It’s the local elections in Britain tomorrow, or the mid-terms as a few half-witted idiots, mainly from the USA USA USA, have called them and it’s very likely that many Brits will vote for the extremes in large numbers. Nigel Farage’s far right, some including me would call fascist, private company Reform Party UK Ltd and the reinvented Greens who have assumed the identity of Jeremy Corbyn’s hard left Labour Party are likely to be the big winners. What’s going on? Has the electorate really moved to the wild extremes of politics or is something else going on?
The people I see in my life value the NHS, they would like to see a kinder, gentler, fairer Britain, they believe that workers should enjoy more rights, that the challenge of climate change has to be addressed and that public service matters. Reform UK believes in none of these things. It favours the American system of private health insurance, it is run and owned by and on behalf of the rich and powerful, it wants to take away our rights at work and our actual human rights, it wants to take an axe to public sector pensions, it will ban all working from home and it wants to take an axe to the welfare system, in which the old, the sick, the disabled and the vulnerable depend. Yet on Friday morning, people will be cheering the fact that their local councils are being run by Reform and the Greens.
Similarly, they will vote for Zack Polanski’s populist Greens, who have the same racist tinges as Corbyn’s Labour. The Greens want to disarm the UK, to remove our nuclear deterrent, to leave NATO, to massively increase taxes on motorists while at the same time making it as hard as possible to drive anywhere, while also charging workers to use the office/factory car park. I cannot speak on behalf of the British people but I believe they will be voting Reform or Green for very different reasons.
“Let’s give Nigel a chance,” said a woman on the news tonight. “He couldn’t go any worse, could he?” Less than two years into its five year term, people say that things haven’t changed, even though they have. They are disillusioned and angry. They were promised change and change hasn’t come quickly enough. Volunteering at a food bank I totally get it. The the cost of living crisis, which is already affecting our friends who visit us, affects millions more, as it will do even more as Donald Trump’s disastrous war on Iran continues to impact the world economy. But hang on a minute: Nigel Farage, a loyal ally, a lickspittle, of Trump supported the war and if he had been prime minister, we’d be up to our necks in an illegal war.
Farage, too, is the architect of Brexit, the greatest political error of post war Britain and a gift to his allies in Washington and the Kremlin. Tomorrow, he will be the leader of a private limited company that will get the most votes in council elections. Our greatest war leader, Winston Churchill, will be turning in his grave.
With virtually the whole media supporting Reform Party UK Ltd, I’m thinking they might have influence on how people vote. Only the Daily Mirror has supported the Labour Party, with everyone else from the BBC through Sky News through every national newspaper, including the increasingly hard left Green supporting Guardian, has attacked the governing party and tacitly supported Farage.
I do not believe that millions of British people have become fascists. Many are disillusioned and feel left behind, as if mainstream politicians don’t care about them. Any maybe they have a point. But I’ll say this: no one has more contempt for the British people than Nigel Farage, who is nothing but a grifting snake oil salesman, and seeks to reward not the people who will be voting in droves for him tomorrow, but the super rich illiberal elite, of whom he is a paid up member.
The government will not fall tomorrow or the day after and life will go on, albeit with a significant number of fascists occupying council chambers. The Labour government has to do more and do it faster and having spent the first two years of its term in office sorting out the mess the Conservatives left, I am optimistic they will. If they don’t, the days of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak will feel like the good old days.
