Don't Be A Divvy

In the spirit of the Trump Dividend, will there be a Farage Dividend? From Ben Delo's £36 million, each of the United Kingdom's 48 million voters could look forward to 75p. After all, what else is Reform UK going to do with that sort of money? It will be practically impossible to spend in British politics. On what, exactly? This is not the country where Delo had to be pardoned by Trump, although not before he had served 30 months' probation and paid a civil penalty of $10 million.

Andy Burnham has caused this. There never was a Leadership Election, so where did the investments in his campaign go? We certainly know what one of them bought, with 10,000 free labourers to be sent by force to the supermarket in which the Sainsbury family retained an interest of 15 per cent. Now Burnham cannot cap political "donations".

In much the same spirit, PIP, an in-work benefit, is partly to be paid in kind as if it were not already used to buy things, and undergraduates are to be made to do "work experience". The first, in particular, will be an administrative hellhole to rank with having the judge decide whether or not to have a trial by jury, necessitating a whole new stage of proceedings. But that is not the point of any of these three measures.

All of this is frankly to pay for wars, so let us never again hear the cry that trade unions should keep out of foreign policy. While I am no Green, it is also the case that nothing is more environmentally destructive than a war such as was being made the pretext for these domestic measures, although it is worth mentioning that the people advocating the benefit cuts, the cuts to public services, and the restrictions on civil liberties, had always wanted those things anyway.

So there cannot indeed be national security at the expense of social security, a view that most supporters of all parties already shared. That way would lie civil unrest, and then a lot worse than that, fomented and funded by enemies abroad that were neither Russia, nor China, nor Iran, as we already see in the Israeli, and increasingly the American, support for Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a support that, even leaving aside the Israeli arming of Argentina in 1982, had been asserting itself bombastically for weeks before the recent sanctioning of the West Bank settlements by Britain and 11 other countries.

Such financial and other assistance is of the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who now needs to be interrogated very vigorously on his attitude to the Falklands; of Patriotic Platform, whose all-black outfits with face-coverings suggest that they were trying to attract rather than repel young male jihadis, as, by way of cultural misunderstanding, would account for their felt need to show a bit of leg; of the Homeland Party, the exposure of links to which has already necessitated the expulsion of Reform's Councillor Daniel Astley of Newcastle; of the Patriotic Alternative that provided the dating pool of the sitting Conservative Councillor Lillith Osborn of Glastonbury; of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who will be a Conservative MP soon enough; of Susan Hall's Pink Ladies; and of the Restore Britain out of which their founder, Orla Minihane, has been driven because her Irish background was deemed to render her a "mudblood". The enemy is in plain sight.