Quotulatiousness

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

January 25, 2025

The stabbings will continue until morale improves

Sebastian Wang discusses the stabbing attacks in Southport, Merseyside last year:

On the 29th July 2024, a man went on a stabbing spree in Southport, Merseyside, killing three children and injuring ten others. The attacker, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, was arrested at the scene. By all accounts, the attack was shocking not only in its savagery, but in its attendant circumstances. Witnesses report that Mr Rudakubana shouted slogans as he killed that suggested he was an Islamic terrorist. Almost at once, social media was filled with questions and with speculation. Also, protests began in several northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, for example – where demonstrators blamed the Government and the ruling class for immigration policies that had made the killings both possible and likely.

Instead of considering these protests and promising to address the causes of the crime, the British Government and the legacy media focussed on managing the narrative and silencing comment on the immigration policies that had allowed Mr Rudakubana’s family into the country. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, seemed more worried about potential “violence against Muslims” than the actual brutality of Mr Rudakubana’s attack on English people. “For the Muslim community I will take every step possible to keep you safe,” he said in his first public statement on the killings. On the protests he added: “It is not protesting, it is not legitimate, it is crime. We will put a stop to it“. His focus was not on the victims, but on ensuring that no one questioned the system that had allowed this to happen.

In the days after the attack, several men were arrested for spreading what the government called “misinformation” online. Their crime? Posting details about Mr Rudakubana’s background and motivations — details that turned out to be broadly correct. Despite being right, these men were prosecuted and imprisoned under Britain’s hate speech laws. The most recently convicted, Andrew McIntyre, was sentenced earlier this month to seven and a half years in prison for postings on social media. Peter Lynch, a man of 61, was sent to prison last August for two years and eight months for the crime of shouting “scum” and “child killers” at the police. Last October, he hanged himself in prison. I am told he was seriously “mistreated” in prison. British prisons for many years have been overcrowded. Room was found for these prisoners of conscience after the Government began releasing violent criminals.

The injustice of this is glaring. These men were punished not because they lied, but because they spoke approximate truths the government wanted to suppress. Their imprisonment sends a clear message: in modern Britain, it’s better to be wrong on the side of the Government than right and against it.

A Carefully Managed Narrative

The media played its part in the cover up. At first, Mr Rudakubana was described, without name, as “originally from Cardiff“. It took days before we were told he was a child of asylum seekers from Rwanda. Even then, the coverage was carefully balanced by a picture of him as a respectable schoolboy – not at the beast in human form shown by more recent photographs.

Only much later, when the story had faded from the headlines, did the real facts emerge. Mr Rudakubana was not just a troubled individual. His phone contained materials linked to terrorism and genocide, and his actions appeared to have an ideological motivation. Yet by the time these details came out, they barely caused a ripple. The public had been moved on to the next distraction.

It’s hard not to assume that the British media was fully in on gaslighting the public about the accused murderer, when you compare the photo that almost universally was used in the time before the trial and a more recent image:

Mark Steyn:

Say what you like about Axel Rudakubana, the slaughterer of three English girls under ten years old, but — unlike the British Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Police and most of the court eunuchs in the UK media — he appears to be an honest man:

    It’s a good thing those children are dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

He has always been entirely upfront about such things, telephoning Britain’s so-called “Childline” and asking them:

    What should I do if I want to kill somebody?

Judging from his many interactions with “the authorities” (including with the laughably misnamed “Prevent” programme), the British state’s response boiled down to: Go right ahead!

It seems likely that the perpetrator of Wednesday’s Diversity Stabbing of the Day — the Afghan “asylum seeker” who killed a two-year-old boy and seriously wounded other infants in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg — is also “so happy”. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” deliberately targeted a gathering of the very young — in this case, a kindergarten group playing in a municipal park. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” did not just deliver sufficient stab wounds to kill: he plunged his knife into each target dozens and dozens of times. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” was well known to the authorities: he had been detained for “violence” at least thrice.

Did these guys also enjoy it? From our pal Leilani Dowding:

For the benefit of American readers, being stabbed in Asda, Argus and Sainsbury’s is like being stabbed in Kroger, Costco and Wegman’s. As you may recall, a DC jury awarded climate mullah Michael E Mann a million bucks because someone unknown gave him a mean look in Wegman’s supermarket. No one stabbed in a UK supermarket will get a seven-figure sum: it’s increasingly a routine feature of daily life — per Sir Sadiq Khan, part of what it means to live in a great world city.

Sir Keir Stürmer and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”. Her officers knew within hours that the Welsh boyo who loved male-voice choirs was, back in the real world, an observant Muslim in possession of the Al-Qaeda handbook and enough ricin to kill twelve thousand of his fellow Welshmen. But they did not disclose this information for months — not until freeborn Britons minded to disagree with Keir Stürmer’s Official Lies by suggesting that this seemed pretty obviously merely the umpteenth case of Islamostabbing had been rounded up, fast-tracked through Keir’s kangaroo courts, gaoled for longer than Muslim child rapists, and in at least one case driven to his death. Does Sir Keir feel bad about the late Peter Lynch? Or does he take the same relaxed attitude to his victims as Axel Rudakubana?

    It’s a good thing that that far-right extremist is dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

Even now, six months on, the organs of the state are still lying — although, with all the previous lies being no longer operative, Stürmer & Co have had the wit to introduce a few new ones. For example:

    ‘A total disgrace’ that Southport killer could buy a knife on Amazon aged 17, says Cooper

That would be Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary — which is the equivalent of what Continental governments usually call the Minister of the Interior, because that’s where the knives penetrate.

January 9, 2025

“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”

The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):

It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.

And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.

This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.

Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.

Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.

