Why is the state so frightened that it arrests preachers and politicians?

At the end of March I posted about John Craven, a Manchester street preacher who was arrested and held for almost a day without food and water. Eventually he was released, and managed to win £13,000 in compensation for the injustice that he had suffered. Earlier today, I commented on the case of Paul Weston, a candidate in the European elections who was similarly arrested for making a political speech which quoted the words of Sir Winston Churchill! 

Reverend Craven was arrested for his supposed anti-homosexualism, Mr Weston for his alleged objections to Muslims, and on the surface the two cases seem very different. However, the link between them is that both men refuse to accept the elite consensus which the great and good hold, and which is regarded as a matter of faith by the liberal middle class who accept that hegemony.

I think the reason for the arrests, to say nothing of the hysterical response to UKIP, is fear on the part of our rulers, who have thus given the green light to their thugs to go into limited intimidatory action. The root of that fear is the knowledge that a sizeable chunk of the British people do not share the values that this consensus embodies, and when rulers are afraid they almost always unleash the boot boys in blue. 

Viewed in that light, the issue is not the two men, it is the fact that they articulated what a lot of people think, and the state needs to stamp down on such throughtcrime as quickly as possible, otherwise it might get out of hand. So the arrests were made in the hope that large scale actions which cost a lot of money and worry investors would not have to be made. That is probably why Reverend Craven was held without food or water for so long, so that after his release he would tell all his friends what happened to him and fear would do the rest.

The problem is what happens when people are not afraid, and when the whole carefully constructed hegemonic edifice starts to crumble? That is certainly happening right now, as more and more people decide that the European Union is not for them or their country. The state and its stooges are throwing everything at UKIP that they possibly can, and the party is shrugging it off and striding towards victory in next month's elections. The great and good have even come up with the notion of Euraracism, which seems to be the most terrible thoughtcrime of all.

Leading on from that, what do we mean by country these days? The Scottish nationalists are coming up hard on the rails and could even win the September referendum on independence. That was never supposed to happen, because the devolved Scottish parliament was set up in such a way so that no one party could ever take control in Edinburgh. Until one did, that is. Then a three question referendum was ruled out by Westminster so that Scotland could not have the half way house of maximum devolution, which most people support. The choice was between the status quo and independence, and all the great and good were convinced that Scotland would fallow the lead set by their traditional rulers in the Better Together team. Until they stopped doing that as well.

The debate is not just between Scotland and England, as within England regional forces are now at work to threaten stability. The North East rejected devolution about a decade ago, but now seems be coming around to the  idea, and it is highly likely that the other regions who have a similar resentment towards London and its dominance will follow along in the fullness of time.

So, we have an elite consensus which a sizeable body of the population do not accept, so the state resorts to a little local intimidation to try and keep a lid on things. As that does not seem to be working, it can be expected that eventually the state will fully unleash its dogs as it did against the miners in 1984/5. The problem this time is that it will be no more effective than it was against the miners who had to be starved into submission. Not only that, but the miners were just one group within society, and this seems to be parallel movements of wildly disparate groups.

In other words, this seems to be the British people, and they are getting very pissed off.

Police arrest Paul Weston, a South East England political candidate for quoting Winston Churchill

I find this hard to believe: Britain has just seen the political arrest of a candidate for making a campaign speech that quoted the words of Sir Winston Churchill. The police did not like that, hence the arrest, and hardly anybody gives a tinker's cuss!

Paul Weston is a candidate for the right wing Liberty GB Party who was making a speech on the steps of the Winchester Guildhall when some woman arrived and started shouting the odds at him. He ignored her, but she was seen to use her mobile 'phone and sure enough the police arrived within minutes to interfere with the democratic process. I have no idea who she was, but the end result was that Paul Weston was interrogated on the street for forty minutes, before being taken off to a police station, held for five hours and then charged with religious or racial harassment.

You can listen to his account of the incident above, but the frightening thing about all this is less the arrest, and more the complete lack of interest that is being shown to it by most of the media in this country. Had this happened in Russia, then you can just imagine what the outrage would be. Now we have a case where a candidate for elected office has been prevented from speaking and the reaction is  almost total indifference.

The Daily Mail has covered the story, but the most outrage is coming from Dan Hannan, who just happens to be an MEP from South West England, the constituency that Weston's party is also running in. That's right, the main Tory in that area is defending a political opponent. Hannon makes the point that there is no evidence to suggest that Weston was inciting violence, to which I would add that the only reason for the arrest seems to be that the police did not like his political message and that thought chills me to the bone.

