Federast Funnies 13

The Federasts don't like it up 'em, so they all complain and get my comments removed from the Guardian:

That one lasted about five minutes before being pulled. Luckily, for all good Brexiteers I grab screenshots of my Guardian comments and then repost 'em here.

Bugger this bringing the country together stuff: I am gonna gloat for many years to come!

The Brexiteers are Victorious!

At exactly 10.00 pm on Thursday, the BBC ran its exit poll which gave Boris a massive majority and I whooped with delight at the thought that the torture of the past three years would soon be over. A few hours later the sun rose over a country that had just reaffirmed the 2016 vote for independence and by that time enough real votes from real people had been counted to prove the accuracy of the exit poll. We were victorious and at that point, I dragged myself off to bed.

There was no need for any of the political lunacy and social upheaval that we have gone through since 2016. All the opposition had to do was vote for Theresa May's nice, liberal withdrawal agreement and by now the European Union would have been nothing but a memory.

Instead, they decided to play silly buggers by taking advantage of a government with no majority to delay our Brexit. When they weren't using dubious procedures in the Commons, they were using their wealth to seek the assistance of compliant judges to further delay the process. Their aim was to so weary us that we would give up on the whole idea of Brexit, probably stop voting altogether and leave the country to be permanently governed by them, with the approval of their supporters.

We bided our time and waited our sweat until eventually, we got what we wanted, a general election. Then we showed those pathetic federast fuckers what free men armed with the most powerful weapon in the world, a ballot paper, can do.

It's time to put this blog on ice and enjoy some peace and quiet after forty long years of campaigning for this moment:

We are the victors and they are the vanquished: what a glorious time it is to be alive!

Two Votes for Boris From a Father and His Son

To the airport this morning to pick up my son's Mexican mother who flew in to watch her darling 19-year-old boy cast his first-ever vote in a British general election. This photo was taken as we left the polling place at about 9.15 am and as you can see, she is a very proud mother indeed.

I have campaigned for Brexit for about forty years now, and since Brexit is the top issue in this election, I broke the habit of a lifetime and voted Tory - to get Brexit done I had no choice.

The lad resents the fact that his mother can be asked damn fool questions whenever she flies in, but the mothers of the Spaniards who bless Edinburgh with their presence can swan in and out as if they own the damned place.

He does not want special treatment for his mother, he just wants all foreigners to be treated the same, and so do I.

So, that was two more votes for Boris and Brexit in Edinburgh West from this father and his son.

Vote for Boris Today to Get Brexit Done

Today is polling day and we, the British people, must make a decision. Do we wish to live in an independent country or are we content to remain as a province of the European Union?

I am 63-years-old and have never before voted Tory, but I will do it today. I do not want to live in a province, I want to live in a free United Kingdom. I will not pretend that I like the Tories because the truth is that I actually detest them, but I can live another five years with Boris as Prime Minister if we are once again an independent country that controls its own laws.

Three years ago I was one of the over 17 million people who voted to leave the EU. We were told that the government would respect our wishes and implement whatever we decided. That was a lie.

Two years ago I voted Labour. I was told by Labour that it respected the result of that referendum. That was also a lie.

We have not left the European Union because an unholy alliance of quislings came together to foil our exit from within the House of Commons. They were aided by tame judges and super-rich immigrants who worked to prevent government policy from being implemented.

Boris purged his party of the bulk of the quislings and any that are left are small in number and keep their mouths firmly shut. Jeremy Corbyn, a man who campaigned against the EU for decades is now a prisoner of his federast party that has demonstrated time and again that they are only interested in Brussels and not Britain.

If you are one of the millions who voted to take back control in 2016 by voting for Brexit, then I urge you to get Brexit done by voting for Boris's candidates today.

Why Soft Remainers Should Vote Tory Tomorrow

Yeah, I know what you are thinking - it's a witty meme and nothing more. Actually, I reckon that it tells a truth that the federasts are so deranged that tomorrow they might just start calling for Gina Miller to do just that.

Leaving the headbangers aside, most of us probably just want this torture over and that means voting for Boris and his Tories. If he ends up with a majority, then we leave the EU next month, the government will start to negotiate a final settlement with the EU and the rest of us can get on with our lives.

If Boris does not have a majority, say he gets around 310-325 seats then the danger that we will crash out of the EU without a deal becomes incredibly real. Let me explain why:

Boris would remain as the Prime Minister unless the Commons can remove him via a vote of no confidence. That means all the odds and sods who will sit on the opposition benches will have to come together to vote on that motion. Given that they hate each other more than they hate the Tories, I doubt if that will happen before the end of January.

However, Boris would probably not be able to get his deal through the Commons, but he does have the advantage in that our withdrawal from the EU is already enshrined in law. So he does not have to do anything other than hold his nerve and run down the clock until 1 February and that is that: we are out with no deal.

The opposition will not be able to play games with the order paper as this new Speaker will not allow those tricks to be played as he has already said. So they will not be able to force the government to seek an extension to Article 50 as they did before.

So, what to do if you are a Remainer who wants to get on with his life? None of the opposition parties can win this election, but your vote could mean that Boris does not get a majority and we crash out of the EU without a deal next month.

There would then be another election probably in the autumn once we are safely out and the Tories could blame any disruption on the opposition.

If you vote Tory then there is more chance that Boris will get a majority and Britain gets its deal. Yes, we leave the EU, but that was decided in 2016, so what we are arguing about now are terms and conditions. Do you want to exit the EU with Boris' withdrawal agreement or do you want to crash out with nothing at all?