The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.

This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.

Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.

By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:

November 24, 2024

“… if Russia were found to have had its own troops assemble a long-range missile and help launch it into the United States, do you think a US president would feel able to let it slide?”

It probably tightened a lot of already tight sphincters when it was announced that President Biden had authorized the Ukrainian government to use US-supplied long-range missiles to attack targets on Russian soil:

There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump. The missiles up the ante considerably against a nuclear power for a simple reason. As Putin noted:

    experts are well aware, and the Russian side has repeatedly emphasized this, that it is it is impossible to use such weapons without the direct involvement of military specialists of the countries producing such weapons.

The tiny tsar continued:

    We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities. And in case of escalation of aggressive actions we will respond also decisively and mirrored.

And he looked on edge, bedraggled and belligerent, his arms and hands not moving a millimeter in what sure looks like AI.

There was a time when a NATO missile strike on Russian territory, followed by a Russian threat to attack NATO “military facilities” in response, would have caused the world to stop dead, paralyzed by the fear of nuclear armageddon. Yet here we are, blithely preoccupied by Pete Hegseth’s sexual exploits and Congressional bathrooms.

Others are not so sanguine. “I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun,” Ukraine’s former military chief, Valery Zaluzhny, warned yesterday, noting both the new involvement of NATO troops and the involvement of North Korea. Our own president, having brought us much closer to the brink as a lame duck, seemed unconcerned. He was last seen wandering off-stage in the vague direction of the Brazilian rainforest. Not optimal.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was even punchier, and pledged to allow Ukraine to use British long-range missiles as well: “We need to double down. We need to make sure Ukraine has what is necessary for as long as necessary, because we cannot allow Putin to win this war”. When asked if he was prepared to risk the UK forces or Ukraine or a third country like Poland being nuked in response, as Putin has threatened, Starmer simply ignored the question.

Meanwhile, just to keep things from escalating, the deputy chief of the British defense staff told a parliamentary committee yesterday:

    If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight. I don’t think anybody in this room should be under any illusion that if the Russians invaded Eastern Europe tonight, then we would meet them in that fight.

There seems to be a general impression that Putin is of course bluffing, that NATO can keep lobbing missiles into Russian territory with minimal consequences, and nothing could possibly go wrong.

But Putin has responded by launching a long-range missile that could be used to carry a nuke but didn’t, as well as lowering the bar for the use of nukes in his military “doctrine“. And ask yourself: if Russia were found to have had its own troops assemble a long-range missile and help launch it into the United States, do you think a US president would feel able to let it slide? Here’s what the British missile, the Storm Shadow, did in hitting an underground military facility in Kursk, according to unverified Russia media sources:

    [The strike] resulted in the Death of 18 Russian Officers, including a Senior Commander, as well as 3 North Korean Officers. In addition, a Dozen other Soldiers and Officers were Wounded in the Attack, including one of North Korea’s most Senior Generals.

I can’t verify that, but it’s perfectly possible. To have NATO’s fingers on the targeting and launch of that missile puts us in a whole new category of conflict.

The job of a president is to keep us far, far away from any risk of nuclear conflict, as Biden seemed to understand until now. And any student of history will know that blithe complacency as two sides trade military escalations is often exactly the precursor to something going very, very wrong. Accidents happen; misjudgments occur; the point of never getting to this point is that this point contains a host of unknowables, some of them globally existential.

I assume that this is all about strengthening Kyiv’s hand in what will be grueling negotiations to end the conflict once Donald Trump gets back into office. Or the intelligence is worse than we know and it’s about avoiding an Ukraine collapse before Biden leaves office — which, after Afghanistan, would be a final, damning verdict on his foreign policy. Or the intelligence is better than we know and the Russian economy is so weak and his military so depleted that NATO thinks this extra pressure will force Putin to crack. Or it’s a norm-defying attempt from an outgoing administration to derail any peace process the incoming one might want to start. The latter possibility — with Biden rolling the dice because he thinks someone else will have to face the music — is not a minimal risk.

November 3, 2024

Kemi Badenoch replaces Rishi Sunak as UK Conservative leader

In the National Post, Michael Murphy discusses the new British Tory leader and why she could be a viable challenger to Two-tier Keir’s Labour government:

… in July, the Tories were ousted by Labour after 14 years in power, limping on with only 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons. But the honeymoon period for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government ended almost immediately, as its popularity plummeted faster than that of any administration in recent memory. This has made the Tories interesting once again at precisely the moment when they’ve chosen a new leader: Kemi Badenoch.

The Nigerian-raised mother of three, elected today to lead the Conservative party, threatens to be kryptonite for a Labour party wedded to identity politics. A black, female immigrant at the dispatch box is apt to leave Labour frontbenchers — particularly Sir Keir, a one-time BLM kneeler — somewhat stumped. To make matters worse, Badenoch is a persuasive speaker, commanding a charisma and eloquence that Sir Keir — a dull, po-faced lawyer — does not possess.

These qualities have given Badenoch cross-party appeal within the Tories, rallying endorsements from both the left and right. By endorsing her, however, the party has effectively signed a blank cheque, as Badenoch, unlike her opponents, has made few specific pledges. She has chosen instead to reflect on the election loss and the party’s ideological roots; she is prepared to play the long game, hoping this will allow the Tories to “earn back trust”.

On some issues, though, Badenoch is clear. “The government is doing far too much and it is not doing any of it well — and it is growing and growing,” she declared recently. “The state is too big; we need to make sure there is more personal responsibility.” These ideas are common fare among Conservatives, especially in bloated welfare states like Britain — but her zeal for them evokes, for many, memories of Margaret Thatcher. As the political commentator Simon Heffer wrote, “Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher”. He noted both women’s hard-mindedness, “deep principles”, and grasp of the “art of the possible”.

