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The Iowa caucuses, both Republican and Democrat, took place on Monday, February 3, 2020.
They truly were a tale of two parties.
The Iowa caucus is the first presidential candidate — and delegate — selection during a general election year in the US.
On the eve of the Nevada caucus on Saturday, February 22, it’s worth revisiting.
Republican caucus
Not all of the Republican Iowa caucuses have gone smoothly in recent years.
This year’s did, and so did 2008‘s.
However, 2012‘s was very tight between Rick Santorum who finished narrowly in first place with 24.6% of the vote and Mitt Romney, in second with a nail-biting 24.5%.
In 2016, Ted Cruz was still at the top of his game, finishing first with 27.6%, and Donald Trump in second on 24.3%. Yet, that was the year that Cruz’s campaign workers spread false rumours to Ben Carson’s supporters that the good doctor had dropped out of the race. A lie! However, Carson’s paltry 9.7% ensured that he did drop out soon afterwards. Terrible!
That was how Donald Trump was able to attach the word ‘Lying’ to ‘Ted’ in a tweet with photos of both their wives. The Telegraph has more on the story.
Trump never let up on Cruz, either. Cruz folded in tears a couple of months later. Marco Rubio dropped out a day or two later, leaving candidate Trump the last man standing.
This year, Trump, the incumbent, had two minor rivals and ‘other’. William ‘Bill’ Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, garnered 1.3% of the vote and one delegate. Joe Walsh, a former Congressman for Illinois, came in third place with 1.1% of the vote and no delegates.
President Trump received 31,464 votes and 39 delegates.
There was a record turnout for an incumbent president, breaking Obama’s record of 25,000:
It was like a mini-rally in places:
Democrat caucus
The Democrat caucus resulted in confusion, much like 2016’s.
The 2016 caucus was held on February 1 that year. The Des Moines Register asked, ‘Iowa’s nightmare revisited: Was correct winner called?’
‘Nightmare revisited’ refers to the Republican result in 2012. As the newspaper reported in 2016:
This time it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans.
Four years ago, the top Democrat candidates were Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (emphases mine):
Even as Hillary Clinton trumpeted her Iowa win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, aides for Bernie Sanders said the eyelash-thin margin raised questions and called for a review. The chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party rejected that notion, saying the results are final …
At 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had eked out a slim victory, based on results from 1,682 of 1,683 precincts.
Voters from the final missing Democratic precinct tracked down party officials Tuesday morning to report their results. Sanders won that precinct, Des Moines precinct No. 42, by two delegate equivalents over Clinton.
The Iowa Democratic Party said the updated final tally of delegate equivalents for all the precincts statewide was:
Clinton: 700.59
Sanders: 696.82.
That’s a 3.77-count margin between Clinton, the powerful establishment favorite who early on in the Democratic race was expected to win in a virtual coronation, and Sanders, a democratic socialist who few in Iowa knew much about a year ago.
Incredible.
In 2020, the result was also contested. Bernie Sanders came in a very close second to Pete Buttigieg:
– Bernie won the popular vote: 45,831 to 43,273, or 26.5% to 25.1%;
– State delegate equivalents were as close as they were four years previously. Mayor Pete ended up with 563.2 and Bernie with 563.1.
Good grief.
Turnout was also low:
So, why, then, was it so difficult for the media to get the results?
This is what happened at CNN:
Bernie, understandably, was not best pleased as Buttigieg announced victory:
Two theories abound as to what happened this year.
One blames the fiasco on a new app that the Democrats were using. Another pins it on incompetence.
Here is a good summary of both:
The new app
Those who blame it on the new app point out that some high-profile people working on the campaign of Mayor Pete — dubbed Mayor Cheat after the caucus — knew the developers:
Questions also arose over ACRONYM:
Here’s more on that:
Shadow’s app looks as if it is/was set to be used in Nevada, too:
One hopes the bugs get ironed out by tomorrow, the 22nd, otherwise, it could look like another case of:
Incompetence
A week later, Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent article about what he saw: ‘The Iowa Caucus Was Waterloo for Democrats’.
If you enjoy politics, you’ll want to read about his experience and about the Democrats he met on and before February 3.
Taibbi discounts the app as having been a factor in the caucus vote meltdown. He adopts the British philosophy of ‘cock-up before conspiracy’.
Excerpts follow.
There were problems with unauthorised precinct captains. The night before the caucus:
… a 36-year-old Minnesotan named Chris Storey called a number he’d been given, for a woman who was chair of the Waukee 4 district. Thanks to a new rule allowing out-of-state volunteers to be precinct captains, he was set to represent the Sanders campaign there.
“We got along, it was great,” he recalls. “She told me she was looking forward to seeing me the next day.”
The next day, caucus day, Storey showed up at Shuler Elementary School in Clive, Iowa. The same official he’d spoken with the night before met him at the door. “It was like two different people,” he recalls. “I was told there was a written directive from the county chair that nonresidents could not be precinct captains.”
Sanders had to get a last-minute replacement captain in Waukee 4, someone not formally aligned with the campaign. He fell short of viability there by five votes. County chair Bryce Smith, who made the decision, said he was responding to a late directive from the Iowa Democratic Party that said they would allow one nonresident captain per campaign, per precinct, but “the discretion of the chair is what goes,” i.e., this ultimately was a judgment call for county chairs. Smith said he didn’t like the change to the long-standing rule — “What’s stopping a campaign from hiring professional persuaders and high-profile people?” he asked — and decided to bar nonresident captains. The IDP has not yet commented.
As a result, some would-be captains from multiple different campaigns in Dallas County were pulled off the job (Smith said he got “five, six, eight” calls to complain). Meanwhile, in other districts, nonresident captains were common.
There were other issues:
Caucus participants later in the week would offer an eyebrow-raising number of other issues: bad head counts, misreported results, misreads of rules, wrong numbers, telecommunications errors, and other problems.
Taibbi says this should have been a straightforward caucus:
The basics of the caucus aren’t hard. You enter a building that is poorly ventilated, too small, and surrounded by mud puddles — usually a school gym. You join other people who plan on voting your way, gathering around the “precinct captain” for your candidate. If your pile of people comprises 15% of the room or more on the first count, your candidate is deemed “viable” and you must stay in that group. If your group doesn’t reach 15%, you must move to a new group or declare yourself undecided. There is a second count, and it should be done.
The caucus results, such as they were, continued to cause confusion the rest of the week:
What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg “in the lead.”
He explains that, although it looked as if Sanders actually won on paper, there was cause to call the win for Buttigieg:
Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), for most of the week Mayor Pete’s lead with “state delegate equivalents” — the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention — made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner.
This wasn’t necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there’s a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.
Returning to the aforementioned Chris Storey from Minnesota, who was ultimately turned down as precinct chairman:
“Is it incompetence or corruption? That’s the big question,” asked Storey. “I’m not sure it matters. It could be both.”
Conclusion
Whatever went wrong with the Democrat caucus, President Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale had this to say:
Democrats should hope for a more carefully conducted caucus in Nevada on Saturday.
Yesterday’s post on Democrat support for abortion featured Pete Buttigieg and a Fordham University bioethics professor who was so distraught by the mayor’s pro-choice stance that he resigned from the board of Democrats for Life.
Last week, the Revd Franklin Graham was astonished to hear Bernie Sanders say that being ‘pro-choice’ — supporting abortion — was part and parcel of being a Democrat:
The son of the late Billy Graham rightly wondered where the ‘outcry’ was against such a stance.
