reform-uk | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

July 4, 2025

33:64 presents “Harold Wilson.”

For quite a while I used to feel almost sorry for Boris’s Johnson. Everything he’d ever done in his life was in the ruthless pursuit of one day becoming PM. The irony was so blatant it was absurd. For someone who loved dropping Latin phrases into conversation, his story was a tragedy worth of Seneca. When, after all the years of philandering, lying, resignations, treachery and backstabbings, he finally achieved his goal, it was at the worst time in post war British political history.

The Brexit deal was yet to be done and the EU were being all EU about it. The angry divisions in Parliament were matched only by those in the country. Everyone felt betrayed. The press was hostile. The Supreme Court got involved. And to cap it off, he lied to the Queen.

Yet somehow, he still managed to win the 2019 general election with an 80 seat majority. Brexit hadn’t been done yet but there was renewed vigour, a feeling of a corner having been turned. It was all going to be alright. Phew! It was getting all a bit squeaky-bum time there for, but onward and upwards towards those sunny uplands and….COVID?

What the fuck is COVID? Why has does some ‘flu in China mean we have to stay indoors? A year of this? Are you insane?And then when we think it’s all over, we’ll have to do it all over again? This time in the winter? And it’ll push us to near bankruptcy as well?

That why I almost felt sorry for him. He’d imagined being PM as one thing and it turned out not to be that thing at all. But whilst Brexit was a uniquely British thing, COVID very quickly became a global thing and for all the rights and wrongs regarding the government’s response to COVID, no-one said that it was their fault that COVID had happened in the first place.

So whilst I used to feel sorry for Boris’s Johnson, it is as nothing when compared to the nothing I feel for Stymied. The one year anniversary of his general election triumph must be tainted by the knowledge of what that year held in store. Because if the oft-quoted dictum is indeed true, and a week really is a long time in politics, then how much longer must a year feel? Especially given how, at the start of that year, Stymied was seen as all things to all men. Remember that? When the press and the public were united in their adoration of him. An adoration he earned by doing the bare minimum, which basically involved not saying or doing anything that might upset people and most importantly, not being Boris. That was it. Keep your head down and not be Boris.

Unfortunately, when he did eventually have to raise his head during the election campaign, he neglected to raise his game as well. Or maybe he did, maybe that was him trying his level best, trying to be all dynamic, and not like the boring technocrat he really was. His performance during a live televised debate between himself and Prada was a shambles. Labour strategists must’ve been in tears. Stymied had the record of fourteen Tory years to throw at Prada, but unbelievably, he floundered and spluttered his way through it. The watching public must’ve thought, “Well at least he wasn’t lying, his dad really was a toolmaker.”

The election campaign itself was basically one gigantic waste of time. The day it was announced, they could’ve held it and there’d have been no discernible difference in the outcome. Apart that is, from Reform UK springing up out of nowhere and having the audacity to win over 14% of the votes cast. That got them five MP’s. Even more outrageously, Labour got a smidge over 33% of the vote which somehow got them 411 MP’s. But the important thing was that the grown-ups were finally back in the room. That seriously minded people were going to do seriously minded things and that Britain would be the better for it.

But then things started to wrong very quickly indeed, and as is the way with politics, when things go wrong they invariably create a domino effect, causing more things to go wrong. Whilst politicians can only ever react to events – and in the case of Stockport, it was the mass stabbing and murder of three children at a dance class and the subsequent rioting that escalated throughout the England – it is up to politicians how they react to them. As I wrote at the time, no matter how distasteful the motivations, opinions and the sometimes violent means of expressing them the rioters used were to the new government, simply dismissing the rioters as ‘far-right’ negated any sensible discussion of any underlying causes.

Then the law got involved. The speed and severity with which rioters were treated was seen as disproportionate to their crimes, not least when compared to the more lenient sentences handed by the courts to arguably more violent offenders. Then problems with prison overcrowding meant that prisoners who were more of a threat to public safety were released early to make room for them. It emerged that one prisoner released early under the scheme was charged with sexual assault relating to an alleged offence against a woman on the same day he was freed. This in turn highlighted flaws in the probation service, whose job it was to monitor them.

Quite aside from the most alarming and unexpected events that any politician has to deal with, it was the domestic events that seem to blindside him, even though these were of his own making. Having made much in the election campaign about how he wasn’t going to tax working people, he did what all new governments do, and blamed the last one for leaving the country finances in such a bad way that he had no choice but to.

