Did Nigel Farage Have a Wobbly Moment?

Did Nigel Farage experience a bit of a wobble yesterday? He threatened legal action against the company that had been hired to vet Reform candidates, instead of just brushing off the media's whinings about someone being connected to some dodgy cove years ago. The press has been searching for stories like that and up to now none of those stories had legs as the press could not interest the punters. However, his threats to sue may have kept the tales alive, so let's hope that today after a good night's sleep he is back to brushing them off again. It really is the best answer that has worked up to now, so why change a winning strategy?

The people who will vote Reform really don't give a damn about somone saying that Hitler knew how to address a rally; what they want are candidates who share their desire to control the country's borders. They have had enough of the downright lies that the Tories have fed them since Cameron was in Downing Street, and they now no longer believe that the Conservatives are anything but a party of mass immigration. Ever since Blair's time they have known that Labour is the immigrant party, so Reform offers them the chance to vote for a party that seeks to answer their concerns.

It may be that Reform is now the official protest party that is used by voters to register their discontent at the other parties. If it is, then it does not matter to them that some candidates have a colourful background as they will still vote for Reform as a two-fingered gesture to the main parties. The aim is to force those parties to listen and take action.

Hopefully, Farage will realise this as he brushes his teeth today, and get back to his cheeky chappy persona that has served him so well up to now.

The Election View From Scotland

 

Let's be honest: the election campaign is over in Scotland as at least five percent of the adult, male population are currently in Germany watching the football. Even when Scotland go out of the tournament the fans are not going to scamper back home to vote next month; they will stay in Germany and engage in Scotland's main pastime which is bevvying.

The bulk of the population who are not in Germany seem to be jammed into bars, watching the team on giant televisions. My eldest son went to watch Scotland's opening match against Germany and was unable to form a coherent sentence the next day which he spent in bed. Like all my sons he is an Anglo-Mexican, but if you like football and bevvy then Scotland welcomes you into her arms.

To be fair, the election is less important in Scotland than it is in England, as the majority of the issues that concern us on a day to day basis are decided in Holyrood and not Westminster. London is responsible for my pension, but both main parties have accepted that the triple-lock will apply for the duration of the next parliament. Sure, they could renege on that, but unless that happens, the pledge stands. Apart from my pension, it is pretty much Holyrood all the way as far as I can see.

Holyrood is not the "wee pretendy parliament" that Billy Connolly mocked back in 1999. It is now a very powerful institution that is 100% responsible for the health service, tax rates, local government and a big chunk of benefits. As a disabled man I used to get Personal Independence Payment from London, now I get Adult Disability Payment from Edinburgh. The Tories have threatened to replace PIP with a voucher system, but that does not matter to me as I get ADP.

Of course, I would like to see the Tories defeated, but a Tory victory would not bother me very much. There is not much that they can do to me in Scotland unless Holyrood allows it.

Why I Will Vote Labour

 

Is my flat the only one in Muirhouse, Edinburgh, with a Labour poster in its window? I suspect that it is the only one with any political posters in any window and I am sure that it is the only one with eighteen potato plants growing happily in its garden and a cat named Daisy sat on its steps.

Yes, I'm going to vote Labour, but not because I give a tinker's cuss for that party or believe a word that its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, says. I was going to vote Reform, as I know the candidate, but my detestation for the SNP is now so total that I just want to see them taken down a peg or two. It's hard to believe that I voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum and then went on to vote SNP in the Holyrood and Westminster elections: they have turned Scotland into a laughing stock and I want rid of them. Labour are the second party in this constituency so I will vote Labour, and it is as simple as that.

The window poster came about because at the start of the campaign, Labour sent a solitary canvasser out to leaflet my area and I got chatting to the fellow and I told him that since I moved into the flat in 2018 not a single person for any political party had ever bothered to hunt for votes on the Muirhouse scheme. Since I was going to vote Labour anyway I figured that act deserved a poster as a reward. That said, since then no other party has been anywhere near and my poster seems to be the only one around.

Westminster elections are held using the first past the post system, but council elections in Scotland use the single transferable vote method, so we have big, multi-member wards. Mine is part of Acorn Ward that consists of this scheme, plus South Queensferry, a big owner-occupied area, along with the swish, leafy Cramond that featured so prominently in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

South Queensferry got the full treatment of leaflets and canvassing at the last local elections, whereas Muirhouse got nothing, so being a bit of an old devil I contacted all the party hacks after the vote and asked them why we were ignored?

The replies were entertaining with the SNP saying that they thought that Muirhouse was solid Labour and the Tories said that as a council scheme it was either Labour or SNP. As an exercise in buck-passing it made me hoot, but Labour took the biscuit by trying to claim that they had canvassed, but when I asked them to tell me where and when so that I could go and knock on doors to confirm the story they clammed up. Still, it prepared me for Sir Keir Starmer, a Labour leader who cannot get his story straight either.

I suspect that since party politics is now a middle-class hobby, its participants basically lack the bottle to walk around a council scheme and talk to real schemies. That makes Labour doubly contemptable in my book since it is the party that was set up to represent the urban proletariat, the very same people who inhabit Muirhouse.

I will still vote Labour, but only because of my deep contempt for today's SNP.

