Counting the Days

So, today is EU election counting day, the day when all the chickens come home to roost and the day that commentators like Dan Hodges will see if their six-week rant in vilification of UKIP and all its supporters has borne fruit. At first, a lot of observers sort of agreed with many of the conclusions resulting from the reported thoughts and deeds of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists and many decided UKIP wasn’t for them. But then it started to become a distinctly grubby game.

Here were all two-point-one major parties (It’s becoming more difficult to describe the Lib Dems as even half a party) engaged in a sometimes desperate united front to hurl some quite extreme accusations at a party that attracted people who used to vote for them. People with unfashionable opinions, sometimes formed through lack of knowledge, sometimes from grudges held against others and sometimes just because they were barmy. People, in fact, much like themselves and the voters who remained.

Then the results were in and a curious anti-London sentiment began to grow as it dawned on ‘the people in the telly’ that the rest of the country no longer regard London as a British city. Dear Dan Hodges, who has been increasingly unhinged of late tweeted, “I'm bored of this "out of touch London elite" narrative. Londoners aren't going to apologise for not being racist throwbacks. Sorry.” and then got into a bit of a spat with me amongst others.

But nobody was talking about ‘Londoners’, the beleaguered former stalwarts of the blitz spirits and all that used to represent and unite Great Britain, they were talking about groups of people who hold themselves above the accountability most of us are subject to; people who live in a fairy tale world where everybody is ‘enlightened’ and believes in the same studiously correct things that they do. Where everybody is equal and equally entitled to live as they wish. Where all people are good people and nobody seeks to control others.

Meanwhile, as these lovely enlightened people were focused on dredging up old non-stories about UKIP candidates, the islamic caliphate of Tower Hamlets carried on doing what it has been doing for years. Electoral chicanery is not only commonplace here, but has been known about for years. And so entrenched is it that the UK government appears powerless to do anything to change it. Please take a few minutes to read this remarkable piece by Andrew Gilligan and then tell me that we have nothing to worry about.

This is not just happening in ‘That London’. In many British cities, there is corruption and anti-democratic graft beyond anything we have seen in the past as concerted islamist groups – under the cover of politically correct ‘tolerance’ and crying racism - seek to control local seats of power in order to impose their own ideology. The bigger prize and eventual ambition for islam is to control all of Europe, all of the world.

The new London 'Elite'

So tonight, as the MEP results are returned and we wait to see the appetite for change in Europe and calculate the odds of our ever getting a referendum on our place in it, ask yourself this: If we can’t even control the corruption in boroughs in our own capital, what chance do we have of ever reforming the European Union? If we truly want a say on how the EU is run, we need to start much closer to home.

The Nazis are coming! Oh, it's just the postman...

Right you wise-old-gents, you personable-and-kind-individuals, you daft-and-glorious-operators*, let’s sort out this racism business once and for all; a lot of you seem confused. For a start, given that we refer collectively to the entire population of homo sapiens as ‘the human race’, we’re not talking about antipathy between actual races. We are all of the same species, a fact regularly demonstrated by the remarkable ease with which you lot keep interbreeding. Once upon a time, racism meant actual harmful discrimination against differently hued people, but apparently that’s no longer the case, racism now merging with simple unease to become indistinguishable in the woolly minds of junior thinkers everywhere; the New Racism is ubiquitous and all-pervasive.

I blame Coca Cola – I want to teach the world to sing, all standing hand in hand, my arse! When I was growing up a distrust of foreigners was commonplace, with their funny ways and strange accents. Of course it was – our parents had been warned throughout their lives that walls had ears and loose lips sank ships. Xenophobia was a survival instinct after two world wars in thirty years. But enter the Seventies and the newly-ageing hippy generation were becoming opinion shapers; since then and up to the end of the twentieth century, Britain absorbed the fruits of globalisation and took multiculturalism in its stride. We were becoming quite diverse enough without the ‘help’ of New Labour’s nose-rubbing designs.

To those raised in the poly-lingual streets of inner London – no longer just the British capital but a ‘world city’, whatever that means – the sudden arrival of Eastern Europe may not have been a big deal, but go to rural towns like Boston and see how former cohesive communities have developed a siege mentality, having been (in their not unreasonable estimation) invaded by people they have been unable to easily accommodate and assimilate. Is it any wonder that a weekend poll in that region predicts only one outcome for Thursday’s Euro-elections? Here is a sizeable population of people who feel they are voting for their continued existence, having had no say whatsoever in the socio-political engineering of the last decade.

These people aren’t racists, at worst they are merely fearful and a little angry which, far from being a crime, is a universal instinct and just as with my parents and grandparents is a natural reaction to events. I haven’t heard of any violent protests, there have been no accounts of paint daubed on houses of foreigners and nobody to my knowledge has been driven out of town with burning brands and pitchforks, but to hear the united front of the mainstream media and the old-order political parties you could be forgiven for thinking we were seeing the resurgence of Nazism.

But of course, there HAS been violence. There HAS been bile and vilification. Mobs screaming hatred at the top of their voices have been seen around the land and property has been defaced and vandalised. Bricks have been thrown, banners have been burned and hate-convulsed faces have been thrust at those who campaign for change. And further calls have gone out on social media to mass against the supposed forces of darkness. What an irony then, that all this frightening violence has spewed from those who say they are AGAINST fascism and that they DON’T hate. Once again it is those who say they care that manage to spit out the most venom.

And with every nasty little jibe, every personal attack and every piece of shit despatched by free post suspicions rise in the minds of the politically unsophisticated. Far from the ‘no smoke without fire’ intentions of smear tactics, ordinary people are seeing a wholly different picture. “How is fear, racist?” they ask, and “Why are words being effectively banned? Why are people who voice my concerns being vilified?” Little wonder then, that the penny is belatedly dropping and all of a sudden senior politicians are popping up to claim that the racist charges are over the top... although they continue to use words like despicable and vile in condemning these neo non-racists.

I’ll be glad when Thursday is out of the way and the votes have been counted; when the people who haven’t been intimidated into staying at home make their opinions clear. Of course, it will make no difference, will it? The battleground for next year’s GE will still centre round borders we can’t control, laws we have little influence over, treaties and agreements we can’t veto, employment statistics conjured from thin air by febrile minds and a referendum, the outcome of which has already been decided. Expect a barrage of pro-EU politicking so thick and so fast that even talking of Brexit will become a racist act.

(*Aren't acronyms fun?)