Tag Archives: LibDems

elections, MPs, Party Politics, Uncategorized

Impressions of The System Parties in the UK in 2018

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The System in the UK is like a rotten wooden building, perhaps a termite-riddled one in the tropics. It stands until a storm or strong wind knocks it down. In the purely political sense, the building is the “three party system”, while the storm or strong wind (which has not yet hit) is a revolutionary situation, a radical movement, or a war.

Introduction and the LibDems

We have just had the three main-party conferences. I include the Liberal Democrats out of custom and long practice, though they have surely come to, or close to, the end of the line now. They still have 12 MPs (peak was 62, from 2005-2010, under the egregious Charles Kennedy, then 57 MPs under the ghastly hypocrite Nick Clegg from 2010-2015), but there is every reason to think that (as I predicted since 2011) the LibDems are really washed-up this time. Best advice is that the projected 2022 boundary changes would leave the LibDems with, on present voting, 4 MPs.

LibDems think back to the superficially-similar trough of the 1950s (sub nom Liberal Party) and imagine that another “revival” can occur. I doubt it. Politics has moved on from vague “centrism”.

I did not follow the recent party conferences closely. I saw news reports, Twitter reports etc. The major difference between the Labour and Conservative conferences was in terms of attendance and the median age of attendees. The Labour conference was well-attended and seemed to be more mixed in terms of age than the Conservative equivalent, where the average attendee was about ?80 years of age (young by comparison to most “Conservatives” in the constituencies, though, where the norm may be 85 or 90).

The Conservative Party

The Conservative Party is now a “virtual” party, where the facade is maintained via millions of pounds from “City of London” (often Jewish) donors, and which has few members: it still claims 100,000, but many suspect that the true number is maybe 40,000 or even 20,000, with active members even fewer, which is why,  a few years ago, the Jew Shapps [Grant Shapps MP] put together the ultimately disastrous Conservative Party “Road Trip” bus jamboree, organized by the degenerate and now (politically, certainly) washed-up Mark Clarke and his slut girlfriend India Brummitt (whose jaw was once dislocated during their, er, private play).

Clarke was banned for life from the Conservative Party and as a Conservative candidate for elected office; he was also, a couple of years later (in 2018) effectively sacked (he resigned, notionally) by his employer, Unilever, over an unrelated sexual scandal. India Brummitt was sacked from her job working for thick/ignorant Claire Perry MP [Con, Devizes], but is presently climbing the managerial-bureaucratic ladder in the NHS (see note, below; Clarke’s wife is a doctor in the NHS). As for the Jew Shapps, he resigned from his ministerial post. Another Jew, Robert Halfon MP, a one-time Director of Conservative Friends of Israel, and who (despite being a semi-cripple) had been conducting an affair with another Conservative slut-activist in the same clique, also had to resign as minister a little later.

The point is that those goings-on occurred because the once-solid Conservative Party, which in the 1950s had as many as 5 million members, had shrunk to a few tens of thousands of members, and most of those very aged, infirm, and incapacitated. The vacuum sucked in trash, from Halfon and Shapps to Clarke and India Brummitt (and others of the same ilk). There were other, unrelated scandals (does anyone now remember crass one-time MP Brooks Newmark, yet another “Conservative” Jew MP?).

The Brexit debacle has surely put paid to the (never based on reality) notion that the Conservatives are competent. I supported Brexit and still do, for social-national revolutionary reasons, but there is no doubt that the present government and its immediate predecessors have royally failed to perform with even basic adequacy in regard to Brexit or anything else. Meanwhile, large sections of the population have no decent standard of living, travel, roads, schools, hospitals, pay, housing; and the migration-invasion continues unabated.

Labour

Corbyn has saved the bacon of Labour, but only up to a point. He has increased the membership to over 500,000 and is not an outsider now for next Prime Minister, perhaps as leader of a minority administration, but there are masses of people who will never vote Corbyn-Labour or any Labour. Labour might become the largest party in the Commons, but its chance of gaining an overall majority is slight. The blacks and browns mostly vote Labour and their numbers are increasing fast. The British people have no-one for whom to vote.

