Quotulatiousness

September 1, 2023

Grassroots protests continue against London’s expanded ULEZ

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

London mayor Sadiq Khan’s “Ultra Low Emission Zone” expansion is not sitting well with the people who see it as an undemocratic imposition on the poorest Londoners:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

This week many Londoners are waking up to the impact of living in an Ultra Low Emission Zone as the £12.50 daily charge for unfashionable cars begins in the outer poorer suburbs.

Normally “climate change” costs are secretly buried in bills, hidden in rising costs and blamed on “old unreliable coal plants”, inflation or foreign wars. Your electricity bill does not have a category for “subsidies for your neighbors’ solar panels”. But the immense pain of NetZero can’t be disguised.

For a pensioner on £186 a week it could be as much as an £87 a week penalty for driving their car — or £4,500 a year. The Daily Mail is full of stories of livid and dismayed people who served in the Navy or worked fifty years, who can’t afford to look after older frail Aunts or shop in their usual stores now, or who will have to give up their cars. People are talking about the “end of Democracy”. The cameras are expected to bring in £2.5 million a day in ULEZ charges to City Hall. But shops inside the zone may also lose customers, and everyone, with and without cars will have to pay more for tradespeople and deliveries to cover the cost of their new car or Ulez fee.

Protests have reached a new level of anger and hooded vigilantes in masks carry long gardening clippers, or spray cans and lasers to disable cameras that record number plates for Ulez. In one photo the whole metal camera pole has been sheared by an electric saw of some sort. There chaos.

Interactive maps have sprung up to report where the cameras are, and help people “plan their trips”. The vigilante group called Blade Runners have vowed to remove or disable every ULEZ camera in London. Nearly nine out of ten cameras have been vandalized in South-east London.

The Transport for London website was overwhelmed with searches from people wondering if their car was compliant and they would have to pay just to drive on the roads their taxes and fees built. Some people have bought old historic cars to get around the fee, but apparently a lot of people hadn’t thought much about what was coming. Sadiq Khan probably didn’t mention this in his election campaign. Presumably there are others in London who will get a nasty surprise bill in the mail.

As Nigel Farage says: “I’ve never seen people so angry about this new tax on working people. “And people are not just furious at Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, they’re angry at the Prime Minister and the Conservatives for not stopping the scheme.

August 18, 2023

When your friendly local bank turns into a branch of the Stasi

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the British bank — probably not the only one to do things like this — that compiled a “dossier” of information on one of their long-term clients with a view to de-banking him, his family, and associates. It might have worked if the client was a private citizen with no particular public profile, but the client was someone who absolutely is not that kind of man:

The following day, [National Westminster Bank CEO Alison] Rose resigned, admitting to “a serious error of judgment”. The value of the bank fell by more than $1 billion.

The weasel words of Ms. Rose and the bank board are worth examination. They deflected, and I suspect were intended to deflect, the main criticism directed at Ms. Rose and the bank: namely, that the bank had been involved in a scandalous and sinister surveillance of Mr. Farage’s political views and attempted to use them as a reason to deny him banking services, all in the name of their own political views, which they assumed to be beyond criticism or even discussion. The humble role of keeping his money, lending him money, or perhaps giving him financial advice, was not enough for them: they saw themselves as the guardians of correct political policy.

It was not that the words used to describe Mr. Farage were “inappropriate”, or even that they were libelous. It is that the bank saw fit to investigate and describe him at all, at least in the absence of any suspicion of fraud, money laundering, and so forth. “The error of judgment” to which Ms. Rose referred was not that she spoke to the BBC about his banking affairs (it is not easy to believe that she did so without malice, incidentally), but that she compiled a dossier on Farage in the first place — and then “error of judgment” is hardly a sufficient term on what was a blatant and even wicked attempt at instituting a form of totalitarianism.

This raises the question of whether one can be wicked without intending to be so, for it is quite clear that Ms. Rose had no real understanding, even after her resignation, of the sheer dangerousness and depravity of what the bank, under her direction, had done.

As for the board’s somewhat convoluted declaration that “after careful consideration, it concluded that it retains full confidence”, etc., it suggests that it was involved in an exercise of psychoanalytical self-examination rather than of an objective state of affairs: absurd, in the light of Ms. Rose’s resignation within twenty-four hours. The board, no more than Ms. Rose herself, understood what the essence of the problem was. For them, if there had been no publicity, there would have been no problem: so when Mr. Farage called for the dismissal of the board en masse, I sympathised with his view.

