Category: Elections

Whither Nigel?

When I wrote, 7 years ago “Believe in the bin“, I did not mean Count Binface. Nigel Farage is back where he belongs in the Commons, and damn the lot of them for trying to oust him. They may do so again.

A week or so has passed, and the brief excitement with it, and we are deep within the Silly Season, albeit without the usual, welcome silliness. Soon the politicians will return to ruin things again, and if we go by experience, they will have learned nothing, from Clacton any more than from any reality. The sights will be trained, with malice aforethought.

(In the meantime, thank the good folk of Clacton that Jonathan Harvey was not sent to Parliament, with or without his bin. Whatever one may say about Nigel, he is serious, and while we have had a brilliant comedy writer in Parliament before, Jonathan is still no Boris.)

The targeted investigation of Mr Farage is still live. I have no reason to question the integrity of Daniel Greenberg, the Standards Commissioner – he has had an honest career built on a moral bedrock, which puts him far ahead of many who have been chosen for a task hitherto distinguished as ‘assassin in chief’. When though one is employed specifically to find faults, some will be found.  A committee of the Commons can then turn all molehills into mountains (or level them out if it is against one of their own).  The process is designed to look fair to an outsider but by design is the very opposite, as has been examined here before.

Whatever makes up the Establishment, state, media, ivory-towers and all, they have had a noble mission since the War, which is ‘Hunt the Hitler’.  Any new political movement outside their control may be the conduit for a new Bohemian Corporal. That is a worthy aim, but to accuse an innocent man for being a new Hitler is a foul slander, and to use the mechanisms developed for ‘Hunt the Hitler’ and use then to squash any change in the established order is an abuse, and a negation of democracy.

That abuse is live and working. To some extent it is understandable: in Weimar Germany the established powers thought that if they just allowed Hitler to play at being Reichskanzler then they could control him. It was not to be. Fear of that loss of control is there.

But this is not 1933 and Nigel is not Adolf. He is a level-headed, clever man, subtle of design and intelligent. If there is a justified fear, it is the body of Reform UK: we may find that its members are the drawn from same discontented wildmen and angry-men-down-the-pub that left UKIP as the loony fringe.  This is the body of the party.  (If I had a car with bodywork like that, I would take it back to the farage.) The question is not whether the Establishment can control Farage, but whether Farage can control his new MPs. Bah – the Establishment can get lost:  they have failed in everything for decade upon decade.

The sensible party remains the Conservatives, but they have been hindered and have failed for decades too:  in essence, it was the failures of the Blob which pushed the one sensible party into practical extinction in the polls and caused the rise of the one they fear.

The assassination procedure then remains live. The Clacton by-election should have killed, but it has not. The procedure (to recap) is an investigation by the Standards Commissioner, who places a report before a Committee. The Committee can then ignore it or make of it as they will to pass sentence on the accused:  in Boris’s case they blatantly invented a new retrospective rule by which to to convict him. The sentence is not expulsion, but a suspension long enough to trigger a by-election – a by-election at which nominally hands authority in the matter to the electorate, by asking “This man is a convicted criminal in our eyes – do you want to re-elect such a man?”  It is not designed to allow a censured MP back.

For Nigel, they should say “the ultimate decision in our procedure  is putting it to te electorate and that has been done, so we withdraw”, but this is politics, and no logic applies. The result may be to pull the control rod out of Reform UK and cause a meltdown. No one should want that.

I will not vote Reform – I am sticking with the sensible party, hopeless as they have been. I will cheer though, and gladly join in, when they use all their authority to extirpate the rotten establishment from their places, if they can.  I just hope that actual sensible people take their place, if there are enough of us, although actual sensible people stay out of politics and the state, to work in real jobs. That perhaps is where the real failure arises.

See also

Books

 

 

Victory in Aberdeen

Welcome to the new MP for Aberdeen South – the forgotten by-election with all the fuss made about one in Lancashire somewhere, but more special than that. The Nationalists were shown the door by a new Conservative. Welcome Douglas Lumsden.

