Category: UK politics

The Steeple Times considers UK politics

The Gavinator vs. The Clown

Nikolay Kalinin contrasts ‘The Gavinator’ Gavin Newsom’s reopening of California with Boris Johnson’s still closed Britain and slams the latter for allowing the Indian variant to spread

Weeks after letting the Indian variant of COVID-19 – now dubbed the Delta variant – to get past the borders despite supposedly cutting off all communications with India, Boris Johnson has been forced to delay ‘Freedom Day’ to 19^th July. Once again, ‘Bosie The Clown’ was too late to close the borders in time.

The nation’s finest gammons have responded to the news in a fashion that can only be described as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” with GB News’ fruitcake Dan Wootton stating: “Those who know continued lockdowns are wrong have a duty to speak up,” while washed-up actor Laurence Fox and local weather loony Piers Corbyn predictably participated in yet another anti-lockdown protest.

Elsewhere, the state of California, which for the past 15 months has been battered by the pandemic, has fully reopened its economy, lifting measures such as social distancing, although large events such as sports will still be restricted. In addition to that, vaccinated Californians can go to most places without a face covering. I really hate to say it, but Americans led by ‘The Gavinator,’ Governor Gavin Newsom, have done something incredibly genius in a while.

The UK government meanwhile, aims to offer a vaccine to people over the age of 18 by the end of the week, in order to achieve the target of the entire British adult population receiving a first dose of the vaccine.

What’s surprising is that even though more people have been vaccinated in the UK than in California, yet more and more people in the UK are getting hospitalised. Much of this has to do with the Delta variant, which the government has foolishly allowed in and which has reduced the efficiency of the vaccines; for example, protection of AstraZeneca has fallen from 73% for the Alpha variant to 60% for the Delta variant.

The delay has also resulted in the government once again considering the implementation of vaccine passports for large events such as sports matches. Personally, I don’t think it’s a risk worth taking because of the reduced vaccine efficiency – meaning that once again the safest option is sadly to extend restrictions.

Let’s put this simply: All this comes because of the stupidity of nepotistic Prime Minister Johnson and misinformation spreaders like Fox and Corbyn and it is jolly well time they realised the errors of their ways and saw sense.

On Tuesday, Gavin Newsom shared California’s good news on Twitter. He remarked: “40 million vaccines. One of the lowest COVID rates in the country. California is BACK and fully reopen!” Earlier, he went further in sharing: “It’s reopening day. We’ve administered over 40 million vaccines. Now… No more social distancing. No more capacity limits. No more colors or county tiers. And if you’re vaccinated – no more masks. It’s a good day.” Shouldn’t Britain learn from this?

Ludicrously in May, the BBC reported that an Indian couple “chartered a plan and held a mid-air wedding with more than 160 guests in an effort to escape coronavirus restrictions.” Meanwhile in April, ‘The Times of India’ reported: “India’s super-rich paid tens of thousands of pounds to get to Britain by private jets ahead of the Covid-hit country being added to the UK’s travel red list even as some charter flights arranged for others were denied landing permits. The website FlightAware show that eight private jets – which would have cost £70,000 each (around Rs 72 lakh) upwards to charter – arrived from India at London Luton airport in the 24 hours before the travel restrictions kicked in at 8.30am IST on Friday. Four of these arrived from Mumbai, three from Delhi and one from Ahmedabad.”

Yesterday in the House of Commons, Sir Keir Starmer quite rightly slammed Boris Johnson for failing to prevent the Delta variant from reaching the UK from India.

The Indian/Delta Variant Timeline…

– 1^st April – Ministers told about the new strain.

– 2^nd April – Pakistan and Bangladesh added to the red list, but not India.

– 15^th April – Public told of this.

– 16 April – Prime Minister’s India trip still on.

– 19^th April – Prime Minister’s trip cancelled and India added to red list.

– 23^rd April – Ban finally kicks in.

The 3-week delay brought 20,000 passengers from India into the UK.

In response, Boris Johnson remarked: “We did all we could.”

June 17, 2021
Anything But GB News

Nikolay Kalinin watched GB News’ launch night and found it to be anything but “doing the news differently”

GB News is finally here and I have to admit it’s not as much of a hub of “fruitcakes and looneys and closet racists” as present on Fox News. It surprisingly has a large diversity in terms of the racial origins of its presenters, but some on the channel, such as Neil Oliver – who will be analysing “what it means to be British” – make me concerned, as a few days ago he made the unfortunate decision to deliver a bunch of tosh about coronavirus lockdowns being utterly unneeded.