Badenoch’s Conservatism can be traced, as the writer Tom Mctague has argued elsewhere, to her beginnings in Africa. Having fled Nigeria during a 1996 military coup, she has a keen, outsider’s appreciation for Britain’s core ideals — not least the rule of law and policing by consent. She is therefore a champion of Britain, of both “the good” and “bad” of its former empire, at a time when it is fashionable to denigrate it, precisely because of her first hand experience that these norms are rare and fragile.

Like Thatcher, Badenoch studied a hard science (computing), marking them out in a Parliament filled with lawyers and humanities graduates. And the swift rise of both women, from modest beginnings through the ranks of the Conservative party, suggests that the “art of the possible” is indeed etched into their stars.

The Armchair General has a few suggestions for Badenoch’s agenda to turn the British economy around:

The new leader of the Conservative Party (image: www.kemibadenoch.org.uk)

My one reservation [about Badenoch] was that, being a software engineer, instead of espousing liberty or slashing laws and regulations, Kemi might reach for more tinkering technocratic solutions — and your humble General is surely not alone in his opinion that we have had quite enough, thank you, of technocratic governments.

However, the more that I consider the severe problems that afflict this country, the more I believe that a process-driven leader, who can focus on the details, might make the biggest difference in the short to medium term.

The immigration issue

As we know, uncontrolled immigration has seized the public imagination greatly — and, indeed, Jenrick centred his campaign around leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). We should almost certainly do this anyway — simply because, like the Americans, we should refuse to sign any treaties that raises foreign courts above our own Parliament.

But leaving that aside, the stated problems with mass immigration can largely be divided into two halves:

  • cultural differences — these are not insignificant, and it is claimed that they lead to an increase in crime (especially sexual crimes) and an undermining of our high-trust society;
  • economic issues — the evidence shows that a massive net influx of low-skilled immigrants depresses wages at the lower end, puts a strain on public services (which cannot expand swiftly enough to accommodate the increase in demand), raises the demand for houses (of which there is a shortage) and thus pushes up prices, and, ultimately, only increases nominal GDP whilst per capita GDP has barely shifted in a decade and a half.

For the purposes of this post, I shall address only the latter issue; given where we are right now, the former is a much thornier problem — at least politically — and probably cannot be solved without radical (and some might say “authoritarian”) action.

The second problem is easier to solve because it is caused, essentially, by the single biggest drag on our economy — our planning system.

[…]

Planning: the Conservatives’ political agenda

The core of the new Conservative manifesto must be a growth agenda; it needs to set out the following core principles:

  1. if we carry on the current trajectory, the British government will be effectively bankrupt in the next 50 years — so something needs to change;
  2. therefore, in order to pay for all the goodies that we have promised ourselves (now and in the future), we need to massively accelerate economic growth;
  3. unless we can build the roads, railways, power stations, research labs, data centres, and homes that we need, then our economy will not grow at the required rate — and spending will need to be cut to the bone;
  4. given the above, the only way to grow is to reform planning laws;
  5. removing the barriers to building will lead to greater investment, lower energy prices (leading to even greater investment), greater social mobility, regeneration of all the regions (so-called “levelling up”), and vast increases in per capita GDP;
  6. where the state invests in infrastructure, then it will cost considerably less than it does currently — meaning that not only will those projects undertaken provide more value for money, but also that many more projects will be viable;
  7. this prosperity and increased mobility will remove even the perceived need for immigrants to perform low-wage jobs (including in our public services), and remove the economic pressures of those that we have already taken in;1
  8. if we do it right, then we will also be able to cut taxes without drastically cutting the size of the state.2

The argument needs to be as stark and inevitable as that.

What this means is that the Conservatives need not stand on a platform of slashing state spending — thus addressing the huge numbers of people in this country who, incredibly, still believe in the benevolent state.

Except for one caveat, there really is no downside to adopting Foundations [discussed here], in full, as the core of the next Conservative manifesto (although it should not be the full extent of said manifesto — there are many other areas that need to be addressed, which I shall write about later).


    1. As I say, the cultural issues are for another time.

    2. Obviously, as a classical liberal, I believe that the size of the state should be drastically cut — but this is not a popular argument in a country that has been raised and educated on socialist doctrine for decades.

October 2, 2024

Poilievre should learn from “Two Tier” Keir’s political stumbles

Sir Keir Starmer swept into office just four months ago, but if you tracked the unforced errors, gaffes, stumbles and bumbles it might as well have been four years instead. Most politicians winning nearly 2/3rds of the seats in Parliament can expect a lengthy “honeymoon” period, but “Two Tier” Keir is far from a typical politician … he’s terrible at his new job. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall charts some of the worst self-inflicted wounds Starmer’s government has suffered and indicates how Pierre Poilievre can avoid them:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s halfway home to a happy life in power, he should look across the pond to see the misery now engulfing Sir Keir Starmer and his new Labour government.

Where to start? Sadly for Starmer, there is a smorgasbord of bad political choice.

[…]

And while Starmer did his level best to stay vague during the election campaign about his planned solutions, as all good opposition leaders do in order to minimize incoming attacks, he was meant to have a plan to sort it all out once he got into the building. But there’s no plan. And that’s according to sources inside 10 Downing Street. That’s right: we’re just three months into a majority parliament and a government with a virtually unopposable mandate and the calls are already coming from inside the building saying it’s all gone to shit.

As I was saying, it’s all very late-stage Trudeau.

