The Dismal Truth

I only ever met Ann Widdecombe once, more than 20 years ago, but what struck me was that she was tiny. Everyone in her rural community will have known that she was a little old lady living alone. And daytime burglary is far more common than many people realise. But still, most of its victims are not murdered. Let the Police do what the Police do.

The present Parliamentary Labour Party is replete with boys who are as obviously virginal as their female colleagues are not. They appear to be experiments in the medicalisation of teenage girls to turn them into some semblance of men. Similarly, Widdecombe thought that men who had “undergone extensive surgery” should be sent to women’s prisons even though every cell of their mutilated bodies still contained a Y chromosome and they themselves had been socialised as males.

Widdecombe was a faithful Junior Minister under John Major, a Minister of State under Michael Howard as he began the shredding of civil liberties in a bidding war with Tony Blair, a Shadow Cabinet stalwart under William Hague, twice a cheerleader for the putative Leadership of Ken Clarke, a scourge of foxhunting, the only Conservative MP to vote with Gordon Brown for 42-day detention without charge, an autobiographical praiser of Michael Heseltine for having killed off the British coal industry, and an avowed opponent of the Assisted Suicide Bill only because it contained insufficient “safeguards”. And why not? Reform UK has welcomed the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, and there was no transmania when Andy Burnham was Health Secretary. For that, you had to wait for a Conservative Government that was really quite aggressive about it, complete with the then Jamie Wallis, Britain’s first and so far only transgender MP, though not Britain’s first transgender parliamentarian, since that was Nikki Sinclaire, elected as a Member of the European Parliament as long ago as 2009 under the Leadership of Nigel Farage, having twice sought election to the House of Commons under that banner after having left the Conservative Party.

Richard Tice wants to legalise cannabis, Farage concurs with the Green Party in wanting to legalise drugs across the board, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Although Anderson changed sides having initially supported assisted suicide, Tice and Sarah Pochin voted for it all the way to Third Reading. That Farage felt the need to stop courting Ben and Zac Goldsmith indicated how far that courtship had advanced. Numerous Reform figures were fanatical supporters of the Prime Minister of Net Zero, of very big spending long before Covid-19, of the highest net migration ever, of Stonewall, of the lifting of the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, of the lockdowns, of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and of the war in Ukraine. If the line is that “immigration hasn’t gone down, it’s emigration that’s gone up”, then not only is that factually incorrect, but emigration was around double its current level when the Minister responsible was Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick was so bent that even Boris Johnson felt obliged to sack him, but their differences were not political. Nor were those between Johnson and Scott Benton, whom Reform nevertheless refused to take, and who ran Restore Britain’s by-election campaign at Makerfield, where he told canvassers to move on if anyone told them that they intended to vote Labour, since the point was to take votes from Reform. Extremely right-wing gay men with Theology degrees are of course routine, and among Old Testament specialists arguably especially so, but Benton came out to his parents just before his wedding to one Harry Symonds. Perhaps they had assumed until that point that he was going to be marrying Carrie Symonds? Indeed, have Harry and Carrie ever been seen together? But I digress. Peter Hitchens writes:

While I have never liked Nigel Farage’s politics, I have admired his toughness in adversity. Never forget that he survived a terrifying plane crash and a very nasty bout of cancer. He is often attacked in public places, in ways which must be unnerving even if they end up with no more than a ruined suit.

Also never forget that one major newspaper made a sort of joke out of that cancer. So I look with a certain amount of sorrow on his current plight. I think he must be very tired and very drained. His recent petulant snarling at TV reporters shows that he has reached the end of his tether.

I think I know why. He has now realised the dismal truth – that his entire huge and, so far, successful movement relies entirely on him, and on his good fortune.

It is a brilliant one-man act. It has all but destroyed the Tory Party. It has split the Labour Party. It has been the pillar of no fewer than three rebel movements. But it has relied on two key things.

Mr Farage himself has always been the mocking rebel and the outsider. And he has never really had to explain what he would do if he got real power.

He won his enormous vote in last year’s General Election because so many Tories suffered a wild emotional spasm, and decided to punish themselves by having a Labour government. He must suspect that they won’t do that again, and helium is plainly beginning to leak from his once-impressive political airship, which sags and wrinkles in the wind.

Now he is the one being mocked. He must spend the next few weeks being teased and provoked by a Left-wing comedian wearing a dustbin on his head.

This will harm him anyway, but if he handles it badly or loses his temper, he can lose his self-inflicted by-election in an afternoon. And on top of that, he appears to have become enough of an insider to attract the colossal sums of money which established politicians control. But he lacks the advisers and financial bodyguards to help him avoid the difficulties he now faces. He has nobody to tell him, ‘Don’t meet x’ , ‘Don’t take money from y’, ‘Get rid of z’ or ‘Don’t resign’. The mocker is mocked. The outsider has been dragged into the establishment.

And this exposes the real problem. Mr Farage really has nothing much to offer the country. He is a male Margaret Thatcher tribute band – amusing to watch on a summer evening, provided you don’t listen too carefully.

He expresses, in a shrug, a wink or a smirk, the opinions of millions, as long as he says as little as possible. But he has no idea what to do about mass immigration, let alone the economy, or defence or the police or drugs (especially drugs).

And now things have got a little rough, he cannot cope. This is sad for him but probably good for this country. It would be really good if those who oppose our horrible cultural revolution realised that Thatcher worship and Trump worship will not get them anywhere.

As Count Binface, Jon Harvey is now polling ahead of Farage. Between them, they are pushing an always absurd state of affairs to the point of destruction. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise. They constitute a single milieu. But the circus at Clacton ought to be the end of it.

Instead, the truly popular centre ground seeks to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

All of this is opposed by and to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy of the Green agenda, the treatment of identity politics as equal or superior to class politics, the treatment of gender identity as equal or superior to sex (“biological sex”), the cancel culture of which our people have always been the principal victims, the erosion of civil liberties, the stupefaction of the workers or the youth, the indulgence of separatist tendencies in any of the three parts of Great Britain, the consideration of any all-Ireland settlement that failed to preserve the NHS and other such achievements, or the failure to recognise that a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control.