In an interview with the newspaper The Herald, Oliver stated: “I think it is the biggest single mistake in world history and I’m just horrified by the damage that has been done. People who have had no support, no help, lost businesses, lost livelihoods and all the rest of it.”

In a tone that sounds hilariously dystopian, Oliver claimed that people come up to him on the streets and “lower their voices, because they want to say that they think things are wrong.”

The channel’s lack of awareness can also evidenced in the fact that chairman Andrew Neil has delivered a ridiculous message that GB News is a channel that it proud to be British, despite the fact that most of its backers are from abroad. Neil has also mentioned that GB News aims to cover the “people’s agenda,” which sounds like something that Nigel Farge would say if he launched his own TV channel.

During the introductory broadcast, Neil also stated that the channel aims to provide debate, and don’t get me wrong, I believe in the principle of debate, because without debate we cannot come to an understanding and work together in order to improve society. The idea of allowing presenters to have their own opinions is also fine by me, because if that principle was not allowed on British television, we wouldn’t have amazing shows such as Top Gear and Mock the Week.

During the introductory broadcast, Neil also mentioned that GB News will aim to not solely look at Westminster, but also analyse how the government’s decisions influence Britain’s communities, which is important if the people want to feel represented and avoid putting their trust the likes of Reform UK’s Richard Tice.

However, the problem is that there are lots of people – especially people like Neil Oliver – who don’t want debate and rather seek to divide. This became evident on GB News’ opening night when Neil asked Oliver about how he feels oppressed in Scotland for identifying with the British identity. He did not offer an alternative view in his line of questioning.

It’s concerning to me that GB News will be a safe haven for the likes of Oliver to give the likes of Laurence Fox and Darren Grimes a platform to spread their harmful messages. This is especially evidenced by the fact that a large amount of people on the channel’s roster are ‘beyond-right-wing’ – such as ex-Guido Fawkes contributor and ‘condom campaigner’ Tom Harwood, ex-Brexit Party MEP Alex Phillips and ex-Brexit Party candidate Michelle Dewberry.

The introductory broadcast has given us hints that this is exactly what is going to happen. During Dan Wootton’s interview with Nigel Farage, for example, the ex-politician described Black Lives Matters as a “Marxist organisation… that wants to bring down Western civilisation,” yet the host didn’t bother to even question this suggestion. How is this providing debate and how is this impartial coverage?

Still, GB News has only been just launched, so we cannot tell fully if this is going to be the British Fox News that no one asked for, or if it’s actually going to offer an alternative and revolutionary coverage of news. Let’s wait and see how the whole operation proceeds, and then let’s make our judgement. After all, cancel culture is not really effective and for the most part, it’s pretty daft.

Mic Wright, the man behind ‘Conquest of the Useless,’ observed: “Live from the Pratcave: GB News is Britain’s least-silenced people saying ‘unsayable’ things they’ve said before.”

Elsewhere in ‘The Guardian,’ Stuart Jefferies reviewed the launch night of the channel and gave it just one out of five stars. He observed: “The ‘anti-woke’ news channel had Andrew Neil and Alan Sugar, but no Piers Morgan – and the opening night felt like the furthest thing from appointment TV imaginable. I give it a year.”

June 14, 2021
The Students, The Portrait and The Outrage

Nikolay Kalinin shares his thoughts on Magdalen College removing a portrait of the Queen

At the postgraduate Magdalen College in Oxford, the students voted to remove a print of the Queen that was hung up in their Common Room in 2013, justifying their decision by stating that the figure represents “recent colonial history,” with one student saying that “patriotism and colonialism are not really separable”.

This move comes out after a YouGov poll that concluded that more young people support abolishing the monarchy, as well as an expose by the Guardian revealing that Buckingham Palace banned members of ethnic minorities from working in office roles.

The removal of the picture has prompted instant backlash, with education secretary Gavin Williamson calling the decision “simply absurd,” while Piers Morgan wrote: “Can we vote to have Monarch-ordered Tower of London imprisonment powers restored for these insolent wastrels?”.

The president of Magdalen College, barrister Dinah Rose, stated that although the students “don’t represent the College,” the decision to take down the image was “their own to take, not the college’s,” and reaffirmed that “Magdalen strongly supports free speech and political debate, and the MCR’S right to autonomy.”

It seems ironic how people like Gavin Williamson supported a “university free speech bill” a month ago, but now are condemning the decision of the students to use that power of freedom of speech to take down a print through democratic means to a vote. This truly shows that to them freedom of speech is fine as long as it supports their own ideology.