Fortunately for Canadians who are desperate for a diversion from Trudeau’s path, Pierre Poilievre is a better politician than Keir Starmer. A vastly better politician. And while that might sound like a pejorative in an era where no politician is trusted, the pile of public policy muck heaps facing Western governments won’t be cleared without someone who understands — deeply and intuitively — the politics of the current time.

Starmer understands none of the current dynamic. He defeated the U.K. Conservatives because the U.K. Conservatives defeated themselves. The country would have taken anyone to stop the Tory psychodrama, even a boring North London lawyer who wouldn’t know politics if it smacked him on his newly-tailored arse. People are angry that nothing appears to be working as it should. Not the hospitals. Not the borders. Not the economy. And not their culture. Everything feels different and/or worse to what they’ve come to expect and they blame the (waves arms frantically) “establishment” for their ills. There’s a reason Nigel Farage’s Reform party won its first seats and came second in nearly a hundred more.

People who are already feeling stretched don’t want to hear, as they’ve heard from Starmer, that their taxes are going up. They want to hear they’re going to go down. “Axe the tax”, anyone? They don’t want to hear that things suck; they want to hear how things will get better. They don’t want to be sung hymns about the benefits of immigration. They want to see someone spot the problem that’s gotten out of control and assure them that it’s not racist to do something about it. They want someone who looks and sounds like them, not another politician in a suit saying things politicians in suits always say. They want radical change, not minor dial adjusting on the dashboards of power. Anything else is more of the discredited same.

Canada’s late-stage Trudeau inheritance is daunting. It cannot be avoided. But it must first be acknowledged, not by simply pointing at the last guy and saying “It’s all his fault” (i.e. the classic politician move), but by mirroring the real distress being felt by the many who’ve lost out where and as the traditional power brokers have won. This is where the room to manoeuvre comes from. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to take something different to produce a different result.

September 30, 2024

“This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept”

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

At The Critic, Titania McGrath decries the manifest horrors of letting ordinary people say whatever they want … without punishment:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.

For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?

The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.

“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” wrote Robert Reich in the Guardian. Although I don’t approve of his surname, he makes a valid case.

Back in 2013, Starmer was quoted as saying that too many Twitter prosecutions could “have a chilling effect for free speech”. These were dangerous words, and although Starmer has since changed his mind, he should probably be calling for his own prosecution.

If you don’t want to be arrested, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.

September 10, 2024

Chilling effect (with a British accent) – “No one is now sure what they are allowed to say”

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

Spaceman Spiff makes a bid to star in one of Gauleiter Keir Stürmer’s big show trials, coming far too soon to a town hall near you:

In Britain many of us now walk on eggshells.

The country and its systems are broken. Free speech is being outlawed. Many are frightened to say anything, although it doesn’t stop them noticing and thinking.

Recent emphasis on invented categories of offence — misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation — mean almost anything can come under the purview of the State and its informers, from ill-timed comments to jokes and humorous observations.

Famously, memes based on simple observation are admissible in Britain’s world-famous show trials, including this one no doubt:1

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.

Everything must be monitored because less and less can be tolerated by those in positions of authority. Their narratives are failing, and they are panicking. They are getting desperate.

Noticing is verboten

Many of the topics that trigger the strongest response by the British Government are simply unpopular policies that normal people can no longer ignore.

More accurately, policies that directly affect growing numbers of law-abiding taxpayers who did not vote for them.

Do not discuss immigration

Mass immigration is the supreme example. Britain’s cities are being flooded with “asylum seekers”, most of whom are economic migrants with no right to settle in the country.

Many are alien peoples from distinct cultures with no connection to Europe and a poor track record of assimilation.

They are aided by an army of well-funded human rights lawyers who distort laws designed to help the genuinely dispossessed, which most immigrants are not.

Thanks to our generosity many privileges are extended to foreigners that are unavailable to natives such as free housing and financial help on the understanding these are used sparingly and temporarily to aid the desperate.

These myriad of kindnesses did not emerge to serve those who want the benefits of first-world living while dodging the corresponding costs; the development of high-trust social structures, the communal spirit that transcends tribalism, and the selflessness it all requires. These are rare phenomenon much of the world cannot produce or maintain, and they are being squandered in Western nations by the selfish obsessed with demonstrating their own virtue.

No serious discussion of immigration is tolerated at any level in Britain. However, this does not stop the erosion of goodwill upon which most of their schemes depend. The generosity they abuse is a limited resource and the magnanimity upon which it depends is evaporating quickly.


    1. Many are being jailed in Britain for posting memes and related social media content. The judges often go to some lengths to confirm it is not the content of the material they are questioning as they are perfectly legal, but the perceived intent behind the posting itself.

    This unprecedented legal descent into clairvoyance, hate speech and arrogance is relatively new. It will not age well and tells us more about the decline in competency in the judiciary than anything else. Standards are clearly not what they once were.

    To put this kind of absurd reasoning on display in irremovable public court records speaks to the level of delusion and arrogance we are now dealing with in Britain. Our social betters are truly lost in a world of their own.

August 30, 2024

Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)

Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:

The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.

I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …

  • The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
  • Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
  • Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
  • Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
  • Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
  • Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
  • The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
  • Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
  • The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
  • The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
  • Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
  • The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
  • A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
  • Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
  • The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
  • The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
  • The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
  • The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
  • Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
  • Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.

Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.

It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.

I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)

But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.

August 15, 2024

“The Establishment … are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration”

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

Spaceman Spiff risks getting the full power and majesty of the British legal system arrayed against him for offering an opinion critical of the authorities and the ongoing immigration policies of this and previous British governments:

Britain is experiencing civil unrest in response to the recent murders of three young girls at the hands of an individual whose family was allowed to enter Britain from Africa and settle in Wales.

