The Left: Lost, Found, Re-purposed, Finished

On 26/07/202427/07/2024 By JacIn Climate, Environmentalism, Far Left, Globalism, Middle East, Ukraine, World Economic Forum42 Comments

Let me start by explaining that the title does not refer to the sad buggers in forgotten communities who vote Labour out of force of habit, nor the careerists they vote for.

I’m dealing with those who bring city streets to a standstill waving terrorist flags and shouting anti-Semitic slogans. Antifa, BLM, and all the other representatives of grievance politics.

And the Quixotic beings forever battling ‘fascists’ and ‘transphobes’, ‘climate deniers’ and ‘Islamophobes’. Those who think the white man is genetically evil.

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IN THE BEGINNING

I’d considered writing something along these lines for a while, but the trigger for what you’re about to read was something that happened a week ago.

I put out a post on X that linked to Google maps to show the heat island around the Senedd, with nary a blade of grass to be seen near the building whose denizens want to plant trees everywhere . . . preferably on what today are working farms. It struck me as mildly hypocritical.

Among the responses was one from someone called Ben Wildsmith.

He seemed to suggest that vegetation does not grow near the sea. Making the marram grass of my childhood summers in Port Eynon a false memory. The palms lining tropical beaches, and trees running down to more northern shorelines, must be equally imaginary.

So I got to wondering about Ben Wildsmith.

Let’s give some background for what’s coming. At the Trump assassination attempt one man died after shielding his wife and daughter from the shooter, His name was Corey Comperatore, aged 50, and he was a firefighter.

In one of those theatrical gestures that Americans seem to like, Donald Trump, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, kissed the fire helmet of the dead man.

Which prompted Ben Wildsmith to put out this post on X. The message reads: ‘Yer Da kisses dead men’s helmets’.

‘Yer Da’ is Scouse for ‘your father’, and the rest is a crude reference to a human penis. However you think about it, it’s distasteful. I mean, is it addressed to Trump’s children? Or is it something really, really clever that’ll be understood by leftist necrophiliacs?

That helmet belonged to a man who put his life on the line in the job he did, and then gave that life to save his wife and daughter. Doesn’t he deserve better?

Well, no – because he was a Trump supporter. That means he can be ‘othered’, and vilified. Because that’s how too many in the modern left think. Including the brainwashed young man who tried to kill Trump. And this nutter.

Reminding us that those who urge ‘tolerance’ are often the most dangerously intolerant.

They suffer a kind of tunnel vision; which is never a good thing, unless perhaps you’re in a tunnel. But as long as sufferers stick together, they see no problem.

Take the July 4 general election. There were people in Wales celebrating a Tory-free Wales as if that was going to make everything better. Of course it won’t; but these people are so fixated on the Conservatives being the source of all evil that they’re incapable of seeing the truth.

Wales has had 25 years of socialist rule from Corruption Bay and it’s been disastrous. But everything’s gonna be fine now – because we’ve got no Tory MPs!

‘Cleansing rain’! Wow! Click to open enlarged in separate tab

Ben Wildsmith was one of those rejoicing, in his Nation.Cymru column. Yes, Ben writes for that site funded by the ‘Welsh Government’. Ben also likes to think of himself as a poet and a musician.

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LOST

I believe the left in the Anglosphere started losing its way in the late 1970s. The answer to human misery was certainly losing ground in the UK then (partly due to over-reach), and this culminated in the Winter of Discontent.

Which helped Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives get elected in May 1979. Her position was then strengthened by an unlikely combination of an Argentine military junta invading some islands nobody’d heard of, and the antics of the extreme left.

In the USA, Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, but was not re-elected due to his administrations’s perceived weakness over the US hostages taken in Tehran. Republican Ronald Regan won the presidency in 1980, and was re-elected in 1984.

To cap it all, after years of obvious decline, but also thanks to a collapsing economy, and a costly and unpopular military intervention in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union started falling apart in 1988/89.

This was crucial, so it’s worth considering how the end of Soviet Communism affected politics in the West. Or certainly, this is how I see it.

On the one hand, the US military-industrial complex had grown rich and powerful by holding up the Soviet bloc as an existential threat.

But in his farewell address in January 1961, less than three years before his successor, John F Kennedy, was assassinated, outgoing president Dwight D Eisenhower, warned:

. . . guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex

With the Soviet empire gone, those Ike warned against were left almost without a raison d’etre.

But with China not yet powerful enough to be a credible replacement there was little alternative but to stick with Russia. The regime had changed, but post-Communist Russia still had all those nuclear warheads. And a space programme.

Which posed a problem for the left, because since 1917 many socialists in the West had looked to Russia for inspiration, even orders.

Remarkably, the left, traditionally critical of US foreign policy in Latin America, Vietnam and elsewhere, eventually fell in with military-industrial complex thinking.

