Amateur Reform and Sleep-walking into Socialism

 Much as I agree with many of the policies as promoted for the Reform Party, I am concerned at the views and apparent lack of sense by some of the people being put up for election. The latest character, Robert Kenyon, standing in the Makerfield by-election, appears to be rather a bad choice.

Firstly, he may claim that he voted for Brexit but all the evidence of his reaction to the declaration of our referendum result and posts of social media around that time contradicts that claim. Naturally, no-one will ever know where he put his cross on the day but my bet is that he was not a great supporter of the UK leaving. That, in itself, is not such a big deal and I can see many people are a bit disillusioned with how things have been negotiated since but my main concern is just how silly his tweets or comments have been. They seem no better than some bloke of limited intelligence having a rant after a couple of beers in the pub. Indeed, I am not sure I would want the type of person who feels he has to comment in that way to other people's messages or posts. His language and attitude lack any class and, looking at how he has behaved and the other things he seems to have supported or shared with a thumbs-up emoji, which in itself, tells us a lot about his lack of grey matter and ability to communicate in society, tend to make me rather unenthusiastic about having him as a Member of Parliament and getting £75000 or so from out taxes plus a massive pay-off and great pension when he gets kicked out a some point in years to come.

The final straw, and something which now has made me think again about supporting Reform, has been his comments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He seems to think that Russia were 'within their rights' to invade Crimea in 2014. I see no comment from him criticising Russia since either. Even if we accept that Crimea has had a fraught history and no-one outside Ukraine seemed to put up much resistance to Russia at the time I fail to see any argument that supports invasion.

Reform also seem to be quiet on most matters concerning Russian activities, reflecting largely the extraordinary silence recently from anyone in the States with any degree of influence on the war in Ukraine. One has to wonder where their policies would lead if elected. I fear that, much like Trump, Farage would not wish to spend any money on further support and would just hope that it all goes away in time. Frankly, a Reform government would have an extraordinary amount of work on its plate anyway with no obvious plan as to how they would implement the changes and so foreign policy generally is likely to take a back seat.

I watched the Makerfield candidate on Question Time yesterday evening and had to smile at just how pathetic all the candidates came across. It was like watching a cartoon. 

The Liberal Democrat made almost no impact whatsoever and the only thing I can now recall, apart from his slightly odd appearance and his not really suiting a moustache, was the mention of his husband for no apparent reason other than perhaps to get the vote of a young chap in the audience wearing a remarkably pink and fancy shirt.

The Conservative had an almost permanent smile. An older chap who spoke a lot of sense but seemed quite out of place and was more ignored by the audience, and Fiona Bruce, than even the Liberal bloke. There was not, it seemed, a single Conservative supporter in the audience anyway and I think he and Fiona realised that.

The Green lady smiled even more than the Conservative but hers was one of those smiles that comes either just before or just after they make a sarcastic remark or are convinced that they know best whatever the other person says. She seemed only concerned in getting the Reform bloke to talk about what he had or hadn't said many years ago about what he might like to do to Carol Voderman's bottom. No-one in the audience, or the panel for that matter, questioned the Green Party's policy on not having any border controls, allowing people to use drugs and supporting Hamas or Hezbollah, probably both, as well as maintaining a list of all the jews in Britain. You do have to wonder what has happened to the Green Party. They used to be concerned about whales and the countryside. Now it's Gaza and, er, Gaza.

Andy Burnham was the Labour candidate and, of course, his sole job was to get through the evening without slipping up so that he could win the by-election and take over as Britain's Prime Minister. He managed that reasonably well, although you got the impression that he didn't have any solutions for any of the problems that the government has got itself into and, in the end, is unlikely to make Britain any better place at all. Indeed, by being somewhat more electable at a future General Election than any of the other obvious candidates, Britain could become considerably worse in the longer term if he were able to keep Reform or the Conservatives out of power for a further five years.

