On 4 April 2019, a by-election will be held at Newport West, the former seat of Labour MP Paul Flynn, who died recently.
Paul Flynn was generally well-regarded, except by the Jew-Zionists, who deplored his principled opposition to Israel and to, in 2013, (the then) H.M. Ambassador to Israel appointed despite being a Jew and admitted Zionist (and so perhaps having dual or conflicted loyalties: see Notes, below). Flynn retweeted my tweets once or twice, I think, when I still had a Twitter account, but also criticized me once. Well, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, so we’ll say no more of that.
Newport West
The constituency was created in 1983. It was won that year by the Conservatives, who received 38% of votes cast (Labour 36.6%, Liberal Party 24.2%, and Plaid Cymru 1.2%). That result turned out to be anomalous, in that Paul Flynn won for Labour in 1987 and held the seat until his recent death.
This is a Lab-Con marginal. The Liberal Democrats peaked in 2005 at 17.9% (third place), plateaued at a similar figure in 2010, slumped to 3.9% in 2015 (fifth place) and collapsed further (to 2.2%, again fifth-placed) in 2017.
Plaid Cymru is irrelevant here, peaking at 7.2% in 2001 but usually found at or near the bottom of the poll at under 2% (and sometimes under 1%).
UKIP peaked here in 2015 at 15.2% (third) and again achieved a third place in 2017, but on a miserable 2.5%.
Other candidates have stood occasionally over the years (Green, Referendum Party, BNP and Independents), but are not even marginally significant (BNP 3% in 2010, beating UKIP).
As to the only significant contenders, Labour and Conservative, Labour’s vote peaked in 1997 at 60.5%; its lowest ebb (apart from 1983) was in 2015 (41.2%). So much for the “personal vote”. After Corbyn replaced Miliband as Labour Leader, Labour’s vote increased, in 2017, to 52.3%.
The Conservative Party vote stood lowest in 1997 (24.4%) and highest in 1987 (40.1%). Its 2017 vote, at 39.3%, was the Con best since 1987, though the Con vote has held up above 30% (perhaps surprisingly so) since 2010.
Opinion
There are several reasons to think that the Labour vote will sink back: a new and untested candidate, the death of a fairly popular longstanding MP, Labour’s perceived pro-mass-immigration stance. Also, the fact that Labour is sending out mixed messages about Brexit in a constituency which voted Leave more heavily than the UK average (nearly 54%). The “Corbyn factor” seems, so far, to have been a positive rather than a negative.
If I were putting money on this, I should probably still back Labour to win, though the Conservative candidate may do well and might just do it. As to the others, they can probably all easily be written off. The interesting side-bet will be how high or low UKIP scores. My guess? Under 5%, anyway (if UKIP stands at all; if not, the Con candidate will be boosted, probably).
Notes
The 2016 EU Referendum results were not directly voted for or collated by constituency, and in Wales the vote was arranged by reference to local authority boundaries, in this case designated as “Newport”, not “Newport West”. I have taken the Leave vote relating to Newport West as standing at or about 54%, but other estimates have it as about 56%.
Candidates have not yet declared. It is unknown whether any candidates of a broadly “nationalist” character will stand. UKIP is a possible but not inevitable contender. What would be significant would be anyone standing for the “Independent Group” of MPs. That group is not yet registered as a party (and may never be); until it is, it cannot put up candidates under “Independent Group”, but only as “Independent”. Having said that, if a candidate were to be endorsed on TV etc by the rebel MPs as the candidate, in effect, of the Group, then that would have an effect. It would split the Labour vote and almost certainly let in the Conservative candidate, though it is just on the fringe of possibility that, in a 3-way split of main candidates, the (in effect) IG candidate might just win. Hard to see it happening but not totally impossible.
My guess is that the “Independent Group” will not put up a quasi-IG candidate, because
voters would not know what his/her policy views might be (except pro-EU Remain, which is the minority view in Newport West);
there would be little time in which to select a candidate and, because of the disorganized way in which IG has been established (step up, Chuka Umunna…), there are no selection procedures in place;
any IG candidate (in all but name) would be likely to go down in flames, so this is a battle that the IG MPs will probably sidestep.
Update, 4 March 2019
The candidature listing is still open. So far, 6 candidates have declared: Conservative, Labour, Plaid Cymru, Green, and two wild cards, “Renew” and “Abolish the Welsh Assembly”. The obvious non-declarers, so far, are the LibDems, UKIP and anyone adherent to the “Independent Group”. However, as stated, there is still time in which to declare.
Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party – Richard Suchorzewski
Renew – June Davies
SDP – Ian McLean
The For Britain Movement – Hugh Nicklin
Democrats and Veterans Party – Phillip Taylor
I see no reason to alter my view of the contest as expressed in the blog.
Update, 30 March 2019
I was just considering to what extent, if any, the meltdown of the House of Commons over and around Brexit will affect this by-election. The obvious protest vote would be for UKIP, which as noted above only scored 2.5% in 2017, though it managed 15.2% at its 2015 peak. Both were 3rd places. To win, UKIP has to beat both main System parties. On paper, that is near-impossible, but we are in interesting times.
The result was that Labour won with nearly 40% of the vote, but less than 38% of those eligible could be bothered to vote. Labour’s candidate was thus endorsed by only about 15% of those eligible.
The Conservatives came a fairly but not very close second. UKIP came third (again). “For Britain Movement” got less than 1% and came right at the bottom of the list of 11 candidates.
I interrupt other blog writing to address an immediate issue. The activist known as Tommy Robinson has now been banned from Facebook, he having already been barred from Twitter. That news highlights again something that I have been writing about, blogging about, speaking about (at the London Forum in 2017) and tweeting about —before I myself was banned or rather expelled from Twitter in 2018— for years, the privatization of public space.
In past ages and, indeed, until about 20 years ago, public space was literally that: the agora of ancient Athens, the forum of ancient Rome, the barricades of revolutionary France, the brief outbursts of free speech in the Russia of 1917 or the early 1990s, and Speakers’ Corner by Hyde Park in London, where a youthful Millard (aged about 21) spoke to fickle crowds a few times in the late 1970s.
Today, the traditional fora of free speech, eg in the UK, are very restricted. Jez Turner (Jeremy Bedford-Turner) made a speech in Whitehall in 2015. He mentioned Jews a few times. That alone was enough (triggered by the malicious Jewish Zionists who denounced him, the supine police who are now so often in the Zionist pocket, the wet CPS who are not sufficiently resistant to the Zionists’ endless whining demands, a Zionist-controlled System-political milieu, and a Bar and judiciary which are frightened of their own shadows and even more of those of the Zionists) to have Jez Turner imprisoned for a year. He served 6 months and was only recently released to live for months more under considerable restriction.
The “public space” which is now most significant is online space. Twitter, Facebook, blogging platforms etc.
I myself was expelled from Twitter last year. I had been the target of both the Jew-Zionists and mindless “antifa” (aka “useful idiots” for Zionism) for about 8 years. I have also had my freedom of expression taken away in other ways, as well as having been interrogated by the police (again at the instigation of malicious Jew-Zionists) for having posted entirely lawful comments on Twitter. I was also disbarred, quite wrongly, for similar reasons.
Alison Chabloz was persecuted, prosecuted and convicted for singing satirical songs in the manner of 1920s Berlin. She is appealing her conviction and the result of her first-stage appeal. She has also been expelled from Twitter (as well as being made subject to a court ban from social media, which bars her from posting until mid-2019).
If Twitter or Facebook ban you, you may have some limited right of appeal, if they so choose to extend it to you. You have no legal right to stay on Twitter or Facebook despite the fact that, in real terms, they are near-monopolies. Yes, I am now on GAB, but GAB has only 500,000 users, if that, whereas Twitter has perhaps 500 million! The fact that, as I believe, Twitter is largely a waste of time, is beside the point.
The point is that, beyond your very limited contractual or other rights qua customer, you have no rights in respect of Twitter or Facebook (etc). Qua citizen, you have no rights at all. You have no right to post, and if the owners or executives of those companies decide to bump you off, off you go, whether you have 50 followers, 3,000 (as I did) or a million.