The Breitbart article of February 12 linked in the tweet tells us that Graham sent a sharp warning about socialism before urging Christians to ‘wake up’ (emphases mine):
The evangelical leader went on to urge Christians to wake up to what is happening in the Democrat party and to take to heart their civic duty to vote.
“This is an example of why it is so important for people of faith to research who you vote for in every election and understand where they stand on issues that are important to you,” he said.
“I urge Christians to pray for our nation, our leaders, and the upcoming elections, from local to national. Make sure that you are registered to vote, otherwise we will lose our country,” he warned.
True.
This November, Republicans, the supporters of the rights of the unborn — and, yes, as God’s creation, the unborn do have rights — need to win back the House of Representatives and maintain, if not increase, their majority in the Senate.
I despair of notional Christians, including clergy, who are lukewarm on the subject of abortion. They laud the Democrats as the only politicians with ethics. The way it looks to many of us, even overseas, is that most Democrat politicians lack ethics, pure and simple. I am struggling to think of any in the House or Senate who deal honestly and fairly.
One thing is for sure: most Democrats no longer support life in the womb.
Where do Democrats stand in defending the rights of the unborn? Sadly, nowhere.
Yet, it has taken several years for this truth to dawn on lifetime Democrat voters.
It is unfortunate that Pete ‘Mayor Pete’ Buttigieg (pron. ‘Budd-uh-judge’) of South Bend, Indiana, is an Episcopalian. He puts the denomination to shame in his support of late-term abortion. Yet, many other Episcopalians — also Democrats — do, too:
On Tuesday, February 11, 2020, at least one Catholic Democrat saw the light, as Mayor Pete defended abortion until the bitter end. Interestingly, Mayor Pete’s dad was a left-wing professor at the University of Notre Dame who was a co-founder and past president of the International Gramsci Society. Who can make sense out of that? But I digress.
LifeSite News reported that the professor who termed Mayor Pete’s views as ‘the straw that broke this camel’s back’ is:
Charles Camosy, an associate professor of Theology at Fordham University, has also resigned from the board of Democrats for Life.
Camosy, who specializes in biomedical ethics, explained his reasons for his decision in an op ed he wrote for Thursday’s New York Post: the Democrats’ complete disregard for the unborn child.
Also (emphases mine):
… it was same-sex married Pete Buttigieg’s attitude to late-term abortion, aired last week on The View, that convinced Camosy that pro-life Democrats are “fighting a losing battle” in convincing their party to respect their position. Buttigieg had indicated that he didn’t think the government should have any say regarding late-term abortion or post-birth infanticide.
“The straw that broke this camel’s back was Pete Buttigieg’s extremism,” Camosy wrote.
“Here was a mainstream Democratic candidate suggesting, at one point, that abortion is OK up to the point the baby draws her first breath.”
He concluded that if the party was “willing to go all-in on the most volatile issue of our time with a position held by only 13 percent of the population, it was time to take no for an answer.”
Camosy also predicted that, thanks to its pro-abortion “extremism,” the Democratic Party will lose the next election.
We can but hope. If they win, they will have cheated; of that, I’m sure.
Dr Camosy does not think he will be able to vote Republican, though:
“My broader values mean I can’t vote Republican, however, and this makes me one of many millions of Americans for whom our political duopoly doesn’t work,” he wrote.
That’s too bad. Opening up other minor yet established parties does not work, either. The British proved that in their December 12, 2019 election.
LifeSite News has more of what Camosy wrote for the New York Post, all of it worthwhile reading. It also quotes Mayor Pete’s views for The View.
In closing, this is what Camosy had to say in his op-ed about the Democrats’ stance on late-term abortion:
Camosy asked them to participate in a thought experiment in which they suppose that “hundreds of thousands of children are being killed each year in horrific ways,” either because they have Down syndrome, or because their grandparents think their parents are too young, or because an abusive partner demands it.
“And then suppose a political party claimed this killing was a social good. Just another kind of health care. Something to shout about with pride,” the ethicist asked.
“This party, it should go without saying, would be unsupportable,” he concluded.
Just so.
Sounds a lot like eugenics, doesn’t it?
More will follow on the Democrats’ views on abortion.
Happy New Year!
Happy new decade!
I enjoy, albeit with trepidation at times, looking back at the decades I’ve lived through and charting the change from beginning to end.
O tempora, o mores!
1960s
In 1960, growing up in the United States, I remember that things were still quite formal. Most people took care in the way they spoke and in their appearance. They were careful to conduct their households in a respectable manner. By the middle of the decade, that began to change but not too noticeably.
By 1968, a social revolution was underway, including sexually. What was once private became public. Attire reflected that. Women began wearing skirts above the knee. Men’s clothes became more form-fitting.
Sloppiness and drugs became fashionable with the advent of hippies. Even though they were a small minority, they received a lot of media coverage. A slogan connected with them — ‘If it feels good, do it’ — began to pervade society at large.
Cinema and television reflected this change.
At home, Americans moved from watching westerns to tuning into a zany comedy hour. In 1960, Gunsmoke was the most viewed programme. In 1969, it was Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Gunsmoke had moved to sixth place in the Nielsen ratings.
Film genres and themes also shifted. In 1960, the great epics were popular, with Spartacus the highest grossing film and Exodus coming third. Psycho was second. In 1969, while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was in the top slot, Midnight Cowboy was at No. 3, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was No. 6 and an X-rated movie, I Am Curious (Yellow) was No. 12. It would have been unthinkable in 1960 that an urban drama about homosexuality, a movie about swingers and one that was pornographic would have been so popular nine years later.
1970s
The cultural shift continued in the 1970s. American magazines and newspapers devoted many column inches to social drop-outs experimenting with communal living. Swingers were becoming popular in suburbia. Again, those were two small sub-groups of society, but everyone — even the most respectable — knew about these two phenomena.
Pop music got bolder, more sexualised. I remember in high school that we talked a lot about sex and could hardly wait to start dating so that we could experiment. Our parents wondered what was wrong with us. The idea of sin and the forbidden went out the window. ‘If it feels good, do it’ had spread to the middle classes. Previously forbidden carnal acts were encouraged as being completely ‘natural’. This furthered the evolution of a shame-free society. Today, I read that some teenagers don’t kiss on a first date; instead they engage in oral sex.
Interestingly, one of the most suggestive singers of the decade, Eric Carmen of the Raspberries, laments where this has led today:
I remember neighbours of ours getting divorced. The wife said that she could earn her own living now, thank you very much. The husband was heartbroken. We felt sorry for their two children. Until then, my family and I personally did not know any couples who got divorced. It just didn’t happen to everyday individuals. However, divorce rates continued to rise and, these days, no one bats an eyelid.
More women started working. What began as a liberating elective would turn out to be a mandatory means of survival in marriage in the years that followed. Few of us knew that then, though.
Returning to music, it was a great decade for youngsters. FM radio produced rather excellent stations devoted to little known genres that never reached Top 40 AM stations. Through them, we discovered prog rock from Britain: Yes, Rick Wakeman, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, to name but three musical greats. There were many more, too numerous to mention here.
Near the end of the decade we had disco. Saturday Night Fever was a huge box office hit and propelled John Travolta from television (Welcome Back Kotter) to cinema fame.