Regarding the ideology behind the removal, I do not agree with the statement that patriotism is inseparable from colonialism, because you can still love Britain and condemn its colonial past. However, I do understand where the students come from, since the monarch was the head of the British empire, and therefore seen as responsible for some of its worst atrocities such as the Amritsar massacre.

Overall, I don’t necessarily agree with “cancelling” the Queen, but I do think that there should be more debate about Britain’s colonial past, how we should deal with it and what the monarchy means to this country nowadays.

The print of the Queen removed as part of Magdalen College students’ decision to invoke what some condemn as “cancel culture.”

June 10, 2021
Cornish Chaos G7

Nikolay Kalinin slams the disregard of the British government for the poor people of Cornwall as the G7 approaches

As the G7 summit approaches, hotels in Cornwall are cruelly evicting vulnerable homeless people in order to make room for members of the police and government officials attending the summit.

According to a report by the Cornwall council, around 130 homeless people were forced to leave hotels in order to make room for 5,000 policemen in recent days. Some of them were moved to other temporary accommodation, only to be evicted once again.

One of the people evicted, who has schizophrenia, was forced to stay at a surf hostel. Her mother, Claire, who did not want her full name used, described the horrific conditions there: “The hostel is full of drunk surf dudes and holidaymakers. She is terrified – she thinks people are coming to get her. They have not even put in her a safe place. She has been treated abysmally.”

Going further, the distraught mother quite justifiably added: “What gives them the right to force vulnerable adults out of their accommodation?”

Local charity DISC Newquay has also reported that homeless people have been evicted from the luxury Carbis Bay Hotel, which sparked fury back in March for pulling down ancient woodland in order to make wave for redevelopment, despite being supposedly “eco-friendly” accommodation.

What these incidents show is a complete disregard for human wellbeing; what was the reasoning behind throwing homeless people out of hotels where it is safer for them to stay? There are around 1,343 hotels in Cornwall, meaning that there HAS to be enough room for members of police and government.

This is not the only problem currently plaguing the summit, as over the last couple of days, environmental activists have organised a series of protests in Cornwall, with one featuring protesters in Boris Johnson masks pushing a burning boat into the water with “YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE” written on it in order to convince the delegates to tackle ocean pollution.

In addition, 80 activists have set off on a 6-day walk from Plymouth Hoe to Carbis Bay in an attempt to convince the delegates to prioritise climate change agenda during the summit, with some of them from the Extinction Rebellion.

I also see very little point in the existence of the Group of Seven, because they seem to meet every year or so and yet achieve very little in terms of global policy. It’s been eons since they pledged to tackle climate change, and yet corporations are still pumping oil and contributing the global warming. The EU has done more to tackle climate change, and its existence in my opinion is more beneficial than the existence of the sockless G7.

Pictured above: The Carbis Bay Hotel – a supposedly ‘eco-friendly’ venue that will host the Group of Seven meeting that has also taken to disgracefully chopping down trees to make way for a parade of pointless politicians.

The Carbis Bay Hotel has quite rightly been targeted by protestors determined to show it as anything but ‘eco friendly’ and anything but supportive of its very own locals. That this business, to suit the short-term visit of a bunch of egomaniac politicians, has shut out locals and destroyed trees for a set of rooms that haven’t even got proper planning permission is utterly disgraceful. The Carbis Bay Hotel deserves nothing but the grief that it is quite deservedly getting.

‘The Convenient Catholic Couple’ Mr and Mrs Boris Johnson will use the G7 summit as the first opportunity of their union to laud it over the world. This shameless puppet mistress and her sidekick will most likely find a way to embarrass Britain only further.

June 8, 2021
Batty Fox

Nikolay Kalinin analyses Laurence Fox’s decision to pull out of the Batley and Spen by-election and suggests this batty man’s days in politics are nearly numbered

As if Labour hasn’t had enough losses this year despite numerous revelations regarding the Conservative government’s utter incompetence, their retention of control over the Batley and Spen constituency is under serious jeopardy.

One of the reasons for this – you may be surprised – is the withdrawal of Reclaim Party candidate and leader Laurence Fox and independent candidate Paul Halloran from the contest, which they justified by saying: “We cannot in good conscience stand and risk splitting the vote and condemning Batley and Spen to any more years of Labour control.”

