The Gift

For many, Brexit is like being given the truly awful present of a colourful tank top by your favourite auntie who lives on the next street and who you bump into at least three times a week.

It is the gift that keeps on shitting on the mat.

It has been over four months since I wrote a politics blog; a large percentage of that time has been spent writing a massive tome about why leaving the EU might not be such a stupid idea, if the right party is in power when it happens. However, since I last did any work on it, Boris Johnson has become PM (by default); Brexit has gone up several ladders and slid down as many snakes; we've gone from Treeza's 'Brexit means Brexit' and 'Nothing Has Changed' to BJ's 'Dead in a Ditch' and the Libdems abstaining from a vote which, in the event of a shit Brexit deal would stop the NHS being sold off to the highest Yankee bidder (thus proving the LibDems really can't be trusted with anything apart from taking the trash out - themselves).

What I can't understand is why Boris's first 10 attempts at getting a GE are not as important as the current one, which has the media going full scale nuclear on Labour's arse. Unless this is a rouse?

Boris is high in the polls (nearly where Treeza was when she called a GE in 2017) and everyone continues to try to demonise that Corbyn fella, blaming him for everything and then a bit more. BJ's trying every possible way to call a Christmas General Election now that's he's failed to get one any earlier. In many ways he sounds like an opposition leader trying to get the PM to resign and call a vote, and I suppose in a way he is in opposition. The thing is so many Tories (who voted for the Fix Term Parliament Act) are so desperate for a GE they really are sounding desperate; but is that desperation because they're so confident they can win big or is it, for the rather surreal reason, that they think they might lose.

There's a reason for this, which I'd like to explain because it does sound a wee bit crazoo...

There is a very good chance that a General Election will deliver us with another hung parliament; in fact, talk to any pollster and despite their affiliation to the Tories they will honestly say they couldn't put their hands on their hearts and forecast a massive Tory win. If we have a hung parliament then there's going to be a huge chance that there will be too many anti-Brexit MPs for whoever forms a government to achieve Brexit without, at minimum, a second referendum. The constitutional dilemma facing the Brexiteer Tories is another hung parliament pretty much guarantees more Brexit deadlock and can you imagine if we're still trying to sort out extracting the eggs from a baked cake in 2025? Can you imagine what the population will be like?

In a poll held in the last week of 1000 Leavers and 1000 Remainers, 63% of Leavers felt that civil unrest, violence and another MP's death was 'a price worth paying' to get Brexit done. Rather scarily (because it flies in the face of my belief) 53% of Remainers feel the same way... It might not be obvious - apart from the rise in hate crime - but tempers are simmering; hate and vile comments are increasing and it won't be long before something boils over. The division is now so great, I reckon we're on the brink of an existential civil war.

But back to the deadlock... Would Boris really want to be PM in charge of the same parliamentary numbers? Would Boris keep trying with subsequent general elections in the hope that eventually he gets the result he wants? That is a joke, but given this PM and his (lack of) success rate, I wouldn't put it past him. There's also the fact that despite being Mr Popular, he's also not particularly trusted, even by his supporters. He's seen as a slightly Machiavellian character and while that appeals to some people, he needs some victories to make him truly electable and for people to stop scrutinising him and his flippy-floppy nature.

Fortunately, he has the Mainstream Media on his side and they're not going to scrutinise him as much as they scrutinise Labour and Corbyn, but as we learnt from Treeza's botched effort in 2017, the MSM stopped trying to besmirch Corbyn because they realised it doesn't do much but make people wonder why everyone attacks this gentle man, who has an allotment and wants a fairer country for all - yes, they can call him a terrorist sympathiser (it's a shame Mo Mowlam isn't still alive to tell the wankers who keep perpetrating this myth that we wouldn't be where we are in Northern Ireland if Corbyn hadn't been on her team forging the Good Friday Agreement; but why let a fact get in the way of casting aspersions?) or they can call him a socialist or a commie, but people might also start thinking, "Well, we've had the Tories for 10 years, I'm worse off, no one trusts politicians any more, no one knows who to believe - why should I give them another go at screwing up the country they've made a good fist of screwing up already?" Labour won a lot of votes in 2017 on this fact alone; we're three years down the line and the Tories don't exactly cover themselves with glory, do they?

So, would Boris and his ERG buddies really want to be in charge of a parliament that will be as intransigent as it currently is? Or would they maybe think, 'Sod this for a game of soldiers, let's see if Commie Boy and his band of cultural misfits can do any better. If he fucks up we'll win by a landslide and can do all the things we wanted to do but legitimately and hey, we're all still young enough...'

I know this is an unlikely scenario, but Treeza's 16 point lead over Labour disappeared faster than a Boris Johnson prediction and Boris hasn't got that lead. When people start talking about the country's issues rather than Brexit, the Tories have a problem because no one really trusts them, not even their largely intelligent middle class supporters (forget working class Tory voters; they could have their children put up chimneys and they'd still vote Tory, because... [insert utter bullshit here]).

Plus there's the 1945 scenario. At the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill - a hero of BJ - was walking on water; if there were personal approval ratings in 1945 he was as popular as Jesus and the election was going to deliver a Tory government who would do whatever Tory governments did in the first half of the 20th century, except they got annihilated. People decided they wanted something new to rebuild the country; to build houses, hospitals for the new NHS, more schools, more infrastructure - create jobs so that everybody post-war could contribute to the return of GREAT Britain. This current situation isn't much different than then, or at least that's the way it's being painted.

One last thing for the benefit of the moaners - not the remoaners, but the people fed up with it all, fed up with MPs for spoiling life by dragging Brexit out. I know there's a lot of people who think we should just leave; tell the EU to fuck off and go it alone. Even if that were possible Northern Ireland is part of the UK. I know that English Brextremists couldn't give a shit about the Irish, but there are a lot of people who do, not least some of the people we hope to make free trade deals with. If Northern Ireland is even in the same universe as a return to the troubles then we really would be fucked. You can dismiss this as project fear or say I don't know what I'm talking about, but pretty much all of the problems now to do with Brexit is how to extricate Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic without causing a civil war and how to do it to keep 10 fruit and nutcase DUP MPs happy. This is akin to giving a chimp 10 Rubics cubes and telling him in Cantonese that he has 10 seconds to solve them all - pretty much impossible without some shit being thrown first and a lot of anger.

This, along with the actual fear of economic oblivion, are the two reasons why so many MPs have thwarted Brexit. We elect them to serve us, yes. But we also elect them to do the best for us; to make the decisions that are not going to cause us great hardship and that's all of us, including the people who voted remain and those that through whatever reason didn't vote at all. I know that Leave voters hate the fact that they didn't win by 99% to 1% but dem's da facts; the referendum 'victory' wasn't a win-all-and-exterminate-the-losers kind of deal; concessions have to be made to try and make as many people reasonably happy as possible and to make sure that even the most rabid of Brexiteers don't starve to death, die of a lack of medicines or most likely get blown up by an Irish Republican bomb while Christmas shopping in Sunderland.

Most people say, 'I don't do politics' but in 2019 most everyone does, even if it's to call MPs 'wankers' or wonder when it's all going to stop. What is even more crazier than my belief the Tories might actually want to lose the election is that all those people who convinced Leavers that the sunlit uplands of Britain would be awash with diamond encrusted Unicorns dispensing money and free sex to everyone are now the same people claiming they never said it would be better and people actually voted to be worse off and culturally bereft. If Aaron Sorkin introduced this kind of story when he was doing The West Wing he probably would have been told the show was trying to stay as realistic as physically possible.

Whatever happens, just remember most of the MPs have been pissing you off to ultimately save you. You might not see it and you certainly don't appreciate it, but at some point in the future you might wish they'd succeeded.

We probably need to leave to shut down the right wing; to stop all this talk and focus on how to fix the country. That depends on who is in charge when it happens. If you work for someone be very careful about who you vote for when that day comes, because one of the parties actively talks about how citizens rights prevents the country from competing with Tiger economies; that same party would be happy to see sickness, maternity and holiday pay outlawed, because it would mean employers could get rid of whoever they didn't like and replace them with people equally as expendable. That same party thinks the NHS is a drain on resources and would like swathes of it privatised and that same party wants to keep reducing public spending while giving the richest 10% more money (which, if you are a Tory voter can you explain to me how that benefits anyone apart from the already very rich?)

If you want a future of uncertainty, fear and no security, you know which party is already offering you this. It's led by a buffoon and his army of posh wankers who wouldn't piss on the average Brit unless there was a fat cash bonus involved.

You don't do politics? Maybe you should. It's as important to humans as breathing; it affects every aspect of your life whether you want to believe it or not and 99% of the time it's instigated by ourselves and has nothing to do with 'unelected' (they are) 'bureaucrats' (aren't all politicians) in Brussels. People need to understand how it works otherwise they will continue to rage at all the wrong things.

Is it Racist?

I have some questions to ask?

Why is it acceptable for British politicians to criticise decisions or actions made by the USA?
Why is it acceptable for British politicians to criticise decisions or actions made by France or Germany?
Why is it acceptable for British politicians to criticise decisions or actions made by North Korea?
Why is it acceptable for British politicians to criticise decisions or actions made by China or Russia?
Why is it acceptable for British politicians to criticise decisions or actions made by the EU in general?
But why is it not acceptable for anyone to criticise decisions or actions made by the Israeli government?