The Labour Party under Corbyn promises much and may be unable to deliver. However, there is this: do the voters as a whole prefer a party which promises much and may be unable to deliver to a party which promises almost nothing? Do the voters prefer a Labour Party which may well prove itself to be incompetent to a Conservative Party which has surely proven itself so? “Those who live will see”…

Labour’s millstones round the neck are mostly racial-cultural: immigration (though, again, the Conservative Party has not made good on its promises); the ethnic minority deadheads and freeloaders on its shadow ministerial team (flagship: Diane Abbott…).

SNP

The SNP is pretty much a System party (pro-Zionist, kow-towing to the “holocaust” narrative etc) but will continue to pull in quasi-nationalist votes in Scotland, enough to create or maintain a bloc of MP seats.

The most likely scenario after the next general election is a hung Parliament.

As Hitler said of the Soviet Union in 1941, “all we have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down!” He was very nearly right, too. We need a party or movement which can do the kicking, first.

Notes

” As of 2015, [Mark Clarke] was reported to be a senior marketing analyst at Unilever, but left the company in March 2018 after claims of sexual harassment were made against him. Clarke was the subject of a formal investigation by Unilever in respect of the sexual harassment matter, but resigned before that investigation was concluded.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Clarke_(politician)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tory-activist-claims-woke-up-6887551

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3817531/Tatler-Tory-s-mistress-Commons-party-storm-Mark-Clarke-s-lover-sparked-outrage-turning-Gorge-Osborne-s-cocktail-bash.html

https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/96912/curry-casual-sex-and-pole-dancing-inside-the-sordid-tatler-torys-activist-outings/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/india-brummitt-64958967

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(UK)#Near_extinction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Halfon

Addendum 14 October 2018

It should be noted that “the curse of Mark Clarke” left others in his cabal damaged too. This blog post was not intended to touch on the case of Clarke etc more than peripherally, but it might be noted that one of his closest cronies (and sometimes described as the most seriously “weird”), Sam Armstrong, was prosecuted for rape, the alleged offence having been committed after-hours and in the office of the MP who employed him at the time (in the end he was acquitted at trial, despite the evidence presented against him).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/samuel-armstrong-westminster-rape-allegation-cleared-conservative-party-aide-tories-craig-mackinlay-a8123401.html

It is incredible to me that the once-great Conservative Party should have fallen into the hands of such as these, though. It is possible that, had Armstrong not fallen into scandal, he might have been selected as a Conservative candidate to be an MP in time, despite his underwhelming academic background (grammar school followed by a mixed politics/history degree from Nottingham University) .

Likewise, had Mark Clarke not lost the election at Tooting in 2010 (various scandals about him having come out during the campaign), there is every chance that, as a semi-“ethnic” person and one who was partly brought up in a council house (and so notionally not “remote” from the masses), he might have been fast-tracked into government and by 2017 been at least a Minister of State! As it was, he was dropped from the list of Conservative candidates and described by David Cameron-Levita as “a nightmare”; yet he was still appointed to head Road Trip 4 years later! A Conservative Party slut “peeress” (former councillor) from Buckinghamshire seems to have been involved, but it is all very murky. The larger point is that the present UK political system is very flawed, leading to the selection of unsuitable and shallow candidates who then often become MPs and ministers. I shall blog about this separately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooting_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Newmark

Update, 13 August 2020

Well, nearly two years have elapsed since the last update to this article. The sinister little Con Party activist, Sam Armstrong, somehow managed to get a job as Communications Director at the “interventionist”, pro-Israel, pro-NWO lobby group, the Henry Jackson Society [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society]: https://henryjacksonsociety.org/staff/samuel-armstrong/

At time of writing, his latest tweet was this:

His lucky escape at the rape trial is of course not noted on his Henry Jackson profile.

As to the rest of my article, well…I  have seen nothing about Con “activist” Mark Clarke for years. He seems to have sunk without trace after Unilever sacked him. His girlfriend at time of the writing of my article, India Brummitt, is now “General Manager, Medical Specialties” at the NHS trust that runs Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospitals in London: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/india-brummitt-64958967

I have occasionally seen tweets or comments by another of Clarke’s little cabal, one Andre-something or other, a scribbler for some online news outlet.

