Here he comes, he’s all dressed in black……1

 

And so, the unspeakable has happened, the unholy trinity of Farage, Johnson, and their US contemporary, Trump, have concluded their ‘Leave Alliance’; the Brexit party will not field any candidates against the Conservatives in the 317 seats they won at the last general election.

Farage, ever adept at playing the ‘old soldier’ and with Vera Lynn crooning in the background, said he felt it was time to put the country before his party and make a ‘unilateral’ move.

‘he felt it was time to put the country before his party and make a ‘unilateral’ move’

Picking the ‘leave’ heartland of Hartlepool, which voted 70% to leave the EU, Farage said he had concluded that if the Brexit party had stood a candidate in every seat it could split the vote and usher in dozens of Liberal Democrat MPs and, in turn, create the circumstances for a second referendum.

But even before than the ink was dry on the marriage certificate the bickering started, as today Farage claimed the Tories are involved in ‘disgraceful’ attempts to persuade Brexit party candidates to stand down. Whilst he did not cite anything specific, he was clearly inferring that this pressure was coming from Conservatives. Farage said:

‘What is going on right now is nothing short of disgraceful. There is a full-scale attempt, going on out there as I speak, to stop men and women, freely, putting themselves up before the UK electorate. You would have thought this was Venezuela.’

Editorial comment: There is something of the night in thus current incarnation of the Tory party, nothing seems beneath them

Unsurprisingly, the other parties were quick to criticise the alliance; Ian Lavery, the chair of the Labour party, said, ‘This is a Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson alliance with Donald Trump to sell out our country and send £500m per week from our NHS to US drugs companies.’

Whilst Ed Davey, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: ‘Nigel Farage standing down shows the Conservatives and the Brexit party are now one and the same. Johnson’s hard-right Brexit takeover of the Tory party has now been endorsed by both Trump and Farage.’

But will the unholy alliance deliver the majority they crave?

‘Johnson’s hard-right Brexit takeover of the Tory party has now been endorsed by both Trump and Farage’

Possibly not; in theory Farage standing aside in the 317 seats the Tories currently hold should help them maintain this position, but, in practise maybe not. We will revisit this later in the column.

Even if with Farage’s help the Tories retain these 317 seats, they still need to win a further 9-seats to have even the slimmest possible majority. And, in many Labour seats it is expected that, Farage will still enter candidates, in doing so the Brexit Party could attract voters away from the Tories making it harder for them to win their target seats.

To further endorse this point pollsters believe that Farage takes about two votes off the Conservatives for every one vote from Labour.

Chris Curtis, YouGov’s political research manager, said: ‘Farage’s decision to stand aside in current Conservative-held seats and not in Labour-held seats that the Tories will be looking to gain will likely make very little difference.’ He said it was ‘unlikely to be a game-changing moment’

Hop-on for the most unpredictable journey in many a year.

 

‘We’ll ride through the city tonight, See the city’s ripped backsides….’ 2

 

Keeping on the theme of the unholy alliance we even have our own scandal. Johnson’s friendship with technology entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri was reignited on Saturday, after it was revealed that the independent police watchdog has delayed its announcement on whether the PM should face an investigation into possible criminal misconduct until after the election.

In a private meeting held before parliament was dissolved last week, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) officials agreed not to announce whether they were going to investigate ‘possible criminality’ over allegations about a conflict of interest in Johnson’s dealings while mayor of London with US businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri until after the election.

The decision prompted fury from Westminster politicians and London assembly members who said it appeared that a ruling had been ‘suppressed’ in order to protect Johnson from potentially damaging headlines at a crucial stage of the election campaign.

Editorial comment: Surely not!

And, as if the whiff of scandal wasn’t enough, does the government understand its own Brexit deal?

Apparently not; Kwasi Kwarteng, one of Johnson’s business ministers insisted the PM was correct in arguing that businesses in Northern Ireland will not have to fill in forms to export goods to the rest of the UK after Brexit, despite this being an apparent part of the departure deal.

