Tag Archives: Vince Cable

Alt-Right, animal welfare, daily blog, Defence, diary blog, elections, Matt Goodwin, MPs, Party Politics, Rishi Sunak, Russia and Russian relations, society, Uncategorized, wildlife

Diary Blog, 8 January 2024

7 Comments

Morning music

[Freedom of the Human Spirit, Birmingham, Michigan]

From the newspapers

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/07/mouse-secretly-filmed-tidying-mans-shed-every-night

“A mouse has been filmed secretly tidying up a man’s shed almost every night for two months.

Wildlife photographer Rodney Holbrook noticed that objects he left out of place were being mysteriously put back where they belonged overnight.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw that the mouse was tidying up,” Holbrook said.

“He moved all sorts of things into the box, bits of plastic, nuts and bolts. I don’t bother to tidy up now, as I know he will see to it. I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning. Ninety-nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night.”

[Guardian]

Remarkable. Like something from a fairy tale or one of the Brothers Grimm stories.

I hope that the man leaves the mouse a little bit of cheese or some nuts occasionally.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/07/parliament-after-next-general-election-will-be-most-diverse-ever-analysis-shows.

“The study, by the thinktank British Future, projects that the number of ethnic minority MPs is most likely to rise from 65 to as many as 83, with much of this rise expected whatever the actual outcome of the election.

If the number of ethnic minority MPs does reach 75 or more, it will have increased fivefold in a decade and a half, having been just 15 out of 650 in the 2005 to 2010 parliament.“

[Guardian]

White people (the people formerly termed “British”) are being removed from Parliament too now. What will be the proportion, both in the population and/or in the House of Commons (and the Lords) by 2030, 2040, 2050? Over-representation in Parliament will be plainly obvious, I think.

In any case, this is the British Parliament, and should only have fully British —in every sense— MPs and (so long as the upper house exists) peers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/06/rishi-sunak-javier-milei-donald-trump-atlas-network

Worth reading. I have been writing the same, or similar, about the “Atlas Network” (or “Group”) on the blog for years. As always, others are late to the party.

Monbiot somehow leaves out the fact that the sinister Antony Fisher was a fervent Zionist…

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher.

Tweets seen

What do you expect? Import this or that national or ethnic group, and you import with them their customary behaviours, and it matters not a jot that they or their offspring were born in, say, Southampton rather than Bombay, or that they attended Winchester, or Eton, or Oxford University.

Tweets seen

“US Treasury Secretary Jeannette Yellen, who is on a visit to China, is criticized for her excessive friendliness, which was expressed in numerous bows at a meeting with her Chinese counterpart.

Diplomatic etiquette experts at The New York Post note that American officials do not bow at all and point out that Chinese Vice Premier He Lifen, to whom Yellen bows glibly, does not respond with a mutual movement. A protocol error that critics will call a sign of America’s weakness.”

How embarrassing for the USA, to be represented by a peculiar and aged Jewish woman who has no idea how to behave. In fact, she looks like a giant chicken. She also looks like she would like to pull off the Chinaman’s hand and keep it as a souvenir.

Ecce “the land of freedom”…

A nice story.

Dershowitz was also a passenger, numerous times, on the so-called “Lolita Express” of the Jew Epstein. https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/08/11/the-jew-epstein-and-prince-andrew-the-british-royal-family-has-another-scandal-maybe-its-time-to-just-get-rid-of-them/.

Valentin Tomberg was right. The “mask of Evil” did “start to come off” from the late 20thC onwards. Even more so in the first quarter of the 21st. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg.

Oh, look, one of (((those))) lovely (((you-know-who)))…

I was tweeting (when I still had a Twitter account) and blogging for years about this scandal, long before most others. Incredible injustice. Cable seems incapable of seeing it, just as he did not want to see the miseries inflicted by the Con Coalition during 2010-2015. Like almost all LibDems, he is a useless waste of space.

I have, though years ago now, also criticized Paula Vennells, that dishonest careerist woman who also posed, at one time, as one of those Church of England “priestesses” of recent decades: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells.

I blogged recently about the fact that useless Skidmore had stepped down as MP before he got binned (his constituency disappears at the 2024 General Election, and no other constituency’s Conservative Party committee wanted him).

Skidmore is thus, as blogged previously, positioning himself to get a job heading some “green” quango or company.