Why does the media get behind outside influences attempting to overthrow an elected government in Venezuela, but ignores Palestine?

Why is it that you can criticise any race or culture in the world but one is exempt?
Why is antisemitism not just called racism? Why does it deserve a special word?

Actually, I can answer all of those questions. The IHRA - International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance - is a body who have created a 'working definition' of antisemitism. It is recognised by the UN and most countries appear to have adopted it in some form or another. It essentially defines antisemitism as any criticism of anything that is related to Jews is a criticism of the Jewish people. So if you think Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of Likud politicians are unjust in their treatment of other dwellers in a similar area to where most of them live and you voice this opinion contrary, you are a racist.

I find that disturbing.

What I find more disturbing is that the Labour party is systematically accused on an almost daily basis of being antisemitic, yet I've only ever heard one example of their antisemitism in almost two years and that was a tweet from a radical leftie criticising Likud over it's treatment of Palestinians. He's been expelled. For tweeting racist antisemitic comments...

I'm sorry, but, what the actual fuck?

My paternal grandmother was Jewish, albeit lapsed and ostracised because she married a gentile, but it's in my blood somewhere and I wouldn't give a holocaust denier the time of day; I'd shout down anyone who would actually be racist - calling a Jew a kike or a Yid. I wouldn't call myself antisemitic (I even worry about criticising Daniel Levy - the Spurs Chairman - for fear of having some nutter accuse me of being a racist. He's a weird looking bald guy but I don't think that has anything to do with his religion...) but by virtue of believing Likud - the current Israeli government - is a paramilitary organisation intent on some kind of radical eradication of Palestinians, I am, by definition, antisemitic. If the BBC reported this they would not report the content just that I'm an anti-Jewish racist who probably worships the alter of Jeremy Corbyn...

You know that I can call Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London and that would be 100% acceptable, but I can't include the definition 'Jewish' without being accused of racism; like saying 'Jewish' is saying 'dog shit eater' or 'child abuser'. To include one specific race in a definition is worse than any other derogatory description or labelling? If it's to do with the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust, what about the number of Muslims or Hindus who died in the Partition of India? That was done in peace time, not in a war. If I said 'Jewish film producer and serial sex pest Harvey Weinstein' I'd probably get pilloried for suggesting his Jewishness had everything to do with it. But if I mention that the London mayor is a Muslim then everyone else can jump on the bandwagon; including Donald 'Man-Baby' Trump.

How does that work then?

The thing is I firmly believe if the general public who have had antisemitism rammed down their throats for years saw some of the never-mentioned exampled antisemitism most would seriously wonder what the fuss is about. The problem to that is we get no balanced coverage of what is happening in Israel and especially what is happening in Gaza and other Palestinian enclaves. Whatever the politics, the rest of the world is sitting by and silently witnessing Israel obliterate a nation, without a hint of irony. Yes, the Palestinians are 'terrorists', but that's our fault and the Israelis for radicalising them through oppression (but, I can't say that because it's antisemitic). Like it was our fault that there is a rift that won't be healed on the Indian subcontinent or that much of former British Empire-controlled Africa is falling apart.

The media do not tell us what happens in Israel; we don't really know what's going on; the place is more like Soviet Russia for visiting journalists or reporters (Simon Reeve proved that recently on TV). Israel is outwardly a very welcoming country practising an aggressive isolationist politics to its neighbours - who pretty much don't and have never wanted them there.

The Labour party or a big part of it is against backing Israel [specifically Likud] in this conflict; therefore they are antisemitic. Labour party members asked questions of certain MPs of Jewish origin why they supported Likud. They were branded antisemitic? Really; this is how it started: a member for Wavertree asked how Luciana Berger could be a Labour MP and yet support the fiercely right wing Likud party and it blew up out of all proportions, with Berger defending her position by quoting the IHRA. Eventually, she received proper antisemitic abuse, but whether these were from genuine Labour members or from newly-created social media accounts has never fully been explored by our media - because they don't want to report the truth when the lie is so much better.

So, it started with almost innocent questions and exploded into something ridiculous. Berger, Margaret Hodge and a few others used this as a stick to beat the leader they didn't want and the right wing media - whether controlled by Jews or not - saw a way of undermining the Labour party, while simultaneously pushing an Islamophobic agenda and supporting the Tories.

But... You say... How come Labour MPs or Jeremy Corbyn doesn't go on telly and tell people this truth about the 'racist Labour party'? Don't you understand yet? You cannot discuss Likud or Israeli politics; it's not allowed. Apparently, it's called being antisemitic. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you can't discuss the elephant in the room in case the elephant gets offended that you might be talking about it, even if it's to comment on the colour of its painted toenails or how it produces nice oranges.

If you can't talk about or address the elephant in the room about why you can't talk about it you can't debate it. Accusations of antisemitism are 97% this. If you mention the Israel government or Likud you are a racist. I can't say it enough, because if the 'press' won't explain it to people who don't care then it's up to me and people I know to do it; without fear of being called a racist (because I will be, especially if people read this and can use it as another stick to beat the Labour party... Except, I'm not a member any more).

No one has ever told me why Jews have to have their own word for racism, unless it's not really racism as we understand it. Zionism is also a word that just to say it has you teetering on the edge of antisemitism. Zionist doctrine is followed by Likud; Zionism is not allowed to be criticised because it is Jewish. That's like the Tories passing a law saying any criticism of their party is an act of racism - a hate crime. Let that sink in and if you think I'm wrong, please tell me why.

For Northamptonshire

I look, from a distance, at my old county and my old employer and I wonder how the Conservative voters of Northamptonshire can look anyone in the eye and tell people that the Tory's are a financial safe pair of hands, or are better with the economy?

I think you've been conned. Obviously not all of you, but a large swathe of the population - possibly driven by the desire to have more money - bought this Tory spun bullshit in 1992, despite the country heading towards economic disaster and, even recently, I have heard from people I love and/or like that they voted Tory for the sake of their children/family/economic stability and I'm wondering how that's worked out for them. Could Labour have done worse?

I've noticed that the press has failed to prevent national coverage of the Northants County Council debacle and I hope that people look at that story and try to marry the fact that NCC has a massive Tory control, along with NBC (the Borough Council) they have managed to sell off just about every one of Northamptonshire's crown jewels to keep council tax low to ensure that the greedy people of the county vote for them.

I want those Tory voters to look at the lack of services across the county and the looming threat to the ones that remain and ask if they think their money was well spent? Do they really think a Labour or Hung council would have been worse? And if they do, why? What evidence have you got that a band of chimps and a dancing frog couldn't run NCC better, because the money all you Northants people pay has been mismanaged almost continually since the Coalition government gave NCC carte blanche to obliterate your public services and still run out of money...

Seriously, at the next council elections - is it May? - if you get a Tory knocking on your door, even if you voted Tory, you need to ask them what evidence they can give you that they are better equipped at running the budget given the evidence at hand. You could also ask them why anyone should believe the Tories are better with the economy. I'll bet you get an answer that equates to 'We're better than Labour' or 'How bad do you think it would be under Labour'... If you think scaring you with something that might be worse is intellectual politics then you probably don't deserve the vote.

You want to know what the irony here is?

The Leave campaign banged on about Project Fear, yet they took their own government's tactic and turned it into a weapon to bash them and all Remainers. Tories have used project fear since Thatcher; why talk about how you can fix things when you can remind people how bad the other side is. People like negativity; they like being able to blame someone.

I reckon people have heard it too many times. Take whenever there's a problem somewhere in the country's infrastructure; this government are always there to remind us that they've invested/spent/kindly donated record amounts to ensure the improvement of [insert whatever's fucked up here]. Well, if they spend the same as the previous government with an inflationary rise, of bloody course it's going to be more; doesn't mean its enough though does it?

If we're so rich, why do we need so much austerity, job insecurity and councils running out of money. If we - as a country - are so rich, who's getting all this money and why haven't you seen any of it? You also need to ask yourself; why do you have to pay for their fuck ups?

Is Labour Worth Saving?

One of the other horrible things about 2016 that has largely gone unnoticed has been the lurch to the right by The Guardian's political and editorial staff. It still sometimes feels like a newspaper that is fighting unfairness, but the ruthless and relentless way it has pursued the Labour Party last year, specifically Jeremy Corbyn, has been both disgraceful and has probably cost them a fifth of their readers. So it was no surprise when they almost gleefully focused on the Tory's 16 point lead in pre-Christmas opinion polls, despite the Conservatives being a bunch of headless chickens and how Labour is trailing in every single demographic apart from communist allotment botherers.

We all know opinion polls have margins for errors, but even with the worst one built in Labour is still looking as electable as Nigel 'Bye-election King' Farage, yet still I held onto the belief that polls are not at all reliable and polling companies are usually sponsored by someone with political interest or skewered by the fact that the same bunch of people are polled all the time. Look at the Brexit vote and how everyone who thought they knew were flummoxed by one single factor - no one bothered to ask the man in the street. Or probably more relevant, no one listened when the man in the street spoke.