The most popular television sitcoms, such as Welcome Back Kotter, were all set in metropolitan areas. In terms of television in general, The Waltons was probably the only show with a rural setting.
Halfway through the decade, I spent a year in France, which was much quieter than the US socially and still quite formal, even though the more leftist state university students were generally unkempt and unwashed. In many respects, the country was a bridge between the 1960s and the 1970s in the nicest possible way.
1980s
Leaving university, I recall that many of my friends latched onto the Reagan zeitgeist and became conservatives.
They turned into their parents and lost the fun-loving verve they once had. I stayed single the longest, so was more acutely aware of a shift into respectability and suburban living.
I lived in a major US city then, earning my own way in life. For relaxation, I used to go to matinees at the weekend. The price of admission was cheaper and the cinemas were nearly empty, giving me the impression I had the big screen all to myself.
I saw a lot of world films in the first part of that decade, some from Brazil and Australia but mostly Britain and France. French film became a passion. Even one of the UHF television channels showed French films from the 1950s. Bliss.
As far as music was concerned, my favourite FM station played British and European singles apart from reggae on Sunday afternoons. More bliss.
Then, around 1986, something began to change. Although my favourite radio station stayed the same, the movie theatres weren’t showing as many foreign films. Within a couple of years, they stopped showing them altogether. One of my lifelines had vanished, sadly. The American films that replaced them were not very good, either, so I stopped going to the cinema.
Everything became very one-dimensional. America, somehow, had lost the link with the zeitgeist of European culture, which it never recovered. It used to be that people in the 1960s and early 1970s made a two- or three-week trip to western Europe to see the historic sites they learned about in school. It was what we today would call a bucket list item.
Fortunately, by the end of the decade, employment events intervened — and further improved — for me.
1990s
Living in England, I realised that I had an insatiable appetite for history and politics. I learned a lot about both thanks to a gift subscription to The Spectator, which I had read about in English lit class in high school. It’s been around since 1828.
In 1990s, my in-laws told me that Margaret Thatcher’s time was up. She had become too full of herself. We had high hopes for John Major.
I remember the 1992 election, which Major won handily. I could not understand the rage of my female colleagues who expected Neil Kinnock to win. They stayed up all night drinking, waiting for a Labour government that never came. The next day, at work, they were hungover, tearful — and, above all, angry. Why did they think he stood a chance? Perhaps I had been reading too much of The Spectator, but I had no doubt that Major would continue as Prime Minister.
By 1997, most of us felt change was needed. The Conservative MPs on the front bench seemed like tired, bloated bureaucrats. None of them had an original idea. Most seemed to be lining their own pockets. I was most consterned by Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley, who started closing A&E (Accident and Emergency) services at local hospitals. What was she thinking?
When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, nearly everyone I knew rejoiced. Change was coming.
And how …
2000s
The first few years of Labour were fine. I was enjoying my work too much to pay any attention.
By 2005, I longed for a Conservative government, especially when Gordon Brown became PM with no general election.
After that, Labour became unbearable, banging on about people’s personal lives and habits. The smoking ban came into force in the summer of 2007. Ministers assured us in television interviews that private members clubs and hotels would be exempt. No, not at all. It was a blanket ban everywhere.
It was during this decade that London elected its first mayor, Ken Livingstone. He served two terms and introduced the city-wide congestion charge for motor vehicles, which we called the Kengestion Charge. My colleagues at the time reminded me that, as head of the old GLA (Greater London Authority), he was known as Red Ken.
Boris Johnson succeeded him, also serving two terms. His administration made the streets tidy again and also lowered crime.
By 2006, I started looking more closely at the EU and the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who seemed to rule our lives. I agreed with those disgruntled Britons who wanted a referendum on our membership.
Most of all, however, I was sick and tired of Labour, to the point of despair.
I also asked my far better half to cancel my gift subscription to the The Spectator, as it had changed its editorial line considerably after Boris Johnson left as editor. Although more people now read it, it is a former shadow of itself. I would not call it neither conservative nor traditional at all any more.
2010s
Hope came in the May 2010 general election.
The Conservatives had to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. It was the David Cameron and Nick Clegg Show, but at least Labour were out of the picture after 13 years.
David Cameron referred to himself as the ‘heir to Blair’. It took me some time to see it, but he was not wrong.
He set out to reform the Conservative Party and alienated older, faithful members in their local associations. CCHQ suddenly did not need their help.
On a broader level, Cameron will probably be best remembered for opening up marriage to same-sex couples and for offering us the EU referendum, billed by all parties as a ‘once in a lifetime’ choice which they all pledged to implement.
A number of televised debates took place in 2016. I watched them all. Some of my friends were less than convinced by the Leave proposition. The one clincher was Brexit The Movie, which is an hour-long eye-opener about the Brussels gravy train and better than any of the debates, no matter how good:
I stayed up until the early hours of the morning of Friday, June 24, 2016 to watch the result. When it was clear that Leave had won, I went to bed. The next day, my far better half and I woke up to Cameron resigning because he did not like the result. We had a celebratory lunch in London and went to a party that evening that had been planned months earlier. I remember the apprehension we both felt about sounding out the other party guests as to their views on the EU. We later discovered that were not alone. Finally, someone there broke the ice upon his arrival by exclaiming:
Is everybody HAPPY? I certainly am!
At that point, we were free to talk about Brexit.
Theresa May became Prime Minister later that summer.
Across the pond, another sea change was happening: Donald Trump’s candidacy. It was even more of a shock when he won. A startled nation awoke to find that Hillary Clinton was not their president.
The conflicts about Brexit and Trump continue today. Opponents to both have grown ever more vehement.
On September 20, 2019, the British website Spiked issued a thought-provoking documentary on Trump and Brexit. It’s 26-minutes long and well worth watching. To cover Brexit, their reporters interviewed residents of Southend-on-Sea in Essex. To cover the Trump phenomenon, they interviewed Pennsylvania journalist Salena Zito and residents of Erie, which was once a major industrial powerhouse in that state. It has fallen on very hard times, indeed:
The major theme running through both is, as they put it, ‘change’, which I believe they should have called ‘self determination’ and ‘recovering the aspirational dream’.
One thing that struck me was the interview with the owner of a gym in Erie. He said that his father raised seven children on a janitor’s salary:
You couldn’t do that now.
Too right. Both parents now have to work — unlike in the 1960s — and few households can support more than two or three children.
People in Britain and the United States want to work and save more of their hard-earned cash. They also want good job opportunities for their children.
A fisherman in Southend said that, because of EU rules, he is restricted to an ever-smaller part of waters in which to fish. The number of fishing boats has continued to decline, he added, and the number of fisherman has also dropped dramatically. That is why he, and many others in Southend, voted Leave in 2016.
The decade closed with Boris Johnson’s landslide victory on December 12. Historian David Starkey explores what this means for the nation in this 57-minute documentary from The Sun, ably conducted by a young reporter:
Starkey explores the evolution of Parliament since Victorian times, when it became the institution we know today. As many Northern constituencies flipped from Labour to Conservative, Starkey says that Boris’s pledge to revitalise the North will mean little unless he espouses their values of patriotism, which, he says, has been a dirty word for many years.
He says that Boris could well become a figure like Charles II, who restored the monarchy beginning in 1660. Many of their personality traits are similar, he notes, particularly their penchant for bringing a nation together and reforming it at the same time. It is well worth watching when you have the opportunity.
