Sure enough, Michael Squires, a Leicestershire county councillor, has blamed "mass immigration" for the low water level at Cropston Reservoir.
He made the claim on X after visiting the nearby beauty spot Bradgate Park on Sunday, reports Leicester Gazette.
A glance at Squires' account, particularly the Replies tab, reveals him to be very online.
As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary and a book review of mine, it includes this article. I wrote it in response to the local election results of 1 May.
In Search of Their Motives
Why did Reform UK do so well in the local elections? How should parties respond to their rise? Who exactly is voting for them?
Some would tell you to wait for the academics to crunch the numbers, but if you go to the research on how and why Leave won the 2016 European Union referendum then you find, as so often the case in academia, not a body of agreed conclusions but a loose bundle of continuing debates. So rather than wait for a consensus that may never emerge, I’m going to do what I can here to clear what seem to me widespread misconceptions about Reform and their voters.
To begin with, the success of Reform should not shock or even surprise us. Ukip polled more than any other party in the 2014 elections to the European parliament, receiving 26.6 per cent of the vote and electing 24 of the UK’s 73 MEPs. Five years later, the Brexit Party did even better, electing 29 MEPs and receiving 30.5 per cent of the vote, slightly more than Reform UK won in this year’s local elections.
These three successes were achieved by Nigel Farage under three different party names, which reminds us that the far right has always been prepared to form parties, break them up and form new ones until they hit upon an arrangement that attracts voters. It also reminds us that Farage has been key to their successes, but we should have grasped years ago that there is no reason to expect us to be immune to the rise of the far right that has taken place across Western Europe in recent years. Despite leaving the EU, Britain now finds itself with a thoroughly European party system that includes a substantial party that stands to the right of the Conservative Party. This may well be the new normal.
After the EU referendum, Leave’s victory was widely attributed to a desire for revenge by left-behind areas. This narrative had its appeal to some on the left, because you could argue that it made the disastrous outcome of that vote all George Osborne’s fault, but I was never convinced. It seemed rooted in a dated, even nostalgic, view of the working class as white, male and engaged until recently in heavy industry. Yes, big changes have taken place in working class employment, but they took place some decades ago. The Full Monty and Brassed Off came out in the mid-1990s, and both were looking back on a transformation that had already taken place.
Yet a disaffected working-class was the first explanation many reached for to account for Reform’s successes on 1 May. Liberal Democrat Voice, for instance, immediately ran an article that argued Reform is “hoovering up votes across the country by doing one simple thing: articulating the grievances of the working classes”. It was good to see an article on that blog which talked about inequality and social class, but I don’t buy its thesis that Reform’s vote came solely from an aggrieved working class. Even in Durham, where Reform swept away a previously solid Labour majority, the figures show that it won a large slice of the votes that previously went to Conservatives and Independents as well as taking votes from Labour.
What I found most striking about the local elections was the collapse of Tory Midland England. Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire all fell to Reform, while Leicestershire now has a minority Reform administration. Even amid the Liberal Democrat triumph in Shropshire, Reform won enough seats to become the largest opposition group on the new council. While all these shires contain areas of widespread poverty and areas of Labour strength, it was the Conservative Party that took a hammering.
It seems to me that the Reform vote is best regarded as a protest vote – a concept we Liberals should be very much at home with, because we depended upon such a vote for survival and occasional upturns for decades. The late, great David Penhaligon was given to suggesting that a “Stuff Em All Party” would do well at the polls, and that is how Reform is seen by many voters, which is perhaps something we miss in our anxiety to condemn Nigel Farage’s views on race or the latest member found to have once espoused Fascist views on social media.
Whether you blame the economic situation it inherited or its lack of ambition, this Labour government is proving a sore disappointment to many who voted for it, while the thoughts of habitual Conservative voters can only be imagined. They now find themselves faced with a leader who is older than Tony Blair or David Cameron was when they came to power, yet comes over as a spiteful child. The majority of her MPs, meanwhile, hesitate to remove her for fear of who the party’s membership might land them with next.
So you can see why there’s now a ready market for the Stuff Em All Party. Meanwhile, we Lib Dems can choose between being disappointed that our concentration in the affluent South means we are no longer viewed in that light, and taking this as a sign we are beginning to have a more coherent policy profile with voters.
Having managed to fake authenticity, Nigel Farage has made himself a better media performer than either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch. It’s not so much that he comes over as being more fun to go for a drink with: it’s more that you can’t imagine the other two going for a drink at all. Added to that, now and then Farage does show political nous – he resisted the temptation to court Elon Musk and his money by embracing Tommy Robinson, sensing that one of his weaknesses is that he is already seen as too close to Trump and Putin.