As people who read this regularly will know, I was not surprised by the EU vote based on my own experiences talking to people while out walking my dogs. Dog walkers are literally all types of people, from all kinds of backgrounds, with myriad beliefs, but these hardy souls have one thing in common - their dogs, therefore before long your dogs' friendships turn into human ones, albeit in the most fleeting of ways. Many of the people I meet regularly stand and chat, chew the fat, while the dogs check each other and the surrounds out, I have no idea what their lives are outside of the field we stand in. Conversations rarely turn to politics, it's like an unwritten law that you don't venture into areas of controversy because... well, you just don't.

During the run up to the EU vote I was pretty much floored by the anti-EU sentiment I heard all over and with a wee bit of hindsight, I am, at times, quite astonished that Remain got 48%.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I did something a little bit unusual with a group of my fellow dog walkers. During a lull in the conversation, I asked them all a question, but I was careful to preface it with enough sensible wording as not to get anyone's back up or turn the conversation defensive. Spurred on by a Guardian headline that suggested Paul Nuttall - the new UKIP fuhrer - was more of a threat to Labour than anything else and coupled with my own blog suggesting that 'The Cult of Jeremy Corbyn' is never going to win anything, I asked my friends this: "I'd be interested in your opinion on something: this isn't about politics, so don't panic; but I read something in the paper this morning that made me realise I really don't know what I think about Jeremy Corbyn and I'd be interested to know what others think about him as a person. Not whether he's electable or anything to do with his politics, just what you think of him."

No one stormed off in a huff or reacted like I'd asked them about their underwear. The replies were disjointed and bitty, because more than one person was often speaking, but I'll break down (and roughly paraphrase) their answers:
J (a former catering manager now a teacher, mid 40s) said: Well, I wouldn't vote for him. He seems like a nice man, but do nice men have a place in politics?
D (a retired widow, 68) said: I think he gets a rough ride in the papers and on TV. He seems like a very decent man. He does seem a bit out of his depth.
T (a retired plasterer, also 68) said: I like him. I've voted Labour all my life, but I don't think he's the right looking man for the job. I'd vote for him but I don't think he'll win.
F (housewife, 50) said: Me and [her husband] have never voted Labour. I've never really paid any attention to him. What I have seen suggests he's being bullied a lot and that makes him look weak.
J2 (housewife, early 40s) said nothing but wrinkled her nose.
J2's mum (retired, late 60s) said: I think he looks shifty, I don't trust him.

Now, a broader generalisation: I'd say J was a Tory voter; D probably Labour but most likely doesn't bother, T is most definitely Labour (he admits it) while F is very blue. I would have thought that J2 and her mum would have been typical Labour voters, however, given the reactions I think they're people who probably don't vote because they have a mistrust of politics (this is borne out by some comments they have made that border on general ignorance), however UKIP probably tempts them.

Over the last few weeks, my friend - A - who is a Momentum member and jokingly refers to himself as 'An Activist', has expressed some deep worries about the Labour Party's complete inactivity in the 'real world'; I argued it's being covert, I might have been deluding myself...

Now the pointless and divisive leadership election is behind us and the Tories are blindly sleepwalking us into some kind of oblivion of our own making, where the hell is the opposition? Despite PMQs just being the modern day equivalent of Punch and Judy, but lacking any real punch or sausages, there are no positive sounds emanating from Labour HQ and personally I believe that's because, like the Tories, they haven't got a clue what to do, so they're just sitting reasonably quietly waiting for the next massive cock-up to surface and hoping that something, eventually, will damage the Tory vote.

I believed for a long time that they were playing the political equivalent of 'give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves', especially given that we're only 18 months into this administration and Treeza isn't showing any signs of calling or forcing another General Election. And, in a reasonable world I think that's not a bad game to play, but I like to think I understand politics (or did, once) and waiting for the right moment to strike and then relentlessly hammering on seems like an interesting weapon. Except... It doesn't appear to be happening. Labour, or specifically the PLP, appears to be a bunch of people thrown together, who are not particularly keen on each other and are grudgingly participating in something they're not really enjoying. Even if the press wasn't preternaturally predisposed to destroying the party anyway, they'd be well within their rights to be questioning where the opposition is.

Hello Labour! Tories slicing and dicing the country up and what are you doing?

I have, on several occasions, since Jeremy Corbyn's first election success, called myself a naive altruist more than a rabid leftie. I have been blinkered by my own refusal to accept everything that is wrong about this new Labour by continually putting forward all of the positives that Jezza's kind of politics could bring. The indications now are that he's neither the messiah nor a very naughty boy.

Last month I told you why Corbyn couldn't be elected. I'm now doubting, especially given the peculiar rise of the right in recent months, that the socialism being advocated by Corbyn and his followers isn't actually that popular amongst most of the voters. Yes, there's lots in their plans that will benefit the country and help bring poor people out of poverty quicker and lots of great ideas on how to make the country money, but as the EU referendum showed: economics isn't the big reason to motivate people to vote. It might once have been, but the media and casual, off-the-cuff public opinion has moved politics into a kind of 'us and them' territory and Corbyn's Labour doesn't even get within a million miles of the isolationism that is growing in rural England.

Tories sway with public opinion like a tree with dodgy foundations - hence why they resemble UKIP more than UKIP at the moment and their rhetoric always makes great use of framing specific words even if they don't mean what they're saying. At the moment they're not as vague as Labour, but you'd need a micrometer to measure it.

History might suggest the worst legacy of Tony Blair was actually the Spin Doctor, because once the Tories worked it out and then threw money at it they became the emperors of spin. The exception to the rule being Scotland, where pragmatism has always meant more than words.

As I said in November, Corbynistas can point at social media, the internet, mobile messaging and whatever and say they're winning that particular market over; but I'm not actually seeing any evidence of this, with one exception - how well Labour's vote has held up in council bye-elections and some of the parliamentary ones. This suggests, especially the way the press has routinely ignored them, that on the ground Labour are actually doing better than we're being told, but you only have to look at my social media news feeds to see that my bubble of like-minded souls are 99% posting 'look what the bloody Tories have done this time' stuff and very little positive opposition stuff.

Preaching to the converted about how crap it is has no discernible effect on the people who might be persuaded to vote Labour (or at the very least not vote Tory) unless they see the message; there's no point in telling people where to look, they need the message force fed to them, which only the Tories seem capable of achieving.

I've said this before but 90% of my news feeds in June were convinced the vote would be remain. 95% of the people I met on the street were voting leave. I don't need to do the maths to highlight that my bubble lost to the real world by about 4%. The main thing that needs to be understood about this vote was, when you boil it all down, it actually wasn't about party politics but about people politics. A proportion of the population basically stated that they didn't like what was on offer. The Tories saw this and Cameron was ushered out faster than the norovirus, and Treeza was seen as the unifying face by the public.

Labour - never as united as the Tories - tried the same thing and it blew up in their faces so badly that I think it's harsh to blame Corbyn for everything; it's his MPs that need to seriously look at themselves but Mr Average won't see it that way. Probably, the wisest move would have been for Corbyn to try and find his logical successor and step aside while endorsing the man best suited to carry on the work he started. Fresh faces at the ballot box does generate some interest in an apathetic populace.

If my straw poll is any indication of how Corbyn's Labour will fair at the next election (given it should be a way off still) then I wonder if he's aware that outside of his massive bubble of support there's a population who either don't care about him or don't really think he's up for the job? If the Labour Party really does care about the country and its people it needs to reinvent itself for the 21st century and start looking at the issues that the people on the street are talking about.

If Marmite subjects like immigration cannot be swept under the carpet, then perhaps it is time the debate was had to really find out just how tolerant our society is at the moment and whether it's worth trying to save?

The um... Kingdom of England (oh, and Wales)

Bloody current affairs... it's just so surreal at the moment it's difficult to ignore...

People who know me know that it is my intention to move to Scotland in 2017. It has been a longstanding ambition and the EU vote acted more as a kick up the arse than any actual reason to get out of 'little' England.

Not that Scotland is exempt from the EU vote, but because they simply seem to be a more tolerant society and that will, if nothing else, soften the coming blows. However, while chewing the political fat with a friend recently, we kind of came up with half a half-baked idea that I want to share with you before moving onto the more ... honest... nature of this blog.

• Both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU.
• Both Scotland and Northern Ireland have benefited more than anywhere else (apart from Cornwall) from EU money - these places wouldn't be so much better off without the EU's money and help.

Experts (pft, what do they know?) believe that to keep the right wing quiet and to ensure no Polish workers go to Ireland so they can nip over the border and start stealing British jobs, there has to be a hard border between the countries. An even harder border than existed during 'The Troubles' and some people believe this could single-handedly cause massive destabilisation in all of Ireland. A price that most of (this newly united) Northern Ireland do not want to pay - even less than wanting to leave their European benefactors.

Now, the idea of Northern Ireland campaigning for independence is not likely to happen, but the idea of Northern Ireland being independent from Westminster and autonomous, yet still part of the Commonwealth and a player in a more 'loose-knit' United Kingdom, might just float in Proddy strongholds.

But why stop there? How about an economic union with an independent Scotland and the Irish Republic, that would mean Northern Ireland, like Scotland could remain in the EU with almost as much sway as the old Britain headed by the English had and a lot more respect from the other nations because, well, quite simply, they're not English.