The Blair law of 1998 [nb: 1998 = 666 x 3…], requiring political parties in the UK to be registered, all but killed any semblance of real political-party democracy in the UK. Now, free speech both online and offline is being, on the one hand, criminalized or subjected to other State repression (at the instigation of the Jewish-Zionist lobby), and on the other hand choked off at source, by companies (under Zionist control or influence) barring dissidents or known activists from even posting dissenting or radical views online.
As to Tommy Robinson, I am not personally one of his supporters, and I deplore his attempt to play the sycophant for Israel and Zionism, but he has some views which are valid, in my opinion.
In any case, freedom of expression is indivisible. It is facile to make arbitrary distinction between some free speech, calling it “hate speech” and so unacceptable, and other speech which is labelled “acceptable” (politically approved) speech. That is mainly hypocrisy. Even my own relatively mild postings are and always have been targeted by the enemies of freedom, of which the Zionists are the worst.
So we have, not only in England but elsewhere (eg in France, under Rothschilds cipher Macron) the same repressive tendency. Sajid Javid, Amber Rudd, Theresa May, others, are enemies of the British people and enemies of freedom of expression. They seem to want to ban all political activity and all political or socio-political expression which does not support the existing System. It is immaterial whether you call it that or “ZOG”.
The System in the UK, in France seems to think that it can slowly turn the screw on repression, controlling the political parties (or setting up “controlled” new ones, as with Macron in France and, perhaps, the “Independent Group” in the UK), preventing free speech by putting the fix into Twitter, Facebook etc, only having controlled news on or in the msm (controlled mass media outlets).
The Soviet Union tried a less subtle form of all that, and it still collapsed in the end. What the System politicians, msm faces and voices etc, fail to see is that a head of steam is building up in the UK (and France) and, if bottled up by the State and those behind the curtain, will eventually explode.
Another example, taken almost at random from Twitter:
As well as censoring our content over the past few weeks, Twitter have now deleted all the people we were following, which in turn means we have lost a ton of followers
Please RT and follow if you’re still right behind us – we have no idea why Twitter is doing this pic.twitter.com/opwxMMr6fX
Another example. A typical pseudonymous Jew-Zionist tweeter (troll), below, exults that a very prominent pro-Corbyn Twitter account, “Rachael Swindon”, has been “suspended” (probably, like me, expelled):
In fact, Rachael Swindon has been reinstated, though only after Twitter’s vice-President for Europe intervened. Why should such people control the online public space? Again, why should the police barge in with large boots and interfere with free speech when no threats are involved? It’s all wrong.
The pro-Jewish lobby freeloader and careerist Tom Watson MP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Watson_(Labour_politician) who has wormed his way to becoming Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (with his eyes on Corbyn’s purple day and night), has attacked Tommy Robinson in the House of Commons and asked YouTube to take down Tommy Robinson’s YouTube channel, which is his last online platform of any importance.
The excuse for Watson’s actions and statement has been the apparent fact that Robinson came to the house of one Mike Stuchbery, a failed (and sacked) supply teacher who poses as both “historian” and “journalist” online, and whose main activity seems to be online advocacy of opposition (including violence, though he usually uses weasel words) to any form of British or other European nationalism. Tommy Robinson has exposed the apparent fact that Stuchbery colluded with others to visit Robinson’s wife or ex-wife at her home. Robinson’s response seems to have been to do something similar to Stuchbery. Tom Watson, in his Commons statement, referred to Stuchbery as “journalist”, based presumably on Stuchbery’s politically-tendentious scribbles for HuffPost and other, smaller, online outlets.
In the end, if someone is prevented from making socio-political expression, that person can either subside into silence, or take other action. That other action might be peaceful, it might not be. When the repressed individual is a public figure with many thousands of supporters, those supporters may also take other action. That might include, potentially, and in the French term, “action directe” somewhere down the line.
Those (of various types: Jew Zionists, the politically correct, “antifa idiots etc) in our society, who crow at shutting down the freedom of others to make socio-political expression should, in the well-worn (Chinese?) phrase “be careful what they wish for”. The Spanish also have a phrase, a proverb in fact: “Do what you will, and pay for it.” Repression of views, not “allowing” people a public platform (and anyway, who is, for example, a blot like Tom Watson to decide who should or should not be allowed to speak?) can only lead to upheaval in the end.
It will be interesting to observe the UK political scene in the coming months and years.
A few tweets seen
A tweet with a few examples of the frequent passive but malicious incitement of violence against white people by “antifa” bastard Mike Stuchbery of Luton:
@MikeStuchbery_ is the coward who Doxxed #TommyRobinson's wife and children accompanied by the Media and a Crackhead. He is a Far Left Antifa Thug who needs exposing to the Whole country.
Below: self-described (fake) “journalist” and “historian” (failed supply teacher and house-husband) Mike Stuchbery inciting serious political violence but trying to deny it…
Below: fake “historian” and “journalist” Mike Stuchbery threatens minor Northern Ireland politico David Vance with a lawsuit. Does he have any idea how much a defamation action (for example) costs? He must have got the idea of constantly threatening to “sue” from the Jewish Zionists and their useful idiots on Twitter, who are always threatening legal action, and who often invoke the “sainted” name of Israel-based “Mark Lewis Lawyer” in this regard. In reality, Lewis is a wheelchair-bound blowhard fake, recently fined by a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for his behaviour. At the Tribunal, he admitted that he often had no idea what he was doing because of his intake of prescription drugs. Oh…and Lewis’s own Counsel said that “he has no assets” and that “his sole possessions are his clothes and a mobility scooter”! See:https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/?s=mark+lewis
This individual has been proven to be an unhinged, hate-filled extremist, who has whipped-up his followers to engage in violent acts. this pathetic weasel should be charged with incitement to commit a hate crime on this evidence – pic.twitter.com/Ec2Yr9AAMM
Something called “Press Gazette” also refers to grifter Stuchbery as a “journalist” (does he have an NUJ card? I suppose that, these days, any wannabee can scribble for peanuts or for free in the HuffPost, silly little online “news” agencies, or for the (now often semi-literate) online msm “newspapers”, and then to call himself “journalist”…and in Stuchbery’s case, “historian”, too!…)
The more serious point here is that “Culture Secretary” Jeremy Wright MP thinks that he is entitled to ask YouTube to take down Tommy Robinson’s videos, Tom Watson MP having already demanded the same. Freedom? Free speech? Free country? Hardy ha ha…
Update, 11 March 2019
and still the tweets keep coming…
You are my favourite tweet thus far. Mike is just an observer? Excuse me for hooting with laughter. Mike is an extremist. It’s documented all over Twitter. He earns a living from incitement not observation. Yet he refuses to take ownership of the effect he has on others.
and Stuchbery has hit back with the piece below, posted on yet another of the plethora of new “news and comment” websites that pose as quasi-newspapers, in this case calling itself the Byline Times
Stuchbery (and many others on Twitter etc) really should refrain from using legal terms wrongly or pointlessly, eg, in that piece averring that Tommy Robinson defamed him. Well, that may or may not be the case, in the lay sense, but any actionable defamation requires publication. I have no idea whether in this case, Robinson published (meaning said or wrote to third parties) any of the allegedly defamatory material via video streaming etc. It seems not. Then there are all the other factors, such as the defences, one of which is that the statements, even if defamatory on their face, are true…
In any case, it costs vast amounts to sue for defamation, though in some open and shut cases it may be possible to find “no win, no fee” lawyers (in the old American parlance, “ambulance-chasers”) willing to take it on, with the help of specialized legal “insurance” (which in my view comes close to champerty, in the old Common Law sense)
…and here we see some supposed “comedian” (comedienne? Never heard of her), by name Janey Godley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janey_Godley , saying that those exposing Stuchbery are “a danger to free speech”:
In fact, I also must have missed seeing any support from Janey Godley for Jez Turner, imprisoned for making, in Whitehall, a humorous speech mentioning Jews and their history in England; neither did I notice the aforesaid Janey Godley (I had never heard of her in any regard until today) tweet anything in support of satirical singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz, persecuted by Jewish Zionists, then privately prosecuted by them before being prosecuted by the CPS (under pressure to take over the matter…) and then convicted, in effect, of singing songs.
