Over The Counter

The two best things about Elon Musk's fake Telegraph headline that Keir Starmer was going to send the rioters to the Falkland Islands are that people believed that the Telegraph might have printed it, and that people believed that Starmer might have been planning it.

Fascists? In their dreams. What do they think of Julius Evola, or of the most recent edition of Rivarol? To those on the Continent whom they flatter themselves are their counterparts, they need to explain why, at the mere suggestion that they might have faced any opposition, they decided to watch those counterdemonstrations on television instead.

Our governing party ordered its MPs to stay away from those events, which were vastly larger than anything that the other side had managed, and tried to tell everyone else to stay at home as well. The Government wanted 100 riots last night so that it could proceed with the assault on civil liberties that it had been planning all along, just as it had always planned to take away the winter fuel payment while keeping the two-child benefit cap. Its outriders are furious that the people whom they had driven out of the Labour Party, and those people's allies, brought the People to the streets and took them back, thereby foiling their plot. Today, they have been trying to revive their favourite scam. But no one is listening anymore.

Will anyone listen to the "legitimate concerns" of the far more numerous people who have more recently taken to the streets? If not, why not? Why has the Labour whip not already been withdrawn from Sarah Edwards, from Alex Baker, and from Lauren Edwards, all examples of Starmer's "highest quality candidates", unlike, say, Faiza Shaheen? At the very least, those three need to take one for the team. As do the Manchester Airport Police Officers, so that the Muslim base that the Police have successfully cultivated in the last 10 days should not be lost. In both cases, that's politics.

Likewise, Reform UK needs to reconnect with, as much as anyone else, the great majority of its own supporters. YouGov has support for the riots at 21 per cent of them and nine per cent of Conservatives. Sympathy with the rioters' views, 25 per cent and eight per cent. Thinking that the riots are justified, 33 per cent and 16 per cent. So not thinking that the riots are justified is running at 67 per cent even of Reform supporters and 84 per cent of Conservatives. Not in sympathy with the rioters' views, 75 per cent and 92 per cent. Not in support of the riots, 79 per cent and 91 per cent. At -4, compared to +7 at the end of last month, Nigel Farage now has a negative approval rating among Leave voters for the first time ever. It was already -10 among Conservative voters, but it is now -27. His overall figure has fallen from -35 to -42. Reform and Farage have urgent work to do.

They need to get behind the campaign to lift the two-child benefit cap while retaining the universal winter fuel payment for pensioners. The world's sixth richest country could easily afford that without breaking Labour's manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, National Insurance or VAT. The first part of it, for which Farage has already called and on which Reform has already abstained, is very much in line with the pronatalism with which Reform will be familiar from its ties to today's American Republican Party, while the second is exactly what the British Right's base is demanding.

But Reform needs to accept that the leadership was being provided by the Independent Left. Of the five MPs who were elected on that ticket, four are Muslims. Of the 12 who are now sitting as Left Independents, seven are Muslims. And by far the most famous Independent Left MP is the man with whom Farage needs to settle after having libelled him. Again, take one for the team.