Of course, if Northern Ireland could remain part of the sovereignty but also as a semi-independent state it would negate the need for borders, however it might require closer checks when travelling from Northern Ireland to England and I can think of quite a few Scots who would love the idea of a hard border between England and Scotland. Hopefully not because there would be an influx of disgruntled English people wanting to escape the hell that is coming.

The reason I like this idea is because it allows sections of the British to remain part of what they, in the majority, believe in; would lessen the impact that Brexit-geddon will bring to many in England and Wales and would make these countries arguably greater than the Britain they'd leave, because there would be a kind of Gaelic unity that us English struggle to identify with (because it's culturally different, innit?).

The other reason I like this idea is because I've recently become a traitor to the cause. I no longer have any faith that the Labour Party or specifically Jeremy Corbyn can turn the fortunes of the party around, especially in the face of the growing right wing tide sweeping up even reasonable people in this country and the fact that basic left wing politics just doesn't appeal to a large percentage of a growing isolationist and intolerant society. The only way Labour can appeal to people who've left them or would normally vote for them is if they broke with some of their fundamental core beliefs and under Corbyn and propelled by Momentum that simply isn't going to happen.

I heard this rumour that the Northampton South MP, David Macintosh, would not be sacked by the Tories because they feared a bye-election. I also heard the Labour Party also didn't want a bye-election for exactly the same reason. That reason was because the Tories would probably increase their majority, despite all the corruption and scandal. This was Labour's reason as well - from up top. Now, before you start telling me how foolish I am, consider this - the Tories are actually quite comfortable with an ineffectual old man leading the toothless Reds because they can basically ride roughshod over most things they want to and there's bugger all opposition. Regain a seat currently held by arguably one of the most corrupt politicians of modern times with a greater majority, regardless of boundary changes, it is going to trigger more ructions among the people on the other side of the chamber and eventually if Labour's slide into oblivion becomes too obvious Jeremy will eventually either fall on his sword or another massively damaging leader election happens again, throwing up the possibility that someone who might change things - for the perceived good - might appear and disrupt everything.

I can't help but notice how little Labour appears to be doing about everything. Not even my social media is buzzing - hell, it's not even murmuring inaudibly, so the theory that Jeremy and his team were all over the internet, cutting out the press, seems to be more hope than hit. PMQs is still an hour of backslapping and obfuscation at best and lies and slander at worst and Corbyn could beat Treeza in a wrestling match, with rabid wolverines, and the press would still call it a draw with the Tories regaining the moral high ground even if it is of a subterranean nature.

He doesn't stand a chance. I don't care that Labour are going to try and rebrand him in the New Year, it's too little far too late. Even if he was given a fair platform and some objectivity from the media he'd still probably struggle because NOTHING IS HAPPENING and a lot of that nothing is affecting potential supporters. His message just might not appeal to more than a bunch of internet bubbles.

But, I wanted Corbyn politics to work because I fear for the entire socialist movement in England and that people like me might end up being labelled 'dissidents' or 'subversives' because we don't subscribe the common right wing beliefs, meaning that 'liberal' speech might even be suppressed, probably by those who would have posted it, for fear of reprisals from who-knows-where.

There has been talk recently of a Progressive Socialist Alliance of Centre-Left and Left wing parties - an idea that seems like it has been born out of one of the Tories key issues not to vote for Labour at the last election. In a Britain that is to become divorced from the rest of Europe there is more need for the countries within it to work together in the interests of 'the Kingdom'. The Tories do not speak for Scotland and only have versions of themselves in Northern Ireland. In Wales, despite a waning support for Labour, the Tories are still unpopular in many areas and in England there are socialist heartlands, and more importantly, areas of the country which would have 'socialist' MPs if the centre and left parties worked with each other to stop the rise of the right.

But for this to happen Labour would need to do a deal with other parties and as we saw from Richmond, they'd rather lose their deposit and credibility than be seen working with someone with ultimately the same goal as them.
Labour would need to sit down with the SNP and forge an alliance that would mean Labour gives up Scotland, but works in a democratic partnership with Scotland to allow SNP MPs to vote along side them for the greater good. The Tories suggested this would mean the downfall of the UK if that happened at the last election, for many keeping Scotland happy is now the key to keeping the United bit with the Kingdom part.

It would also mean working with Plaid Cymru, the Liberals and to a much lesser extent the DUP, to ensure that someone other than a right wing candidate wins. It doesn't take you long to work out, looking at 30 marginal seats won by the Tories at the last two elections you can see that had an alliance been in place and the Liberals endorsed a Labour candidate and didn't stand against them and vice versa, those 30 seats wouldn't have been won by a Tory. Yes, it's simplistic and general, but convince the public that it's the best way and fairest way forward for Britain and it might just work.

But Labour still retains illusions of grandeur and the divisions within the party run so deep the entire concept is anathema to them from the top to the lowliest backbencher, because it would mean some of them possibly losing seats or would rest control to a coalition of similarly ideological but deeply different bedfellows. The problem is Britain has clung to it's left, middle and centre model for so long that change is happening and it's leaving politicians behind. How else can you explain the popularity of UKIP amongst a certain demographic and one which UKIP is exploiting to the glee of the Tory party?

If nothing else, a progressive coalition of Labour, SNP, Liberal and Green would at least have similar hymn sheets and could stem the tide of anti-tolerance, bigotry and hate that is becoming more public, by making a government that is both prosperous and tolerant of difference and diversity.

Still, however crazy the political landscape has become in the last 12 months, something that might actually be of benefit to more people in this country than ever before would not get house room and it might take the Tories to achieve complete breakdown of the country's economic and social stability to bring about a change for the benefit of both the country and the many.

No Soft Option

Having recently discovered that facts are irrelevant, I don't see the point in banging on relentlessly about this, that or the other. Take the EU exit for instance - no one knows what is going to happen; very few people really believe that the UK is going to get a better deal and the hard reality is that the other 27 EU countries are going to force limitations on what we want. They weren't that ecstatic we wanted out after all...

The truth is if we're coming out of the EU it has to be a HARD one, realistically there is no soft option. It will cost too much money and pretty much leave us in the same situation we were in except without any voice. The hard option will also cost us but it will be front loaded - costs will rise, some goods will no longer be available or no longer at prices the average person can afford and no one really knows how it will affect unemployment - it could go down. One thing is certain, the people who voted to leave because they believed it would be the best thing will be hurt either economically or emotionally.

The thing is Treeza and co., are all too aware that regardless of how you spin it, her party, UKIP and the right wing press have forced her into believing that the EU referendum was actually about migration and if that isn't addressed, then regardless of what the 48% wanted, there will be factions within the country who will deal with immigration in their own 'unique' ways. It might happen even if we close our borders, but the reality, at this moment in time, is that it will cost us a lot of money whatever way we choose and people will still want to blame migrant workers and the EU for it. Honestly, if the Tory's can - 7 years on - still blame Labour for the country's ills (never addressing the fact that in those 7 years they've made it actually worse) and get away with it, then if you're foreign then you'll pretty much take the flak for every hike in inflation, rise in unemployment, redundancy or failure to obtain a job.

The sad thing is regardless of the truth people will always blame the easiest thing. Migrants, for instance, don't steal peoples jobs. I'd like a Brexiteer to explain to me how migrants steal jobs? There is obviously not identity theft going on, so are these migrants infiltrating factories, working harder and offering to work harder for much less money? Even if this was the case, it would not be them stealing jobs, it would be employers preventing the indigenous from getting these jobs by a mixture of fraud and bad practice. There is no other way of looking at it. If you hear someone say, 'bloody foreigners stole my job,' you need to ask them how exactly their job was stolen and whose fault it was, really?

How about the country is full, there's no more room... Well, it isn't. That is about as facile a comment as a bunch of people with no authority promising you - the people - that £350million will go to the NHS if we pull out of Europe. Yes, we have a rise in homelessness, but is that because of migrants? Are you stealing peoples houses? Moving in surreptitiously at night, moving out a British person's belongings and acquiring their house by some medieval EU law? No, the truth is the government has made life so difficult for genuine strugglers that they face a Christmas with little or nothing. Because of the way our renting system is now you'd be lucky to get a stable at an affordable price. More affordable houses need to be built and while the government looks to the house sales market to keep the economy at least marginally 'balanced' there's unlikely to be any nice cheap homes for any of the disenfranchised to move into.

Of course, we can say without fear of contradiction that migrants are responsible for the strain on public services. I mean, it was obviously E|U migrants who slashed the public sector budgets and they've obviously been forcing the government to not build new hospitals or schools, or make public transport better, because it makes perfect sense that EUs will come here and destroy our services so they can access them easier...

Blaming migrants for the woes of the world is just blind refusal to blame the government - of which many people voted for. If by some UKIP fluke of nature and all migrants who have moved here since 2000 were deported, would we see a vast improvement in our lives? Would the government invest all that lost tax revenue back into ailing services, or, would they more likely award fat contracts to private companies making 'consolidation' their main aim.

The blame for migrants and the way they are seen is mainly at the feet of the right wing press, who seem so intent on stirring up hate it would seem their only intention is to cause some kind of civil race war within the country, presumably so they can then sit on their high horse and say they told us so. The Tories have to take a lot of the blame - they have it in their power to end hostility to migrants almost immediately, by gagging their pit bulls in the press and showing the stats that prove the migrant crisis isn't a crisis at all, just something blown out of proportion by the Mail, which has a history of essentially being neo-Nazi.

