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The Conservative party’s faltering general election campaign suffered a potentially damaging blow when Nigel Farage announced he intended to stand as an MP and lead the Reform party for the next five years.
The former Ukip and Brexit party leader said he would stand in Clacton, Essex, after changing his mind while spending time on the campaign trail. He claimed that he did not want to let his supporters down.
Farage will also take over as leader of Reform UK from Richard Tice, pledging to stay in post for a full parliamentary term.
While his announcement poses an immediate threat to the Tory candidate in Clacton, it may also energise his party’s national campaign, splitting the rightwing vote in other constituencies.
It also raises the spectre of Farage antagonising the Tories as they descend into a post-election battle for the soul of their party.
Farage’s bid to win in Clacton, which was the first to elect a Ukip MP in 2014 and has a Tory majority of 24,702, will be his eighth attempt to enter parliament. He has failed on each of the previous seven occasions.
In any other election but this I would use those seven previous losses as the punchline to a joke about cats and his chances this time. But this time might really be different, for reasons given in the next paragraph of the Guardian’s report:
In a further blow to Sunak, YouGov’s first MRP constituency projection, before Farage’s announcement, showed Keir Starmer could win a 194 majority, bigger even than Tony Blair’s 179 majority in 1997.
Colchester always looks prosperous when I go there. There are designer clothes at prices I cannot afford in its charity shops. I think of it as a place where the last serious incident of anti-social behaviour was in AD 61. Not so, according to the Telegraph:
All the crime in British libraries has traditionally been contained between the covers of our books – any rowdiness instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”
But in Colchester, Essex, that idyll increasingly resembles fiction. Over the past three months, the city’s local library has recorded a shocking 54 incidents of antisocial behaviour, forcing librarians to consider donning bodycams for their own protection.
Books have been snatched from the shelves, tossed about and destroyed. An irreplaceable collection of local 18th-century maps has been defaced with obscene sketches. A glass door has been shattered, fires have been lit on the carpet tiles of the quiet study area and staff have been subjected to appalling verbal abuse and – on one occasion – a physical assault.
Perhaps most worrying of all, however, is that the Essex librarians are far from alone, with similar learning sanctuaries across the country now battling a wave of criminality and disorderly behaviour.
In Kent, such institutions witnessed a 500 per cent increase in antisocial incidents affecting staff and library users between 2020 and 2023, while in Bristol, several libraries were forced to close or change their opening hours over the school holidays last year to deter unruly young visitors.
Note the timeframe. I suspect that this startling 500% increase in antisocial incidents in Kent public libraries between 2020 and 2023 was a ripple from the Black Lives Matter tsunami finally making landfall after crossing the Atlantic. However that is but the latest book in a multi-volume saga. The article speaks of any rowdiness being ‘instantly quelled by the librarians’ famous “Shh!”’ When did that last happen, 1975? Perhaps there really were Shh-ing librarians like that once. My imagination gives them beehive hair and cat-eye glasses. Never actually saw one though, and in the 1980s I spent vast amounts of time in the local public library. All my life, trendy young librarians lived in terror of being thought to be that sort of librarian, and the fear never went away while they gradually turned into old librarians who’ve still got their CND badges in a drawer somewhere.
No longer the silent book storage and study areas of old, libraries have evolved to become “community hubs” offering a wide range of free or affordable services to visitors of all ages. You can go to a library to access the internet and use printers and photocopiers. They host knitting clubs, manga drawing sessions and bereavement support meetings. Often they’ll loan out medical equipment such as blood pressure monitors, with many becoming Covid vaccination centres during the pandemic. A new Scottish scheme even offers up musical instruments for users.
In Colchester’s library, parents and grandparents are supervising toddlers clambering around a small soft play area situated on the two-storey building’s ground floor.
There is nothing wrong with the manga drawing or the soft play areas in themselves. Nor do I have any automatic objection to a library, in the sense of a place whose primary purpose is to make books available to the public, also hosting activities such as Drag Queen Story Hour, as Colchester library has done. Although I do think the famous Rainbow Dildo Butt Monkey whom Redbridge council commissioned to do the rounds of its children’s libraries in 2021 might have been a little off-putting to certain demographics.
