Morning music
I remember that song. 1967; I was a 10-y-o child living in Mosman, a North Shore suburb of Sydney. Different times (look at the comments appended to that YouTube video).
From the mass media
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68305050
“Major French magazine L’Express has revealed that its prominent former editor, Philippe Grumbach, was a KGB spy for 35 years.
He counted presidents, actors and literary giants as close friends. He was a legendary figure in journalism who shaped the editorial direction of one of France’s most successful publications. When he died in 2003, Minister of Culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon said Grumbach had been “one of the most memorable and respected figures in French media”.
But he was also “Brok”, the KGB spy.
Extensive proof of Grumbach’s duplicitous life can be found in the so-called Mitrokhin archive.
Born in Paris in 1924 into a Jewish family, Grumbach fled France with his mother and siblings in 1940 – the year Nazi Germany invaded and Marshal Philippe Pétain took power in Vichy with a collaborationist regime.“
[BBC]
The Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections
At Wellingborough, a convincing win for Labour. I thought that it might go closer than it did. Labour 45.9%, Conservatives 24.6%, Reform UK 13%. All 8 other candidates lost their deposits; the LibDems came closest with 4.7%. A local Independent, Marion Turner-Hawes, scored 3.7% and probably would have beaten the LibDems had she been the only Independent standing. The Greens, as usual, were nowhere (6th) on 3.4%, and Britain First was even more “nowhere” on 1.6%.
The Conservatives were let down partly by the choice of candidate, the girlfriend of unpleasant former MP, Peter Bone. Having said that, the main reason for the electoral upset was that people want a change, even if it is really not much of a change, or the wrong change. They wanted, also, to stamp on the Conservative Party.
The Conservative candidate tried to make “stopping the boats“, i.e. the continuing cross-Channel migration-invasion, the issue. Of course, the fact is that the cross-Channel invasion is only a tenth, if that, of the main invasion— the enormous influx of “students”, “family-members”, “highly-skilled workers” (Indians that can work a computer) as well as supposed “asylum-seekers” etc.
Also, the “Conservative” governments of 2010-2024 have not even seriously tried to “stop the boats”, let alone the main migration-invasion. Not far short of a million a year now.
Talk is cheap…
Empty words at best, lying words at worst (collusion with the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalergi_Plan).
A better candidate, and one not tied up with Peter Bone, might have scored higher, maybe well over 30%, and so lost less embarrassingly.
A real social-national party, if one existed, might have won. Turnout was only 38%; a huge 62% of those eligible to vote did not bother, or showed their contempt for the whole system via abstention.
No need to “analyze” the Britain First vote— pathetic. As for Reform UK, it is going to have to do a lot better than that if it is going to start winning seats. Another pro-Israel scam-party by Nigel Farage.
Overall, the result is another nail in the coffin of the Rishi Sunak government, and the Conservative Party (and Sunak himself, of course).
I should be ready to bet that, if voters aged 65+ (many of whom would have voted early by post) were taken away, the remaining Con Party vote would have been no more than 10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellingborough_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s
Kingswood, north of Bristol and in effect an outer suburb of Bristol, also returned a Labour MP yesterday. Pointlessly, of course, because not only will there be a general election this year but, also, the constituency is being abolished.
The result was Labour 44.9%, Conservatives 34.9%, Reform UK 10.4%, Green 5.8%, LibDems 3.5%, UKIP 0.5%.
Turnout was 37.1%, even lower than at Wellingborough. Almost two-thirds of those eligible could not be bothered to vote, and/or despise the whole circus.
The Labour candidate had the advantage of being of local origin, more or less, combined with not being a Conservative. His unusual personal life (gay, and having converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism to fit in with his Jewish “civil partner”) seems to have been disregarded by the voters (meaning the 11,176 who voted for him, out of about 80,000; the other ~68,000 were eligible to vote but either did not vote or voted for other candidates).
The Conservative Party candidate came closer than I had expected. His own local origins can probably be thanked for that. The Farage vehicle, Reform UK, came third, but again seems to be —time after time— the “also ran” party…
The Greens saved their deposit and beat the LibDems into 5th place. The rump of UKIP came last, and one has to wonder why candidates for no-hope parties like that even bother.
Yet another nail in Sunak’s political coffin, of course.
Taking away the local aspects of both by-elections, for me the “takeaways” are that this “Conservative” government is toast, that Sunak is toast, and that the Conservative Party is toast. Also, that the LibDems are seen as dull and, except where they have a good tactical chance against a Conservative candidate, unappealing to voters.