The left have to get involved in defending our political opponent whether we like it or not. Irrespective of the argument that freedom of speech is too important to be left to the whims of semi-educated policemen, there is the obvious point that if the police get away with this then we are next in line.

The police commissioner for Hampshire is Paul Hayes, and you can write to him at this link. Please be polite, otherwise you may be getting a visit from the police yourself, as they are clearly out to get activists of all shades. If you are in a political party or trades union, then please raise the matter with them as quickly as possible so we can build the biggest coalition possible to defend our right to listen to all political candidates without first having them vetted by the state's agents.

If you live in South West England then why not vote for Liberty GB? Sure, they are a bunch of eccentrics, according to Hannan, but it is only the European elections so they don't count for very much. Or at least they didn't, until the police made them important.

UKIP will win next month: here's two reasons why

UKIP look more and more like a winner in the Euro elections and I have a sneaking feeling that they might just grab a seat in Scotland to really make their day complete.

There are two reasons why the party seems to be doing so well. The first is that it appeals overwhelmingly to people who are over sixty, and that is the age group that is most likely to vote. Conversely, people in their twenties may very well be the most hostile to UKIP, but they are the least likely to go along and cast a ballot.

Secondly, there are the protest voters who have chosen UKIP as their flavour of the month. This seems to me to be the reason why all the howls and smears that are being thrown at UKIP are being shrugged off. People look at the metropolitan elite who are doing the screaming and seem to have decided that sticking two fingers up to such people is worth a punt for UKIP next month.

In other words it is a complete waste of time telling people that UKIP really are a bunch of small town Poujadists who hold aloft the banner of the Sacred Maggie, because nobody really gives a stuff.

This election is about sticking it to the people who have turned the main political parties into vehicles for their own ambitions and those members of the media corps who cheer them on.

Why the Scottish independence campaign looks increasingly like a winner

The Scottish campaign for independence is gaining ground rapidly and is now just a few points behind the unionists. Needles to say, a lot of people are blaming the unionist team for this, but with the best will in the world, there probably just isn't much that the Better Together outfit can do at this late stage. They are fighting a campaign from the last century, whereas Yes Scotland has moved into the new one with a vengeance.

Better Together is a traditional elite coalition of the three main national parties, some trades unions and until yesterday the Scottish Confederation of British Industry. That body announced that it would no longer campaign for the union when many of its member bodies were forced to resign from it under pressure from public opinion. However, that does not mean that individual companies are not campaigning to keep the link with London, and many of them are even reported to pressuring their workers to vote against Scotland in September.

The unionists are stuck in the past where meetings were held with the audience as consumers of the message being put out by a member of the great and good. Better Together announcements are usually made by a similar representative of greatness and goodness, usually in the form of a threat that something nasty will happen to Scotland if she votes yes in September. That is basically it, with Better Together's elite telling the proles just what is good for them and expecting the great unwashed to consume that message and vote accordingly.

Of course, Yes Scotland is also an elite group, but the advantage that the nationalist campaign has overall is that most sympathisers do not look to Yes Scotland to tell them what to do. Instead, they get out and do it themselves, with the result that there isn't just one campaign, but quite a few, and they are all autonomous.

What many people outside Scotland do not realise is that the nationalists are running a version of the old Liberal pavement politics shtick, but with no central control. They have an army of people in every area who just talk to people. It is not about knocking on doors, it really is about your daughter's boyfriend's cousin who invites the couple to a meeting held at your local church hall. She comes home all worked up and talks to her mum over coffee and biscuits. Then mum talks to you and you and her go along to some other meeting held in a back room at the local pub, where you are every Friday night, anyway. The Unionists cannot compete with that as they do not have the numbers.

The nationalists can do this, partly because they are greater in numbers, but mainly, I suspect, because they are just a lot younger and a lot more on the ball technologically speaking. Paul Mason, the former BBC economic editor, put forward twenty reasons why its all kicking off everywhere, and those reasons apply to Scotland, just as much as they do to Spain, Greece or Egypt.

In the first place, we have "a new sociological type: the graduate with no future." This person has a laptop, tablet and smartphone and is wired into Facebook, Twitter and the rest of social media. They are all connected to one another, usually in the virtual world that they all inhabit, which means that the connections are horizontal, not vertical.