The Establishment response is similar to comparable European states like Ireland or Germany. They are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration.

Vocal rejection of multiculturalism and evidence of its failure in Britain is treated as a hate crime, a subject that cannot be discussed.

This has done nothing to quell discomfort and has done little more than show us Britain’s elites are lost in a bubble that is increasingly divorced from reality.

Mass immigration is deeply unpopular

Immigration has been an issue since the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has featured as one of the key issues in every election, often the top issue for most.

Conversely it has been summarily ignored by the educated classes who run the country. Immigration is here to stay, and Britain must change to accommodate it.

The elite section of society promoting immigration is especially indifferent to those most affected, low wage workers. There is also a strong cultural component beyond the economic arguments, an understanding the drive is to make Britain less white with very vocal attempts to champion non-natives in every area of life.

For many decades the educated classes have viewed notions of patriotism or national loyalty with suspicion. Many fancy themselves as internationalists more in tune with the educated in foreign nations than their working-class compatriots.

Now, after decades of immigration, whole communities have been displaced. Some areas of Britain have no Europeans living there. Some tourists complain parts of London do not look English.

[…]

It is the height of arrogance to believe we can somehow circumvent the wisdom accumulated throughout history. And the price being paid is by the British people who are losing their homeland.

Those behind our utopian schemes are working harder and harder to shore them up. Not just mixing cultures but expensive climate initiatives, radical feminism and fractional reserve banking to name only a few of today’s fads. None of them were ever going to work and now they are obviously failing.

The announcements represent the beginning of the end of bad ideas that were doomed from the start. A sane government would take note and begin a plan to reset Britain starting with listening to concerns about mass immigration.

Instead our ruling elite are digging in, and that will probably mean increased civil disturbance as more and more recognize they have no voice and no say.

Given who we are, who we really are under the political correctness and the good manners, this is absolute insanity on their part. Perhaps just the latest decision in a long line of bad ideas unable to accommodate reality. The distortions within their bubble are strong and they are becoming impossible to hide.

The end is nigh for the believers in Western liberalism.

August 7, 2024

“Two Tier Keir” fails the latest challenge

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

Violent protests continued in many British cities over the weekend, and despite promising to crack down on violent groups, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer fluffed it again:

Young Muslim men rampaging through Birmingham should have offered the government a convenient chance to quash the accusations that the Prime Minister is “Two Tier Keir”.

Fuelled by rumours that the far right were organising a protest in the area, the demonstration soon took on a dark life of its own. Young men in balaclavas harassed journalists, driving Sky News’ “communities correspondent” off the air, with an attempt even being made to slash the wheels of the Sky van. LBC’s Fraser Knight was chased out of the area. Mr Knight explained that “6 men ran after us down a road with what looked like a weapon”, and that “cars followed us”. “There wasn’t a safe place for us to go for miles,” he says.

Meanwhile, a white man was attacked outside a pub by a mob of masked men, and attempts were made to stop random drivers. This violence and intimidation, of course, mirrors that which has been perpetrated in riots elsewhere.

But there is a difference. Where were the police in Birmingham? We have seen riot police wielding dogs and batons against the far right, and Keir Starmer was promising that rioters would face the “full force of the law“. In Birmingham, though, the police appear to have acted with a light touch. One officer was recorded apparently dismissing the violence as a “small scuffle“.

Local MP Jess Phillips is famed for her outspoken and combative manner, so one might have expected swift condemnation. (Indeed, given that Phillips was recently bragging about how “unflappable” she is around criminals, it’s a shame she wasn’t there to resolve things.)

Actually, Phillips’ first public response to the disorder was to quote tweet a video of a group of masked men and write:

    To be clear all day rumours have been spread that a far right group were coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.

Okay, I can believe it. But surely this was time to tell them to disperse and go home? Phillips then quote tweeted Richard Tice MP, who had published a video of the Sky News team being intimidated. “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them,” she wrote:

    This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it MR Tice!

Sure, again, we get it. The gathering was fuelled by misinformation. But when a group of journalists — with a female correspondent, no less — is being intimidated by masked men flashing trigger fingers at the camera, it has clearly evolved into something more hooliganistic. These men were not confronting a skinhead in a “Blood and Honour” t-shirt. They were confronting a woman trying to do her job.

Esmerelda Weatherwax gathers reports from local media in Birmingham over the weekend:

A huge crowd gathered in Bordesley Green this evening following rumours that a “far right rally” was going to take place … hundreds of mostly young men in balaclavas and face masks gathered outside the McDonald’s at the junction of Bordesley Green and Belchers Lane.

300 or so people mostly Asian and male, many dressed in black and wearing masks or coverings, turned up after the rumour spread rapidly online.

Despite the rumours circulating today, there was no rally and the crowd was seen later dispersing, with some young men using the opportunity to show off on motorbikes.

A 45-year-old from Bordesley Green said he was there to stand up against fascism … “We don’t want this portrayed as Muslim men causing trouble …”

Yardley West and Stechford Cllr Baber Baz was among the crowd this evening and said there was a “strong response from the community”. Cllr Baz added: “As long as it remains peaceful which I am sure it will we are sending a strong message to the EDL that they are not welcome here and will not divide our community.”

A Sky News reporter was forced off air after she was sworn at, with one man on a bike riding towards the camera before saying: “Free Palestine, f*** EDL“. A man wearing a balaclava and wielding a knife “stabbed” the tyre of a Sky News van after its reporter was forced off air, it has been reported. Sky News had to cut short its broadcast in Bordesley Green after its reporter was sworn at on TV.