On the wider picture, the vagaries of the British electoral system and the lack of enthusiasm for Labour resulted in a Con majority of 80 at the 2019 General Election. The result was that Boris Johnson, a part-Jew, part-Turk public entertainer, is now posing as Prime Minister.

Finally, it was recently announced that there will not now be any reduction in the number of Westminster constituencies, and so in the number of seats, from 650 to 600. There may be boundary changes in 2023, but so far there has been no legislation to that effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Periodic_Review_of_Westminster_constituencies

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/boundaries2023.html

 

Party Politics, Uncategorized

UK System Parties Struggle For Relevance

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Overview

The next UK general election must be held by mid-2022 at latest. Pundits have suggested every time between Autumn 2018 and that date. I myself incline to the view that the next general election will be in late 2018 or Spring 2019, but I have no great faith either way.

What interest me are the prospects for social nationalism and I assess them, at present, as close to zero, assuming a general election in 2018 or 2019. Why? Primarily because there is not only no credible social national party, but in effect no social national party at all.

UKIP

What is left of UKIP is being pushed as a fake “alternative” by those who have no interest in actually having a social national government in the UK: conservative “nationalists”; “alt-right” “social media” weirdos (who never criticize Israel or the Jewish Zionist lobby, or put forward any policies for a better society) such as “Prison Planet” Watson and “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin; as well as various others who actually wish to prevent a social national movement developing.

Does UKIP have any chance of resurgence if, for instance, Brexit turns out to be a fraud (as seems likely)? If what is meant by “resurgence” is an increase, perhaps even a doubling or tripling, of its vote percentage, yes; if what is meant is a breakthrough and the election of a bloc of UKIP MPs, no.

At present, after 25 years of activity, UKIP has no Westminster MPs (out of 650), 2 members of the London Assembly (out of 25), and 4 members of the Welsh Assembly (out of 60), as well as 17 MEPs (out of 73 in the British contingent). The last will of course disappear next year even on a nominal Brexit. In 2015, UKIP managed a Westminster vote of 12.6%, which fell back to 1.8% in 2017. In order to get back to the 2015 position, UKIP would have to increase its vote 7-fold (and even then probably be unable to get even one single MP elected).

UKIP has been a winner for the System: it took votes and attention away from the BNP prior to 2010 and has taken the wind out of the sails of social nationalism by, to mix metaphors, diverting the waters of popular discontent angry at mass immigration, the EU, globalism etc. All that popular discontent was diverted into a “safe” channel– not “anti-Semitic” and, in fact, not really even anti-immigration. UKIP after 2010 fielded numbers of ethnic minority candidates. At one point, the favoured candidate to take over the party leadership was one Steven Woolfe MEP, of both Jewish and “African-American” descent. Woolfe had become an MEP in 2014 (UKIP’s peak year) after having come third (with only 13% of the vote) in the North West, which result points to the essentially shallow support that UKIP had even at its peak.

As to the small parties trying to swim in nationalist waters, none has any weight or credibility.

For Britain

“For Britain”, the narcissism vehicle of Irish lesbian ex-secretary Anne Marie Waters, is an anti-Islam one-trick-pony and one, er, woman band, pretty much. Not only has it few members (at an educated guess a hundred or so), but its popular support is effectively non-existent: leader Ms. Waters managed a derisory 1.2% (266 votes) at the Lewisham by-election of 2018, coming 7th in the poll. “For Britain” actually expelled a local election candidate because of alleged links to both National Action and Generation Identity. To make matters worse, that information had come from the partly-Zionist-funded “Hope Not Hate” “antifa” snoop-group. The conclusion is obvious: from every point of view, “For Britain” is a waste of space.

Britain First

Britain First is the most important broadly supposedly nationalist party and is said to have perhaps 1,000 members. It is not, to my mind, credibly social-national, being pro-Israel and expressing support for Jews in the UK. Its leaders are not known for intelligence or cultural depth. Its actions, such as invasion of mosques, throwing bacon at mosques etc are little removed from a Monty Python level of tactics and activity. It has done abysmally in all elections contested to date and in fact has (since 2017) been deregistered as a political party. Another waste of space from an electoral point of view.

