WHO TO VOTE FOR IN THE U.K. ELECTION

The Kremlin-backed gammon-whisperer is back amongst us!

by Colin Liddell

The answer to this question really depends on how low or high info you are as a voter. If you are low info, just go with your heart, or don't bother voting. At the last election in 2019, the biggest group of voters were the people who didn't bother to vote.

Whether you vote with your heart or stay home, your vote (or non-vote) will probably be wasted and/or help someone you don't want to win to win. Welcome to "first past the post" democracy!

If, however, you are a high info voter, you will know a bit about your registered constituency, and will probably be forced to vote for a candidate you don't really like in order to stop a worse candidate winning. But it's also highly likely that you'll have a constituency where voting tactically won't really be an option because the most likely winners will both be reprehensible. In that case, all you can do is vote with your heart again for a candidate that best represents your views - a combined protest and wasted vote.

In my home constituency back in Scotland, for example, the sitting crypto-Irish SNP MP is stepping down, and it's probably a toss-up between a gay Labour "Deep State" candidate and a shrill SNP activist, who is also possibly crypto-Irish (I haven't had the opportunity to find out yet). The Tory candidate is unlikely to win, especially under present conditions. Also, there are a few red flags about him, which it is unnecessary to go into here. Reform UK meanwhile have managed to dig up someone to stand.

If the Tories were doing a good job managing the complexities of immigration, I would be inclined to vote for them on the off chance that the Tory would come through the middle in a three-horse race. Or at least cast my vote as a show of support. 

Compared to the inherently "open borders" Labour and SNP, the Tories are still marginally better on this vital issue. But they have also "shat the bed" on immigration, from what I can see. I don't think it's realistic for Britain to be totally against immigration, as many in the DR wish. This is just LARPy. But it should be limited, managed, and well run. This is the opposite of what the Tories have done.

Their policies are a mixture of pointlessly draconian mixed with recklessly laissez faire, essentially to signal hard to gammon voters while allowing their pals to make easy money in the fake UK public-private economy, where public services are farmed out to "mushroom" companies and agencies that spring up overnight to provide substandard services and cream off the profits.

This article in the Guardian, "UK care agencies accused of exploiting foreign workers caught in debt traps," shows you that the Tories have been basically conniving in a massive "human trafficking" scheme to supply questionable cheap labour to the Brit welfare state and enormous private profits to the suitably well-connected.  

A few quotes to give you the flavour:

"David Neal, who raised the alarm about the care visa system when he was the government’s borders inspector, said: 'As soon as we looked at social care visas, we realised there was exploitation going on.' He added: 'Throughout my inspection, I was thinking of the Windrush scandal and there are echoes of it here: the state inviting workers to come to this country to help us in the labour market and then abandoning them.'

Lawyers say UK care providers who promise regular full-time work and then offer exploitative or underpaid jobs on arrival may have broken the law. The sponsorship system means an individual’s visa status is tied to a particular employer, meaning many feel trapped." 

Of course, Neal is no longer in his job. Surprise! Surprise!

"Neal’s report, which was published after he had been sacked from his role, warned that the Home Office did not have sufficient oversight of the visas being offered. 

He found hundreds of certificates of sponsorship – documents needed to secure a skilled worker visa – being granted to one company that was pretending to be a care home and thousands to a company without its knowledge. For every 1,600 employers licensed to sponsor foreign workers, there was only a single inspector."

Neal was sacked by this fast-tracked creation of an earlier wave of NHS cheap labour importation, James Cleverly, who is also one of the favourites to succeed Sunak as Conservative Party leader. You couldn't make it up!

Why was Cleverly so eager to reduce oversight of "medical" work visas?

Neal claims he was fired because he stood for oversight of the whole dirty process of agencies using "social care" visas to traffic in migrant workers. One might want to look into who Cleverly's friends are in this case.

In fact, you could compare the way that shoddy agencies have been exploiting "social care" visas to the way private capital has been ripping off the privatised UK water sector, and then pumping out record amounts of sewage into UK waters while running down existing infrastructure.

Each mainstream UK party, it seems, has its own way of fucking over the British voter. Unfortunately, punishing whichever one is more recent in its misdeeds only puts the other one in power. But the Tories are definitely worthy of being punished.

So, is Reform UK the scourge to do it with? My view is that voters should be high info and vote tactically where they can. People like Cleverly aside, the Tories are still better than Labour on immigration. But in places where the predecessors of Reform UK (UKIP and the Brexit Party) have done well in the past, like in the North and the East of England, then a vote for Reform could have a salutary effect.

Now, I'm also of the opinion that Farage and Reform UK (and their obvious boosters GB News) are very much part of a Kremlin influence operation. I won't go into the details here, but there are just too many red flags to dismiss this. This is unfortunate, but it's not all bad. A healthy showing for Reform is unlikely to save Putin's bacon, and Farage has already served his "Kremlin purpose" by "assisting" Britain exiting the EU. 

To stop Madman Putin from savaging a fellow European nation, it is much more important that Joe Biden beats Donald Trump in the US election later this year, so I support Biden in that two-horse race. In the case of the UK, however, we can afford to punish the Tories without too much damage to the Ukraine. Starmer will follow more or less the same course as Sunak, and whatever happens in this election, Farage won't be PM after July 4th. 

If Reform break through and go on to replace/ subsume the Tories, the earliest at which a pro-Kremlin Farage could be PM would be 2029. By then, I would guess, Putin will be in the same place as his old friend Yevgeny Prigozhin. If not, we'll cross that bridge when and if we come to it. In the meantime, those wanting to push against the "open borders" nonsense of parties like Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems, and the SNP have to vote in a way that firms up "the Right."

This means tactically. And where your vote is likely to be wasted, your best option is to throw it on the pile that best signals to the establishment where your concerns lie. For those opposed to the massive immigration mess of this and past governments, that probably means the Kremlin-tarnished Reform UK and Nigel Farage.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).