The far right is now calling from inside the building
Speymouth
I got my review pack for Adult Disability Payment. It was very quick and easy to fill in. I checked the box confirming no changes to my condition and sent back the form with a copy of a letter written by my occupational therapist when I was discharged which confirms that my needs will be life long. I hope that will help them make a decision more quickly. Now I just have to wait. I also got confirmation that my disabled parking Blue Badge has been extended until 30 June 2026, so that’s a result. Now the waiting begins. So onto business…
The results of Thursday’s local and mayoral elections in England have been coming in on Friday and they prove that the UK is well and truly screwed. The far right in the shape of Nigel Farage’s English nationalist Reform UK has been performing much better than the opinion polls had suggested they might.
The right wing voters that Labour was trying to appeal to went and voted for a right wing party anyway and the left wing voters who had backed Labour in last summer’s general election decided not to vote for Labour this time round because Labour is far too right wing now, left and centre-left voters did not sign up for cutting disability benefits, retaining the two child cap on benefits, refusing to tax the super rich, austerity, doubling down on Brexit and demonising minorities and migrants. People voted for hope and change and vision not Reform lite and the same old Tory crap which Starmer has delivered.
Who could have possibly predicted that promoting Reform talking points would lead to Reform victories. Just about everyone except Keir Starmer, a politician who is spectacularly bad at politics and whose naked ambition and careerism has led us to where we are today. Make the lives of ordinary people worse while protecting the interests of the super rich and you’ll pay for it at the ballot box. Labour has lost three quarters of the seats it was defending in yesterday’s elections.
Much of the blame for the rise of the far right in the UK can be laid squarely at the door of Keir Starmer. However he is not solely to blame. The Conservatives, who like Labour, have been receiving a severe kicking from the voters in yesterday’s elections, shoulder much of the responsibility too with their unnecessary choice to capitulate to the hardest possible Brexit in the wake of 2016’s EU election and their constant pandering to the far right ever since. The British media is also responsible, the BBC in particular. The British media has consistently given far right voices a platform out of all proportion to their electoral strength, a platform they have not given to the Greens, who have done better than the far right in terms of winning elections, at least until yesterday. But then advocating the continuation of civilised human life on the planet, dignity for women and minorities and protection of the planet upon whose health we all depend doesn’t make as interesting television as being a hideous demagogue who demonise Europe and migrants while shilling for billionaires.
Thursday’s local and mayoral English elections mark something truly significant and deeply concerning in British politics. Last summer’s general election saw the far right get their toe in the door with the election of five Reform UK MPs, these local English elections have seen the far right take power in the newly created mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire and the county councils of Staffordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Durham, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Lincolnshire, where Reform have put the grim into Grimsby. Other county councils look set to fall into Reform UK control by the time that counting is finished.
As if Boris Johnson wasn’t bad enough – now it seems that unless there is drastic change and a complete U-turn by Starmer, England is going to vote for a government led by Nigel Farage at the next Westminster general election. There’s no “Better Together” that Scotland was promised. Scotland’s future is independence or Scotland has no future at all. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Better Together warned that Scotland needed Westminster to protect us from political extremism. Well now the extremists are calling from inside the building, and it was Westminster and the British media, particularly the BBC, which opened the door and let them in.
Starmer in his arrogance will continue to resist calls from the left of the Labour party to rejoin the European single market and customs union and introduce a wealth tax on the super rich. The Tories, whose electoral kicking has been even greater than Labour’s drubbing, will now come under even more intense pressure to reach some sort of deal with Nigel Farage. Local councillors form the back bone of their party’s ground campaign during general elections, the Tories have just lost hundreds of their most experienced canvassers and campaigners. Labour figures are already talking about how many migrants and asylum seekers they have deported as though people who might be persuaded to vote Labour won’t do so because Labour’s not being cruel enough to migrants.
In normal circumstances the Conservatives could have expected to receive a boost when campaigning against an unpopular government. Instead, voters have punished the Tories even more than Labour. The Tories have been pretty much wiped out as a credible force in English local government where they have dominated for decades. There’s now a very big question mark about the future of the Labour-Tory duopoly which has characterised British politics for the past one hundred years. The Tories look set to be replaced as the party of the right by an even more right wing party. Witnessing the well deserved death of the Conservatives as a major political force would have been cause for celebration were it not for the fact that they are poised to be replaced by something far worse.
For Scotland, even though no Scottish votes were cast yesterday, this election is a warning of what is in store for us if we don’t rally behind the pro-independence parties at the next Holyrood elections and in the Westminster elections due in 2029 we will lose our chance for independence and will be trapped in a nakedly English nationalist far right British state which will leave the European Convention on Human Rights and become a vassal state of Trump’s MAGA Republicans, the doddery and senile Trump might not survive too much longer, but the Republican party which is now a mindless Trump personality cult will find a successor in his ugly image. There will be no place for Scottish political distinctiveness in Farage’s Greater England. England is heading for a Reform UK government with Labour and the Tories reduced to ineffectual rumps.
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