An example, below, of the muddled thinking of many on Twitter and elsewhere: this idiot, calling himself/herself “66ALW88” (what?) thinks that the way to preserve free speech online is for the online platform companies to “crack down” on, er, free speech online…
Below, a tweet not at all significant in itself (there are literally thousands of unthinking, purselipped nobodies like this Irish “academic”, one Fergal Lenehan, around, all waiting for the chance to denounce people, to “report” to Twitter, Facebook or police, or wanting to ban the free speech of others not signed-up to the System/ZOG mental straitjacket). It is the trend, the existence of a large bloc of such nasty idiots that is of importance.
and here (below) is a well-funded basically Jew-Zionist organization which admits that it wants, inter alia, to stop the historian David Irving from conducting lecture tours. I think the reverse: that those who oppose freedom of speech on political, social and historical topics should themselves be stopped…
The fact that Irving has done this before does not mean that we should allow him to do it again. We have plenty of advance notice to prevent it this time.
Let’s try & stop this grotesque event from happening ever again.
— Anti-Fascism & Far Right 🥤 (@FFRAFAction) March 17, 2019
Update, 18 March 2019
Now the cowardly and mentally-disturbed grifter, Stuchbery, continues to try to claim the moral high ground, which is laughable (and note the support from a political cretin, “Leftwing Revolt”, in the thread below, who is a member or supporter of “Resisting Hate” and sees nothing wrong with someone he might disagree with being attacked with an axe! Resisting hate? You could not make it up…). I might not “support” Tommy Robinson, but I prefer him a hundred times over to Stuchbery and the “useful idiots” of “antifa”!
and (below), another little shit like Stuchbery, this time a New Zealander, who positively welcomes censorship and repression (and he is, wait for it…a “writer/director” of film and theater”!). One of the weird aspects of the present time is that those most eager to see censorship and ideological repression are “creative industries” drones, writers, film and TV people etc, and journalists.
and he retweets, approvingly, this (below) announcement of New Zealand governmental censorship. I personally have no wish to see footage of the recent New Zealand massacre, but that should be my choice, not the New Zealand (ZOG) government’s.
Chief Censor David Shanks has officially classified the full 17 minute video of the fatal Christchurch shootings as objectionable.
It is illegal for anyone in New Zealand to view, possess or distribute this material in any form, including via social media platforms.
and…again: the same little shit, one Andrew Todd, does not want the accused to be allowed to defend himself in case he says something the New Zealand government (ZOG) does not want people to hear…
Not everyone on Twitter agrees with the idea of censoring views and people being found guilty as soon as they are accused, however:
So you believe in a system where your proven guilty before your convicted by a judge and group of your piers. Let me give examples of places this has happened: Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and Uganda during the rule Idi Amin.
Here’s another one, below, a New Zealand journalist positively gagging for censorship (I had no idea that NZ was so ZOG-occupied):
FYI, more useful detail on how the big tech companies are failing to weed out hate speech videos and how they missed out on white supremacist videos https://t.co/lYdO10D2Nr
and yet another virtue-signalling “journalist” who is, it seems, an enemy of both freedom of expression and of the future of the European peoples…
I spent a good part of 2 years reporting on ISIS internet and how the group uses social media — in 2019 it's mind-boggling to me how well the coordinated cross-platform effort to remove them from the internet worked and how there hasn't been a similar one for white supremacists.
The grifter actually makes a joke out of his begging and scavenging!
It's been a challenging – and expensive(!) – couple of weeks, so if you enjoy the written pieces, the history threads, or whatever, you can always make a small tip through my Ko-Fi… https://t.co/Xd2iEmxucQpic.twitter.com/OJ7UGuAzPr
Tommy Robinson has now been banned from Twitter (welcome to the club…) despite (because of?) his being a candidate in the European elections (North West England).
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [John F. Kennedy]
Update, 5 June 20199
Another random example of how the quasi-monopolies of youtube, Twitter, Facebook etc have arrogated to themselves the right to censor and banish: [Update, 22 July 2022: the tweets etc noted have now been completely deleted]
Update, 18 June 2019
More…
A Dr Who writer @OldRoberts953 is expunged from a book by the BBC because he won’t conform to the latest transgender ideology. His views on transgenderism are probably shared by 90%+ of Brits but he’s now a Non-Person for the BBC. The net tightens around free speech. Please share https://t.co/G9fM2BK1e4
Grifter, “antifa” supporter, fake “journalist” and “historian” Mike Stuchbery is desperate to close down free speech for those with whom he disagrees politically. See his recent tweets, below. This is one of the worst enemies of freedom of expression in the UK.
YouTube shut down four major US white supremacist channels in the last 24 hours.
If they're serious about reversing the spread of radicalisation, here's four accounts in the UK they could shutter today… https://t.co/nNG4sk938a
The latest news is that some odd woman tied up with both “antifa” nonsense and Jew-Zionists has created a GoFundMe appeal on behalf of Stuchbery, supposedly so that he can sue the political activist known as Tommy Robinson.
I prefer not to comment on the proposed legal claim until I read more about the foundations for such claim. I presume that Stuchbery is doing this (the woman mentioned above may be raising funds for him but only Stuchbery himself can actually sue) because:
he knows or believes that Tommy Robinson has assets sufficient to satisfy any successful claim;
he has seen that others are already suing Tommy Robinson;
he thinks, perhaps, that a civil legal action will damage Tommy Robinson by starving him of funds;
if successful, Stuchbery will make a great deal more money than he gets at present via online begging or his part-time work in Stuttgart, where he now resides.
Were I the defendant, and leaving aside the potential substantive issues that might be in issue in the proposed case, I suppose that I should focus firstly on the fact that Stuchbery is
resident outside the strict jurisdiction (albeit still in the EU);
is a foreign national (as I understand, an Australian citizen);
has no real or other property in England and Wales;
has no means with which to satisfy any judgment on costs or in respect of any counterclaim or setoff that might be claimed by Tommy Robinson, should the Court decide against Stuchbery on one or more issues or otherwise.
I doubt that this claim will get off the ground. I certainly doubt that it will clear the probable first hurdle, as explained above, but we shall see. It appears, however, that plenty of mugs are donating to the said GoFundMe appeal at present.
Update, 25 November 2019
Stuchbery’s solicitors, Eve Solicitors (the firm is a limited company in fact, possibly in effect a one-man operation), are operating out of a rundown Victorian terrace in Bradford; several other small legal and other firms are operating nearby. The operation has only been in operation since 20 May 2019, at earliest:
The “firm” has only been at its present address since 28 September 2019, before which, i.e. from its incorporation in May until September 2019, it operated out of a tiny Victorian terraced house in a “Coronation Street” lookalike, Hudswell Street, Wakefield (Yorkshire).
The principal (and only named) solicitor is one Waseem Ahmed.
Where the name “Eve” came from, God knows. My only guess is “Adam and Eve”, as in the Cockney rhyming slang, “you wouldn’t Adam and Eve it!”
Only joking.
Having said that, when I was a practising barrister in London in the early-mid 1990s, I knew of Pakistani and other ethnic-minority solicitors (in London, in Luton and elsewhere) who used “English”-sounding names for their small firms. Some of them still owe me money! (Unpaid fees). I am sure that Stuchbery’s solicitor is not like that.
I looked earlier at the GoFundMe appeal set up to collect money for Stuchbery’s proposed legal claim against Tommy Robinson. So far, 262 mugs have donated a total (as of time and date of writing) of £5,209 to start the claim. I wonder whether they or others will donate the rest of the £15,000 asked for? Frankly, I doubt it, though the amount so far raised has been raised in only three days.
I doubt that the proposed lawsuit will either launch or get anywhere.
Further thoughts
The woman who is fundraising for Stuchbery, and who seems to have all day to tweet etc, has tweeted that “As many of you know, Mike Stuchbery is about to sue #TommyRobinson for harassment. He is backed by #ResistingHate and a full legal team.“
A “full legal team”? So that would be someone called Waseem Ahmed and…?