July 22, 2023

“… no-one has a ‘right’ to a bank account …”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Unlike in Canada, where the extra-legal debanking of an unknown number of what Justin Trudeau described as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” had all the bien-pensants in and out of the legacy media nodding along, British opinion is not so friendly toward the extra-legal debanking of Nigel Farage and his family and friends:

An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, a hardline capitalist (so he says) made a comment that no-one has a “right” to a bank account, as they don’t have “rights” (those inverted commas are doing a lot of work here) to healthcare, education, paid-for holidays, etc. He was, of course, writing about the Nigel Farage/Coutts saga that has seen the CEO of NatWest, Coutts’ parent firm (39% owned by the taxpayer) issue a sort-of apology to the former UKIP leader.

[…]

When a person is “debanked” today, they can have a problem opening an account anywhere else if the bank asks them why they left a bank in the past. As a result, we have almost a sort of “cartel” system operating.

In time, hopefully, competition will swing back, and some of the nonsense going on will disappear. In the meantime, while I agree with you that the idea of having a “right” to a bank account is as bogus as many of the other “rights” that people talk about today, the fact that banking is such an embedded form of life in a modern economy means this issue hits hard in a way that, say, isn’t the case if you are banned from a pizza restaurant or candy store for holding the “wrong” views. Of course, it may be that the Farage case might encourage a firm to go out of its way to court business from those who have been targeted. Let’s hope so. For example, a bank could, without incurring wrath from the “woke” or regulators, say something like “Banking is all we do. No politics. No agendas. Just finance.”

And as I have said before, the outrageous Nigel Farage case, and that of others, surely demonstrates that a central bank digital currency idea must be resisted. This would be the end of any financial autonomy at all.

As you’d expect, Brendan O’Neill isn’t a fan of this latest attempt to make certain political viewpoints effectively illegal:

So there you have it. Nigel Farage really was given the boot from the prestigious private bank Coutts because of his political views. Because he is very pro-Brexit, is fond of Donald Trump and has been critical of Black Lives Matter. Because, in the words of an extraordinary internal dossier compiled by Coutts, his views “do not align’ with the bank’s values”. For the past fortnight the chattering classes have been chortling over Farage’s claim that Coutts was persecuting him for his political beliefs. How dumb – worse, how complacent in the face of corporate tyranny – those people look now.

Last month, Farage went public about the closure of his Coutts account. I’ve been given the heave-ho for political reasons, he said. He also said that nine other banks have since rejected his custom. Now he has published a dossier that was distributed at a meeting of Coutts’ “reputational risk committee” on 17 November 2022. It is a truly chilling read. It runs to 36 pages. There is a strong case for “exiting” Farage from the bank, it says, because his publicly stated views are “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The Stasi once compiled dossiers on dissident activists and artists whose views ran counter to those of the GDR regime. Now Coutts seems to be doing similar on customers who dare to bristle against the regime of woke.

The dossier basically finds Farage guilty of wrongthink. It highlights his renegade views not only on Brexit and Trump but also on Net Zero and even on King Charles – he has had the audacity to criticise His Majesty. Like dissidents in East Germany, his friendships are held against him, too. His links with Trump and tennis champ Novak Djokovic make him suspect, apparently. The dossier quotes the Independent‘s description of Farage’s visit to Djokovic’s trophy room in Belgrade, during which he criticised Australia’s expulsion of Djokovic for failing to get vaccinated against Covid, as “the spineless, chaotic behaviour of a chancer”.

[…]

The Farage / Coutts story is important because it highlights what a huge threat woke capitalism poses to freedom and fairness. Let’s be clear about what has happened here: a man has been economically unpersoned for having the supposedly wrong views. He’s been blacklisted for being a little too dissenting on the big issues of the day. And it’s happening to others, too – including people who do not have access to the same media platforms as Farage and thus have little leeway to protest against their expulsion from economic life by unelected, unaccountable banks and businesses. We acquiesce to this capitalist policing of thought at our peril. It is surely time for the government to act and clip the wings of banks and companies that believe they have the right to penalise citizens for the contents of their conscience. It might be Farage today, it could be you tomorrow.

Theodore Dalrymple sees it as a sign of the rise of woke totalitarianism:

It isn’t a question of whether Mr. Farage is always right or sometimes horribly wrong; when the bank says that it “uncovered” something that he said, as if he had recorded saying it by secret microphones, it makes itself ridiculous. Not even his worst enemies, or perhaps his best friends, would accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel.