(I have to say, thinking about the Lancastrian one, that electing Andy Burnham to parliament was a bit of an extreme way to get rid of a disastrous Metropolitan Mayor. Still, that is what they have done. To replace one failed Labour government with, erm, the same one.)

They say it is the first Conservative Westminster by-election win in Scotland since 1967 – that is astounding as you would think they would happen oftener, but maybe because Conservatives have for most of that time been the ones in power and by-elections are about kicking the government, and somehow with the wedge being driven through British society, the Tories have been portrayed as ‘the English party’. That is a sad development. Scotland used to be heavily Conservative, and many of the Conservatives’ leading lights have been, and are, Scots (if you can even make a distinction, after centuries of mixing).  If we carry on like this, with Reform showing strongest south of Berwick and the Tories north, maybe the Conservatives will be ‘the Scottish party’.

Hard work, over an extended period, becoming known on the doorstep – these are the keys to a Conservative local campaign. It is hard to despite a distant caricature when its embodiment is standing on your doorstep charming your boots off. That is the way it was won.

You would have to speak to those actually on the doorstep to know the full story, of why this part of the city used to vote for nationalist socialists, and then came to their senses. It is a transformation that hints at something in the weirdness of the electoral system. It can be examined in detail – except that all the attention is on Mr Flip-Flop 2, who won in Makerfield.

It was not all good news: the nationalist socialists won again in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (and Broughty Ferry so polite a place!) As we knew she would, their winning candidate spoke of ending division in the nation, by dividing the nation. Apparently these things make sense to politicians. Sigh and move on.

See also

Books

Two-Year Keir

The local polls have not opened and the race is on to replace ‘Two-Year Keir’. The candidates show why actually we should hope he limps on. Keir is an utter disaster – and yet he is the more sensible one. The problem is not TTK but the Labour Party.

Voters can see the relentless car-crash that is this government. The usual reaction has been to dump the car-crash leader, in the expectation of a more popular successor, the way the Conservatives used to – I am not sure that is an encouraging example. A moment of reason though should tell us that the car-crash is not from the man, but from consistent Labour policies. It is as I wrote at the time of the 2024 election: the voters threw out the Conservatives for their undoubted failures, only to choose a party who follow more keenly those failed policies:

It is as if voters complained that their dog occasionally nips their heels, so they will get rid of it and buy a crocodile instead. It will be a horrible five years ahead. Voters though in coming years will try to justify buying that crocodile even as they are being consumed.

The crocodile has been devouring its prey. We can all feel it, but many voters think the problem is that it has too few teeth. What is worse that a crocodile, the imagination can fill in, but whatever it is, it is the Greens. (Zack Polanski may be the only one of that family to make Roman look respectable.)

Sir Keir Starmer should be calling removal vans, by all accounts. He  is fatally wounded. For the sake of libel lawyers, I should say that he has not been found guilty of misleading the Commons – the Commons chose not to hear the matter. He has not been charged with treason, because we are not at war with the country in question. He has not been charged with  the more serious offence of eating a cake, that capital offence that damned Boris. No – his doom is being seen to make Labour unpopular.

To replace him though – whom do we see? Now, I should say that Angela Rayner has not been convicted of tax fraud. Plenty of Labour MPs have had imprisoned for fraud or assault, but she was not even investigated (any more than Jimmy Saville when Sir Keir was in charge). Her numerous faults are political: basically, she makes Two Year Keir look sensible. Things are stormy under Starmer – the reign of Rayner would be torrential. And yet Labour are seriously thinking she is a better bet. Those high up know that she was deputy leader (until her tax issue) just so that the loony wing would have a representative at the table.

Or there is Ed Miliband, once the Hard-Left’s champion, and now the champion of cold houses and crashed economies.

Then again, Alistair Cairns has been on manoeuvres. A decorated Royal Marines Colonel would surely be the ticket. He has kept his mouth shut as Hermer the Harmer has persecuted our soldiers, and no one seems to know his politics.

Sir Keir, you see, is the best bet. His ministry is an utter disaster, but that is because it is Labour, not because it is Sir Keir. The answer? The only answer is not the resignation of Sir Keir Starmer, but the resignation of the whole party, and dissolution of Parliament.