If public, government-run libraries were private, commercially-run libraries as once existed in the UK – Boots the Chemist used to run a mass-market circulating library – we could have lively competition between the “We’re not your grandma’s library” libraries and the “We are your grandma’s library” libraries. I am sure there is room for both.
But that is a dream. In the real world, low as its fees were, “Boots Book-Lovers’ Library” could not compete with the government-subsidised version which proudly boasted it was free to all. And the generations of public librarians since then thought they were being non-authoritarian by taking that “to all” literally. “The library isn’t just about books”, they said. The banks of computers pushed the books into a corner. “The library isn’t just for swots”, they said. “We won’t make you stay quiet”, they said. It stopped being a quiet haven for swots. “We are inclusive”, they said. “The library is for all sorts of people.” And, lo, no one was excluded and all sorts of people came.
Islamist extremism remains the predominant terror threat in the UK. Islamist terrorists have claimed the lives of 94 people from the 2005 7/7 bombings onwards (far-right terrorists, for all the media hype about this threat, have killed just three people in the same period). The weekly ‘pro-Palestine’ demos in London and elsewhere have given vent to all manner of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Polling shows that anti-Semitic views (while nowhere near a majority) are more likely to be held by Muslims than the general population – especially by Muslims who are poorly integrated into British society. Sectarian voting along religious lines is also fast becoming a grim feature of our politics.
As I have often stated I am keen to see the ‘Conservative’ Party not just lose but be annihilated, I was asked the very reasonable question:
And what happens next, after the cataclysmic labour government?
So…
The impending disaster as Labour dials all the Tory idiocy up to 11 is what will hopefully create the political space for an actual small-c conservative party, likely some messy mishmash of nationalists, classical liberals and old-school pre-woke former tribal labour supporters.
The not-very-ideological “tribal voters” (which face it is a large chunk of both Labour and Tory voters) will only be up for grabs when it become impossible to pretend the old tribes still exist. Most Tory tribal voters have got the message, and some Labour ones as well. The next few years will convince what remains.
It will be a ruinous, horrible intermediate period (in the Egyptian sense of the term). Close to nothing Labour does will make people’s lives better, and as Labour gets desperate, they will become ever more rapacious as they try to fund various doomed-from-the-start schemes (such as the nationalised energy company, which I imagine will quickly become the British Leyland of our time). As a result, many with movable assets will indeed move them and themselves elsewhere until it becomes clear how things will shake out in the medium to long term.
That is how I see it. No prizes for guessing what I am going to do during the ‘intermediate’ period.
Though this new far right will present as liberal progressive Islam, their ideology is closer to that of Reinhard Heydrich than Caroline Lucas. But white liberals are too blindsided by their hatred of the white working class to recognise the Nazism in their own ranks. They see the brown faces around them and applaud themselves for being inclusive and diverse, even if that means embracing Hamas supporters and cheering on rapists. Evil no longer shows up in black uniforms with skull insignia. It wears liberal institutions as a skinsuit and adopts their language
[…]
Unlike white far right groups, the new Islamic fascist movement is highly organised, motivated, funded (by you) and unopposed politically. They’re competent and quite ruthless in ways white far right never could be. Our zombie political class doesn’t realise what’s happening, and wouldn’t act even if they did. The Labour party is only too happy to turn a blind eye to it when it suits them. As such, the Labour party are collaborators in what is a far right takeover of our cities.
Twelve months of mandatory national service would be reintroduced by the Conservatives if they win the general election.
Eighteen-year-olds would be able to apply for one of 30,000 full-time military placements or volunteering one weekend a month carrying out a community service.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
Back to the good old days:
As I walked out on London street
A press gang there I chanced to meet
They asked me if I would join the fleet
On board of a man-o-war, boys
They said that a sailor’s life was fine
Good comrades and good pay I’d find
They promised me a bloody good time,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
– Traditional sea shanty
The press-ganged sailors of the Napoleonic wars often did fight well. That might have been due to their national spirit. Or it might have been due to the disciplinary methods detailed in the next two verses of the song:
But when I went, to my surprise
All they’d told me was shocking lies
There was a row and bloody old row
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The first thing they did, they took me in hand
And they flogged me with a tarry strand.