There is much more to Starkey’s interview than summarised here. He talks about the people of the North, Labour, Jeremy Corbyn, David Cameron, Tony Blair and, significantly, Benjamin Disraeli. Starkey hopes that the PM will study his Victorian predecessor’s successes closely.
With that, I must close for now. There are many developments over the past 60 years that I have not mentioned. This is merely to give an idea about the direction that Western society took as the decades rolled on.
Welcome to 2020. Let’s hope it brings many good tidings. I wish all of us the very best.
Since the early hours of Friday morning, I have said many prayers of thanksgiving for Boris Johnson’s overwhelming Conservative Party victory.
The new Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, which has always voted Labour in living memory, spent the weekend giving thanks, too. God is good:
When I wake up now, this is one of my first thoughts:
This is another:
As is this. What a lovely scene of London, especially with the Christmas tree in the middle:
I am amazed at how the Conservatives were able to demolish the impenetrable ‘red wall’, as they called it, by winning in constituencies that had not voted Conservative ever or for a very long time. Their novice candidates beat long-standing Labour MPs.
This is incredible:
Ballots from St Ives were the last to arrive because of a storm:
This was the result (note the Father Christmas sweater):
Thursday’s election result was truly historic, the best since Margaret Thatcher 40 years ago:
See how true blue the electoral map of England has become post-election (second tweet):
Guido Fawkes has more detail (emphases in the original):
The Tories lost seven seats to the SNP and one to Labour, but won enough new seats to make up for those and more, particularly in the Midlands, Wales, and the North. The one seat Labour managed to take off the Tories was typically metropolitan Putney…
Big names to lose their seats included:
-
- Jo Swinson
- Laura Pidcock
- Dennis Skinner
- Chris Williamson
- Emma Dent Coad
- Caroline Flint
- David Gauke
- Antoinette Sandbach
- Dominic Grieve
- Anna Soubry
- Nigel Dodds
- Zac Goldsmith
Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna, and Sam Gyimah also failed to win new ones.
The Tories won so evenly across the country that Michael Gove was able to triumphantly declare in the Tories’ victory event this morning that “Next year both the Durham Miners’ Gala and the Notting Hill Carnival will take place in seats held by the Conservatives.” The Tories won back Kensington which includes Notting Hill, and astonishingly Laura Pidcock was defeated in her seat of North West Durham…
Commiserations to Nigel Dodds and Zac Goldsmith. I will miss them. UPDATE (Dec. 17): Apparently, there could be plans to elevate Zac Goldsmith to the House of Lords, enabling him to keep his cabinet position.
Guido posted another list later that day, based on the BBC’s research. This one concerns all the MPs who ran as independents, so some of the same names will appear. Explanatory notes in purple are mine:
Research by the BBC’s Laurence Sleator has shown that all 18 MPs who defected in the last Parliament then stood again for this one failed in their endeavours to be re-elected to the House of Commons. Two even lost their deposits…
Liberal Democrat Losers
-
- Angela Smith (ex-Labour)
- Chuka Umunna (ex-Labour)
- Phillip Lee (ex-Conservative)
- Luciana Berger (ex-Labour)
- Sarah Wollaston (ex-Conservative)
- Antoinette Sandbach (ex-Conservative)
- Sam Gyimah (ex-Conservative)
- Angela Smith (ex-Labour)
Independent Losers
-
- Frank Field (ex-Labour; elderly, has served Birkenhead well over the years)
- David Gauke (ex-Conservative)
- Dominic Grieve (ex-Conservative)
- Anne Milton (ex-Conservative)
- Chris Williamson (Lost deposit) – ex-Labour
- Ivan Lewis (Lost deposit) – ex-Labour
- Gavin Shuker (ex-Labour)
- Roger Godsiff (ex-Labour)
- Frank Field (ex-Labour; elderly, has served Birkenhead well over the years)
Tigger Losers (TIG — The Independent Group)
-
- Anna Soubry (ex-Conservative)
- Mike Gapes (ex-Labour)
- Chris Leslie (ex-Labour)
- Anna Soubry (ex-Conservative)
Turns out voters don’t take too kindly to party-hopping democracy dodgers when their time comes…
I’m sorry about Frank Field, but as far as the others in that list are concerned, good riddance. Many have commented online that this is evidence of ‘draining the swamp’. True.
The ex-Conservative rebels, e.g. Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Antoinette Sandbach and Anna Soubry, were so certain they would win. Ha!
The Press Association has a great recap of how the early hours of Friday morning unfolded. Note the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon making a fool out of herself when she found out that the then-Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson lost her Scottish constituency to the SNP. Shameful. Furthermore, the big-hitting Conservatives predicted to lose their seats WON. The media were WRONG:
Only Tom Harwood, 23, who works with Guido Fawkes, predicted a Conservative landslide. Guido posted a compilation of Harwood’s appearances on the BBC’s Newsnight where presenter Jo Coburn sneered dismissively, ‘And we’ll live happily ever after’. The media were wrong AGAIN.
Congratulations, Tom. Highly recommended viewing:
It was Tom’s idea to use ‘stonking’ at Guido Fawkes in describing the Conservatives’ majority. Now Boris is using the word, too, as did Sky News’s Kay Burley and Labour’s Ian Lavery:
Another point worth making is that we now have a record number of women MPs!
Before the election, media pundits said the rough and tumble of Parliament would be too much for them. The media were WRONG about this, too:
Here’s another thing the media got WRONG: Boris Johnson was going to be turfed out of the last Parliament.
Let us look at Boris’s Friday the 13th — an excellent day for him:
Late that morning, he went to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen invited him to form a new government:
Then he returned to 10 Downing Street:
Shortly after 3 p.m., he addressed the nation. This video is subtitled. The press await on the opposite side of the street:
This version from the Press Association (PA), also subtitled, is a bit longer:
Meanwhile:
WEDDING RING UPDATE (Dec. 21) — owner found, ring a family heirloom:
On Saturday, December 14, the PA reported that a grateful Boris was visiting some of the constituencies that had voted Conservative for the first time (emphases mine):
Boris Johnson will meet with newly-elected Conservative MPs as part of a celebratory victory lap after winning a “stonking mandate” at the General Election.
The Prime Minister secured an 80-seat majority and many of his gains came in Labour’s heartland areas across the North and the Midlands.
Some areas, such as Bishop Auckland in the North East, had never elected a Tory MP before Thursday.
Mr Johnson, speaking outside Number 10, said he would “work round the clock” to repay the trust of those who “voted for us for the first time” – including those whose “pencils may have wavered over the ballot and who heard the voices of their parents and their grandparents whispering anxiously in their ears” …
Mr Johnson will make the first move to show newly-elected MPs that the concerns of their constituents will be heard with a visit on Saturday to some of those who overturned a Labour majority.
Later that day, the PA reported that Boris poled up in Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s former constituency, which voted overwhelmingly Conservative:
Boris Johnson has vowed to repay the trust of former Labour supporters whose votes helped deliver him victory in the General Election.
The Prime Minister made a symbolic visit to Tony Blair’s old Sedgefield constituency in County Durham – which fell to the Tories on Thursday night – to pledge his commitment to spreading opportunity across the country.
“We believe in giving opportunity to everyone,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters and newly-elected MPs from the region packed into the local cricket club.
“We believe that talent is evenly distributed throughout our country, but opportunity is unfairly distributed.
