On The Election (2024)

I've not posted anything Political on this blog in a very, very long time, in fact, outside of a few rants about the Tories' online policies and the EU Referendum, I've barely touched the topic of Politics here. That's not to say I have no opinion on the matter though, because it should go without saying that I do, and that in this particular case, I have a fair bit to say. If you somehow don't know, on Thursday, the 4th of July 2024, the United Kingdom will be voting in a General Election, one that's at once long overdue and, if you believe a single word any of them say, far too early. When the Election was called on a rainy day back in May, I didn't really care, I'd accepted that neither of the options are in any way acceptable or deserving of being in government, in fact I wasn't sold on even bothering to vote, that was until Nigel Farage threw himself into the race and made this the most exciting and entertaining Election I've seen. Now, before we carry on, just know that I'm not an expert on the matter of Politics, I never have been and I've never claimed to be, but I've still got some things to say about it, as you do. 

The first General Election I voted in was the 2015 Election, in which I voted Conservative, I knew very little of Politics at the time, outside of the burning hatred my Grandparents had for Labour Party leaders; Tony Blaire and Gordon Brown, a position I went on to share. In 2015, however, the race was between the Tories, let by David Cameron and Labour, led by Ed Miliband, neither of which were especially remarkable candidates, though the Tories, supposedly being the more traditionalist and conservative party, appealed much more to my Grandparents, which was good enough for me. In 2015, Nigel Farage, who'd been campaigning for Brexit for his entire political career, spooked the Tories enough for them to cave and promise a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. A year later, in the Brexit Referendum, I voted to leave, liking the sound of Britain getting it's sovereignty back from the increasingly federalist European Union, as well as another elephant in the room that we'll get back to. Fast forward to 2017 and things weren't going well; Cameron resigned after the Referendum and the Tories' new leader, Theresa May, was hopeless, weak, and looked to be completely compromising the promise of Brexit, either intentionally or through complete incompetence. In the 2017 Election, I Voted Liberal Democrat, not out of support for the Liberal Democrats, but out of dissatisfaction with the Tories, who it seemed were going out of their way to stall on delivering Brexit and throw away the wonderful opportunity for Britain that it represented. 

Running against May in that election was Jeremy Corbyn, who was a lunatic, albeit one who had complete confidence in his convictions, which ironically made him quite charming compared to the awkward, robotic and cowardly May. In that election, the Tories lost their majority in the House of Commons and were forced into a coalition with the DUP to form a government, something they also had to do with the Lib-Dems in 2010. Having lost the majority in the House of Commons, May had now found herself in an even weaker negotiating position, the exact opposite of what she was hoping for going into the election, while comparatively, Labour and Corbyn's position had been strengthened, further hurting Britain's chances of ever actually seeing Brexit happen. Fast forward again to 2019 and things looked like they were going to get better. Theresa May had resigned after being humiliated over her Brexit deal and in her place was Boris Johnson, a bumbling, charming idiot that, through his charisma and the promise of finally delivering Brexit, carried the Tories to a thundering Parliamentary Majority, humiliating Jeremy Corbyn in the process, who had promised a 'People's Vote' as an alternative message to Johnson's 'Get Brexit Done.' And while Nigel Farage had historically nipped at the Tories' heels on the issue of Brexit, his new party; the Brexit Party, humbly got out of the Tories' way so they could make good on their promise. As you'd expect, I voted Tory in 2019, wanting the madness of Brexit to finally end and for someone with a positive vision for post-Brexit Britain to be in charge. And then it all went completely to shit. 