Late tweets

The Rwanda idea will only, even if implemented, deal with only a small fraction of migrant-invaders (on small boats), and none of the hugely-bigger number entering superficially “legally”.

Imagine what it will be like in 2034 (if the state of Israel lasts that long).

Late music

[Rembrandt, Man in Armour]

Boris Johnson, Brexit, by-elections, Campaign Against AntiSemitism, elections, Jewish lobby in UK, MPs, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

Could the LibDems Win A General Election in 2019-2020?

2 Comments

Background

Nearly eight years ago, when I still had a Twitter account (read “before the Jew-Zionists prevailed upon Twitter to expel me”), I tweeted that the LibDems were finished. At that time, around 2011, the height of the Con Coalition, the LibDem careerists were signing up to pretty much everything required of them by the misnamed “Conservatives”. In fact, even now in 2019, new tales come to light about how totally supine the LibDems in coalition were: recently, for example, it was revealed that the LibDems agreed to screw down harder on the sick and disabled in return for a 5p tax on plastic shopping bags.

The public were so disgusted by the LibDems 2010-2015 that the LibDem support and vote in the country hit almost rock-bottom in 2015. The 2010 general election had seen so-called “Cleggmania” and a popular vote of 23%, resulting in 57 House of Commons seats. In fact, that 23% was only 1 point above the level achieved in 2005 under the LibDems’ former (1999-2006) leader, Charles Kennedy; the LibDems in 2010 had 5 fewer seats than they had in 2005.

Naturally, the UK’s unfair First Past The Post [FPTP] political system left the LibDems with far fewer Commons seats than they “deserved” by reference to their popular vote. 23% of the 2010 popular vote “should” have given the LibDems about 150 MPs, not 57.

The 2010 hung Parliament result gave the LibDems their chance to demand proportional representation, instead of which their leadership (Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and David Laws, mainly) accepted from the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron-Levita, the mere promise of a referendum on Alternative Vote [AV], a halfway house between FPTP voting and proportional representation [PR].

Gordon Brown, on behalf of Labour, the then Prime Minister, was willing to offer the LibDems immediate AV, via a new law to be passed by Labour and LibDem MPs, but the LibDems instead (and to my mind inexplicably) chose the Conservative offer of a mere referendum on AV over the Labour offer of immediate AV. When they did that, it was already clear that the LibDems (so called “Orange Book” LibDems, meaning pro-finance capitalist LibDems) much preferred to make common cause with the Conservatives.

This “Orange Book” “liberalism” underpinned what the LibDems did in coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015. The “Orange Book” itself took the LibDems far from the positions of the old Liberal Party and even from those of the LibDem party itself during the time when it was in the hands of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy.

The authors of the Orange Book favoured socio-political positions not far from those of leading members of the Conservative Party post-2000: effectively anti-Welfare State, pro-business, socially-judgmental, favouring so-called “choice” etc.

It is striking how many of the Orange Book authors have, in the years since its publication, been hit by scandal:

  • David Laws: found to have cheated on his Parliamentary expenses to the tune of about £40,000; many thought him fortunate not to have been prosecuted for fraud;
  • Chris Huhne: prosecuted and imprisoned for the very silly crime of perversion of the course of justice relating to a speeding offence [cf. Fiona Onasanya];
  • Mark Oaten, exposed as a coprophiliac and user of “rent boys”; since when Oaten has represented the International Fur Trade Federation, a largely Jewish body despised by animal-lovers worldwide. Oaten was also a supporter of fox-hunting.

“Only” three, but three out of only nine LibDems who wrote the Orange Book (Oaten admitted that in fact his research assistant had written his, Oaten’s, designated chapter, and that he, Oaten, had not even read that chapter, let alone the rest of the book). Of the other LibDems involved, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg both lost their Commons seats in 2015 and 2017 respectively, gratefully then accepting lucrative directorships from transnational finance-capitalist companies.

The LibDem fortunes since the days of the Con Coalition

The LibDem popular vote crashed in 2015, sliding from its 2010 level of 23% to only 7.9%. MP numbers were slashed from 57 to 8.

In 2017, the LibDem popular vote slumped further, to 7.4%, though by the quirk of the FPTP voting system combined with the way boundaries are drawn, the LibDems actually managed to increase the number of LibDem MPs from 8 in 2015 to 12 in 2017.