It is your call.

The Tories Know That Drunks, Druggies and Losers Are Not the Working Class

Do you remember Rachel Finn, interviewed by the BBC, who only had 14p to her name? Needless to say, the great and good immediately began to wail about this heartless Tory government and promptly dipped into a crowdfunded appeal for the charmer.

Before you contribute, just read this:

The authoress of that angry piece is Kerry Louise Finn, the sister of Miss Rachel 14P. As you can see it puts a whole new perspective onto the story. Click this link and read the original Facebook post by Kerry Louise and you will see that she is not the only family member or friend who is outraged at the way that a woman who is both a dipso and a druggie is being pandered to by the liberal middle-class whilst they are left to shift for themselves.

Go to any council estate and the bulk of the people are pretty much the same as they have always been: decent, working-class souls who are just trying to live their lives without causing grief to anyone. Many of them have fallen victims to the economic changes that have occurred over the past few years. For instance, I had a neighbour, Colin, who worked all his life as a coach driver. Colin lost his job a few years back due to a reorganisation, and cannot find another one as he is not very literate. Expecting him to go online to apply for pretty much any job is out of the question and the days when he could wander along to a bus depot and speak to the inspector of buses are long gone.

So, there is a great deal of sympathy for the Colins of this world, but none whatsoever for the dipsos, druggies and losers who far too many middle-class types equate with the working-class as a whole.

The Tories seem to understand this, but sadly today's Labour Party doesn't. Until Labour gets it through its collective head that the drunken, druggie losers are a small minority who are detested by the rest of the population then it will fail to recover the votes of untold millions of working-class people.

Thus the forward march of Conservatism into what were once Labour heartlands will continue.

As the Brexit Party Collapses, the Road for Boris Opens

Yesterday, three Brexit Party MEP's resigned the whip the be quickly joined by a fourth who had lost it the day before. Together they sent an open letter to Nigel Farage, telling him that it was his party, The Brexit Party, that now stands in the way of Britain and Brexit. They then urged voters to back Boris to get Brexit done.

Whether Farage will listen or not remains to be seen, but what is becoming clearer is that ordinary people are putting aside their understandably atavistic loathing for the Conservatives and will, like me, vote Tory on Thursday. As far as we are concerned, all other issues are secondary to Brexit, which is the only issue in our minds.

In 2016 we voted to leave the European Union and thanks to Labour MPs in Brexit voting areas we have not left the EU. We were told that the government would implement whatever decision we made and the government was not able to implement anything like our decision because a majority of Westminster MPs put loyalty to Brussels before whatever loyalty that had to Britain. We really don't care whether those MPs were Labour federasts or Tory headbangers: we voted to leave the EU, we have not left the EU, so some Westminster fuckers are going to have to suffer.

How can we trust Labour with it goodie bag of policies to deliver any of them if the party cannot deliver on Brexit, the most basic matter that so many people in the country voted for?

This General Election Is in Danger of Ending With a Whimper, Not a Bang

Exactly a week from now the polls will be open and the British people will have their opportunity to vote for a candidate who stands for Britain, and British independence, or any number of candidates who prefer it that the country remains a province of Brussels. The country should be in a state of flux as people argue the case for or against Brussels and its status quo with the candidates and each other.

Except that is not happening. Nothing seems to be happening ever since YouGov produced a major poll for the Times of the type that had correctly predicted the last general election in 2017. Last week's poll put the Tories on target to win 369 seats, Labour to get 211 and the Lib-Dems 13. Even with the SNP grabbing 45 seats there would be no way on those figures for the opposition to cobble together and anti-Brexit chaotic coalition as Boris would be home, dry and with a good majority.

Labour realised that it was in grave danger of losing seats in its Northern and Midlands heartlands as Brexit voters switched to the Conservatives, not The Brexit Party, which Labour had fondly imagined would happen. So Labour adopted a defensive strategy and threw resources into defending the seats that it already held rather than taking them for granted and trying to win new ones. The Lib-Dems did the same, with even more urgency as they woke up to realise that they could lose Jo Swinson's seat in Scotland. Losing a couple of backbenchers is one thing, but seeing your leader go down the electoral pan is quite another.

The Tories then seemed to have decided that they will concentrate on their target seats and accept a smallish majority. This is a high-risk game as Labour lead the Tories by quite a large margin in London where the Tories have 21 seats at stake. If Tory gains in the rest of the country are not as good as the party expects and if Labour makes inroads in London then we could be back to a tiny majority for Boris or even no majority at all.

For the Brexiteers this is not actually as bad as it sounds. The law is clear that we leave the EU on 31st January 2020 unless the government pleads for another extension. If Boris has no majority to speak of but can hold his nerve, then we can crash out at the end of January and he can blame any disruption on the opposition and demand that they then start to support his emergency summits with EU leaders to calm down the troubled waters. 

Once we are out, we are out and there is no going back other than to apply to Brussels to join as a new member. That is a long and complicated process and one that no Tory government would even consider. If Labour did then they would certainly run the risk of losing seats in the Brexit supporting parts of the country and the Lid-Dems are probably going to have to elect a new leader for what remains of their party.