Others

All other “nationalist” parties and groups (English Democrats, the rumps of the British National Party and National Front etc) are tiny and not worthy of consideration. One possible exception is Generation Identity, but that is not a political party. Other small but non-nationalist parties and groups are of no importance.

System Parties

It is clear that the next general election will be fought among the long-established System parties. Even UKIP will play only a walk-on role: its likely vote of 1% or 2% is unlikely to make an electoral impression in any but the few most marginal seats.

Conservative Party

The Conservative Party can now be characterized as “donkeys led by donkeys”, with not a lion in sight, unless is included the moth-eaten toy lion called Boris Johnson. The Conservative Party’s best electoral argument is that it is not the Labour Party.

Britain teeters on the brink of social breakdown. The “Conservative” governments since 2010 have slashed spending on police, the legal and justice systems, social security, housing etc. In the past, “law and order” was the Conservative Party’s trump card. Now all that is left is a barrage of empty words.

Who now votes Conservative as a natural thing? The few percent of very wealthy individuals? The –maybe– 25% of the population who are relatively affluent? Buy-to-let parasites? I get a sense that formerly loyal groups —pensioners, ex-military, Brexit supporters, anti-immigration small-c conservatives, suburban homeowners— are deserting the Conservative Party in droves. They may not vote Labour or even LibDem, but are not going to make much effort to vote Conservative. If the Conservatives are only going to get their core 25%-30% vote out, they are in trouble.

Labour

Labour is damaged by being seen (and all the more under Corbyn) as the party of mass immigration, though that is not entirely fair: the Conservatives first triggered the post-1945 immigration trickle that became a flood much later; the Conservatives have presided over enormous volumes of immigration, most obviously since 2010 (despite  –again– empty words against the invasion). In fact, the Labour Party that deliberately imported millions of non-white immigrants was that of Tony Blair, not that of Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour’s strength is that its present policies, such as rail nationalization, utilities regulation, building social housing etc, resonate with a population that has seen living standards fall for a decade.

Labour may lose 30 seats in the 2022 boundary changes, but 2022 seems a long way off at present…

Liberal Democrats

The LibDems were mortally wounded by joining with the Conservatives in the 2010-2015 Con Coalition. At present, their only strength is that some voters in the South of England will vote LibDem rather than Conservative, when they would not vote Labour.

The LibDems presently have 12 MPs, but the boundary changes set for 2022 will cost them as many as 8 seats. The LibDems have been there before, but not for many decades and that was in a political milieu where the typical election in a constituency would be a three-way split; now five or six parties, plus minor and joke candidates, contend. If the LibDems lose 8 seats, that will be close to the end. It was noticeable that their recent Conference was attended almost exclusively by the over-60s and indeed over-70s.

Conclusion

If a general election is held in 2018 or 2019, the likely result is a hung Parliament, probably with Labour as the largest party. If a social national party can be founded within the next two years, it has every chance of attaining power within a decade.

Notes: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Woolfe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Britain

by-elections, elections, Party Politics, Uncategorized

Stoke-on-Trent Central By-Election

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Last week, I wrote a preview of the upcoming (23 February 2017) Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election, one of two taking place on that day

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/stoke-on-trent-central-preview/.

Now that the main candidates are declared, I am ready to expand on that and to predict the result as best one can a month before polling.

The Stoke Central constituency has existed since 1950 and the Labour Party has won every election since then. Until Tristram Hunt appeared in 2010, the Labour vote varied between 48% and 68%. Hunt’s votes have been 38.8% (2010) and 39.3% (2015). Stoke Central has moved from being a Labour safe seat to one which can be regarded as marginal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoke-on-Trent_Central_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections

The Labour vote in 2015 was about 12,000, that of both UKIP and Conservatives about 7,000. The Liberal Democrats, until 2015 the second party, crashed to fifth place (behind an Independent) with 1,296 votes. In fact, the LibDem vote in 2010 was 7,000, the same as the UKIP vote in 2015, perhaps a sign that the “protest vote” bloc at Stoke Central is around 7,000 or so. Arguende. The LibDem candidate for the by-election is Zulfiqar Ali, a consultant cardiologist, who lost his deposit (vote share 4.2%) in the 2015 General Election.