More? Well, that Reform UK is not exciting enough people, not yet anyway, to start being a major player. Also, that the Greens only appeal to around 5% of the electorate, if that.
Finally, for me the point is that, in both of these by-elections, only just over a third of people even bothered to vote; without postal voting, that 37%/38% would probably have been nearer to 20%. The voters most interesting to me are those not presently energized to vote.
What do these results say about GE 2024? That Labour must be en route to victory, though a victory not welcomed by all, or even a majority, of the voters. A feeling of dull meaninglessness, perhaps. A hollow victory?
For the Conservative Party, these results must mean that the bulk of their MPs are on the way out. 50 may survive, maybe 100.
Tweets seen
A few days ago. I missed that story.
The time may come when Israel faces thousands of such drones.
I agree with the first bit, but only partly with the second. Many 2019 Con Party voters seem to be switching, in despair, to Reform UK, but that would be only a small minority of the overall electorate. Look at the turnout figures from yesterday. Only a third (just over) of eligible voters even voted. Reform UK, with its limited “conservative nationalism” “cosplay”, its pro-Israel, pro-Jewish lobby attitude, and its semi-“libertarian” economics, will never inspire even a half of the voters. Maybe 10%, maybe 20%. I doubt that it will go higher.
The fact is that, even at Kingswood, where the result scarcely mattered in itself (a general election this year, and the seat then ceasing to exist), Reform UK only gathered in 13% of the votes, i.e. about 5% of all possible votes. The Wellingborough result was similar: 9.4% of votes cast, i.e. about 3% of all possible votes.
Only a fully-credible social-national party might be able to energise and inspire the British people. That party does not exist.
“Today, the Tories are only holding half the people who voted for them at the last general election, in 2019, and only a little more than one in three of the people who voted for Brexit, in 2016. These are supposed to be the party’s core supporters. But many of them are now abandoning Sunak in droves, running for the hills.
And do you blame them? Seriously? Given some of the other events this week it’s not hard to see why. For a start, Sunak’s failure to control Britain’s borders was reflected in the remarkable finding that just 1.3% of the illegal migrants who entered Britain on the small boats since 2018 have been removed from the country.
And then came the latest data on the dire state of the economy, which confirms Britain is in recession and suffering the longest hit to living standards since records began, in 1955. Contrary to Sunak’s pledge to deliver economic growth, this week we learned that throughout his first year in office Britain’s economy grew by just 0.1%, while GDP per capita —which adjusts for population growth — fell by 0.7%.
This, too, will prompt many voters to ask Sunak some tough questions. Where is the growth you promised? Where is the strong economy? And where is the growth the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and countless other experts told us would surely arrive if Britain opened its doors to unprecedented immigration?
The answer is it’s nowhere to be seen, partly because rather than deliver the high-skill, high-wage, highly-selective, and highly productive immigration the Tories have been promising since Brexit they’ve instead delivered low-skill, low-wage, non-selective, and unproductive immigration from outside Europe, which has been shown to be a net fiscal cost rather than a net benefit to Western economies.
...more and more [voters] are turning off and tuning out. Just look at the rates of turnout at the latest by-elections. Labour and Keir Starmer are not setting Britain on fire, far from it; the Tories are staying home.
These voters aren’t idiots. They know they’ve been led down the garden path by a Conservative government and a Conservative prime minister which have routinely overpromised and underdelivered.
These voters want decent economic growth and an economic model which prioritises British people. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories have given them more of the same.
These voters want much lower and manageable rates of immigration. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories keep putting mass migration on steroids. And these voters want strong and secure borders and a government which prioritises the security of the British people. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories have lost control of our borders, largely because they refuse to reform laws and leave conventions which make it impossible to remove illegal migrants and foreign nationals who commit crime, as we saw with the shocking case of Abdul Ezedi.“
[Matt Goodwin, on his Substack blog]
In any case, the UK needs no immigration at all. It needs to educate and train real British people to a far higher level, and then provide suitable employment for them. British people, real British people.
Suitable employment, appropriate and decent pay; decent housing; decent transport; decent medical care; decent social care; also, decent architecture and town planning.
Defying the Kremlin can be dangerous. The story that Navalny “felt unwell after he went for a walk” is obviously unlikely.
The daytime temperature in that region today is about -20C. Cold weather for a stroll, even for a Russian.
As to Navalny himself, I knew nothing of him beyond what was occasionally on TV news or in the newspapers. I was unable to understand why he returned to Russia after he had recovered from having been poisoned in Russia and flown to Germany for treatment.