No matter the country had had a year of COVID, of a furlough scheme which meant no tax venue to pay for it and thus massive borrowing, the way Stymied would have us believe it, Boris’s Johnson had basically Johnson’d the money away. This had created a £21.9 billion “black hole”, and because of this, certain winter fuel payments would be scrapped for around 10 million pensioners. The farmers inheritance tax protests and employers increase in National Insurance tax storms followed. More scandals engulfed him.

All of which culminated in a weird kind of buyers remorse. People felt cheated. This wasn’t what they’d voted for. Although as Labour only got 33% of the vote, meaning that more people didn’t bother to vote in the first place, it was difficult to feel much sympathy for their nonsense. But now, how people feel is a big thing in our society, and because of this, we live in age where if you feel unhappy about something you start a petition and if you tell people about it on social media, hopefully enough people sign it and something will be done about whatever it was that made people sign it in the first place.

Over three million fuckwits signed one demanding that a new election was held, and in so doing, highlighted one of the inherent problems with a functioning democracy. Namely, in order to be considered as such, its electorate should some level of basic understanding of how it works. And how a government is elected is about as fucking basic as it comes. Its not complicated.

But thats where Britain was at the end of 2024. With a public who thought our government was like a crisp manufacturer and that by signing a petition calling for a new election was no different to one demanding that prawn cocktail Wotsits to be brought back. But this is a public addicted to social media, so used to sharing their thoughts and opinions, that they delude themselves into thinking that how they think or feel has greater worth than others who don’t think the same way.

So it can’t have been too much of a surprise then for Stymied to discover that Corblimey had a special anniversary present for him. A parliamentary expression of the same way of thinking, as equally blinkered and dogmatic, of the most performative virtue of the age, the least virtuous of all the virtues that have infected peoples minds, opposition to the Israeli war in Gaza. Yes, he and co-leader Raisin might’ve thrown in the odd references about socialism, to benefit cuts, poverty and the disabled but it was all just blah, a smokescreen to conceal their true intent.

Which is to pile on yet more troubles for Stymied, to weaken his position still further and to hasten the calls for him to go. With the year he’s had, one could hardly blame him if he did.

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist.

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates, standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them.

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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May 2, 2025

34:63 presents “Mari Wilson.”

As with all things, the devil is in the detail, and there is a lot of detail for Farrago to dwell on, following the overnight constituency, local council and mayoral elections. It is now Friday afternoon and more grim tidings are expected to be heading Plonkers way. But the results are just as troubling for Farrago, albeit in a different way, one replete with potentially longer term damage.

First of all, a quick shufti at the actual results. The Reform UK candidate, Sarah Poitin, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, overturning a majority that rights, shouldn’t have been vulnerable. However, as stunning – and widely predicted – as her victory undoubtedly was, she only got 38.7% of the votes cast and only 42.6% of the voters actually bothered to vote. And even that was lower than the turnout less than a year ago. at the general election.It’s not like there hadn’t been any publicity, media interest and speculation about it or anything.

Which means a few things, none of them good for her glittering parliamentary career, which may or may not happen or for Reform UK’s positioning of itself as a viable electoral proposition. Firstly, with a majority that is the very definition of ‘by the skin of their teeth’, and with such a low turnout to boot, a better result for her would’ve been to have lost by six instead. Because you can bet that the local Labour Party will scrutinise her parliamentary attendance record, forensically examine her expenses claims, flood her constituency surgery with labyrinthine constituent problems, all designed to portray her as bad MP at the next election. They’ll also be all over her social media content – especially in her youthful postings – for any damaging content, and trying to unearth anything in her past that might be used against her. So basically what every political party handed such opportunity would do.

The situation in Greater Lincolnshire, where Dame Angela Jenkins became Reform UK’s first mayor, is if anything, potentially even worse. Yes, she’s a former Conservative MP so she knows how the game is played and yes, as mayor of newly formed super council, essentially overseeing three smaller councils each represented two senior councillors each, – given as how all of whom are Conservative,- this in theory doesn’t pose as much of a problem as if they were Labour. I didn’t know this, but prior to last night, over 65% of Reform UK’s local councillors were defectors from the Conservatives. But be that as it may, Ange got her gold chain with a vote share of 42.2% – good -, a majority of nearly 40,000 – double good -, on a voter turnout of, er, 29.9%.