The question is whether it’s the role of a bank to examine its clients’ views and deny them service if those views don’t accord with those of the chief executive, as if the latter were indisputably true and from which it were heresy to dissent. Is a bank an inquisition?

The chief executive of the parent bank, Alison Rose, said soon after her appointment that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her work, and on the occasion of the so-called Pride month last year said that “our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families, and businesses”. This year, the company headquarters were covered in the rainbow colors of the LGBT flag, with lettering the height of humans declaring the “Championing the power of Pride”. Under her leadership, staff may “identify” as women and men on alternate days, should they so wish.

Of course, when she said that “diversity” and “inclusion” was “integral to our purpose”, she was using these terms in a strictly technical sense to mean “everyone who thinks as I do and has a fair bit of money”. The diversity “integral” to the “purpose” of Coutts doesn’t include those persons with less than $1 million to deposit, who even in these days of currency depreciation remain a small minority. People bank with Coutts because it’s exclusive, not inclusive.

The chief executive, however, is safely within what we might call the Coutts Community, because she was paid about $5.2 million last year. The prospect of being barred from the bank will no doubt inhibit anyone who banks with her banks from suggesting in public that she’s paid too much.

February 5, 2022

A new biography of Nigel Farage

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:

Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.

The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.

Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.

As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.

This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

November 15, 2020

Mark Steyn is looking for an argument

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I somehow missed this when it went up on Mark’s website:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of Mrs Thatcher’s great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.

To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That’s when the system’s functioning, which it certainly wasn’t under, say, Andrew Scheer’s Tory leadership in Ottawa.

But, even when it’s not functioning, somebody’s making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party — from the Tories to Sinn Féin — was “pro-Europe”. Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn’t get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel’s issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie’s great formulation: He’d won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.

In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where’s the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator — the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.

Instead, there is a multi-billion-dollar two-year campaign, which is all polls, fundraising, horse race piffle, telly ads for the halfwitted, plot twists of no interest to anybody normal (ooh, look, Cory Booker is up from point-three to point-four in Iowa!), all culminating in a stilted pseudo-debate tediously moderated by a pompous mediocrity asking questions all framed from the left’s point of view. You’d almost get the idea that the entire racket was designed to eliminate the very possibility that someone might make an argument.

October 3, 2020

“The Tory party, desirous of a fat majority, will sell the country out over Europe”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Gawain Towler sees a major opportunity for Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party:

The simple fact is that this Government had the opportunity to do something about our negotiations with the EU in the months after the election. They had a whopping great majority and the goodwill of the nation. Boris had used his ebullience to present the country with a vision that with one bound we would be free, the deal was oven-ready, he was going to get Brexit done. Yes, he had inherited the Withdrawal Agreement, a deeply duff deal, from his predecessor. His resignation as Foreign Secretary over it gave us the confidence that he recognised it as such. And yet on the 25 January, a mere month after his triumphant election victory, he signed that same duff deal and condemned the country to this slow lingering betrayal. It was not necessary to do so, he could have pointed to the election, the vote, and with the support of the country gone to Brussels and made it clear he would not sign. This he signally failed to do.

So here we are again, with the EU making threatening noises, taking legal action with leaks coming out of Berlin and London suggesting that the UK is prepared to make more concessions. A No 10 spokesman confirmed that “The PM will be speaking to President von der Leyen tomorrow afternoon to take stock of negotiations and discuss next steps.”

According to Bruno Waterfield of The Times, “This is seen broadly as a good sign – if, as expected, the British prime minister is ready to signal a bit more give on fish, state aid and subsidy control”.

Note the “more give” – there has already been a lot of giving.

The thing is that Boris is beset with problems, with the Remain lobby, both on his own green benchers and elsewhere; yet again digging up dire predictions of economic meltdown, the CBI taking the lead. The ERG group of Tory sceptics have been oddly quiet, focusing more on Covid-19 than on the clear danger of a failed Brexit. There is no pressure on one side, and a great tidal wave of it pushing him to make a deal at any cost.

Then there is the electoral arithmetic. This shouldn’t matter so far out from an election, but the rumours of Boris’s political demise and the currents swirling around the Chancellor make Labour’s slight lead in the polls a matter of concern. Labour is beginning to solidify after years of infighting, but it is not cutting into Tory support.

That is where Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party come in.