“We are going to rectify that as a One Nation Conservative government, as a people’s government, that is what we are going to do.”
Sedgefield was one of a swathe of seats across the North, Midlands and north Wales in Labour’s hitherto impregnable “red wall” to go blue as the Tories stormed to an 80-seat majority in the new House of Commons.
Sedgefield residents were over the moon:
We have a lot to look forward to once we ‘get Brexit done’, as Boris says, and begin trade negotiations. That said, I will not be buying chlorinated chicken, especially as free range British chicken is the real thing and so, so tasty. Let’s hope our Conservative victory does augur a landslide victory for President Trump in 2020:
Today heralded a glorious return to Parliament!
Congratulations to Boris Johnson!
Congratulations to everyone in Britain who voted Conservative!
Congratulations to all Conservative MPs, especially the novices!
Onwards and upwards for what Conservatives are calling The People’s Government!
This is my last post on British politics before the December 12 election.
I have already written about Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Like the Britons in the video below, 17.4 million of us would like to finally see Brexit delivered so that we can move on to trade negotiations with the EU and the world at large. Only one person can lead Parliament to bring this to fruition — Prime Minister Boris Johnson:
Voters have confidence in his leadership thus far (130 days and counting):
Contrary to the misinformation the media have been ramming down our throats, many British voters would be perfectly happy with a no deal or a Boris Brexit:
Although Labour have been promising households in Britain everything except a free puppy, the harsh reality would mean more — and higher — taxes for nearly everyone, ‘the many, not the few’, to borrow their slogan:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) calls Labour’s spending plans ‘colossal’! Venezuela, here we come:
Labour’s proposed higher corporation tax would not only stifle innovation but consumer prices would go up in order to compensate for those taxes:
However, under the Conservatives — even with Parliament’s prolonging Brexit uncertainty — Britain has record employment and buoyant wages:
Our currency recently rallied, too. The Boris effect?
The Leader of the House is entirely correct in his assessment of the Prime Minister’s support of free enterprise:
Those worried about the NHS should keep in mind that a healthy economy promotes a healthy population.
Since November 6, Conservatives have been campaigning across the country.
The Prime Minister has made several campaign stops every day to factories, schools and hospitals. In November, he visited his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in west London with his father Stanley, a television celebrity in his own right:
Last week, he made another stop in London: Grodzinski’s bakery in Golders Green. The video of Boris piping ‘Get Brexit Done’ on doughnuts is subtitled. This must be the friendliest and most heart-warming video of the campaign for any party:
Another Conservative of note is Jacob Rees-Mogg, most recently Leader of the House, and current incumbent candidate for North East Somerset:
His sister, Annunziata, is one of four Brexit Party MEPs who, last week, urged voters to back the Conservatives:
Rees-Mogg has been campaigning in North East Somerset since Parliament was dissolved in November. It is a delightful part of England, even when cooler temperatures and rain dominate the landscape:
There is always room for humour in a political campaign. For those unfamiliar with British English, ‘moggy’ is slang for ‘cat’:
This is my favourite photo, and it is hard to disagree with the reply:
Conclusion
Only a majority Conservative government can break the Brexit logjam by the time of our next deadline:
Once post-Brexit trade negotiations start in earnest during the transition period, MPs can then begin to focus on what matters to the British:
Are these sensible policies important to you?
While our other political parties, especially the Scottish National Party (SNP), want to break up the Union which has held strong since 1707, the Conservatives will continue to hold it together, because:
On Thursday, December 12, a Conservative vote makes sense:
I’m borrowing this GIF to say …
Back Boris.
The charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged Labour since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader in 2015 beggar belief.
Labour has the highly dubious distinction of being the only other political party than the BNP to be formally investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for anti-Semitism.
It is unclear why anti-Semites within Labour have felt so free to be so open with their hatred.
The front page article in The Sunday Times from December 8 has chilling content (click on image to read it in full):
Few are saying Jeremy Corbyn himself espouses the same hate, but he seems to be doing little about it. This is what he said on the last debate of the campaign on Friday, December 6:
Yet, the diversity campaign video that Labour issued on Saturday, November 30, mentions every ethnic and religious group in some way — except the Jews!
The Daily Mail has the story along with the video (emphases mine below):
Mr Corbyn posted the one minute and eight second video about diversity on Twitter on Saturday with the words ‘this is our strength’.
The video uses a speech by shadow equalities secretary Dawn Butler as a voice over in which she lists various different groups and insists ‘a Labour government will value you’.
But the video does not refer to British Jewish people in a move which has sparked fury and risks worsening Labour’s existing anti-Semitism crisis.
The party remains under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission over its handling of allegations of anti-Semitism …
Ms Butler said in her speech: ‘If you are in social housing, if you are LGBT+, if you are straight, if you are a traveller, if you struggle to pay the rent, if you wear a hijab, turban, cross, if you are black, white, Asian, if you are disabled, if you are old, if you are young, if you don’t have a trust fund.
‘If you didn’t go to Oxbridge, if you are working class, if you are under 18, if you are aspirational, if you work, if you are a carer, if you feel you won’t live beyond 25, if you have ever ticked the ‘other box’.
‘You have a future and you are worthy. Worthy of equality, worthy of dignity and worthy of respect and a Labour government will value you. Just be your authentic self.’
The video ends with a statement on screen which reads: ‘Our diversity is our greatest strength. Let’s unite and unleash the potential of all our people’.
The situation has been serious for at least a year. Yet, it would appear as if most of our main media outlets are purposely ignoring it.
Imagine if the Conservatives had this problem. It would have been headline news, front and centre, all year long.
How did I find out about it earlier this year? Via Guido Fawkes.
In looking through my bookmarks, however, I found a few Press Association articles from 2018:
‘Corbyn sorry for “pain and hurt” caused by anti-Semitism in Labour’ prior to a protest by Jewish leaders in front of Parliament (March 25)
‘Corbyn faces renewed calls to tackle Labour anti-Semitism’ (April 1)
‘Shadow minister “frustrated” over Labour’s slowness to tackle anti-Semitism’ which features a protester holding a sign saying ‘For the many, not the Jew’ and mentions Labour MP Thangham Debbonaire being criticised by her Bristol constituency Labour Party for attending the aforementioned rally against anti-Semitism (April 8)
Things went quiet until July 2019, when the BBC’s Panorama investigated charges of anti-Semitism against Labour. This was just after the the Equality and Human Rights Commission had begun their formal investigation. Guido Fawkes‘s team distilled the hour-long documentary into a video just under nine minutes long:
Labour’s Disputes team, comprised of a handful of people, was in charge of investigating claims of anti-Semitism. Then, Corbyn appointed a new party General Secretary. Under her leadership, few suspensions were issued. Instead, letters were sent reminding offending members of the party’s code of conduct. One by one, the longer-serving members of the Disputes team resigned. One had a nervous breakdown. Another seriously considered committing suicide.
One Labour MP interviewed said that things started to go downhill once Corbyn made his pro-Palestinian views more widely known. It appears that pro-Palestinian party members thought they had licence to abuse the notional enemy, with Jewish members suffering verbal abuse for their faith.
