Nigel Farage's weird claims about Scotland

Nigel Farage has made the curious claim that the SNP cannot hold the balance of power after the next election on the grounds that the SNP will only take votes off Labour, and thus what will happen is a swap of leftist seats from one party to the other.

This headbanging thesis ignores the fact that the Liberal-Democrats have eleven seats in Scotland, and at least nine of them are under threat from the SNP. In fact, such are the majorities in Labour's West Coast strongholds, that it is quite likely that the bulk of them will remain Labour after May, so put together those two factors combine to make Farage's point risible.

Is it just me or is Farage losing his formerly steady touch?

Tory list of no-hope seats is leaked

The first leak from the Tory camp is out and it's a delightful list of the seats that the party thinks are either rock solid or no-hopers; either way resources are not to be put into any of them. Interestingly enough, Rochester and Strood is on the list which suggests that the Tories have written than one off to UKIP already. Manchester Withington is also there, and that came as a surprise given that Withington is as bourgeois as they come.

Here's the full list:

Ben Adams – Stoke-on-Trent North
Bim Afolami – Lewisham Deptford
Festus Akinbusoye – West Ham
Heidi Allen – South Cambridgeshire
Valerie Allen – Sefton Central
Sue Arnold – Walsall South
Liam Ascough – Stoke-on-Trent Central
Andrew Atkinson – Wrexham
Anwen Barry – Arfon
Peter Bedford – Bolsover
Huw Bell – North East Fife
James Bellis – Vauxhall
James Bird – Birmingham Hall Green
Will Blair – Holborn and St Pancras
Alex Boulter – Birmingham Selly Oak
Miles Briggs – Edinburgh South
Louise Burfitt-Dons – Nottingham North
Alexander Burnett – West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine
Kim Caddy – Streatham
James Cartlidge – South Suffolk
Jo Churchill – Bury St Edmunds
James Cleverly – Braintree
Rebecca Coulson – City of Durham
Peter Cuthbertson – Darlington
James Daly – Bolton North East
Chris Daniels – Stockton North
Dehenna Davison – Kingston Upon Hull North
Keith Dewhurst – Cynon Valley
Oliver Dowden – Hertsmere
Sarah Downes – Bassetlaw
Spencer Drury – Eltham
Luke Evans – Birmingham Edgbaston
Chamali Fernando – Cambridge
Peter Fortune – Lewisham East
Lucy Frazer – South East Cambridgeshire
Fraser Galloway – Paisley and Renfrewshire South
Nusrat Ghani – Wealden
Laetitia Glossop – North Durham
George Grant – Bradford West
Fiona Green – Wythenshawe and Sale East
Charlotte Haitham-Taylor – North West Durham
Ed Hastie – Neath
Darren Henry – Wolverhampton North East
Garry Hickton – Nottingham East
Claire Hiscott – Bristol West
Kevin Hollinrake – Thirsk and Malton
Paul Holmes – Mitcham and Morden
Marc Hope – Central Ayrshire
Sajjad Hussain – Oldham East and Saddleworth
Russell Jackson – Lewisham West and Penge
Ranil Jayawardena – North East Hampshire
Meirion Jenkins – Bridgend
Gillian Keegan – St Helens South and Whiston
Seema Kennedy – South Ribble
Resham Kotecha – Dulwich and West Norwood
Pearl Lewis – Hayes and Harlington
Michelle Lowe – Coventry North East
Alan Mak – Havant
Robert Manning – Manchester Withington
Lindsay McCallum – Ross, Skye & Lochaber Conservatives
Robert McIlveen – York Central
Johnny Mercer – Plymouth Moor View
Huw Merriman – Bexhill and Battle
Amanda Milling – Cannock Chase
Dom Morris – Exeter
Stefan Mrozinski – Tottenham
Kieran Mullan – Birmingham Hodge Hill
David Nicholls – Clwyd South
Luke Parker – Brent North
Lindsay Paterson – Edinburgh West
Suria Photay – Wolverhampton South East
Alex Pierre-Traves – Leeds West
Beth Prescott – Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford
Mina Rahman – Barking
Paul Ratner – West Bromwich West
Alastair Redman – Argyll and Bute
Katie Redmond – Luton South
Bill Rees – Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney
Joe Rich – Stoke-on-Trent South
David Roach – East Lothian
Dean Russell – Luton North
Molly Samuel-Leport – Walthamstow
Matthew Scott – Leyton and Wanstead
Olivia Seccombe – West Bromwich East
Isabel Sigmac – Birmingham Ladywood
Matt Sleat – Sheffield South East
Matthew Smith – Bethnal Green and Bow
Ann Steward – North Norfolk
Rishi Sunak – Richmond (Yorks)
James Symes – Ealing Southall
Ross Thomson – Aberdeen South
Kelly Tolhurst – Rochester and Strood
Clark Vasey – Birkenhead
Mark Vivis – Chesterfield
Matt Warman – Boston and Skegness
Christopher Wilford – Poplar and Limehouse
Evonne Williams – Derby South
Tom Williams – Warley
Simon Wilson – Leeds North East
Mike Wood – Dudley South
Scott Wood – Sedgefield
Jacob Young – Redcar