I do not say that “Eve Solicitors” (i.e. Mr. Ahmed) is a one-man-band (though it certainly seems to be), and I cannot say that there are no legal people offering advice etc from the sidelines (what used to be known at the Bar as “cocktail party advice”), but I do know, having been at one time a practising barrister who (in the 1990s) regularly appeared (weekly, at least) in the High Court, as well as in County Courts, and more occasionally other types of court and tribunal (both then and in the 2002-2008 period), that GoFundMe £20,000 will only serve to kick off such a case and claim, if I have understood its likely nature properly. Costs rapidly escalate.
Solicitors vary in their fees, barristers likewise. Simply to issue proceedings in a High Court action (which I suppose the proposed case would probably be) would be several hundred pounds as a minimum, and many thousands of pounds in some cases:
As a rule of thumb, a barrister will get anywhere from (as minimum) £500 a day on a small civil matter in the County Court, up to many thousands of pounds per day for almost any High Court matter, though there is no “limit” as such, and some barristers, eg the top commercial silks (QCs) will be on £10,000 a day or more. The spectrum is very wide.
As those who enjoyed Rumpole of the Bailey will know, a barrister usually gets a “brief fee” (to cover all preparation and the first day, if any, in court), then daily “refreshers”. How much are they? How long is a piece of string?
One of my own last few cases was a County Court commercial matter involving a large amount of cattle feed. Now that it is long ago since I last appeared in court (December 2007; this case was not long before that), I think that I can reveal, by way of illustration, that I was paid, that time, £5,000 as a brief fee and £1,000 a day for refreshers (in fact there were no refreshers, because the matter settled on the first day in court).
I have no real idea how much the case of Stuchbery v. Robinson might cost Stuchbery in legal fees if it is ever pursued to court, but my semi-educated guess (“semi” because I have not been involved with the Bar for over a decade) is that whoever presents it in court (unless doing it for free or on the cheap) will probably want a brief fee of perhaps £5,000 (at least) and (at minimum) £500 per day refreshers. Maybe £10,000 and £1,000 per day. It can be seen that, even at the lower estimate, a 2-week hearing (10 days in court, which this well might be) is going to cost £9,500 for Counsel’s fees alone.
Solicitors’ fees also vary widely. When I myself worked (overseas) for law firms (as an employed lawyer), the firms charged for my work at anything up to USD $500 (or about £400) an hour (I myself didn’t get that, sadly, the firms did); and that was over 20 years ago. I suppose that Stuchbery’s solicitors will not be very expensive, but will probably still charge maybe £50 an hour at absolute minimum. Solicitor case preparation might take hundreds of hours. 100 hours @ £50 p.h. = £5,000.
Then there are what solicitors term “disbursements”, i.e. the expenses of the case such as issue fees, witness expenses, whatever.
You can see how £20,000 can be quickly exhausted…
However, even if Stuchbery’s solicitors (solicitor?) can launch the proposed matter and fund a couple of weeks in court (and don’t forget that the solicitor, if in attendance, will also be charging for his time there), there is the matter of what happens if Stuchbery loses. No, that is not left to chance. The lawyers for the proposed defendant, Robinson, will in that event have to have their costs covered too. Even if they only come to the same level as Stuchbery’s (which I doubt), that puts Stuchbery (and possibly others who have funded the claim) £20,000+ in the hole. It could be a great deal more. Maybe even hundreds of thousands.
Stuchbery is an Australian citizen, maybe also a German one now (I do not know). He has no real property in the UK or, as far as I know, even in Germany, where he now lives. He has no, or no substantial, monies in the UK (or anywhere?). He does not have a substantial income or a full-time job.
On the above facts, and if Robinson applies in court for that, Stuchbery is almost certain to have to provide “security for costs”, i.e. [see above] monies “paid into court” (into a court-controlled account) to cover Robinson’s costs should Stuchbery lose his case. Likewise, on the above facts, that would almost certainly have to be the whole of Robinson’s likely outlay in defending the case. Certainly tens of thousands of pounds. Possibly over £100,000.
If Robinson applies for security for costs, if the court agrees with the application, but then Stuchbery cannot come up with whatever sum is demanded (I cannot think that it would be lower than £20,000; probably far far more), then the claim (the case) will be struck out, possibly with costs awarded to Robinson.
Stuchbery will probably have to raise £40,000+ even to start his case.
I think that my readers will understand better now why I think that Stuchbery has no chance of success regardless of the merits of his case (if any).
Presumably, Stuchbery does understand that, in a case like this, witnesses (he himself, Robinson, others) will have to give evidence, be cross-examined on that, all the while with Stuchbery staying in the UK, perhaps for weeks or even a month or more.
Once again, I am deflected from my slow and peaceful writing of a piece about my several years in Cornwall and Devon, and particularly those spent at Polapit Tamar [below, pictured in the 1940s], and which has an interesting history of its own,
by the need to write about contemporary political events. Still, duty calls…
Social Nationalism is stalled in the UK, but waking from a dormant state…
In other blog posts, I have criticized Corbyn-Labour-supporting Aaron Bastani, Ash Sarkar etc, but Bastani is surely right in tweeting that “The space for a successful far-right party in the UK is massive.” The label “far-right” I disparage, of course, but in essence I agree with him. The difference is that he opposes the birth of such a movement, whereas I support it!
The space for a successful far-right party in the UK is massive. We are fortunate that both the BNP & UKIP failed to fill it.
The fact that much of the establishment still thinks a 'centrist' politics is even remotely possible shows they either don't know this or don't care >
I have recently blogged about the “Independent Group” non-party, about how it will struggle even to get to a 2015-UKIP level of support (see Notes, below), both for “technical” reasons (FPTP voting, a likely even level of support nationwide, so insufficient to create a winning concentration of votes, a Schwerpunkt, in any one constituency etc) and because the voters are moving to the falsely so-called “extreme”. I examined also the Social Democrat Party of the early 1980s.
There is however also the point that Bastani raises in the tweet shown above (does he read my blog?): the fact that people generally are getting frustrated, and many angry, very angry, with smug, “centrist” MPs and MEPs complacently making hay for themselves as people struggle and, in not a few cases, literally starve to death in the UK (thanks to policies such as the “welfare” “reforms” which were imposed by political rats such as Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, Esther McVey, the Jew “lord” Freud and many others).
The roads are potholed, the trains are expensive and don’t even run much of the time, mass immigration has, taking the effect overall, trashed our European society, legal services, local services etc have been cut or destroyed, housing has not only become completely inadequate (mass immigration, millions of births to backward aliens, private profiteering) but threatens to become even less adequate.
The British people want and increasingly will want concrete results. The Westminster game of using the corrupt electoral system to win over the “moderate” voters in the 50-100 most marginal constituencies to a “same-old” pseudo-democratic con-game is seen as the rigged system that it is.
A few years down the line, the choice will be stark: European civilization and social nationalism against “multikulti” neo or pseudo-Marxism and also against Zionist-controlled private profiteering and fake “conservatism”.
When the right time comes, our society will be changed in the right way, keeping what should be preserved, creating what is new and worthwhile, but destroying the inferior with the flame of justice.
I was just reading a few appreciations of Paddy Ashdown, the one-time LibDem leader, who recently died. I tend to adhere to the saying de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, but when it comes to political people, kindness must sometimes give way to clarity.
In fact, I rather liked Paddy Ashdown, at least in parts (not that I ever actually met him). I certainly feel more respect for him than I ever could feel for the idiots who preceded and followed him (Thorpe, Steel, Kennedy, Campbell, Clegg etc, though I do have time for Jo Grimond, whose interesting and erudite memoirs I reviewed on Amazon years ago; Grimond was by far the best of the Liberal/LibDem leaders, to my mind).
I feel that Ashdown was a great deal more honest than most System politicians, for one thing. Also, he was an idealist, and someone willing to put a mission above his (and his family’s) comfort: not many men in their mid-thirties would leave a comfortable and perhaps promising SIS/FCO career to get involved in the hurly-burly of UK politics, particularly for something as marginal as the then Liberal Party (at the time it had only 13 Commons seats, despite having garnered nearly 20% of the popular vote in both of the two 1974 General Elections). Ashdown gave up a pleasant diplomatic/intelligence near-sinecure based in Switzerland to take ordinary jobs in the Yeovil (Somerset) area while pursuing his political mission. When his employer folded, nearly a decade later, Ashdown applied unsuccessfully for 150 jobs. When elected MP for Yeovil in 1983, he had been unemployed for 2 years and was doing unpaid volunteer work as part of a programme for the long-term unemployed.
