International
UK election 2024: Nigel Farage could deliver another profound shock to the establishment
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/07/tvrd-ls-nigel-farage-image-2024-07-02.jpg)
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
With Nigel Farage and Reform U.K. from the right, and George Galloway and his Workers’ Party from the left, the populist element threatens to make the cheerless pantomime of British politics entertaining – and interesting – again.
The United Kingdom’s general election is days away. Thursday, July 4, a memorable date for American home rule, may see a degree of self-rule return to Britain as the liberal establishment is shaken in its heartland by populists from the right and left of the center of permanent government.
Last week current Conservative Foreign Secretary David Cameron said on video that British policy on Ukraine was “fixed” and that nothing would change if Labour won the election – as many expect they will.
Yet a rising tide of populism led by two charismatic figures has complicated the situation.
Despite attempts routinely seen in European nations to “lock out” populists from mainstream media, Nigel Farage’s Reform continues to surge. Mass rallies across the country combine with several polls showing his party now pushing the Conservatives into third place nationally in three polls.
When the first poll showed Reform a point ahead of the Tories, Farage claimed his party was now “the real opposition to Labour.”
BREAKING
Reform UK has just overtaken the Conservatives in the polls.
We are now the real opposition to Labour.
Join me on ITV1 in 20 minutes. pic.twitter.com/jrPaf86PbM
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) June 13, 2024
Farage has complained that his party is not being given fair media coverage. Reform have cautioned against believing mainstream media polls, as their own claim to show far stronger support – such as this from July 1.
As many former Conservative voters openly call for their party to get “zero seats,” Nigel Farage and George Galloway are rising in the polls to challenge both parties of government – widely seen by their traditional voter base as having betrayed them.
Almost all polls exclude Galloway’s Workers’ Party from their calculations, locking his voice out on screen. But it is his voice which has resonated with many who share his support of Gaza against Israel’s ongoing genocide.
Galloway claims that the established parties have “abandoned the working class.” He claims to stand against “the uniparty” of British politics, having denounced the “one-party state” of Britain in colorful terms in the past.
His recent sentiments on the merits of both the Labour and Conservative leaders will be shared by many.
“I have never seen an election in which two people who less deserve to be the Prime Minister of Britain are competing for that office.”
Workers Party of Britain leader George Galloway says voters are fed up with the main political parties. pic.twitter.com/88JotpxXcL
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 19, 2024
With Galloway from the left, and Farage from the right, the populist element threatens to make the cheerless pantomime of British politics entertaining – and interesting – again.
Farage came to prominence as a leading figure in the “Brexit” movement, which following then Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum, saw the U.K. vote in it to leave the European Union.
Many British voters – known as “remainers” – sought to remain in and seek to rejoin the E.U., and hope that a vote for the Labour Party will realize this ambition.
British Christian commentator Peter Hitchens criticized the referendum at the time, saying that it introduced a conflict over sovereignty that replaced another. He said that the referendum made the popular vote sovereign at the expense of Parliament, and that the membership of the E.U. had also done the same. This, he said in 2023, had diluted the power of Parliament overall.
'Ever since the 1970s the UK has given away so much of its sovereignty, and people don't realise how little room for manoeuvre the British Government has.'
Peter Hitchens and Alex Deane discuss the UK leaving the ECHR amid the growing migrant crisis. pic.twitter.com/zTLgowelR3
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 14, 2023
Hitchens concluded that the referendum really contested the supremacy of Parliament in determining the fate of the nation.
Election as referendum on Parliament?
This election can be seen as a sort of second referendum – on the legacy of that Parliament and how its determination to act against the nation should be judged by its population.
The Conservative Party has ruled Britain for the last 14 years. It has attacked Libya (in 2011), unleashing waves of mass migration, which saw the party then call for integration and diversity as scandals over child sexual abuse (2010-2014) and the public execution of a British soldier (2013) by immigrant populations hit the press.