This was achieved because many leftists began to regard the new Russia under Yeltsin, and then Putin, as a betrayal. And when Putin came all out for nation, church, family, tradition, the left turned on him.

When he banned gay marriage the comrades became apoplectic.

Putin’s position on these matters also made him a target for the Globalists, who ridicule religion (but only Christianity), and seek to undermine the family unit, erase national differences, and destroy Western traditions.

This led to a fear among both Globalists and the military-industrial complex that the new Russia might serve as a dangerous example to the West. This became another reason to treat Russia as the enemy, and to villainise Putin.

And so it was full speed ahead to NATO encirclement of Russia, EU enlargement, the 2014 Kiev coup, provoke war in Ukraine and . . . I wonder what comes next?

Something else that must be understood about the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it killed off any lingering belief in the Communist economic model. It just didn’t work. Few saw that more clearly than the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The lesson for ‘our’ socialists was that their war against the corrupt and evil West would need to take a different form. Which meant cultural Marxism; initially the relatively benign ‘political correctness’, with this softening-up process leading to the mind-numbing idiocies of Wokeism that followed.

Yet Russia in the early 1990s, with its vodka-loving president, and gangsters fighting over state assets, was a bit of a shambles. In the public mind it was not perceived as the same threat as its superpower predecessor.

Other ‘threats’ were needed as a supporting cast.

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FOUND

In the UK, the initial cleansing under leader Neil Kinnock wasn’t enough to win Labour the general elections of 1987 and 1992. A complete re-brand was needed, and it came with Tony Blair and New Labour which, after victory in 1997, stayed in power until 2010.

New Labour was a kind of Margaret Thatcher tribute band.

In the USA, the left seemed to be largely incorporated into the Democratic Party, and to some extent de-fanged.

The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet empire, and with it the removal of a unifying focus for Western concerns, was also a problem for supranational bodies that like to influence public perceptions and political decisions.

The answer they came up with was ‘global warming’, or ‘climate change’. This racket fulfils an almost identical role to the Cold War; because as well as focusing minds and frightening people, it’s used to dictate human behaviour, curb individual freedoms, and satisfy corporate greed.

And when it came to more immediate military ‘threats’, well there was a theatre company of sociopaths out there with dodgy moustaches . . . and oil. To raise the curtain, and stress the importance of oil, Saddam Hussein conveniently invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And as we soon learned from US and UK spokesmen, Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). People who knew that to be a lie were helped to commit ‘suicide’.

Perhaps Saddam felt encouraged to invade after the US had funded and armed his bloody war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. Done, not because the Americans had any liking for him, but because the Ayatollahs had deposed their Shah in 1979. And of course, as payback for the hostage crisis that so embarrassed the USA and brought down the peanut farmer from Georgia.

(Though rumours persist that certain US agencies dragged their feet over the hostages in order to make Carter look bad, and help former CIA boss George H W Bush get elected. What a thought!)

These forays into the lands of oil initially wrong-footed the left. Normally, the comrades would oppose Western powers invading countries over natural resources. But Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti was a difficult bloke to defend.

So by 2010 the left is onside with the thinking of the military-industrial complex agenda, has bought into the Globalists’ climate scam, and is open to adopting any lunacy that can be deployed to challenge Western values and institutions.

With a Conservative government returned in 2010 the left felt it was time to flex its muscles again.

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RE-PURPOSED

In the USA, blue collar workers and southern whites had been switching to the Republicans for some time. And this continued under Obama.

While in the UK, many lower-paid workers had lost their fear of voting Tory with Margaret Thatcher, some moving to even more ‘exotic’ destinations on the right.

Which meant that Labour and Democrats needed to replace these lost voters. In the USA there was a push to register more voters from minority groups. But that took a dangerous turn when the left started arguing that to ask voters for ID was ‘racist’.

Now, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, we’ve seen Democrats demand that undocumented, illegal migrants be allowed to vote.

The thinking behind this is pretty obvious.

The military-industrial complex may have taken shape to further US imperial ambitions and enrich US corporations, but it soon spread its influence to UK politics, and NATO.

For as Tom Paxton put it in Daily News:

Ban the bombers are afraid of a fightPeace hurts business and that ain’t right

At its simplest . . . corporate America gains from making the weapons for the military. The quicker the products are used, and replaced, then the bigger the profits.

But the military-industrial complex also profits from ‘rebuilding’ the countries wrecked by the weapons it’s produced.

This report from 2005 explains how Halliburton did it in Iraq. And with the fighting still taking its bloody toll along the Dnieper BlackRock and JPMorgan have been quick off the mark to set up a Ukraine Reconstruction Bank.

Globalist corporations profiting from a war the USA engineered in order to support the most corrupt regime in Europe. What’s more, Ukraine’s been corrupt for a long time.

