Category Archives: parliamentary elections

CLEARING THE WEEDS IN THE POLITICAL GARDEN

CLEARING THE WEEDS IN THE POLITICAL GARDEN

As any gardener knows, the first thing you have got to do in sorting out a flower bed that has become choked with weeds is to remove all the weeds and cut out any of the dead flowers etc. in order to make it worthwhile digging in your fertilizer or compost and planting your new plants.
This is the sort of stage that we have reached with our Parliament, which is now stuffed, in both the Commons and the Lords, with people who are not merely unpatriotic, but are actually anti-patriotic and are hostile to the very idea of our Nation.  They are Internationalists and Multiculturalists. 
For our national politics to flourish we need to see such weeds removed from our political flowerbed and also all the deadwood and old decayed plants as well, so that we can have a fresh and more honest and a patriotic revival!
In this sense it is welcome to see that Boris Johnson’s Government has had the guts to withdraw the Whip from all those Conservative MPs that betrayed the trust that had been placed in them by voting against Boris Johnson this week.
Even better was seeing Amber Rudd resign form Cabinet and the Conservative Party in response. She is the classic career-minded entryist who, in ideological terms, is a Liberal Democrat Remainer, Multiculturalist, Globalist, but could see that her career prospects would be better if she badged up as a Conservative.
These people were all elected on the ticket of implementing Brexit and, as ‘Conservatives’ were expected to be loyal, not only to their manifesto mandate, the country, but also to their Party Leader.  They proved disloyal on all counts.  They have no place to be remaining in our Parliament and it will be good to have them all thrown out of Parliament come the next General Election.
As for those who have crossed the floor to join other parties, they have gone fully beyond the pale and so will have to stand or fall come the next General Election with their new party rosettes on.  Let’s see what their local electorates make of them then!  I suspect none of them will be re-elected.
Less visibly, our Left-wing biased media has been more coy about reporting the movement of Labour MPs to the Liberal Democrats.  The latest one being Luciana Berger. 
Looked at from the point of view of purging our politics of the corrupt old ideologically meaningless “broad church” Establishment parties of Labour and the Conservatives, both of these developments are to be welcomed.   
We need to move to a politics where its voters can rely upon a party label to tell us much of what is in the political tin, as we would expect to be able to do if we were buying tinned food.  
If an ordinary trader made a business out of putting labels of baked beans on tins of peas, they could expect to be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act.  We urgently need something similar with our politicians to enable us to hold them to account if they fail to deliver on what they promised when they were standing for election.
I notice that those MPs that betrayed their electorates often talk about Edmund Burke’s idea that he was “a representative” of his electorate rather than his electorates “delegate”.  It is however worth remembering that, despite that explanation sounding quite grand, in fact at the next election, when he had proved himself to be unwilling to do what his electorate wanted him to do, he lost his seat! And quite right too! 
We need to move away from the bogus pretences of so-called “Liberal Democracy”, where undemocratic elites hide behind the pretence of democracy.  I think that we need to move instead to a proper functioning “Popular Democracy” where politicians are expected to live up to focussing on doing what is needed to be done to deliver the Will of the People. 
What do you think?

BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?

BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?

Last week on the 1st August there was a Parliamentary by-election, the reports of which had been very overshadowed by the national political events, like the formation of the new Boris Johnson Premiership and Cabinet.  Then almost out of the blue, as it were, we learnt that the Conservatives have lost the seat. 
There were suggestions in the Remainer Main Stream Media that Boris has already lost his bounce. A more obvious point on the facts would be one that they are not so keen to report, given their pro-Labour bias, that in fact the Labour candidate had almost lost his deposit in a Welsh constituency which had once been part of Labour’s Welsh permanent fiefdom!  The seat was Labour for many years until 1979.
A bit more enquiry reveals that the Conservative Party’s candidate had previously been the MP, but the by-election was called as a result of a Recall Petition because he had been convicted of creating fraudulent invoices and claiming fraudulently on his parliamentary expenses. 
So what on earth induced the Conservative Party to put him up again as a parliamentary candidate?  Was it incredible arrogance?  Incredible stupidity? Or some sort of devious plot?
Of course in human affairs generally it is often a mistake to discount the role of sheer mistaken stupidity.  That maybe what has happened here; perhaps coupled here with a sense of obstinate entitlement. 
There is however an alternative idea to consider. 
Let’s first look at the timeline here:-
The previous MP and recent Conservative candidate, Christopher Davies, pleaded guilty of putting in false expenses in March 2019 and in April he was sentenced.  
The Speaker launched the legal petition on the 24th April and the petition was opened on the 9th May and remained open for signatures until the 20th June.  It only needed to get 5,303 signatures but in fact got 10,005 signatures.  10,005 petitioners who signed to remove him amounted to 19% of the 53,032 electors in Brecon and Radnorshire. 
 