That said, I would prefer it that we left with the withdrawal agreement that Boris negotiated just a few weeks ago and had a period of rest and relaxation as the government negotiates a final settlement with the EU. For that to happen, Boris needs to be returned with at least 330 seats and the closer it gets to 350 the happier and more relaxed I will be. If we are unhappy with the final agreement then a government with a small majority can be easily voted out at the next general election, so let's hope that Boris gets around the 330-350 mark.

For that to happen, the Tories need to up their game in the final week of campaigning to enthuse the Brexiteers to turn out mob-handed to ensure that we leave the EU, with minimal disruption, next month.

If the Tories Really Want to Win, Why Are They Standing Such Poor Candidates?

Don't mind me as I could just be having a private wobble at the moment, but I have to ask the question, just how serious are the Tories about winning this damned election? I ask because to win the Tories need to take a goodly number of Labour seats and looking at the campaign overall in many of them they do not seem to be putting in all that much effort.

Let's take Bradford South to begin with. According to Electoral Calculus, this seat should swing Tory based on the result of the 2016 referendum, but Richard North, a Brexiteer of long-standing does not think that it will. According to him:

But with the real give-away is that the Tories are not even trying to win the seat. They've parachuted in the son of a millionaire Indian property developer, a man who has no economic ties with the constituency, doesn't live in the area and has not even bothered to campaign. So far, in the entire period, we've had one leaflet and an electoral address from Labour, and that's it. None of the other parties has bothered to leaflet us. 

Of course, the fact that around 12% of the vote in Bradford South is made of Pakistanis who are hardly likely to vote for a Sikh, whether he can be bothered campaigning or not doesn't help matters. That simple fact forces me to ask the question why the Tories chose to stand a candidate that a big chunk of the electorate will not support under pretty much any circumstances if they were serious about winning the seat?

Let's move over to Bolsover, the Lair of Dennis Skinner, the Breast of Bolsover, who has seen his majority reduced over the past few elections to a fairly close 5,000 or so in 2017.

Dennis is now 87 years old and unable to campaign owing to hip replacement surgery just last month. That more than anything should give the Tories a boost as it reminds people of just how old Dennis Skinner now is and how unlikely it will be that he will be able to finish a full five-year term as Bolsover's MP.

So whey then did the Tories decide to stand a 34-year-old former President of the Cambridge University Student's Union, who is a homosexual and who worked for an offshore-based private health outfit?

The Tories seem to be incapable of grasping that working-class people in places like Bolsover are social conservatives who believe in state-directed, collective answers to the economic issues facing the country.

They also seem to be unable to understand that historically they did well when they stood candidates who were ample-bottomed local worthies who were well-known in their areas and had agreeable wives who could run the constituency office when the MP was in London. Such candidates would use the saloon bars of every pub in the area and make speeches how much better it was for England to be drunk than England enslaved. Oh, and they supported what started off as Imperial Preference, and then morphed into basic protectionism after the Second World War.

Seats like Bolsover and Bradford South could very well return Tory MPs next week, but it would be much better for the Tories if they had chosen candidates who could appeal to the local population on cultural grounds at least, rather than rely on the people's visceral dislike of the modern Labour Party.

What You Can Do to Help Boris and Brexit

As we enter December, polling day becomes something that will happen next week and it is the time in the election cycle when the bulk of the population wake up to the fact that they can no longer ignore all that background noise about politics as it is decision time.

A poll published in the Times by YouGov seemed to give comfort to the Tories as it predicted that they would have a good majority. Alas for them it seems to have given aid and comfort to the opposition parties who have obviously dug through the data and realised that disaster can be averted if they change some of their policies, sharpish.

First to do so were the Liberal-Democrats who dropped their policy of unilaterally revoking Article 50 in favour of giving the losers in 2016 another bite at the cherry. This Losers' Vote idea has been Labour policy for some time, and by accepting it the Lib-Dems have conceded that they are not going to win the election. They now hope to hold onto a many of their 2017 gains as possible, grab a few seats from the Tories in those parts of the leafy South where Brussels' Loyalism is strongest and hope for the best.

Labour for its part seems to have stopped its offensive campaign to gain seats from the Tories in favour of a purely defensive strategy to stop the Tories making major inroads in the English North and Midlands.

In theory, all this should mean that the Tories can continue to cruise on easy steam towards an easy victory next week. However, what has happened is that their lead over Labour has been reduced as Lib-Dem voters decide to dump their first choice in favour of Labour, the party that is more likely to halt the Tory juggernaut. 

It is highly unlikely that Labour can win the election, but it is now possible that the Tories could lose it by not getting an overall majority of seats. If that happens we will be back to the nonsense and buffoonery that typified the last Parliament, and Brexit itself could be under threat if Labour, Lib-Dem and even the SNP can put together a clunky coalition. The only way to avoid that is for the Tories to fire up their boilers to full steam and then turn their ferociously efficient election machine loose against their opponents.

Dominic Cummings was first out of the traps when he told people that the election was closer than it looked - a point he made before the polls confirmed that trend. He made the point that if a losers' coalition can be cobbled together, the franchise will be extended to include all the EU nationals who are currently blessing our country with their presence so as to rig the referendum that will then follow. 

I believe him, and for that reason, I urge all good Brexiteers to put aside your dislike of the Tories and vote for Boris next week. Not only that but please tell the blokes you go drinking with or the women you chat with at the shops to do the same. It is time for all Brexiteers to become canvassers for Brexit.

We can win this thing if we vote and if we make sure that as many of our family and friends also vote for Boris and Brexit.