August 21, 2019

British-EU negotiations under Boris Johnson

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In a speech to Slovak journalists, Sean Gabb outlines what he expects the British government to be doing about Brexit now that May has been put out to pasture and Boris Johnson is in charge:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Here, I come to a digression on the nature of how Britain is governed. My country is not particularly democratic. At the same time, there is no cabal of evil persons directing all events and appointments from behind the scenes. This is generally not how ruling classes operate. A more realistic model can be taken from Ian Kershaw’s analysis of the National Socialist revolution in Germany. This proceeded with limited central direction. Before 1939, the leaders were concerned mostly with foreign policy, after that with fighting a big war. Instead, the revolution was decentralised. Reliable men were put in key positions and told to “work towards the Fuhrer” – that is, to act in any situation as they might imagine Hitler himself would act. The result was often administrative chaos. The benefit was that the leadership could concentrate on what it saw as the essentials, and more local knowledge could be used in the overall revolution than would otherwise have been possible.

This is largely how things work in Britain. Our own Transformation is not driven by detailed orders from the Shadowy-Ones-on-High, but by creating a bias within every useful institution to those who are broadly in favour of the Transformation. The benefit is a constrained diversity of approaches that can be presented as a genuine diversity of opinion. The disadvantage is that executive power lies in this country where it has since 1701 – that is, in the hands of the Ministers of the Crown, who are accountable to the House of Commons. If the Prime Minister turns out to be a fool, and the other ministers are too cowardly to stab him in the back, there is no easy way to remove him.

I come at last to the Brexit strategy of the new Government. These people are not right-wing extremists who can eventually be forced to give in. Just like Theresa May, they see Brexit as a problem that needs to be solved. If they could wave a magic wand, they would roll back the calendar to 2016 and make sure that Remain won the Referendum. Or they would roll it back a little farther and make sure the Referendum was not called that year, or at all. But they cannot. Instead, they have to deal with the effects of leaving a political fool in charge for three years of the Brexit process.

Theresa May had one job after 2016. This was to produce the minimal departure I have mentioned. Instead, she negotiated a Withdrawal Agreement that caused a storm of outrage among the English. The details of what this Withdrawal Agreement contained are, again, unimportant. What does matter is that the Withdrawal Agreement was published in English on the European Commission website, and millions of us read its 585 pages. We may not have been that interested in the details of our membership. But the details of our “withdrawal” were unacceptable. She tried three times to force it through the House of Commons. Each time, a majority of some very trashy people were terrified to be seen supporting it. Anyone else less stupid would have tried something else. Instead, Theresa May treated us with open contempt. Whether or not we really cared about it, we had been asked if we wanted to remain in the European Union. Having voted “No!” we expected some show of respect for our clear instructions. We did not welcome a Brexit-in-Name-only.

At first, the damage was confined to the possibility of a Labour Government. Then, with the rise of the Brexit Party, the system as a whole moved towards a crisis of legitimacy. The European elections of the month before last were seen as the second Referendum the Remainers had demanded. It was won by the Leavers. The Conservative were crushed. Labour was humiliated. It seemed that a general election would, for the first time, produce a bloc in the House of Commons of Members opposed not only to the peripheral issue of the European Union, but also to the Transformation.

So Theresa May had to go, and she was replaced by Boris Johnson. His own inclination, I have no doubt, is to get a few cosmetic changes to the existing Withdrawal Agreement, and then tell us he is a diplomatic genius. His problem is that this will no longer do. Theresa May has left too much poison in those waters. Brexit must now be more meaningful than was at first projected. Last week, there was an election in Wales to fill a vacancy in the House of Commons – a bye-election. This should have been won by the Conservatives. Instead, the Brexit Party took enough Conservative votes to give the seat to one of the opposition parties – not the Labour Party, which did badly. The political arithmetic is that anything less than a No-Deal Brexit or a diplomatic triumph will mean a collapse of the Conservative vote at the next general election. And this will not mean a Labour Government, but political chaos and a crisis of legitimacy.

In a post at the Continental Telegraph, Alex Noble shows the quite different political trajectories of Change UK (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) and the Brexit Party:

[Simon Jenkins in the Guardian claims that] the majority of Britain want to stay in the EU.

Is he right?

Well, the recent defectors from the main parties clearly believed he was – Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry et al abandoned their positions to form the CUKs and provide the disenfranchised British masses with the staunch Remainer party they had all been failing to demand for so long.

They came out of the blocks fast, called in favours with journalists to get favourable press coverage, and burst upon the political consciousness of Great Britain like a glitter-filled Zeppelin of cross-party europhilia.

And then … oh the humanity.

Whereas Brexit geezer Nigel Farage sauntered out of the blocks under withering crossfire from the establishment and its pet churnalists, and immediately went hypersonic – from 0% to 20% before the establishment pollsters could unlimber their clipboards and stutter their leading questions.