Fox also mentioned in his statement that a major reason for his decision to withdraw is the events at the Batley Grammar School, where a teacher was suspended and received death threats after showing a cartoon of Muhammed from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which Fox called “a blight on our free, tolerant, fair and democratic society.”

Nevertheless, Fox also mentioned in his statement that he would be inviting both Conservative and Labour candidates to a meeting with the citizens of the constituency “very soon to discuss tolerance in the UK.”

It’s very hard to understand how Reclaim could have split the vote had it stood in the election, but most likely they would have successfully capitalised on the grammar school incident. They would have probably have painted it as an oppression of freedom of speech, thereby convincing more right-wing people to vote and preventing the Conservatives from winning the seat.

One thing we can conclude from this episode however is that Fox is not intending to go anywhere anytime soon. Even though this loony was humiliated by YouTuber Niko Omilana at the recent London mayoral elections, he is showing great determination to make his party successful.

Still, we have to keep in mind that much of the reason why Reclaim is known by many people is because of Fox’s utter insanity and because the very, very wealthy financier Jeremy Hosking is strangely not yet tired of funding his operation. The people will eventually move on to better politicians, and Hosking will realise that his large investments into Fox’s party of clowns has not proved beneficial. All in all, the days of Laurence Fox’s political career are quite deservedly numbered.

Yesterday, seeking yet more attention, 43-year-old Laurence Fox took to Twitter to condemn the England squad as “millionaire woke babies” for taking the knee. He continued by suggesting he hopes England will lose in the first round of the Euros and added: “I’m embarrassed to be British.”

In spite of wasting a huge amount of Jeremy Hosking’s money – said to be upto £5 million – Laurence Fox’s 2021 London mayoral election campaign was an utter disaster. He won 47,634 votes, achieved just 1.9% of the vote and thus effectively spent £104.97 for every vote the Reclaim Party received. As a result, Fox lost his £10,000 deposit paid to London Elects, the Greater London Authority team responsible for organising the election of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly as he failed to achieve the 5% of votes or higher required to retain the deposit. The public, however, may now find themselves in a worse situation – Laurence Fox might return to making awful music condemned as “more Chelsea Travelodge than Chelsea Hotel.” Of it, in January 2020, the ‘Guardian’s’ Michael Hann observed: “Laurence Fox’s music doesn’t sound as if it had to exist. It sounds as if it exists because he had the wherewithal to make it, and because his name meant there would always be people willing to give it a plug. The very definition of privilege, really.”

Aside from being the co-founder of Marathon Asset Management, University of Cambridge educated Jeremy Hosking is a shareholder in Crystal Palace F. C. as well as the owner of the Gravetye Manor hotel in Sussex. He previously funded the Conservative Party, Vote Leave and the Brexit Party prior to becoming financially involved with Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party.

In September 2020, ‘The Steeple Times’ suggested Laurence Fox had “morphed from a much loved tellybox treasure into a tedious twerp.” In the time since, he’s got even worse.

June 7, 2021
Deranged Dom & Bashful BoJo’s Rotten Regime

Nikolay Kalinin concludes that both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson’s rotten regime come out of this week disgraced

Dominic Cummings’ questioning at the COVID select committee has undoubtedly provoked a tsunami of responses. Cummings branded the PM he once advised as “unfit for job” and condemned Matt Hancock by saying that he “should have been fired for at least 15, 20 things, including lying to everybody on multiple occasions.”

Cummings claimed during questioning that Hancock lied about people getting treatment during the summer and stated: “We were told explicitly people did not get the treatment they deserved, many people were left to die in horrific circumstances.”

Not only that, but Cummings also stated that Johnson did indeed say that he would rather “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” that enforce another lockdown. If true, this demonstrates that the Prime Minister is absolutely not fit to rule a country whose people he has put in peril as a result of his continued incompetence.

There is no denying that the response of government officials to Cummings’ accusations has been plainly childish, including the response of Liz Truss, who stated that she “hasn’t had time to look at it yet” but also then stated: “I’m not going to engage with the false claims that are being made today.”

Meanwhile, Peter Kyle, Labour MP for Hove has decided to try to kill two birds with one stone by releasing a PMQ video from 25th March 2020 where he told the PM about the lack of COVID tests available in his constituency and how long it took to deliver them, captioning it with the words “They knew. THEY KNEW!”