You really do need to be half my age, which is to say 30 or under, to fully comprehend the level of connections that these young people have with one another, but it works for them, and it is being used to push the campaign for Scottish independence forward.

Let's look at how it all works in practise for the benefit of my fellow oldies. On Saturday 26th April a group called Yes Edinburgh North and Leith decided to meet up at the Foot of the Walk, which is the centre of Leith. They spoke to people on the street and tried to generally jolly people into voting yes. As far as I am aware, Yes Edinburgh North and Leith is little more than a Facebook page, with no physical presence in the sense of a campaign headquarters or the like. Yet it can organise a well attended event that should have persuaded some people to vote yes in September. The only commitment that anybody is asked to make to this group is to hit the like button on Facebook, which I did, as I did not attend the event in person.

However, I did notice that the page links to a man named Simon Barrow, who is a fellow Englishman and near neighbour of mine. I clicked on the link and found a page where he sets out his reasons for voting yes for Scotland, so now I have two virtual connections in this campaign, all without having to get off my lardy backside and forcing my aching legs and wheezy lungs to work.

What motivates the "graduate with no future" who is at the heart of this peaceful insurgency, is the knowledge that although his future in an independent Scotland is a gamble, his life in a continuing United Kingdom is likely to be as awful as his present. Positive change is possible with independence, but highly unlikely if the union is maintained.

There is a massive consensus within the yes camp as to the type of Scotland that they want to see emerging, and it will be a social-democratic country, with a high level of public services and possibly high taxation. Beyond the young graduates that we mentioned earlier is the army of working class people, over half of whom are now committed to the yes campaign. Like the graduates, they have less to lose than the established middle class, only about a quarter of whom have come down on the side of independence.

By way of contrast, the unionists are a fairly heterogeneous bunch who are united only by a desire to keep things as they are. They run the range from the old aristocracy, via big business and its middle class supporters, to thuggish fans of Glasgow Rangers:

Looked at in this light, the wonder is not that the independence campaign is now running the unionists a close race, but that the nationalists are not rocketing into an unbeatable lead.

A coup against Farage may be likely soon

Sources in the West Midlands tell me that An Independence From Europe is gaining members hand over fist from UKIP. This engagingly named party was set up by Mike Nattrass MEP to ensure that his party tops the ballot paper in all the nine English regions where it is standing, and according to my UKIP source, Nattrass could retain his seat at to 22nd May elections under his new colours. Well, the colours are purple, the same as UKIP, but you take the point, I'm sure.

Mike Nattrass is a popular bloke, but popularity is not enough to account for the number of MEPs and senior UKIP figures who are cheering him on behind the scenes. To understand that, I am told that about four or five years ago Nigel Farage ordered his contingent of MEPs not to employ their wives as aides in Brussels. Now it has emerged that he was doing exactly that with his own awfully wedded, and the knives are being sharpened even as I write.

Does that sound trivial to you, especially when we consider the main issue at stake, which is getting the UK out of the European Union? The problem is that as with all small parties the men with the big swinging dicks tend to go up against each other like stags in the rutting season.

Right now, an awful lot of wives who had once hoped to get a cushy number in Brussels to pay their dressmakers' bills are now fuming that their men did not do for them what Farage did for his wife. One can imagine to conversations that went on as wives accused their husbands of being incapable. Needless to say, comparisons would be drawn with Mrs Farage's husband who is, of course, a real man who loves his wife. You can write the script yourselves if you know anything about women.

So, big swinging dickery is now on with a vengeance. If An Independence From Europe does well in its West Midlands base, then you can expect a coup to be mounted against Farage as soon as the elections are over.

It will be presented as uniting the anti-EU movement again, without the presence of divisive individuals like Farage, but really is all about men with hard-ons who want to prove that they are not going to be humiliated by "Mr Shortarse and his German wife," to quote one of my sources directly.

Fake UKIP poster

Yeah, it's a fake, or more likely an unofficial poster that the party can deny having anything to do with. It's so engaging that it almost makes me forgive them for being small town,  Thatcherite wallies.

Almost, but not quite.

How English commentators on the Scottish debate help the nationalists

There are two things that English commentators do with the Scottish independence debate which I find really irritating. Well, actually there are a lot more, but these two are the biggies that spring to mind.

The first is the jovial claim that if Scotland becomes independent then Hadrian's Wall needs to be brought back into use because, of course, Scotland will be such a basket case that thousands of Sweaties will be fleeing south.