As I’ve reported before, the head of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, wants “governments, businesses and non-governmental organizations” to have the power of compulsory purchase over farms and other private property.

Should that happen, then WWW, or Radnorshire Wildlife Trust, or even Bute Energy, could throw you off your land, or out of your home – to save the planet.

When they’re not supporting the US military-industrial complex and the most corrupt country in Europe, the comrades are promoting the Globalist land grab agenda of Jamie Dimon and his buddies.

As I’ve said before, 2016 saw the process ratcheted up because, through Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, the lower orders had proven themselves to be both stupid and racist. The gloves were off.

Which is why we are where we are. And seeing the West so weak, socialists may think their time has finally come. But I believe their time has come, and gone.

The entitled, attention-seeking clowns, with their half-baked ideas, have become an embarrassment. Certainly Ed Miliband thinks so. The days of performance socialism may be coming to an end. People have had enough.

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FINISHED

Miliband is close to those hoping to benefit from net zero, carbon capture, and all the other elements of the climate scam. So he may not just be speaking for himself.

But anyway, it’s not just Miliband, there are other signs that something is changing. Just look around. Can’t you smell it!

There are governments in Europe hanging on for dear life, dreading the next election. The UK has a government with no real mandate. France seems to be falling apart. The West is being flooded with ‘refugees’ who are nothing of the sort. Following an assassination attempt on the man likely to be the next US president, there was a palace coup to remove the incumbent!

All because people are waking up to the truths. They know they’ve been lied to in so many ways, and for too long. Those who’ve lied to us are getting worried.

Change is inevitable. Possibly major change.

Finally following Ike’s advice and reining in the military-industrial complex, curbing the power of the Globalists, and dealing with the clowns who serve their agendas without realising it, is the best hope for a just, peaceful, and prosperous world.

But if it’s too late and the worst happens; then when you see that mushroom cloud, you can at least console yourself by knowing there are no Tory MPs in Wales.

♦ end ♦

2024, Things Can Only Get Better

On 01/01/202401/01/2024 By JacIn Globalism47 Comments

It’s traditional to look ahead at this time of the year, and you know me, I’m a traditionalist. A conservative, and a man who speaks his mind. So fasten your seatbelts because I won’t pull any punches. The situation is too serious for that.

But there are grounds for optimism.

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GLOBALISM AND THE ‘QUISLING LEFT’

I’ve used the first of those terms often enough for you to know what I’m talking about, but maybe I should explain what I mean by the second.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 would be a good place to start because the social and economic system imposed by the Communists proved attractive to many on the left in the West who sought radical change.

People who should have known better went to the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s and came away praising Josef Stalin and his works. For me, this marks the birth of the modern Quisling Left; by which I mean socialists, who create internal strife, on behalf of external allies or influences, in attempts to wreck the West.

As for the many millions who died and suffered under Stalin, well, it was punishment for them being ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘enemies of the people’, ‘revisionists’, ‘kulaks’, etc.

For there was always a label to justify the punishment. Whoever was given a label was damned, and could be ignored, or silenced.

Under Stalin innocent people would admit to ‘crimes’ they knew nothing about until they saw their ‘confession’. Millions of people both inside the Soviet Union and in the West, pretended to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, and Stalin was the saviour of mankind – all done in order to ‘Defend the Revolution!’

I mention this because of course we see the same contempt for truth today.

And labels are also back in fashion.

It could be argued that counter-revolutionaries have become conspiracy theorists. Enemies of the people might be White supremacists. Perhaps revisionists have morphed into transphobes.

Though Kulaks remain farmers, and scapegoats. But instead of being blamed for the food shortages – that were the fault of Communist policies – farmers are now accused of destroying the planet, in defiance of the prophet Gore and his disciple Saint Greta.

For today’s People of the Labels are very similar to those who worshipped ‘Uncle Joe’. But with important differences. For example, they are now cultural rather than ideological Marxists, and usually described as ‘Woke’.

This has accompanied the biggest change of all.

When it took its inspiration from the Soviet Union the Left in the West denigrated the capitalist system; but those who call themselves Communists today do the bidding of the biggest corporations and the richest multi-billionaires.

How did this come about? And why?

While you’re pondering that, you might enjoy this cartoon featuring the new President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Maybe graphics are needed to help socialists realise whose dirty work they’re doing.

This paradigm shift happened because a self-elected global elite wants control over almost every aspect of our lives. To achieve this, these Globalists must control the political system, the education system, the media, and much else besides. (I’ll give more background on the ‘marriage’ in the next section.)

Running in tandem, we see a campaign to malign everything the West relies on, from agriculture to fuel, making them all more expensive, or banning them completely. The creators of the modern world that has benefitted billions of people must be vilified to the point where attacks on White people and their achievements are the only acceptable form of racism.