Up and down the country, the British voter was encouraged to overlook the Brexit Party by an establishment still traumatised by the referendum, with pollsters snidely relegating the party to the column entitled “Other” during their obfuscatory enquiries.

And the British voter seized them by the lapels and yanked them into a ferocious Brexit headbutt.

The desperate EU stooges in the Tory party, realising their puppet Treason May was fatally wounded, threw her under the bus and began their Stop Boris campaign, but all the manufactured scandalettes failed to prevent the Johnson Juggernaut from roiling over them and into Downing Street.

For now, the Brexit Party have stalled on 20% – they hold their position now like a lioness crouched in the long grass, waiting for Boris Johnson to reveal the slightest Remainer tendencies. And if he does, the catastrophic injuries he and his party will suffer will make Theresa May’s mauling look like the amuse bouche at the Marquis de Sade’s final soundproofed basement party.

May 29, 2019

The EU election was “the Tories’ worst result since 1678”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the results of last week’s EU parliamentary elections:

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

[…]

Instead, Mrs May in particular but also Parliament in general chose to double-down on the estrangement from the masses revealed by the referendum, and spent the next three years demonstrating that, whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared “Brexit means Brexit”, it obviously doesn’t mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people – and Nigel Farage, who is a very canny fellow, decided six weeks ago to create a party to fill the gap in a European election the UK shouldn’t have had to participate in.

Listening and/or watching to the BBC on Sunday for as long as I could stomach it, I detected a strange urge to suggest that the Brexit Party had somehow under-performed, as though it’s normal for a six-week-old party to win twenty-nine out of seventy-three seats, while the century-old Labour Party wins only ten, and the Tories four and the nearest Nigel gets to a run for his money is the second-placed Liberal Democrats with sixteen seats. Farage and the other officially pro-Brexit parties (Labour, Tory, Democratic Unionist) won 44 seats. The Lib Dems and the other officially Remainer parties (Green, Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party) got 29. Adding in the unelected UKIP and Ulster Unionists, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, in that the Tories are supposedly pro-Brexit but totally bollocksed it, and Labour is only pretending to be pro-Brexit as part of a difficult straddle between its Old Labour working-class base and the New Labour preening metropolitan Euro-luvvies. Many of the latter – including such hitherto loyal champagne socialists as actors Simon Callow and Michael Cashman and even Blair’s old Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. – flew Corbyn’s coop and voted for the Lib Dems. Even so, for those demanding a second referendum (or, as they cynically call it, a “people’s vote”), there’s not much evidence for a second-time-around sadder-but-wiser Remain majority. Among riven Tory families, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister stood for the new Brexit Party while Boris Johnson’s sister stood for the equally new “Change UK”, a militantly anti-Brexit party formed by a coterie of disaffected Remainer media self-promoters of the soft left and soft right. Annuziata Rees-Mogg was duly elected in the Farage surge, while Rachel Johnson flopped out because “Change UK” had barely any statistical support outside the more desperate bookers of telly current affairs shows.

May 28, 2019

Brexit Party wins big in European elections

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Nigel Farage and his brand-new Brexit Party took 31.6% of the popular vote in England, Scotland, and Wales in the European elections (the Northern Irish results are delayed):

The distribution of the seats:

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that despite the Brexit Party’s stunning results, the establishment is still determined to prevent Brexit and deny the democratically expressed wishes of British voters:

And still the establishment is in denial. Even following the stellar performance of a brand new party in the Euro elections, still the political establishment and its cheerleaders on social media are in a state of blinkered, fingers-in-ears denial about political feeling in the UK. How bad is their denial? Get this: the Brexit Party, barely six weeks old, soared to victory in the EU elections, decimated the Tories, conquered historic Labour-held territories like Bolsover and Hartlepool, and became the largest party in the entire European Parliament, and yet the No1 political trend on Twitter is… #RemainSurge.

Yes, these people, these inhabitants of the Brexitphobic echo chamber, have convinced themselves that this electoral revolt in which the Brexit Party steamrollered all the other parties is actually a victory for them. This takes self-delusion to giddy new heights.

“This is a really strong night for Remain”, said Caroline Lucas, like a real-life version of that meme showing a dog saying “This is fine” as his house burns down. “Tonight the Brexit Party wasn’t supported by around two-thirds of voters”, said Hilary Benn, perversely ignoring the millions of people who did vote for the Brexit Party, who vastly outnumber those who voted for his Labour Party. Alastair Campbell interpreted the election results as a mandate for a second referendum, which is almost as mad as saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes.