See also

Books

Gorton Bennett, what was that?

I know the time to write of the Gorton and Denton by-election was Friday morning – but the new MP is a plumber, so it is appropriate that it is several days late, and I’ve not got the right tools in the van.

Unfamiliar with that corner of Lancashire, in common with most of the commentators who have written about it, I did know the old MP – a fine chap, despite the colour of his rosette – and it was sad to see him go, but health is a capricious thing. Now the people of his constituency have chosen a slip of a thing from the loony party. A joke, or desperation? Or an exercise of community power?

Voters should exercise power, and at by-elections they do so with glee. The fear is that here one sectarian group were trying to show their own power, not that of the voters as a whole, and that the winning party played up to it, in spite of standing for everything the sect despises. Much has been made of that ‘robustly’ in other fora. Looking calmly, it still looks bad. I will add no more though: I do not have such ‘robust’ opinions.

This is not the first time a distinct, separated community has sought to overwhelm the electoral process: it used to be Irish Roman Catholics producing an artificial block-vote. It was for them that electoral law introduced an offence of intimidation by threats of ‘causing spiritual injury to, or placing undue spiritual pressure on, a person doing any other act designed to intimidate a person’. Those sermons in the Papist churches of Liverpool threatening damnation on any who voted Tory were too much, and now (it is alleged) the same happened in the mosques of Gorton and in Longsight. Proven threats of ‘spiritual injury’ were one of the charges on which Lutfur Rahman was convicted.

Well, they and the students. You cannot expect sane deliberation amongst students. I know – I was one once.

All the dust has settled. For all the outrage at community voting and worse, the community in question has elected a blonde, white woman, a dog-lover, from a fiercely atheistic party – not the profile you expect. She then celebrated by noshing in public while her voters were fasting. (Not a bacon baguette?  I would have.  But then she may be a vegetarian. Odd really how atheists are intent to condemn others’ dissent from their strict, invented moral codes.)

The cynicism is uncalled for: the liberal-atheist alliance with Mohammedan radicals was forged even as the Berlin Wall came down. Each uses the other to rise, waiting for the moment when their von Ribbentrop Pact can be discarded and the victor can swallow its erstwhile travelling companion.

It was a by-election in the end, not the real thing. It was a time for protest and making a loud noise in a way that does not really matter. Let the Greens preen. They are still loonies.

See also

Books

Not so smug now, are you Nigel?

So you thought it would be easy, but the established parties have clocked you long since, and you failed. Here you face the reckoning.

Yes, I know – you have almost single-handedly made your party the biggest force in British politics, and have turned swathes of the council landscape a fetching shade of turquoise, and put a boxer into office as another was turned out, and turned defecting Tories a whiter shade of blue, and all that. There is not a single deep blue county council left. Nigel, you can be measuring up the curtains for Number 10.

Except of course that it’s not your party now. One man on a megaphone is what you know, but suddenly you have all manner of men and women, dedicated people and fruitcakes and loonies, wearing your colours and speaking what they are pleased to call their minds, out of turn and out of control. You remember what happened to UKIP? It makes you wake with a sweat in the night still, doesn’t it.  Now they are in charge of actual things, given unwonted responsibility and left to fall into the inevitable pit of compromise, prevarication, dishonesty and trusting whatever the council officers tell them they have to do. They  are human, after all – they cannot be Nietzschean supermen like yourself. And they, Nigel, are the ones with the power and the voice now. It is not your party anymore.

Four years are yet to run until 2029. (That is, if Sir Keir allows us an election then.: his beloved European élites have shown you do not have to accept the popular choice. He is an experienced prosecutor, after all – he might have let Jimmy Savile off, but you and your people are in his sights for any wee infraction of the rules, even if the rules have to be made up.)

The path to Downing Street is no yellow-brick road but is a twisted woodland track, with tripping-roots and potholes hidden in the shadow. Footpad beggars, who were once potent men you cast out of their castles, lie in wait there.

But Nigel, enjoy your feigned triumph for the brief time you can, for when you look, you have failed in your bold attempt: there are still some Tory councillors left.