To get back to the Reform candidate, I had, at least, expected him to be able to present himself well, with some passion and good old Reform banter and protestations and instant, one-line recipes for fixing things. Instead we saw him floundering and way out of his depth, woefully unprepared and definitely not someone we would want to be running any department in the country. According to the polls before the show, Reform were running Labour a close second and, had someone called the Restore Party not being standing, they might have stood a chance of winning the seat. After the show Labour were 10 points ahead and I fear for the worst.

Unimpressive as Reform looked that night, I see their victory as the only way to avoid a long-term socialist destruction of all that I care for in Britain over the years ahead. I don't like all their policies and the candidate is rubbish but they are the only party with any chance of beating Labour at this time. I would vote Reform in Makerfield and would encourage anyone who does live there to do so.

Let us hope that the next General Election is some time away so that Kemi Badenoch can continue to impress people and regain the trust of so many Conservative voters who turned away from the party in 2024. I believe Reform have now peaked and, as we see more of their rather poor candidates on TV, I predict that their vote share will diminish with that of the Conservatives growing once more. It may well be that we have an even split across the parties as I think the ridiculous Greens will steal votes from Labour and the Lib Dems so we could even be looking at 20-20-20-15-15-5, the 15s being for the Greens and Lib Dems and the 5 for the usual rag-bag of Independents, Monster Raving Loonies and Islamic State supporters etc.

Whatever else one may conclude from that, one thing is certain, much as big change is necessary, it ain't about to happen as no combination of parties would have enough authority to do much more than collect taxes and talk a lot.

The trouble is that unless the Conservatives and Reform can start to work together and demonstrate that they have learned lessons from their previous failure, in the case of the former, and that they have solid and well-researched policies for fixing Britain, in the case of the latter, then the public will remain largely unimpressed by anyone and we will find ourselves sleep-walking into Socialism.

Perception rules

 I have written much in the past about how ridiculous attention to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion matters has developed over the years, with HR departments and leagues of new 'staff development' trainers delivering instructions to organisations across the country, mostly large and influential but also small and vulnerable, to the extent that most of us are scared to say or write anything relating to anything that might be considered a 'protected' minority characteristic. 

I have always blamed this intrusion into common sense left, right and centre on the last Conservative government's lax attitude and simply not spotting what was going on under their noses. I never thought they actively condoned or supported the changes happening but I did believe that they were very wrong in just letting it happen.

Now, thanks to an excellent article by Charles Moore in The Telegraph, I realise that the seeds of the racial element of much of this were sown far earlier, in 1999, when we were governed by Blair's Labour government. I reproduce most of the article here as it sets out so well how things went wrong.

When enormous official reports about terrible wrongs appear, most of those commenting on them do not have time to read them in full. The story breaks and everyone wants a quick reaction. This usually guarantees favourable reporting: much safer to praise than to interrogate.

In 1999, I was busy editing this newspaper, but I decided to take time out to read and analyse the whole of Macpherson. Something about the clamour surrounding it, and the mob intimidation from the public gallery in Lambeth Town Hall of witnesses to the inquiry, had made me suspicious.

Two things struck me about the report. The first was its tone. From the start, it was accusatory and rhetorical, not measured and professional. It assailed the character of police officers who appeared before it, like a prosecution, not an official inquiry. Its interpretation of events seemed settled in advance, whereas a well-conducted inquiry takes evidence on which to form its interpretation. Officers who dissented from the Macpherson view were exhibiting “their own unwitting collective racism”, it said. Hence, his concept of “institutional racism”. 

It seemed to me that the report never proved this. It simply asserted it.

The second point arose from the first. If the police, as the report said, were “unwitting” in their collective racism, it followed that self-selecting enlightened people – such as Sir William Macpherson, then in his 70s and living in a castle in non-diverse Perthshire – should order their re-education.