The template, as I said a while back, is the collapse of the Western Roman empire. Which didn’t happen overnight, or through a single incident, such as someone opening the gates of Rome to Alaric. It was a slower process.

Over many decades the provinces were weakened by constant attacks. While in Rome itself decadence and decline allowed the barbarians to just stroll in.

Which is what we see happening today, from Eagle Pass to Lampedusa.

Reminding us that the decline we see today is engineered. The poison of Wokeism has been injected by those who’ll take advantage of the anger, confusion, and polarisation created.

“Yes, we must curb illegal immigration – digital ID is the only way to do it! Perhaps even a microchip under your skin”.

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ROOM FOR OPTIMISM: CONTRADICTIONS AND CON JOBS

One reason for optimism is that the absurdities, contradictions, and downright lies employed by the Globalists become more obvious by the day, despite the best efforts of the establishment and its media.

Let’s consider the climate crisis scam. We’re told we must reduce our carbon emissions. ‘We’ being the West. Apart from the fact that CO2 is essential for life on Earth, China, Indonesia, India, and other states push ahead with hundreds of new coal-fired power stations – but nobody complains!

Not only does this tell us that only the dumbest and most brainwashed really believes that CO2 is a threat, but it confirms yet again the anti-Western focus of Globalism and the Quisling Left.

A Globalist shill came back to power recently in Poland, which had been holding out against the Globalists. And when Donald Tusk started closing down TV stations the BBC reported it as ‘reforms’.

The BBC went on to tell us that Tusk’s new administration is targeting “politicised media outlets” – which describes perfectly the Globalist-controlled mainstream media!

As we were recently reminded by the BBC introducing Wokery into Agatha Christie!

This intolerance explains why Elon Musk is under attack for not allowing X to be used by Globalist agencies in the way that these agencies still influence the content on Facebook, Google, and other platforms.

It also explains why the EU is now threatening X with censorship. And why Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said it, “has always been a bit of a sewer“.

To combat what they’ll call ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘hate speech’, and the rest, those the Globalists control will introduce censorship. But of course it will not be called censorship. It will instead be given some innocuous and reassuring label. Like the ‘reforms’ in Poland.

In Varadkar’s Ireland it’s a Hate Speech Bill so vague, and therefore, ‘flexible’, it doesn’t even define hate. Unsurprisingly, it has attracted criticism from around the world.

Because controlling the narrative is essential for the Globalists to push their lies; whether it’s climate, Covid, mass immigration, 15-minute cities, doing away with cash, digital ID, ULEZ, or anything else.

This became clear a few years back through a movement many have forgotten. In the economic crisis of 2009 governments bailed out rather than punished those responsible, which helped expose the corruption at the heart of the Western system.

This saw the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The unwelcome attention, and the positive media coverage it received, made the Globalists realise they needed better control of the media, and that this youthful zeal needed to be ‘refocused’.

And the need to cement the rapprochement between global capital and the Left became more urgent with the double scare of Brexit and Trump in 2016.

Brexit provides another reminder of how the Left has changed. The Left in the UK used to be split over the Common Market / European Union, many calling it “a rich man’s club“, but EU membership now seems to be an article of faith for the comrades.

Attitudes on both sides are hardening as those of us who defend farming, fight for cheap and reliable energy, and challenge unrestricted immigration, realise that the EU is implementing the Globalist agenda.

The strength of this alliance is in full view when we see socialists out on the streets demanding the implementation of policies that will harm the elderly and the poorest in society.

You’ve been had, Comrade!

Also out on the streets these days are Muslims, intimidating morally confused cops and morally corrupt politicians; behaviour justified by ‘insults to Islam’, or protesting that Israel should not punish the savages responsible for October 7.

Which takes me back to a personal turning-point in 1989, when I saw on television, copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses being burnt in Bradford. For younger readers I’d better explain why that was a seminal moment in my political education.

An image I grew up with, regularly used as shorthand for the evils of Nazism, was burning books. Partly because books are precious, and partly because it implied intolerance, and a contempt for the views of others.

And yet, here it was – book-burning in an English city, with not a swastika in sight.

Now, of course, I know more about Islam. I see a dangerous, intolerant religion that allows or even encourages its adherents to kill, rape, and enslave, non-believers.

Making Islam incompatible with Western values.

Which explains why the Left – otherwise dismissive of religion – has adopted Muslims as an ersatz proletariat. And why Globalist-controlled politicians keep our borders open to these followers of Islamo-fascism.

If the Left is to provide the Globalists’ foot-soldiers, then Muslims taking over and wrecking European cities will be the shock troops.

Which is why we see the Quisling Left march in support of Hamas and bring London to a standstill. But then, the Left has always leaned towards anti-Semitism.

And of course they’ve coined a term for anyone pointing out the danger – ‘Islamophobia’.

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MORE ROOM FOR OPTIMISM: IT’S ELECTION YEAR!