Obviously, Treeza won't do something as calamitous as admitting their incompetence is the main reason for the lack of things, nor will she rein in her media allies, so we have a situation where racism, or at least xenophobia, is allowed to escalate to the point where there are twats openly being arseholes all over the country and using freedom of speech to perpetuate their hate, while failing to see the irony in being called out by the fair people who they themselves have repeatedly abused.

Recently, a friend of mine commented on the Guardian's CiF section lambasting trolls as being worthless and hopeless antagonists who must have sad lives if the only pleasure they get is out of being nasty in a comments section. His comment was 'moderated' and deleted, despite having no bad language in it, but possibly being disrespectful to the people who do nothing but be disrespectful. His follow up comment complaining that the Guardian seemed keen to delete a message that was essentially criticising the Guardian for having double standards was also deleted. On the same page there were several attacks on 'hand wringing liberals' that went unmoderated. When a newspaper as (and I use this term loosely) moderate as the Guardian starts censoring people complaining about the lack of censorship from hate groups then you have to start wondering where we're going as a race.

The parallels to the 1930s are there for all to see and it's much faster because of social media and the new and different ways we have of communicating with each other. It isn't just migrants facing daily abuse; Pinko-liberals are getting it too. The left wing is now as much a target for the papers as migrants and presumably because some left wingers are pro-EU and believe in the freedom of movement. How long before those who advocate this are considered enemies of the people?

So the hard truth is a hard Brexit. Yes, all of us Pinko-liberals who voted remain will suffer the consequences, but they'll be no different than those who voted Leave. This won't be a Tory party pandering to those who voted for them and ignoring those who will never vote for them, this will be a real true moment of 'we're all in it together - whether we like it or not'. Apart from the cost, there's the social implications of a soft option - this is a generalisation but one with some basis in fact; quite simply Leave voters are more likely to cause problems than Remain voters and as I keep saying Treeza doesn't want to call a GE for a number of reasons, both legal and because if people don't vote for Labour and want to vote out the Tories, who does that leave?

As much as I'd like to think there could be a second referendum, I'm also acutely aware that should that vote be 53-47 in favour of staying after all, then there would be much more of a fight from the 47% than there has been by the current 48% of remainers. The sad truth is Brexiteers want you to accept a result they would never have accepted had it been a mirror result.

I also discount the claim that only 28% of the actual population voted for Leave. 72% of the people who could vote voted and frankly we have absolutely no way of knowing if that 28% would have swayed it towards Remain. I met an awful lot of people who had made their minds up they weren't voting because they thought they'd already lost. I think the country voted for Brexit because being out of Europe was some rainbow-shitting unicorn to solve all of our woes and the Leave campaign did a fantastic job of making the Remain camp out to be a bunch of scaremongering liars.

Quite simply, as I jokingly said two years ago, we need to exit and quick and then sit back and watch everything fall apart. However, I no longer believe that people who voted Remain should then rub it into the faces of those who voted Leave, because wars have been started for less.

Look at the options: decide against the vote and go back to the EU and renegotiate our membership - which isn't going to happen, but even if it did we've caused far too much disruption to expect anything in return. Or leave, jump off the cliff, and face the consequences and see if we have politicians and businessmen with the guile and acumen to sort it out and make the best of what will undeniably be a bad lot - for a few years at least.

The soft option angers too many and that's where Treeza is a bit of a populist and has angered some of her own MPs by being a bit UKIP-lite, presumably based on the combined readership of the right wing press. Hard Brexit might end up being a Pyrrhic victory for the Tories because, let's be honest about this, they've not really shown any evidence that they're any better with an economy than Labour, in fact now that they're borrowing more money than ever before they'd be hard pressed to accuse Labour of doing the same, especially as Labour might have borrowed too much but there is some actual evidence to suggest it was spent on infrastructure rather than feathering Richard Branson's pension fund.

Crazy crazy world

Honestly, you couldn't make it up.

If, say 15 years ago, you were told that the UK would elect a Tory government despite more than 50% of the country being pissed off with poverty and misery, and would also vote to come out of the EU based on a mixture of feelings, misplaced patriotism and idiocy and then we might witness the election of a President of the USA who, frankly, is crazier than batshit daiquiris, you'd probably think I was describing a new Armando Iannucci political comedy, because I'd think all of that and I'm a) writing this and b) living it too.

We live in a Post-fact, post-expert, post-logical world where people simply don't give a fuck about facts - especially those who voted for Leave. Experts are just there to scare us. Logic is there to confuse us and Facts are there to be ignored and derided because Feelings and Pride are far more important to the future of everyone.

The problem is we're talking about a majority of people now. You know and I know that it isn't really a true majority, but it's big enough and ugly enough to dictate the country's rhetoric. The sad truth is a large percentage of the 52% voted as a protest to the shit they've been suffering for years without really understanding that the referendum had nothing to do with what has been happening to them and no one made a big enough issue out of the fact that it was the EU that stopped the worst off and most disenfranchised among us from being marginalised even more. If you weighed up the difference between what Westminster and Brussels has given to the people of South Wales you would have thought they would have voted 99% to remain, instead of 61% of them opting for the exit button. What's worse is these people think that our government is going to save them... That's how stupid people are now. 

There are people in Sunderland facing economic oblivion as their largest employer scales back and considers moving elsewhere who actually feel happy and proud that they've helped precipitate their own downfall. I'm amazed Cameron quit; the referendum gave a warped legitimacy to everything him and Gideon were doing; the fact that Treeza May is actually attempting to reverse some of their less humane achievements almost smacks of the same level of crazy.

I loved a short statement made by *Yasmin Ali - "Tonight I went to a Tory Party meeting on Brexit. More specifically, I went to a Tory meeting on what happens after Brexit to bring the nation together again.   So what did I learn? If I distil it down, it is that they have no idea. No idea how to leave the EU. No idea what happens now. All they know is that they are so loved up with their vote that all these tedious questions are nothing but Party pooping nonsense."

Doesn't this just about sum up the feeling of the Brexiteers across the country? The same people who claim quite self-righteously that if they'd lost they wouldn't be making such a big issue about it... Yeah, right and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle...

It isn't just us; there's this Rodrigo Duterte fellow in the Philippines who is basically advocating and promoting a criminal-cleansing spree, allowing his citizens to kill anyone they suspect is a drug dealer or taker or friend of either. The weird thing about Duterte is despite caterwauls of horror and disgust from the rest of the world, he's a bloody popular bloodthirsty tyrant among his own people - the right wing/Libertarian supporting Philippinos think 'Digong' is top banana and his popularity has grown as the graves of the criminals have filled up.

Hungary has been trying to out-Farage Nigel by having a referendum that I'm still not entirely sure about. I could check this but that takes the fun out of it, but apparently they've just had a referendum to reject the EU's migrant policy, which kind of doesn't make any sense because as part of the EU they've already caused ructions by putting a bloody great fence around their country and restricting movement (you know, the thing 52% of our population would get massive erections about if offered the chance). The fact that not enough Hungarians actually voted to make it officially recognisable is, hopefully, a testament to nice Hungarians, because, according to my Romanian neighbour, 'Most peoples from Hungaria are shit.'

I'm sure Hillary Clinton isn't all the things she's being accused of, because if she is then the USA has finally succumbed to Total Dumb by having two unbelievably crooked and dislikable people vying for the job of Chief Button Pusher. I know it's more about how much money you can throw at it than politics, but if the USA wants to be treated with the respect it deserves it should really take a good hard long look at itself. Sometimes the idea of the Yellowstone Caldera Extinction Event seems like a damned fine idea.

Oh and while this isn't strictly politics, you have to wonder what kind of world we're now living in if fear, scaremongering and worst case scenarios are touted as news... At least four tabloids in the last week have picked up on the 'Britain is headed for an apocalyptic winter' news story. This incredible prophecy of doom first appeared in the Daily Express - the paper that essentially talks about three things: the weather, Princess Diana and the evil Labour party. The Express actually just rehashed a story written last October, with a slight edit to suggest they were a hair's width from being totally right about saying 2015 would be the worst winter since the opening sequence of The Empire Strikes Back. The truth was last winter was one of the mildest on record. The Express would have been more accurate had they said 'Pretty bog standard winter with some cold days and some mild days, lots of wind and a cold spring', because this is essentially what six of the last 10 years have been. Of the other four we had two colder than average winters and two warmer than average winters and warm springs (both of these years my apricot tree fruited).

The thing is as the Met Office says on a regular basis - anything over a week and you get into chaos theory and frankly you can only base long range forecasts on trends and computer models, therefore the Met Office has said what I said in the paragraph above - 2016/17: an average winter with colder spells and milder ones. Yet this is the sixth time in seven years the Express has told us we're all going to freeze to death.

Why?

What does scaring the shit out of Brexit-voting pensioners achieve? Do governments just say to newspapers that parts of the economy need stimulating so make up some shite that'll get pensioners in Bournemouth bulk buying bog paper from the local Asda, or is that just a crazy conspiracy theory too far?

* Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (left-ish UK Muslim journalist)

Prophets and Loss

Most people that know me, know that I'm interested in politics, but, by my own admission, I'm no expert and I'm often shown things that I was ignorant of or that flies in the face of my beliefs. Recently I've been accused of being a 'blind Corbyn supporter' because I refuse to see the damage he's doing to the Labour Party - internally. But like many other slightly disgruntled people, I look at the man I see and not the Machiavellian machinations that are obviously going on with or without his blessing and then I'm mocked for either being too naive or too altruistic or deluded because I refuse to see the wider picture. I do see the wider picture and what I see has been commented on in these pages many times - career politicians putting their own interests ahead of the people and therefore not acting in my best interests, despite representing the party I've supported all of my life.

Like right wing leaning people, I tend to stick with my 'tribe' and therefore spend a lot of time preaching to the converted and have probably been labelled a 'loony leftie' by many of my more moderate friends and relatives, who sometimes view my politics as 'harmful' and 'non-negotiable', but I hope they will at least recognise my commitment to my beliefs. However, in this very narcissistic world we live in now, I can't help but want to get a big massive trumpet out and start blowing it loudly from the hills.

Talking to an equally 'radical' friend the other night, I made the rather modest (highly unusual for me) statement that I must be some kind of prophet. After the hilarity of the statement dissipated, I quantified my statement: Since I resurrected this blog last year, I've focused a lot on the Brexit issue and the turmoil in British politics. I've made lots of forecasts, based on my feelings rather than the biased press and media, and an incredibly huge amount of them have come true. With hindsight, some of the observations I made seem more lucid and realistic now than they possibly did when I was sounding like a conspiracy theorist on steroids and many of the things I said weren't echoed in the press - ever; many of the questions I asked ended up being asked when it was too late and while I have no doubt many other bloggers sensed the real feeling around the country, I didn't see the politicians, the media and all of their assorted bandwagons have the same kind of handle on the 'mood' as I did from dog walks, work and general conversations with people.

How can someone so politically naive, with no formal qualifications in the subject, and an interest generated more through suspicion than through faith in politicians have got it right so many times and yet people who get paid loads of money failed to see, or more importantly, listen to the people outside of their front doors? Is his more evidence of a media agenda or are these people simply not as astute, as expert, as we like to believe?

Politicians really need to have a good hard look, not just at themselves but at the 60-odd million people living here (there's that famous altruism shining through). If nothing else people have made it clear that they no longer trust politicians of any kind - the left despise the right and vice versa and there hasn't really ever been a middle ground, despite whatever heights the Libdems reached, all that was was the first signs of a disgruntled nations starting to grow tired of the same old same old.

Look at Farage. Honestly, I'm not as obsessed with the man in real life, but in political terms I consider him to have had more impact on a nation than very few politicians in the last 50 years, possibly Thatcher being the exception. The incredible thing about him is his ability to turn repeated failures into some kind of perverse victory (all aided and abetted by our hard right media); like some kind of carcinogenic Eddie the Eagle his resilience is a thing to behold; Oswald Moseley probably would have seen him as a future PM. Yet there is no arguing with how he has single-handedly turned UKIP into the third largest party in the country (by vote share).

The real shame of UKIP is they have inadvertently tapped into the general malaise of the average working man, something one of the other parties should have done - knowingly. Historically this is probably totally inaccurate, but UKIP appeared to be a semi-respectable face of British Nationalism when it started; almost like they realised there was a hot bed of xenophobes and casual racists out there all ignorant enough to want to blame anything foreign for their ills and woes. The problem is, that party is a disorganised shambles, even compared to the Labour Party, if they had a collective brain they could be very dangerous.

In 2001, a good friend of mine said to me in a pub in Nottingham, "Do you know what we should do? We should join the Conservative Party." I stared at him in utter disbelief. "No, wait, hear me out. They are such a disorganised rabble at the moment that anyone with a half decent idea can walk into that party and change it. Until they get proper people running it again they'll never get elected." Obviously we never joined and even if we had, I'm sure there was someone somewhere in CCO planning a future that didn't involve two 'socialist' men just about to turn 40; but the point is UKIP by and large seems like a party with no real reason to exist, except maybe to steal votes from the disgruntled, diluting voter share even more and giving the Tories an easier path to complete dominance. What better way to win an election than by duping former die-hard Labour voters to vote for a party that politically is further to the right than the party they claim to despise. Oh the irony. The point is with proper 21st century politicians running it, UKIP could be a serious threat. We should be thankful for small mercies.

I've often heard the phrase 'the government is out of touch with its people' and, to be honest, I've often felt that was a throwaway comment; I've never felt governments have ever really been in touch with the people. However, for the first time in my 50-odd years, I believe that statement is more pertinent now than ever before, except it isn't the government who is out of touch, it's the entire political machine. Do you know why Jeremy Corbyn is probably perceived as more of a threat to the status quo than him just being a mad Trot? Because he did something last year that has stopped happening with our politicians - he went out and talked to people. I remember general elections when I was growing up and right up until about 2007 with politicians doing what we want them to, engaging with the voters, on doorsteps, at rallies, on market squares, with soapbox in hand; listening to the people and trying to reflect that in their politics. But something happened and media took over and more and more people grew to dislike politicians and it was no longer safe for many politicians to walk the streets of their constituencies; the more Westminster lost touch with the real people, the more real people grew to hate them.

The death of Jo Cox was systematic of what has happened and how people are no longer connected to their representatives, even the ones like Cox who was more engaging than others. Obviously this incident isn't going to have the MPs flooding onto the streets to gauge opinion and engage with their voters and Cox's death might also have signalled the death of any true links MPs will have to local non-political communities. There is now no way people aren't going to view them all as aloof, privileged and not reflecting what they'd like to believe.

Former Labour MP for Northampton South and now Green councillor for the County Council, Tony Clarke, won his seat in 1997, despite traditionally it always being a Tory seat, because he got out and knocked on doors, talked to people, won over their trust, even if they weren't Labour voters and he was regarded as the left of a then newly-modernised and centre New Labour. Yet, he used the swell of opinion mixed with actual hard work to win his seat and then just about retain it later. That doesn't happen any more or if it does prospective MPs and incumbents tend to pick and choose the areas they canvas - therefore are probably preaching to the converted and those who will probably vote anyhow.

The sad thing is that my forecasts weren't intended to be scaremongering, they were intended to highlight what might or would probably happen, from my perspective, and almost as if I scripted it personally, everything from Cameron to Johnson to Eagle's resignations to the economic instability has come true; even my reluctance to believe that Leave would probably win in the two weeks leading up to the vote...

So what does the self-proclaimed new guru of political forecasting believe will happen now? Well, returning to my radical friend and our sage-like weekly conversations about the state of the nation; he believes Theresa May should call a general election in November, because if Labour is in civil war and looking totally unelectable, then she'd be stupid not to. My response to that is 'too risky'. The media might be telling us one thing, and for sure Labour is valiantly trying to destroy itself, but I think there's a definite feeling within the Tory party that people don't want more politics thrust upon them and now we've had one monumental protest vote - with repercussions for decades likely - in this decade of crazy shit happening, the last thing is for a cocky Tory party to go back to the country and end up being in a coalition again. Or worse still, a turn out of less than 40% would not make any mandate legitimate in the majority's eyes. Tories want a few years of crisis managing the economy and trying to be as anodyne as possible to the masses.

On Thursday of last week, I was convinced that the Labour Party coup was going to blow itself out and some kind of uneasy truce will have been found that could have at least taken the party forward, but sadly events escalated again and the civil war is actually getting uglier and unbelievably harmful to democracy in this country. I said in another blog that this is no longer a battle to oust Corbyn but a movement to shut down his wing of the party. The PLP want the left eradicated from the party completely, and not because they've read the mood of the public and seen the future, but because they've seen the future and their careers are at stake.

So technically speaking, May doesn't need to call an election because, at the moment, the Tories have no effective opposition; their majority might as well be 100.

As a Corbyn supporter, how do I feel about what has been happening? This was a question I was asked just the other day and my answer was tempered by my current bemusement with life in general. This is how I see it; a year ago, feeling wounded by a really disappointing election campaign with a leader less electable than Neil Kinnock and left wondering just what the Labour had to do to make itself more popular than a government that was very unpopular, but still won? Despite my interest in politics, I didn't know Jeremy Corbyn from a hole in the ground and like many people indoctrinated by the media, I thought he was the sacrificial left-wing lamb to show some range of democracy in a relatively anodyne leadership contest. Then, like many others, I started to see this groundswell of support for a reasonable man, unruffled by the hyperbole of 21st century politics, talking sense in a crazy political world. The opposition towards him started before he even won and I forecast the tensions ahead of him, without realising just how low it could sink.

I cannot deny Corbyn represents a wing of the Labour Party that the establishment dislikes and is prone to being labelled extremists and like the far right, the extreme left attracts its own kind of loonies. I saw Corbyn's win as a genuine protest by the voters who care about Labour, for it to return to its grass roots and that has constantly been ignored by the majority of the MPs who cannot accept Corbyn's victory and therefore are not going to listen to the people they supposedly represent.

Whatever accusations are made at Momentum or at Labour, then as many accusations have to be levelled at the rest of the PLP for their own Machiavellian schemes, acted out in their own interests and with scant disregard to the enormous amounts of people who have started to follow Corbyn's beliefs.

