I’ve just read Mark Steyn’s take on our latest national discussion. I’ve followed Mark Steyn for some years in his various positions and posts in British publications and on GB News. I concluded, quite a while back, that he’s a clever bloke with sound judgement and the honesty to stick with his beliefs which does, more than somewhat, separate him from most of his colleagues in the ‘commentariat’, and he’s paid a heavy price for this.
I can’t quite understand how he lost the court case against Michael Mann, the ‘scientist’ who sold the bogus ‘Hockey stick’ global climate rise in temperature model. Awarding Michael Mann the derisory $1.00 was a sort of vindication for Mark Steyn, but the legal costs and the strain cost Mark quite a lot more. ‘Lawfare’ in its various forms is a relatively new instrument deployed to silence dissenters or screw-over political opponents. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before we get more of this in the UK…
A propos…
After reading his latest column I’ve decided to weigh-in on a topic which I’ve sought to avoid for a while.
I really didn’t want to get involved in the argument about whether Nigel Farage and Reform should support Tommy Robinson’s case, and his campaign. I’ve tended to share the view of most commenters that those of us who wish to see a change for the better in British politics and government should really stick together and try to avoid focusing on anything which risks dividing those supporting that endeavour, which means backing Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, in my view.
I have tried to put aside the dissension which is now manifest over this matter and I suppose that this has been crystallised by the recent about turn from Elon Musk and his reported earlier interest in bunging $100.0 million to Reform and the presumed cancellation of this. Ah well! Membership subs are up and Nick Candy’s not a bad choice as Treasurer.
Let’s look at this carefully before we come to any conclusions. There are a number of considerations to bear in mind and not all of them will chime with everybody who supports Reform. I’m not trying to make a case. I’m trying to review the scenario and make some sense of this, to me at least.
Reform UK is an insurgent political party set against the established political parties which have run the country over the last 100 years. I largely discount both the LibDems and the SNP from this analysis which might be wrong of me. With a few exceptions, we’ve had Conservative or Labour governments since 1923.
Reform polled some 4.17 million votes last year and won five seats with a 14.30% share of the vote. By contrast, the LibDems polled 3.52 million votes, some 12.20% share of the vote and got 72 seats. Iniquitous, in many respects, but it’s our system of FPTP which tends to avoid the condition of coalition governments which characterise all the other European nations. I don’t advocate for PR, although I did do so many years ago as a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party. Frankly, PR tends to be just another excuse for politicians reneging on election manifestos, as if we needed more excuses for this.
The single biggest shock to the British parliamentary establishment and the government apparatus and all its public sector agencies across the nation, in our nation’s recorded history, was in 2016 when 17.40 million, 52% of the voters turned out, on a 72% turnout, and voted to leave the European Union.
Allowing for the contribution of others since Maastricht, there is no doubt that this victory was owed in large part to Nigel Farage and his moulding of UKIP which forced David Cameron to concede the referendum. The subsequent annihilation of the Conservative Party in the Euro Parliamentary elections and the Brexit Party’s triumph was utterly hilarious.
This provoked a riot in the Conservative Party which threw up ‘The Man who would be King’, Boris Johnson, who capitalised on the UKIP/Leave votes in Labour constituencies to get the Conservative Party’s big win in the General Election of 2019 promising great prospects of a successful separation from the EU on mutually beneficial terms.
This lasted for a few years and included Covid and gave us a very different perspective of a UK government and a less than perfect deal with the EU. Ah well!
Where are we now? Given the abysmally low turnout at the last General Election of a shade under 60% we must recognise that there’s a deep-seated malaise in British politics and the tenuous connection between the electorate and its representatives in Parliament has stretched beyond a reasonable and sustainable limit. The disconnect has never been more obvious in all my years of observing this since the late 1960s.
As a remarkable demonstration of this, I’ve just realised that the combined total of votes for both Labour and Conservative parties last year was lower than the 17.40 million who voted Leave in 2016, at 16.50 million.
I am stunned by this. I knew that things were pretty grim. I just hadn’t looked at the numbers to confirm this. It’s puzzled me since I went to look for those numbers and I’ve checked it a few times. Clearly, a hell of a lot of voters went missing as there were over 16.0 million voters for Remain, not to mention the fact that we’d been ‘enriched’ with quite a few million new residents over the years.
Consider this for a little while. Fewer voters chose all of the Conservative and Labour MPs than voted to leave the EU only eight years ago. Extraordinary.
Back to Reform and the Tommy Robinson factor. It’s tricky.
There’s a description in our upper middle class used to describe those who were ‘PLU’, that is to say, ’people like us’, I get the distinct impression that Nigel Farage doesn’t regard Tommy Robinson as ‘PLU’ and I can see why he’s of this opinion, and, just as importantly, Farage believes that this is a view which is shared by most of the 176,388 members, and counting, who have signed up for his party.
He fears that he will lose half of those members and a lot more votes if Tommy Robinson is associated with Reform, and it’s a logical, and tenable position.