Can the Tories Make Gains in Scotland?

"You've called for legislation to protect the NHS from Donald Trump. Maybe it needs legislation to protect if from Nicola Sturgeon?" That was the question posed by Andrew Neil when he forensically demolished Scotland's First Minister who heads a completely devolved Scottish National Health Service that allows patients to die due to polluted water.

Yes, the read that right, the water at the brand new Queen Elizabeth hospital in Glasgow was not safe to drink, and twenty-six patients were infected by it of which two later died. That is what happens in third world countries and now it happens in Scotland.

I should point out that if you live in Scotland the bulk of the issues that affect you on a day to day basis, education for your kids, the health service, local government, the police, are all run completely by Holyrood, not Westminster, and all of them are failing.

Let me go on the say that I am a double-leaver: I voted Yes for independence in 2014 and then Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. If I am cheesed-off at Sturgeon's failures then God knows what your average man in the street thinks.

The SNP are running at about 40% in the polls, but the Tories are now on 28% and seem to be gaining ground. Most of it may be coming from Labour and the Liberal-Democrats, but if the Tories can break clear from the pack, say by reaching 30% in the polls, then this will become a genuine two-horse-race.

Nicola Sturgeon is a brilliant campaigner for Scottish independence and well adept at brushing aside the economic arguments against it. However, as First Minister of Scotland, her time in office has been a catastrophe for the bread and butter issues that very many voters are concerned about.

It is on those issues that her party should be judged and the verdict must be that it is not fit for the country's purpose and our votes.

Why Labour Leavers Must Vote Conservative

Boris is on target to win a historic victory of monumental proportions that could even put the landslides of 1945 and 1983 in the shade. The Tories are making great strides in Northern and Midlands England and look set to take over thirty seats in that region. Wales is a longstanding Labour fiefdom that could fall next month to the blue wave, so what can stop Boris' army now?

If we ignore unforeseen events that tend to crop up when nobody expects them and blindside one side or the other, the major danger that Boris faces come from Jo Swinson, her Liberal-Democrats and the unwilling help that they could give to Labour.

The Lib-Dems are a party that has not made any headway in this election and are now stuck on about 15% in the polls. If just 5% of that total decides that since the Lib-Dems are going nowhere and Jezza's Labour gang are the second-placed horse to back then they could put Labour back into contention for the top spot.

Swinson appeals to the real hardline Federasts who support an immediate revocation of Article 50 with no Losers' Vote to cover up that act. It may very well be that since Swinson is a Scottish Unionist who represents a Scottish seat her objection to another EU referendum is directly related to her hardline opposition to another vote on Scottish independence which the SNP are demanding. If you think about it, opposition to one is intellectually incoherent without opposition to the other. Swinson's seat is under threat from the SNP so she has to bolster her Unionist credentials to try and save her seat on the Westminster gravy train.

However, the 15% or so of the population who support the Lib-Dems almost certainly do not share her desire to save the Union first and foremost. It is quite likely that they put the EU first and as Boris rises in the polls they may just decide to cut their Lib-Dem losses and take a chance with Jezza and his idea of another referendum, or a Losers' Vote as I call it.

What can Boris do under those circumstances? There is not much left to squeeze out of The Brexit Party who are now down to about 3% in the polls, so the only obvious target is to try and make a play for Labour Leavers.

Funnily enough, that is exactly what the Scottish Tories are doing right now, although their target is the SNP:

This Tweet from Annie Wells, a Tory MSP went live on Saturday. It is a brutally honest and totally cynical appeal to Scottish voters who may even hate the Tories to vote for Boris's party to stop the SNP forcing another independence referendum on us and then Labour doing the same with their Losers' Vote wheeze. People in Scotland are as entitled to a quiet life as people in the rest of the country so a vote for the Tories is the best way to get it - even if we loathe the party.

If Labour starts to climb in the polls, with an obvious decline in the Lib-Dem vote, then Boris is just the man to issue an appeal to what is left of the Labour Leave vote to rally behind him to get Brexit over and done with by the end of January 2020.

Brexit cuts across all other loyalties and that is why all sound Brexiteers must line up and vote for the one party that will deliver Brexit to us, and that party is the Conservative one with Boris Johnson at its head.

With the Debate Over, Boris Continues to Climb in the Polls.

The debate between Boris and Jezza that I was worried might lead to a boost for the latter ended up as a draw with neither man gaining an advantage which meant that Boris' steady climb in the polls was able to continue unhindered. Next week there is another debate involving all the party leaders, but quite rightly Boris has decided to sit that one out. It is about climate change, so is only of interest to the type of snowflake who won't vote for Boris, anyway.

The next potential crisis came and went yesterday with the release of the Labour manifesto. Two years ago, Labour's manifesto led to an immediate increase in support for the party, but it seems as if the Tories were ready this year and have moved to try and defuse the more popular parts of Jezza's offering.

Other people who have concerns about Labour are also getting in on the act, such as this young woman with her ditty that manages to be both engaging and terrifying at the same time:

My feeling is that the manifesto falls down on the quite simple grounds that most of it cannot be implemented from within the EU. Certainly, the free broadband idea would run up against EU competition rules and those members of Labour Momentum who are discussing the need for exchange controls with great glee really do need to be reminded that free movement of capital is one of the four freedoms that are the cornerstones of the whole EU edifice. I try to remind them that this is one of the reasons why historically the left opposed the EU root and branch but they don't seem to want to listen. Hopefully, a defeat will make them see sense.