In the face of this colossal culture of denial among the political and media elites, let’s reiterate some basic facts. The Brexit Party battered Labour and the Tories. It won more than five million votes. It won 31.6 per cent of the vote, which is 8.4 per cent more than the Tories and Labour combined: the Tories got 9.1 per cent (fifth place) and Labour got 14.1 per cent (third place). The Brexit Party got 28 seats, making it the largest party in the European Parliament. It won in every single region in England apart from London, speaking profoundly to the massive political and moral divide separating the capital – the heart of the political establishment – from the rest of England. It also did spectacularly well in Wales, topping the poll and winning in 19 out of 22 council areas.

And yet myths are already taking hold, being feverishly promoted by pro-EU figures. The first is that the Brexit Party is “just” – why just? – picking up the old UKIP vote and therefore its victory isn’t all that significant. Actually, the Brexit Party has got almost 32 per cent of the vote share, which is five percentage points higher than UKIP got at its high point in the Euro elections of 2014. The other myths – that the Brexit Party is only successful because it is a shadily funded, demagogic outfit, whose new MEPs probably have Russian roubles stuffed in their pockets – is the usual conspiratorial and anti-democratic rubbish we’ve come to expect from the rattled defenders of the status quo.

As for the “Remain surge” idea. Get real. The two parties that are most explicitly anti-Brexit and have expressed their searingly anti-democratic intention to overthrow the mass vote of 2016 – the Lib Dems and the Greens – won a combined vote of 29.7 per cent. That’s two per cent less than the Brexit Party got. The most poisonously elitist anti-Brexit Party – Change UK – disappeared without a trace, winning 2.8 per cent of the vote. Remember how much Change UK was talked up by the liberal media? At one point the chattering classes really did see this party as the saviour of Britain from the horrors of Brexit and yet it won a pathetic, paltry level of electoral support – 600,000 votes to the Brexit Party’s five million.

May 21, 2019

The Brexit Party may be getting dirty foreign money! Call out the plod!

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Guardian, totally neutral and disinterested journalists report on former Labour PM Gordon Brown’s call to investigate where the Brexit Party is getting its funding from:

The Electoral Commission is under mounting pressure to launch an investigation into the funding of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party because of concerns that its donation structure could allow foreign interference in British democracy.

Before Thursday’s crucial European elections, Gordon Brown has written to the Electoral Commission calling on it to urgently examine whether the party has sufficient safeguards on its website to prevent the contribution of “dirty money”.

The former Labour prime minister will use a speech in Glasgow on Monday to say an investigation into the Brexit party’s finances is urgent and essential.

“Nigel Farage says this election is about democracy. Democracy is fatally undermined if unexplained, unreported and thus undeclared and perhaps under the counter and underhand campaign finance – from whom and from where we do not know – is being used to influence the very elections that are at the heart of our democratic system,” he will say, according to pre-released extracts.

As Tim Worstall points out:

It’s actually an entire 13 paragraphs later that we get to the meat of the matter:

    Only donations over £500 have to be declared under British law.

The Brexit Party is obeying every jot and tittle of electoral and fundraising law. This is the very system that the federast establishment set up itself. But, you know, the wrong people are succeeding under it so aspertions must be cast.

And guess what? The Electoral Commission isn’t going to get anything done by Thursday. Not even to be able to confirm that the law is being obeyed as it should be. But we’ve managed to get the propaganda out there that Nigel’s posse are bought by the Russians and that’s the point of it all anyway.

You might think me a little cynical here. But sadly I’m not. When I was working for Ukip the Times – Sam Coates it was – announced that we simply weren’t going to contest the next election. No reason given, no analysis performed, an apology of any prominence never was forthcoming. Just a bit of disinformation dropped into the public conversation there.

That’s how the federasts play and any governance system that has to play that way isn’t one we desire to be a part of, is it?

The Hell with the EU.

Of course, dirty anonymous foreign money sources can fund other groups too.

May 23, 2018

Farage and Zuckerberg

Filed under: Business, Europe, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

March 12, 2015

Brendan O’Neill talks to UKIP leader Nigel Farage

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Love him or hate him, it’s difficult to ignore him … especially with a British election heaving into view quite shortly:

“They’re not proper people.”

