Europe’s marked shift towards populism appears to be accelerating, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party has surpassed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in an opinion poll for the first time, signaling a potential shift in the British political landscape as the nation approaches the July 4 general election.
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It’s the favourite buzzword of Left-wing news outlets and pundits. But what exactly do they mean by it?
h/t DS
Some of us have vindictively long memories. I am one such person. So let me summon up just two stories from the not-so-distant past that have some bearing on our unhappy present.
In 2009 the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was barred by Jacqui Smith, the then Labour home secretary, from entering the UK. In a letter explaining her decision, Smith (or rather her Home Office lawyers) wrote that Wilders’s ‘statements about Muslims and their beliefs would threaten community harmony and therefore public safety in the UK’. Perhaps Smith was partly influenced by the possibility that if Wilders came to the Houses of Parliament and gave his speech (in which he was expected to show his film Fitna) thousands of angry Islamists might decide to take to the streets in Westminster. Something which has, of course, never happened since.
Thirty-one years ago, the Progressive Conservatives lost all but two seats and spent years puzzling over how to rebuild
A party unspooling in its waning days of power, a prime minister plumbing news depths of unpopularity, the looming threat of an electoral “nightmare scenario” and a newly empowered Reform party hellbent on destroying the national Conservatives.
Canada’s 1993 federal election fundamentally altered the country’s political landscape and shattered its national conservative movement, forcing leaders to spend a decade puzzling over how to rebuild a broken party.
A world-historical societal transformation is taking place before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. Britain, the erstwhile leader of the Western world and the foundation and source of English-speaking civilization, is in its last days as a free society, and will soon become an Islamic state. Yet despite the mountains of evidence that this transformation is taking place, many will still deny that it is happening at all. They may not even admit it when it overtakes them personally.
Only 16% of Britons would fight in a war to defend France, according to new UnHerd polling.
The survey, conducted by FocalData, polled 1,012 UK voters about foreign policy and defence, asking them which nations they would be willing to defend in an armed conflict. As Second World War veterans travel to Normandy to mark today’s 80th anniversary of D-Day, the UnHerd findings reveal that British gratitude is in short supply.
At nine o’clock in the morning, everybody in Clacton-on-Sea seems to be leaning on something. A walking stick. A frame. A shopping trolley.
Passersby in the bracing sea air are few. But the one busy place is the local Wetherspoons, the Moon and Starfish, where Nigel Farage had a customary pint on Tuesday. This marked his first day campaigning as Reform leader as well as the party’s parliamentary candidate for Clacton. Residents and holidaymakers are following his lead, tucking into fried breakfasts and early drinks.
The time for empty talk about net migration being brought down to the “tens of thousands” is over. After it was revealed that more than 1.2 million people arrived legally into Britain last year, around half of Britons have said they want to see a freeze on all “non-essential” immigration.
Richard Tice is stepping aside as leader of Reform UK to allow Nigel Farage to take the reins.
The former UKIP and Brexit Party leader, who is largely credited with pushing ‘Leave’ over the finish line in the 2016 Brexit referendum, said “there is a rejection of the political class going on in this country in a way that has not been seen in modern times,” and that he is coming back to lead a political “revolt.”
Labour is on track for its biggest election victory in history surpassing the number of seats won by Tony Blair in 1997, a poll of more than 50,000 people suggests today.
The YouGov survey suggested that Sir Keir Starmer is on track to win 422 seats, with the Conservatives reduced to 140 MPs.
The Conservative party deserves this.
The Labour Party may have ejected Jeremy Corbyn, but the Green Party is now putting up aggressively Islamist candidates.
For years I’ve been oddly intrigued by those poor souls who somehow manage to run themselves over with their own cars, such as the pop singer Brian Harvey of East 17. I always think of this when I consider the Keystone Kommunism of Komrade Jeremy Corbyn.
He’s the little man who got behind the wheel of a vehicle far too large for him to handle and eventually went under it when, in 2019, he led Labour to its greatest defeat since 1935. Huge swaths of traditional working-class Labour heartlands — the Red Wall — opted for Boris Johnson.
Since it seems inevitable that we will soon have a Labour government it is worth pondering now what manner of monstrosity it might be.
The Conservatives have spent recent days warning about the known knowns of the Labour Party. Which is perhaps inevitable. But to continue with the Rumsfeld-ism, we should spend at least some time dwelling on the known unknowns. The things that we know that we do not yet know.
This year, several articles in mainstream papers have sounded the alarm that the global human fertility rate will soon cross below the point needed to keep the population constant. Anxiety that our species is about to die out seems a bit premature, given that we’re still predicted to add another three billion to the world population before levelling off. Furthermore, these reports always gloss over a key outlier because it undermines the case for our imminent extinction: Africa.
A leading reason that continental Europe is shifting to the political right is popular concern about mass immigration. So I’m putting Europeans and their short-sighted representatives on notice: you folks haven’t seen anything yet.
The PM knew he had no good options left
There is surely only one explanation for Rishi Sunak’s sudden rush to the polls. In stark contrast with the D:Ream anthem that nearly drowned out the Prime Minister’s announcement: things can only get worse.
Regardless of Sunak’s message that the country has turned the corner, and that he can be trusted to finish the job, a prime minister who genuinely believed the country would be noticeably better off in a few months’ time would surely wait until the end of the year to go to the polls. Sunak, by contrast, has got nothing to bank: he is 23 points behind and has calculated that today’s conditions are his best shot at remaining in power.
The cost of renting a home increased by a staggering 30 per cent from mid-2021 to the start of this year, while wages rose by 17 per cent in the same period. Compare that with the record of the preceding decade, when rents rose by 26 per cent, just 1 per cent less than the increase in wages.
According to analysis by Capital Economics, rents in the 2021-24 period climbed 11 per cent higher than they would otherwise have done thanks to the unprecedented levels of immigration over which this government has presided. Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11 per cent higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.”
