Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by. May marks The Mark Steyn Club's seventh birthday, and I thank profoundly all those First Month Founding Members who've opted to sign on for an eighth year. We hope, as the days proceed, that our Johnny-come-latelier members will want to do the same.
~As you know, two weeks from today my suit against the media censor Ofcom comes to the High Court of England. I shall be landing at Heathrow just as the UK election campaign kicks into what commentators insist will be "high gear". And yet I can muster zero interest in its outcome now that Nigel Farage has - for the second time - whiffed his rendezvous with destiny. Cometh the hour, cometh Nigel's absurd contention that he's unfortunately needed in America to get Trump across the finish line. Patrick O'Flynn, a favourite Steyn Show guest from the GB News days, writes:
Nigel Farage has blown his chance to destroy the Conservatives
Nigel Farage has announced that he will not be standing or leading the Reform party in the general election, putting his non-combatant status down to a clash with his work on the US presidential election.
What "work" on the US presidential election? To listen to Farage's blather, you'd think he was Chairman of the RNC or Trump's campaign manager. If you can identify a single US citizen unwilling to vote Republican until a British subject or any other foreigner recommends it, do let me know.
Yet, if anything, an early summer contest in the UK should have cleared a potential diary clash on that score and allowed him to participate in both.
What is this "participation" whose demands cut into so much of Nigel's time? Right now, the actual presidential candidate is only permitted by corrupt hack Judge Merchan to "participate" in the election one day a week and he seems to be making it work for him.
It seems far more likely that Sunak's 'ambush' election, compressing the time available for Farage to get an undercooked Reform operation into shape, has put the former UKIP leader off.
While he says he will do his 'bit' to campaign for Reform and support its leader Richard Tice, the harsh reality is that he has also just sent out a signal to millions of right-wing voters that he doesn't have faith in the brand or its prospects...
Without the X-factor that Farage could have brought to the party – as well as his generally phenomenal performance levels – we should now expect Reform's ratings to ebb away.
That seems the way to bet. So Farage has taken what O'Flynn calls "a Canada-style extinction event" for the miserable Tories - and the ensuing once-a-century party realignment - off the table. On GB News, Nige keeps assuring the remaining viewers that Rishi Rich only called an early election because of him, because Rishi is "scared" of him. Au contraire, it's the feeble Farage who's allowed Rishi to scare him out of any meaningful role in the nation's future.
Yet Nigel is so out of it that, having been scared into what O'Flynn calls "non-combatant status", he's now "challenging" the PM to a debate:
I am challenging @RishiSunak to a live TV debate on immigration.
If he refuses, that will confirm the fact that he can't stop the boats.
No, it won't. It will confirm the fact that he's standing for Parliament and you're not. You can't have a leadership debate between the leader of a UK political party and the under-deputy-assistant-leader of the Trump Election Campaign, or whatever you're passing yourself off as this week. Otherwise, the leader of Macron's Moisturising & Exfoliating Team could insist on a debate.
The comments below the tweet are withering. That said, you could hardly have a better encapsulation of the state of the country after fourteen years of "Conservative" rule than a debate on UK immigration between two men who are planning to emigrate to America on July 5th (Rishi rather more lucratively).
~So the Conservatives will lose, but they will lose sufficiently non-"Canada-style" to stagger on. Which means the Cameron/May reinvention of the Tories as a party of unprincipled soft-left modish creeps will survive. At the indispensable Conservative Woman, another Steyn Show favourite Laura Perrins provides a grim summation:
This is what we got from 14 years of Tory Rule:
· Universal child benefit abolished.
· BUT external childcare funded from nine months old. (This SHOULD have been the biggest story yesterday – nine-month-old beautiful child of a solicitor and barrister killed at nursery. Taxpayer now funding this.)
· Gay marriage
· Criminal justice system literally collapsing, letting prisoners out early, not charging some offences, and (I forget the number) 100s of people on probation going on to kill someone.
· Lots of stabbing and mothers being stabbed in the street – latest one was in Luton on the school run.
· Absolutely ridiculous immigration numbers. Off the charts, so off the charts that even Labour pretend that they will do something about it.
· The only reason they pulled back from the transgender bullshit is because of the feminists.
This next bit's good:
For all the 'I'm socially liberal but economically conservative' conservatives out there, how did that work out for you?
· Oh yes, highest tax burden since the war.
· Inflation.
· Huge funding of ridiculous foreign wars and death to keep the military industrial complex going.
· And, the real jewel in the crown: lockdown. Not to forget either that falsely contrived 'exit from lockdown' – the mass unprecedented unsafe vaccination programme that we still do not know the full and terrible impact of.
So what does that leave? Oh, yeah: Brexit. First, Boris sold out the Union for the "Northern Ireland Protocol", which ensured that Brussels continued to control one of the four home nations, erecting internal frontiers within a supposedly sovereign state, so that you need the EU's permission if you want to take your Scottish terrier for a walking holiday in the mountains of Mourne.
Oh, and then Rishi sold out what's left in the "Windsor Framework", effectively backdooring England, Scotland and Wales into the Northern Ireland Protocol and ensuring that the UK's future is that predicted in a certain niche Canadian's satirical fancy - the Euro-equivalent of a princely state under the Raj.