This year will definitely see two elections, probably three. Let’s start with the probability.

∼

The UK will likely have a general election in the spring or early summer. It will be interesting, if only for the lack of enthusiasm for the two major parties, each led by a man with the charisma of a stale sausage roll.

Prime minister Sunak has never faced the electorate as party leader, and will not survive his first encounter. For me, questions remain over whether he personally, or his wife’s family, profited from investments made relating to Covid.

While Labour has Keir Starmer. I’ve struggled to think of something nice to say about him, or to make him sound interesting. I have to admit defeat.

From many voters the big question for both parties will be: “What are going to do about immigration?“. I can tell you now – sod all.

While, in Scotland, the SNP, after ‘chicks with dicks’, financial mismanagement, and other disasters, is now led by a singularly unattractive Islamist. It will be interesting to see which party or parties benefit most from the SNP’s decline.

If Reform can make a good fist of their campaign they’ll probably get my vote.

∼

There will definitely be elections for the European Parliament 6 – 9 June. These could be interesting for a number of reasons.

Across the EU a pissed-off public is angry about so much and coming to realise that those they can’t vote for – the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen – are in fact running the EU on behalf of the World Economic Forum and other Globalist bodies.

We can be sure that parties prioritising the interests of indigenous populations will prosper in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary and other countries.

But looking over the water I wonder if these elections have come too soon for the ‘insurgent’ parties in Ireland. I just hope that the Irish Freedom Party, Aontú, and assorted dissidents, don’t queer each other’s pitch.

Ireland will see two referendums on March 8. The legislation proposed on – family, gender and care – could also make immigration easier. Increasing opposition to the Globalist’s open borders agenda is why the establishment is getting worried.

∼

The Big One in terms of elections will of course be the US presidential election on November 5. And at first sight, it seems easy to call.

Because every poll predicts a Trump victory . . . which means it’s only a matter of time before some Soros-funded DA finds an unpaid Trump parking fine from 1997 and demands 30 to life in a federal penitentiary.

Understandable desperation, seeing as the Democrats are lumbered with Joe Biden. Who is already showing signs of dementia, and with the truth closing on his crackhead son and the family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.

And then there’s a third party candidate in lifelong Democrat Robert Kennedy Jr, who’s guaranteed to take votes from that party’s supporters concerned by its lurch to the left.

Putting it all together, it’s difficult to see how the Globalists and the US deep state can allow a fair and open election. But how far would they go to stop it?

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WALES

Few countries have surrendered more completely to the Globalist agenda than Wales. There are two possible reasons for this.

Either, our political class and those in public life, really believe in man-made climate change that can be cured by covering Wales in wind farms and killing all the cows.

Or . . .

They know it’s all bullshit but go along with it because doing so allows them to pleasure themselves by satisfying their authoritarian natures.

Neither possibility does them any favours.

You know me, I’ve been a nationalist all my life. Not a devolutionist, and not a federalist. I want my people to have full and unfettered control over our country.

But true independence is impossible until the Globalist threat is lifted. To achieve independence, and then blindly follow the Globalist agenda, would destroy Wales.

Consequently, I believe independence must be put aside for the moment. Especially when so many of those pushing for it have clearly sold out to Globalism.

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CONCLUSION

After all that, why am I still optimistic?

First, because the mainstream media has lost its authority. Even weather forecasts are now ridiculed for their bias. More and more people turn to other sources. With the Globalists’ lies questioned, the mask slips. Openly talking of censorship is proof of that.

Despite the Globalists still controlling the political class in too many lands, we’ve seen hopeful signs lately in a number of countries, most recently, in Argentina. So spread the word, and keep campaigning against these traitorous bastards.

It’s becoming clearer how the Quisling Left fits into the bigger picture, so let’s expose these parasites – many funded with your money – for what they are. Make people see how unhinged, anti-Western, and repulsive, modern socialism has become. (However much lipstick is smeared on Comrade Pig.)

I still expect things to get worse before they get better. But keep going, for it’s always darkest just before the dawn!

♦ end ♦

General Election 2019

On 16/12/201911/01/2020 By JacIn Brexit, Cardiff Bay, Devolution, Ireland, Plaid Cymru, Public Funding, Scotland, Welsh Labour191 Comments

PLEASE APPRECIATE THAT I GET SENT MORE INFORMATION AND LEADS THAN I CAN USE. I TRY TO RESPOND TO EVERYONE WHO CONTACTS ME BUT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE EVERY BIT OF INFORMATION I’M SENT. DIOLCH YN FAWR

♦

Well, what an election that was, for all sorts of reasons. I shall start this analysis with a quick look around the other countries before homing in on Wales.

◊

NORTHERN IRELAND

If we are to believe the BBC then the results were bad for both major parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin. Certainly SF lost Foyle (Derry) but it was to the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party. To compensate, the party won North Belfast, where Belfast Lord Mayor John Finucane triumphed.