On August 2, Guido Fawkes posted ‘Labour Anti-Semitic Incidents Hit Record Numbers’, which says in part (emphasis in the original):
A damning report published by the Community Security Trust – the charity set up to protect Jews from antisemitism – has shown that there have already been 100 incidents of anti-Semitism which are “examples of, or related to arguments over, alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party” in the first half of this year alone …
Alarmingly, there was a spike of 55 incidents in February and March alone – when several Labour MPs including Luciana Berger left the party over its endemic anti-Semitism. Almost 20% of anti-Semitic incidents across the whole UK were linked to the Labour Party in March, with the CST report noting that Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis “clearly has an important bearing” on the record-high number of incidents recorded. All the while Corbyn continues to dismiss it as just a case of a few members occasionally ‘dipping’ into antisemitic language…
The MP mentioned, Luciana Berger, joined the Liberal Democrats.
One month later, a Brexit-supporting Labour MP stood down to work for the Conservative government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson:
On September 12, Guido Fawkes posted a schedule of fringe meetings for the Labour Party conference, ‘Labour’s Anti-Semitic Conference Line-Up’, which ends with this:
The problem for Labour is surely within their party these views are no longer fringe…
On October 16, a Labour MP from Liverpool, Dame Louise Ellman, resigned her party membership. She is featured in the BBC Panorama video above:
More former Labour MPs began to denounce Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
The next was Ian Austin, who was an independent MP before Parliament dissolved on November 6:
Former Home Secretary David Blunkett — now Lord Blunkett — was next:
Charles Falconer — Baron Falconer — served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain under Tony Blair. On November 26, he gave the BBC his thoughts on the Chief Rabbi’s condemnation of Labour:
Britain’s former most senior civil judge is also deeply concerned about anti-Semitism in Labour:
Former Labour MP Ivan Lewis is calling on voters to back Boris:
Yet, the anti-Semitism continues. The bookmarks I have are too numerous to include here.
Going back to The Sunday Times of December 8, referenced above, little is actually being done about anti-Semitism at Labour HQ (paywall):
Moving on to other topics, it has been said that Jeremy Corbyn wants to do away with MI5 and specialist law enforcement.
This happens to be true, as evidenced by these photos of the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Organiser featuring Jeremy Corbyn. Click on any of the tweets below to see the full thread. Click on any of the images themselves to see the full text:
Former leftist and veteran political pundit Rod Liddle succinctly summarised historical reasons not to vote Labour — Corbyn in particular — on Thursday. This is from a recent BBC Question Time programme in Bishop Auckland:
Reports have emerged saying that Hamas are actively supporting Corbyn’s election on Thursday:
Then there is Brexit. Corbyn has been very non-committal on where he personally stands. Historically, he has been thought a Leaver, but, as his party supports either Remain or Leave as a member of the Customs Union — worse than remaining as a full EU member — interviewers could not get him to make a commitment either way.
We also have the outrageous spending pledges from Labour.
This is a long but interesting thread debunking them. Highly recommended:
A shorter thread follows. Even this leftist says that we can’t take these pledges seriously:
Kate Hoey, a Brexit supporter and, most recently, Labour MP for Vauxhall in south west London, urges Bournemouth West voters to back Boris by voting for the Conservative candidate, Conor Burns:
These are only some of the many reasons not to support Labour, especially on Thursday, November 12.
Friday, November 29, 2019, began as a normal day in the general election campaign.
Tom Harwood, who works with Guido Fawkes, ably outlines what the political parties were up to until the afternoon, when a terror attack took place on London Bridge, effectively halting the campaign for 24 hours:
Guido’s accompanying column received a lot of comments, including the following.
On Brexit, a reader quoted an MEP on the necessity of No Deal (emphases mine):
Ben Habib MEP: “There is perhaps only one way the Conservative Party could comply with its pledge to be out of Transition by the end of 2020 with a deal along the lines set out in its manifesto. That is if it is prepared to take the UK out of Transition without a deal. It remains as true today as it did in 2016 that, to get a good deal, the UK must be prepared to leave with no deal.”
Labour pledged more madness. Only a few days after they promised to plant 2 billion — yes, you read that correctly — trees in Britain, they came up with a massive housing pledge. Another reader discussed Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s plan:
John Mcd threw the kitchen sink in with his environmental pitch today not only Labour building more houses than their is bricks on the planet, every house will have solar panels and heat exchangers. No longer grasping, just saying anything because they just ignore the facts.
Another reader discussed what would happen if Labour’s — McDonnell’s — plans for corporations came to fruition:
McDonnell intends to steal 10% of a company’s share capital and give it away. Either he steals existing capital or a company creates more shares. Either way the value of the company remains the same but now everyone’s shares will be worth less either because there are more shares or the shares have been given to someone else. So, anyone paying into a Defined Contribution Pension Fund and there are millions doing just that, will suddenly find that their savings are worth a lot less than before the capital restructuring. Someone tell the voters.
Another comment examined the Liberal Democrats‘ Jo Swinson’s perorations on climate change:
‘Climate Change’ – we can’t “fight it by leaving the EU”. 🤔
What won’t we be able to do as an EU state in relation to climate change – that we otherwise can do as a member ?
Given the fact that China produces more C02 emissions that the EU Britain and the US combined – what is it that we are supposed to do ?
Has Swinson thought this through ? Or is it just a risible hollow slogan for yoghurt knitters in the middle classes ?
Someone pointed out what the 2017 terror attack — also on London Bridge — did to the Conservatives‘ chances days later in the June 8 election:
… the problem is that the Tories are allowing Labour and the others to constantly raise the NHS, climate, trust, WASPIs and everything else besides, in an effort to sideline the Brexit debate. And I’m worried that it’s working! Tories need to get the agenda back on message ASAP. Also, I presume that I don’t need to point out the disturbing similarity to the 2017 campaign in what we’ve witnessed unfold on London Bridge today, and that it signalled the beginning of the end for Theresa May’s majority as soon as Labour used those atrocities to introduce reduced police numbers into the debate. I’m nervous. Very, very nervous!
That concerns me, too. However, Boris Johnson is not Theresa May. He’s campaigning across the country every day.
Moving on to Twitter, someone pointed out that a fatal incident has occurred before each of the last three plebiscites in Britain:
Friday afternoon took a dark and bloody turn as events unfolded at London Bridge.
Cambridge University was holding a conference at Fishmongers’ Hall near London Bridge. The subject of the conference was prisoner rehabilitation.
Attending the conference on day release wearing an electronic tag was 28-year-old Usman Khan, who, as the Press Association (PA) reports:
was a convicted terrorist released half-way through a 16-year prison sentence for a plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange.
Last Friday:
Usman Khan killed a man and a woman in the knife rampage on Friday afternoon and injured three other people, who are being treated in hospital.
The 28-year-old, who was on licence and wearing an electronic monitoring tag, was attending a conference on prisoner rehabilitation organised by University of Cambridge-associated Learning Together at Fishmongers’ Hall and reportedly “threatened to blow up” the building.
Armed with two knives and wearing a fake suicide vest, Khan was tackled by members of the public before he was shot dead by police on London Bridge next to the Hall.
Video footage posted online shows Khan being taken to the ground as one man sprays him with a fire extinguisher and another, reportedly a Polish chef, lunges towards him with a narwhal tusk believed to have been taken from the wall inside the Hall.
Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said he had been living in the Staffordshire area and that police were “not actively seeking anyone else” over the attack.
Why do police always say that? Often, in the weeks that follow, it turns out there was a plot involving more than one person, including some that had no prior police record but were aiders and abetters.