In a thoughtful piece for Compass, Olly Glover, the Lib Dem MP for Didcot & Wantage, wrote of it becoming “increasingly common to encounter voters who are open about their intention to vote Reform. A surprising number of these were choosing between Reform and Lib Dem.”
He continued:
Voters’ reasons for considering Reform are more varied than might be assumed, with scepticism about net zero and climate change commitments now as common as concerns about immigration.
Uniting them all is widespread cynicism and loss of confidence in the entire political system and the British state. This aspect is shared with many non-Reform voters too, but Reform have captured the bulk of the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment.
And Dr Nathan Ley, a Lib Dem councillor from Abingdon, has written on his [now vanished] Substack that Reform is now:
The repository for some voters who are angry, dispossessed, downtrodden, as well as lots of people who are actually quite comfortable with their life, but feeling just a bit bored.
Labour is pinning its hopes on recovering these disaffected votes simply by governing better and producing visible improvements by the next election. This ambition does not seem to extend much beyond the NHS: elsewhere the government is continuing the austerity its members devoted fourteen years of their lives to condemning.
I wish Labour well in this endeavour, but they are going to have to find better communicators to put their case across. If Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves gave a fireside chat, you fear the fire would go out.
It’s hard to know what to advise the Conservatives to do. The most significant voting pattern of the 2016 referendum has always seemed to me the way that great swathes of prosperous Southern England voted Leave. You can blame David Cameron – if a prime minister puts a choice to voters in a referendum, they are entitled to assume that both paths are reasonable ones for the country to take – and I wouldn’t discount Dr Ley’s observation that voters were a bit bored. But what happened to all those Southern Tories with a fat stake in the status quo and a determination to keep things pretty much as they are?
I would look to the disappearance of responsible clerical and middle-management positions to technology and cost-cutting, and to the difficulty most people now experience in getting on the property ladder. David Boyle wrote a book about these trends, Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, back in 2014. [The link is to a radio programme based on the book.]
Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.
And for Liberal Democrats? We should be wary of habits that it is too easy to learn online. One reason I distrust the argument that Reform is winning on working-class votes alone is that it plays into a snobbish view of the working class held by some people who imagine themselves to be left wing. The working class, they believe, is, like anyone who disagrees with them, stupid.
Such people write about, say, Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries, complete with a party of native bearers carrying their aspidistra and upright piano, but instead of cleft sticks to send messages, they use smartphones. They paint the county as impoverished, sexist, racist and any other ist you care to mention. This view is backed up by some small-town boys who praise themselves for having escaped it.
Yet Lincolnshire voted in line with the rest of the country in the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the European Economic Community – two-to-one in favour. And, years after that, Liberal candidates piled up huge votes in coming second in constituencies like Gainsborough & Horncastle and East Lindsey. In the latter, which is largely the Boston & Skegness constituency now represented by Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, the Liberal Alliance polled over 20,000 votes at the 1987 general election.
Politics is rarely as simple as online debate makes it appear.
Rachel Hewitt argues that telling boys and men that they're disadvantaged only hinders them further - and, anyway, it's not true: "If we really want to help boys and men be happier, then perhaps, as a society, we could forge a different and more positive outlook on masculinity, in which we focus less on how men are purportedly hard done by and emasculated compared to the last century, and more on the genuinely fulfilling opportunities that are open to them in this brave new world."
Liam Geraghty on a report that finds new housing estates are forcing their residents to rely on cars.Only a quarter of students at the University of Edinburgh are Scottish, with the result, says Melissa Knight, that they have found themselves the unwanted target of discrimination from English snobs who often look down on, and mock them due to their accents or working-class backgrounds.
Alwyn Turner reminds us of an earlier politician who had ambitions to take over a party led by Nigel Farage." As far as the media were concerned, Kilroy-Silk was 'UKIP’s star turn', its leader-in-waiting. But he didn’t wish to wait. The man who’d once called on socialists to act with ‘a tint of arrogance’ was now sixty-two and impatient. At the party conference in October 2004, he set out his stall in a typically assured performance."
"Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling." After many years, Adam Roberts reads the Gormenghast trilogy again.
It's been a busy day in the courts for politicians, writes our legal affairs correspondent.
First, the Independent (formerly Labour) MP for Runcorn and Helsby, Mike Amesbury, was jailed for 10 weeks after punching a constituent in the street.