The present situation

Nick Clegg took the Zuckerberg shilling (or should that be million?) and became an apologist for Facebook. He was replaced by Tim Farron, someone who was from an earlier, Nonconformist tradition within the LibDems and their ancestor-party, the Liberals. For example, “Farron was one of only two Liberal Democrat MPs to vote against the under-occupancy penalty (also known as the bedroom tax) in 2012.” [Wikipedia]. Farron was in the anti-Orange Book Beveridge Group [see Notes, below].

In 2017, Farron in turn was replaced by another Orange Book author, Vince Cable. Then, in 2019, Jo Swinson took the reins. She, though very much of the Orange Book persuasion, is more identified publicly with “socially liberal” than with “fiscally conservative” positions. Jo Swinson held the positions of PPS, and then Business Minister, during the Con Coalition period, but has managed to escape too great an identification with the social policies of the Coalition. Surprising, really, in that she

  • “Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (which Labour describe as the “bedroom tax”)”;
  • “Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices”;
  • “Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability”;
  • “Consistently voted for making local councils responsible for helping those in financial need afford their council tax and reducing the amount spent on such support”;
  • “Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits“;
  • “Almost always voted for reducing the rate of corporation tax“

[see: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/11971/jo_swinson/east_dunbartonshire/votes]

I have to say that I have always seen Jo Swinson as a ghastly bitch, who, like her husband (Duncan Hames, also a LibDem MP from, in his case only, 2010 to 2015) has been mainly a careerist type in politics; in Jo Swinson’s case, her brief period in provincial commerce before 2005 can only be seen as underwhelming, at best.

My view of Jo Swinson is, admittedly, mainly a personal impression based on what I have seen on TV etc. Her voting record on domestic UK issues must give pause, though, to those who see her as enlightened, socially compassionate etc.

Jo Swinson is a LibDem leader who does not frighten the Conservative horses. That could be key. In 2017, there were, if memory serves, 35 seats where the LibDems were in close 2nd place; there were many others where the LibDem was in close 3rd place. Most of those are Conservative-held seats. The implication is clear: if Brexit Party weakens an already-flagging Conservative vote, scores of (mainly) Conservative seats could fall, many to the LibDems. The Brexit Party is a major factor here.

Then we have the Remain vote. About 48% of the UK, famously, voted Remain. All three System parties were split in the 2016 Referendum, but the LibDems less so than the other two. As a party, the Conservative Party is now seen as basically Leave; the Labour Party is seen as sitting on the fence. That leaves the LibDems as the sole unalloyed Remain party. How that translates into votes and then into seats is another question. For one thing, people are likely to vote in any 2019/2020 general election on various issues, not only Brexit. However, Brexit is probably the one leading issue at time of writing.

The British electoral system is a bad joke. We know that a simple matter such as how the boundaries are drawn can alter everything:

c64bh5xw0aiwygy

In 2022, new boundaries will come into effect, along with the reduction of MP numbers to 600 (from the present 650). The Conservatives will be far less affected than Labour and the LibDems. It has been suggested that the LibDems will be all but wiped out by those changes. Perhaps, but any 2022 or later general election is still at least 2-3 years away. We are looking at the very strong likelihood of a general election within maybe only 2-3 months or so. The Conservatives would like to wait longer, but how can they, when they have a majority of one or none?

Boundaries and other factors make the popular vote indeterminative. In 2005, Labour’s popular vote was 35.2%, and the Conservative vote was not far behind (32.4%), yet Labour ended up with 355 MPs, while the Conservatives won only 198!

If the LibDems can gather to their banner the bulk of the votes of those for whom the number one issue is Brexit and for whom Remain is the only way to go, and then add those votes to the LibDem core support (which may be as low as 7%), then it is not impossible to conceive of the idea of the LibDems under Jo Swinson getting a vote at least as high as Charles Kennedy’s 22% or Nick Clegg’s 23%, and possibly even higher. As against that, many voters will not support the LibDems under any circumstances, either because the party is pro-EU Remain, or because it is seen as weak on immigration (but are the other two System parties any better?) or because most voters remember the LibDems as doormats for the Conservatives during 2010-2015.

In order to form the largest bloc in the House of Commons, the LibDems would have to get a popular vote in the region of 35% or 34%, both Lab and Con getting below 30%. Even then, the LibDems would be or might be at least 100 seats short of a majority.

