Afternoon music
Tweets seen
Answer: NO.
Hard, in a sense, to see what that snake-oil salesman would add to Reform UK’s limited popular appeal, especially after his recent frenzied pro-Israel soundbites, but then I am not a typical voter. Parties need leaders, either that or at least figureheads.
If Farage takes up the reins of Reform UK, and if that boosts its vote-share from last week’s 18% to 26%, and if the extra 8 points come equally out of the Con and Lab vote-share, leaving Cons on 14%, Labour on 44%, LibDems on 9% and Greens on 7%, the result might be Labour with 490 Commons seats, Reform UK with 57, LibDem 55, Con 6, and Greens 2. [calculation via Electoral Calculus https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html].
Is that possible? The uncertainty alone speaks volumes. It seems impossible… and yet…
That would put Reform UK into Parliament as second-largest party, and official Opposition. As for the Conservative Party, 6 MPs and a very very poor fourth place; for them, it would probably mean the end of the road.
If Sunak, the little Indian money-juggler, were to lose his seat, he would not even have to find a reason to relocate, with his immensely rich wife, to California. If so, good riddance.
Even were Labour to ebb to 40%, and the Cons to recover to 18% (where one opinion poll had them last week), that would still leave the Cons with a mere 35 MPs (Lab 435, LibDems 58, Greens 2, but Reform UK with 79 MPs!
A party has to get well beyond 20% to get any seats at all under the UK’s FPTP voting system, but if it can get 25%+, it may hit the jackpot.
We shall have to wait and see, but the situation looks dire for the treacherous and incompetent Con Party, and I doubt whether the latest pseudo-1940 “fight on the beaches” appeal, featuring the Indian money-juggler and the Jew Shapps (he of the 5 fake identities and the Israeli Bnai Brith membership) will do anything, except confirm that the voters will vote “ABC” (“Anywhere But Conservative”).
Talking point
I happened to be out early in the car this morning, and tuned in to the Radio 4 Today Programme for a few minutes. I caught most (I think) of an interview with a retired general, only a year older than me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Shirreff.
The general seemed to want, or want to risk, a war with Russia, and seemed totally signed-up to support for “Ukraine” (the Kiev regime). He wants “the Ukrainians” (Kiev regime) to be given more and more-powerful weapons, so that they can attack Russia, and far deeper inside Russia.
“That’s what you do in war, attack the enemy“, proclaimed the desk warrior (his only active “war” command a few months in the Gulf in 1991, as a major, and aged 36).
When the interviewer hesitantly wondered whether that might lead to all-out war between NATO and the Russian Federation, he seemed sanguine about that awful possibility.
The general also seemed to miss the point that, while the Jew-Zionist regime in Kiev may be at war with the Russian Federation, we in the UK are not…; not yet, anyway, no thanks to people like him.
Britain has not been well-served by its chocolate soldiers of recent times, and it seems to me that their very limited-in-scope yet gung-ho pseudo-macho posturing might yet lead this country into becoming the target of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal.
More tweets
Talking point
More tweets
My 2019 assessment of Esther McVey: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/10/03/deadhead-mps-an-occasional-series-the-esther-mcvey-story/.
Late tweets
When I started at the (English) Bar in 1993 (I had been Called to the Bar a couple of years before that but was living in the USA), I did some criminal cases, mostly in the magistrates’ courts in London, and also some Crown Court trials. Most of the defendants were non-white. To some extent, that reflected the rather rackety chambers I was in, but not only that; most serious criminal defendants in London were non-white, mostly West Indian. That must be even more so in 2024, over 30 years later. That, despite the fact that, in 1993/1994, the proportion of non-whites in London was probably only about 10% to 20% (it’s 46% in 2024).
As for relatively recent migrants, say those who have “arrived” in the past two decades, it is hardly surprising that they commit a huge amount of crime: most are young or youngish men, few even speak English beyond a “pidgin” level, few have any marketable skills, and few have any money (though they must have had some previously in order to have been able to buy their passage from the people-smugglers).
“Russia only needed one crack in Ukraine’s defenses to increase its vulnerability – The New York Times.
Recent Russian offensives in eastern and northeastern Ukraine are beginning to “dangerously” change the geometry of the front for Kyiv. The “sudden” breakthrough of Russian troops in Ocheretino illustrated how even a small crack in the defense line can cause a cascading effect, threatening already stretched platoons of the Ukrainian Armed Forces with encirclement from the flanks, writes The New York Times.
The publication spoke with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders on the front line. They acknowledged that they were in a more vulnerable position than at any time since the “first harrowing weeks” of the conflict.
Moscow is trying to use the window of opportunity that has opened. Its army is increasing pressure in the Donbass and is seeking to open a new front by attacking Ukrainian positions along the northern border near Kharkov.
According to the publication, months of delays in American assistance, a growing number of casualties and an acute shortage of ammunition led to dire consequences for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This is evidenced by the exhausted faces and tired voices of Ukrainian soldiers.
“To be honest, I’m scared,” the commander of a Ukrainian tank battalion told The New York Times. “Because if I don’t have shells, people, equipment with which my people can fight… then this is the end.”
A city suffering blackouts has a strange atmosphere. When I relocated (for a year) to Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 1996, blackouts were an everyday occurrence, affecting various areas of the city in turn, even the “Presidentsky District” (the governmental and diplomatic quarter) where I lived. I have blogged in the past about this.
A typical example of the shambolic brutality of the Zelensky dictatorship.
Crowdfunder
https://www.givesendgo.com/GC14J
Late music