As Amesbury has been imprisoned, a recall petition can now be launched to remove him from the Commons if he doesn't do the decent thing.
Then Nathan Gill, who was a UKIP and later a Brexit Party MEP between 2014 and 2020, and briefly the leader of Reform Wales after that, appeared in court accused of accepting bribes to make statements in the European Parliament that would benefit Russia.
The Crown said the alleged offences were carried out during his time as an MEP and before the UK left the European Parliament, on 31 January 2020.
Gill was granted bail on the condition that he surrenders his passport and does not obtain international travel documents nor contact his co-accused, the retired Ukrainian politician Oleg Voloshyn.
Let's begin this story with Peter Freeman.
Freeman won Brecon and Radnor for Labour at the 1929 general election, but lost it two years later after Ramsey MacDonald's formation of a National Government split the party.
He returned to the Commons as MP for Newport in 1945, having beaten Roy Jenkins to the Labour nomination, and represented the seat until his death in 1956.
In 2004 Mike Bloksome published a biography of Freeman under the title The Green Casanova. The blurb on Amazon describes its subject as:
arms manufacturer, cigar producer, international tennis player, MP, theosophist, animal rights and green issues campaigner - and ladies' man of renown!
An article about the biography on Wales Online said of Freeman:
In the 1930s, '40s and '50s, he was considered too extremist to be ministerial material. Now his views on animal rights, pacifism and banning capital punishment would be considered progressive or orthodox.
It turns out Freeman was also an opponent of corporal punishment and a champion of children's rights, though any reasonable person would be alarmed at a case he brought up in the Commons in 1954:
The Leicester Mail for 20 July 1954 reported his intentions:
Caned 200 boys: MP's question
Mr. Peter Freeman, Labour MP for Newport, is to question the Minister of Education (Miss Florence Horsbrugh) on Thursday about the punishing of 199 innocent schoolboys.
He will ask "whether her attention has been called to the action of Mr. Oliver Whitfield, of the Secondary Modern School, Durham, who caned 200 boys became he was unable to discover a misdemeanour alleged to have been made by one of them: whether such mass corporal punishment cf children has her approval: and whether she will issue instructions for the dismissal of this headmaster for punishing 199 innocent boys."
And ask it he did on 29 July 1954.
In reply, Florence Horsburgh said:
I have seen reports of the incident in the Press. Disciplinary matters of this kind are within the discretion of the headmaster and of the local education authority, and I would not wish to intervene. In any case, I have no 668power to require the dismissal of the headmaster.
That did not satisfy Freeman who asked a supplementary:
Is the right hon. Lady aware of the statements made by the Home Secretary on this question of punishment a few days ago, when he said: "the two requirements of natural justice that have gone back to the beginning of civilisation are that a person who may be punished should know what the complaint is against him and that he should be given an opportunity to meet it. That is the basis of the rule of law throughout the ages."
Was either of those conditions fulfilled in the case of any one of these 200 children? Is this not a gross abuse of the ordinary custom of justice which is being denied to these children and has not the right hon. Lady the responsibility of safeguarding their rights? What action does she intend to take to prevent this gross abuse of justice?
Despite his eloquence, Horsburgh gave much the same answer.
Then someone else on the Labour benches rose:
Is the Minister aware that the parents in this district are not complaining, and that it would be an advantage if my hon. Friend the Member for Newport (Mr. Peter Freeman) would leave the teaching profession alone for a while? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Is the Minister further aware that the discipline of this school can only suffer from the publicity given to a Question of this sort?
That MP was George Thomas, the future secretary of state for Wales and Commons speaker.
If you had shares in Thomas, I hope you sold them, because in recent years his reputation has plummeted.
In 2017, the journalist Martin Shipton published a biography, Political Chameleon: In Search of George Thomas. Among its revelations is that Thomas somehow dodged the call up in the second world war and that he met Stalin as a new Labour MP after 1945. Yet he ended his life as a supporter of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party - a precursor of Ukip.
Thomas's enthusiasm for the caning of innocent schoolboys may make more sense if you listen to his appearance on the Desolation Radio podcast around the time his book was published. He say that when he was a teacher, Thomas had a reputation for brutality.
You may even remember that in 2014, seventeen years after Thomas's death, a man came forward to say he had been raped by Thomas when he was aged about nine.