Labour Lies

 Why does Sir Keir Starmer keep repeating his "my dad was a toolmaker" line when everyone knows that it is such utter bollocks? Rodney Starmer owned the factory in which the tools were made, it is as simple as that. By the way, the Starmer family lived in Oxted, which is as home counties plush as they come. 

It's not just Sir Keir, either. Emily, Lady Nugee, is the wife of a senior judge and the daughter of a very senior United Nations official who likes to pretend that she is poor Emily Thornberry who was dragged up on a council estate. Actually, when her parents divorced little Emily spent five minutes in a rented house until the divorce settlement came through and her mother then bought a nice house with some of the loot.

 Her Ladyship even went campaigning in Rochester and took this photo of a house with its England flags and transit van. It was as if she was a Victorian explorer seeing a Zulu hut for the first time, that is how remote these people are from my tribe.

Labour has always had an upper-middle-class element in its ranks. Clement Attlee, Tony Benn, my old MP Michael Meacher, were all born to wealth, but they didn't pretend that they were anything but wealthy men who had cast in their lot with the urban proletariat. 

Sir Keir and Lady Nugee both do: they pretend that they are just like us when it is so obvious that they don't actually like us, still less understand us. That's fine as it means we don't have to pretend that we like them, but I am curious to know why they think they can get away with it?

It may be that since Labour has now shed almost all it working class members and party meetings are made up of the teaching trade, social work industry and the local government nomenklatura. Few of such types even know anyone who is currently glued to his TV watching the football, still less socialises with them. So, they believe the bollocks that Sir Keir and Lady Nugee dish out to them.

However, the rest of us can tell from their accents, their dress and the way they carry themselves that they do not belong in our ranks.

A bit of honesty in future would be welome.

Contrived Row Over D-Day Junket

 

I found the Rishi Sunak D-Day row a bit hard to take. I know where my father was eighty years ago this month: he was a gunner, so was on the southern coast along with most of the artillery in anticipation of the Germans launching a raid to try to disrupt the D-Day landings. By the end of the month, with all the beachheads linked up, the heavy guns crossed the channel and Gunner Charlie Bell helped blast the way through France and into Germany with a minimum of finese and a maximum of high explosive.

He was demobbed in late 1945 and put the whole wretched war behind him. He never went to the local cenotaph, nor did he join any veterans association. I claimed his medals for him years later as he had no interest in doing it himself and when I told him my plan he replied: "You'll have to pay for 'em! You don't get owt for nowt in't bluddy army!"

Actually, they were free and his Second World War Medal, his Good Conduct Medal, along with his France and Germany Star duly arrived in the post. He stuck them in a sideboard and forgot to tell me so I found them by accident.

Forty years ago when the politicians last used D-Day as a vote grabbing opportunity I asked my parents why it was forty years and not fifty, and my mother who had been conscipted to work in the Avro factory to work 12-hour days building Lancaster bombers, replied that it was so that there would be enough old men around for the politicians to be photographed with.

Both my parents are long dead, but I just know that my dad would not have given a tinker's cuss about Sunak leaving France early, so on his behalf, I don't either.

Why the Election is Now Good Fun

 

 

Sunak is 5'6" and Starmer is supposedly 5'8" but I have my doubts looking at this photo. Clearly, the blonde is taller than the pair of 'em. Now, I know that there is a difference between midgets and dwarfs, but I will be buggered if I can remember what it is. Shall we just settle for calling them a pair of shortarses?

This photo was taken before the first leaders' debate, but it reminded me of just why I don't really care which one of these two chancers gets to live in 10 Downing Street in July. I live in Scotland and just about everything that affects my day to day life is decided in Edinburgh and not London. Of the things that do come from London such as my state pension, there is unanimity between the two parties that the triple-lock will remain. Even Brexit is a non-issue, with both chancers determined not to discuss it. So, I settled back to watch the fun, without really caring one way or the other who won.

Then Nigel Farage entered the fray and what was tedious became very good fun indeed.

Then I discovered that Keith Vaz, a former Labour minister and washing machine salesman was standing as an independent. That the Northern mill towns where the Pakistanis are the only ones guaranteed to vote were breaking away from Labour and standing their own independent, Islamic candidates. That George Galloway and his Workers' Party of Britain were aiming for the Pakistani and the White working class vote in those towns with a campaign that mixes support for Gaza with an economic policy that I approve of wholeheartedly. Finally, that several Labour candidates in London have been prevented from standing under Labour's banner and are now on the ballots as independents, with the chief amongst them being the former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

With Farage giving the Tories a serious collective bowel movement and the Islamists, Workers' Party and London independents doing the same to Labour, all of a sudden my heart was filled with glee as I realised that two parties that really don't give a stuff about me or the Muirhouse council scheme where I live, were about to tear themselves to pieces.

Hopefully, out of the wreckage, something better will emerge, but even if it doesn't I am determined to enjoy the show for the next three weeks.

Let's enjoy it together.

Election Blogging Time

 

After a four-year blogging hiatus I am back until the 2024 election is over. I have to be honest and say that I have not enjoyed myself so much in years and I want to share my glee as I watch the political system collapse.

In three weeks the blog will go back on ice, but until then, I'm gonna rock, roll and enjoy myself.