Mr Davies was re-selected as the Conservative candidate (the re-selection process now requires not only the local party to support the candidate, but more importantly requires the National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party to sign the candidate’s Nomination Certificate.  The National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party is Victoria Carslake, who was of course an appointment by Theresa May). 
The close of nominations in this by-election took place on 5th July and, as I mentioned, the election took place last week on the 1st August. 
This timeline alone shows that this by-election can really have absolutely nothing to do with Boris Johnson.  The fact that the recently convicted fraudster Conservative candidate still managed to do so well might really show that Boris Johnson, if he had any effect on it at all, very nearly got him re-elected however unsuitable he might be as an MP!
So I return to the question of why would the Conservatives put up a candidate who has not only been recently convicted of fraud on his parliamentary expenses, but also to strong feeling locally about this, triggered this by-election? 
Another possibility, other than Conservative stupidity, might be another devious plot by Theresa May and her inner circle. 
We now know that Theresa May never sought to negotiate any form of proper Brexit.  She never suggested to the EU negotiators that we might leave with ‘No Deal’ and she never attempted to get the United Kingdom a good deal.  Her whole effort was to try and tie us up as close to the European Union as possible, which is why she went on, not only lying about what she was doing, but also signing us up to yet further EU commitments, such as the new EU Army. 
She also called her General Election not because she wanted to guarantee Brexit, but rather because she wanted to be independent of the Brexiteers and to impose her Agreement on the country. 
So I suggest that a possible scenario is that this totally unsuitable Conservative candidate was re-selected in order to lose that seat and so give Remain supporters in the House of Commons yet more clout. 
All this was going on whilst Theresa May was trying to and partly succeeding in getting huge further spending commitments which would bind the hands of her successor, which was already most likely to be Boris. 
If this is what was actually happening, then this by-election is nothing to do with Boris except in the sense that it was always set up as a trap. 
The most laughable suggestion is that this is all the fault of the Brexit Party splitting the vote.  This is of course a variant of the old line of the most cynical Establishment vote manipulators that you cannot vote for anybody else other than the Conservatives otherwise you get Labour (or vice or versa if you are a former Labour supporter). 
Whilst it is true that the Brexit Party got more than the difference between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat, it does not follow that people who voted Brexit Party would have voted for the Tory convicted fraudster.
Of course all this undemocratic nonsense relies upon the most appallingly undemocratic electoral system, the “First Past the Post” which regularly cheats large numbers of voters out of their preferred outcome. 

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

 
ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?
It is commonplace amongst political commentators that the voting public is not interested in politics and does not spend much time thinking about it.  In fact the best example of how this has been explained that I have come across over the years was a commentator who said that the public only see politics out of their “peripheral vision”.  If somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then politically that is a game changer. 

So this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public.  This has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed to get on with it unchecked.

It is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into thinking critically about the politicians that are being elected.  This is the situation in which the current generation of parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.

So if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole political career.  Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party membership.   Once selected, in order to get elected, they have had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were Europhiles. 

Theresa May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised.  The most glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”.  In fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years before 1939!

However whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass immigration.  That was enough to satisfy the public so that their gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her accountable for her actual lack of achievement!

This current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold them to account.  That would however have been without the Brexit vote! 

As a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades.  The unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would be implemented.  This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers. 

Theresa May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation. 

It is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at Chequers. 

Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”.  Now the public is turning its eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a Remainer who has remained a Remainer”.  This is despite the public’s vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General Election manifesto.

This leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings! 

For the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The Times newspaper was kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.

When the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold Government Office ever again. 

It may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them. 

The purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step required for a reconstruction of our national politics. 

We need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real voters.  These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration, pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS nationalists.  Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU, anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic cosmopolitan block. 

The current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at cross purposes with most voters.  Most of us like some of what Labour has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t like all of what either of them have to say.  So, at the moment, voters have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they actually fully agree with.  Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a reform of our politics well worth seeing!

Unfairly selective invitations to hustings


During Parliamentary Elections there are often Hustings events. These are often organised by schools, churches or local media. All candidates are often invited but sometimes the organisers are selective about whom they invite – not always fairly.

Wherever we have been the victim of unfair selection I am urging people to protest about selective invitations to hustings. Here is my correspondence:-

Dear All

Please find below a letter that I have written to my Returning Officer regarding electoral expenses, together with a letter that I wrote to Brentwood County High School regarding one of the hustings that I was not invited to.

Please adapt these letters to write to your Returning Officer regarding any hustings that you know that you were not invited to and to the person organising the hustings.

Letter to Returning Officer

Re: General Election 2015 – Candidates Expenses Returns – Hustings

I am writing to put you on notice that there were, I believe, at least three hustings (there may well have been more) in the recent General Election in the Brentwood and Ongar constituency where I was not invited to take part. The Electoral Commission’s Husting Events Rule 8, as enclosed, has made it clear that in the circumstances that not all the candidates were invited to take part in any hustings that the candidates who were invited have to make declaration of the cost of that hustings as part of their electoral expenses.

I am therefore giving notice that I do require this cost to be included in the other candidates expenses forms and require you to reject any of the other candidates’ expenses forms if they do not include these items.

I would confirm that I was only invited to one hustings, which was the Radio Phoenix FM hustings. The other candidates I believe were invited to all other hustings and therefore the cost of each of those hustings should be included in their returns. I am aware that I was not invited to either the Brentwood High School hustings, or Brentwood School hustings or the Anglo-European School hustings. All three of these hustings should therefore appear in all the other candidates’ expenses returns.

Please confirm receipt of this letter.

Yours faithfully

R C W Tilbrook

Chairman

The Headmaster

Dear Sir

Re: General Election Hustings

As you may know, I was one of the six candidates in the recent General Election for Brentwood and Ongar.

I note that you did not invite me to take part in the hustings which your school organised but which the other candidates were invited to.

Perhaps you had not read the enclosed explanation of the rules on hustings prepared by the Electoral Commission, as you did not send me any explanation for my exclusion, let alone the “objective reasons” specified in Rule 6.

Be that as it may, I would now ask you to let me have details of the cost of the hustings and also to confirm that you have notified the other candidates of that cost, which must be included in their election expenses returns as a donation which your school has made to their campaigning.

Yours faithfully

R C W Tilbrook

Returning Officer

B Borough Council

Dear Madam

Re: General Election 2015 – Candidates Expenses Returns – Hustings

Thank you your telephone message regarding my letter to the Council dated the 20th May. I have written letters to the organisers of the hustings, and enclose copies for your information.

Yours sincerely

R C W Tilbrook