Not only has Cummings’ dropped a bomb on the government but on ‘Costly Carrie’ too. In stating that his resignation from the role of Chief Adviser was linked “to the fact that the prime minister’s girlfriend was trying to change a whole bunch of different appointments at Number 10 and appoint her friends to particular jobs” – which sounds like a totally legitimate claim, especially considering how desperate ‘BoJo’ was to defend Carrie’s friend Henry Newman who got exposed as the man who leaked info about a second lockdown.

A YouGov poll conducted after the questioning concluded that although 55% of people do not trust Boris Johnson and how he has painted the government’s handling of the pandemic, a whopping 75% do not trust Cummings’ claims. This is not surprising considering the fact that he was responsible for the deceptive propaganda of Vote Leave and its “£350 million for NHS” claim.

Another poll conducted by Survation has concluded that even after Cummings’ revelations, the Conservatives extended their lead over Labour by 11 points, which is extremely concerning, because this shows that more people would rather trust the words of a man who throughout this pandemic has demonstrated barely any decent leadership and whose utter idiocy has destroyed the lives of many.

Not only that, but this poll shows that the people of Britain seem more likely to support a man whose fiancé wants to undermine the democratic process on which this country stands on and replace it with a rotten regime and controlled cronyism.

It truly feels as if most of Britain’s population are in the ‘Cult of BoJo’ and cannot stop ignoring all the terrible things he and his lackeys have done. If this is the kind of country that we are destined to live in for the next few years, then I’d argue that we are truly doomed.

Dominic Cummings’ grilling this week told the public what they already knew about Boris Johnson’s rotten regime.

Boris Johnson comes out of this sorry saga looking more and more like a puppet and one formerly controlled by Cummings and now most definitely in the clutches of his latest ‘baby mama,’ Carrie Symonds.

The court of Carrie Symonds (pictured with her “chatty rat” bestie Henry Newman) holds more sway than anything else currently in the ear of our laughable, not laudable Prime Minister.

May 28, 2021
Is a Republic on the way?

Nikolay Kalinin analyses the results of a YouGov poll that came out in favour of a republic and elected head of state

Breaking away from the traditionalist views of their predecessors, the youth of today in Britain recently proclaimed support for the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of an elected head of state, a YouGov poll has found.

According to YouGov, which conducted its survey between 2019 and 2021, more than four in ten 18 – 24 year olds surveyed supported removing the monarch and replacing it with an elected representative. Meanwhile, 31% of 18 – 24 year olds were found to still support the monarchy, a 15-point decline from 2019.

Another key headline was that general support for an elected head of state rose over the past two years, from 26% in 2019 to 41% in 2021.

These results come after two years of controversies surrounding the royal family, including Prince Andrew’s juggernaut wreck of an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight regarding his friendship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview on CBS.

Nevertheless, backing for the royal family itself actually remains high – three in five support the Queen and her heirs – especially amongst the older age groups. Seven in ten people between the ages of 50 – 64 were found to still be in favour of the monarchy, whilst of people aged 65 plus, that number rose to 8 out of 10.

The results of this poll to me are not surprising. Many young people don’t like the idea of a monarchy and its disconnect from the rest of the population in general. Many also resent spending millions to sustain their palaces whilst more and more people become homeless in the UK every year.

We also have to remember that the government is planning on spending £200 million of taxpayers’ money – which could have been used to fund the NHS or to build more police stations – on a massive yacht named after the late Duke of Edinburgh. I join those questioning how that yacht will benefit the British public.

To young people, the monarchy is a reminder of an age when society was more backward, and to them there is also no need for a sovereign ruler whose very existence undermines the principle of democracy. Young people are also more likely to be critical of what they see as the cult-like attitude of the media towards the monarchy, even having ‘royal correspondents’ who report on their affairs. To them, it’s all so unnecessary and out of place in the 21st century.

Opposition to the monarchy is not leaderless; the pressure group Republic has risen to prominence in the recent years and currently has around 80,000 supporters in the country. Responding to the poll results, the organisation’s CEO Graham Smith stated: “Support for the monarchy has been sustained by the Queen’s long reign. The automatic succession of King Charles will dramatically alter the debate and public attitudes, putting the monarchy on collision course with modern British values. This latest poll is another reminder of the urgent need for a serious, honest and grown up debate about the future of the monarchy and the democratic alternative.”

Still, just as the Martin Bashir scandal and the intense hatred of the British public for ‘MeGain’ rumbles on, the royal family continues to enjoy popularity amongst the older traditionalist crowd. This comes especially as the Queen herself has reportedly been “deeply upset” by Prince Harry’s comments on his upbringing in a “cycle of suffering,” which he revealed on his new Apple TV+ series with Oprah Winfrey.