July 12, 2024

The British prison system is over-capacity, and Starmer’s new government has a plan

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

As Ed West points out, the new Labour government’s plan is to move in a different direction than most Britons were hoping:

“Main gate to the HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs in spring 2013” by Chmee2 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

Britain’s prisons are desperately overcrowded and morale among staff at an all-time low, following years of underfunding by the Conservative government and the inability of the state to build new jails against local opposition.

Now the incoming prime minister says that we have too many prisoners, while new prison minister James Timpson believes the British justice system is “addicted to punishment”, stating that only a third of inmates should be in jail.

The justice secretary, meanwhile, is considering “lowering the automatic release point for prisoners to less than 50 per cent through their sentence”. While currently prisoners serve half their sentences, or two-thirds for some sexual, violent or terror-related offences, the government plans to push the automatic release point to 40 per cent of their terms for those serving less than 4 years, benefitting 40,000 inmates — but not necessarily benefitting the rest of us.

This would be a very unwise move. The majority of prisoners are inside for sexual or other violent crimes, and even restricting early releases to those serving under four years would set free some very dangerous individuals, while previous amnesties of this type have led to huge increases in crime.

The idea that Britain “is addicted to punishment” jars with the sentences regularly handed out even for the most horrendous crimes, and the way that incorrigible criminals are allowed to offend again. This is the subject of a Twitter thread which I began six years ago, in order to highlight how the common belief in the punitive state was mistaken.

As an illustration, and bear in mind that their “sentences” are often twice what they actually served, here are a few cases:

A man who killed his wife in 1981, who was released after a few years and went on to strangle a girlfriend 12 years later, was subsequently freed — and ended up killing a third woman.

There was serial rapist Milton Brown, who was sentenced to 21 years for raping three women – one of whom took her own life – and was released early, only to rape again.

Or Joshua Carney, 28, freed on licence from prison and who just five days later brutally raped a mother and her 14-year-old daughter. He was allowed out despite 47 previous convictions, and now having been convicted of “13 charges including rape, attempted rape, actual bodily harm and theft” he is still eligible for parole in 10 years. Doesn’t sound like a country addicted to punishment.

There was John Harding, who treated a woman “like a rag-doll” when he beat and threatened to kill her after she told him she didn’t want a relationship. Despite terrorising his victim, including wrapping a sheet around her neck, and being in breach of a 30-month community order for a number of offences, including assault and threatening to kill another woman, and having other convictions for theft and criminal damage, he received a sentence of 21 months. As a result, in 2023, Harding was free to rape two women. Now convicted of rape, actual bodily harm, false imprisonment, strangulation and threats to kill, his sentence of 15 years means he could be out in 10.

If you believe that criminals only behave that way because of “systemic racism” or “poverty” or some other form of impersonal forces, you’ll likely also believe that punishment therefore serves no useful purpose and be in favour of all sorts of alternatives. At least until you or someone close to you is a victim of violent crime …

July 7, 2024

More on the British general election results

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter has some further thoughts on the Sunak implosion on the 4th of July:

Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street, 5 July, 2024.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

The Conservative wipeout was disappointingly not the annihilation that early polls predicted. The Tories were successful in scaring a critical mass of boomers in a last minute get-out-the-vote effort. At the same time, I suspect that some incidents late in the election that were used to paint Reform as raving Nazis were successful in driving down the Reform vote. One such incident involved a marginal Reform candidate caught on microphone being extraordinarily vulgar, who later turned out to be an actor that specialized in playing precisely the sort of character he was portraying for the media, which is of course all rather suspicious.

As a result, Reform only got 4 seats. This was less than the 13 that were predicted by the BBC based on exit polling, which prediction was revised to the 4 that Reform in fact won partway through counting, as the models’ Bayesian priors were updated accordingly, no doubt. That said, among those 4 seats is Nigel Farage, who is now a sitting member of Parliament.

That Parliament is now, in all likelihood, in the hands of the weakest massive majority government in its history, and if that’s not true (British history in its entirety being rather extensive), certainly close to it.

Keir Starmer’s Labour has 412 seats of Parliament’s total 650, giving it an unassailable majority. This is not because of a sudden surge in their popularity: their share of the popular vote didn’t budge, from around a third of the population. Turnout was moreover unenthusiastic, about 59% of the population I think, which while not as wince-inducing as the nearly 50% participation that the BBC was claiming throughout most of the counting period, is still nothing to write home about. The total number of people who voted for Labour decreased by 600,000. Labour cannot claim any sort of popular mandate, and they know it.

Not that Labour — or any western political party elected under these circumstances — could be expected to take it into consideration. From their point of view, all that matters is the seats in the House of Commons, and they’ve got them in spades.

Reform and the Lib Dems were not the only beneficiaries of the Conservative collapse. This can be seen immediately in the crazy quilt of the electoral map, which despite Labour’s two-thirds majority, is planted with the flags of all sorts of weird political tribes.

My favourite part is Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein held its 7 seats (making it the fifth-largest party after the SNP), and the rest of it is split up in an impenetrable jumble of splinter parties vaguely associated with different reasons for remaining part of the UK and/or the EU. Wales has been painted bright green by Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, who doubled their presence in parliament to 4. This is the same number of seats as Reform got, despite Plaid Cymru having gotten just under 200,000 votes, as compared to Reform’s 4.1 million, yet another perversity of first-past-the-post.

To everyone’s disappointment, first-past-the-post did not deliver a seat into the hands of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who received only 5,814 votes, a dismal 0.02% of the total 28.4 million votes cast. I do not know what kind of person votes for the Monster Raving Loony Party, but I bet they are absolutely fascinating. They should consider moving to one of Britain’s remote underpopulated islands, the Orkneys perhaps, where they might just be able to take over a seat. Having a strong, concentrated regional presence seems to be the best way to get members into Parliament in a first-past-the-post system, and having a sitting member for the Monster Raving Loonies would be even funnier than having Nigel in there.