The Conservatives, as with many other parties of the liberal consensus in the West, strongly supported lockdowns and burdened the nation with record borrowing to fund the destruction of the high street businesses, community groups and the education and development of children and young people. They aggressively promoted the so-called “vaccines,” with conservative commentator Andrew Neil saying it was “time to punish the unvaccinated.”
With its “winner takes all” system of “first past the post,” the party with the most votes in each constituency wins. This means Reform may take millions of votes, but still end up with very few seats.
Elections are not only a matter of who counts the votes. They are also determined by who draws the boundaries – in reality and in the media.
Mass migration breaks the game
Yet it is mass migration – and its profound effects on the politics, policing, and practices established in Britain which is mainly driving support to Farage’s Reform. Why is that the case?
It is a reality which can no longer be ruled out of bounds by the politics and media of the establishment.
Mass migration has increased significantly under the Tories, as the Conservatives are known. So have laws against free speech, including a National Security Act which threatens to criminalize investigative journalism. Nigel Farage was himself “debanked” under measures permitted by Conservative rule. The party of law and order has marked the nation by the absence of both.
READ: Press freedom under threat as UK National Security Act could put journalists in jail
Christians have been prosecuted and cautioned by police for praying, preaching the Gospel, and singing hymns. In May 2024, the Daily Telegraph reported that “Christians are the most despised minority in Britain” as a result.
The U.K. now has the highest tax burden in 70 years, and it is set to rise higher still. Taxes have risen in the U.K. more sharply than in the U.S. or the E.U. in the last five years.
For these reasons the most vociferous opponents of the Conservative Party are now its own former core voters.
This election will be lost by the Conservatives. It may finish them. But a massive Labour victory is not guaranteed, and the chaos created by Labour and the Tories in Britain is driving people towards populism to secure a meaningful change – from the politics of national suicide.
A guide for Christian voters
The U.K.’s Christian Institute has produced a guide to all the parties’ policies, showing where each faction stands on issues of concern to the near 60 percent of the population which identifies as Christian, per the most recent census in 2021.
Nigel Farage’s Reform is the only party to oppose the LGBTQI agenda in schools. Reform also supports marriage with a proposed raise in the marred couples’ tax allowance. It wishes to abolish “hate crimes,” including repressive measures on speech, and has pledged to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits most meaningful action against mass migration.
The elephant in the room
The migration issue remains one which dominates ordinary life in Britain, but whose mention has been routinely and deliberately excluded from mainstream debate and media coverage for the decades during which it has taken place.
Nigel Farage has won one referendum – on Britain leaving the E.U. in 2016. Most polls said he would lose that one. One said “Leave” would lose by 10 points.
With the elephant of migration now dominating what little room is left in Britain, Farage may be on course to deliver another profound shock to a system designed to conduct business as usual – regardless of the interests and opinions of its people.
International
Liberal reporter reveals Democrats secretly wonder who’s running America after seeing Biden
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From LifeSiteNews
New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi reveals that since January, Democrat insiders have been reaching out to her to convey the fears about who’s actually in charge of the federal government they’ve developed after seeing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline up close.
The fallout from incumbent President and presumptive Democrat White House nominee Joe Biden’s disastrous first 2024 debate with Republican predecessor and challenger Donald Trump continues, with liberal New York Magazine publishing perhaps the most scathing account yet of Democrats privately vindicating concerns about the president’s mental health that for years had been dismissed as partisan smears.
At age 81, Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history, and throughout his tenure he has been hounded by concerns that he has been suffering cognitive decline, based on increasingly frequent public instances of odd statements, incoherence, tripping, and apparent fatigue and confusion, with polls finding majorities considered him too old to effectively serve a second term.
Democrats and their allies in the mainstream press have largely dismissed such concerns as unfounded; as recently as June 21, left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact attributed the narrative in large part to “videos of President Joe Biden that have been selectively edited or taken out of context.”