Inevitably, however, the older generation is going to die out, and the increasing republican and younger members of society will become more outspoken. There is even a parliamentary petition with almost 7,000 signatures calling for a referendum on the abolition of the monarchy, though it still needs to reach 10,000 signatures before a government response is even orchestrated.

This dissatisfaction with the monarchy can be easily reflected in Nick Abbott’s radio episode on LBC on 21^st May, in which he commented on the negative response to Prince Harry’s comments by stating: “It’s as if though we’re obsessed with time not advancing, and Brexit is a lot like that. We just want to regain some imagined past, some Disneyfication of the nation.”

Will the monarchy survive into the 2030s? Young people don’t seem especially enthusiastic for it if YouGov’s latest poll is to be believed. The scandal of Prince Andrew’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and other unsavoury characters hasn’t helped and nor has the behaviour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, but the Queen remains firmly in the nation’s hearts – that is for sure.

“Replacing the monarchy with a museum” is the desire of some in the UK, but that most certainly is not backed by older British citizens.

In June 2012, ‘The Steeple Times’ featured reader favourite Anton Lorien’s tribute to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. It stands as a testament to the legacy of an esteemed lady whose service to her country is widely believed to have been exemplary.

May 25, 2021
Wisdom From Wales

Nikolay Kalinin delves into Labour’s success in Wales in the recent elections and suggests if the party wants to win nationwide they should pay heed to what went on there

If there’s anything that the Senedd election results can tell us, it is that the Welsh people are amongst the few that have not gone completely crackers and voted for parties that will make their lives worse at this time.

This can be evidenced by the fact that there are now no seats taken by members of UKIP and the Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party, with the former losing all seven of their seats and gaining a miserable 0.8% of the constituency vote and 1.6% of the regional vote. This is an even more shameful result than AWAP, which gained 1.6% of the constituency vote and 3.7% of regional vote.

However, both the Green Party and AWAP had a high chance of winning a regional seat in the South Wales East – where back in 2016 UKIP came second with 17.8% and got 2 out of the 4 regional seats. Nevertheless, both parties fell short by just over 5,000 votes.

The anti-lockdown Reform UK also failed in their goal to “change politics for good,” gaining no seats and once again showing Nigel Farage and Richard Tice that no one cares about their party.

So far, none of the party leaders have said anything about their predicament, meaning that they have truly been defeated in a literal and mental sense, and hopefully they will keep their filthy noses out of Welsh politics for as long as possible.

How was Labour successful? They avoided focusing too much on attacking BoJo and his sleazy Eton pals and ‘Carrie Antoinette,’ and focused instead on positive messaging, even managing to attract the voters who backed UKIP back in 2016.

Welsh Labour’s leadership during the pandemic has also meant that the electorate feels more comfortable with voting for a party which has led the region during one of the biggest public health crises the country has ever seen, with many describing this attraction to the government as “Stockholm syndrome,” which I personally find to be very stupid.

Another conclusion that we can take from the results is that Plaid Cymru’s dreams of a Welsh referendum of independence is going to be very hard to achieve due to the lack of seats they have. They only managed to gain 13 seats, which is only one seat higher than their results in 2016.

The Welsh Labour manifesto has been seen as a big reason why Labour did not gain a majority, since it has been criticised as over-cautious, although looking at it I don’t see anything too tame there. Labour for example wants to keep prescriptions free in the region, open up a new medical school and develop the Young Persons Guarantee that will give everyone under 25 the offer of work, education, training, or self-employment.

Labour’s results in Wales should be a model for Labour as a whole party; there’s some speculation that by 2040, Labour will have enough support for a coalition government, although I don’t see this as possible if Labour keeps going at this rate.

As I previously mentioned in my article about Hartlepool and when I spoke to Nick Abbott on LBC, the reason Labour won in Wales was because they appealed to the former UKIP working-class voters. So, next, it’s time Sir Keir Starmer applied that same tactic nationwide.

Pictured top: First Minister of Wales, The Right Honourable Mark Drakeford.