The following spring, Covid-19 swept across the world and many countries, including Britain, responded by going into Lockdown; closing all "non-essential" businesses including gyms, pubs, shops and cinemas, as well as churches and schools. In addition to closing down basically the entire country, they also literally made it illegal to see people; implementing social distancing and isolation policies that prevented people from mixing. On top of that, they implemented nation-wide mask mandates that remained in place for over a year. All of these policies were completely arbitrary and had little to no effect on the spread of the virus, as claimed by numerous reports and scientific journals, all the while the Tories' scientific advisory body; Sage was staffed by at least one member of the Communist Party, and as it turned out, Johnson's Health Minister, Matt Hancock, was busted having an affair while the isolation policies were in place. The madness genuinely didn't stop; it became illegal to have sex with someone you didn't live with, it became illegal to sit on a park bench, and pubs became able to serve drinks if they were served with a "substantial meal," leading to arguments over what constituted a "substantial meal," all the while one of the masterminds of this madness was getting his scotch eggs nibbled on by one of his staffers. The justifications for the Lockdowns came from the modelling of people like Neil Fergusson, who predicted half a million deaths if no action was taken, only for it to take months for the official death toll to reach a tenth of that, and would you believe it, Fergusson was also breaking the rules and having an affair. Famously, when the second Lockdown was announced, the modelling used to justify it was proven to be unreliable within hours of the announcement, but the Lockdown was imposed anyway. 

But for as bonkers as it was, there was a sinister side, one that I genuinely think has given the people of the British Isles a kind of shared PTSD. Social interaction and contact was illegal, leaving countless people alone, isolated and scared, and completely unable to seek comfort in their friends and family, or to relieve the stress by indulging in hobbies and pass-times. Compounding this was a several-year-long campaign, carried out by the government and media class, to scare the British people into compliance. Johnson's government waged full-scale psychological warfare on the British, vastly overstating the lethality of the virus, counting Covid deaths as anyone who died within twenty-eight days of a positive test, regardless of what killed them, and flooding the TV, radio and newspapers with constant messaging of the threat. There were posters and advertisements supposedly showing dying Covid patients, asking viewers to "look them in the eyes" and tell them the threat wasn't real and that they followed the rules, using aggressively emotive imagery and language to guilt and coerce people into obeying the rules. They actively encouraged snitching behaviour as well by turning the fear and propaganda on the people, incentivising and encouraging the more zealous and fearful of the population to rat out and be confrontational with people who didn't follow the rules, who were being selfish and putting everyone else at risk, so a lot of rule breakers went on to be investigated and fined, leading to widespread distrust and paranoia, which inevitably further compounded the fear and isolation. 

I myself was on the receiving end of a lot of this zeal and abuse, being someone who very quickly decided to ignore the mask mandate and who was very vocal about my opposition to the rules, which got me branded as a selfish, ignorant, stupid, science-denying, cruel, evil Granny killer, and yes, I was called all of those things, as well as being accosted multiple times in shops for ignoring the mask mandate. All of this culminated in the argument about Vaccine Passports, an idea that was not just being floated around, but was actually being implemented in several major countries across the EU like France, Germany and Austria, as well as in places like Canada and New Zealand. The plan would have effectively forced unvaccinated people into permanent Lockdown while allowing the vaccinated to get on with the "new normal," which still meant social distancing and masks, but also gave you access to luxuries like restaurants, cinemas, gyms, sporting events, even churches and public transport. Had the Vaccine Passport system been widely adopted and kept, it would have created a two-tier society in which unvaccinated people became an underclass with less rights and freedoms than the vaccinated, and this was something all the governments considering and implementing them knew. Famously, then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, when asked by a journalist about creating a two-tier society, smirked and said "that is what it is." 

Covid Vaccination became a requirement for doctors and nurses within the NHS, despite the entire justification for the Lockdowns being to protect the NHS and allow it to carry on running smoothly, it was now at risk of losing as many as a eighty-thousand staff. At the same time, the NHS was falling apart; completely failing to treat and diagnose patients, all the while being pedestalised as a divine institution that was beyond criticism of any kind, a position that's become a lot harder to defend in recent years as the NHS has failed to recover and is continuing to fail it's patients. Then there was the care homes scandal, in which British care homes became prisons where countless elderly died alone, confused and scared because their families were forbidden from visiting them, all the while untested hospital patients were being moved into said care homes with the full knowledge of the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care. And on top of all the old people that had the final years of their lives completely destroyed, an entire generation of kids had their futures destroyed by being robbed of two years of their education and vital social development. And all the while people were actively having their lives destroyed by the government and it's evil policies, criticism of those policies was branded as insane, conspiratorial and dangerous, with concerns about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine being aggressively supressed and discredited, even as it was being effectively forced onto the people and an unfortunate few were suffering from severe reactions to it. 

