by Tom Rogers
I think you are missing the point here a bit, Neil, or maybe you do just accept the premise that any expression of a view contrary to the shibboleths of the socially radical Left always wrong and unacceptable for a candidate? Nigel Farage had the option to say that every candidate enjoys freedom of expression, just like the rest of us, and he need not necessarily agree with every specific detail of what candidates utter.
The excuse is sometimes made for Farage that he has no choice, but he does. I listened to the comments of the party official accused of ‘homophobia’ and it seems they were made in a private context and were pretty mild, the sort of remarks an ordinary person might make. I do also wonder why, if the comments are so offensive, the media would make them freely available for sensitive snowflakes like me to listen to?
Yesterday, Farage gave a press conference and an interview and in both he genuflected to the demands of the media that he “clean up [his] party”. I couldn’t listen to it for very long because it was clear what he meant. He doesn’t half talk rot.
On the other hand, I suppose Reform UK have broken the mould with five MPs (six if you count the Northern Ireland independent), and it’s a start – but the problem is, it’s no more than that. I can’t help but wonder if a better organised campaign could have won more seats and even killed off the Tories. Farage uses the excuse that the election was called unexpectedly, but he knew there was an election coming. No doubt Farage is not the only one culpable in this, but he comes to me as the type who is a great frontman/party speaker type, but not much of an organiser, nor a detailed-oriented person.
He also comes across, at least in his public persona, as a bit simple, the type whose public utterances consist of stringed-together talking points and barroom clichés. I think he has had a bit of a privileged life and has never had to really think too much about the issues he pronounces on. His instincts are business-like rather than for people and nations, as such.
One of the things that put me off him and his party recently is his eagerness to castigate the unemployed. He seems suspicious of anybody claiming disability or sickness benefits, imagining that they may be workshy shirkers. Not that this affects me personally, and I am sure there is something in it, and I’m sure that lots of people agree with him, but it just for me reinforced my general impression of him as somebody who is a bit lazy and ignorant, and intellectually a bit dim. The type of middle class person that England produces in abundance: private education, left at 18 for a City job despite being academically mediocre (try getting such a job if you’re a working class mediocrity – good luck!), well-spoken with plummy accent, southern England bias,, disdain for ordinary people, disdain for intellectuals, etc., etc.
I don’t know much about the benefits world, but it strikes me as quite likely that the type of people who manipulate the benefits system to live off it will often have deeper problems than just being workshy or lazy. If you stop and think about it properly, nobody is workshy or lazy. Not really. Work isn’t the problem for the most of these people. It doesn’t occur to people like Nigel Farage to think about it properly. They just rush to their lazy, pre-prepared, ready-made opinions that are tuned in to the Daily Mail.
I would much rather see a figure on the Right who is more intelligent and that bit more in touch with ordinary people’s lives and problems and not so keen to punish people for being misfits or poor
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I didn’t realise this would be made it own piece, but thanks. I think the letter ‘r’ is missing from the very last word at the end. Maybe it could be corrected?!
By all means delete this message, now it’s corrected. Thanks.
Farage let Robert Lomas down in Barnsley North. He was expected to win the seat according to the exit poll, but lost to Dan Jarvis by nearly 8,000 votes. He did get 29.3% of the poll, however. Farage dropped Lomas as a candidate on June 29th when the BBC found out that he had said that black people “need to stop acting like savages”. I ask you, what pub won’t you hear this in? I don’t think it is a statement that every single black person misbehaves, but is a comment on the level of crime in that ethnic group. I recall Cressida Dick, formerly of the Metropolitan Police, claiming that black people were eight times over-represented in violent crime.
We have to stop playing into the Far Left sensitivity policing, or we won’t be able to say what we mean on any topic. Lomas could have won that seat but the announcement that even Farage viewed him as beyond the pale robbed him of the chance. We need to point out that the occasional frank word does not offset the huge toll in violence, terrorism, rape and everything else that immigration inflicts on our country. I think when Farage started all this pandering to the media, he actually lost lots of votes, as Reform UK appeared to be timewasters.