Wisdom From Wales – Two contrasting leaders, Mark Drakeford and Boris Johnson, who’ve both had remarkable success in the 2021 elections. Labour First Minister Mark Drakeford was returned with an extraordinarily increased majority and polled nearly 50% of the total votes cast in Cardiff West. Labour also took back Rhondda from the former Plaid Cymru leader, Leanne Wood. Of the success of this pair and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland also, ‘Unherd’s’ Freddie Sayers remarked: “One factor that hasn’t been much discussed is that these three characters — Sturgeon, Drakeford and Johnson — have for the past year of pandemic been on the television screens almost every evening precisely calibrating the level of freedom people should expect to enjoy. Sometimes our leaders have been generous, allowing us to have a coffee on a park bench with a friend; at other times, they have been pointlessly capricious, such as when Mark Drakeford insisted that non essential items like birthday cards and books were cordoned off in Welsh supermarkets so that people did not shop unnecessarily.”

May 11, 2021
A Hiding in Hartlepool

Nikolay Kalinin shares his thoughts on Labour’s electoral hiding in Hartlepool

On Friday, came the result that everybody expected: The Labour Party lost the Hartlepool by-election to the Conservatives and for the first time since the constituency was created in 1974, a party other than Labour has the seat.

The outcome is both surprising and not surprising; after all, back in 2016 nearly 70% of Hartlepool voters supported leaving the EU, and the successful COVID-19 vaccine rollout has ensured that the government has the majority of public support. Yet in 2017, the Corbyn led Labour managed to retain the seat, even gaining the majority of the vote, and in the 2019 election Labour retained the seat, even though the party was seen as the biggest opponent of Brexit.

The truth is that there’s no single reason why Labour lost the by-election; Lord Mandelson for example has attributed Labour’s defeat to the “two Cs – Corbyn and COVID,” while casting Brexit as a secondary issue: “Believe it or not, not on one door that I knocked did a single voter mention Brexit to me. The one thing they did raise with me however is Jeremy Corbyn – he is still casting a very dark cloud over Labour,” Mandelson remarked.

Labour’s defeat and Jill Mortimer’s win also lies in the absence of the Brexit Party, now named Reform UK; back in 2019 the party split the vote, gaining 25.8% whereas the Conservatives gained 28.9%, which was instrumental in allowing Labour to win with just 37% of the vote. Had the Brexit Party not run that year, the Conservatives would have definitely won.

The disconnect between Labour and the electorate can be evidenced in Friday’s episode of BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast, where several callers voiced their dissatisfactions with the party; one Conservative voter and small business owner stated that Labour “have taken Hartlepool for granted” and “chose a guy who was a devout Remainer.” Another caller added that Labour “needs to work on actually speaking to the working classes again” and connect with “small business owners, self-employed, Deliveroo drivers” as they “are the new working class.”

The choice of Paul Williams as Labour’s candidate for Hartlepool was also a factor in the party’s undoing in the by-election, since his choice once again evokes a disconnect between Labour and the voters they are trying to appeal to; not only was Williams an MP for another constituency – namely Stockton South – but he also opposed Brexit when most of the voters in his seat voted to leave the EU. You shouldn’t choose a Remainer to represent a Brexiteer constituency, just like you shouldn’t choose Priti Patel as ambassador for a mental health organisation, would be my conclusion.

Even Sir Keir Starmer seems to agree that Labour has been disconnected with the voters, as he reacted to the election results by saying, “Very often we’ve been talking to ourselves, instead of to the country, and we’ve lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool. I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that.”

To a lesser extent another reason for Labour’s defeat is the fact that their previous MP, Mike Hill, was a sexual predator, which makes me wonder: “Why was Stephen Crabb, Conservative MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire, not forced out of his seat considering he was shown to be a degenerate with an unrestrained sexual desire.”

So, what is my overall analysis? Labour’s defeat in Hartlepool and the collapse of an important part of the ‘Red Wall’ was brought on by a wide range of factors, ranging from the time of Corbyn’s leadership, the successful vaccination rollout by the Conservative government, and also the issue over EU, which suggests that Brexit is still a prevalent issue among the British public.

Many would blame Corbyn for where the party is now, and I can agree that he dragged Labour down in 2019, but the truth is that Sir Keir might actually drag them down even further; whereas Corbyn tried to appeal to the “new working class” of young workers – which was essential in getting more young people to vote in 2017 – Starmer has decided to go after the older homeowners who are more likely to vote Conservative.

If Labour wants to regain the seat and have a chance at challenging ‘Bosie The Clown’ and his sleazy Eton friends in 2024, they must connect with their core working-class electorate, no matter whether they voted for Brexit or not. The ‘Wallpapergate’ sleaze scandal seems to have no impact on the government at all, so it’s probably best if Labour now instead dedicates its time to connecting with those that actually could get them elected.

Pictured top: Sir Keir Starmer campaigning in Hartlepool with wannabe MP for the Paul Williams.