First-past-the-post gets a lot of hate, and I’ve been ripping on it here, but it actually seems well-suited to an island which is shared by a bunch of squabbling ancient tribes. While it tends to produce majorities quite easily due to the winner-take-all nature of the contest within each riding, this also allows areas with strong regional identities to assert a disproportionate presence in parliament, despite getting a measly percentage of the vote. Not that that especially matters, given the aforementioned tendency for the system to hand out crushing jackpot majorities to the dominant players, as it has indeed done once again.

With the sole exception of Reform, there has not been any wave of enthusiasm for any of the parties in parliament. Large numbers of voters simply stayed home, whether tuning it all out or punishing their home parties while failing to see anything they wanted to vote for. It is as though the tide has gone out, exposing the sand and rocks of the sea shore. Whether this is a regular tide, which will gently slosh back in again in time, or a tsunami, remains to be seen. Certainly it feels that the water has receded very far indeed, exposing more of the seafloor’s surface than one normally sees. Say, is that Doggerland over there?

July 6, 2024

Labour’s “landslide”

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

I put the scare quotes around the word “landslide” because Labour’s eye-popping total of seats in Parliament was won on a remarkably narrow share of the actual votes cast in the British general election on Thursday (less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won in 2019). Fratricide on the right allowed a lot of Labour candidates to squeak in the win as the combined Tory/Reform votes would have been more than enough to top Labour.

Labour has won a landslide and the largest swing in British history without even increasing its vote share in England, and winning perhaps only 35% nationally. Its only significant gains in proportional terms were in Scotland, largely at the expense of the SNP, who have suffered catastrophic losses, meaning they are only 1 seat ahead of Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland — who are in turn 3 seats ahead of Reform, the third largest party in Britain by vote.

But these Reform MPs are — as I write — outnumbered by the five pro-Gaza independents, who won seats in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and London in reaction to Keir Starmer’s position on Israel. Labour are down an average of 18 points in seats where the Muslim population is 20%, and in seats where that figure is above 25%, they are down 23 percentage points. While Labour lost a huge share of the Muslim vote, what is more worrying is the atmosphere in which this has taken place.

In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips held on by 700 votes, and in a remarkably unpleasant – I might even say upsetting, although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep — count she lamented that “This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in”, as she was booed.

“I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence”, she told her antagonists, and described how opponents had filmed a Labour activist in the streets and slashed her tyres, while another was screamed at by a man. She told how Jo Cox’s family had wanted to come and campaign but she couldn’t let them endure it. “Can you throw them out?” she asked the authorities of her hecklers.

There were similar scenes in Birmingham Ladywood as Shabana Mahmood was heckled as she gave her speech, the returning officer pleading with the supporters of independent Ahkmed Yakoob to stop.

Yakoob was described by the Sunday Times‘s Will Lloyd as “the one man in Britain who embodies the way our politics have changed”. He described “a 36-year-old defence solicitor who wears black Prada trainers, a glittering diamond watch, tinted gold-framed sunglasses and Gareth Southgate-like waistcoats. He has 195,000 followers on TikTok, a platform he understands more intuitively than 99 per cent of the politicians in this country. He speaks in clipped, brutal epigrams that sound like they are only ever a few” and “The word ‘genocide’ is never far from his mouth with ‘For Gaza’ printed on his leaflets.”

Labour hung on in Ladywood, a historic constituency in England’s second city where in 1924 Neville Chamberlain very narrowly beat a rising star of the Labour Party called Oswald Mosley.

Gaza independents also narrowly lost Birmingham Hodge Hill by just 1000 votes, and Ilford North, the constituency of Wes Streeting by just 528 votes.

While the media focus was largely engaged in catching out the musing of some of Reform’s less intellectually capable candidates, this other populist revolt has been carried out in an atmosphere of anger and intimidation perhaps not seen in English elections since the days of Rotten Boroughs.

There was police intervention in Oldham last month, Naz Shah MP was abused as a “dirty, dirty Zionist … paid by Friends of Israel”.

Fellow Canadian observer Damian Penny refuses to apologize for his headline “The Sunak Sets over the British Empire” (and I don’t blame him in the slightest):

Canadian readers, stop me if you’ve heard this before: an historically unpopular center-right Tory government heads into an election under a hapless leader running a catastrophically poor campaign and finds that even its traditional support is being badly eroded by an upstart right-wing populist party called Reform.

What happened in Britain on July 4 (weirdly symbolic, that) is not exactly what we experienced in Canada in 1993 – the Tories suffered the worst election result in their history, but they’re left with 119 more seats than the venerable Progressive Conservative party under Twitter-troll-in-waiting Kim Campbell, and at least the outgoing PM managed to hold on to his own seat — but it’s kind of nice to see the Mother Country adopting our traditions for once.

Honestly, 121 seats for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is much better than I’d expected at the start of this campaign. And had it not been for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, they might have managed a much less embarrassing defeat, because this kind of thing happened many times over last night:

Not everyone who voted Reform defected from the Conservatives – had Farage’s protest party not been on the ballot, many of its supporters would have stayed home or cast their votes for fringe parties and independent candidates — but it might have made the difference between a bad night for the Tories and the worst election in the Tories’ history.

Reform won four seats outright – less than a hyperbolic exit poll predicted, but four more than most observers expected at the start of the campaign. They can’t really affect much at the national level, especially with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party holding an absolutely massive majority of seats in Parliament, but they will make things very difficult for the Conservatives.