Pint in one hand, fag in the other, Nigel Farage is passing withering judgement on the political class. “They don’t pass the Farage Test”, he says of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. The Farage Test? Warming to his theme, his voice rising an octave, he explains. “I judge everybody by two simple criteria. Number one: would I employ them? And number two: would I want to have a drink with them? To pass the Farage Test, you only have to pass one of those. There are lots of people I’ve employed over the years who I wouldn’t choose to have a drink with, and there are lots of people who are completely useless but rather nice to have a bit of a jolly with. But this mob don’t pass either.” Then, after eviscerating Them, calling into question their employability and drinkability, wondering out loud if they’re even “proper people”, he lets out what I think we should call the Farage Laugh: a deep and hearty, nicotine-stained guffaw at the world: “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”

I don’t know if I’d pass the Farage Test, but the UKIP leader has agreed to have a drink with me. We’re at a pub in a small street in central London — outside, natch, for smoking purposes — with a pap lurking behind a parked van, clearly unable to believe his luck that he might get a shot of Farage drinking and smoking and laughing. We’re interrupted every five minutes by passers-by who want to shake Farage’s hand or get a selfie with him. (“Go to UKIP dot org and become a member. Bloody well do it!”, he tells one young fan.) It’s chilly but sunny; Farage is making light work of his pint; he still has a little make-up on from a by-all-accounts barnstorming appearance on ITV’s Loose Women; and he’s ready, he says, to speak his mind. “Interviewing me over a drink — always far better. HA HA HA HA HA HA.”

[…]

He saves his most stinging class-based barbs for the Tories. “The Conservative Party is as upper class today as it has ever been. Over the past hundred years, the upper classes had more connection to their fellow man than they have today. And I’ll tell you why. Firstly, those that were from the landed classes may have been selfish financially, over the corn laws or whatever it was, but they ran their estates themselves. They actually knew the lads that cut the hay and looked after the horses. And then we had two world wars, which brought the whole class system together. Up until the late 1980s you had senior Tory politicians from posh backgrounds who could talk to the lads doing the scaffolding. They can’t do that now.”

It isn’t only the aloof, not-proper-people of the New Conservatives, New Labour and the Lame Lib Dems who fail the Farage Test: his strongest ire is aimed at another group that has of late become a major player in British politics, a key pillar of establishment thinking — the media. He’s cutting. “The media have now become a bigger problem than the politicians. We talk about the Westminster Village in politics, [but] forget it — the media village is even tighter, even narrower, even more inward-looking, and even less in touch with their own potential readership and with the country.”

May 26, 2014

Triumph of the Euro-skeptic parties

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

The Irish Times looks at the Euro election results which have seen big gains for several Euro-skeptic parties:

Among the victors was Ms Le Pen’s National Front party which topped the poll in France with a quarter of the vote, bypassing the conservative UMP party, and leaving François Hollande’s Socialist Party in third place. The party is now in line for 24 seats in Strasbourg.

UKIP was expected to top the poll in Britain, with exit polls last night predicting the party could win 31 per cent of the vote. “Up until now European integration has always seemed inevitable … I think that inevitability will end tonight,” UKIP leader Nigel Farage said last night in a live video link to the European Parliament in Brussels, describing the decision to allow former Soviet countries into the European Union as one of Europe’s “great errors.”

Greece’s main opposition party Syriza topped the polls there, while the far-right Golden Dawn party came third with between 8 and 10 per cent of the vote.

In Germany, support for Alternative for Deutschland (AFD) an anti-EU party formed barely two years ago, reach 6.5 per cent, with the party in the running for six seats.

In Austria, the far-right Freedom party was expected to win 20 per cent of votes, up from 13 per cent in 2009.

However, some extreme anti-EU parties in smaller countries did not poll as well as expected, with the far-right Vlaams Belang in Belgium losing support.

Of course, not all Euro-skeptic parties are the same. UKIP is somewhat nativist and has a vocal anti-immigrant wing. Vlaams Belang has a larger and more vocal anti-immigrant component, while the Greek Golden Dawn are as close to modern day Fascists as you’ll find anywhere; not a party you want to be sharing newspaper space with.

May 24, 2014

A significant factor in UKIP success – all “right thinking” people loathe them

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

Before the recent elections, Brendan O’Neill explained why the serried ranks of anti-UKIP pundits, politicians, and the “great and the good” may well be helping UKIP rather than hurting them:

Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when Britain’s various elites were as united in fury as they are now over UKIP leader Nigel Farage. In the run-up to this week’s Euro-elections, in which the Eurosceptic UKIP is expected to do well, leaders of every hue, from the true blue to the deep red, and hacks of every persuasion, from the right to the right-on, are as one on the issue of Farage. From Nick Clegg to the Twitterati that normally gets off on mocking Nick Clegg, from David Cameron to radical student leaders who normally hate David Cameron, fury with Farage has united all. It has brought together usually scrapping sections of the political and media classes into a centre-ground mush of contempt for UKIP. Not even Nick Griffin — who is a far nastier character than Farage — attracted such unstinting universal ire. What’s up with this Farage fury?