They flogged me till I couldn’t stand,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
James Cleverly has insisted that “no one is going to jail” if they refuse to take part in National Service, but that the Tories would “compel” young people to participate.
Rishi Sunak last night vowed to create a mandatory scheme where school leavers will either have to enrol on a 12-month military placement or spend one weekend each month volunteering in their community.
But Mr Cleverly said that young people would not face any criminal sanctions if they did not take part.
Asked what would happen if someone said they didn’t want to engage, the Home Secretary told Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “There’s going to be no criminal sanction for this. No one’s going to jail over this…
“We want to make this compelling, we are going to compel people to do it, but also we want to make sure that it fits with different people’s aptitudes and aspirations.”
He added that “we force people to do things all the time” when pressed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about whether he was comfortable as a Conservative forcing teenagers to do something.
He told the BBC: “We force 16-year-olds who, as a society, for example, we recognise are not fully formed, and they still require education. So the decision was made that they remain in education or training.
“So we force teenagers to be educated. No one argues with that.
But the Royal Society’s recent honours to some of the world’s most controversial scientific figures reveals the decline of institutional science into ideological blobbery.
– Ben Pile. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy, has honoured Anthony Fauci, and in doing so confirmed its role as the guardian, not of empirical discovery, but politicised institutional Science.
That the NHS has been able to avoid reckoning with its own catastrophic failure owes a great deal to how it has become sanctified in modern Britain. To the fact that it is treated and used by our cultural and political establishment as something close to a state religion. We’re not meant to challenge it. We’re meant to worship it. We’re not meant to question it. We’re meant to give ‘thanks’ to it, as we did during the early stages of the Covid pandemic.
The Tories are delivering us trussed up and oven ready for full on, overt socialism/globalism/neo-fascism rather than the underhand stuff we’ve put up with for the last 12 years.
– Spectator commenter MaryR accurately summing up the UK’s future for the next few years (£)
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, sorry Humza Yousaf, sorry John Swinney wanted a turn at the podium.
Declaring an emergency is a signal to government that the current situation is not working and there needs to be intervention.
The councils cited issues ranging from pressure on homelessness services, rising property prices and high levels of temporary accommodation.
By declaring an emergency, the Scottish government is formally recognising the housing problem and calling for cuts to its capital budget to be reversed.
However, there are no practical effects that automatically happen due to a declaration being made.
The one declaration they will not make is the one that would have an effect; the one reversing the stupid thing they did that brought about this “emergency” in the first place.
I have some news for the Scottish Government. “Bah! Humbug!” Rent controls simply do not work.
UK data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released on 17 April 2024 reveals the largest increase in average rents since 2015, was in Scotland. Rents which have had a cap since September 2022, have increased more than in any other country in the United Kingdom.
ONS figures show that during the year to March 2024, average monthly rents in Scotland went up by more than in England, which went up by 9.1%, while Scottish rents rose by 10.5% to £947pcm. This is proof enough for me that rent control in Scotland has had the opposite effect from what the Scottish Government said was intended.
Not surprisingly, take-up of smart meters has been far slower than governments have hoped. Nobody wants a device in their home whose only function will be to enable an energy company to charge them five quid for a shower before work. Yet to avoid public pushback, ministers since Miliband have falsely claimed that smart meters will help households ‘reduce bills’ and put the onus on energy retailers to implement the rollout – if they don’t show sufficient effort in enforcement of the Government’s policy, they can then be fined. Thus, the public standing of energy companies has diminished over the duration, fuelling a growing antagonism between customers and retailers, as smart meters and other policies, such as the destruction of coal-fired power stations, have caused power prices to triple since the early 2000s. Energy companies take much of the blame for Westminster’s policy failures.
Don’t misunderstand the point. This is not a defence of energy companies. Of course, companies like National Grid have their greedy eyes on the opportunities created for them by green dirigisme. But only a fool would expect them not to. And one thing that there is no scarcity of is fools in SW1A. Energy companies have been relatively candid, if one cares to look, whereas Energy and Environment Ministers, from Gummer, Yeo, and Huhne, to more ideological zombies such as Miliband and Davey, have promised that climate targets can be hit with no downsides. But whereas the targets are binding in law, the upsides they promise are not. Anyway, rationing is good for you, donchaknow?
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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