Snowflake Season Is Here

We all know what colour a snowflake is. The Labour video hit job on Matt Goodwin is called politics, and his crybaby response to it makes him even more ridiculous than he already was after the narrowness of his definition of being British had been matched only by the breadth of his definition of being Mancunian. Why did Reform UK not simply submit that it thought that Goodwin ought to be a Member of Parliament, by definition including the constituency responsibilities, and was presenting him at the available opportunity to the judgement of the electorate? A party that will not recognise voters as responsible adults would not fight to the last ditch to save jurors, either.

There are so many funny Goodwin quotations, but the best to have come out so far has been when he asked whether the United Arab Emirates would tolerate mass immigration. The foreign 88.4 per cent of the population of the UAE includes the Deputy Leader of Reform and the Telegraph columnist to whom that Deputy Leader is engaged. Nigel Farage himself is in Dubai. A few hours ago, he gave a keynote speech at a private party hosted by GB News and attended by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE's Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. On Tuesday, Farage hosted a lunch backed by a local resident, the Indian billionaire Sunny Varkey.

At 10:30 on Saturday morning, Labour will choose its candidate from four Manchester City Councillors and the Leader of Bury Borough Council. The cost of filling the winner's seat does not worry the National Executive Committee, but councillors sitting as MPs is a grand old British tradition, Dan Jarvis did so for all four of his years as Mayor first of Sheffield City Region and then of South Yorkshire, Boris Johnson remained Mayor of London for a year after he had returned to the House of Commons, Ben Bradley spent four years both as an MP and as the Leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, and so on.

The Labour selection meeting will be at the Jain Centre in Denton. I am no pacifist myself, but I am shocked that the Jains would have this on their premises. Would the Quakers? And which lot of Jains owns this temple? Does it enforce the Digambara undress code? Whether or not it did, there is a sense of having no clothes, in that three of these six candidates have had companies struck of compulsorily, putting them in the same position as Reform's candidate for Mayor of London.

Andy Burnham has never had a company struck off compulsorily. In 2015, he was nominated for Leader by Keir Starmer, with subsequent and ongoing events being another sign to Goodwin that politics was not for the squeamish. To want to be Leader of the Opposition is in principle to want to be Prime Minister, to want to be Prime Minister is to think that you should be Prime Minister, and to think that you should be Prime Minister is to be more than a little bit funny in the head. That does give some context to the progress of the Conservative Party's reactions to this month's defections to Reform, from "good riddance" to Robert Jenrick, through "never heard of him" to Andrew Rosindell, to "well-known fruitcake" to Suella Braverman, who stood for Leader while the party was in office, and thus directly for Prime Minister, because she had thought that she was worth it.

In excluding Burnham at Gorton and Denton, Labour has not only said that he would have won, which absolutely nobody is saying about his party in his absence, but also that any other candidate would lose it the Greater Manchester mayoralty, which again is not being disputed, and that the aspiration to the Premiership was an absolute disqualification. Sorry, David Lammy, despite your "memorable" performance at this week's Prime Minister's Questions. Has anyone ever been represented in court by Lammy? That would be one for the Sunday papers.

Perhaps because Starmer himself was in China, no one at PMQs bothered to raise the story of him, Lord Hermer, and the veterans. That that one seems to have gone by the by is a fascinating insight into the morale and the influence, or lack of it, of factions such as Labour First and Blue Labour. Labour First has a particularly strong commitment to nuclear weapons, so Starmer cannot have endeared himself to it by undertaking, pursuant to an agreement struck by the previous Conservative Government, to transfer the Chagos Islands to a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty. Consider that while Donald Trump may not know what that is, the State Department always has, and it backed this transfer until last week, if not still. And consider that, in nuclear deterrence's own terms, there must no more be nuclear weapons in Iran than there were in Iraq, or Iraq would never have been invaded and Iran would not be facing an armada even as defined by Trump.

Iran will go to whichever of three contenders gave Donald Trump total control over where the oil and gas went. One of his suitors is the absolute monarchist but fake royal, Reza Pahlavi, who is almost a complete stranger to Iran. Another is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq of Islamo-Marxist terrorists whose collaboration with Saddam Hussein was up to and including fighting for Iraq in the war with Iran, a country where it, too, has now been almost completely unknown for two generations. And the third is the present regime, just as Trump kept the regime in place in Venezuela, where it is not doing too shabbily.

But what of the Islamo-Marxist alliance that was supposedly running rampant through Britain 20 years after the last time that that was suggested by the suggestible? If the Green Party did win Gorton and Denton on "the Muslim vote", then that vote would have elected the candidate of a party whose Leader, already highly prominent in the campaign, was a gay Jew. Well, yes. The Gorton part, which as I understand it is the more Muslim, elected eight times an MP who could not have been more obviously both gay and Jewish, and who died in office with a majority of 24,079, having taken 67.1 per cent of the vote.

The Greens, though, are a party of anti-industrial Malthusians whose latter-day opposition to the two-child benefit cap can only be seen as opportunistic in the extreme. Their councillors vote for austerity as if they were Labour ones, and their parliamentarians vote against even such workers' rights as Labour can be bothered to propose. They support the war in Ukraine, and Zack Polanski himself said that he could never vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour "as a pro-European Jew". It is all too telling that the Zarah Sultana section of Your Party has endorsed the Green Party at Gorton and Dalton, where the baradari endorsement of that party of drug legalisation, "sex work", and gender ideology is as opportunistic as that party's tactical support for fecundity. But arguably the heaviest ever electoral blow to the baradari system was at Bradford West in 2012. It can be done.

Those machines are most typically enmeshed with the municipal right wing of the Labour Party, so those who take them on are generally taking on that, which is not for the fainthearted. See, for example, Shockat Adam MP, who defeated Jonathan Ashworth only to see Ashworth all over the airwaves while he himself is ignored. Or see the Birmingham City Council candidate Shahid Butt, likewise talked about but never spoken to. In 1999, having been tortured to confess, he was convicted of "terrorism" in Yemen under Ali Abdullah Saleh, the sponsor of al-Islah, the party through which the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated every institution, including a judiciary that was already profoundly corrupt and subject to heavy regime control.

And how did Butt ever enter a world in which he might have attracted such attention? He did so via the Lynx Gang, which was at least initially constituted to defend his community from the White Power skinheads. This month, the sitting Councillor Lillith Osborn of Glastonbury has had to be suspended from the Conservative Party because she was on WhiteDate, a whites-only dating site on which she described her political orientation as "pro-white" and stated she was seeking a partner interested in "indigenous European spirituality", Paganism being one of the most significant features common to the Far Right and to the Green-inclined. In Councillor Osborn's dating pool were members of the frankly neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, a sewer of street thugs, white genocide conspiracy theorists, and Holocaust deniers, one of whom once called in and coaxed Starmer into endorsing the Great Replacement theory on LBC. Since 2023, Patriotic Alternative has been somewhat eclipsed by the breakaway Homeland Party, which plays down the Nazism in order to promote remigration, and of which, while formally Independents, at least nine sitting councillors are members. Yet there will be no parliamentary or media scrutiny of any of that. Imagine the reaction. We all know what colour a snowflake is.