entrants, namely UKIP and Monster Raving Loony. The UKIP entry will obviously eat into Brexit Party’s chances; to what extent we shall see, though even 500 or 1,000 votes might be enough to sink Brexit Party in the by-election. Looks more like a spoiler than a serious candidature.
The Guardian interviews locals. One part stands out:
“Given that 19% of the local electorate signed the recall petition, almost double the 10% threshold, a surprising number of locals of different party allegiances express sympathy for Davies’s plight. Yet there are some who are adamant that he should have stood down. One council worker tells me that, owing to her job, she’s in electoral purdah and can only speak off the record. “I signed the petition against Chris Davies because he tried to shaft a friend of mine who works in his office, by blaming the expenses mistake on her,” she says. As far as this council worker is concerned, Davies, whom she voted for in 2017, was given a second chance for cynical reasons. “Everyone knows that they didn’t want to put any promising new candidate in,” she says, “because they know they’re going to lose the seat.””
Had a look at Oddschecker betting array. LibDems are hugely odds-on (1/9), Conservatives second at aroung 7/1, Brexit Party about 12/1, Labour 100/1. Not noted were UKIP and Monster Raving Loony. I expect that anyone wanting to throw away a few pounds could ask for and get 500/1 against either of those.
Betting is not always a sure indicator of a election or referendum result, but the LibDems have, as previously said, a lot going for them here: a fairly recent history of providing the local MP, the fact that the Conservative candidate is damaged goods, the fact that those who would have voted for the parties that have voluntarily withdrawn (Green, Plaid Cymru, Renew) will vote LibDem in a contest where Labour is anyway a wasted vote.
Well, “the moment of truth”, meaning that the by-election will be held tomorrow, Thursday 1 August 2019. This blog post has so far had, in about 5-6 weeks, 600+ views, far above the norm for my blog. Brecon and Radnorshire is having its 15 minutes of fame…
The LibDems are in pole position, hugely odds-on with the bookmakers (1/20 in some quarters), with the Conservatives in 2nd place (about 9/1) and (perhaps surprisingly) Brexit Party in 3rd position (as high as 50/1, which may be, at those odds, a value bet); Labour seems out of it at odds of 150-1.
A month ago, I was predicting, provisionally, LibDems to win, followed by Brexit Party, Conservatives, Labour, UKIP (a pure spoiler candidature, it seems) and the inevitable joke candidate, a Monster Raving Loony calling herself Lily the Pink (presumably after the comic song of 1968).
I see no reason to think that the LibDems will not win Brecon and Radnorshire. They have all the Remain votes and so many of the votes of the highly-subsidized local farmers, though no doubt some of the latter will remain loyal to the Conservative Party and its recently-convicted candidate. I do not know what sort of campaign Brexit Party put up in the constituency, but I should imagine that BP might still come second, notwithstanding the bookmakers. If it does not, Brexit Party’s balloon deflates a little more, but many will be looking at the result of the by-election to see whether the Conservative might have won were there no Brexit Party candidate. If the Brexit Party candidature alone meant that the Conservative could not win, alarm bells will sound at CCHQ.
Update, 1 August 2019
Polling day. The betting odds, for what they are worth are (best odds) LibDems 1/18 odds-on; Conservatives 7/1, Brexit Party 100/1, Labour 150/1. The bookmakers, at least, think that Brexit Party is heading for 3rd place. Perhaps.
It may well be that tactical voting is taking place, in particular that Labour supporters, recognizing that Labour has no chance here, are going with the LibDems in order to ensure defeat for the Conservatives (and Brexit Party).
The only significant changes in the betting are the Conservatives taking closer order (yesterday 8/1 or 9/1, today 6/1 or 7/1, and Brexit Party sliding from 50/1 to 100/1.
Looks as if the LibDems have probably nailed it and that the Government’s majority, even with DUP support, is now 1 MP vote.
The LibDems won fairly decisively, but with a smaller majority than the betting might have been suggesting. I have posted links here below.
For me, the most important aspect beyond the headline result is the fact that the Conservative ex-MP would have won, even handsomely, were it not for the candidature of Brexit Party, which received 3,331 votes.
The LibDem majority over the Conservatives was only 1,425. In other words, had Brexit Party not been standing, the Conservatives would almost certainly have won by nearly 2,000 votes. I shall be blogging separately later about the by-election and the implications of that Brexit Party aspect for the national political picture.
The Labour vote had suffered a general decline in the constituency over the years (all-time high was 57.69% in 1964), but this was its lowest-ever vote-share (5.3%). I attribute that partly and perhaps mainly to tactical voting: Labour supporters voting against the Conservatives (mainly) in a situation where Labour had no real chance anyway: the Labour vote here has not exceeded 20% since 2001 (21.4%).
The Monster Raving Loony Party got 1% (334 votes), the UKIP spoiler candidate (or was she just irredeemably stupid?) only 0.8% (242 votes).
There is not much sunshine for the Conservatives in this result. Still, ex-MP Christopher Davies can always return to auctioning cattle; and he has some lovely landscape photographs (the subject-matter of his criminal case) for his Builth Wells office. Something to think about as he endures his community service serf-labour…
Ynys Mon, a constituency which (sub nom Anglesey) goes back to 1545, was won by the Conservative Party at the 2019 General Election, only the third time a Conservative Party MP had been elected there, and only the second Conservative MP (the first having been the multikulti supporter, Keith Best [MP 1979-1987], who was convicted, while MP, on charges of having made fraudulent share applications).
As to Brecon and Radnorshire, the Conservative Party won easily, with a vote-share of over 53%, at the General Election. Brexit Party had not stood (rather, withdrawn) a candidate after Nigel Farage stabbed his own supporters in the back.
The present MP for Brecon and Radnorshire is Fay Jones, a rather obscure and youngish woman (34/35 y-o) whose father was also once a Conservative Party MP (and is a prominent freemason in Wales).
Ian Robert Millard 