The wonderfully named minister went on to say Johnson was ‘absolutely on the money’ when he told Northern Irish exporters last week that they would not need to fill in extra paperwork, prompting accusations the PM was misleading the public.

The minister’s comments contradicted the view of Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, who told a House of Lords committee that businesses would need to complete ‘exit summary declarations’ for such sending shipments.

And, in yet another of those foolish ‘dead in a ditch’ pledges, Johnson told exporters they would not need to fill in customs declarations when they sent goods across the Irish Sea, adding that if firms were asked to they should call him ‘and I will direct them to throw that form in the bin’.

Editorial comment: Advice to any would-be NI exporter, fill-in the forms!

And, now finally we return to the unholy alliance and the impact it might have. One common theme leading up the election is the impact on Labour in leave-voting seats in the north of England, particularly could this be where Boris find the seats necessary to win a majority.

However, there is another sub-plot that has been largely overlooked, the growing disconnects between voters in traditional Tory heartlands and the right-wing ideology of Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group.

Many of these suburbs and towns have become more cosmopolitan, and internationalist in their outlook, putting them at odds with what the Tories have become.

 

‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out washing their cars…’ 3

 

This was evidenced 2017 in the seats lost by the Tories to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats: Bath, Kingston and Surbiton, Battersea, Enfield Southgate. This was repeated with a weakening Conservative presence around Manchester and Bristol, and in Lib Dem targets such as St Albans in Hertfordshire.

‘suburbs and towns have become more cosmopolitan, and internationalist in their outlook, putting them at odds with what the Tories have become’

If we isolate Surrey, the picture become even more illuminating; after the election in 2017 the county had 11 Tory MPs, however since then the party has expelled Anne Milton, Philip Hammond and Sam Gyimah (now a Lib Dem). In local elections this May, the Tories lost 117 council seats and control of four local authorities.

Among Surrey’s eight remaining Tory MPs are Brexiters such as Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Kwasi Kwarteng, some standing in pro-remain constituencies;

 

  • Guildford polled 56.2% remain in the referendum.
  • Woking, 56.2%;
  • Elmbridge, which includes Raab’s seat of Esher and Walton, nearly 60%.

 

Many voters in these supposed Tory heartlands, including myself, feel disenfranchised; many voters in these areas now find both Labour and the Tories too extreme, people are looking for a centrist party.

The Tories are making the election about ‘getting Brexit done’, but many of us don’t want it ‘done. People, including me, will switch, if we are voting on Brexit, we’re Remainers.

Let me consider in detail my own constituency of Chipping Barnet, a constituency where 58.93% voted ‘Remain’.

As the table below illustrates, ‘Remain’ voters followed their instincts in the 2017 election, voting against the incumbent MP, Theresa Villiers a well-known Eurosceptic, reducing the seat to a ‘marginal’, with a swing of c.14% in favour of Labour.

 

brexit

 

Since Chipping Barnet was created as a constituency in 1974 it has been a Tory fortress. All the relevant numbers point to this:

 

  • 63.5% of the electorate are homeowners,
  • 71.8% are ‘white’
  • only 7% Asian and 3% black.

 

The demographics are broadly spread but slightly favouring ‘older’ people:

 

general election

 

Yet, despite all of this it is impossible to escape the fact that, as a result of Brexit, this is now a marginal seat. Whilst I don’t favour a Corbyn led government I don’t expect him to win a majority, therefore I shall vote Labour, in the hope that this is one of the 317 seats Johnson doesn’t retain.

And even in that Tory holy of holies, Cities of London and Westminster, anti-Tory feelings run high: a lady in her 40s said, ‘Voting Conservative is something I’ll probably never do again,’ This time, she was planning to vote for the Lib Dems, she said, but she might easily switch to Labour in future.

Her reasons for giving up on the Tories:

 

  • Hard Brexit
  • The prorogation of parliament and contempt for the rule of law

 

On a final note are two reasons not to vote Tory:

When stress-testing the decision to go for a December election, Johnson and his advisers clearly completely forgot about floods, even though November and December have become serious flooding months in Britain in recent years:

 

  • November 2009, Workington was almost cut off from the rest of the country by floodwater
  • December 2103, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were flooded, as was Kent and Sussex.
  • Early 2014, the Somerset Levels were overwhelmed
  • December 2015, Lancashire and Cumbria were inundated.
  • Christmas 2015, Yorkshire again.