As for those on benefits – a lot of them are just depressed – and this shouldn’t lead to sickness benefits. But there is more to it than laziness. Maybe house prices – themselves a function of immigration – mean that work does not pay and so many seek to go on the sick. This is what is really happening.
Regarding blacks and violent crime, from the late 1990s until roughly 2012, the Metropolitan Police even had a murder investigation unit dedicated to ‘black on black’ violent crime: known as Operation Trident. Though the unit did not officially use the phrase ‘black on black crime’ or similar, it was explicitly stated on the Trident website that a major concern of the unit was the victimisation of blacks by other blacks and it was implicitly understood by everyone that the whole point of Trident was to deter and investigate this. People in the black community even complained when the unit was made defunct.
From Hugo Miller
I agree with your sentiments about Nigel pandering to ‘cancel culture’ within the Party, having been a victim of it myself. This is paticularly annoying since the Party’s own manifesto pledges to champion freedom of speech and end ‘cancel culture’. Channel 4 News had come down and done a hit job on me at the start of the campaign –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usV9RhxZhVs&lc=Ugyy19HBmAZxVxKV1HR4AaABAg.A4RF6o6FFf8A4Sts99CiKi
They had dug back over many years’ worth of Facebook posts (most of them cat videos) to find something I had re-posted comparing some BLM rioters (who were jumping up and down on a police car) with the apes in Windsor Safari park (who were jumping up and down on a tourist’s car). C4 claimed that I had “compared Black people to animals”. In fact I have never in my life made any comment on “Black people”. I was condemning the behaviour of the rioters and comparing it to that of apes. My comments were described as “offensive”. They were meant to be offensive. If the rioters were offended, I’m happy.
Then there was a picture of a van. Written on the side were the words “Two Niggers and a stolen van – we treat your shit like it was ours”, together wth a caricature of a couple of grass-skirted spear-wielding African savages. I thought it was absolutely hilarious, and I still do. But C4 clearly didn’t, because (shock, horror) it contained “The N-word”.
In the interview, I had a bit of a Biden moment. I told them I had snapped this pitcure in Miami. In fact it was not mine, but a picture captioned “seen in Detroit”, that I had re-posted many years ago. And the pic had been sitting quiety on Facebook till C4 came and dug it up. Now it has been banished!
Reform UK tried to disown me after the broadcast, but I told them to get lost. I had done nothing but give truthful answers to some questions put to me. I gained a lot of support locally, with the consensus being that this was all “complete bollocks”.
I went on to gain 6,000 votes on Thursday, which cost our Conservative MP his seat, the first time in recorded history Horsham has not been Conservative. ‘Sir’ Jeremy Quin lost to the Lib-Dems by 2,500 votes. So I am very pleased to have sent the ‘Conservatives’ a message they needed to hear.
But I must utterly disagree with your characterisation of Nigel as “somebody who is a bit lazy and ignorant, and intellectually a bit dim.” That is an inversion of the truth. I have known him for thirty years. Nigel Farage is a phenomenon of Nature. He is a power-house. He never stops. He is never down-hearted, and never defeated. Most people, havng failed seven times to win a seat in Parliament, would have given up. Not Nigel. He is also an historian, specialising in the Great War. And of course he also has business experience, unlike the vast majority of today’s politicians.
I can well see him, now that he has his foot in the door, moving into his spiritual home in Downing Street next time round.
Thank you for your response, Hugo. I was harsh in my assessment of Nigel Farage. It shouldn’t be taken personally, as I don’t know him, whereas you can speak from personal experience – not that he would be bothered by anything I say anyway.
Congratulations on your result. I think the way you were treated was very unfair. I hope you are selected as candidate for next time.
Thank you, Hugo. We missed ousting Hunt by less than 1,000 votes, but you succeeded in despatching a sitting Tory. And without even being officially on the ballot! Well done.
Two little words in your account above caused me a rueful smile: “Channel 4.” I didn’t know it had been them that had set you up, in addition to the Parker incident. And probably several more.