But Thomas's attitude in that Commons exchange is probably best explained by the fact that he was an official of the National Union of Teachers before he became an MP. You can hear the deafening clang of a profession closing ranks as he speaks. Complaints of individual injustice have little chance against that.
We should not forget that, with the single exception of some Evangelical Christians, the teaching unions were the last people to oppose the abolition of corporal punishment in schools.
And what of Oliver Whitfield, the headmaster? Here's the Daily Mirror for 13 September 1954:
169 bravos for `caning master'
Headmaster Mr. Oliver Whitfield has received 180 letters from different parts of the world since he caned 200 boys because not one of them would own up that he made a rude drawing on the school wall.
"And all but eleven of the letters told me I did right," Mr. Whitfield, who is head of the Usworth (Co. Durham) secondary modern school, said yesterday.
I'm not surprised he received letters - the subject has its enthusiasts - but surely this was the end of his time in the limelight and he then returned to obscurity?
Not a bit of it. Fast forward to 1966 and the Newcastle Journal for 14 April:
Teachers' president a skilled leader
Today the last words will be spoken by the nation's teachers at their annual conference at Eastbourne.
Although he would probably be the last one to admit it, Mr Oliver Whitfield, President of the National Union of Teachers who was born and bred in County Durham has contributed In great measure to its success.
Already his skilled leadership is making itself felt and it is a pretty safe bet that posterity will have cause to remember him as one of the union's great presidents.
Posterity turned out to have better things to do, but if you go to the Wikipedia page for the National Union of Teachers you will find that Whitfield was indeed elected president of the union for 1966-7.
I was going to end by pointing the moral that the social reforms of the Sixties were desperately needed. But we should remember that corporal punishment was not outlawed until 1986 and in all private schools until 2003.
Richard Tice announced yesterday that his Reform party would put up a candidate in every constituency at the nest general election.
There will, he said, be no deals with the Conservatives, even where a sitting Tory MP holds similar views to Reform.
From which we can conclude that Tice thinks the Tories will lose that election, with or without intervention from Reform.
So his best bet of being relevant afterwards is if disappointed Tory members decide they lost because of Reform and then demand that their party moves further to the right to attract Reform voters.
But it's far from clear that, without the issue of Brexit, Reform will be able to attract enough voters for that strategy to work.
And there's another problem. The voters Reform could attract will probably be looking for some protection from the market, whereas the party's leadership wants to give them more market and give it to them good and hard.
If Labour thinks it worth exposing this contradiction, the electorate may be more willing to listen than they were in the Ukip days, even though that party was similarly broken backed.
The Lib Dems, however, do have a base on Spelthorne council in the Sunbury Common half of the division; in 2019 this ward returned two Lib Dems and an ex-Lib Dem independent.
The Lib Dems have made the intriguing selection of Harry Boparai, who works for BA at Heathrow; I say “intriguing” because Boparai was a Conservative candidate in the neighbouring London Borough of Hounslow at the 2018 local elections before standing in the 2019 general election as the Brexit Party candidate for Hayes and Harlington.
He was originally supposed to stand in December 2019 here in Spelthorne, before the Brexit Party party withdrew from Conservative-held seats. You don’t see many Brexit Party to Lib Dem defectors, but it takes all sorts to make a world.
The local MP is Kwasi Kwarteng, and I must admit that when this vacancy came up I was looking forward to describing this by-election as the first of his chancellorship within his constituency. Oh dear.
Harry Shukman reports from the Ukip conference: "Today, fifty members of Ukip fit into the function room of a country pub outside Skegness, and there are plenty of empty chairs. The guest list barely stretches onto a second sheet of A4. There is talk of policies and history and electoral success but the room gives off the impression of a village cricket AGM instead of a party that recently took four million votes in a general election. Without Farage and without Brexit, Ukip is bereft."
Lucy Scholes praises The Glass Pearls, a forgotten novel by Emeric Pressburger about a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight in the streets of Pimlico.
Robert Hugill enjoys an evening of queered 18th-century music.
"My father took the following photo of Baldwin’s Gardens in 1949. The view is looking down towards Gray's Inn Road. In the early years of the war, the area suffered from the impact of several high explosive bombs and the effects of these can be seen to the right of the street." Baldwin's Gardens runs from Gray's Inn Road to Leather Lane and is a street I remember from Liberator paste ups long ago. This is a typically interesting post from A London Inheritance.
London's first UFO was spotted over St James's Park and Bloomsbury by a well-known physician called Cromwell Mortimer in 1746. Ertan Karpazli has the story.