My conclusion (beyond the apparent fact that Navalny was a braver man than me— and a more foolish one, arguably) is that he had a huge amount of egotism. He probably wildly over-estimated his popularity in Russia (in fact only about 5% supported him), and may have thought that arriving in Moscow on a private jet with a horde of Western reporters on board would probably protect him, especially as thousands of his supporters (mostly Moscow-based) would be awaiting his arrival at Vnukovo (one of the four main airports in the Moscow region: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vnukovo_International_Airport).
The plane was diverted to Sheremetyevo Airport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheremetyevo_International_Airport, thus bypassing the expected mass welcome.
I may be wrong, but I think that Navalny may have thought that his return to Russia would be akin to that of Lenin in 1917. However, Lenin was never in any danger of arrest and detention in 1917, and had not only supporters but an armed guard force at his historic speech at the Finlandsky Station in Petrograd. Also, the Tsarist Government had already effectively fallen. There was no-one to arrest him.
Navalny has, by reason of his imprisonment and probable murder, achieved the status of martyr, but had he ever become leader of Russia, might have been as harsh, and probably less effective, than Putin.
I am old enough to remember how the usually-wrong Western msm thought, in the 1980s, that Andropov would be “liberal” (mainly because he was said to like jazz). The same or similar was said in the late 1970s of the African tyrant Robert Mugabe (“well-educated” by Jesuits, and a “democrat” by African standards. So they said…). Indeed, look at how the globalist msm lauded thick-as-two-short-planks Nelson Mandela…
Well, there it is.
One interesting aspect to the news coverage in the UK today is that it has been so extensive. In a way, surprising, when Navalny had no real support base in Russia, and never had a real chance of deposing Putin.
Were I more of a conspiracy theorist than people think I am, I should suspect that the UK TV people are using the Navalny matter to talk less about yesterday’s by-election results.
Also, the Kiev-regime forces are crumbling on the Ukrainian front-line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny.
More tweets seen
Many, even perhaps I myself, might think that a retaliatory strike by Israel on Gaza, immediately after the October 2023 incursion, meaning in the following few days, would probably fall into the “self-defence” and “proportionate” area (leaving aside the behaviour of the Israeli Jews since 1948), but what has happened since then is a cruel slaughter and devastation worse than the much-criticized Reduction of the Warsaw Ghetto by German forces in 1943. The Germans did evacuate most of the non-combatant Jews before killing or capturing the rest (saboteurs, terrorists, and rebels) and then levelling the area.
According to my use of Electoral Calculus, that would still leave the Con Party with 117 MPs. Maybe. One or two points can make a big difference. For example, if the Con/Lab numbers were 23% and 45% respectively, the Cons would have only 97 MPs.
Also, these polls always over-estimate the Green vote. When and where (except at Brighton Pavilion) did the Greens get anywhere close to 8%? 5% is more usual; or lower.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html
As to “the best Prime Minister“, terrible for Sunak, but hardly a ringing endorsement of Starmer either.
After Guantanamo, Bagram, Kabul, Abu Ghraib etc, the U.S. Government can say nothing about human rights abuses.
Well, anyone can make a “mathematical error”, as when a number of, say, six million becomes one of four million and then, later, one and a half million…anyone could make such a mistake, I suppose…
Adam Smith wrote about “the hidden hand“, but I don’t think he had this “hidden hand” in mind…
Interesting, but Britain First can never be the party Britain needs. Its pro-Jewish lobby, pro-Israel stance…that alone…
…and here is Emily Thornberry living the high life with a pack of Zionists in London, including the former Israeli Ambassador, Regev (centre of photo):
Labour, “the party for working people”??
For me, the main thing is to break the rigged “two main parties” system (scam). So if the Conservative Party is trampled upon and left almost powerless at GE 2024, good, even though that would be at the cost of a Labour Party “elected dictatorship” for up to 5 years. With one large party reduced to almost nothing, the System’s rhythm will be disrupted. No more the idea that “the other lot” will be better. With the Cons deflated, and the LibDems already on the floor, other ideas, social-national ideas, will come through, one way or the other.
Late tweets seen
So the percentage of complete idiots or outright traitors in this country is now “only” 21%. Still far too high.
My thoughts are with him. He may not be quite my sort of person, but he is a martyr for truth. The UK should ditch the one-sided UK/US extradition law.
The Kiev regime may collect money, but on the front-line its soldiers are being gradually defeated, and the UKR ranks are thinning daily.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 