So her election has succeeded in highlighting the flaws in our voting system and nothing else. As the mayor of a new super council, she needs the support of six others to ratify any policies she wants to introduce. They in turn are at the mercy of local officials, in town halls and council departments to make those policies real. And successful implementation of her policies will, even if they succeed in permeating down through the layers in bureaucracy, rely on council staff and contractors, who might be instinctively opposed to Reform UK. They won’t want her mayoralty to become a shining example of good governance should Farrago enter No.10.

And this is why the greater the electoral success that Reform UK has, the greater the threat to Reform UK has of suffering irreperable reputational damage. It can only present themselves as the change Britain needs for so long. At some point, they’ll have to deliver that change, and whilst bemoaning the structural unfairness of the first-past-the-post voting system chimes with people who care about such things, if potholes are left unrepaired, schools face staff shortages, or social care is pared back even further, nobody will much care.

They won’t care that central government has cut the councils budget, but they will care the their council tax bill goes up or that they have to buy a residents parking permit. They won’t care that the council is barely meeting its statutory obligations but they will care when those statuary obligations are perceived to be applied discriminatorily. They won’t care when council run things that they never use are closed, but they will care when things that they do use close. Then they’ll care, then they’ll care a lot.

And it won’t just be Farrago regretting getting the thing he always wanted.

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April 30, 2025

34:63 presents “The Corporal Jones guide to politics.”

In recent days there has been a lot of speculation in the press concerning what exactly Plonker will do in order to nullify the threat of a Reform UK rout of Labour at the upcoming local elections tomorrow. They have pretty much conceded the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which voting also place tomorrow, which on paper they should win, given as how the former MP Mike Amesbury won it with a majority of nearly 15,000 at the General Election barely a year ago.

But then having a by-election forced upon you because the sitting MP had to resign after recieving a 10-week suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to punching a constituent last year, is not a good look. But neither is it a good look for a politician to carefully finesse his public image so that him saying little about actual policy in the general election campaign – so that everyone can fill in their own hopes onto him – works only so far. Which in his case, turned out – to no-ones surprise – to be until he was elected and soon thereafter revealed himself to be as slippery as most other politicians.

Anything less than a resounding victory for Labour- an increased majority, an increased voter turnout from the general election and the other parties being thoroughly rejected by the electorate – will be a defeat. It remains to be see if its a crushing one or not. The local elections pose more of a threat, because most people will vote based on how competent or not they judge central government to be. Sad but true. Its politics. Just like when in February Local Government Secretary Angela Ratner announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey would be delayed for one year to allow major reorganisations to take place. It may well be true, maybe there’s a compelling rationale behind her decision. But in order to prevent the taint of political chicanery being levelled and gaining traction, making the announcement less than three months before they’re happening, again, isn’t a good look.

But this government seems to be constantly bedevilled by events, responding to them, and being in constant firefighting mode, rather than shaping them and exuding calm. The postponement of the aforementioned is but one example of this. Another is sudden flurry of headlines this week suggesting that Plonker will take a stronger line on immigration in order to try and mitigate the threat from Reform UK. Its not because of something as old fashioned as its the right thing to do and that doing such – reducing the numbers of people being granted asylum – might have a beneficial effect on already overstretched public services. That Plonker seems unwilling to grasp this obvious political calculation is one reason why Reform UK is polling so well and why all Plonker has are desperate last minute throws of the dice. His default position on immigration is to label anyone who thinks that immigration needs tougher action as racist or bigoted or far right extremists, effectively attempting to shut down any sensible discussion on this topic.

But as Reforms growing threat, and Labours craven reaction to it amply demonstrate, while such a strategy might work in posh metropolitan circles, out in the wild, out where most of the electorate live, out where the very real consequences of immigration are being felt, that strategy isn’t working.

Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. Like a lot of people flirting with Reform UK, its only because of the lack of any other viable political alternative And like a lot of people who are considering voting Reform UK, my values and principles, my fundamental conception of what the state should do – and what it shouldn’t – and what obligations the state owed to the citizen – and vice-versa – haven’t really changed. Its the political parties who have changed out of all recognition.

Despite the many horrors that the Grocers Daughter visited on the UK, she at least had ideological underpinnings to them. There was a logic, twisted and serving the interests of a minority, yes, but a logic. The most socialist thing about Plonker is his first name, and the only thing he stands for is a piss.

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