Helen Dale summarized the British general election result in a modified Gary Larson image:

Andrew Doyle points at the disproportional share of the vote won by Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party compared to the tiny number of seats as a condemnation of the first-past-the-post system (also used here in Canada):

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks the real lesson to be learned from this election is that populism is here to stay:

To see the true quake, you need to look beyond Labour’s mirage-like landslide. As is now becoming clear, Labour has not been swept to power on anything like a wave of public enthusiasm. On the contrary, it won its 412 seats on the second lowest electoral turnout since 1885, and more as a result of people’s exhaustion with the Tories than their love for Sir Keir. No, it is those who refused to vote Labour who have brilliantly unsettled British politics. It is those who took a punt on Nigel Farage’s Reform party who have planted a bomb in the political landscape that will not be easily defused.

For me, the most fascinating stat of the election is the share of the vote received by Labour and the Tories. Labour won around 34 per cent of vote, the Tories around 24 per cent. Let’s leave to one side what a lame landslide it is if only 34 per cent of the people who could be bothered to vote put an X in your box. More striking is the fact that the combined vote share of Labour and the Tories, the parties that have dominated British politics for a century, was 58 per cent. That is staggeringly – and, if you will allow me, hilariously – low.

To put it in historical context: at the last General Election, in 2019, their combined vote share was 75.8 per cent. In 2017 it was even higher: 82.4 per cent. In the elections of the 2000s it hovered around 70 per cent. Why has it now dropped to less than 60 per cent, giving rise to the possibility that in the next few years the two parties that have run this country for decades might see their combined vote drop to less than half of all votes cast? Largely, because of Reform. And a few independents, too. Reform’s vote share is around 14 per cent, enough to shatter the Labour / Tory duopoly and to unravel the two big parties’ arrogant belief that they and they alone have a right to rule.

The speedy turnaround of the Reform revolt was extraordinary. It was only a few weeks ago that Farage ditched his plans to go to America to assist the Trump campaign and instead decided to become leader of Reform. He has now been elected MP for Clacton. Reform has won four seats in total. What’s shocking is that the Liberal Democrats won 71 seats despite getting fewer votes than Reform. The Lib Dems got around 12 per cent of the vote, to Reform’s 14 per cent. That the democratically less popular party of the two will wield far greater power in the Commons is a testament to how busted our first-past-the-post electoral system is. This is unsustainable. It is outright undemocratic.

And yet, even without the parliamentary representation their vote share deserves, Reform has struck a blow for democracy. Their voters, in thinking for themselves and rejecting both the Labour and Tory variety of technocracy, have forcefully created a new opening in political life. They have burst a few of the buckles on the political straitjacket that is our two-party system. The last time this happened was with Farage’s UK Independence Party, in the 2015 General Election, when it won 12.6 per cent of the vote, reducing the Tory / Labour vote share to 67.3 per cent. But where UKIP was mostly a one-issue party, dedicated to getting Britain out of the EU, Reform has broader policy goals. The millions of working-class people who voted for it are saying something very clear indeed: “We want something different”.

June 25, 2024

The ebbing tide of Corbynism

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds the humour in the staggering collapse of the Corbynist wing of the British Labour Party, from being tantalizingly close to forming a government to today’s political knife-fight for a single seat in North London:

Jeremy Corbyn, then-leader of the Labour Party speaking at a rally in Hayfield, Peak District, in 2018.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.

Schadenfreude is an unbecoming emotion, I know. But if you think I am not going to derive at least fleeting pleasure from the fact that the Corbynista movement went from being on the cusp of government to fighting tooth and nail to hold on to one poxy constituency in north London, then you are off your rocker. We must all find mirth wherever we can in this drabbest of elections. And I find mine in the staggering contraction of Corbynism, the almost total collapse of this cause that was once so beloved of every trustafarian Trot, Glasto wanker and they / them fruitloop.

It’s nearly too funny for words. Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn and his crew were eyeing up Downing Street. They were in the running to run the country. Now they’re entirely concentrated in Islington North. Corbyn once commanded vast crowds of affluent youths at Glastonbury, basking in their posh chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”. He had whole armies of time-rich tweeters who put their expensive education to good use by barking at us “gammon” about how “Jez” was “the absolute boy”. Now he can just about rustle up a few score political anoraks to go canvassing for him in a little bit of north London. It would require a heart of stone not to laugh.

Much has changed for “Jez” in the past five years. He was leader of the Labour Party back then. Now he isn’t even a member of the Labour Party. He was suspended in 2020 after he said the scale of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem under his leadership from 2015 to 2020 had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons“. Then he was officially expelled this year after he announced his intention to stand as an independent in Islington North, the constituency he represented for Labour since 1983. The man who wanted to be PM is now fighting for his life to remain an MP. We’ve gone from “socialism in one country” to “socialism in one constituency”.

Die-hard Corbynistas are flocking to Islington North as if it were the Paris Commune under attack from Versailles. They’re beating the streets to plead with constituents to return the absolute boy to parliament in order that socialism might yet live. The list of starry names Corbyn has dragooned to his door-knocking cause reads like a Sky News producer’s rolodex of wankers. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, anyone? Yes, I’m sure her post-truth bollocks about “all white people [having] white privilege” will go down a treat among the white working classes on the council estates of Archway.

There’s Grace Blakeley, too, a privately educated flapper-girl socialist who thinks flouncing out of a book festival is “collective action“. That’s how she described her decision to withdraw from the Hay Festival over its receipt of funds from the investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. Tweeting “I’ve decided not to go to Hay” is the well-heeled millennial’s Battle of Orgreave. Perhaps Ms Blakeley will compare her class-war wounds with those of some old Irish fella she meets in a pub in Holloway when she’s out electioneering for the boy.

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