Boris is not out of the woods just yet, but with the election coming less than three weeks from now, his position looks solid.

Why Tonight's Debate Could Backfire Against Boris.

I am very dubious about the Boris versus Jezza head to head debate that will take place tonight. There is a good reason why sitting Prime Ministers do not take part in these stunts and someone should have had a quiet word with Boris and told him that this was not one of his better ideas.

The Tories are ahead of Labour by at least ten points so what does Boris hope to gain from this event? It is unlikely that his margin will increase but the danger is there that Jezza may score enough hits to increase his level of support.

Boris is the better speaker of the two, but as those of us who remember him from the Oxford Union will testify, he is also bone-idle and relies on his wit to carry the day and get him out of the trouble that his lack of knowledge of a subject has caused him.

It must also be said that Jezza has one advantage over Boris in that he actually believes what he says. Boris, on the other hand, comes over as the cove who says whatever he has to in the hope of getting the votes.

Even if Boris does not implode - and I do not think that he will - then the possibility that the debate will lead to an increase in support for Jezza is still high. Consider the possibility that the Leader of the Opposition will leave the audience realising that the Liberal-Democrats are going nowhere and thus persuade a big chunk of their 14% in the polls to switch to Labour. If that happens then Boris' ten-point lead could be halved pretty quickly and that puts us back into hung parliament territory once again.

Finally, and most serious of all, could a Boris victory in the debate leave Brexiteers feeling that he has it in the bag? If enough start to think that then Nigel Farage's five per cent in the polls could turn out to be on the low side. We need to remember that votes for The Brexit Party come overwhelmingly from the Tories, not Labour. 

All in all, tonight's performance is a bad idea for the Brexiteers, and we all will pray mightily that not too much damage is done by it.

Nigel Farage Gifts the Tories Another 42 Seats

It is impossible not to admire Nigel Farage. I felt that way when I met the man about six years ago and I still retain all my admiration for his work over the past two decades to free the UK from the tentacles of the EU. I just wish that he was more astute as a strategist, that's all. As a campaigner he is great, but he does seem to have forgotten of late that Brexit is not about any single man it really is about leaving the EU.

His unilateral decision to stand down his candidates in 317 Tory seats will certainly help Boris, but almost as important was the failure to find candidates - or have them resign rather than split the Brexit vote - in 42 more. Most of them are in Scotland where The Brexit Party has collapsed to all intents and purposes as I reported recently, but there are a few others in ultra marginals that the Tories need to win if they are to stay in office. 

Farage has gifted those seats to Boris, albeit as a result of The Brexit Party's incompetence, rather than by any design on Nigel Farage's part. Still, Boris needs good luck as well as good management, and Lady Luck has just smiled on him 42 times.

Brexit Party Will Not Contest Edinburgh West

Following on from yesterday's posting, now that nominations for the elections have now closed, The Brexit Party will not stand a candidate in Edinburgh West. Michael Boyd was due to be the sacrificial lamb to Nigel Farage's ego but following representations from any number of people, including me, he decided to stand down. His replacement happens to be a friend of mine and as soon as I told him what the situation was in this constituency he decided not to bother as well.

Sadly, The Brexit Party has managed to find two people who will stand in this city, one in Edinburgh North & Leith and the other in Edinburgh South-West. Neither has any hope of saving his deposit and neither will get any support from a party that has basically collapsed as an electoral force.

Both were chosen at the panic-stricken meeting that was called at the Marriott Hotel on Tuesday when pretty much anyone who had 500 quid in his pocket to pay his election deposit was allowed to stand.

Across the whole of Great Britain, the press is reporting that the clownish buffoonery that we have seen in Scotland is being repeated, with candidates standing down and being replaced by anyone who is willing to put his name forward and stump up the deposit. God knows who these people are, but I expect that more than a few will come into the category of headbangers and the press should have a field day reporting on their weird and wonderful views.

All good fun, but I just wish that Farage had taken his victory and left the field wide open for Boris to get a thumping majority.

Exclusive: The Brexit Party Has Collapsed in Scotland

The Brexit Party appears to be falling apart in Scotland, which is good news for those of us who have decided that Boris' way is pretty much the only way to get Brexit done.

Nigel Farage pulled all his senior people out of Scotland a week ago, including the National Organiser. Louis Stedman-Bryce, the party's sole MEP in Scotland was then appointed as the new National Organiser, but given no support or help whatsoever. He was due to stand as the candidate in Glasgow North but resigned using Farage's decision to pull over 300 candidates from the line as his excuse. Actually, I suspect he realised that he would be left carrying the can for the looming catastrophe and decided to get our sharpish.

Edinburgh West had a candidate named Michael Boyd, a man I wrote to yesterday to urge him not to stay with the Brexit Party's sinking ship. Just today, I got an email from an old friend telling me that he had been asked to stand in this division, so it looks as if Michael Boyd took my advice.

I answered my old friend's email and pleaded with him not to take this poisoned chalice, and I am pleased to report that he will not now be standing for The Brexit Party.

This afternoon, a meeting was called at the Marriot Hotel in Edinburgh's Old Town and pretty much all the attendees were begged to stand in next month's elections, so it looks as if Boyd and Stedman-Bryce are not the only people who have called it a day. By the way, that meeting was only called yesterday, which suggests to me that bowels are liquifying nicely in what is left of the senior reaches of The Brexit Party.