John Finucane was just a lad in 1989 when Loyalist assassins burst into the family home and killed his solicitor father, Pat. Loyalist killers controlled by MI5.

Yes, votes for both Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party were down but it was the DUP that lost (in total) two seats, not SF. The cross-community Alliance Party won North Down, and in addition to Foyle the SDLP won Belfast South.

For someone who remembers the Troubles – and even the time before the Troubles – it’s quite amazing how politics has changed in the Six Counties.

Until the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley formed the DUP in 1971 the Ulster Unionist Party dominated the political scene, and it wasn’t until 2004 that the DUP became the largest Unionist party in terms of seats at Stormont and in Westminster. Now the UUP has no MPs and got just 11.7% of the vote last week, but even that was an improvement of 1.4% on 2017.

On the other side, the similarly hegemonic SDLP has been eclipsed by a party that until quite recently was dismissed by the British media as the mouthpiece of the IRA. I can recall when we weren’t allowed to actually hear SF spokespersons – we could see them, and see their lips move, but the words had to be spoken by actors!

That was one of the more bizarre episodes in British broadcasting history. If we were allowed to hear what they said but not them say it, then I can only conclude that we were being protected from the harsh Ulster accent.

Northern Ireland, with more Republican/Nationalist MPs than Unionist MPs, plus one MP representing a party that is neutral on the border, and with Brexit thrown into the mix, is probably moving towards a referendum on Irish reunification.

For this debate is no longer framed by tribal loyalties. The old Protestant-Unionist objections to unifying with a poor, ‘priest-ridden’ country to the south are gone. The Republic today is both more liberal and richer than the North. What’s more, it’s in the EU, and Northern Ireland voted to Remain.

In any future referendum it will not just be Republicans and Nationalists voting for reunification, it will also be members of the Protestant middle class, business people and, especially, the young.

◊

SCOTLAND

The headline result is of course that the SNP ‘won’ the election with 48 out of Scotland’s 59 seats. Though as we know, Boris Johnson has already refused to allow a second independence referendum, so how might events unfold?

Some suggest that the Tory government in London should play the SNP like a fish, paying out a little line (concessions), then reeling in (refusal) . . . until its energy is exhausted and it can be ‘landed’ (accepts no referendum).

Basically, faffing about in the kind of way that would suit Johnson perfectly.

An interesting metaphor that ignores too many unavoidable pitfalls and a number of imponderables.

First, there’s ‘Getting Brexit done’, which served as Johnson’s mantra throughout the recent election campaign. Yet 62% of Scots and every single council area voted against leaving the European Union. That is a fact that cannot be changed – Scotland voted by a large majority to remain in the EU.

Which means that in fulfilling this election pledge he cannot possibly renege on Johnson will further antagonise many Scots. Even some of those who voted Leave but now wish to respect the majority vote.

Then there’s the Scottish parliamentary elections of May 2021. If London proves obstructive and the SNP turns this election into a mandate for independence we could enter a Catalonia-style morass. God knows where that might lead.

Another imponderable is how Labour supporters might vote in a referendum. They’ll be confronted with a choice between independence and Tory rule. Some will choose independence. How many take this option could prove decisive.

Then there are those who voted Leave but want independence, and may have lent their votes to the Tories last week in order to ‘Get Brexit done’. How many of these are there?

Imponderables aside, four fundamental facts are unavoidable:

1/ The SNP has won a massive victory.

2/ Consequently, the Tory government in London has no mandate to rule Scotland.

3/ Scotland voted to remain in the European Union.

4/ Consequently, London has no mandate to take Scotland out of the EU against its will.

Looking beyond the SNP – difficult given how it dominates the scene – we see that once-mighty Labour is reduced to a single seat, Edinburgh South. The Liberal Democrats are holding on to Orkney and Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross in the far north, Edinburgh West and Fife North East.

The last of those is interesting because the SNP held this seat by just two votes, the smallest majority in the House of Commons. This time around the anti-SNP vote piled in behind the Lib Dem again and pushed Wendy Chamberlain over the winning line with a majority of 1,316.

Though the Lib Dem’s UK leader, Jo Swinson, she who had talked of becoming prime minister not so long ago, narrowly lost her Dunbartonshire East seat to the SNP.

Elsewhere, the Tories, who had been shaping up to become the natural home for Unionist votes lost seven seats to bring their total down to six. Given that they now hold large, rural constituencies (especially the three along the border) this means that the map gives a somewhat inflated view of Tory support.

Though it should be remembered that in all six Conservative seats the SNP is second, sometimes just a few hundred votes behind.

Sometimes a party’s share of the vote can tell as much if not more about its overall performance than the number of its MPs. The figures for Scotland make poor reading for Unionists in general and for the new government in London in particular.