~Meanwhile, reality marches on, disinclined to be interrupted by anything so footling as a six-week election campaign. A heart-rending headline from The Daily Mail:
We're stuck in a mouldy flat with our 11 children and one toilet - the council has done nothing to help us
Oh, my. This is the story of a young couple who came to the capital from Scunthorpe ...whoops, my mistake, from Afghanistan. They settled in Canning Town, where what the census calls the "White British" population is down under five per cent, but the council reckons with one more push they can get it below three and heading to statistically undetectable. Hence Wahidullah Safi, 35, and his bride Bibi, 45, now pregnant with their twelfth child:
His family came to the UK aided by the British Army in 2022 after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, although Mr Safi has been a resident of the UK for seven years as he works as a delivery driver.
I take it that, being a UK-resident delivery driver, Mr Safi was not one of the legions of Afghans working as a British Army "translator", the country's most popular occupation until about halfway through August 2021 and accounting for 73 per cent of the nation's GDP. So presumably the fecund Mrs Safi and several of her progeny were working as "translators" - is that it? Is that why the British Army needed to get them out a year after the fall of Kabul?
Incidentally, to judge from the photographs, several of their children appear to have been sired by Mr Safi courtesy of bargain flights back to Hamid Karzai International Airport. (Is that still the name? Or has it gone back to Sword of the Infidel Slayer International?)
One more point: A small mould-infested flat is no place to grow up, but what exactly is the appropriate level of public housing for a couple with twelve children? A thirteen-bedroom flat? A nine-bedroom flat? Seven? And how many of those does Newham Council have?
Or to put it another way: Why is it in the interest of the existing inhabitants of the United Kingdom to import the Safi family?
When I first started talking about demography, those who dismissed me as "alarmist" said that birth-rates were "certain" to fall as immigrants assimilated. Okay, let's suppose the Safi family's fertility falls by half in the first generation, so those twelve kids between them only deliver Mr Safi seventy-two grandkids. How many is your semi-transitioned daughter going to give you?
Here is a prediction: whether Conservative or Labour, Plaid Cymru or Sinn Féin win the UK election, the future of the country will continue to accelerate towards that previewed in the Safis' Canning Town flat - and still none of the parties will talk honestly about it.
~The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the Ginger Growler elle-même, knows the score. The London media have spent the spring going bananas over the Garrick being an all-male gentlemen's club, public outrage being so virulent that various luvvies, KCs and even the head of MI6 have been bounced into resigning from it, having been shocked to discover that the fetching young thing at the other end of the smoking room is not a lady but just a High Court judge who forgot to leave his wig in the cloakroom. Just days ago, the Garrick was forced to back down, and admit women. But men-only politics? Men-only hustings? Men-only photo-ops? No problem! Here is the Ginger Growler celebrating non-diversity at an all-male election meeting:
Leaked footage shows Labour's Angela Rayner literally begging Muslims for their vote, the absolute appeasement and groveling, embarrassing and shameful. pic.twitter.com/GYPHtAWZHK
— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 27, 2024
~By comparison with Mr and Mrs Safi, both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are irrelevant to the future of the United Kingdom. To be sure, Sir Keir will continue the constitutional vandalism of the Blair years: Labour will finally complete the century-long demolition of the House of Lords, replacing it with some "Assembly of the Nations and Regions" or whatever that will ensure the otherwise indistinguishable ranks of the left-of-centre party and the ever so teensy-weensily right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-centre party retain their monopoly of power - and that, whatever the name of the new upper chamber, such questions as the demographic transformation of an historic nation will never sully its debates.
So, in order to make it appear that this election is about something, Rishi Rich has proposed the return of "national service" for teenagers - ie, military conscription ...or at least pseudo-military: the nation's youth would be permitted to opt for the constabulary or fire brigade as well as the armed forces. From about ten minutes after the end of "national service" six decades ago, certain crusty old Shire Tories spent the Sixties and Seventies demanding its return as the cure for whatever passing fancies most revolted them - mods and rockers, joss-sticked hippies, nose-ringed punks...
All those crusty old Shire Tories are either dead or 130 years old, and equally demographically irrelevant are all the youthful excrescences they railed against. The young in London look like that Canning Town flat, and Rishi's got as much chance of getting them to do a tour of duty in Ukraine as he has of getting an Albanian sex-trafficker on a flight to Rwanda. More "British" Muslims signed up for Isis than to be soldiers of the Queen.
Where's this all headed? Nowhere good:
The St Johns Church in Hanley, Stoke dates back to 1737. In 2023 it was turned into a Mosque called the Darul Falah Centre.
A local man visited the site while being converted. The headstones of the dead were desecrated, ripped up & placed in a heap. Tarmac laid over graves.
A... pic.twitter.com/6uiavDKh0P
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) May 26, 2024
Thus the paradox of Brexit: Britons voted to "take back control", and, after this election, will have less of it than ever.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court two weeks from today.
We had a very busy holiday weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark revisiting a highly pertinent interview by the Hoover Institution's Peter Robinson. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date plumped for Alice Faye and Tyrone Power In Old Chicago, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week told the convoluted tale of the biggest hit ever to come out of Africa. Our marquee presentation was the fourth edition of Mark's new weekend audio show, and on Monday The Mark Steyn Show presented his traditional Memorial Day observances.
If you were too busy spending the weekend taking Rishi's election promises seriously, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
