While wishing Mr Webber all the luck in the world, one cannot help but think he is trying to treat a symptom instead of the disease. Having watched the US TV series House from beginning to end – you have to do something during lockdowns – I feel I am qualified to diagnose the true underlying cause and I have several other qualifications.
As one of the county councillors who rattled the cages of the established parties in 2013, I have seen politics close to. Having stood twice against an incumbent Conservative Minister in one of their safest seats I also have some insight into how the game is played out well above my pay grade.
I’ve helped at six or seven by-elections and the Brexit Referendum. As a group at the county we were, I believe, unique in that we ended up with more councillors than we started with having resisted the fissiparous tendency of UKIP elsewhere.
My application to open a Right of Way through the Houses of Parliament was successful up to a point in its aim to change Rights of Way case law but has been stymied by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s refusal to move its commencement. That has taught me about how the Civil Service and politicians in power collude to keep the peasants down.
I watched UKIP fail to learn anything as its support walked away, watched the best chance to change the political landscape we have had for years thrown away by politically incompetent idiots and opportunists out for ego instead of country.
For six years I was a face-to-face, hands-on practical politician in a very small way. I know what I’m talking about.
Let’s look at the symptoms.
Mr Webber writes “The government has essentially treated the British public with huge contempt, and has ridden roughshod over any consideration for their feelings.”
There’s the big one. The Government feels it is able to ignore the wishes of her Majesty’s subjects and not suffer as a consequence. The underlying disease is the tendency of the public to vote for the label, not for the candidate. Until the Red Wall broke – gifted to the Conservatives by Nigel Farage in a decision that shows what his priority is until Brexit is achieved – that was generally true across the entire country.
The North has been ignored by the metropolitan parties, denied growth, forced to bear the brunt of immigration, treated by the Labour Party as a vote factory while its jobs were being stolen by the EU. And up until the last general election the vote factory had delivered, fed with propaganda by the national broadcaster and large sections of the other media. Folk memories of betrayal, unemployment and a diffuse hatred of toffs from London kept that wall in place for decades after it deserved demolition. When forced they even voted for horny-handed sons of toil like Peter Mandleson and Tony Blair. There is an opportunity for a new party in the North, but those votes won’t be triggered just by dislike of lockdown. It will need more, and sitting under an anti-lockdown umbrella will only serve to show that the real disease is being ignored.
Labour is rotten through and through, believing it is able to lie to the electorate about racism, to boot its cronies into the Lords, to cosy up to Big Quango and suck the taxpayer’s money from any public teat its collaborators put up for grabs. David Milliband anyone?
I don’t like the Labour Label.
British industry is just about to be flushed down the toilet. Mr Johnson’s Green Revolution (Green Reset, Green Paradise, call it what you will) is a load of old hancocks, but the convinced voters believe everything they are told by the media. Radio, television, newspapers, there’s not a trustworthy investigative journalist among the lot of them. Yes, there are commentators who comment about the stupidity of renewable and unreliable energy but they are just there to harvest clicks, pet lions which are allowed to roar while the tamer cracks his whip and looks macho. We are about to enter the real world outside the EU with energy prices which are twice those of major competitors like the USA and South Korea, industrial competitors which obviously have too small an advantage for this government. Johnson’s dash for expensive green energy will, literally, kill some of those elderly voters we’re closing down the country to preserve. You couldn’t make it up.
When Call Me Matt Hancock was Minister for Energy and Climate Change (the hubris of the label should have been enough to frighten the voters away) we had a discussion about solar power which he saw as a coming thing. I pointed out that electricity needs to be stored if it isn’t used immediately it is generated, and… well, you know that pause he does when he’s been asked an unexpected question and his face goes blank? He did that. The Minister for Energy didn’t know the first thing about keeping the lights on and industry running. Nice chap but a fearful fibber – he claimed on the local Beeb station in 2017 that he’d been for Brexit all along. I was so taken aback that I didn’t protest. The Beeb presenter didn’t even blink. He was probably used to politicians telling lies.
