I AM WRITING this on Saturday morning, so by the time you read it on Sunday I may have been disproved on my first take from the council elections. But I doubt it. The country continues to fracture, Labour has lost its last vestige of credibility and Starmer the Shameless is going nowhere. His socio- or psycho- pathology should be the study of psychologists. So too should the cowardice of his cabinet colleagues. One thing you can say for the Tories is that they do know how to wield the knife.
Behind Starmer’s blank, expressionless face, my guess is that he knows that Labour’s rout at the hands of Reform is less of an earthquake than it looks. The splintered map of Great Britain disguises his greatest asset: the non-vote. A 35 to 45 per cent turnout was even less than the General Election vote that brought him to power.
That’s just one of the reasons why Farage needs to manage his moment and the public’s expectations. He needs to make people aware of the realities of centrally controlled and financially dependent local government. Look at the own goal of Reform-run Kent County Council’s collapse into chaos (or growing pains, depending on which newspaper report you read) when he didn’t.
Yes, the results are a political weathervane moment. And who would deny Farage, the undoubted politician of the century, another moment of triumph? But as with Brexit, prolonging that moment into lasting and real change (which with Brexit he chose to back off) is by far the more challenging task.
He can’t say it enough. Rayner’s promised ‘Devolution’ and planned structural ‘reform’ will just make matters more confused, local councils remaining constrained and controlled by central government financially and legislatively in what they can do. Think Epping and the housing of illegal migrants, the most contentious of areas. The council was defeated in the courts. Until a radical new government is installed at Westminster with a sufficient majority to repeal legislation and or to introduce referenda as a local government democratic principle, it’s hard to see anything in the offing other than more frustration and fury from feeling let down.
The 2,000-plus newly installed councillors have their hands tied. No more can they say ‘we are going to get rid of all costly and wasteful DEI requirements’ than they can discriminate about who they house and provide social care for. Especially not when they are reliant on ‘Exceptional Financial Support’ from central government to avoid bankruptcy.
On top of that, some will be in post for only a couple of years. Many have no experience and many will find themselves in councils or authorities where there is no one party majority. Arguing the toss, trying to make deals, giving more power to the in-situ local officials is my guess for their tenure.
If Mr Farage wants to make change effective in the long term, he has to reconsider his principled view against mandatory voting. And risk the possibility that everyone who stayed at home last Thursday was a potentially rabid Green voter or a lazy Labour voter. He can already discount the Tories.
And then face the fact of the still hidden protest vote that won’t get out of bed for Reform UK which they see, as Mark Steyn put it in his inimitable way, as the ‘Uniparty’s latest Faragian Islamo-Tory iteration’. But they may stir their stumps for an invigorated Restore Britain or Advance UK – like those millions who’ll head to London for Tommy Robinson’s next Unite the Kingdom rally a week on Saturday.
The bottom line, as Danny Lockwood exhorted us last week, is the ballot box. It is our only weapon. Just how urgent it is Danny explained in his second article of the week. Research into most active voter demographic, he reported, confirmed his own long-term observations of his stamping ground around Dewsbury. They ar under thirty year old Muslims. This is the most radicalised section of the population – whose help from the vote-buying Greens they may not need much longer. A point picked up by Mark Steyn from a Colin Brazier prediction which turned out to be right on the money.
‘Muslim Independents,’ Colin tweeted, are ‘projected to win more than 200 council wards. For future historians these elections may be a punctuation mark in our island story, after which the politics of mainland England more closely resemble the sectarian voting of Northern Ireland.’
They won 204 seats.* What ‘progression’ is that likely to translate into at the next General Election?
This needn’t be a one-way show. Ben Habib’s congratulatory tweet to Rupert Lowe underlined what can be achieved by a committed on-the-ground effort. Restore UK won all the Yarmouth area’s ten seats on a higher rather than lower 46 per cent turnout.
It needs to be more. The people most activated to vote, however, were people unlike Jacob Rees-Mogg, who have no desire at all to sleepwalk into the jaws of sharia. They are too close to it. The very highest turnouts of the country were in the ‘white flight’ (for those who can afford it), ‘Christian’ wards of Bradford Metropolitan District Council:
Ilkley 63 per cent
Wharfedale 57 per cent
Bingley East 54 per cent
Baildon 51 per cent
Shipley 50 per cent
Airedale 50 per cent
Enclaves in an area where the overall white population has shrunk from 94 per cent in 1970s to 57 per cent in 2021, and no even doubt further in the last five years.
Nigel might worry that Reform UK took only one seat here, if my AI research was telling the truth. Just one. Why? Answers please.
Tremors are shaking Australia too this weekend. Like the UK, not quite an earthquake, but if the Farrer by-election yesterday delivers Pauline Hanson her moment that I predicted last week and gains her first One Nation seat in the Lower House, she will be breaking a political glass ceiling. Like Farage, she is riding high in the polls, though she takes far fewer prisoners. Both have the merit of vocally opposing covid lockdowns.
It’s in Australia that the criminality of pushing covid vaccines is being brought to court. The good news I heard last week is that this landmark legal case on which Roger Cook reported for TCW a few weeks ago is progressing. The Queensland Government has not been able to dismiss it.
An incident midweek reminded me once again that enlightenment remains a long way off, and that the certitude of the progressive left remains firmly entrenched. I was having a drink with some old media colleagues when the ‘right-wing granny’ (yours truly) that Liz Hodgkinson wrote about found herself up against it, again. My views on lockdown and vaccine policy caused raised eyebrows. But they saved millions of lives, one gasped. No, I said. The covid (infections) graph had already peaked before lockdown could have taken effect. Well of course, the response bounced back, lockdown should have started earlier. And shouldn’t you wait until Hallett completes her report before you make judgment? None asked me why I disagreed. They never do.
Something that President Trump nailed last week when he ripped into the media coverage of lefty Bill Maher’s interview with Governor of California Gavin Newsom.
Yes, it did raise the broader question of messaging and accountability. The cliff face that we on the dissident right are up against is not just that the left progressive world view dominates the MSM – that’s bad enough – but that even its so-called centre-right outlets amplify leftist and extreme voices. Never voices that represent you and me and the millions of others! Just take the amount of airtime given to the disquieting neo-fascist Zack Polanski.
That’s why, on a positive note to end with, I am amplifying a US perspective and analysis of the war on Iran through the person of an incredibly well-informed US attorney, Clayton Wood. Thanks to a ‘heads up’ from TCW writer John Le Sueur, Clayton’s reports have proved an education for me, and I hope you too. Anyone who missed them should check them out here.
*UPDATE
Muslim-first local politics is here to stay, Emma Schubart, author of the report Danny Lockwood wrote about, has told the Telegraph. She has identified at least 257 victorious councillors as ‘Muslim sectarians’ – that is ‘an individual whose public, politically salient behaviour made repeated reference to Muslim transnational grievances – talking about Kashmir, Gaza or Tehran. Signing a Palestine solidarity pledge was not enough’.