Not that I agreed with much of Ashdown’s policy-set: Ashdown was a politician for an England which was disappearing even in the 1970s. He seems to have been sanguine about mass immigration, for one thing. I doubt that he was ever anti-Zionist in any sense (certainly not my sense). Ashdown was no intellectual and not (to my mind) a policy person. Neither was Ashdown intellectually honest in a way that might match what I still perceive to be his personal integrity (leaving aside the “Paddy Pantsdown” episode). Certainly, amid the pathetic rabble called the LibDems, Ashdown could hardly fail to be seen as a star, just as the young Bill Clinton, with his Georgetown, Oxford and Yale academic background, could not fail to shine in the intellectual backwater that is Arkansas.
Yes, much can be laughed at in Ashdown, not least his absurd sense of his own importance and weight, as when he was or tried to be (using my own parody-title for him) “the Lord High Panjandrum of the Balkans and Afghanistan”, but without at least some elevated sense of self-worth, Ashdown would never have tried to be a political leader in the first place, I suppose.
So why am I talking about Ashdown, when this blog piece is supposed to be about the creation of a social-national movement?
What caught my attention about Ashdown as politician was that he only got elected as MP in 1983, after about 8-9 years of trying; also, once he was an MP, it only took him 5 years to become the leader of his party (admittedly tiny in terms of MP numbers).
One of the precepts of the American “self-help” guru Anthony Robbins is that “most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” That is very true. Examples are all around in history.
Famously, Hitler joined the NSDAP as “Member no.7” in 1919. A year later, it was still of little importance even in its home city, Munich. By 1923 Hitler had attempted the Beer Hall Putsch, which went down in shambolic ignominy; by 1928, 9 years after its foundation, the NSDAP could still only raise a national vote of 2.6%. However, Hitler had built a party and beyond that, a whole volkisch movement. It only needed the right conditions in which to flourish. The Depression provided that, together with the widespread feeling against the Jewish exploitation of the German people: by 1930, the NSDAP had a vote of 18%, by 1932 of 33%, and by 1933 of nearly 44%.
Lenin’s serious revolutionary political activity could be said to have begun with the establishment of Iskra [The Spark] in 1900. Though by 1910, Lenin was still politically marginal, he was considered to be one of the leaders of the Marxist tendency, at least. However, both Bolsheviki and Mensheviki together numbered only 8,400 by 1910 (perhaps 75% of whom were under 30 years of age). Once again, though, the important point is that a party, albeit split, existed and, once the disastrous Russian participation in the European war of 1914 onward had destroyed the strength of the Tsarist government and society, that party could take over the existing uprising in 1917 and perform a coup d’etat later the same year.
Other examples? How about “Solidarity” in Poland? Founded by a small number of workers in Gdansk (former Danzig) in 1980, by 1989 it was the governing party in Poland.
UKIP was formed in 1993 and had become an organized though marginal party by 2003. UKIP never did break through. It peaked in 2014 and deflated from 2015. What stopped UKIP from taking power was not only the UK’s totally unfair First Past the Post electoral system (though that did not help). What stopped UKIP was, first, that it was and (to the extent that it still exists) is not a revolutionary, nor even radical, party/movement; also, there has been no truly “triggering” event comparable to the First World War, the Great Depression etc in the UK of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.
Even if the future for the UK and Europe is a kind of multifaceted civil war, a political party or movement must exist. It is the sine qua non. In a year, it would achieve nothing, but in ten years it could achieve everything.
I have interrupted the drafting of a far more significant blog post to comment on matters arising from and matters around the resignation of Nigel Farage from UKIP, announced today.
Nigel Farage and UKIP
It is perhaps the conventional wisdom to regard Nigel Farage as a hugely–skilled politician who made UKIP into a major force in British politics. My own view is rather different.
I see Farage as an articulate, fairly intelligent fellow, not very ideological beyond an ingrained free-marketism. Certainly not a great or even wide-ranging thinker. Farage was leader of UKIP (founded 1993) from 1997 to 2016. On the one hand, Farage mobilized and organized UKIP sufficiently to gain, at peak, 24 MEPs and 2 Conservative MP defectors. On the other hand, in 25 years of operation and 19 years under Farage, UKIP never came close to having a new UKIP MP elected anywhere (mainly the fault of the British FPTP electoral system, so be it).
UKIP (as I tweeted and blogged for years) peaked in 2014. Since then it has been on the downward slope. Farage saw that and jumped ship, first giving up the leadership, then getting new and presumably lucrative work as radio talk host on LBC and as a general talking head.
Now Farage has resigned from UKIP because he says that it is becoming a single-issue party obsessed by Islam or Islamism. He also thinks that the new UKIP leader is obsessed with the idea of linking up with “Tommy Robinson” and his large band of followers. Farage’s view is mired in irony though: if there has ever been a one-issue party (or maybe two connected issues) it is UKIP, with its emphases on exit from the EU and mass immigration.
Farage’s own view seems to be that he prefers immigration (so long as notionally “high-skilled”) from India than from EU states. Despite the influx to the UK of low-wage Lithuanians and others, and also Roma Gypsy thieves and freeloaders, that is just mad, or at best very wrongheaded. After all, “race is the root, culture is the flower”.
UKIP’s Electoral Chances
As I have blogged several times, I assess UKIP’s electoral chances as close to zero. At electoral peak in 2014, UKIP might have had several MPs elected, had there been a General Election that year. As it was, the 2015 General Election saw UKIP miss the bus. Its (in round figures) nearly 4M votes (12.6% of the overall vote) were insufficient to win any individual seat, because spread evenly among English and Welsh constituencies.
Any linkage with Tommy Robinson might revivify UKIP to some extent, but in my view not enough to do well electorally. Most of Robinson’s supporters vote UKIP anyway, in all likelihood.
Down The Line
It is possible that, if Brexit either does not happen or happens in a patently false way, then UKIP might do better, but it is not the party for any radical or revolutionary new start for the UK. “Robinson’s” noisy beerswillers will contribute little to UKIP, which I think will still pretty much disappear by 2022 at latest.
Further thoughts, 8 December 2018
UKIP was a major reason why the BNP (which until 2010 often did better than UKIP in elections) failed to take off in the 2005-2010 period. The BNP, though somewhat crude, was a genuine social-national party, not (as was or is UKIP) a partly-fake conservative-nationalist party. The attitude of, eg, the BBC, made that clear. UKIP members were and still are welcome on the Daily Politics show (or whatever it is now called), Question Time etc. The BNP was only allowed on to be trashed or when law and regulation prescribed, mainly during election run-up times.
There were positive aspects to UKIP when it was a live party:
UKIP raised the profile of nationalism in the UK;
UKIP raised the subject of mass immigration into the UK and the EU, and because UKIP had a platform on msm TV, radio and Press, was able to awake some slumbering people to it and the consequential dangers of it;
UKIP may have been the catalyst for the EU Referendum. Even if Brexit is defeated or denied (overtly or not) the national debate has once more awakened many not only to the EU’s faults, but to migration-invasion etc.
Notes
UKIP membership, at one time around 40,000, now stands officially at 23,000 and is believed to be in very steep decline.
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.
Well, having now read the above for the first time in 7 years, I see that my thoughts were almost all correct, yet my ultimate view on what would be the result of a 2019 General Election was not correct. “Events, dear boy”…
I could not have predicted that snake-oil salesman Farage would set up Brexit Party, and at first lead it to the cusp of victory, before stabbing his own candidates in the back, thus gifting the fake Conservative Party under poundland Churchill, “Boris” Johnson, an unmerited electoral bonanza.
In the past, by which I mean as far back as you want to go, but particularly the 1920s, 1930s etc, the primary method of opposing a political movement or tendency was to do so directly. Political battles on the streets, electoral contests involving propaganda and shows of strength etc; books might be written, too. One thinks perhaps of Trotsky’s book Terrorism and Communism, largely apolemic against the social-democrat Karl Kautsky. That was then. Today, while elements of the former methods still exist, new ones have come to the fore. One of these, applied particularly to (deployed against) the nationalist wing of politics, is the fake party, fake movement, fake tendency (call it what you will).