Honestly? I think what he's doing will ultimately be destructive, but unfortunately if he acquiesces or is forced out of the party by High Courts and breaches of democracy then the party will also destroy itself, because whoever replaces Corbyn will be seen to have won it in a bloody coup, in an undemocratic fashion that will alienate a large percentage of their core vote. Lose/Lose.

If I was Corbyn faced with hostility from all sides, I would do one of two things. I'd either come out fighting - properly. And I'd start with the press; I wouldn't pander to their whims and when I'm asked pointless personality or personal questions, I would simply turn it round and ask them why they're asking unimportant questions when they should be focusing on all the things that the public should be made aware of. Since he's shown no inclination to be anything but frosty, then the other option would be to sit down with Tom Watson and try to work out a logical successor, who can in some way continue to move Labour back towards its roots as a socialist party rather than a pink Tory party, while offering proper opposition and continuing to attract the people that Jeremy has so far recruited into the fold. Because Owen Smith isn't that man; he's a faceless bureaucrat with a questionable history who to anyone with half a brain sees a token candidate put up to do as much damage as possible.

What I'd like to see is for the 150 plus MPs who are so disillusioned with Corbyn to decide to break away - which is what they want to do but with the Labour name as their own - and form another political party; force 150+ by-elections and see how well they all do. It may well force the UK into looking at socialist coalitions as the way forward to defeat the Tories, or it might simply spell out to these 150+ MPs just how out of touch with their voters they really are. Perhaps this is what is needed; to make the comfortable 'elite' MPs realise that we put them there and therefore they should be representing us and not their own self-interests. The problem with this is MPs are insecure creatures at the best of times; they'd rather try an undemocratic route than an honest plebiscite. Destroy and rebuild from within, because the public has a short memory. Unfortunately betrayal tends to root itself deep.

The Astounding Truth About Jeremy Corbyn and the 37 Naked Contortionist Porn Stars

"The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Joseph Goebbels.

There is a large part of society that really dislikes people quoting Nazis. However, this is one quote - the correct one - that extreme nasty bastard Joseph Goebbels said that should you remove his name and replace it with...

"The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." - Donald Trump/Tusk/Duck

... could easily be believed (especially about Donald Tusk and his observation of the Out campaign).

Just because someone is seen as a thoroughly despicable human being doesn't mean they can't be accurate in an observation. The last x number of years have been built on a large number of lies and exaggerations of the truth and depending on what newspaper you read, or TV news station you watch, some lies are more important than others. Tony Blair probably lied about the circumstances that led to the Iraq war and his ongoing vilification has been expected and generally welcomed. The Coalition government essentially blaming a portion of the population draining £2billion from the budget were responsible for the country's ills and not the tax avoiding corporations not paying in excess of £40billion in legitimate taxes - the comparisons were never addressed in the mainstream media - was a lie. Recently we've had £350million promised to the NHS as the pinnacle of the Leave campaign's reason for leaving the EU and did you notice how quickly that was dropped? Or how many of our 'impartial' media outlets made an issue out of it? Lies.

The simple truth is we're being lied to by the sources we depend on for fair and even coverage. Take the BBC, always accused of being left wing biased by the right wing, yet the corporation currently produces some of the most anodyne 'current affairs' content in its history and has a news department that is awash with Conservative editors, who have recently admitted - and ignored by the mainstream press - that it might have possibly maybe shown some anti-Corbyn bias in its coverage. Or as an independent blogger worked out: Labour in-fighting is covered on a ratio of 4:1 against Conservative in-fighting; Leadership contests - until the announcement of Theresa May, Labour's coverage was 2:1. More strikingly is that media coverage of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was extensively on them with less than 20% of media coverage on the 'in-turmoil' Tories or their various leaders. Once the coalition came in focus on Ed Milliband - the opposition leader - rose to almost 50%. His pales into insignificance at the almost persistent hounding of Jeremy Corbyn.

In the last twelve months there has been a record number of newspaper retractions of things they, wrongly, said about the Labour leader. There has been an almost constant trivialisation of the man, while simultaneously building him up as both dangerous and unelectable. In a sensible society, one should wonder why the media are so desperate to continue warning us about the dangers of a man with policies that would have had 1960s Tory MPs nodding in agreement (with the exception of the Trident bit, naturally)? If the man is so dangerous, how come he's not being, you know, dangerous? Preventing 25 Tory bills in 12 months, 11 of which have been banished from the statute books is actually a better record than any opposition leader in 50 years in such a short space of time. I actually couldn't find any examples of anything the Tories prevented during the Blair/Brown era. Obviously information like this is not important to the general public; they're more interested in the size of Jeremy's marrow or that he was sitting in a park playing Pokemon Go (when, in reality, the desperate Daily Mail reporter handed Jezza the game and asked him to comment on its current trendiness).

Plus it's really easy to make click bait headlines against him. Corbyn attacks Eagle with knife is better than Corbyn grows prize marrow.

There are a number of reports floating around at the moment that shows enormous amounts of evidence to back up the media bias against Corbyn: this is one example - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/media-depictions-of-corbyn-are-an-affront-to-democracy/ and even some of the broadsheets have briefly mentioned this, but none have supported it, condemned it or criticised any of their competition about it. Even The Guardian, for some inexplicable reason now, still the preferred choice of the intellectual Labour voter, has pretty much nailed its allegiance to a lost cause - neoliberalism or Blairism.

Despite Labour continuing to win council by-elections and now mobilising a greater number of young voters, the knives are out again and sharper, because of the Labour Party's desire to self-destruct for the sake of some career politicians. 

This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a fact - the country is pretty much run by a small bunch of people from all across the political spectrum who do everything in their own interests first; it has been seen with the expenses scandal, it has been hinted at with the simmering but never likely to amount to anything election budgeting 'scandal' and the continued onslaught by the none-left wing members of the Parliamentary Labour Party to do anything they can to prevent someone who isn't them and doesn't share their ideology from disrupting their comfortable status quo. The press hasn't really focused any of its attention on Owen Smith or Angela Eagle because there's a Corbyn to be scalped and the fact the old bird is still around makes that scalp really valuable.

I'd like to throw in a theory; it's tenuous I warn you...

UKip are reported as being the biggest threat to luring older Labour voters away (this could be down to the media's knowledge that old Labour voters would never vote Tory, but might be duped into voting Tory under a different name), yet in the majority of those council by-elections I like to bang on about over 90% saw a substantial drop in UKip support (incidentally as the primary goal of UKip has been achieved, how come the mainstream press aren't questioning their continued existence?). It is possible that Corbyn is having a similar effect, but on a different demographic, which Nigel Farage had when his purple fascists suddenly became players on the political landscape (through vote share rather than any seats in Westminster; and remember, their only MP is Douglas Carswell, a former centre-right Tory MP with some hard-right ideas). Some people out there suspect Corbyn isn't the Antichrist and won't eat your children regardless of what Rupert, Paul, Rebekka and co want you to believe.

I've maintained for years that Farage's appeal to your average, largely ignorant, over 50 has been down to his stirring up of jingoistic attitudes and laying the blame at the feet of all the people not responsible for all the ills he peddled. 21st Century fascism encouraged by an inordinate amount of screen time given to, I presume, his general entertainment value. It's like putting subliminal messages into Teletubbies cartoons, programming your children to axe murder you when the signal is given. All he did was peddle lies, deceit and worst of all echoed the urban myths and legends floating around canteens and factories all over the country; it has to be true even if many never saw any evidence of it. Corbyn appears to be galvanising people who still have a social conscience in a similar way.

Once the media started its halfhearted attacks on Farage it increased his support - the little guy who stands up for us workers is being attacked by those lying scumbag newspapers; what are they scared of? Oddly enough the same people will perpetuate myths such as Corbyn not singing the National Anthem or bowing low enough at the Epitaph because they read it in the Sun or the Mail (or those lying scumbag papers, when it suits them)... 

I know people who buy it all; believe that Corbyn is not the right man for a variety of reasons all culminating in, 'and he's simply unelectable' using a term that the media coined, so however much people protest their opinion of the man is their own and hasn't been tainted by outside influences, why aren't you looking at his record, why are you looking at his tie?

Anyhow, Paul Dacre at the Mail will continue to sanction some of the vilest and despicable lies imaginable and somehow remain above the law or criticism. The far right supporting Daily Mail isn't going to be criticised by Tories for blurring the boundaries of impartiality by printing spurious bullshit and if someone from the left attempts to criticise them or take them to task they just lash out again because they know they have no leash. Look at the vicious attacks on the Millibands' dead father and yet Cameron's father was involved in all kinds of tax dodges and the same newspaper called for the dead man's memory to be left unsullied and people believe and support them despite blatant double standards and promoting elitism.

Remember the Sun in 1992? "It was the Sun what won it" or some similarly grammatically appalling headline and I think most people over the age of 40 believe that newspapers can win elections for people; the Sun claimed it won it for Blair, which newspaper historians might interpret as 'Murdoch says this guy will bend over more for me than the last guy'. The Sun didn't win it for Cameron in 2010, but they tend not to mention that. 

More and more people no longer listen to the radio how they once did. TV is changing all the time and our new and innovative ways of viewing are being adopted by more people. Newspapers are dying out among younger audiences, who get their news from different sources. My generation is probably the last one to depend on a lot of 20th century staples and yet we're slowly adapting; but in 20 years many of us will be very old or dead and the people who will become us will have a completely different approach to everything and hopefully that will mean changes in the way we do politics and engage with common people. 