And then there’s the life after death careers of failed Tory politicians. How many copies of Cameron’s autobiography actually sold? Who paid thousands to listen to Mrs May (Mrs May! Thousands! Ye gods!) give an after-dinner speech? Who was shunted up to the Lords, the best club in London which is kept as somewhere to featherbed failed main party politicians who get paid to go there? How many jobs are shoved the way of a compliant Chancellor of the Exchequer should he fall off his perch?
I don’t like the Tory label.
Then there’s the “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice party”, the LibDems. People actually vote for the woke, right-on, painfully politically correct LibDems! Not me, not many people, just those who think it would be nice if everyone was nice – i.e. those with very limited experience of the cold, hard, nasty real world.
I don’t like the LibDem label.
Cure the underlying disease. We have a political class, Left, Right and Barking, that is incompetent, borderline corrupt, uneducated in practical matters and with limited experience of the real world. It’s not lockdown, it’s not Covid, or global warming or industrial suicide. It’s all those things.
An alliance party indeed, but an alliance against lock-down without real policies to back it up? Not a label I’d recognise. Or vote for.
I am, however, available to write you a comprehensive manifesto.
Excellent article, one of the best I have seen on this site, and really hits home. I too as a UKIP branch chairman and election candidate, witnessed our support walk away because of egos further up the chain of command. The good work we were doing locally to over haul the worse than useless conservative councilors who were, and still are in power, was cancelled out by the idiots at the top, saying silly things one after the other. Now we have to hope that Reform UK or the Heritage Party can make vital breakthrough. We will have our best chance I feel in May 2021 to do this. There are so many long term Conservative voters out there who are wringing their hands of the fake Conservative Party, and saying things like ‘never again’. In your opinion who was the biggest idiot responsible for the collapse of UKIP?
It was a generic thing with people who had ambition above ability elbowing their way to the top
We had three leadership elections and I got it wrong every time. If I could go back I’d vote for David Kurten, but he gave a lightweight jokey hustings speech and I voted instead for a dubious CV with no attached speech. So I was part of the problem as well.
I warned the NEC that unless they put out a press release reiterating the ban on anyone who had ever been in an extremist party we’d be wiped out. They didn’t and we were. If a hostile Press can paint any opposition to the Liblabcons as racist they will do so :the British voter will always reject racism.
TBP/Reform needs a set of policies other than lockdown resistance which will be forgotten in 6 months. Start working up a skeleton manifesto or support will drain away.
JF
” I watched UKIP fail to learn anything as its support walked away, watched the best chance to change the political landscape we have had for years thrown away by politically incompetent idiots and opportunists out for ego instead of country”
Ouch! Painful, but absolutely spot on.
Only one solution for us – get back in there the minute Johnson has placed his final hand of Brexit cards on the table. Not long now.
We have discovered that political parties can all be either bought controlled or destroyed or ignored. Where does that leave us? We could form a new Party and get it elected but how long before it goes the way of all the rest?
We could elect a parliament of independents who would:
a) campaign on and implement a policy of outlawing political parties. Hmmmm.
b) campaign on abolishing elections and using random selection to appoint people to serve in parliament for a single term. But watch the random selection bit like a hawk . . .
c) we could just abolish statute laws altogether (except for those critical to national survival) and abolish parliament taxes and civil service. Admittedly this idea needs some work! But in principle let’s start from here – we might be amazed how we progress.
d) we could apply to be the newest state of the USA after Trump triumphs . . . but there just might be a queue.
e) more ideas please!
I like the left, right and barking – ammo for debates, thanks.
1300 hrs. Solar 1.87GW. Wind 0.55GW. Even together the big unreliables cannot beat coal, that forbidden fuel that’s been totally phased out, which is delivering 2.76GW from beyond the grave.
Solar is fine at domestic level with appropriate backup, but trying to run our country on it is complete madness. There seems to be a plethora of battery installations appearing too, no thoughts of pollution created by their manufacture and disposal.
Cold and foggy is common in winter but sadly is anathema to both solar and wind power. Better throw another chairleg on the fire!
I suppose if they use wind power when it’s ‘in excess’ to create hydrogen, it would be better than battery storage. However, issue of climate change being blamed on human activity is the fundamental flaw all this madness is based on.