Nailing the first Labour lie of the general election

Labour has kicked off its 2015 general election campaign with a lie that is so blatant that it has forced me out of my Christmas and New Year hiatus a month earlier than planned. The porkie basically states that a vote for the SNP in May's general election could leave the Tories in power. This is because, says a Labour spokesman: “It is a simple fact that the single biggest party gets to form the next government. The more seats the SNP get from Labour, the more likely it is the Tories will be the biggest party and David Cameron will get into government through the back door.”

In February 1974 the Tories won 297 seats to Labour's 301, but Ted Heath did not resign immediately, he tried to cobble together a coalition with the 14 member Liberal contingent. He was entitled to do that as sitting Prime Minister because it is not about which party is the largest, but about who can command a majority in the House of Commons.

That is why when Labour scored 258 seats to the Tory 306 in 2010, Gordon Brown still tried to hang on in the hope of a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats who had been returned with 57 seats. As with Heath a generation earlier, it was not possible, but nobody in 2010 claimed that Brown had to resign because he had fewer seats than Cameron. His resignation came about because he could not create a majority in the Commons which is not the same thing.

So why are Labour lying? The answer is obviously that they believe that we are so stupid north of the River Tweed that we will believe any old wank that they can come up with, such is the hatred of Toryism in Scotland. If Labour can take its Scottish fiefdoms for granted then it can pander for the votes of the South English middle class scrote element and then form a majority government.

In other words, the people who have suffered the most during that past thirty-odd years will get nothing other than a few table scraps, because Labour will have to keep pandering to the scrotes for fear that they will desert back to the Tories at the following election.

On the other hand, the SNP have already set out their stall for a deal with Labour and none of the items on offer are anything that a traditional Labour man can oppose. End the war on claimants, abolish some of the more loathsome Tory acts such as the bedroom tax, stop the near constant wars against the Islamic world, abolish Trident.

If Labour wants to get its collective snout into the public trough then we should at least ensure that we get something for ourselves out of the deal. A vote lent to the SNP might just ensure that an incoming Labour government has to remember that it isn't just Tristram and Samantha who can dump them: so can Billy and Mary.

The National becomes permanent

Now that it has been announced that the National will continue indefinitely beyond its initial five day test period which ended today, I wonder how long it will be before people start calling it the Nat? That way the on-line version can be dubbed the Cybernat!

I thang you...

The National hits the stands: here's my take

Did you hear the one about the Englishman, the Scotsman and the American woman who all went looking for The National at about 7 o'clock tonight?