 

Despite floods becoming an annual event, the current floods in South Yorkshire’s Don valley, a part of the country that was swamped by swollen river water in 2007 and 2015 again caught the government flat-footed, or, more likely, Brexit fixated.

In his typical blasé fashion, Johnson initially dismissed the floods as ‘not a national emergency’, and, when he finally turned up in Yorkshire he was met by shouts of ‘You took your time’ and ‘Where have you been?’

‘You took your time’ and ‘Where have you been?’

The fact these floods are in precisely the kind of leave-voting parts of the north that the Conservatives are targeting in this Brexit-dominated election makes his attitude beggar belief.

This a former coalmining part of the country, pits that Thatcher closed, meaning that the Tories are not easily welcomed here, Johnson’s too little too late attitude only endorses their suspicions.

Irrespective of whether Johnson wasn’t paying attention or just doesn’t care, this only serves to highlight aspects of his leadership style; part reckless, part careless and part useless. He promises maximum preparations against floods, but it’s all talk.

‘part reckless, part careless and part useless’

Whilst the cause of the floods are due to climate change, the lack of governmental attention makes it a northern issue, and an issue of equality. Corbyn, not unreasonably, was quick to highlight the north’s subordinate place in Johnson’s southern-dominated vision of Englishness.

If floods weren’t enough, this week is was reported by the anti-poverty campaign, the Trussell Trust, that, in the last 6-months, we have seen the steepest increase in emergency food parcel handouts in 5-years,

 

  • a record 823,145 food parcels were handed-out between April and September,
  • of these 301,653 that went to children,
  • a 23% increase on the same period last year,

 

This represents the steepest rise the charity has witnessed since its network of food banks was fully established.

The top three reasons cited by people needing emergency food were:

 

  • 36% – insufficient benefit income
  • 18% – delays in benefit payments
  • 16% – changes to benefits

 

The trust’s ‘State of Hunger’ report estimated that one in 50 UK households used a food bank in 2018-19 and at least 3m food parcels were given out.

Prior to the French Revolution a princess, reputedly Marie Antoinette, said ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ (‘Let them eat cake’) the quotation reflecting a disregard for the peasants, or her poor understanding of their situation.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Do we want five more years of this?

 

‘Pushing through the market square, So many mothers sighing
News had just come over, We had five years left to cry in’ 4

 

OK lyric spotters another double double for your delectation today, as the great Great British Mug Off begins in earnest (shurely – General Election Campain?…….Ed).

As the Police, Armed Forces, NHS and schools are promised bounteous gifts beyond their wildest hopes, or realistic expectations, Philip is doling out points like a man with no arms this week – but only to high achievers; I can claim ‘mid-table fodder status’.

All claims to be submitted in the usual way, and please be aware that some suspicious activity has been detected in recent postal submissions – come on chaps, its not the British way.

First out of the box 1 is what Philip describes as ‘a great song, bound to shock’ – fully four points for bagging regulars The Velvet Underground with ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’.

Next 2 ‘highlight of the great man’s solo career, almost, but mercifully not, an anthem’ – an anthem it may not be, but it was high profile enough to be on my radar – however, just a singleton for Iggy Pop and ‘The Passenger’.

Then, more points for me, with the instantly recognisable Members 3 and ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ – however, just one point on offer, and the ongoing connundrum – is it punk, is it pop, is it any good, what’s the point of it? – tune in to the forthcoming TV debate.

Lastly, and ‘what no Bowie’, I hear you cry – of course there is; according to Philip ‘this is tough, very well-known album from the master, but the song, it’s worth 4 points’ So, 4 if you’re smart enough to get to ‘5 Years’, straight to the top of the polls. Enjoy!

 

 

 

Philip Gilbert 2Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

 

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