And to top off all of this insanity and cruelty, while the country was in full Lockdown, the Tories, who had implemented the Lockdowns, were throwing Christmas parties and Labour's new leader; Kier Starmer, who had been in full support of said policies, was illegally gathering with his staff for drinks. Naturally, the news media stabbed the political class in the back for their breaking of the rules, all the while refusing to acknowledge the real reason people were mad; that the political class knew the policies were stupid, ineffective and evil, and implemented them anyway while deeming themselves exempt. The revelation that the Tories broke their own rules caused the entire Covid narrative to collapse, and today most people look back at this period in recent history as though it were a bad dream. There are some of us out there who will never forget though, nor will we forgive, I'm one of them and even to this day, I hate Boris Johnson and the entire political establishment with a burning passion. And even in the years after Covid, the Tories have continued to be traitorous and crap; with Boris committing Britain to supporting Ukraine in it's war with Russia, a war that he personally played a key role in prolonging. But then the bastard decided it was time to step down, and when he did, he was replaced by Liz Truss, someone every bit as thick and with nowhere near the charisma, but someone who's heart appeared to be in the right place. 

When Truss took office, Britain's economy wasn't doing so good. Endless money printing during the pandemic had rocketed the rate of inflation, the war in Ukraine had caused disruption to food and energy production, causing prices to go through the roof, further compounded by the British government's refusal to subsidise British food production and its fanatical commitment to green energy as part of it's Net Zero plan. Within two months of Truss taking office however, she was forced to step down after apparently and miraculously destroying the economy with tax cuts, only to be replaced by her opponent in the Tory leadership race, none other than Boris Johnson's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. So with no electoral mandate, sky high inflation and the highest tax burden since the end of World War II, Sunak bravely carried on with business as usual, in which time Britain began to literally, as well as figuratively, fall apart. Now, in addition to taxes, inflation, house prices, and energy, fuel and food costs being the highest in decades, on top of the complete destruction of the British high-street through the bureaucratic strangling of small businesses and closures caused by the Lockdowns, roads, schools and hospitals were beginning to crumble, and through financial mismanagement and incompetence, the institutions tasked his maintained our infrastructure were unable to do their job. And all of this was now being overseen by a man that the electorate and Tory base did not vote for or support, and who they believed had no love or loyalty for Britain, just great. 

There's an elephant in the room here though, something I haven't mentioned yet, but that has compounded every single issue I've brought up. It's the issue on everybody's minds this Election, it's immigration. Journalist and commentator, Tom Harwood once quite hilariously observed that in the late 1990's, "something happened" that caused house prices to spiral out of control, and even after nearly thirty years, they're still spiralling, and we're still not building enough houses to meet demand, even though Britain has a sub-replacement birth rate. Meanwhile, the NHS is falling way behind on appointments and treatments, with a tenth of the entire country on a waiting list, despite funding for it being increased year on year. In major cities like London and Manchester, crime has skyrocketed and community cohesion has almost entirely eroded. Entire boroughs in many major cities have effectively been colonised, and have become isolated from and hostile to the surrounding culture, and as highstreets across the country have withered and died, they're now swarming with Turkish barbers and Vape shops. But probably the highest profile example of Britain's 'cultural enrichment' is the Grooming Gangs, organised groups of men, almost always from a foreign background, that groomed and sexually abused British girls, and that managed to get away with it for years because the police, who were aware of the abuse, refused to take action out of fear of being called racist. 