Thus the subject of racism gained the special privilege of not being defined by the criminal law in the ordinary way. A new, non-legal principle was invented and imposed. “A racist incident,” said Macpherson’s famous conclusions, “is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

So anyone who thought he or she had suffered a racist incident had indeed done so, no further evidence required. And since even declared non-victims could, by “perceiving” a racist incident, make it exist, you needed only one person to perceive a racist incident, and report it, to make it an event which must be officially recorded. What was the criminal law, whose job is to establish guilt or innocence, supposed to make of that?

“If this definition were to be accepted,” I wrote in this space at the time, “the statistics of racist incidents would suddenly shoot up, allowing the police to be attacked even more.” That is exactly what has happened.

Macpherson added something else: “The term ‘racist incident’ must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment” (“24 hours a day”). That, too, is exactly what has happened, the official name for this extra branch of police work being “non-crime hate incidents”.

Finally, Macpherson recommended that his racist incident definition “should be universally adopted by the police, local government and other relevant agencies.” That has also happened. We are governed by Macpherson race theory.

Sir William, I wrote then, “imposes on his victims, the police, a concept of racism which makes them guilty whatever they do… It is contemptible that someone versed in [the English] law should have done such a thing.” By doing so, he would “inflame racial feeling.”

Today, the flames are crackling. They may even succeed in burning down our entire party system.

One of the “nine principles” of our police, deriving from Sir Robert Peel, who founded them, is that “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.” The Macpherson legacy is quite different. It is to make the police – and many other public employees – the agents of a race doctrine they have been told they themselves do not understand.

The same doctrine teaches that, if they are white, they will never understand it. So now poor police officers run around gabbling half-digested jargon about identity and disable the native capacity of their own eyes and ears, even when someone is dying in front of them. How could such a police force ever win public approval? That is why, as Kemi Badenoch recently put it, we are “descending into tribalism”.

It is race, obviously, that makes this discussion so tense. But I think the problem runs wider and deeper. It is an irrationality of which racism itself is the worst but not the only symptom. After Macpherson, the British state decided to allow “perception” to trump the law’s traditional emphasis on provable fact. That irrationality has opened up other ones – such as the assertion that gender is a matter of choice not of biology, or the doctrine, in relation to sexual assaults, that “The victim must always be believed”, which has led to a slew of false, life-ruining accusations of child sexual abuse.

Racism remains a real and present evil, so the unpicking of the Macpherson legacy must be calmly conducted, but unpicked it must be.

It seems worth ending with one further point. In Britain today, by far the most virulent form of racism is anti-Semitism. A serious attempt is being made to drive out Jews, arguably the most well-integrated of all immigrant groups. And where have our post-Macpherson, “anti-racist” police been in all this? Just standing and watching as the Jew-haters march down the street.

Finally, after the publicity surrounding the attack on Henry Nowak, people are realising that the police have been acting as they have been trained to do and it is that training that needs to be changed - and quickly. That will not be easy. Many officers and legal minds have grown up over 25 or more years believing this concept of 'perceiving' a racist incident. It will take a long time to reverse much of teh arguments made before and, no doubt, there will plenty of push-back by those who wanted and made the instructions in the first place. No-one likes to admit they were wrong.

There is a long way to go before British society and legislation returns to the wonderfully simple elements of common sense and freedom of speech and thought that we were once well-known for. Some movement has taken place on trans matters with our Supreme Court declaring that you are either a man or a woman and you cannot change your biological sex. You may be free to dress or act as your please but remain as your were born and will be treated under the law as such. Anyone can choose to be a transvestite or announce that they feel most comfortable at any point they choose along some spectrum of gender from male to female and it is right that we respect their views in day-to-day life. We should not, however, be fired or arrested for asserting that a man is a man and should not be using a woman's toilet or changing room, or for referring to him as her and declining to engage with weird new pronouns like ze or expected to use they in contradiction of the grammar we have learned.

There is a long way to go but, at least, it appears we may have made a start.