North West goes to polls as Farage eyes ownership of Europe debate

Achtung! Europe goes to the polls to elect a new Führer today, and Britain wants no part of the insanity. That’s why people will be turning out by the imperial mile to have their say on a continent-wide political edifice which those currently wresting the nation’s steering wheel have deemed to be malignly and cynically undemocratic. 

The fact that nobody in the UK remotely understands how the European political system works is just another good reason to wish it didn’t exist, of course. Nobody understood Jeux Sans Frontieres, we might reflect. We cancelled that, after a couple of series. It’s A Knockout, as any fool well knows, pissed on it.

The notion that by Sunday night Nigel Farage will be the most mandated politician in the country with respect to the European question should give pause for thought to those on all sides of the tug-of-love

So as we tramp life’s greased inflatable in our cart-sized rubber plimsolls towards a destiny which none of us voted for, it would perhaps be wise to take another detour into the polling booth at some point in the day, while the opportunity is still availed to us to vote ‘For’ or ‘Against’ the kind of cartoon gangsterism which comes round only once in a National Breakdown. 

There may be many more good reasons for voting Leave than Remainers would care to admit - the wholesale re-branding of the working class as a seething mass of ham-faced dimwits may well be one - but the notion that by Sunday night Nigel Farage will be the most mandated politician in the country with respect to the European question should give pause for thought to those on all sides of the tug-of-love.

Whether Farage’s electoral coronation is, or is not, an outcome which salts your reveries, you might want to scrawl an ‘X’ on the matter this time around - because the political landscape, as we know, is likely to change in the coming days.

In point of fact, you might think that while in the grip of the unceasing nightmare, the party calling itself ‘Change’ would poll well whenever YouGov’s team of cold callers ring round the elderly - and anyone else lonely enough to pick up a landline call these days - to ask them about their voting intentions. Bear in mind it’s the elderly-landline demographic which has been oiling this government’s conveyor belt of second-chances for the past three years. 

To identify a yearning for change, though, would be to fundamentally misread the mood of the nation. After three years stuck on the Brexit Bus Mystery Tour everyone is so biblically fucked off with civilisation as we know it that the perverse pleasure to be taken from the masonry falling all around us is the only thing keeping many people sane. Perhaps that’s what’s coming down the handset to the pollsters. People don’t want Change - they want War, basically. Fuck the sad-sacks at Change. The War Party would clean up in this election, if only they had the guts to stick their piggy little heads above the parapet. 

Watch this space, fuckos, and look out for #dunblanehoax coming down the greasy mindpipe, somewhere along the line

In their lamented absence it’s the Brexit Party who look set to do the damage – as sports pundits and would-be lotharios like to say. Yes, that’s the outfit registered barely a few baneful weeks ago – quite possibly by that advisor to Nigel Farage, Raheem Kassam, who thinks the gun laws should be revoked. Is he still on the scene? You’d think that being advised by a Muslim who wants the right to bear arms would be unpopular on the doorstep for the leader of the Britain’s leading send-‘em-back political movement. Not so, it seems. 

Watch this space, fuckos, and look out for #dunblanehoax coming down the greasy mindpipe, somewhere along the line. Oh, and remember: there’s nothing you can’t hoodwink the British electorate over with a shit-eating grin and the flash of a well-rehearsed drinking elbow.

Trailing pitifully behind these political giants are the minor parties: Labour, whose actual position on Brexit is said to have been coughed up at a conference fringe meeting last year, an incident its foot-soldiers incessantly claim to have been missed by the MSM; the Strong & Stable party, still wildly popular in the shires; the Liberal Democrats, who having been made to stand in the corner for the last nine years for having given the Tories the matches to set fire to the country, have now been allowed to return to their seats on a let’s-put-it-behind-us basis; and the Greens, currently enjoying a bounce because they know that we’re all going to die anyway.

Bend over....what you need to know

The UK has twelve European parliamentary constituencies, each of them represented by between three and ten MEPs, depending on size. Who wins these seats is decided by a system of proportional representation called the D’Hondt method – to the squeamishly patriotic, no doubt, the electoral equivalent of a German toilet, where the results are more readily available for inspection before the waste is finally disposed of. 

Thus, there are a total of 73 UK MEPs elected every five years to serve in the 751 member European parliament. Our own constituency is North West England and we’re represented by a total of eight MEPs. You vote, simply, for whichever party you favour; the seats being allocated in accordance with each party’s share of the vote.

Currently we’re represented by three Labour, two Conservative and three Independent MEPs. Each of the main parties in this election (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Brexit and Change UK) are fielding eight candidates, in the theoretical hope of scooping all eight seats. That means a candidates list longer than your average Diane Abbott troll thread. 

The vote share could be set to change radically, this time around, as YouGov’s latest opinion poll in the North West has Brexit on 32%; Labour on 29%; the Lib Dems on 13%; the Conservatives on 9%; the Greens on 7%; UKIP and Change UK tied on 3%.

At last week’s Mayor-making Sir Richard Leese shouted down the latest attempt by the Lib Dems to petition the council to publicly endorse a Peoples’ Vote

If that picture is replicated in today’s poll then Brexit will win three of the eight seats in the constituency; Labour will hold on to its three; with the Conservatives hanging on to one and the Lib Dems picking up one. That reflects a nation-wide surge which has seen the Farage bandwagon accelerate to an eighteen-point lead in the opinion polls, with the Lib Dems a distant second and support for the two main parties about as visible as the subscribers list for Spanking Digest.  

All of which suggests that from next week there will be a mandate for Farage to hold forth as the most authentic spokesman of the will of the British people when it comes to questions of Europe, beer, handguns, private health insurance or the decline of traditional British weasel-coursing. His party will dominate the UK’s allocation in the European parliament – for the short time before Brexit itself finally comes to pass, perhaps – and with the Remain vote split the initiative will be with the no-dealers.

Meanwhile, politicians and faith leaders of this parish have been united in condemnation at Tommy Robinson’s attempts to shill his ideological hooliganism, hereabouts, as an opportunistic independent candidate.

“We have to deal with that,” affirmed Pat Karney to this website, in the manner of an SAS captain looking forward to bringing hostages out of the Congo.   

Would it help if some would speak up for what they actually believe in? At last week’s Mayor-making Sir Richard Leese shouted down the latest attempt by the Lib Dems to petition the council to publicly endorse a Peoples’ Vote – this despite the overwhelming majority for Remain among the Labour group and the Mancunian electorate.

“We’re just abiding by the national policy set at the conference,” came the explanation after the fact. And that was that question effectively spanked into touch.

Nigel Farage portrait, credit Charlie Clift.