They think it's all over ...

Actually, you won't hear a peep about yesterday's election on the news or read a word in the nationals, because we've all got to pretend we don't know what happened until Sunday night, after the last EU subject nations have voted. Already it's safe to assume that the Brexit Party have scored big and Labour and the Tories have been creamed. However, steps are already underway to undermine the validity of that vote -

Change UK (CUK) claim that many of their members were unable to find their way to the polling stations as the little map on the poll cards was not in colour and didn't look like TomTom. "Change UK voters have been wandering the streets utterly lost, clutching their poll cards and were still looking for somewhere to vote at 10pm" said a spokesperson

Remain Alliance took the example of Dan Snow, who claimed a crocodile in a Brexit Party waistcoat was delivered inside his postal vote "I thought it was the postman playing a joke, but all over the New Forest hundreds of little Brexit Party crocodiles in Teal waistcoats have been gummed into the vote envelopes and in some cases they have eaten the ballot forms" said Dan

Momentum claimed a shortage of milkshakes had prevented many of their members from voting "The comrades won't turn out just to put a cross in a box" said Comrade Spart "They need a bit of street action, know what I mean? But it was warm and most of the milkshakes accidentally got drunk"

A Soros-funded 'migrants taxi' organisation claimed that rigorous checks by electoral officials were preventing illegal migrants from registering to vote "I mean honestly, we've arranged for over 1,000 Afghans, Iraqis and Somalis to come over in stolen boats in the past few weeks but barely a score have managed to get on the electoral register. The system is biased towards people who can read and write English and who have a legal right to be in the UK. This is unfair to global migrants"

LibDems claimed their vote had been sabotaged because there were more than three parties on the ballot forms "It was deliberately intended to confuse our supporters, who expect only three boxes and look for the one that isn't Labour or Conservative. This time the papers were as long as your arm with loads of boxes. This totally confused our members, many of whom reported making crosses at random on the form"

Guy Verhofstadt claimed Britain's vote was unfair because Belgium was not allowed to participate in the vote "Had perfidious Internationalist Britain acted fairly and invited the populations of Belgium and Luxembourg to participate in the elections, as is their right as loyal Europeans, the result may be very different. This constant pandering to British nationals is destructive and anti-European"

Update 11.50
...It is now!

Well, today's the day

For those of you voting today - which should be all of you unless like me you've already voted - I can only offer the advice given yesterday by Conservative Home to members of my Party.

Well, last night she barricaded herself into Number Ten and refused to meet any of her ministers. No doubt Hammond, Sedwill and others dependent on her for their own survival are even now urging her to hang in there, but I expect it's all over.

This election is good for one thing - bringing the Party's closet LibDems out. Osborne and Heseltine are both out, and Major is wriggling with frustration at feeling unable to publicly follow them.

May's utter stupidity means a Conservative vote in the region of 4 - 6%. Dan Hannan may be out of a job, but he should have been anyway by now, so nothing to be sorry for.

So taking ConHome's sage advice, I can only say to you all

 
Update
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HM is visiting Heathrow today - and looking quite stunning

Three varieties of Remain fanatics

Of the Remainer minority in the Referendum, only a small number are the sort of Remainer fanatics so disturbed by losing that they are prepared to condone any trickery, any betrayal, any perversion of democracy and even violence to deny their defeat. And of that small number of fanatics, there are I think three varieties.

First are the (generally) youthful, naive and selfish. They are not driven by any ideological or economic concerns or any doubts over Britain's future as an independent nation but purely by what they see are their personal losses. They have a sense of entitlement to 'stuff' they imagine is free, such as Erasmus, or Euro railcards, that the EU have cleverly spent taxpayers' money to shower on them for just this reason. Their chance to lig around the EU like gypsies at someone else's expense may be curtailed, they fear. These are the milkchuckers, the silly street rabble draped in EU rags.

Secondly are the more altruistic who genuinely do have economic fears, or fears that we can simply not flourish as a nation without being part of the embrace of the Federast empire. For these I have the greatest sympathy. All I can answer to their fears is that many of them are contrived and invented by cynical users such as the former Chancellor or the current one who use such lies to manipulate public opinion. Their genuine concerns are being used to stir them to anti-democratic behaviour. I think poor Andrew Adonis is in this category; an effete, naive and foolish fop stomping his foot in well-intentioned frustration.

Finally are the ideologues, the zealots committed to the European Empire. These are the Grieves, Soubrys, Starmers and Thornberrys, the Boultons, O'Briens and Graylings. The civil service. The entire bien-pensant patrician establishment, the political class. Globalists all. Their nation means little to them in the scheme of things; they owe allegiance to supranational masters. Of all the remainers, these are the most deadly - and the sole class of remainer fanatic against whom we should exert our time and energy.

Robert Tombs writes today in the Telegraph about extremist Remainers but lumps all three types together as though they were a homogeneous rump. They are not. He's better I think at defining Leavers - but fails to demonstrate that Brexit is about so much more than Brexit.