Fake Movements: example
It may be that the modern “fake movement” tactic had its genesis in the repressions of the Russian Empire in the period before the First World War. The Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, established agents as “dissident” voices, attracting to those agents genuine dissidents. Thus society had “safety valves” and could blow off steam safely, with no danger of serious damage to the overall society or the government’s hold on the people.
There were many examples. The famous Father Gapon became one such, though it seems that, like his even more famous predecessor, Judas Iscariot, he started off as an “honest dissident” or believer in social justice. Likewise, the assassin of Stolypin was another “double agent” or double player, being both a revolutionary and an agent of the Okhrana.
Fake Movements Today: UKIP and how it was used to beat down the BNP; the Alt-Right fakery now joins with UKIP to prevent the rise of any new and real social-national party…
It is of the essence of a “fake” movement that it starts off or seems to start off as a genuine manifestation of socio-political frustration. UKIP was like that. It started life as the Anti-Federalist League, the brainchild of a lecturer at the London School of Economics, Alan Sked, whose first attempt at electioneering led to a 0.2% vote (117 votes) at Bath in 1992. UKIP itself was created in 1993. At that stage, UKIP’s membership could be fitted into one or two taxis.
By 1997, UKIP was able to field 194 candidates, yet still only achieved 0.3% of the national vote, perhaps equivalent to 1% in each seat actually contested, the same result as had been achieved in the 1994 European elections. In those 1997 contests, the Referendum Party funded by Franco-Jewish financier James Goldsmith was its main rival (beating UKIP in 163 out of 165 seats). The BNP was another rival, on the more radical, social-national side. However, the votes of all three combined would have amounted to only a few percent in any given seat.
It is at this point that an early joiner, Nigel Farage, emerges as leader. Alan Sked left UKIP, fulminating about “racism” and Farage’s meetings with BNP members etc. Farage had been the only UKIP candidate to have saved his deposit in 1997 (getting 5% at Bath, Sked’s old test-bed). Goldsmith died; most of the Referendum Party joined UKIP. “Major donors” emerged too.
In the 1999 European elections, UKIP received 6.5% of the vote; not very impressive, but enough (under the proportional voting system in use) to win 3 seats in the EU Parliament. From that time on, UKIP slowly gathered strength. In the 2001 general election, it still only had 1.5% of the national vote, but 6 of its candidates retained their deposits.
On a personal note, I missed much of UKIP’s rise. I was living out of the UK for much of 1990-1993 (mostly in the USA), again in 1996-97 (in Kazakhstan) and after I left Kazakhstan again spent much time overseas (many places, from North Cyprus to the Caribbean, the USA, the Med, the Canaries and Egypt, among others). In any case, I was not much interested in UK politics at the time. I had lunch with a girl in a pub at Romsey in Hampshire in the Spring of 2000. She told me that most of her time was spent “working on behalf of something called UKIP. Have you heard of it?” Answer no. When it was explained to me, I have to admit that I thought, secretly, that something like that had no chance. I suppose that I was both right and wrong at once.
Now, at the time when UKIP was gaining strength, after 1999, the BNP under its new leader, Nick Griffin, was also gaining strength and –in Westminster elections– doing better overall than UKIP at first. In 2001, it got over 10% of the vote in 3 constituencies (16% in one). It is important to note here that the BNP was a genuine party, proven as such by the hatred it engendered in the “enemy” camp(s): Jewish Zionists, “antifascists” (many of whom are also Jews, though some are naive non-Jews), and the System (a wide term but certainly including existing MPs, the BBC, the journalistic swamp etc).
The anti-BNP forces were trying constantly to repeat their success in destroying the National Front in the 1970s. It lived on after the 70s, but as a shell. Internal factionalism was aided and abetted by skilled enemies. Akin to cracking marble in Carrara.
Whatever may be said of Nick Griffin (and I am neutral on the subject, though certainly more sympathetic than hostile), it cannot be denied that he gave the BNP its only chance of becoming a semi-mainstream party in the manner of the Front National in France. A strategic thinker, he managed to bring the BNP to the brink of success by 2009.
Within UKIP itself, there were social-national elements as well as what I would call conservative nationalists and others who were really Conservative Party types who, being anti-mass immigration, anti-EU etc, had defected. Two of the last sort later became UKIP’s 2 MPs, both initially elected as Conservatives: Mark Reckless, Douglas Carswell. Their kind of pseudo-“libertarian” “Conservatism” was exactly the wrong position for UKIP to take and positioned UKIP somewhere near but beyond the Conservative Party, when, to really break through, it needed to go social-national.
When the BNP imploded after the disastrous post-Question Time 2010 General Election, UKIP was able to get the votes of most of those who had previously voted BNP, if only fuelled by frustration or desperation, or “better half a loaf than none”.
UKIP beat all other UK parties at the 2014 European elections, getting 27 MEPs. OFCOM then awarded UKIP “major party” status, enabling it to get huge amounts of airtime (and people still talk about Britain’s “free” mainstream media…).
UKIP however, was unable to beat its way through the British fair-seeming (but in fact as good as rigged) “First Past the Post” electoral system at the General Election of 2015. 12.6% of national vote (nearly 4 million votes), but only 1 seat (Carswell’s, at Clacton, Essex). Meanwhile, the BNP vote had collapsed even from its 2010 level (1.9%, 563,743 votes) to effectively zero (1,667 votes).
I myself had already tweeted and blogged from 2014 that UKIP had peaked. I paid virtually no attention to the BNP, which by that time was already yesterday’s news. The 2017 election brought UKIP 1.9%, whereas the BNP bumped along with statistical zero (despite having tripled its individual votes to 4,642).
Douglas Carswell, the “libertarian” Conservative faux-nationalist resigned before UKIP’s 2017 failure to take up lucrative “work” in the City of London. His work with UKIP was done, let us put it that way. As for Farage, he reinvented himself as a touring talking head, while keeping his hand in as a “nationalist” by referring to his concerns about the “US Jewish lobby” (strangely, he failed to mention the Jew lobby in the UK or France…).
Today, in 2018, with neither main System party commanding firm support, we see the System, the Zionists in particular, “concerned” about the “resurgence” of the “far right” (i.e. worried that the British people might awaken and turn to a real alternative).
So what happens? The System “operation” revs up a little: the “Alt-Right” talking heads –who rarely if ever criticize the Jewish Zionist lobby– are now flocking to join UKIP! Milo Yan-whatever-he-is-opolous, “Prison Planet” Watson, “Sargon of Akkad”, “Count Dankula” etc…all the faux-“nationalist” fakes and fuckups are going to UKIP, have in fact gone to UKIP, have all suddenly joined as members of UKIP.
Conclusion
Naturally, all this could be co-incidence, but it is very odd that the events that I have chronicled seem to have happened at just the “right” time:
UKIP rising at the same time as the BNP which was, at that time, a rapidly-growing potential threat to the System;
Nick Griffin ambushed on BBC TV Question Time;
BNP marginalized in msm while UKIP was promoted as a “threat” to LibLabCon;
UKIP given endless msm airtime so long as it was “non-racist” (it now has quite a few non-whites as prominent members and is pro-Israel etc…);
Conservative Party MPs defecting to UKIP and so (in the absence of any elected UKIP MPs) bound to take leading roles in UKIP and steer it into capitalist, “libertarian” backwaters;
as the people look ready to follow any new credible social-national party (were one to emerge a little further down the line), suddenly dead-and-nailed-to-its-perch UKIP gets a boost from those fake “Alt-Right” figures…;
Former msm “radical” talking heads such as Paul Mason turn up shouting about the UKIP/Alt-Right convergence as if the SA were marching down Whitehall.
It is just all too convenient.
Still, God moves in mysterious ways. Maybe the System, in its cleverness, will score an “own goal”. After all, that’s what the Okhrana did in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg…
From 2005 through to 2008, I worked as a practising barrister in England, but spent about half my time in Brittany, commuting on a twice or thrice-monthly basis by sea and air. I did not keep in close touch with UK political affairs. I used my TV in France only for DVDs and videos and had no Sky service. The brief triumph of BNP candidates Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons in the European elections was heard by me via BBC World Service and Radio 4 (which can usually be picked up on or near the coast).