From an affluent middle-class background, Dulwich College and the City, Nigel Farage knows about class, as do other members of Reform. I get this, but I don’t think that it’s the determining factor today. I’m middle-middle class and have lots of friends who are lower-middle and working class in the old format. Three decades of living elsewhere has left me with a blurred and, probably, antiquated sense of these distinctions. One could argue, with some justification, that the ‘class divide’ in UK today has more to do with the distinctions between those employed in the public sector vs the rest.
I don’t know enough about Tommy Robinson to make a useful and informed decision on his suitability or otherwise about his possible value to Reform, much less his ‘suitability’ as a member of the party, which may betray my prejudices. He is, as far as I can determine, a very proud member of the working class from Luton, a town which I only really registers with me because Eric Morecombe was such a big fan of its football club.
I’d ask that readers here consider spending an hour looking at the documentary film, ‘Silenced’, which he produced and give it some thought. It is, on the basis of this film that he was sued for libel and landed with a £340,000 payment, or thereabouts, to the Syrian young man who features as the ‘alleged’ victim of the film.
Watch this and draw your own conclusions. Remarkably, it hasn’t been pulled from YouTube yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWMqit6l5Z4
Be aware of the fact that at least two of the people who feature in the film, including the Head Teacher, were paid quite a lot of money under ‘Non-Disclosure Agreements’ to not present themselves as corroborating witnesses for his defence in the Civil Court hearing which found Tommy Robinson guilty of libel and charged with compensation and costs totalling about £500,000….I may not have all the right numbers.
It his defaulting from this payment and failure to be present again in court which resulted in his conviction for contempt and his sentence of 18 months in jail. 18 months for this appears to be unduly harsh, especially contrasted with many sentences for violent crimes. I would cheerfully cite sentences for burglary or stealing very expensive cars in comparison, but I don’t think that the Police bother to investigate or arrest anybody for such crimes these days.
As I’ve said, I don’t know a lot about Tommy Robinson, much less any previous convictions he is reported to have. I’m pretty sure that falsifying income to get a mortgage doesn’t usually result in a criminal conviction for fraud otherwise quite a few people I’ve known, and their Building Society/Bank advisers would have been clogging up our penal system over the last 50 years.
I am told that HMRC decided to give Tommy Robinson a thorough going-over a few years ago – a measure which normally gets visited on very wealthy people who look like they’re bent. Tommy Robinson doesn’t appear to have been either very wealthy or conspicuously crooked. He was, certainly, extremely irritating as far as HMG was concerned and had several thousand ‘followers’ before large parts of his social media sites were chopped by the people in charge.
I have urged a few chums of the left to open their minds and just watch the film which I find persuasive and quite well put together. They’ve refused to consider doing so as they regard Tommy Robinson as so odious that they wouldn’t risk having this downloaded onto their machines – it’s tainted and, oddly, ‘haram’, if I can use that term ironically.
This is a special type of left/liberal intolerance combined with a lack of curiosity which marks our political world and disappoints me. Frankly, this verges on bigotry, which may sound harsh but fits the bill, I’m afraid.
A deliberate wish to utterly ignore new information which might be unpalatable is the attitude which has facilitated the tacit permission for the mass rape of thousands of under-age girls by organised Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other Muslim gangs which have perpetrated their crimes over the last 30 years or more across the country.
Let’s be very clear about this. We’re often told that ‘silence means consent’ when it comes to not speaking out about rape. I’d suggest that this applies to a vast swathe of taxpayer-funded public officials, Police, and elected councillors across the country. I’d suggest that it also applies to any number of government ministers since 1995.
I don’t accuse anybody of complicity, unless they were complicit, but I question the mindset of people who refuse to even look at new information because it comes from a source which they’ve prejudged.
Hell! I look at stuff in The Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesman until the firewall hits. The same level of delusion and unwillingness to even look at other sources of information has been blindingly obvious in the US over the last four years….but that’s another story for another time.
Reluctantly, and on balance, I’m forced to the conclusion that Nigel Farage needs to reconsider his view on Tommy Robinson, and I say this with a full awareness of the likely consequences and with some reservations.
The sensible approach would be to allow Tommy Robinson to make his case with a full and frank presentation of his life and career to date including criminal convictions and all of the circumstances pertaining to these. I don’t know much about this, but I’d be very dubious about relying on Wikipedia which is about as straight as a dog’s hind leg.
All of this presumes that Tommy Robinson actually wants to join Reform which I’d guess is a presumption too far. It appears to be a presumption made by Elon Musk and, I suppose that if you’ve got more dollars than God, you’re allowed to make such presumptions, but it’s not one which I buy.
Electorally, and tactically, it’s going to be a divisive issue for Nigel Farage and Reform over the next year or more.
My view on this is extraordinarily quite simple. If Reform is now on the path to have a membership with democratic rights embedded in its new constitution and structure, it shouldn’t be too difficult to put this to a vote, always assuming that Tommy Robinson actually wants to apply for membership, which I think is unlikely.
By the same token, should more than a few members of Reform wish to see the Party express support for Tommy Robinson, then this can be resolved by a swift online canvass of paid-up members. With some reservations, and all things being equal, I’d be inclined to vote for such a motion.
I’m afraid that the ball is in your court Nigel. Play it, or watch it bounce out of play and lose a game. I don’t think that ignoring this is a viable option for much longer.