As I have blogged previously, I do not think in terms of a LibDem surge, but more a concatenation of circumstances —LibDems as sole Remain party, weakening of Conservative vote because of Brexit Party, disenchantment with Labour— drawing votes away from the other parties and so to the LibDems. LibDems as largest Commons bloc? Unlikely but, now, not totally impossible.

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_United_Kingdom_general_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_general_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Book:_Reclaiming_Liberalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oaten#Scandal_and_resignation

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Susan_Kramer

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8508098/David-Laws-broke-the-rules-and-must-pay-a-price.html

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne#Expenses_claims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne#Criminal_conviction

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

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

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

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

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=195941

Update, 13 September 2019

Well…

So there it is: Jo Swinson could never work with (be in coalition with? proffer “confidence and supply” to?) Jeremy Corbyn and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s against her “principles” to support any criticism of Jews or Israel, it seems. Pity that her principles did not extend to refusing to work with evil part-Jew manipulators such as George Osborne and David Cameron-Levita. She and most of the LibDem MPs voted for all or most of the measures which for a decade have demonized, impoverished and actually killed sick, disabled and poor people in the UK via the “welfare” “reforms” of evil part-Jap Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and the Jew “lord” Freud (etc).

I was right about Jo Swinson. My instinct told me that she is an evil bitch. I was right.

https://twitter.com/misslucyp/status/1172941119287648256?s=20

Update, 17 September 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/16/lib-dems-would-need-gargantuan-swing-hit-200-seat-target/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget

Some LibDems are actually saying that the LDs could get hundreds of MPs in the upcoming general election! Proof positive of their disconnection from reality. People are mostly going to vote LibDem (if at all) only as a way of hitting out at the more major parties. There is no “LibDem surge” as such, but (as I have repeatedly blogged) there is a desire on the part of many Remain partisans to vote against the Conservative Party (mainly).

We have been here before, as when pathetic David Steel urged his rank and file to “prepare for government” (in 1981): http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=42

I imagine that the LibDems will pick up some seats, maybe even 50, but what will prevent Jo Swinson getting 200 or becoming PM is that no-one really wants a LibDem government (well, about a tenth of the voters might…), but many more will vote LibDem negatively, to block other parties or to signal pro-EU Remain support.

Update, 8 October 2019

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=195941

Update, 24 October 2019

https://twitter.com/jameshirst91/status/1187268475477213185?s=20

Update, 27 October 2019

Well, my prediction that the LibDems want another “Con Coalition” becomes firmer daily; the Labour reaction is scalding (or should that be “scalded?):

https://twitter.com/TheMendozaWoman/status/1188389011917852674?s=20

https://twitter.com/MikeH_PR/status/1188347126352437248?s=20

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/27/bid-libdems-snp-december-9-election-rejected-stunt-tories-labour/

Update, 20 March 2020

Well, my analysis in the above article was right, but the basic facts changed in that Brexit Party candidates standing in Conservative Party-held seats were ordered by their duplicitous leader, Farage, to stand down. That order applied to all Conservative-held seats, even those held by the most committed pro-EU MPs!

That decision by Farage, which betrayed his own candidates and supporters, meant that dozens of pre-election Conservative Party MPs kept their seats when, had Brexit Party stood candidates, they would have lost them to the LibDems.

The LibDems were on track to win several dozen MPs until Brexit Party self-destructed.

Jo Swinson’s decision to push for a General Election, and Corbyn’s silly willingness to be shamed into going along with that, led directly to the victory of the Conservative Party at the 2019 General Election. It led directly to Boris Johnson, a part-Jew, part-Turk public entertainer, as Prime Minister. Disastrous.

My more recent pre-General Election blogging guessed the LibDem result almost exactly. I predicted that the LibDems would get fewer than 10 seats. They got 11. So nearly right, anyway.

As for Jo Swinson, her doormatting for the Jewish lobby paid off, in that she was made a fake “baroness” and elevated to the House of Lords once she lost her Commons seat.

Brexit, elections, MPs, Party Politics, Uncategorized

The LibDems Elect A Leader

93 Comments

Introduction

I suppose that I should write a brief piece about the LibDems, now that they have elected a new leader. Somehow an underwhelming topic. First of all, the new leader.

Background

Jo Swinson MP was born in Scotland in 1980, went to a local state school and then to the LSE, graduating, it seems, aged only 20, and with a degree in management. She then worked briefly for a small enterprise in Yorkshire before becoming marketing manager with public relations duties for a local radio station in Hull, called Viking Radio.