Finally, people are getting text messages begging them to stay at home tomorrow to receive visitors who will ask them to sign candidates' nomination forms. Given that these forms have to be in by 4.00 pm on the dot, and that ten signatures are needed for each one, I think this is a bit of a forlorn hope but never mind. As I understand it one woman who was asked to waste a day indoors told the caller that she was going to the hairdresser's and would be out of touch all day.

What is going on? Basically, Farage is brilliant as the leader of a pressure group and appalling as a party political leader. He only trusts his close friends and anyone who is not a mate of Nigel is kept out of the inner-sanctum. 

The sensible thing for Farage to do would be to pull all his candidates and give Boris a clear run to the Brexit prize, but his ego will not allow him to do that. He must know that candidates that have been chosen the day before nominations close have no chance of even saving their deposits - deposits that they have to find themselves, by the way - but he needs 300 of them to ensure that he gets a free television party election address. Besides that, he has announced that he will have 300 candidates, and his ego means that wants that number.

I do not know what is happening in the rest of the country but in Scotland, The Brexit Party is pretty much finished as a serious political force. 

The field is now wide open for Boris and his gang!

A Caserolazo Is One Way to Resist a Very British Junta

As the various quislings who seem to make up the bulk of the opposition in the House of Commons talk about their plans for a so-called Government of National Unity, it might be a good idea to use original Spanish terms for what is rapidly becoming a very Hispanic type of politics. While we are at it, we can also look at some effective means of popular resistance.

First of all, we will not legitimise this constitutional coup by adopting the name given to it by its members and supporters. For us it is a junta; a gang of treasonous buffoons who may lack the comic opera uniforms found in the Hispanic world but who are just as unconstitutional.

There is talk of John Bercow being installed as jefe de la junta, but I find that idea as risible as Bercow. Most coup leaders end up as figures of fun, but they never start out that way and that is Bercow's lot, I'm afraid. At 5' 5" tall the most he could do is threaten to headbutt someone on his kneecap, but I doubt if he could even manage that threat and make it credible. Not when he knows that his own wife puts the horns on him with his brother. He must also know that we know as well and find his inability to control his own household an endless source of amusement. We suspect that the family dog ignores him as well. 

The fact that the putative coup mongers have not ruled Bercow out suggests that they are short of talent, but assuming that they find someone, then manage to remove the government and install this caudillo in Downing Street, how shall we respond?

The classic Latin-American response to a coup has become the international standard: it is called the caserolazo, and it is very effective. Basically, you take a casserole dish and a big spoon from the kitchen, go outside and then use the dish as a drum to create, along with thousands of other women, a cacophony of noise.

We don't know who came up with this idea, but it seems to have been a Chilian, probably during their period of rule by the junta. That a woman came up with this idea in the first place strikes me as axiomatic: how many men do you know who even have a dim awareness of where the kitchen is, still less what the pots are stored in it?

One person banging one dish is just local noise, but a thousand people doing the same is guaranteed to put the shits up the local bizzies, especially if the demonstrators are stood in their own backyards and the boys in blue can't see them so don't know exactly how many people are involved.

In 1980s Chile they had to print leaflets such as the one reproduced above to get people to engage in a caserolazo, but we have the internet and mobile phones that can be used to spread our agitprop quickly and cheaply. If the Chileans could get tens of thousands to join in the demonstrations then we should be able to get the whole of the Brexitland to create a feeling of blind terror in the hearts of all the quislings.

The coup is coming, so let's be ready to meet it!

Federast Funnies 12

Well, another one of my comments at the Guardian that did not last very long. Needless to say, more than a few Guardianistas were having the vapours when they read it, but it is a fair point - how can a man like Bercow be expected to have the respect of anyone when he cannot even command it from his own wife?

The General Election is gonna be fun, you mark my words.

Federast Funnies 11

As Boris announces that Parliament will be prorogued to stop the Federasts from implementing their cunning plan to put some backbencher into Number 10 Downing Street, the Guardian promptly went into a meltdown that is even more entertaining for normal people than the one they had in the aftermath of the People's Vote in 2016.

"Guardian meltdown will commence in three, two, one: meltdown commence now," was my comment, a remark that was quickly deleted by the Guardian's Mrs Grundy.

This comment did not last much longer, but at least I managed to grab a screenshot of it before Mrs Grundy could delete it - she did, by the way.

I have now been put in pre-moderation, thanks to all the precious, weeping Federasts who complained that I have invaded their safe spaces or something. Not that it matters; what matters is that the Guardian's finest feel like shit.

Which is what they are.

Federast Funnies 10

I haven't created a Federast Funny for over a year which is far too long, especially when the Guardian gives me such an open net to score in. Today, one of their hacks came up with an interesting piece which drew lessons from history to illustrate its pro-EU point. Fair enough thought avuncular old Uncle Ken, who then proceeded to do the same with this comment:

Now, I wasn't being entirely 100% serious with this quick comment, but I don't think that it is too bad and it is certainly in keeping with the piece that I was commenting on, so who could complain?

Well, It seems that an awful lot of Guardian webmongs did not agree and the little retards began by missing entirely that fact that we were supposed to be drawing lessons from  history:

I was tempted to ask Marcel which war he wanted me to get over since I did discuss about three in my comment and I was also tempted to tell Herman that I was gonna call him Arminius whether he liked it or not just for giggles.