Millions seem set on voting resoundingly for Brexit at the European elections. They are angry with politicians but not intimidated by the future. I realised that we might well vote to leave the EU when I saw a Eurobarometer poll (carried out by the EU itself) in 2013, showing that Britain was the only member country in which the majority believed they could better face the future outside the EU. This belief reflected a realisation that the EU was failing, and a confidence based on Britain’s history that it could succeed.

Watching the Brexit Party's London rally via iPhone clips on Twitter yesterday evening I felt, as a Conservative Party member, a little like a plump lamb at a kebab convention. But such thoughts are for the weekend. For today, congratulations to Nigel and TBP and all my fervent wishes for you to smash the polls tomorrow. 

Politicians still don't get it: They're not special

This week we're being treated to the spectacle of our Westminster politicians playing out games far divorced from the reality of most lives. The problem is that they still don't get it. You may have noticed that there's a Conservative leadership race underway, with a candidate meeting yesterday arranged for the press at which senior Tories preened and demonstrated just how out of touch they were with the real world. It was painful. They did a great job of telling us in what high regard they held themselves, and that it was unreasonable if we did not love them as much as they love themselves. Elsewhere, Tom Harris wrote a piece  explaining that matters such as picking a party leader were far above the capacity of we ordinary folk, and it was something best left to professional politicians. And today, William Hague takes a break from oil-wrestling with his driver to tell us to leave everything to the politicians - that we we can get on peacefully with our dreary lives without bothering our silly heads about these things.

Titanic's fate is a frequent meme for the future of the EU. But it is not only the EU that is sinking beneath the waves, but our own political elite. The expenses scandal ten years ago should have been the catalyst for widespread and fundamental reform of parliament, but instead they picked a few scapegoats to serve jail time and covered up the crimes of the rest. People haven't forgotten.

Over 180 years ago the Chartists foresaw the danger of not only the folie de grandeur that being in parliament could induce, but the proclivity to corruption, venality and above all the danger of neglecting to represent those they were sent to Westminster to represent. So the Charter set a maximum term for MPs of one year. It was the only one of the Six Points that we have not achieved since 1838.

What will it take to bang it into the heads of our Westminster elite that they're not special?

Light dawns on the Political Class

For the second time in about a week there are signs that the issues that are driving the electorate, and to which the political elites have been so far blind and deaf, are finally emerging into their consciousness. Today it is Janet Daley in the Telegraph who shines the torch - and I hope the 'graph will forgive me for quoting her at greater length than is normal here;

(Parliament's failure to deliver Brexit) is not the real democratic scandal. The discussion that should be dominating the public debate is whether true self-government within nation states can remain possible in an age of globalisation. In a world where international players dominate economic and geopolitical reality, can the idea of an elected government accountable to its own populations survive?

The Remain lobby says, in so many words, that it cannot. Indeed, this is their principle argument: the world is too big for parochial little guys who want to make their own way with their own leaders making decisions on their behalf. At least, that is what they say when they deign to argue at all. Mostly they just smear their Leave opponents as bigoted know-nothings. But the terms of that abuse all add up to this one significant point: Britain cannot go it alone in the way for which it has been renowned, with only its unique institutions and the judgement of its own population to guide it. The world is a different place now: you have to belong to a much bigger conglomerate whose authority must take precedence over your piddling little outfit if you are to have any chance of competing for business, making your mark, having your voice heard, etc, etc.

This may or may not be true. (Most of the factual evidence suggests that it is not.) Either way, it is the argument that must be called out. It must be seen for what it is with all its deeply unattractive implications. This is what the case for Remain really amounts to: the democratic nation state is the past. The corporatist global bloc is the future.

There you have it. It is a political division between Globalists and Internationalists, between those who believe in the supremacy of supranational organisations such as the EU, IMF and UN and those who believe in the supremacy of the nation State. Can we determine our own future or must our potential, our wealth, the rewards for our children all be decided in the boardrooms of the global corporates and the corrupt plenums of unelected technocratic supranationalists?

What is considered to be extraordinary but actually isn't is the extent to which we - the ordinary folk, the little people - are alive to the key issues when the patrician elite at the centre of power are blind and deaf to them. We, after all, are the first to be affected; we are neither dumb cattle nor ill-educated political fodder. We are intensely sensitive to the things that matter. As Daley writes

It is that inexorable logic that is sensed by so many of the dissident “populist” forces in Europe and even beyond the EU. For there is a critical loss of confidence in government in much of the democratic West: a sense that what was once one’s own country is being run by some world-dominating club to serve its own interests, and that this global hegemony regards ordinary people with contempt (“They don’t care what we think”.)

We have fought long and hard for democracy, for the secret ballot and universal suffrage, for the freedom to form and associate in political parties. That is why Farage's simple message - It's Democracy - resonates so strongly through every part of the electorate.

And Daley is quite right - until our parties align as either Globalist or Internationalist, we will not have a settled demos.