And thanks for your defence of Nigel Farage. I haven’t met him, though I have been within a few feet of him while he was speaking. But he certainly doesn’t strike me as dim.
And yes, he now has a foot in the door…
Just to put it in context, this article is a promotion of a comment Tom made at 05:20 this morning, way down the thread on “The Election: Time to Move On.” It was made in reply to a comment from David Webb, criticizing me because I said (factually and truthfully) that one of the Reform candidates in Surrey had a Sri Lankan style name. Prior to that, I had mentioned the Channel 4 racism incident, and expressed the view that it may well have been a set-up. At no point did I say anything about left-wing shibboleths, or suggest that I am opposed to any and all speech which violates them. It was Mr Webb who started talking about “racism tropes” and accused me of peddling them.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do think that the Reform party has been too harsh on some of its candidates for their utterances. I am still trying to work out what Hugo Miller, for example, actually said that got him into so much trouble. I can’t judge it unless I can read or hear it from the original source, and put it in its context.
I think there is always a problem with free speech for anyone who is running a political party. In a normal situation, you should judge speech on what it says, and whether it is true and reasonable. But since politics is a game of perceptions, not of truth or reasonability, there is a tendency to try not to offend, and so to err on the side of over-caution by condemning what is not actually unreasonable.
Anyway, I’ll simply repeat what I said that caused the blow-up: “One of our candidates in Surrey is named Mayuran Senthilnathan.” He got 5,795 votes, by the way – better than my candidate, but not as good as Hugo. The people who voted Reform for these two didn’t worry about Mayuran’s ancestry or Hugo’s mouth. And nor should any of us.
Thank you for your response, Neil. I don’t entirely agree with you. I think there are certain important matters, thankfully few in number, when someone’s racial or ethnic ancestry should be a consideration, but of course I respect your right to disagree – and I’m sure you are in the majority on the point.
I’m afraid Neil said a lot more than he is admitting to. What he said was this: “But Nigel was only telling the truth. Reform is a racially diverse party. For example, one of our candidates in Surrey is named Mayuran Senthilnathan. The battle we’re fighting at Reform is about a lot more than skin colour, birthplace or received religion. It’s about freedom, justice and prosperity. For everyone in these islands who measures up to human standards”.
We are NOT fighting for abstract freedom for everyone who measures up to human standards. That is another way of saying we don’t have a country and welcome demographic engulfment. Skin colour, birthplace or received religion do matter as they point to the identity of the person. A Sri Lankan is simply not one of us. It’s not a matter of being anti-Sri Lankan. It’s just that they are not us. We have already had one Indian ethnocentrist in Downing Street who made it clear that he adheres to Indian culture and constantly referred to his celebration of Diwali in Downing Street. This is NOT a multicultural country, but rather our country.
Reform should not be peddling diversity. If Mayuran wished us well, he would not have stood. We have already had Priti Patel pretending to be some great English nationalist, and then stating her resentment at often being the only Indian in the room in some settings in England. Er… I lived in China for 4 years, but I didn’t spend it complaining that there were too many Chinese people there.
Neil, you have repeatedly supported Cultural Marxist causes on the LA blog – I think it ridiculous to say otherwise. Statement like freedom for everyone of all races is straight out of the Communist Manifesto. It’s what the Internet-sphere refer to as “gay-race-communism”, a better word for wokery. Nigel needs to deconstruct and unpick the absurd accusation of “racism”, not to just accept it and try to plead that actually he doesn’t believe this is our country either — he is just arguing for “only” 400,000 migrants a year under his Net Zero migration proposal.
Sigh, again.
Three sighs and you’ll be out, David. I shall alert Mr Bickley to make sure that Dr Gabb will signal “out” if that should happen.
I will publish my adjudication as a separate posting.
I cannot agree with you – Reform’s major donor is Zia Youseff (sp?), a Muslim with a Pakistani name, but he comes across as quintessentially British in every respect. When he talks about defending ‘our’culture, he means British not Islamic values.
