Morning music
Clacton and Reform UK
The System is now getting very worried about the level of support being shown even for Reform UK, a basically small-c conservative-type party. The anti-Reform UK rhetoric is now close to that displayed in the past against more social-national parties such as the BNP and, further back still, the National Front.
The System thinking must be, “if even Reform UK can be so disruptive, how more so would be a credible and genuinely social-national party?“
That anti-Reform UK propaganda is broadcast as Reform UK reaches heights of popular support few thought that it would or could reach.
Some polls are putting Reform UK as high as 20%, and all are putting it well above 15%, the average now being around 17%.
Meanwhile, support for the Conservative Party has dropped to as low as 18%, and may go even lower. I have just yesterday heard admittedly anecdotal evidence that, in my own local area (in coastal Hampshire, and one of the most heavily-Con in England), lifelong Con voters are planning to vote anywhere other than Con or Labour. Many, perhaps most (?), are switching to Reform UK, and some to the LibDems.
I was just looking at my blog from about 8 or 9 months ago. I thought then that Reform UK would get a nationwide popular vote of at least 15% and, at the outside, 20%. Seems that I was right (so far).
Estimates of the number of MPs Reform UK might have by 5 July 2024, i.e. once the votes are counted, range from 1 or 2 to as many as 22. A few Reform UK optimists are doubling or even tripling that. It seems very open, with less than a week to go.
I doubt whether the Channel 4 undercover silliness will change the minds of many people planning to vote Reform UK, as witness the tweets below:
In any case, Channel 4 News is only seen by a small minority of people. Only about 4.5% of the viewing public even watch Channel 4 overall, so maybe 1% or 2% (?): https://deadline.com/2023/06/channel-4-woes-deepen-ratings-historic-low-1235417804/; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12199071/Panic-Channel-4-viewing-figures-plummet-historic-low.html.
I doubt that more than a few hundred of the voters of Clacton will have even seen the “expose”. In any case, the main person shown was merely a volunteer. It may even be that some people will be more inclined to vote for Reform after having seen the Channel 4 piece. You never know.
There is also the point that postal voting has already taken place. Many of the older and/or disabled British voters, as at Clacton, will by now have voted.
Farage seems nailed-on to win at Clacton, as far as I can see. The Conservative Party candidate has not even been seen (by me anyway) on TV or online, while the young African standing as Labour MP has apparently been redeployed to help another Labour candidate, in the West Midlands, and has thus left the field of battle at Clacton.
I can only suppose that Starmer decided that only the Con candidate had any chance of beating Farage, having scored 72.3% in 2019, so scaled back the Labour effort at Clacton to zero for nakedly tactical reasons.
Also, the fact that Labour deliberately chose an African for its candidate at Clacton, of all places, would be likely to prompt a surge in support for Reform UK. Anyway, he’s gone elsewhere, and will probably not be seen at Clacton until the count on Election Night. I still think that he might lose his deposit.
As blogged previously, while I am not a Reform UK supporter, as such, its existence moves the “Overton Window” a bit, at the very least, and will help to break down the “two main parties” scam.
More tweets seen
The public’s view of the mostly System politicians is not favourable. Even Starmer, on the crest of his “popularity by default”, is only viewed favourably by just over a third of voters.
Look at Sunak. Only 19%, the same as the Conservative Party. I begin to wonder whether previously undecided voters will actually start to pile in against the Conservative Party now, or at the last minute, thus reducing the Conservative vote to somewhere below that 19%, maybe as low as 16%. We shall know in 6 days’ time.
I should say “80% that’s broken“, not “everything“. Otherwise, I agree.
As Hitler said, “dirty democratic politicians“…[Mein Kampf].
See also: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/10/03/deadhead-mps-an-occasional-series-the-esther-mcvey-story/.
The African will probably get about 4% of the vote, and lose his deposit.
This is incredible. It does not necessarily mean that the Channel 4 “expose” was a fix, but it certainly raises questions.
How did Channel 4 News come to fasten upon that particular person for its undercover filming?
My view: both main System parties should be eliminated.
Gavin Barwell really is an utterly stupid person, yet there he sits in the House of Lords, getting nearly £400 a day (taxfree) any (sitting) day on which he chooses to turn up for 30 minutes and have his name ticked off… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Barwell.
Yes. If all Con-leaning or anti-Lab-leaning voters were to vote Reform UK, Reform UK could just about win at Dover; even then it might be very close. One thing is for sure— the Con candidate cannot win.
So Giles Watling is still alive… I had seen and heard nothing from the retired actor since the Clacton campaign started. I assumed that he had fallen into his soup and drowned at the Garrick Club.
Watling has nothing in common with most Clacton voters. Hopeless.
The Jew Zelensky thinks that there can be a “peace summit” without Russia’s participation (unless Russia were to effectively surrender). He’s a con-man who has stolen billions.
Talking point
Should make people think.
More tweets seen
I tend to agree, up to a point, with that last tweeter. Yes, the Cons are doomed, but look at what the Labour Party now is! A mixture of Blair-Brown-style fake communitarian rhetoric, “woke” craziness, “Ukraine” (Kiev regime) partisanship, and pro-Israel-ism, combined with pro-Jewish lobby repression of free speech and, in terms of domestic policy, almost indistinguishable in reality from the policies of the Conservative Party.
Incidentally, it is Bicester and Woodstock, a new constituency, not just Woodstock. That may explain the close polling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicester_and_Woodstock_(UK_Parliament_constituency).
Even Reform UK has more support among the under-30s in the UK, especially in England, than many suppose. A real social-national party might be able to capture far more hearts and minds.