[…]

The real motor to the anti-Farage outlook, the fuel to this unprecedented fury of the elites, is a powerful feeling that he has connected with the public, or a significant section of it, in a way that mainstream politicians and observers have utterly failed to. The elites see in Farage their own inability to understand the populace or to speak to it in a language it understands. They see in his popularity — his oh-so-stubborn popularity, so notably undented by the daily furious outpourings of the anti-Farage elites — their own failure to swing public attitudes in what they consider to be the ‘right’ direction. That Farage’s popularity in the polls has remained pretty high even as our elites have been attacking him on a daily basis fills them not only with fury but with fear: their arguments seem not to have much traction outside the Westminster bubble, outside of medialand, where despite their best efforts the awkward, annoying little people still remain fairly favourable towards a loudmouth politician who isn’t PC and drinks beer. The fury behind the attacks on Farage is really a fury with the throng, with the masses, whose brains have clearly been made so mushy by UKIP propaganda that even the supposedly enlightened arguments and policies of their betters can now make no impact. It isn’t Farage they hate — it’s ordinary people, and more importantly their own palpable inability to make inroads into those people’s hearts or minds.

In short, the true momentum behind both UKIP’s rise in the polls and the rising temperatures it has provoked in pretty much every elite circle in Britain is not the charms or coherent ideologies of Farage himself. (In fact, many take great pleasure in pointing out that most UKIP supporters don’t know UKIP policy on any issue beyond immigration and the EU.) Rather, it is the political class’s alienation from the public, and its existential insecurities, that have propelled UKIP to the top of the political agenda. The aloofness of the old political machine, its growing distance from and contempt for the voters, its view of the public as a blob to be re-educated and made physically fit rather than as sentient beings to be politically engaged, is what has boosted public support for a party like UKIP that seems willing to speak to, and maybe even for, so-called ordinary people. And it is the out-of-touch political class’s subsequent panic at UKIP’s rise, its fear that the success of this party might spell doom for its safe, samey, middle-ground ilk, which leads it to aim its every ideological, political and media gun at Farage, having the unwitting effect of making him both more widely talked-about and possibly even more popular. It is the political class’s crisis of legitimacy and vision which both created and then inflamed the UKIP phenomenon.

June 26, 2013

Mark Steyn on the rise of UKIP

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It’s the attack of the swivel-eyed loons:

It’s all but impossible to launch a new political party under America’s electoral arrangements, and extremely easy to do so under Continental proportional representation. The Westminster first-past-the-post system puts the task somewhere in between: tough, but not entirely the realm of fantasy. The Labour party came into being at the dawn of the 20th century, and formed its first government in 1924. The United Kingdom Independence party was born in 1993 and now, a mere two decades later, is on the brink of … well, okay, not forming its first government, but it did do eerily well in May’s local elections. The Liberals were reduced to their all-time lowest share of the vote, the Tories to their lowest since 1982, and for the first time ever, none of the three “mainstream” parties cracked 30 percent: Labour had a good night with 29, the Conservatives came second at 25, and nipping at their heels was the United Kingdom Independence party with 23 percent.

They achieved this impressive result against not three opponents but also a fourth — a media that have almost universally derided the party as a sinkhole of nutters and cranks. UKIP’s leader, the boundlessly affable Nigel Farage, went to P. G. Wodehouse’s old high school, Dulwich College, and to a sneering metropolitan press, Farage’s party is a déclassé Wodehousean touring company mired in an elysian England that never was, populated only by golf-club duffers, halfwit toffs, rustic simpletons, and hail-fellow-well-met bores from the snug of the village pub. When I shared a platform with him in Toronto a few months back, Mr. Farage explained his party’s rise by citing not Wodehouse but another Dulwich old boy, the late British comic Bob Monkhouse: “They all laughed when I said I’d become a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”

The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they’re not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. “Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at … that means he’s dangerous,” declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an “unfulfilled capacity for evil.” “Stop laughing,” ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post. “Farage would lead us back to the dark ages.” The more the “mainstream” shriek about how mad, bad, and dangerous UKIP is, the more they sound like the ones who’ve come unhinged.

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