Near where I live, there are many Hindu Indians, kicked out of Uganda I believe and now largely working at Gatwick airport. These people are in many ways more British than the British, at least the older generations. By the time the younger ones have been through the British school system, many have adopted the degenerate swagger of their peers rather than the unfailing politeness and good manners of their elders, which I find truly depressing.
Zia Yusuf is his name. I caught some of his speech at the recent Birmingham rally, and it sounded pretty good. It seems he co-founded a company called Velocity Black, which was taken over by Capital One (US credit card giant) about a year ago. That’s why he is rolling in money.
This has got to be good for Reform, given that Nigel said on Friday that he is “serious about building a mass popular movement for real change over the next few years.” I hope there will be more where Zia came from, as such a movement is grossly overdue, and the more money it has, the faster it can grow.
[“…Reform’s major donor is Zia Youseff (sp?), a Muslim with a Pakistani name…”[unquote]
I know. It’s one of the things that worries me. If a party’s chief donor is a racial alien, anything that party says about immigration cannot be relied on.
[quote]”…but he comes across as quintessentially British in every respect.”[unquote]
I’m sure he does. That’s why he’s so dangerous. He is the acceptable face of the invasion and take over of my country. He’s welcome to stay. I have nothing personal against him. But he shouldn’t be allowed to vote, fund parties or participate in politics. Allowing him to do so is what leads to all the other problems. It’s not necessarily his own fault, but he and people like him are a factor in it all. I would rather be poor and live in Britain than live in a wealthy Brazil.
Non-whites are not British, even if they have a passport that says so. Their passports are fake. They are not British, thus they cannot be “more British than the British”. Quintessential qualities and attributes that help them integrate are of course welcome but they can never actually be British.
Since we’re on the topic of politeness and manners, I wish British people of your generation would refrain from castigating the younger generations of Britons. I know you qualified your remark by blaming it on schools, but the undertone of what you say is that you prefer foreigners. I have nothing against foreigners. Best of luck to them, but they’re not Britons and this is Britain. The xenophilia of your generation is a disease. It’s obviously down to the economic model that we have: your generation need more cheap labour to enter the country in order to fund your pensions. It’s basically an undeclared civil war that we are fighting in which baby boomers, understandably, want to maintain a standard of living, while younger people want a country with a future. I don’t mean to be cold when I say that we may have to wait for you to die out before we can shift to a more sensible approach to policy.
I’ve noticed that the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ – your parents’ generation, I assume – were of a similar mindset. They never missed an opportunity to slag off my generation. We were brought up by the baby boomers and the Greatest Generation (grandparents) were always on our backs, making unfounded criticism and acid remarks that were not too far removed from yours here. We could do no right, but none of them stopped to consider their own behaviour and culpability in the country’s problems – especially that they willingly and enthusiastically fought an unnecessary war that caused the social and economic ills of subsequent generations. Nor is it mentioned that sexual licence and other moral lapses were common amongst that generation during the war years, or that many British soldiers deserted and that some British soldiers were raping and mistreating Germans during the post-war occupation. Instead of introspection, they were boasting and gloating every chance they could get with their medals on Remembrance Sunday and preening themselves as, supposedly, a generation of dour hard-workers. Moreover, they brought up the ensuing generation that in turn raised the generation they liked to moan and whinge about.
I’m glad they have almost died off. I realise I am in a small minority on the point, but I will not miss them. They were not the Greatest Generation, they were Worst Generation. They will live on in infamy – I tell you there will come a day when they are hated. They ruined the country, and then expected us to thank them! And they even had to brass neck to blame us for the problems they caused! It was quite a scam they ran.
Much could also be directed at your generation, and I will not mourn your generation either.
My experience of young British people today is that they are, on the whole, polite and civil. I will concede that they get away with more than even my generation did, and I’m not all that old. Much has changed and quickly, and have experienced one or two bad incidents myself – there are always idiots – but there will always be variations in behaviour, just as there are amongst older generations, including your generation. Most of it is nothing that would be out of place from the young people of any generation – including yours.