‘Getting Brexit done’ may have worked as a slogan in England, and Wales, but it seems to have had the opposite effect in the land that gave us the very word sluagh-ghairm. Which is perfectly understandable given that Scotland voted Remain.

With its separate legal and education systems, with the Kirk, with its banks and different banknotes, Scotland always was a different country. Soon it might be a very different country.

Whatever happens, we can guarantee that the greater the prospect of Scottish independence the dirtier the British state will play. And it certainly played dirty in the 2014 independence referendum campaign. Explained in this remarkable video, London Calling: BBC bias during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

I urge you to set aside an hour of your time over Christmas to watch it. Those you’ll see in the film are not wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, these are people who know the score. On the plus side, the BBC is now so discredited that it could never again play the influential role it played in 2014.

Scotland will soon regain the independence that was surrendered in 1707 by an unrepresentative parliament whose members had been bullied or bribed into supporting the Act of Union.

As Robert Burns put it: Such A Parcel Of Rogues In A Nation.

◊

ENGLAND

Reporting of the election in England was dominated by words like ‘landslide’ and talk of crumbling ‘red walls’. The reality is rather more nuanced, and disturbing for anyone wanting cultural harmony and social cohesion.

The truth is that in England the Conservative share of the vote increased by just 1.7% on 2017. The real story is the collapse of the Labour vote, down 8.0% on 2017. The Liberal Democrats were up 4.6%, the Brexit Party 2.0%, and the Greens 1.2%.

But if we look behind those bare figures we find where and why the Tories did so well. Those areas of the Midlands and the North that voted Leave in June 2016 saw the Tory vote increase substantially, while Remain areas saw the Tory vote go down.

The problem for Labour was that they lost out in both. That’s what happens to ditherers.

The cities remain Labour, especially London; which meant that in the Midlands and the North the cities and conurbations did not collapse with the rest of the ‘red wall’. The West Midlands conurbation remained largely Labour, as did Merseyside, and Manchester, Sheffield, the Leeds-Bradford conurbation, plus Hull, while in the north east – Sedgefield and Blyth Valley not withstanding – Labour holds a swathe of seats from Newcastle upon Tyne North all the way down to Middlesbrough.

It is the smaller towns and cities, the former mining districts, that will be represented by Conservative MPs for the next few years. Without doing an in-depth check it looks to me as if Stoke on Trent was the largest English city to ‘defect’.

So why did Manchester and Birmingham stay Labour while Bury, Scunthorpe, Dewsbury, Wakefield and many similar towns go Conservative? Almost certainly because the major cities of the Midlands and the North share certain features with London that make them more challenging for the Tories.

These features are:

1/ A generally younger population, with many students.

2/ Large immigrant populations plus settled ethnic minority communities.

3/ The presence of a ‘progressive’ middle class.

4/ More diversified economies that have coped with recession better than coalfield areas and towns built on a single industry.

5/ They attract more investment.

Which results in the rich and poor of England linking arms and facing off against those in between. Which is a strange thought, because for the greater part of the twentieth century politics in England split along class lines, a division that pitted Tory-voting shires and suburbs against Labour voting cities and industrial regions.

Going further back, to the nineteenth century, it was the new industrialists and others – through the Liberal Party – that represented the interests of the lower orders against the Oxbridge-educated Establishment of aristocracy, landowners, bankers, Church of England, army, civil service.

But last Thursday we entered a new paradigm. When so many people on the minimum wage are prepared to vote Tory then you know something has changed.

Students of politics will immediately recognise the parallels with the USA, where Donald Trump managed to get support from the richest sectors of US society and some of the poorest. Leaving the Democrats with a minority of the white working class supplemented by ethnic minorities, immigrants, and white liberals.

Brexit may have brought these US divisions into sharper focus in the UK but they would be there even without a debate over EU membership. People in the ‘neglected’ areas might have voted Tory last Thursday even without Brexit.

I say that because another reason they voted Conservative was because Labour, the party they once regarded as theirs, has drifted away, hijacked by the hard left, the detested metropolitan elite, and others who look down on them and regard their patriotism with revulsion.

Remember this from the Rochester by-election in 2014? Thornberry is back, and now one of the leading contenders to succeed Corbyn. Click to enlarge

As Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North American editor put it in this article (which is well worth reading): ‘Labour in the UK lost the working class, but gained the woke. And that will give the party sleepless nights over the coming months and years.’

Labour lost the election because it has alienated too many of the patriotic white working class. An as yet unquantifiable percentage of which might be mopped up by whatever party Nigel Farage comes up with next.

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WALES

Let’s be brutally frank, there were just two things that saved ‘Welsh’ Labour from a worse kicking last Thursday.

The first was the terror felt by too many in the region twixt Blaenafon and Kidwelly at the prospect of rotating grandparents in the graveyards of Salem, Jerusalem, and yea! even Caersalem.