Geoff Mulgan looks at the Spectator’s grip on the Conservative Party - its weakness over wokeness and overreliance on wordsmiths.
"The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift." Diane Bolet explores the links between pub closures and the rise of Ukip.
Sophia Alexandra Hall explains why Good Law Project has launched a legal challenge on the high numbers of children in care being placed outside their local area.
"England is no more a single country than Great Britain or the UK. The “Jurassic divide” in our geology - traced by the Trent-Humber river - has split England since before it was England." Regularly falling to foreign takeovers and perennially divided, England is a nation that never was, argues James Hawes.
Sarah Lawson talks to Melvyn Bragg about how he has spent more than 50 years championing the joy, value, and fascination of knowledge.
"How extraordinary to glimpse on the horizon, then, amid the unrelenting horizontality of everything, a vertical shape, a tower aimed straight at Heaven, built in a style which took as its fundamental principle precisely the emphasis, the exaltation of verticality." Dominic N visits Boston and the tower of St Botolph's - Boston Stump.
Twitter is not Britain, they say. And that's just as well.
Much of the reaction I've seen on the platform from those disappointed at the result in the Hartlepool by-election has involved attacks on the town's voters. They are stupid, they are racist and so on.
But what if Labour got pretty much the result they deserved? What if they had a disaterous recent history on the local council and imposed the wrong candidate?
Here's a paragraph from the magisterial preview of the by-election that Andrew Teale wrote for Britain Elects:
Then the wheels really started to come off the clown car that is Hartlepool council. This is complicated, please bear with me. In 2018 the five UKIP councillors walked out of the party and, eventually, rebranded as a new party called the Independent Union.
Just before the May 2019 elections the ruling Labour group suffered a huge split, with most of the leadership group walking off to join the Scargillite Socialist Labour Party. The electorate were not impressed, and in May 2019 ... Labour lost six of the nine wards they were defending and overall control of the council.
And here is Ailbhe Rea reporting her visit to the town in the New Statesman:
"Have you heard about our fantastic candidate, Dr Paul Williams?" a keen Labour activist asks an elderly gentleman who has answered his door in Seaton Carew, a seaside village a few minutes’ drive down the coast from Hartlepool’s centre.
He is not voting Labour, he tells the canvasser, saying he has read that Williams was involved in the decision to close critical care at Hartlepool hospital (Williams, an NHS doctor, was indeed on the board that consulted on that decision).
Sometimes in politics you get the result you deserve.
Ten years ago, Europe was not an issue for the vast majority of the people of the UK. The right wing created this psychodrama, created this problem, this crisis that was never there and now see themselves as the ones who have heroically solved it. This represents a fine piece of manipulation.
However, we can start to consider this issue with the role of New Labour. I remember when Blair was still PM, my saying that though I thought it was the case that the UK needed migrants and they add to our society, the way Blair had overseen such a rapid arrival rate of migrants would stir up racism, as the UK was still a racist society.
I was told at the time that the UK was not a racist society any more and there was nothing to worry about. Probably by the same people who were saying we were now a meritocracy, class conflict was over and everyone was becoming middle class.
But migration was the impetuous to turn a fringe issue, our relationship with Europe into what it became. It allowed Farage to sculpt UKIP into the cloaked racist anti migrant party that it became. And to turn it into the threat that it became to the Conservative party leading to Cameron putting the offer of a referendum in their manifesto, never thinking that he would win so well.
Unfortunately the Sun did more than blow the bloody doors off Milliband's chances of winning in 2015 with its sandwich eating shot, so that Cameron won outright. Without the restraint of being in Coalition, no Clegg to hold him back, he was forced to hold the referendum as promised. Well complacent Cameron feeling he was Mr Lucky messed up at that referendum, as we all know.
Johnson actually a pro-European saw that his only route to the job he so craved was to support Leave and to make sure Leave won. His charisma and affable clown persona helped push Leave over the line. Cameron at this point instead of showing character and fulfilling his responsibility and getting a deal and taking it through parliament instead went off in a huff to Chillax.
May as the new PM immediately showed one of her flaws of character, that of not being able to work well with others, and decided to go it alone instead of taking a cross party approach to build a consensus Brexit. In a failure of self-confidence and judgement, thinking she did not have enough of a majority to get what she wanted through, when it would have turned out that she did, went to the polls.
At the polls she did so badly that now she was in the position where she did indeed not have the majority needed to get what she wanted through. She lost her majority by rather than playing safe and having a neutral manifesto that would focus on getting Brexit done instead put forward a reckless radical vote losing manifesto. Yet May still managed to put together a very shaky Brexit deal to put to a vote.