In mid-2009, having given up Bar practice in early 2008, I returned to the UK. I started to take great interest in British political life. One aspect surprised me particularly: the rise to –brief– prominence of persons whose connection to politics was slight. Not so much “commentators” (their usual self-styling) as pseudo-commentators and pseudo-“activists”. One of these was a young woman called Alexandra Swann (on Twitter, @alexandralswann, not to be confused with @alexandraswann, an American blogger). She was (for her “15 minutes of fame”) a UKIP spokesperson:
and the msm started to take an interest in her. For a few months she seemed to be on TV constantly, pontificating (albeit risibly) on social welfare, employment, all sorts of things. UKIP gave her 10 minutes in which to speak at its 2012 Conference:
The Guardian –of all outlets!– gave Alexandra Swann op-ed space, calling her “the new face of UKIP”. She was also called, by others,”the future face of UK politics”!
In fact, she described herself as “libertarian” and had been an office-holder at one time in “Conservative Future”, the more or less defunct Con youth wing (the Scottish section even had to cancel its conference, when only 6 people applied for tickets!). Like so many youthful “libertarians” (she was 23 years old in 2012), she had a wealthy father to help her out should she be unable to stand on her own two feet in the approved Ayn Rand manner. Indeed, she was, at the time, still a student, working on a politics-oriented PhD at Sussex.
In fact, it was around that time that UKIP started to split internally between the members who were basically pseudo-nationalist Conservatives (fiscal Conservatives who were anti-mass immigration) and the more social-national UKIPpers who might (and did, briefly) appeal to voters in the Labour heartlands of the North.
She was so politically-unaware that she thought that UKIP should ditch its anti-immigration stance and become a party of Ayn Rand “libertarians” (liberty for the wealthy and austerity/repression for the poor, as I see it). She was not alone in holding such attitudes: some who held elected positions were not far from her in this; one could mention Daniel Hannan MEP, Douglas Carswell MP etc as “fiscally conservative, socially-liberal”. Those far more seasoned (not to say educated and intelligent) figures likewise at least pretended to think that a “small-state” national conservatism could be popular. Needless to say, the idea is anathema to me.
Since that time, Alexandra Swann has retreated into private life and (her tweets have recounted) has even had a job or two, as well as becoming, presumably on a small scale (via family money? I do not know, but how else?), a buy-to-let parasite or “residential real estate investor” if you prefer. I should add that the lady blocks me on Twitter, though I have never tweeted to her. She must have disagreed with a tweet of mine which was critical of her smug “entitled” attitudes…
What I am writing about here is not this one now-obscure person, Alexandra Swann, as such (she was, in the end, too silly and inconsistent a figure to be taken seriously even in Britain’s decadent political/msm milieu), but as a symptom of a time when the mainstream media promoted almost anyone, especially those thought to be travelling along the “welfare reform”, “austerity” line. A pretty face and youth helped but were not essential. There were others after 2010 who were trying to become media talking heads and/or political stars. Some even became MPs.
There was Louise Mensch, who caught the wave early. David Cameron-Levita-Schlumberger placed her on the “A” List, as a result of which she was briefly an MP, though she resigned for “personal reasons” later, by which time various stories about her behaviour had surfaced, not least the fact that (as she admitted), “hard drugs” had “messed with” her brain…
Louise Mensch could be seen on TV constantly in 2010-2011, supporting the evil policies of the “Conservative” government of Cameron-Levita (and not only on Sky News, but Newsnight, at the time still a programme of some weight).
Since her resignation as MP, Louise Mensch has tried and failed at various commercial social media and Internet activities and was for a few years a columnist for the Sun “newspaper”, until she “left” in 2017. I always wondered why Murdoch paid her (assuming that it was a paid job). It seemed bizarre that a woman who constantly gets basic facts wrong could be a columnist even for the Sun. She still tweets, though: prolifically and sometimes –though unwittingly– funnily. She blocks me on Twitter…
I should add that Louise Mensch has been gunning for me for years on Twitter and elsehow. She loved it when the Jew Zionists managed to get me disbarred in 2016 (I suppose that she thought that I was still in practice and that I would suffer as a consequence) and (together with or parallel to the same Zionists) tweeted directly to me that she was going to get me chucked out of the New York Bar too. She is married to a wealthy Jew. Her desire to extract the “pound of flesh” from me was patent!
For the record, the New York Bar does not police its members’ opinions on politics (there’s this thing called the U.S. Constitution…) and I never heard anything more about the complaint by Louise Mensch against me (if it was ever made) or that supposedly made by some London Jews (eg one Goldberg QC, who threatened me with the same in the newspapers). In fact, I have never practised in New York anyway, and whether I belong to the NY Bar is a matter of supreme unconcern to me.
There were many others around 2010 (in fact from 2009) and in the succeeding years who were to be seen on Sky News and BBC News newspaper reviews, on Question Time and BBC Daily Politics. Some found niche positions in small publications or online, but most have almost faded from view. One is the egregious Caroline Criado-Perez. Like several others of the type now under discussion, she seems to have come from a rather wealthy background, so it scarcely matters to her from an everyday point of view that she dropped out of university in the first year. Her Wikipedia entry –pretty obviously mainly drafted by her– mentions her “working in digital marketing for several years”…well, it may be true…(ha).
It seems that some silly and malicious people emailed or tweeted to Caroline Criado-Perez in a threatening way (three were even convicted), allowing her to claim a kind of pseudo-martyr status for a while. I personally have no objection at all to women of note (no pun intended) being depicted on paper money, but to agitate for that (which had already been done anyway) hardly counts as a career…
Caroline Criado-Perez had an OBE bestowed upon her by David Cameron-Levita for her “activism” in getting Jane Austen on a banknote (though Elizabeth Fry had been on banknotes for years). She has now agitated for a statue of a Suffragist in Parliament Square. She still seems to regard herself as a kind of full-time or other “activist” though her Wikipedia entry says that in 2013 she was “in process of completing” a Master’s degree in Gender Studies. Roll over, Einstein! I have no idea whether she will now get a CBE for having asked that a statue be erected; maybe not.
I have never tweeted to Caroline Criado-Perez, but she must have seen me criticize her on Twitter or, more likely, not take her seriously on Twitter, because she too blocks me…I have only seen her a couple of times on TV and she seems quite pleasant in her interview manner, but “pleasant” alone just does not cut it in these times. She is a one-trick pony who is just not at all interesting.
What strikes me about the three women above is how adept, at least initially, they were at self-promotion. Also, how, in the end, self-promotion is not enough. 2010 and 2012 were different to 2018. Times are becoming serious. Yes, you could get on TV shows if you were a pretty girl willing to address (however shallowly) important issues; yes, you could maybe become an MP if you had the right help and image; yes, you could get an OBE for something like demanding that a certain type of person be put on a banknote. However, that’s where it finishes. The pretence of gravity is not the same, ultimately, as gravity. If you are shallow, or ignorant, or a one-trick pony, the more serious times will not carry you along but will dump you as irrelevant.
My intention in writing the above was not to criticize those mentioned but to characterize a time, a time that is pretty much gone now. The new time demands serious people with the ability to think and act seriously. This is no longer the time of the dilettante.
Later Note
“[Louise] Mensch is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made her realise she was “self medicating” with wine for stress….[103] She has also commented, on BBC Question Time during a debate on calls to decriminalise hard drugs, about taking hard drugs in her 20s; she subsequently told the press: “It is something that I regret incredibly, that, in my youth, I messed with my brain. I said ‘we all do stupid things when we are young’. It’s had long-term mental health effects on me.”
[Wikipedia]
Update, 25 January 2020
Nearly two years have passed since I wrote the above. The times have indeed become serious, but I have been astonished to note that System politics has founds niches for dilettantes almost as absurd as the three mentioned in the article. The Prime Minister is now Boris-idiot, dilettante sans pareil, and his top adviser is Dominic Cummings, another dilettante, who has asked that “weirdos and misfits” apply to “reform” the Civil Service. 35,000 have, we are told, applied. The UK is now going down so fast that it is dizzying.