Elected as MP in 2005 [LibDem, East Dunbartonshire], she was PPS to Nick Clegg, then a PUS, then a junior minister, all during the time of the “Con Coalition” of 2010-2015.

Jo Swinson voted for all or almost all of the Con Coalition policies, and has endorsed both zero hours contracts and “flexible working”. I am not a LibDem, but I have to say that Jo Swinson is really rather far from the LibDem traditional stance on such matters. She comes across as almost “libertarian” as far as worker rights are concerned.

The other candidate, Ed Davey, is not far from Jo Swinson, ideologically, though I should say that Davey was the more intelligent candidate of the two, so it makes sense for the LibDems to go for the less-intelligent and less-educated Jo Swinson…Davey was also the more experienced candidate, being about 15 years older and having been in Parliament for longer (since 1997, compared to Swinson’s 2005); Davey was also the only one to have served in the Cabinet.

Both Swinson and Davey lost their seats in 2015 (Davey to a Conservative, Swinson to the SNP), but were re-elected in the same constituencies in 2017. Both are “doing rather well” financially outside politics too: Davey is director or consultant to a number of companies, while Jo Swinson’s husband, Duncan Hames, an accountant (and also a LibDem MP from 2010 until 2015), now works for Transparency International, a well-funded NGO.

The LibDems’ situation and chances

2010 was surely the high point of LibDemmery. 57 MPs (out of 650) and a share in government: the Con Coalition. In 2005, under the egregious Charles Kennedy, the LibDems had won 62 seats out of 646, but were not in government.

The LibDems got 23% of the popular vote in 2010, but only about 9% of the MPs.

I believe that the LibDems could have demanded electoral reform from the Conservatives. They did not. They sold their chance for a few ministerial places, for official cars, red boxes, rank and flummery. In return they (Ed Davey and Jo Swinson among them) voted for every misconceived “Conservative” measure: the appalling regime of hounding of and cruelty to the poor disabled, sick and unemployed; the whole nonsense of “austerity”, which left the UK economy almost alone in advanced states in being mired in recession and/or low growth for years; the near-destruction of the armed services as an active and effective global force. For all that and more, for being doormats for the Conservatives, the LibDems were punished by the electorate.

In 2015, the LibDem vote slumped to 7.9% (8 MPs), then slumped again in 2017, to 7.4% (but, by the vagaries of the British electoral system, the LibDems ended up with 12 MPs).

In the 2019 UK European elections, the LibDems came second. I blogged about them then:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/05/29/eu-elections-2019-in-review-the-libdems/

but they failed fairly miserably at the Peterborough by-election a week or so later:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/06/07/peterborough-by-election-post-poll-analysis-and-thoughts/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/06/08/a-few-peterborough-afterthoughts-about-the-libdems/

I do not think that I have a lot to add to what I then wrote. My view is that there is and will be no “LibDem surge”, but what there might be is a LibDem gain from the decline of both of the other main System parties, as well as an electoral benefit arising from the Brexit Party surge —if it happens— in the South of England, mainly, where the LibDems are not infrequently in 2nd or close 3rd place.

If the Conservative Party is hit badly in the South, its voters split between Con and BP, the main beneficiary is likely to be not the Brexit Party, and not Labour (in most cases) but the LibDems. In those circumstances (and “Change UK” having died shortly after birth), it is not now impossible to imagine the LibDems again having a bloc of 50 MPs, something that I admit I thought, until very recently, would be impossible. The LibDems may not deserve it, but might in any event get it. In fact, thinking of —inter alia— Boris Johnson, that might just be the epitaph of our present age.

Notes

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_(UK)#General_elections

Update, 12 December 2022

We now know that there was the 2019 General Election only 5 months after I wrote the above assessment. At that election, my initial judgment, rather than my later speculation, was vindicated: the LibDem vote increased from 7.4% to 11.55%, but the FPTP system resulted in the LibDems losing 1 MP. That MP was Jo Swinson, who exited political life, having led her party for less than 5 months (144 days).

After the departure of Jo Swinson, Ed Davey was elected leader.

The LibDems had 12 MPs after the 2017 General Election, which reduced to 11 after the 2019 General Election. However, since then the LibDems have had three by-election successes, taking their number to 14.