Alas, the Guardian's Mrs Grundy responded to all the Federasts whining and deleted my comment and its very engaging replies before I could do any of that. However, that was not before I had grabbed the screenshots to provide you with some free entertainment this fine Sunday afternoon.

All good fun, people, all good fun.

Titania McGrath is Brought to Life at the Edinburgh Fringe 2019

Titania McGrath was created by the satirist Andrew Doyle as a series of tweets, which then grew into a book and has now been brought to life on the stage by Alice Marshall. If you hurry you can see it as I did last night as it runs up to and including Sunday. Tickets cost just over a tenner, which as Titania says is only the price of a decent flat latte.

So who is Titania McGrath? Well, she is everything that normal people hate, but according to her, she is a typical Kensington girl, with a modest trust find and a burning desire for social justice. In other words, she is a parasite who wants to make the lives of the rest of as difficult as possible. The Titania's of the country have been riding the cultural wave for several decades now and as anyone who has ever read the Guardian will know, the Brexit vote has created terror in their ranks as they contemplate what the plebs who outnumber them could do if they set their minds to it. 

Andrew Doyle's creation is the start of the process that will hopefully end with the real-life woke warriors back in their boxes having learned the meaning of the word defeat. We have a long way to go yet, but the book and now the one-woman performance can be said to mark the start of that process.

How good is the play? Well, it is good, but it still needs a script that has been tightened up some more, since it tends to wander from one thing to another until it ended up as a mixture of stand up comedy with some vignettes added. I liked the running joke about Titania's plans to set up a new political party called Shame UK, and it might have been a good idea to make the whole 45-minute performance the introduction of the new party. 

That said, when you look at the way that the Federasts are behaving both inside and outside the Commons, you might argue that it is impossible to parody the parody of British life that they have already created. That is doubly so when you consider that some of them blame Dad's Army for Brexit and others hold that air-conditioning is inherently sexist. Only then can you consider just how difficult it is to parody people who are so lacking in self-awareness that they do not realise how risible they are to normal people.

I was also dubious about interspersing Titiana's execrable poetry into the play, but that might just be me: I tend to the view that poetry by its very nature is pretty bloody execrable.

The Edinburgh fringe is the place where new works get their first outing before the changes are made that lead to their successful transfer to the London stage and given what I saw last night, this one should be odds-on the make the transfer very soon. Especially if the producers keep Alice Marshall in the title role.

She really did bring the character to life, and everything about her performance reeked of the privilege that the metropolitan woke generation regard as their right to impose on the rest of us. Sadly, the audience lacked a few members of the pure at heart who can be expected to make a loud exit half-way through a performance such as this and provide easy laughs for the rest of us. I believe that on other nights there have been such disruptions and that Alice Marshall is now pretty adept at making sure that they exit the theatre with their tails between their legs which is the way it should be. Alas, none of them was in the almost full house yesterday.

At the end of the play, I asked her to sign my copy of Woke, which she did. She was also, I thought, pleased that I called her Miss Marshall and not Miss McGrath, which leads me to wonder if some people do not believe that the actress really is the character. If they do, then I think she should take that as a complement to her theatrical presence, as she really did allow Titania McGrath to shine, in all her loathsome splendour.  

Titania McGrath is on at the Pleasence Courtyard, Edinburgh, up to and including Sunday, 25 August.

My Family and Peterloo

Today is the 200th anniversary of Peterloo and in the 1880s a photograph was taken of a group of people which was published as The Failsworth Veterans of Peterloo, and the first time I saw it I damn near choked on my tea. Sitting at the front of the group the fat man on the left is Thomas Schofield, with Alice, his wife who is dressed all in black on the right. When I showed this photograph to my parents in the 1980s my dad remarked ruefully that you expect buggers like the Schofields to have been involved in events like that.

My mother's family rented 29 Old Road, Failsworth, Manchester, from the Schofield family from before the Great War to about 1960 when we moved into number 31 right next door. My mother told people that we had the gipsy in us, you see...

No matter which house it was the Schofield's owned the whole block and every time it rained the tenants had to put buckets in the bedrooms to catch the water. If we had a typical British summer then my dad got very little sleep as those buckets filled very quickly and needed regular emptying. In winter the back yard became a skating rink, which made a trip to the bog an interesting experience.

A descendant of the Peterloo couple was Redfern Schofield who was the head of the family when I was a very small boy. He became a conscientious objector in the Great War and was always called Old Conchie by my time. 

On my wall today I have the above photo of my mother's maternal uncle, Fred Burden, his wife Maggie and their daughter. When my maternal grandmother died in 1920 her three brothers met up, in a pub of course, and decided what to do with her three children. Fred Burden got Rose, my mother, and she joined his family as one of Old Conchie's tenants. The photo was taken in about 1916 and shows Fred Burden proudly wearing his army uniform as one of Kitchener's Volunteers. He died in 1926 at the age of 40...

Fast forward to 1939 and Dick Schofield, Redfern's son, was also a conchie, and he was known as Young Conchie to differentiate him from his dad. My father, who married my mother just after the war ended, served in the Royal Artillery and helped lug a 25-pounder around Europe. My mother worked six 12-hour shifts a week at the Avro-Roe factory that built the Lancaster bombers that did so much to dehouse the population of Germany during the 1940s.