This line irritates on so many levels, especially since the advocates obviously do not realise that the whole wall falls quite a long way inside England. Are they seriously offering Scotland several thousand miles of new territory, or are they just fucktards who don't understand the political geography of the country they are trying to save?

My guess is the latter, so if they do not know where the border truly runs, why should people take anything else they say seriously? 

Secondly, we have the crude attempt to delegitimise the vote by claiming that the Scottish diaspora cannot vote in it. 

Someone really should take these buffoons aside and teach them that we do not yet have English or Scottish nationalities, and that we are all still British. Thus the people who will vote on the 18th September 2014 are the British people who are resident in Scotland. Is that so hard to understand? Probably so for a fucktard.

I think that the Better Together campaign might try to reign in some of its more idiotic on-line supporters, or at least disown them.

Update, 10.10am:

I see that Norman Tebbitt has just posted over at the Telegraph and yes, he came out with all the old wank discussed above. Well, that's a few more votes for independence in the bag I reckon.

An Independence From Europe may be self financed

In the early hours of this morning I broke the story of An Independence From Europe, a party set up with the sole aim of doing over UKIP at next month's European elections. At the time I assumed that it was being funded by the Tories, but information just in suggests that this may not be the case.

A well placed source in the West Midlands UKIP area reminded me that Mike Nattrass MEP, who founded this outfit was actually a well known and popular figure in UKIP, and was widely expected to top the party's list for the West Midlands. Nigel Farage intervened and Natrrass fell at the first hurdle when he failed to even make the UKIP list of approved candidates. 

The source went on the say that Mike Nattrass is paying the deposit for his region out of his own pocket, and that  the people who wish to head the list in the other eight English regions have all agreed to pay the £5,000 deposit as a condition of taking the top spot. All of them are former members of UKIP who have fallen out with Farage, and they are all wealthy people who regard £5,000 as "pocket change," according to my source.

Since the simplest explanations are usually the correct ones, this version of events sounds the likeliest to me; a bunch of wealthy ex-Kippers who want revenge against the senior leadership and are willing to stump up their own money to ensure that UKIP takes a hit. 

We are still no neared finding out who was responsible for the smear letter, which my Brummie source tells me is circulating widely in that region as well, but given that the letters were posted in Birmingham - and given that the city is the centre for An Independence From Europe - it is possible that the membership list was leaked from that region.

Fake UKIP could hurt the real party next month

An outfit calling itself An Independence From Europe could hurt UKIP next month. The party was registered in 2013 by Mike Nattrass MEP who was deselected by UKIP and therefore is unable to run for the purples in next month's elections.

His new party will run in all nine English regions and the name means that it will be on the top of every English ballot paper. The party colours are purple, just like UKIP, and the obvious aim is to act as a spoiler to damage UKIP as much as possible. Revenge, it is a bitch, isn't it?

Now then, where is the money coming from for all this? Just to run one slate means a deposit of £5,000 has to be found, and An Independence From Europe will run in all nine English regions, so someone has to stump up £45,000. Then we have the cost of election materials and the like, so this is an expensive game that is being played.

It will be remembered that back in 1994 an outfit called the Literal Democrats siphoned votes off the Liberal Democrats in the South-West region and probably cost the Lib-Dems the victory there. The assumption has always been that the Tories financed the Literal Democrats, so I do not think it is too fanciful to suggest that they are doing the same thing with An Independence From Europe.

Interestingly enough, this new party is based in Birmingham, and if you read the post immediately below this one you will see that the smear letter that was sent out to any number of former and existing UKIP people was posted in that city.

This coming election is going to be engagingly dirty!

First smear of the year aimed at UKIP

I suppose that St. George's Day is as good a day as any for the first political smear of the year to plop through my letter box, having been forwarded to me from my old address in Nelson, Lancashire.

The gist of the anonymous letter, printed on both sides of an A4 sheet and signed "UKIP Loyalists" is that "the police have evidence of multi million pound frauds, theft and child pornography on EU owned computers." The letter goes on to advise everyone to dump UKIP, especially the candidates for next month's elections, as otherwise they will have to explain themselves to the police who, we are assured, will raid every UKIP home. The letter, reproduced in full in this posting, goes on to state that when the party is declared bankrupt, individual members will be responsible for its debts. 

What are we to make of this? Well, it is obviously old wank of the highest order, but it has been produced by some outfit that has access to at least some of the East Lancashire branch's membership list. Seemingly it still has my name on it even though I have not been a member of UKIP since they slung me out last year for not toeing the line when it came to worshipping the memory of Maggot Thatcher.