Labour? Same: Jess Phillips for one, tipped (incredibly) as leader at some point (I doubt it, not if Labour is going to survive).
Update, 17 March 2023
None of the three women mentioned has come back into prominence, except that Louise Mensch has continued to tweet complete rubbish (including anti-Russia propaganda); she has been dumped by her now ex-husband, a wealthy American Jew; she still, it seems, lives in New York. As far as I can see, her tweets about me from years ago have all been deleted, and I myself was expelled from Twitter in 2018 after a long campaign by a pack of Jews.
The UK train is hitting the buffers. The train crash has been slow, long in coming, but it is now starting to happen.
Decades of decadence, mass immigration, political corruption, Zionist takeover of the legal system, cultural sickness in all mass media (fostered by Zionist infiltration at all levels) etc now result in manifestations that are becoming apparent even to the voting public.
The public has little idea, even now, of the causes, but it sees the effects: National Health Service creaking, beginning to fall to pieces; the housing market effectively closed to most of those who wish to buy a house or even an apartment; sky-high rents paid to speculative parasites by employees and others; congested roads and trains; cities full of those of alien race and culture; schools which brainwash children with “multiculti” propaganda and “holocaust” lies.
Those few (including me) who saw this coming as long ago as in the 1970s (in my case) or even 1960s, were and still are marginalized by a mass media system which is thoroughly corrupted. The same is true of the political system and, increasingly, of the professions, where to speak up at all invites expulsion: see
The Zionists are behind much of this and are now trying to shut down free speech and comment across social media– as happened long ago in the mass media.
The question that now has to be asked is what, in the next 4-5 years, will be the political result of the slow but accelerating collapse of British society in all areas?
It is clear that specifically English (leaving aside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) voters are now, in a semi-rigged “First Past The Post” electoral system, voting against parties rather than for them. There is little enthusiasm for any of the System parties, let alone the more or less washed-up UKIP, Liberal Democrats and Greens, but there is determination to block parties by voting tactically for the party most likely to achieve that in any given seat.
Beyond the wish to block unwanted parties and candidates, there is a general and growing dissatisfaction. Above all, the “Middle Classes” are joining the “workers” and the marginalized at the bottom.
That can only help Labour, despite the misgivings many feel about its MPs and leaders (the obvious example being Diane Abbott). The success of the Corbyn faction and its vanguard, Momentum, may unsettle some voters, but may give rise in others to the feeling that at least Labour is fairly solid ideologically, not a chaotic mess. That is bound to play to Labour’s advantage electorally. Contrast with the Conservatives. This cartoon portrayed the way in which Theresa May achieved office by default:
The next general election will probably favour Labour, though probably not enough for it to win a majority in the House of Commons. After that, one can foresee continuing mass immigration, continuing slide in public services, continuing disparity in wealth. That will be the moment when a social-national party can strike. First of all, one must exist, however.
The by-elections in Stoke Central and Copeland have been held. The public relations people for Labour (UKIP seems to have no public relations section) are still trying to spin positives out of the Stoke result and even the Copeland defeat. The time has come to look to the future based on what can be taken from these by-elections.
I blogged before the poll that, if UKIP failed to win Stoke Central, that that would surely be the end or at least beginning of the end for it as a serious contender. I have also blogged and tweeted for 18 months my view that UKIP peaked in 2014. I have no reason to change those views now.
As a candidate, Paul Nuttall was fairly poor, not resilient, not intelligent, not really passionate enough politically. The UKIP organization or administration of the campaign also seemed poor. Overall, as in the past, UKIP seemed to be afraid to really set the campaign alight. The law being what it now is, UKIP could hardly have copied the successful 1960s Smethwick Conservative by-election candidate whose posters said “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour”, but UKIP seemed to want to bypass the race/culture question entirely. There was no bite to the UKIP campaign.
The Labour candidate at Stoke Central, Gareth Snell, might fairly be described as “a poorly-educated and spotty Twitter troll, living mainly if not entirely off his allowances and expenses as a local council leader, who seems never to have had a non-political job (except a trade union one of some kind)”. In some respects he was a worse candidate than Paul Nuttall.
One has to bear in mind the heavily-industrial, heavily-Labour-voting history of Stoke-on-Trent. Labour has always had a built-in advantage there. The Conservative candidate, Jack Brereton, though looking like a schoolboy, did well to come a close third to Labour and UKIP, though in fact the Conservative vote increased by only a modest 1.8 points over the 2015 result.
Apathy or hostile apathy was the real winner in Stoke Central. 62% of the electorate did not vote. No party energized them to come out to vote for it.
As to Copeland, the main point that leaps out, apart from the obvious Labour car crash, is the poor performance of UKIP.
Future View
UKIP
UKIP surely must be finished now. It started in 1993 and in the nearly 24 years since then has failed to win a single Westminster seat, save for that of former Conservative MP Douglas Carswell, who is really just a Brexit Conservative and “free market” globalist.
UKIP would have been in a far better position had it won even a couple of seats at the 2015 General Election, but, in the irritating phrase, “we are where we are”. Theresa May’s Brexit policy has “shot UKIP’s fox” on the EU.
That leaves immigration, race and culture. UKIP now seems to have many spokesmen who are not of European race, so UKIP is not even offering the UK a white persona, a white country, if you like.
The conclusion is clear: UKIP is pointless, hopeless and must go.
Labour
Labour has been declining for years. Corbyn is both symptom and cause. The disappearance of the industrial proletariat has swept away the bedrock underneath Labour, replacing it by the sand of the “precariat”. Labour imported millions of immigrants, who are now breeding. The social landscape becomes volatile. The political landscape too.
The elimination of “socialism” from Labour led to focus-group rudderlessness, surely personified by Tony Blair, who has no principles, no real ideology, just careerism, self-seeking and politically-correct non-thinking. Labour became a party made in Blair’s image. It has no real ideology any more, not even social-democracy.
By 2020, the House of Commons will consist of 600 MPs, reduced from the current 650. Labour is currently at about 25% in the opinion polls and it is likely that, in 2020, Labour will have between 100 and 200 MPs in the House. Labour cannot now form even a coalition or minority government. It will slowly crumble.
The Future Beyond 2020
A new social nationalist party must be formed. It must be ideologically clear, administratively disciplined, capable of gaining trust and credibility. When a crisis comes, that small party may be able to seize control, as has happened before in history.
Update, 23 April 2019
I am updating because there has been much water under the bridge in the past 2 years and 2 months. Labour did fail to become the largest party in the Commons at the 2017 General Election, held a few months after the above was written. However, the Conservatives lost ground. Labour has trailed in the opinion polls since I wrote the above blog post, but just recently has managed to come back, not really on its own merit but because the Conservatives under Theresa May have had a complete car crash in several respects, especially Brexit. Labour has been sitting on the fence, not exactly a “cunning plan” but effective enough…
As for the planned reduction of MP numbers to 600 (from 650), that will not now occur.
Update, 6 December 2020
I just noticed that my prediction of Labour MP-strength in the House of Commons (100-200 by 2020) was right: the Labour Party now has 200 MPs (201, if presently-suspended Jeremy Corbyn is included).
At date of writing, and despite the appalling incompetence of the Boris Johnson government, Labour under Jewish lobby puppet Keir Starmer is still trailing a few points behind the Conservative Party.
The Reform candidate came second, with 24.2%. The Conservative vote slumped to 17.6%.
It is not unlikely that Reform will triumph next time, looking at the present opinion polling nationwide.
Incidentally, Snell is now married to half-Jewish former MP Ruth Smeeth, the Labour Friends of Israel member and alleged agent for both Israel and USA, who now sits in the degraded House of Lords as “Baroness Anderson”, having been “ennobled” by Conservative Friends of Israel former PM, “Boris”-idiot. What price “democracy”?
The next general election will probably favour Labour, though probably not enough for it to win a majority in the House of Commons. After that, one can foresee continuing mass immigration, continuing slide in public services, continuing disparity in wealth. That will be the moment when a social-national party can strike. First of all, one must exist, however.
Ian Robert Millard 