The Tory party has promised in manifesto after manifesto to bring down the rates of immigration into Britain, and where Brexit was motivated by a desire to see the end of free movement of people, it was Boris Johnson's government that decided infinite immigration was the future, even as he shut down all the pubs and schools and told everyone to stay at home and be afraid. In the last few years of Tory rule, immigration has increased year on year, not just from the tens of thousands that cross the Channel illegally and are somehow allowed to stay in Britain, but from the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants that are allowed in on work, student and dependant visas. Not long ago, the Tories announced a plan to start flying illegal immigrants to Rwanda, a plan that's so far cost god knows how much money, not seen any results, failed to discourage opportunistic illegals, and doesn't even factor in the bulk of immigration into Britain that's coming in legally and being allowed in by a supposedly conservative and anti-immigration Tory government. And to add insult to injury, when illegal immigrants arrive, instead of being sent straight back, they're shacked up in hotels and allowed to apply for asylum, meanwhile all the homeless people across the country get to carry on sleeping on benches and in the doorways of shops. And just in case you're not insulted enough, to publicly complain about immigration is to be branded a far-right, racist Nazi and to be targeted for harassment by demented leftists, or worse, denied services and employment. But for the immigrants, these concerns don't apply, and they have no obligation at all to be decent or respectful to the native population, even further contributing to the erosion of community cohesion and the simmering resentment towards the new arrivals. 

The problem the Tory party has here is that they've been in power for fourteen years. In that time, there have been three General Elections and in each one, they've promised to reduce immigration, but there's always been someone or something else to blame for them not being able to; the European Court of Human Rights, the European Union, the Labour party, "lefty lawyers," human trafficking gangs, the French, and foreign conflicts. But at this point, the good will is completely gone; no one trusts the Tories to reduce immigration, just as no one trusts them to lower taxes, get housing, food and energy costs under control, or fix our crumbling infrastructure and institutions, in fact, Tory voters now see the Tories themselves as the source of all these problems, the party which has failed again and again and again and again, and which seems destined to continue to fail forever, almost as though it's trying to. And on the other side is Kier Starmer's Labour party. The Tories' message in this election is to not let Starmer and Labour into government because they'll be worse. I have no doubt they'll find a way to be worse. Starmer has promised to clear the backlog on immigration and build a million new homes, making it abundantly clear that mass immigration will continue. He's vowed to solve the energy crisis by investing in green energy as part of their Net Zero policy, which is the same as the Tories' policy, just with a 2030 deadline instead of 2050, so they're not going to fix energy costs. Going back to Covid, Starmer and Labour's only objections to the Tories' Covid response was that it wasn't tough enough, making me very doubtful that they will respect and uphold the British people's rights and freedoms any more than the Tories did. 

Despite promising more of the same while also blaming everything on the Tories, Labour look set to win this Election, not through their strength, but through the total collapse of the Tories, who have had fourteen years to stop the degradation of Britain, and used that time instead to accelerate it. Now all they can offer is an assurance that things will be worse under Labour, hardly an inspiring or optimistic message, but it seems they just can't help themselves. In a desperate bid to hold on to older voters, the Tories decided that, were they to be re-elected, they would introduce National Service, a policy that's unsurprisingly massively unpopular with the young voters it will effect, the very same young voters who feel that the Tories have betrayed them and stolen their futures, to say nothing of the erosion of the very concept of the nation state and national pride that started under Blaire in the 90's and was continued under the Tories, to the point that you can't fly an English flag anymore unless you're a football hooligan or a racist. All the while LGBT ideology has been a adopted as a sort of state religion, one protected under law and actively promoted by both the Tories and Labour, and if it's all the same, I'm not prepared to die in some foreign war for the sake of Gay Rights, nor am I prepared to die for some stuffy office manager that thinks he's making the world a better place, be that Starmer or Sunak. 