Just six days later, however, the narrative on the Left changed almost overnight with Biden’s performance against Trump in a debate hosted by CNN. LifeSiteNews’ Ashley Sadler described the president as “appear(ing) visibly unwell from the beginning of the debate, struggling with numerous answers (including, early in the debate, claiming to have ‘finally beat Medicare’), speaking with a hoarse voice, and frequently seeming vacant.”
Ever since, Democrat commentators, strategists, and activists have spoken openly about their fear and panic over winning the election if Biden remains their nominee, with the White House so far resisting calls for the president to bow out.
On June 29, Axios published a report detailing admissions from “current and former Biden officials” that the president is only “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., outside of which “or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.”
On July 4, New York Magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi published an even more damning story, about a “Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” based on off-the-record conversations with Democrat insiders who had been reaching out to her since January to relay their concerns as to whether Biden could “even make it to Election Day” that they developed after interacting with or seeing him up close.
“Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed,” Nuzzi wrote. “Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. At a White House event last year, a guest recalled, with horror, realizing that the president would not be able to stay for the reception because it was clear he would not be able to make it through the reception. The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not really be the acting president after all.”
“Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew,” she continued. “But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.”
Nuzzi recounted personally observing some of the same while following then-candidate Biden in 2020, who had “good days” of recognizing her and being as sharp and engaging as ever, but also “bad days” when “he was less animated. He stared off. He did not make eye contact. He would trip over his words, even if they were programmed in a teleprompter. On such occasions, he was hurried out of the venue quickly and ushered into a waiting SUV.”
When seeing Biden at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Nuzzi says she was taken aback by him looking “not quite plausible.”
“I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality,” she wrote. “He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said ‘hello.’ His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. ‘And what’s your name?’ he asked.”
After the photo op, she added, other reporters “made guesses about how dead (Biden) appeared to be, percentage wise. ‘Forty percent?’ one of them asked.”
National polling aggregations by RealClearPolitics and RaceToTheWH indicate a widening popular vote lead for Trump since the debate, with the former president’s leads in swing states translating to a seemingly durable Electoral College advantage over Biden.
International
Keir Starmer becomes new UK prime minister as Nigel Farage finally elected to Parliament
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/07/tvrd-ls-labour-leader-sir-keir-starmer-image-2024-07-05.jpg)
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
Britain’s Labour Party has achieved a historic majority of over 150 seats, following a general election with the second lowest voter turnout in almost 140 years, while Nigel Farage’s party took 4 million votes but only 4 seats in Parliament.
Britain has a Labour government with a historic majority of over 150 seats, following exit poll projections of the U.K. general election. Thursday’s July 4 vote saw the second lowest voter turnout since 1885, with only an estimated 60 percent of registered voters taking part.
Former lawyer Sir Keir Starmer is set to become prime minister when announced by King Charles today, having purged his party of left-wingers in a successful move to mimic the electoral success of Tony Blair.
4 seats for 4 million votes
Current projections say the Labour Party won 9.6 million votes and an estimated 412 seats, with the Conservative Party second with 6.6 million votes and 120 parliamentary seats. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK took over 4 million votes, making his insurgent populist party the third force in U.K. politics by the popular vote.
Due to the workings of the British electoral system, however, Reform gained only four seats at the time of writing. This result still sees Nigel Farage finally enter Parliament as the MP for Clacton, having failed to win in previous elections.
Hopes for “zero seats” for a Conservative Party widely acknowledged to have conserved nothing were dashed, yet the Labour landslide – the greatest since 1945 – sees the Tories lose over 250 seats in what could be their worst result since their party was founded in 1830.
Winner takes all
Many constituencies saw Reform overtake the Tory vote. Conservative voters who turned to Reform have cost the Tories an estimated 124 seats in splitting the vote. This follows changes to election boundaries made last year.
The U.K.’s constituency boundaries were changed in 2023 to reflect population growth within them, and to arguably “equalize” the numbers of people voting per MP. The causes and demography of this population growth were not explained in reports, nor did any address the obvious mismatch between Welsh, Scottish, and English constituencies.