This really is stunning. If accurate, it may mean a House of Commons with 483 Labour MPs (overall majority 316), 73 LibDems, 27 Reform UK, and only 22 Con Party MPs (SNP 18, Green 4 etc). https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html.
It would mean the LibDems as official Opposition, and Reform UK with several more MPs (27 in toto) than the rump of the old Conservative Party (22), which would not be the Opposition, not even third party, but a poor fourth. Finished. Washed-up.
I have yet to meet, in the past month or even longer, even one person who expresses an intention to vote Con. There may be some people I meet who intend to vote Con without my knowing it, of course; I meet relatively few people, and rarely talk directly about politics with most of those that I do meet. All the same…
In fact, and by my use of Electoral Calculus, it may be that, were Reform UK to poll at 24%, only 3 points higher than in this latest poll, Reform could edge the LibDems out of second place, which would mean Reform UK as the official Opposition, and Farage as Leader of the Opposition! Were that to happen, I should have to eat my words of a year or two ago (dismissing him as not such an effective politician despite his oratorical and mass media skills).
We shall soon know.
“Brutal” is the word. Whatever one may think of Trump and his overall fitness for office, it is clear that Biden should now go into retirement.
The world has rarely if ever been in such multiform peril. The state with, by far, the greatest military-destructive power on Earth, is a “colossus on legs of straw”, and cannot, at this time, be commanded, even notionally, by someone not in command of his own faculties.
From the newspapers
“The Labour parliamentary candidate for Poole, Neil Duncan-Jordan, said he and others have been targeted with ’disgusting and disrespectful’ comments.
He said he had been called a ‘white traitor’ and told that ‘Adolf Hitler had the right idea’.
Mr Duncan-Jordan has called on his counterparts in the election to distance themselves from antisemitism, racism and hate crime following a number of incidents he and his supporters have faced.
Mr Duncan-Jordan said: “In the last few days there have been three separate incidents that have caused me concern. I’ve been called a ‘white traitor’, one of my supporters was spat at and I was told that “Adolf Hitler had the right idea.”
“I think it’s important that all candidates in this election come out clearly and say that antisemitism, racism and fascist views have absolutely no place in modern Britain.
“Spitting at someone because you don’t like their political views is disgusting and disrespectful. We cannot allow this kind of behaviour to become the acceptable norm.”
The candidate has reported the incidents to the police.“
[Bournemouth Echo]
Well, while I would never condone spitting at (or for that matter, throwing milkshakes over) people (as a Labour supporter did to Farage recently), if a candidate wants to knock on people’s doors to engage them in political debate, he must expect some of his “victims” to cut up rough, bearing in mind what the System parties have been doing to this country.
More tweets seen
God knows what, in the course of time, will be the karmic, including group-karmic, consequences of everything that has happened in and around Gaza in the past 9 months, or indeed the past 77 years.
“They” are always the “victims”…
The whole of the System msm is rotten.
Britain 2024
“A grandmother has told of how she was beaten black and blue by a gang of feral yobs, who stamped on her head as she slept at a beauty spot.“
[Daily Mail].
More from the newspapers
“Rishi Sunak‘s chief of staff has been interviewed as a witness by the gambling regulator as part of the row over alleged bets on the timing of the general election, it has emerged.
Liam Booth-Smith is reported to have spoken to the Gambling Commission last week to help the watchdog understand who may have known when polling day would be.
Sources stressed to the BBC that the PM’s top adviser – dubbed the ‘Treasury Travolta’ during Mr Sunak’s time as Chancellor due to his fondness for leather jackets – is not a suspect in the regulator’s investigation and had not placed a bet himself.“
[Daily Mail]
Can you believe it, even today, as the UK goes into a tailspin? The Chief of Staff of the UK Prime Minister— and look at the bastard!
“Liam Booth-Smith (born 1987) is a British political adviser who has served as the Downing Street Chief of Staff since October 2022. He previously served as de facto chief of staff to then-chancellor Rishi Sunak as head of the Joint Economic Unit.
Booth-Smith was born in 1987[2] in Stoke on Trent and was raised by a single mother.[3] He read politics and social policy at Loughborough University. Booth-Smith was appointed as Downing Street Chief of Staff in October 2022 after Rishi Sunak‘s accession as prime minister. He succeeded Mark Fullbrook.
In 2023 the New Statesman named him as the ninth most powerful figure in British Right-Wing Politics.”
[Wikipedia]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_Booth-Smith
I know that I often expostulate in this vein, but this country really is ****** on so many levels…
[Update, 16 January 2026: Liam Booth-Smith must have been born under a lucky star— he was elevated to the House of Lords by Sunak, in his 2024 Resignation Honours List, so now gets about £400 a day taxfree just for rolling up, for as brief a time as half an hour, any sitting day, i.e. about 200 per year. About £80,000 a year taxfree, for not necessarily doing anything at all. He also makes a great deal more via his salary, bonuses etc as executive of an AI company. As a John le Carre character called this country, “the pigs in clover society“…]
More tweets
In the 1970s, Britain still had many avenues open to it. Now, it is as if (?) we are painted into a corner, with almost nowhere to turn.
2024-2029…perhaps in the next few years there will, at long last, emerge the popular social-national movement that can sweep all before it.
When I stayed for three weeks with a French couple, in Paris, in 1971 (at age 14), I was taken once by car through an area my host referred to as the “quartier arabe“. Now it seems that much of Paris is the “quartier africaine“…
What about a population of ~70 million (the UK)?
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 