So when the election was called, I didn't really see a point in voting, I felt that I didn't have a choice in the election, that the only meaningful difference between the two options is the colour of the rosette, and that incompetent, boring globalists who don't care about this country, my country, don't deserve my vote, be they red or blue. Then in barrels the man of the hour, Nigel Farage. Before the return of the Farage, the Brexit party had been rebranded as Reform UK, a party under the leadership of Richard Tice, one that positioned itself as a right-wing alternative to the Tories and promised to actually answer the demands of the British electorate and bring meaningful and positive reform to Britain. Except like Liz Truss, while Tice's heart is in the right place, he is still a product of the political machine, and like Truss, I doubted his ability to deliver on the promises he made, as nice as they sounded. I met Richard Tice on the campaign trail while on holiday in Skegness, I shook his hand and told him I intended to vote Reform, and that wasn't a lie. After the election was called, Nigel Farage stepped back in, not only running for Parliament, but also as the leader of the Reform party, and over night, this election became awesome. Suddenly the discontented voters that the Tories had alienated had someone they could rally around, an outsider to the political establishment that was making all the right promises, saying all the right things, had complete confidence in himself and his beliefs, actively engaged with and was honest to his supporters and, perhaps most impressively of all, didn't give a damn what the political establishment or news media thought about him. 

Farage almost instantly sent Reform rocketing in the polls, quickly closing the gap and then, amazingly, overtaking the Tories, while also putting a noticeable dent in Labour's lead. Starmer and Sunak are hopelessly unexciting and unimpressive, then along comes Farage, getting up on stage like some kind of Rockstar, complete with roaring crowd and pyrotechnics, and while Labour and the Tories are floundering on social media sites, Reform's social media is exploding. It genuinely looks like all the political will in the right wing of the British electorate, having been beaten down to almost nothing by endless Tory failures and lies, has reawakened and mobilised behind Farage, and whether you love him or hate him, you can't deny him this achievement. With only days to go before the election, all the stops have come out to try and discredit Farage, from channel 4 releasing footage of a supposed Reform canvasser making racist remarks about Sunak who, it turns out, may or may not be a professional actor with ties to Channel 4, to past comments Farage has made about NATO's responsibility for the War in Ukraine, to Farage being ambushed about his racism on Question Time by guests who turned out to have ties to the BBC, to the most desperate allegation of all, that Farage is a Putin lovie whose massive upswell of social media support is actually an army of Russian bots. 

Like a certain other Populist superstar, the endless attempts to damage him are having the opposite effect; far from people now believing Farage to be a racist, they're now seeing him as a man under attack from the political and media establishment, who would only go to such depths to hurt his chances in the election if they were afraid of him, a notion that's only further galvanising his supporters who, like him, hold beliefs that the establishment have deemed to be morally wrong and in need of being stamped out. It's a great tragedy that Boris Johnson saw himself as the heir to Churchill, a true leader who would see his great nation through its darkest hour, when he turned out to be one of the architects of it, and in his place, there is Farage, a man who might actually be the change this abused nation has been crying out for. Does he have a chance of winning this election though, unfortunately, no. Even for as popular as Reform has become in the last few weeks, it's still not enough, and as the Tories have crumbled, this election will be a Labour victory, but give it a few years, let Labour not be the change people want and let them continue to ruin Britain just as the Tories have, and come the next General Election, who knows, maybe Reform and Farage will be able to make their move, and maybe we might have an actual conservative government that will look after this country and, you could say, make Britain Great again.

I'm not sure how to wrap this one up, but as I said at the beginning, I'm no expert on politics, I'm just a guy with an opinion, so if you think I'm wrong, that's fine, and this isn't me trying to persuade you on who to vote for. I'm just someone who's had enough of Labour and the Tories and wants there to be a change in the political order of my country. Do I know for sure that Farage and Reform are that change, no, I don't, do I know for sure that they can win the next election after this one, no, do I even know if Reform will get it's foot in the door in this election, no. But if they did, and if Farage actually is the change I want, the next couple of years of British politics will, at the very least, be a lot less boring.