Tristram Hunt, the outgoing-going-gone Labour Party MP, was never very popular in his own constituency, though London TV studios loved him. He made no bones about despising the leader of his own party, tried and failed to formulate policy of his own and was surprisingly bad (for someone of his background and education) at arguing his points when (as so often) being interviewed.

Hunt stepped down as MP in order to take a job as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. MP pay is about £74,000 (plus generous expenses); the V&A Director presently gets a package worth £230,000. Hunt may be getting more. No wonder that he said that “the V&A offer was too good to refuse.” So much for political conviction, vocation and, indeed, loyalty (whether to party or constituents). Stoke Central is well rid of him.

The Labour candidate in the by-election is Gareth Snell, a still fairly young former leader of the Borough Council of Newcastle-under-Lyme (3-4 miles from Stoke-on-Trent). His selection indicates that Labour are going to play on local roots and try to pretend that God is in His Heaven and Jeremy Corbyn far away, Corbyn being (arguably?) an electoral liability (seen as a credible future Prime Minister by only 16% in a recent poll).

The Conservatives have not been even the second party at Stoke Central since 2001. This by-election is one which will be decided between Labour and UKIP. The recent Theresa May Brexit speech may well have shot UKIP’s fox overall, but at Stoke Central no-one is expecting a Conservative win or even a Conservative second. The Conservative candidate is Jack Brereton, 25, who was elected at age 19 to Stoke-on-Trent City Council.

Since the 2001 General Election, the second and third-placed candidates at Stoke-on-Trent Central have received very similar numbers of votes (behind victorious Labour).

UKIP, joker in the pack. Paul Nuttall, a Northerner who was recently elected leader of UKIP, is the candidate. He must have a chance despite his partly-“libertarian” views (of which Labour is making the most, of course, claiming that Nuttall believes in NHS privatization). UKIP has a steep climb in the by-election, but it is possible. This is a by-election. The result will not affect who governs the UK. People can protest with their votes. Labour is now seen as the pro-mass immigration party and the pro-EU party. Stoke Central voted nearly 70% for Leave in the EU Referendum.

If turnout is low, if the 2015 Labour vote halves to about 6,000, if the 2015 UKIP vote mostly holds up at 7,000 or not much less, then UKIP can win. If.

It is not credible to imagine a win for the Conservatives or LibDems and they will vie for most votes not going to Labour or UKIP, but this is very much a Labour/UKIP contest. If enough people (eg 2015 Conservative voters) vote tactically for UKIP, UKIP has a good chance. On the other hand, many 2015 LibDem or Green voters may also vote tactically for Labour.

In 2015, an Independent got over 2,000 votes. Will those votes go to UKIP, now that that candidate has not renewed his candidature? Open question.

Unemployment is high, immigration is high and having had Labour MPs for 66 years has not prevented either in recent times. There is strong cultural resistance in the seat to the Conservative Party. UKIP is the insurgent here.

Prediction

The bookmakers still have Labour as odds-on to win the by-election and it would be tempting to call it as a Labour-UKIP-Conservative 1-2-3, but I am going to be bold and say that Paul Nuttall and UKIP can crack this. The seat must be one of the best chances UKIP has had or will have: anti-EU, pro-Leave, anti-mass immigration, disenchanted with the System parties and very much a “left-behind” area. Also, Tristram Hunt abandoning the seat for a quarter-of-a-million-pound job must sit badly in an area which is one of the poorest in England. In addition, Nuttall has the cachet, such as it is, of being his party’s leader.

In sum, I see the 1234 as: 1.UKIP; 2.Labour; 3.Conservative; 4.LibDem.

Effect

If the result is as I have predicted, it will push even more anti-Corbyn Labour MPs to jump ship and it will weaken Labour even further in the North (it being of little importance now in Scotland or most of the South of England). If Labour hangs on to win, then everything depends on the majority obtained but it might well be just a slower car crash.

Update, 30 May 2019

I blogged twice more about that Stoke on Trent by-election:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/stoke-central-by-election-final-word-before-polling/

and

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/stoke-central-and-copeland-the-aftermath-for-labour-and-ukip/