While the extreme left-wing Scottish National Party lost 37 seats, the eight it held onto were returned by only 666,000 votes. In Wales, the equally progressive Plaid Cymru won four seats with only 194,000 votes cast for the Welsh “nationalist” party.
As a result of this system, the liberal-globalist Labour Party will enjoy a record majority on a vote share lower than their right-liberal “conservative” and right-populist opponents.
Lower vote share, record low turnout?
The former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn won his seat as an Independent in Islington. In the last election he contested as leader, he won 40 percent of the vote – but narrowly lost to Conservative leader Theresa May in 2017.
The current Labour vote share is expected to be lower than that won by Corbyn, at around 36 percent of votes cast. Yet the overall number of votes is, according to one expert, expected to be one of the lowest in decades.
As the Hindustan Times reported, “Prof. Sir John Curtice, the psephologist who led the team that produced the exit poll, indicated that early results align with expectations of a low voter turnout.”
Speaking to the BBC, Curtice explained: “We may discover we are heading towards one of the lower turnouts of general elections in postwar electoral history.”
Curtice warned that the low turnout he expected was due to voter indifference – to what George Galloway has called the “uniparty” politics of the U.K.
“The Left are globalists now” said Galloway in a March 22 podcast, in which he called for an exit from NATO and condemned the U.K.’s involvement in the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Curtice appeared to agree with the sentiment about establishment politics, concluding there was “not that much difference between Conservative and Labour in much of what they were offering the electorate.”
In recent days, former U.K. Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary David Cameron admitted on camera that the British policy on the Ukraine war was “fixed,” and that no change would come with a Labour victory. The power to change foreign policy is clearly outside that offered to the British by liberal democracy.
Whilst Galloway himself certainly offered a different choice, he lost his Rochdale seat to the Labour candidate. Parliament will be far less interesting due to his absence.
Notable losses
Parliament has lost its champion of the vaccine injured, however, as Andrew Bridgen lost his seat in a four-way race won by Labour. Other absences include former ministers and high profile Tory MPs.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss lost her seat, as did Zionist Defence Minister and former B’nai B’rith youth leader Grant Shapps. Well known Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg was defeated in Somerset. Many high profile Tories are now out of Parliament, with the former Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker saying “Thank God I’m a free man” on losing his seat in Wycombe.
What the future holds
Labour under Starmer has promised a “mission-driven” government. This mission appears to be strongly globalist in flavor.
Starmer has removed candidates from his party who held strong left-wing and Israel-critical positions. He is widely believed to have moved the party to the “center” to secure a mandate to govern.
The program he has in store does not resemble an abrupt transition to socialism. There is talk of taxing non-state schools, and rumors Starmer will increase income and inheritance tax – to redistribute the wealth of the British to a voter base expanded by over 11 million immigrants since 2011.
A further 6 million are expected in the next 10 years.
The Labour Party under Starmer has a plan to “Change Britain.” This plan is expected to go beyond its 10 headline promises to transfer state power to globalist-aligned NGO-like structures and other bodies independent of Parliament, providing for a permanent continuity of policy. Labour under Starmer has been as fastidious in “purging” anyone who stands for its founding principles, as has the defeated Conservative Party.
The uncertain future of liberal globalism
What is notable about this landslide is that it comes as a result of voter disaffection, with a lower turnout overall, and mounting exasperation with the political settlement of “uniparty” politics.
As Europe – and especially France – risks political instability in its attempts to lock populists out of power, the future for Britain looks less like socialism and more like the last hurrah of business as usual.
Populists are now in Parliament, albeit in a capacity which fails to reflect their level of support across the country. It is their voice which will provide a meaningful opposition to the liberal-globalist agenda, whose power internationally is in terminal decline.
The same can be said of the Labour Party, whose power is purchased in a context of exasperation with establishment politics. This victory is the verdict of a broken system. How long it can prevail against the tide of the times is the question.
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