This photo shows the whole block that was owned by the Schofield family. On the far left you can just see the Schofield's shoe shop at number 27 Old Road and across the street and opposite was their furniture warehouse, since demolished. One night in the 1950s some blokes were hard at work breaking into the warehouse and my mum woke dad up to tell him. He told her to go back to sleep and ignore it, which she did.

The Schofield family was made up of Nonconformist, Liberal, teetotal, sanctimonious, anally-retentive, self-righteous gits. My father was a labourer, my mother a dressmaker and they were both low-Anglicans who voted Tory because you don't vote for the landlord's party, do you?

Just over a decade after Peterloo the Great Reform Act was passed which enfranchised the Schofield men and their ilk. They became the local petty capitalists which was the sum total of their desires. I suspect they were like Thatcher's family and people like that are always loathed by the bulk of the local population who would make a point of adopting a political view contrary to theirs because their interests are invariably not ours. It is probably why when the bulk of working men got the vote in the 1880s many voted Tory; my family certainly did and the first time my parents ever voted Labour was in 1983. They recognised in Thatcher a creature so loathsomely typical of the petty capitalist class that she forced them to break the habits of a lifetime.

So, when looking at Peterloo, you need to remember that many of the demonstrators were not proto-Leninists who battled to overthrow the existing order. They were aspirational arsewipes who wanted to enjoy their place within that order and pretty soon after 1819 that is exactly what they did.

Why Did The Brexit Party Lose Peterborough?

Why did The Brexit Party lose the Peterborough by-election? There may be lots of reasons, but the main one seems to be the old problem that all insurgent parties have in that they rely on enthusiasm rather than organisation to achieve victory and it seldom works.

Labour's victory was down to good organisation. The constituency was canvassed several times so the party knew where its supporters were. That information was put into a databank so that on election day tellers could be put at every single polling station to collect voter numbers. Those were fed into the database so that in the evening, the party knew more or less which of its supporters had failed to vote. Then cars were sent out to collect the non-voters and ferry them to their polling stations.

This system was invented in Reading and first used in the 1945 election. It helped get Ian Micardo elected and was quickly copied by the rest of the Labour Party before all the other parties copied the Reading system themselves. 

The old Liberal Party excelled at it. Since they lacked much in the way of constituency organisation, the Liberals set up a nationally organised group of activists where were expert in the Reading system and when a by-election was called they were sent out to the constituency to run the local campaign. The local activists were dragooned into acting as foot soldiers by those national organisers and the Liberals quickly acquired a reputation as ferocious by-election campaigners with a string of victories.

The Brexit Party has become an expert at social media, at photo-ops that show Nigel Farage with a man of the people pint in his hand and at getting the mass media to follow its lines. What it failed to do in Peterborough is what it has always failed to do ever since Farage was in UKIP. It cannot organise its election campaigns efficiently and it leaves too much to local enthusiasm and blind luck.

Today, any political party can buy in canvassing tools, so there is no excuse for this cack-handedness. The most popular one is called Nation Builder and the company which sells the software even throws in a free, online set of tutorials that are aimed specifically at first-time candidates and their staffs.

The Brexit Party had a good candidate in Mike Greene who is well-known in Peterborough, a positive message and lots of enthusiasm. It lost against Labour's poor candidate, confusing message over Brexit, but ruthlessly efficient by-election machine.

The Brexiteers need to copy that winning strategy as quickly as possible.

Siobhan Prigent, a Federast Who Enjoys Watching the Elderly Being Attacked

Meet Siobhan Charlotte Prigent, a graduate of the intellectual powerhouse that is the "University" of Glamorgan and one of the mouthy Federasts who enjoyed demonstrating against Donald Trump yesterday in London. If you can't tell the difference between the two images, Siobhan is the fat ball of lard and the other is the big orange balloon filled with air.

Here's another image from her Twitter page. God knows what the text is supposed to say as I can only read English and Spanish;  Gibberish has never been my strong point.

Here she is screaming "Nazi scum" over and over again at an old man who had to misfortune to find himself surrounded by Siobhan and her unwashed cronies.

Then when someone threw a milkshake over him, she stopped screaming and started to laugh. What a brave fighter for the Progressive ethos she is to be sure.

Or not as the case may be. You see the internet decided that this naughty little girl needed a virtual spanking so set out to administer one to her.

First, she was named as Siobhan Charlotte Prigent by any number of Twitter feeds and websites.

Then her company, an off-the-shelf outfit based in Manchester called Vlek Ltd received an enormous amount of unwanted comments which will do wonders for its future profitability I am sure. Not that she will care, I suspect, since she only set it up last September, and still spends most of her time in London doing various short-term clerical non-jobs in the public sector.

Faced with this, Siobhan did what the middle class always do when things go wrong, she went into full arse-crawling apology mode:

When that was not enough, because by then the whole internet was in full payback mode, she deleted her Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts and went to ground.

 

Normally, I would not bother about such a lump of lard, except to note that Siobhan is about half my age and twice as fat. However, this illustrates the important truth that the middle class are either snarling at our throats or crawling at our feet. Siobhan, like all of her tribe, is only brave when she thinks that her actions do not have any consequences.

When they learn that they do, especially when it relates to their desire to arsecrawl up the bureaucratic or corporate ladder, then they run like kicked curs. 

Since all we do is regard bastard fucking work as the price we pay for our money, we are pretty much invulnerable in that area and can do as we please in our own time.

As Siobhan found out just recently, that does not apply to her and her kind. That makes them vulnerable and that is another factor that will help ensure the final victory for the Brexiteers.