What about the attack that same day in the Netherlands? This is what happened in The Hague:
Returning to London Bridge, no doubt this is the first time many of us have heard of a narwhal tusk, but you can see below what they look like in nature on this species of whale, also known as the unicorn whale. The tusk protrudes from a canine tooth. The narwhal lives in Arctic waters.
A narwhal tusk was hanging in Fishmongers’ Hall. A quick-thinking man deployed it against the terrorist:
Here’s a dramatic video of events as they happened. The second tweet shows Fishmongers’ Hall. One of the pikes shown below was used in subduing the terrorist:
Here is a video of what happened on London Bridge when the police arrived. Fishmongers’ Hall is pictured in the second tweet:
Understandably, everyone would like to see the men who subdued the terrorist given an honour or reward of some sort. However, one of them was also a prisoner on day release, attending the Cambridge University conference. James Ford had committed a horrific murder in cold blood in 2003 and was given a life sentence in 2004. Hmm:
The Mirror reported:
James Ford, 42, was jailed for life in 2004 for the murder of 21-year-old Amanda Champion, who was found strangled with her throat cut in Ashford, Kent, in July 2003 …
… Ford found himself embroiled on the London Bridge attack as he helped bring down the knife man while out on day release from his life sentence.
Ford is understood to be in the final days of his sentence at HMP Standford Hill, an open prison in Kent.
It’s believed Khan was tackled by ex-offenders inside Fishmongers’ Hall – who had all been invited to a conference on rehabilitation.
Source say Khan began “lashing out” in a downstairs room of the hall but was grabbed by the conference-goers and bundled out of the front door as he tried to go upstairs.
Those who tackled Khan on the street were not ex-offenders.
Ford’s victim’s aunt Angela Cox has told how she was contacted yesterday by Kent Police who informed her Ford had been involved in the terror attack as a member of the public, reports the Mail.
Angela, 65, said she was “angry” Ford was out on day release after the horrific murder of her niece – who had the mental age of a 15-year-old.
She said: “He is not a hero. He is a murderer out on day release, which us as a family didn’t know anything about. He murdered a disabled girl. He is not a hero, absolutely not.
“They let him out without even telling us. Any of my family could have been in London and just bumped into him.”
Angela described how a police liaison officer had called her yesterday asking if she was aware of the London incident before revealing Ford had been captured on TV.
The still-heartbroken aunt said the officer told her “don’t worry” before saying Ford was at the scene and “being classed as a hero”.
Former factory worker Ford has never revealed his motive for killing Amanda.
At the time of his jailing, a judge told him: “What you did was an act of wickedness.
“You clearly have an interest in the macabre and also an obsession with death including murder by throat cutting.”
On to people who should be classed properly as heroes, we have the Polish kitchen porter employed at Fishmongers’ Hall who allegedly grabbed the narwhal tusk. By December 3, it transpired that Lukasz Koczocik was indeed one of the pursuers, but not the man brandishing the tusk. Lukasz was the man with the pike. The attacker stabbed him five times. Fortunately, the heroic kitchen worker was released from hospital on Saturday. He has been nominated for an official honour in Poland:
It seems the tusk got broken:
Not surprisingly, questions arose about the terrorist’s early release:
As with Labour (1997-2010), the Conservative government has had its part to play in law and order failures:
You can see from the following that Usman Khan did not act alone in 2010. Several other men were involved, some released since their 2012 conviction:
On that basis, I do wonder if police did the right thing in saying they are not looking for other suspects at this time with regard to Friday’s incident.
Again, what about the attack in the Netherlands that day? This RT article has one description of the suspect; Euronews has another. Dutch police said then there is no terrorist motive. On November 30, with a suspect in custody, they said it is ‘too early to speculate’ as they are investigating ‘several scenarios’.
Perhaps these statements are meant to keep the public calm while police investigate further.
Yet, we find time and time again that terrorism is the motive and that, especially in France, more than one person is involved somewhere along the line.
Sentencing and law enforcement soundbites should be reviewed.
Cambridge University was not left unscathed Friday afternoon. Sadly, one of their employees, Jack Merritt, was the first fatality. My condolences go to his family and friends:
The Guardian reported:
Merritt worked as the course coordinator for Learning Together, a programme run by the University of Cambridge’s institute of criminology which had been running a course at Fishmongers’ Hall next to London Bridge on Friday.
Two people were killed and three were injured when 28-year-old Usman Khan launched a knife attack. Khan was arrested in December 2010 and released on licence in December 2018, wearing an electronic tag.
David Merritt posted on Twitter on Saturday: “My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.”
His words came as Boris Johnson, said the system of automatic release from prison was flawed.
A second Cambridge graduate, Saskia Jones, 23, also died in the attack. My condolences to her family and friends at this difficult time.
This was the Prime Minister’s column for the Mail on Sunday:
The early release of dangerous prisoners — terrorists, murderers and the like — needs a thorough rational, not emotional, discussion.
Many of us have been wanting this for several years.
If not now, when?
How many more people, including those who advocate for prisoners, will have to die?
On Tuesday, November 19, 2019, ITV showed the first debate of the election campaign.
Supporters of smaller political parties criticised ITV for inviting only Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, but, in reality, only one of the two will be Britain’s next PM:
At that point, a week before Remembrance Day (hence the poppies), the Liberal Democrats’ Jo Swinson was confident she had a real chance at becoming PM:
Although Conservatives believed Boris should have been harder hitting on Labour policies, he probably pulled back because a) this was early in the campaign and b) he wanted to help convince undecided or low-information voters that Conservatives have the better policies.
Afterwards, ITV News reported on the highlights (emphases mine):
In the opening exchanges, the prime minister warned the UK faced more “dither and delay” under a Labour government.
He said a vote for the Conservatives would be a vote to finally “get Brexit done”.
“If you vote for us, we have a deal that is ready to go. Approved by every one of the 635 Conservatives candidates standing at this election,” he said.
“As soon as we can get that deal through Parliament, as we can in the next few weeks, we can get on with the people’s priorities.”
But Mr Corbyn retorted that he could not deliver on what he was promising.
“That idea that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson’ deal can be dealt with and finished by the end of January is such nonsense,” he said.
“What he is proposing is a trade deal which will take at least seven years to negotiate whilst at the same time saying he will negotiate a special trade deal with the European Union.
“The two things are actually incompatible.”
Also:
Mr Corbyn’s shifted focus onto the NHS, claiming the service would be part of trade negotiations with the US.
Mr Corbyn accused the prime minister of conducting “secret meetings” with the US about the NHS and a future trade deal.
The Labour leader said: “What we know of what Mr Johnson has done is a series of secret meetings with the United States in which they were proposing to open up our NHS markets as they call them to American companies.”
To this claim, Mr Johnson replied: “I’m amazed how often this comes up.”
Mr Johnson insisted: “This is an absolute invention, it is completely untrue, there are no circumstances whatever that this Government or any Conservative Government would put the NHS on the table in any trade negotiations.”
That was the week after Prince Andrew’s disastrous interview on the BBC, which had aired the previous Saturday evening. Moderator Julie Etchingham asked the two leaders about the monarchy. I have highlighted what the PM said, because it has been often misquoted since:
Asked if the monarchy is fit for purpose, Mr Corbyn simply replied: “It needs a bit of improvement.”