A Hiding in Hartlepool 2021 – Jill Mortimer didn’t win over voters in Hartlepool. Labour, in fact, lost them.

May 9, 2021
Word of the Week 2021 – Going to the Polls

Susie Dent shares the fascinating origin of “going to the polls” just as Count Binface looks to get more votes than Laurence Fox in spite of the latter having a ludicrous £5 million campaign pot

With voting underway across the country, “that woman in Dictionary Corner” Susie Dent this morning shared with her 753,000 followers on Twitter the origin of “going to the polls” this morning:

Origin of the day: the ‘poll’ in ‘going to the polls’ originally meant ‘head’, referring to the counting of heads or votes. A ‘noddypoll’ was an incompetent fool, a ‘clod-poll’ a blockhead, and a ‘tadpoll’ (later ‘tadpole’) a ‘toad-head’.

Referencing what a lacklustre bag of bilge Londoners have been offered by the mainstream parties and echoing Nikolay Kalinin’s analysis of Labour’s national multifaceted mess for The Steeple Times yesterday, Inside Croydon declared of the campaign:

“It has been a very long, and very tedious, London election campaign, but for some of the capital’s voters, perhaps bewildered by the multitude of different voting systems employed and vast number of candidates for Mayor or the London Assembly, there has been one bright spot: Count Binface.”

“In elections that were postponed from 2020, among the various races-within-the-race for City Hall, there is a fascination among those who long ago tired of the lies of Tory Shaun Bailey or the deadly dull platitudes of Sadiq Khan (did you know: his father was a London bus driver?), the idea that a geezer with a bin on his head could attract more votes than the spittle-flecked campaign of Laurence Fox has lightened the mood these past couple of weeks.”

“And what’s more, unlike so much of so many of the pointless political campaigns, Binface is actually doing some good, by raising thousands of pounds for homelessness charities.”

Elsewhere on social media yesterday, Count Binface himself shared an amusing video based on Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody asking his followers to make him their first choice today. The Steeple Times’ editor Matthew Steeples duly obliged when he headed to St Columba’s Church of Scotland in Pont Street, SW1 this morning and casted a protest for Max Fosh as his second choice also.

LONDON! Here's my final pitch to be your mayor, and/or the UK's next Eurovision entry. Make me your first choice vote, and together we will crush the loopy candidates. (You know who I mean.) #VoteBinface pic.twitter.com/lZ7BpqE7Qv
— Count Binface (@CountBinface) May 5, 2021

Going to the Polls – Count Binface morphed into Whitney Houston to share his final pitch to be the next Mayor of London “and/or the UK’s next Eurovision entry.” He urged: “Make me your first choice vote, and together we will crush the loopy candidates. (You know who I mean.)”

Origin of the day: the ‘poll’ in ‘going to the polls’ originally meant ‘head’, referring to the counting of heads or votes. A ‘noddypoll’ was an incompetent fool, a ‘clod-poll’ a blockhead, and a ‘tadpoll’ (later ‘tadpole’) a ‘toad-head’.
— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) May 6, 2021

Going to the Polls – Susie Dent, as ever, brought a bit of insight on polling day 2021.

Boris Johnson casts his vote for the London mayoral election alongside fiancee Carrie Symonds #Election2021 pic.twitter.com/I2h3KLwJKu
— The Sun (@TheSun) May 6, 2021

Going to the Polls – Boris Johnson was escorted to vote in Westminster by his latest baby mama Carrie Symonds at just before 8am this morning. Whether she had to help the ‘noddypoll’ PM mark his voting card or not is unknown.

Going to the Polls – Many Twitter users mocked the ex-actor Fox and remarked of their desire for Count Binface to actually be his ex-wife Billie Piper in disguise.

Going to the Polls – The parody Boris Johnson account went further and declared: “To be honest, I don’t care if we take Hartlepool, as long as Count Binface beats that streak of piss, Laurence Fox.” 1,200 clicked “love” in response. Author Emma Kennedy added: “When Count Binface gets more votes than Waitrose Tommy Robinson tomorrow, I look forward to the 3682 5k thinkpieces/profile articles in The Telegraph and Sunday Times telling us what a brave visionary Count Binface is. Also: BBCQT AHOY!” and got 1,600 “loves” also.

Going to the Polls – John O’Connell announced: “Duty done. I voted. Now I can freely spend the rest of the day taking the piss out of Shaun Bailey and Laurence Fox, and cheering on Count Binface.”

May 6, 2021