The sensible thing for pro-European MPs to have done at that time would have been to have cashed out on the May deal. But they did not. For some it was the hope that kills you, the hope of a People’s vote that stopped them taking the option of the May deal. On the Labour side who knows what machinations were going on with the objective of bringing down Corbyn being prioritised over the European issue.
So in came the Johnson premiership on the mantra that he would get Brexit done and that as this was now the democratic will of the people, to do anything else would be an attack on democracy, an attack on The People. How far we have come in ten years from our relationship with Europe being a marginal issue to it having been such a central and divisive one.
Brexit is now done, well sort of. With vast amounts of money spent, with our national political life having been directed towards this issue above all others for four years, until the pandemic arrived, and with the union of the four nations put at risk, with a deal that does in fact look worse than the one we were in whilst part of the EU, the questions we now ask are:
"The players coming in during the next few years come from a generation deprived of free to air cricket. This generation will have come in on the echoes. Soon it will be a privileged generation: in the main sons/daughters of club cricketers and sons of parents able to afford a very expensive education, or sons able to win scholarships to such institutions."
Today, the first hot day of the year, the countryside was alive with hikers and Scouts, giving it something of the atmosphere of its 1930s heyday.
It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began.
It was clearly set out in the Coalition agreement. Now clear off down the garden and leave our dustbins alone.
When [Charles] Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what it had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for?
Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out.
the causes of the anger over MPs' expenses go beyond indignation at what has been done with our money. That anger is so great because this affair has laid bare what an unequal society we now live in.
No doubt this is meant to appeal to Tory voters who like tradition, but in reality there is little tradition of teachers dressing smartly. The traditional dress for teachers was the academic gown, which was designed precisely to distance education from the world where a good business suit matters.
Less grand teachers wore a tweed jacket with leather patches and a worried expression.
If a comedian or journalist had made similar reference to the fact that a politician was a woman or was gay or was Black, it would have finished that comedian or journalist's career. Yet in our society it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people for being old.
The idea that the state should decide the speed at which people walk their dogs is ridiculous.
there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.
Shropshire UKIP activists were targeted by MI5 spooks during the 2001 general election campaign, according to a new book written by one of the party's candidates.
Henry Curteis, whose autobiography encompasses the worlds of politics, business, and the paranormal, claims that MI5 bugged phones, tried to infiltrate the local party, and the State intercepted UKIP's mail in Shrewsbury.
He says that, exhausted at the end of the campaign – he came fourth in the Shrewsbury & Atcham seat with 1,620 votes – he went on a long holiday to Italy, only to discover somebody had been sent to tail him.That result suggests the deep state need not have worried too much about Mr Curteis.
Theresa May, the House of Lords, Jeremy Corbyn, the BBC, the Irish, the abolition of National Service, immigration, trendy teaching methods, decimal currency, the decline of proper wet fish shops, unelected Eurocrats, elected Eurocrats and Gary Lineker.It seems I left someone off the list:
I love the "we" here.It was naive of the monarchy to imagine that not intervening was the uncontroversial option here. I'm afraid it simply demonstrates to supporters of constitutional monarchy that we do not have one any more. When we finally win, the monarchy will have to be abolished, alas. https://t.co/diYR947TT2— Andrew Lilico (@andrew_lilico) April 9, 2019
I’m an ardent royalist and love our @RoyalFamily but this is spot on. Bitterly disappointed. https://t.co/DiXPQmUWg6— Suzanne Evans (@SuzanneEvans1) April 9, 2019
If she really expected the Queen to refuse royal assent to the Cooper and Letwin's EU Withdrawal (No.5) Act this is more evidence for the theory that one of the problems we face today is that many of our politicians are thick as mince.
In this fearless and controversial booklet, Bill Etheridge argues that the political and social elite have cravenly surrendered to the diktat of the Politically Correct dogma that has crushed free speech, smashed enterprise and reduced Britain to a mere shadow of its former self. Using personal insights and real life examples he shows how our political leaders can no longer be trusted and issues a powerful rallying cry for all lovers of freedom to stand up against the totalitarian bigots who have forced Political Correctness upon us.
"The changes you have made have changed the party beyond recognition.
"The party is now seen by large swathes of the British public as a vehicle of hate towards Muslims and the gay community...
"For my part I wish UKIP well and leave with great sadness that the party I loved has left me and taken a different direction."
