One in a hundred Brits is drinking the alcohol level equivalent of eight other citizens. These people vote. I don’t think Nigel Farage is doing his cause any good with lofty comments from the sidelines about UKIP. Nor is the Guardian when it condemns the bombing of Somalia without reference to the history behind it. And framing Tommy Robinson for a revenge attack on Islamics is uncomfortably like blaming Jo Cox’s death on Brexiteers.
This is a much bigger percentage than the margin of victory in most elections. Should we now have breathalyzers outside polling stations?
But Nige, he also seems to be a bit of a dick. The last thing UKIP needs is a jockey handicapped by behaviour as well as Party chaos, First Past the Post and the Britain First breakaway. The only thing likely to heal UKIP is, um, Nigel Farage.
The Guardian eh, doncha love it? This was their lead story earlier today. Although you’ll never see the agenda spelt out in their columns, this is the summary:
* Somalians are dead. They are African. Black lives matter.
* More nasty US air strikes why oh why oh why?
* On Trump’s direct orders, because every last iota of nastiness in the world is down to Donald Trump.
….to which my retort would be:
* Somalia is the world’s main industrial-level supplier of piratical, murderous rapists. All lives matter regardless of ethnicity, creed or demographics.
* Doubtless Washington has its own nefarious geopolitical reasons for the air-strikes: but ports and tourist destinations on the Western coast of India have been racked to near ruin by Somalian pirates. Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth.
* Somalian pirates show zero remorse for their crimes, and Somalia was a basket case long before Trump opened his first flop-joint. He’s an asshole, but he didn’t start this fire.
Over at the Daily Telegraph this afternoon was this object lesson in groundless smearing:
Setting aside the fact that Cardiff-born self-styled avenger Darren Osborne (who allegedly ploughed into Islamic worshipers) represents thus far a unique UK example of direct action against Jihadists – a remarkable fact in its own right – this headline attempt to incriminate Robinson is ever so quietly contradicted later in the piece by this extract:
We live in a truly awful world now where I find myself defending those with whom I have little or nothing in common; but misrepresentation in the media to further a subjective agenda is wrong, wrong wrong. It is merely another attempt to vicariously pin the blame on a demon-figure via deliberately misleading connections. It is, in fact, Jo Cox and UKIP blamestorming, Take Two.
The mass intellectual failure to grasp this fundamental principle of citizen liberty is one of the more depressing features of the 21st century.
The Slog 