The second was the absolute fucking uselessness of Plaid Cymru. Because if Jon Sopel is right, about the Labour Party in England, then here in Wales the woke have become Plaid Cymru.

Yes, I know, Plaid held its four seats . . . and failed to come second in any of the other seats it contested. Leaving Plaid Cymru in serious danger of becoming a regional party within a small country, representing a constituency that is rural and largely Welsh speaking in an urbanised and largely anglophone country. Now there’s a party with a future!

Though, in fairness, Plaid Cymru has tried to break away from the ‘rural, Welsh-speaking’ strait-jacket. Unfortunately, rather than appealing to patriotic English speakers in the cities and towns the party allowed (encouraged?) the takeover by socialists who tar any critic with the ‘fascist’ brush, and those who insist that anyone who doesn’t accept a man with a penis as a woman is a ‘transphobe’.

Pick the bones out of that. Click to enlarge

Then, before the election, Plaid’s strategists (don’t laugh!) decided that it would be a splendid idea to go into a Remainer pact in a few seats with the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party of Englandandwales. In a country that voted Leave!!

This is why, last Thursday, when presented with the open goal of a Labour Party in chaos, a Conservative Party made untouchable by the fear of spinning sounds from the local boneyard, and the Lib Dems led by a delusional woman, Plaid Cymru’s vote actually fell, in real and percentage terms!

The only consolation is that Plaid Cymru is probably finished. No party with such limited appeal, making such disastrous decisions, is entitled to any future. What’s worse, in Plaid’s four seats the party’s supporters are social conservatives of the kind despised by those who now control the party. How long can this misalliance last?

Maybe it would be best for Plaid Cymru to drop the pretence that it’s a mainstream party and rebrand itself as the loony left party it has become. This would allow the emergence of another national party on the right to represent the ‘fascists’ and the ‘transphobes’, the patriots and those who’d like to build up an indigenous economy rather than rely on a begging-bowl variant of devolution.

At heart, Plaid Cymru is a Devo Max party securing the maximum number of careers, sinecures, peerages, etc., for those it represents, within the colonial system. Which means having enough power to indulge its lunacies without the responsibility of having to fund any of it.

Here we have a woman whose party has just had a truly dismal election congratulating winning candidates from other parties – just because they’re women! Click to enlarge

But things are not looking too good for this model of devolution at the moment. For a start, Labour is in deep and serious trouble on a UK level and this might extend to the 2021 Assembly elections, with Plaid Cymru in no position to keep the gravy train on the tracks.

Who’s to say the Tories won’t win an outright majority in 2021?

Worse, Plaid Cymru’s obvious weaknesses coupled with Labour’s self-destruction might encourage the new Conservative government to undermine or do away entirely with devolution.

At the very least, London could take more control over funding. An article by Martin Shipton dealt with this possibility in Saturday’s Llais y Sais. Here’s a link to the WalesOnline version, with a clip from it below.

Now picture the scene . . . Boris Johnson rocks up in Swansea (or it could be Wrexham, Merthyr, Blaenau Ffestiniog or Pembroke) and says, ‘Now listen chaps, I can see that with this bally devolution most of the moolah stays in Cardiff, and that’s jolly unfair. In future, the Bozmeister will dish out the goodies himself – and I guarantee that it will be fair shares for all!’

This will of course result in demonstrations in all corners of the land defending the status quo, demanding that the money be given to the ‘Welsh Government’ . . . for it to divert into the poverty racket (third sector, to you). I foresee hastily-scribbled placards being borne aloft insisting that even spads and lobbyists have to eat.

Yes, I’m joking.

But it won’t be BoJo undermining devolution. Labour and Plaid Cymru, plus their parasite friends down Corruption Bay and elsewhere, have already done the job for him, to the point where few would put up much of a fight if the Tories tried to do away with devolution altogether.

Devolution has been an abysmal failure because nobody wanted to make it work for anyone but themselves. Nobody in London or Cardiff.

◊

CONCLUSION

I have chosen to look at all the countries of the United Kingdom because while the Tories’ campaign was all about getting Brexit done, everyone knows that achieving that objective will jeopardise the unity of the state.

I have argued since the EU referendum in 2016 that Brexit and the chaos it could unleash, the knock-on effects in Scotland and Ireland, would offer great advantages to Wales if we only had the sense and the determination to seize them.

But for Wales to capitalise on these opportunities we need politicians, and political parties or movements that want Wales to be a country that benefits the Welsh, rather than a haven for retirees, refugees, colonists, third sector parasites and ‘investors’ looking for easy money.

But I’m deeply pessimistic; for this election suggests that Wales will be in no position to take advantage of the opportunities coming our way. We shall just drift towards assimilation.

♦ end ♦

Jac o' the North

Tag: Woke

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