Mr Johnson answered: “The institution of the monarchy is beyond reproach,”
Ms Etchingham then asked if Prince Andrew is fit for purpose.
Mr Corbyn highlighted how sympathies should be with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, which Mr Johnson echoed.
Boris never said the monarchy was beyond reproach, meaning individual royals. He remarked on the institution itself.
Corbyn, who has been repeatedly accused of downplaying anti-Semitism in his party, which, oddly, has been rampant since he took over as leader in 2016, brought up Jeffrey Epstein. As everyone following the scandal knows, his surname is pronounced ‘Ep-steen’, but Corbyn deliberately pronounced it ‘Ep-shtein’, putting real emphasis on it.
The former editor-in-chief of The Independent, Simon Kelner, wrote an editorial about it for the i paper, ‘Conscious or not, Jeremy Corbyn’s mispronunciation of Jeffrey Epstein’s name matters to British Jews’. Too right it does:
The question, which we can be sure will never be answered, is this: did Corbyn do it, consciously or unconsciously (they’re both as bad as each other, by the way), to make Epstein sound just a little more sinister and foreign and, relevantly in the context, more Jewish? It’s hard to come up with an answer that doesn’t make the Labour leader appear either malevolent or incompetent. Given the wall-to-wall media coverage devoted to the scandal over recent days, it stretches credulity to suggest that Corbyn hadn’t heard Epstein’s name pronounced correctly multiple times.
… it was a very emphatic delivery – is something else entirely, and Corbyn had to go out of his way to summon up the mittel-European pronunciation …
I am more of a pedant than I am an anti-Semite hunter, but my synapses were twitching on both counts. I have a high threshold for anti-Semitism, and I have never thought that there was a prima facie case against Corbyn in this respect. In fact, I share some of his views on the politics of the Middle East. But this definitely pulled me up short. Having just watched his epically short-tempered interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4, which was filmed in 2015 but went viral this week, it made me wonder whether Corbyn might just be, to borrow [the BBC’s] Eddie Mair’s epithet about Boris Johnson, a nasty piece of work.
While the mispronunciation of Epstein’s name may not be viewed by the majority of viewers as overtly anti-Semitic, it definitely had a nasty edge. No one is offended on Epstein’s behalf (that would be ludicrous), but if I found it offensive, many, many other Jewish people would have found it more so …
Whether I am reading too much into a slip of the tongue is open for debate. But what is not in question is that Jeremy Corbyn should be doing all he can to persuade Jewish voters that, on anti-Semitism, he doesn’t just talk the talk. And what he did here was, apart from anything else, very bad politics.
More on this follows below.
Members of the audience were allowed to ask questions:
The debate ended with a hypothetical question from an audience member about what Christmas presents the two leaders would give each other:
Before their closing remarks, the prime ministerial hopefuls were asked what Christmas presents they would buy for each other.
Mr Corbyn said: “I know Mr Johnson likes a good read, so what I would probably leave under the tree for him would be A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and he could then understand how nasty Scrooge was.”
Responding, Mr Johnson said: “I would probably leave a copy – since you want a literary reference – a copy of my brilliant Brexit deal.”
Pressed by host Ms Etchingham to give a non-political answer, Mr Johnson said: “Mr Corbyn shares my love of plants and trees. I think maybe some damson jam,” to which Mr Corbyn said: “I love damson jam.”
At that point, Boris walked over to Corbyn and invited him to shake hands. It was a spontaneous moment, and it’s a pity that ITV did not report on it. Viewers could see Corbyn backing away from Boris with his outstretched hand. After seconds of hesitation, he extended his own for a limp handshake. Boris’s was much heartier.
What did the general public think? Interestingly, the result was similar to that for the Brexit referendum, which was 52% to 48%:
Leaders of the two main parties take part in debates like tonight’s, in part, to try to win over undecided voters.
A YouGov snap poll suggested 51% of Britons believed Mr Johnson won the debate compared to 49% for Mr Corbyn.
Those who answered “don’t know” were removed from the result, with YouGov adding the figures are so close as to be within the margin of error.
ITV’s political editor Robert Peston told news presenter Alastair Stewart that Jeremy Corbyn needed this debate to present a positive game-changer for Labour, who were trailing in the polls then and continue to do so now. Peston said that it was a draw. People who want Brexit done will vote for Boris. People who are worried about the NHS will vote for Corbyn:
Tom Harwood, who works for Guido Fawkes, said that Labour missed a trick with their claim that the Conservatives would ‘sell the NHS’ to President Trump:
Interestingly, our EU negotiator for Brexit, Michel Barnier, noticed another of Harwood’s tweets — and ‘liked’ it:
Dear me. Whatever next?
Well, the Labour-supporting newspaper, The Mirror, did not exactly go overboard in favour of Corbyn’s performance. Then, again, Prince Andrew was still making the headlines:
At the weekend, the polls remained static. More than one person thought this was because of the anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. They are the only other political party other than the extreme British National Party to be investigated for it. Shameful:
One week later — Tuesday, November 26 — Corbyn appeared on the BBC for an evening interview with veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil. He looked tired, ‘low energy’ (to borrow a Trumpism) and cranky. Neil took him to town on anti-Semitism, forcing him to admit nearly everyone in Britain would be poorer under Labour as well as false claims about the Conservatives wanting to sell the NHS to Trump:
It was generally agreed that, only days after Prince Andrew managed to give one of the all-time worst interviews on television, Corbyn managed to rival him:
This is how bad it was:
These were some of the newspaper headlines on Wednesday:
Andrew Neil began by asking Corbyn if he thought a particular statement about ‘Rothschild Zionists’ was anti-Semitic. Corbyn refused to say, until after the fourth time Neil repeated it:
Guido Fawkes said (emphasis in the original):
Jeremy Corbyn had to be asked four times before admitting ‘Rothchild Zionists run Israel and world governments’ is an anti-Semitic trope. This’ll undoubtedly put the minds of 80% of British Jews to rest…
Corbyn offered no apology for the anti-Semitism in sections of the Labour Party. This video is subtitled:
Andrew Neil grilled Corbyn on taxing everyone more, not just the wealthy:
Neil exposed the fact that Labour’s costings make no sense. Where’s the money coming from? The reply is not an actual Corbyn quote, by the way:
Labour supporters accused Neil of interrupting Corbyn, but:
The Sun has an excellent summary of the interview:
The next morning, ITV’s Piers Morgan picked up Corbyn’s daft comment on ISIS:
The interview got very good ratings:
With regard to the NHS, Neil scored points there, too.
Even Barry Gardiner, the erudite, effete veteran Labour MP — technically a Labour candidate, now that we are approaching the election — couldn’t defend his leader to Andrew Neil with regard to his questionable statements about the Conservatives wanting to sell the NHS to the United States. This interview took place 24 hours later:
Guido Fawkes commented:
The second excruciating Andrew Neil interview Labour has had to go through took place last night, when Shadow Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner was shown up over Jeremy Corbyn’s blatant fibs to the electorate. Labour are banking on people not being bothered to read the 451 pages they produced. Unfortunately for them, Guido has…
With this and snapping at a journalist for mentioning anti-Semitism, Gardiner has not been having a good media round…
Those interested can follow Guido’s link in his first paragraph to see the documents in question.
Jeremy Corbyn is talking a lot of nonsense not only on the NHS but everything else his party proposes.
One thing is for certain: so far, he has been a gift to the Conservatives.