“I am still trying to work out what Hugo Miller, for example, actually said that got him into so much trouble. ..”
So am I! Reform UK won’t talk to me, so I don’t know what their specific complaint is.
Channel Four insinuated that I had said some unspeakable things, but they didn’t say what they were. They referred to Facebook posts which had been out there for all the world to see for several years before I was ever accepted as a candidate. I did indeed compare the rioters to apes, because they were behaving like apes. It was not clear from the video what colour the rioters were (it was dark), and I made no reference to it. C4 seem to have made the assumption that because they were rioting, they must have been Black. And somehow I’m the racist!
And I said that I found the van with “Two Niggers and a stolen van” on the side was hilarious. It was a very enterprising way of attracting business by a couple of Black guys, and I say good luck to them.
I am still working out what action to take against C4 and against Reform UK for sabotaging my campiagn.
Hugo Miller
Hugo, I watched the C4 video, and it gave me no more information than I already had, except that they used the phrase “the N word,” without saying exactly what they meant, and left their viewers to fill it in. That was ethically dubious to me. They ought to have showed the picture, but then people would have been able to see its context. So, I am still just as much at a loss as you are over what you actually did wrong.
It’s an unfair world, isn’t it? You get 6,000 votes without even officially having a campaign, while Graham my candidate, I and our team of volunteers worked our hearts out for six weeks, and only got 4,800!
Neil,
It’s an apple and oranges comparison. Both you and Hugo performed admirably and are a credit to your party.
Ah yes Neil, but your candidate Graham didn’t have Channel 4 giving him a boost! I was of course still on the ballot as the Reform candidate. If the C4 programme had gone out two and a half hours earlier, they could have removed me. But the nominations had already closed. C4 did the interview the previous day, so maybe they delayed it deliberately in order to prevent Reform installing a replacement.
I wish I could post the “Two Niggers and a stolen van” pic on here. It loses a lot in translation, without the graphics. It was on my FB for years until C4 ‘exposed’ it.
In fact, here it is – it says “truck”, not “van” incidentally – another Biden moment I’m afraid!
https://www.mediamatters.org/national-rifle-association/nras-ted-nugent-posts-racist-2-niggers-and-stolen-truck-meme
Hugo Miller
Well, Hugo, I agree with Tom. I think it’s quite funny. Though I probably wouldn’t find it so funny if I hadn’t lived in the US, and didn’t understand their culture as well as I do.
The “Media Matters” takedown depends critically on their statement “There is no actual moving company; the image is actually a fake.” I cannot find any evidence on the Internet of the existence of any such company. But then again, Media Matters do not offer any evidence that it is a fake, and neither of the links they give does either. And I, for one, am not inclined to believe anyone that uses phrases like “conspiracy website” to smear their political opponents.
To be fair, “Two niggers and a stolen van”, is quite funny. I’m only surprised Nigel Farage hasn’t adopted it as the party slogan for campaign buses and so on.
From Hugo Miller
The pic is available on the internet – and it is universally and hysterically denounced as a ‘racist meme’. Frankly I don’t see how. It is hilarious in my opinion – it is clearly intended to promote their business and I would say it’s very enterprising of them.
Do you remember that veteran Radio 2 DJ who was summarily dismissed by the BBC some years ago for playing the 1920’s song “The sun has got his hat on (and is coming out to play)”? One verse referred to “little nigger boys lying in the sun” or some-such. That was enough to get the DJ sacked on the spot.
The word “nigger” is viewed as impolite, and it is not a word I would use to address a Black man. But then again, if I went to the US and addressed a Black man as “Boy”, I would be liable to get a punch on the nose. So is “boy” now a racist and offensive word? Where does this all end?
It is time we took on the self-appointed language police.
And why is everybody so utterly terrified of being called ‘racist’. Whatever the word means, it is not a pleasant attribute, for sure. But there are far, far worse things of which one may be accused.