I think this is what Jeremy Corbyn's team has been trying to do. For every person saying, he's unapproachable, he's not statesmanlike, he's out of touch; he doesn't engage with the press enough, there are more people praising his constituency work; his campaigning, his charity work, his support and how, unlike so many other politicians, he's approachable if your intentions are earnest. He gets out and meets people, talks to them and does it the old fashioned way, while simultaneously getting his army of younger political activists to target the places that most people over 50 only hear about from kids or on TV. Young people writing messages about politics aimed at young people doesn't sound so crazy when you say it out loud.

Corbyn and his team are well aware that he is never going to court support from the majority of papers, but Momentum are looking ahead at how things will be fought in the future, while Corbyn remains this quiet, largely unruffled figure refusing to play the games or pander to the media. The biggest problem for Corbyn with right wing leaning news reporting is that if there is a slow news day they aren't averse to manufacturing a story that is negative rather than run a story that is positive. The press would rather you know that someone, somewhere, might be Muslim who is linked to a crime and supports Corbyn than report on how the negative and devastating cuts have decimated deprived areas even more.

If Corbyn's brand of politics is going to remain in charge they need to get a bit slicker in the PR department and they need to try and get a lot of their MPs deselected and new faces to replace them before the next election; so these candidates can win these seats. He also needs to adopt some populist language - or constructive lies - to appease those who think he's soft on areas they want strength. Cameron came across like a sexually aroused horse sporting an enormous erection when he lied to the nation he'd get immigration down; it hurt him that he didn't - but probably nowhere near as much as Jeremy Corbyn's failed radish crop will spell the next downfall of the freakish warmongering vegetarian peacenik (™ The Daily Mail). It's nice to think we have a politician whose principles embrace honesty, but we've got used to being lied to. We don't believe the lies, but we want to and that keeps us going until the next lie comes along.

The Eagle Has Landed Awkwardly

Just for a few minutes, those of you convinced by the media onslaught that Jeremy Corbyn is totally unelectable put those thoughts to one side. Imagine he is just the leader of the opposition and not some kind of whatever he is this week Antichrist-warmongering-vegetarian-lunatic. In fact, try to picture a leader who has the overwhelming support of the party members and in the eyes of a raft of people he is the best thing to happen to Labour since Nye Bevan. Can you do that? Suspend belief for a few minutes and imagine a democratically elected leader who so far has a reasonable track record of getting the Tories to U-Turn and has stimulated interest in politics both from the disaffected and the young. Can you do that?

Good.

Now, I want you to picture Angela Eagle. She is not a Blairite, but she voted for the Iraq war; she also voted on a number of things both positive and negative. In many ways her politics represent a more Corbyn-leaning; she is more left wing than many of the people who dislike Corbyn and that must be the reason she has been asked to sacrifice her political career in what is likely to be a futile, misguided and ultimately hugely damaging defeat for the entire Labour Party. It is clear that the Parliamentary Labour Party has decided that they can live with up to another 9 years in opposition if they can get rid of Corbyn regardless of the damage it does, today.

This is no longer about right and wrong; this is about Establishment Labour attempting to break its own rules to get rid of someone they don't like and now that every fair means has failed, they're starting on the foul ones. With the knowledge that the media will lap up this disintegration and the affect it will have on the voters will be, in the short term, horrendous. There are probably 'New' Labour gurus planning the clean-up and bounce back already, safe in the knowledge that a centre-left leader will get the majority of the press off their backs and allow them to get their message Pink Tory message to the masses. They are also probably convinced that while 500,000 party members might be on the verge of revolution, the party will survive once these fanatics have been driven away and Labour will thrive by attracting more disgruntled Tories, fed up with Austerity Version C.

Honestly, they could learn a thing or ten from the Tories, who have gone from meltdown to brilliantly executed unity inside five days (with little or no media hostility). They can't manage the country but they can manage themselves, which is damning with feint praise, but it's praise all the same. The only thing Labour hasn't unified this week has been everything. And surely Angela Eagle must be aware that making herself the sacrificial lamb is going to cause one of two things - a schism within the party, or a massive revolt against the party by the party! You can imagine the targeting seats by the 'redicals' to ensure a Corbyn-less party does even worse than they imagined - but, but, but... that would be destruction for the party? Yes, a bit like what the centre right of the party are doing now.

A possible schism will be caused by the threat of deselection - imagine a new leader of the opposition who gets a vote of no confidence from her own Constituency Party? It is more than a distinct possibility that 172 MPs get deselected and even my growing knowledge of politics isn't wide enough to even contemplate the constitutional nightmare that would cause. If Corbyn wins this week's leadership contest there's a good chance a lot of MPs will be looking for new jobs, very soon.

Two things are clear if Eagle and the PLP win this ridiculous 'war' - many Labour voters will turn their backs on the party if they feel their will has been undermined by just a handful of people (compared to members) and while Eagle might be more popular within the MPs in Westminster, she will have become toxic to everyone but the most devout and loyal of supporters. Secondly, to quote a friend - 'Labour is finished', but only if the PLP allows itself to play out what will be seen as a poor and grubby Machiavellian coup; because it's a damned sight harder to forgive Labour anything than it is the Tories and the conspirators will realise that their long term aim has just turned into a short term career move.

Would Eagle be a stronger more effective leader of the country if she was in charge? Well, the same applies to her as applies to Corbyn; we simply don't know. People thought Cameron was a strong, effective statesman - yes, he was indeed statesmanlike, was he strong or effective? Would a quiet man in an ill-fitting suit, bordering 70 be that worse than the suits we think of as leaders who have all but run away? This appears to be the reasoning behind why he is unelectable - he doesn't look the part. Well, Angela Merkel looks like she's halfway through makeup as a new Dr Who villain; Francoise Hollande looks like a dull tax inspector who models himself on Rafa Benitez; and even I struggle to put names to faces after that, but few of them could stand next to Obama and look impressive - and Obama's apparently not universally loved.

Now that Labour's new unknown superstar Owen Something has thrown his hat into the ring, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ange-E (as we should call her) do what is called in the trade 'A Leadsom' and retire to Wallasey to mend her napalmed bridges, leaving Mr Something's imminent defenestration a foregone conclusion in a leader vote. It begs the question of why this has been done in the first place?

How about this? The PLP isn't on a self-destruct course at all; as I said, they're prepared to wait another 9 years before they have an earnest crack at winning an election and 9 years in politics is an eternity (given the last week). The PLP either doesn't believe the interest Corbyn has generated and will stick with the unelectable tag or they realise that he is a genuine threat both to the party and their own future security and ambition. If career politicians go into politics to eventually help run a country, imagine you are Jeremy Corbyn in a Tony Blair government? What chance of you got of influencing anything? That is what faces the likes of Kendall, Cooper, Umanna and both the Hotel California Sisters if Corbyn remains. So how about destroying Corbyn's Labour Party? For at least 170 MPs Corbyn is more of a threat to them than the Tories; but as the core of the parliamentary party they represent 'true Labour' - they can rise phoenix-like from the ashes of defeat and stand triumphant against the Tories in 2025. Napalm Labour now, rake those undamaged or tarnished by Corbyn's lunacy out and set them up as the new Shadow cabinet and if necessary dispense with the unions in an attempt to become more electable in the suburbs. Job done. Sorry population, but you just get in the way of their careers.

How does Jeremy Corbyn salvage Labour from this debacle? Here's a little nugget that would never appear in the press - yes, mention the name Jeremy Corbyn amongst disaffected older, traditional Labour voters, and those who know who he is dismiss him as if he's some kind of lower-than-Osborne pond scum; yet in normally traditional Tory heartlands there has been a growth in Labour members from the under 25s. Why would the children of Tory voters in places like Oxfordshire and Surrey suddenly join Labour - post Corbyn? The common belief is that austerity has really only affected the poorest the most, but in reality austerity has a trickle up effect. Once cuts at the bottom start impacting on the next level up, this has a kind of domino effect until it actually starts affecting on those usually immune to it. The young, even the privileged young have friends, acquaintances and witness the world through different eyes than us. Kids not normally bothered by politics will start to notice changes among their peer groups and while barely one of them really care about council estate kids in Macclesfield, they care about their mates on social media, down the pub, at the club. It's a selfish-based system, but one that used to attract some of the aristocracy or wealthier classes to be philanthropists and left-wing politicians.

If Corbyn can mobilise his young team to motivate younger voters and come up with some language to appease a portion of their lost vote in heartlands, then he has one thing, one very big thing, going in his favour... The Tories.

Theresa May has a monumental task ahead of her for one very clear reason, the referendum was as much a protest vote against the Tories as it was against the EU. People are fed up and she either has to make them less fed up or the Tories could face their own watershed moment in May 2020 when a mass protest vote against their policies could leave the country bereft of a dominant party, especially if Labour can't unify. Imagine a parliament with 150 Tories, 100 UKIP, 30 Lib Dems, 60 SNP, 150 Labour and 110+ others? Rainbow coalitions might work, but the dissent from the press would weigh heavily on their shoulders, because while the press don't always represents the majority of people, they are always right.