I'm the Englishman who had been thinking about getting off his bum all day to wander round to the local newsagents to pick up the first edition of the new Scottish daily which will editorially support Scottish independence. The Scotsman was the bloke who got there a minute before me to snaffle up the last copy, before holding it up with a downward tilt to his mouth to show how thin it was. The 32 page tabloid is skinny indeed, and at 50p a bit overpriced, but we both agreed that a new paper is just a good thing these days, and then we wandered along to the next newsagent on the street to see if I could get a copy. For his part my new friend wanted to buy as many as he could to give to his friends, but he agreed to scamper on ahead of me with a promise that one copy was for me.

An American woman had gone into the shop just before him and when I arrived he announced that all the copies had gone. That was when she announced that she had bought the last three, and completely unbidden gave one to me. She even refused payment, saying "war all have to stick together on this one," so I not only got to read The National, but it came as a freebie as well.

So what do I think of it? My first reaction is that it is a bit preachy. Most of the stories are seen though the eyes of a committed, fire-breathing Nationalist, and more of the Yes voters are now people who want to get on with their lives. We fought a good fight, but there is more to our lives than trying to turn the referendum into a neverendum.

Secondly, I am dubious about the exclusive story which claims that Rangers and Celtic have combined to undermine the government's anti-sectarian drive. The point here is that Prods and Papes may enjoy hammering seven bells out of each other, but that does not mean that they are anti-independence. It means that they have a different set of cultural values to the ones propounded by the hacks who write for The National, but that is not the same thing. If the paper wants to attract the type of people who stuff a tabloid into the back pocket of their jeans then the self-righteous, bourgeois gittery needs to go.

Staying on the same theme, I could have done without the two page spread that profiled Hassan Rouhani. That's OK, as I had never heard of him, either, but he turns out to be the President of Iran...

Overall, the paper gives me the impression of something that has been knocked out in haste, so much so that the website is nothing more than a holding page at the time of writing. That in itself is not a major problem as the committed will buy the paper in the same way that Labour activists bought the News on Sunday back in the 1980s. However, does Scotland really need a paper that is only bought out of a sense of duty by the ideologically pure at heart?

If The National is to succeed then it needs to attract readers from the Daily Mail and its similar middlebrow competitors such as the Daily Express. The paper is obviously not aimed at the Sun's readership as there are not enough tit, bum and celebrity pages to attract that market. The problem is that as a mid-market tabloid it is not chatty enough to bring those readers over, and the air of pulpit pounding seriousness may put them off as well.

It's not the end of the world, and I hope that The National succeeds in its aim of giving Scotland a new daily paper that looks at the country through a nationalist lens. If it can acquire a character all of its own, one that appeals to a nationalist-leaning readership that is made up of people who have other things to do that talk about politics all the time, then it should do well.

It's official: UKIP really is a pussy party

Well, I have been saying for quite some time that UKIP is top-heavy with cunts, and this seems to be the proof.

For those of you who don't have a Filipino - English dictionary to hand, that's what puki means down there, as it were...

Brooks Newmark stops being cocksure

Do we need to rerun the story of Brooks Nemark's downfall? Of course we do, if only for the laughs that it provides. Brooksie is the fat, balding, middle aged Tory minister who thought that svelte young things would enjoy seeing photos of his corpulent flesh, so he was in the habit of sending photos of his naked self to just about anyone female. The problem was that the girl on the left was actually a male freelance journalist who had nicked the photo of a Swedish fashion model to use as bait, and Brooksie sent a selfie that showed him wearing paisley jimjams with his dick sticking out of them. It's not just the fact that he is fat, balding and middle-aged that has made the internet roar with laughter. What tickles everyone's funny bone is that he thinks that paisley jimjams are sexy!

What can we say? Brooksie is claiming that he is suffering from some convenient mental disorder and has scampered off to a psychiatrist to have his head shrunk. However, that leads us to ask what was David Cameron thinking about when he appointed this head the ball in the first place? How can anyone trust a government that has people like Brooksie in it ranks?

Not only that, but even though he has promised to step down at the next election, why should the good people of Braintree be forced to endure  this buffoon as their member until May next year - he should resign now and let the people choose someone who hopefully has a bit more self awareness than this fool has so far displayed.