So who wants to try and damage UKIP in East Lancashire? The list is long, to put it mildly, starting with me. That said, I prefer to tell the truth about the party, which is that in spite of what Farage claims, it is not an outfit that offers anything to the people who live from McWork or benefits on the big city council estates. I want Britain out of the EU so that revenge can be taken for the events of the past three decades, starting with a government that can tax the middle class until the pips squeak. All I need to do is remind people of just how much the average UKIP members loves Thatcher and everything that the old whore stood for - I don't have to lie about UKIP, not when I can tell the truth about the party.

The local Tories are the party most threatened by UKIP, but I have my doubts that the finger can be pointed at them. When the Tories do a smear it is usually a good one and this one is far too long and much too clumsy. Besides, why should the party that gave us the recent Mail on Sunday smear on food banks resort to posting missives like this: they would feed a story to the press and leave the grubby hacks to do their dirty work for them.

To be honest, it reads like something that the far right would produce. If you have ever seen a British National Party or British Democrat leaflet then you will know that they believe in filling every inch of space on a page. Given that they both have strong memberships in that part of England, and given also that they hate UKIP more than they hate each other, I would tend to look there for the culprits.

However, how did they get an old copy of the UKIP membership list that has my name on it? Well, last year when UKIP was trying to get rid of me someone in the party was briefing a far right website that I am a wicked leftist who has a bust of Uncle Joe Stalin in his living room. Those are not smears, by the way, they happen to be true, but the point is that when the BNP website ran the story none of the press even knew that there was a fight going on between yours truly and the lovers of the Blessed Margaret in East Lancs UKIP.

So, looked at in this light, the story is not about a long, tedious letter with its mad allegations: the story is about continuing links between UKIP and the headbanging right.

Update, 11.45PM:

I checked the postmark, something which I should have done at the start, and saw that the letters were both franked at the Birmingham Mail Centre, one on the 17th of this month at 8.56pm and the other on the 19th at 8.08am. So my notion that this is something restricted to East Lancashire is clearly not correct and this is a nationwide campaign.

Funnily enough, a spoiler party called An Independence From Europe, which will run in all nine English regions, is also Birmingham based.

Sitting in the pub tonight, I spoke on the phone to a very good friend in UKIP and he reported that a lot of people are getting these letters, so clearly the people behind the smear have money to spend on this action.

The plot thickens!

UKIP and the Jewish Vote

Shneur Odze is the number three on the UKIP list for the North West of England seat in next month's European elections. I met him last year, on the day when this photo was taken of me shaking hands with Nigel Farage,  and he came over as an honest, agreeable fellow. 

Sneur is an orthodox rabbi and for religious reasons cannot shake hands with women. For that Fred McGlade, the former Regional Organiser, decided to try and move against him. McGlade's version was that Skneur's views would "alienate women," and then various unnamed sources in UKIP began to spread the smear that Shneur had been banned from attending some UKIP branch meetings because of that.

The whole sorry tale reads like a version of the trouble that I had with McGlade last year, what with unnamed sources feeding stories to the press, so I was pleased to see the other day that UKIP has allowed McGlade to resign from his well-paid number within the party and I am told that he is no longer connected to UKIP in any way.

UKIP have to be congratulated on moving quickly to ensure that this nasty matter ended quickly.

Cleared of murder, the state refused to free Nicky Jacobs

Nicky Jacobs (45) was cleared of the 1985 murder of Keith Blakelock yesterday and was expected to walk out of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in triumph. Instead he was taken back to prison on the pretext of there being outstanding paperwork, but the screws who normally handle that matter had all gone home - so an innocent man got to spend another night in jail. He was finally released just before noon today.

Not a single newspaper seems to be carrying this disgraceful turn of events, and we have the BBC to thank that the news has even got out at all.

The excuses for this are many and varied, with the so-called Ministry of Justice saying po-faced: "Public safety is our priority and prisons must be satisfied there are no outstanding legal issues before releasing an acquitted prisoner." For its part, the prison commented off the record that "This case is of a high media profile and we don't want to release him in error."

Translated into simple English the police wanted a bit of petty revenge for their failure to fit up an innocent man, so they kept him banged up for another night out of spite, as his solicitor Tony Meisels said: "It's almost like the last small laugh of the police, to keep him an extra night."

The party tonight in Tottenham, London, is going to be something to see!