The Coming Apocolypse

This is a blog that will hopefully be wrong. Hopefully, in a few years time, I’ll be able to add a postscript here showing how wrong I was, and this post will be hilarious footnote in political wrongheadedness.

Until then – this is the story of how Nigel Farage becomes Deputy Prime Minister in 2020.

It’s May the 6th, 2020. Teresa May returns to 10 Downing Street, apparently victorious. But a deal needs to be cut. Polls in 2017 – pre Article 50 – were forecasting an easy win for the Tories. A shambolic Labour Party in opposition, determined to be a party of opposition yet unable to do anything but oppose itself, a small but vociferous SNP bloc, and a Liberal movement in the Lib Dems that had been safely neutered via its association with the Cameron Government and its willingness to accept all the blame, but not fight for any of the credit. In 2017, this would have been a landslide. But not today.

But Teresa May had spent the last few years making deals. And it was time to make a new one. And the only offer on the table came from That Man. And he wanted one thing – high office. And what else could she offer? Deputy PM. It had killed off Clegg. Maybe it would kill Him off too.

There are lots of elements that will need to come together to make this situation come true – but I honestly believe they are all already in position ready to see Britain lurch as far to the right as America did in 2016.

Article 50

The obvious factor will be our negotiations to leave the EU. Teresa May does not hold her own destiny in her hands, bur rather in the hands of 27 other states. For Teresa May to survive 2020, she needs to come back with a deal, and, to put it bluntly, she won’t get one. We need to show we’re winning, 27 other states need to show we are losing. If May comes out of the negotiations in 2019 with anything less that a minted deal for the UK, then she’s in trouble.. But there’s a key here – ANY deal will infuriate the right. If we walk away on WTO terms, they’ll be angry once the loss of financial services, business and trade kicks in. Too soft and she angers the right, too harash and pig headed and she angers the left AND the right, outraged at the damage to the vital financial services sector. Europe, the perennial sore of the Tory Party, will be its undoing as so many times before.

Banks’ Right

For those unaware, the major donor the UKIP is a charming man by the name of Aaron Banks – and thanks to a tangle with his kind, I got msyelf embroield in a right old shitstorm on Twitter last year. He’s also the major funder behind grim anti-EU outfit, Leave.EU. Most of the awful stories from the EU referendum came via Leave.EU, and they’re still very much at it these days. The key thing here is the relationship between Banks and UKIP – it’s dead. Banks has relasied how effective Leave.EU’s model was in the referendum – strong on social media, strong on reactionary news, negative/attack dog rhetoric and loose on actual fact. It was modelled heavily on the US way of campaigning, and managed to galvanise a grassroots campaign (effectivly gamifying campaign work) and control the news cycle. Remember during the referendm how all the stories were ‘Remain reacts to Leave statement x’? Bingo.

This blog has taken me ages to write, mainly because the news keeps changing and leaping ahead. Since I started writing this paragraph, Andy Wigmore, one of Banks’ ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ has published an image for the ‘Patriotic Alliance’. This will be a new movement, presumably bankrolled by Banks and the other major UKIP funders now that UKIP has served its function. They have three years to kill UKIP off, and the quickest way to do that is to cut its funding and watch it wither on the vine, for the majority of UKIP’s support based, the major attraction was Farage – and he’ll be the major driver behind the new Patritoic Alliance. It won’t have a leader, as such. It will be a collection of, I assume, ‘independent’ candidates, broadly signing up a general formula but with as much latitude as possible within that to, basically, win. So, hospital under threat? They’ll support it. Hospital bosses wasteful? They’ll oppose it. Whatever works.
There will be basic things they will sign up to – immigration control, tax cuts, small public sector, Lords reform, high defence spending etc. The main benefit, if you can call it that, is that it can be whatever it wants and as it won’t be per se a party, it can disown what it wants. 

One constant millstone around Farages neck was the shitness of his company – a bunch of swivel eyed pasty racists – who couldn’t help dropping embarrassing gaffes like hot racist pasties. No matter how much he played his ‘Normal man of the people’ act, some local councillor from Clacton would pop up and say that Britain was better when marmalade pots had Golliwogs on them. This movement won’t care about that, it doesn’t want council seats – it will train it’s eyes squarely on 2020. Whatever it claims to do, whatever it says it’s for, it has only one goal -get Farage elected. The rest is just a handy tool to the very special brand of electoral trolling he specialises in. 
Will it work? Banks has already said it will be about 200 candidates, in seats with ‘unpopular’ MPs. So, for that, read black, female, left wing etc etc. It aims to raise the age of MPs to at least 40, and abolish the House of Lords. It will be scary. It will hate the young, the disabled, the liberal, the fair and the just. If you are not white, male, rich and over 40, it will not just refuse to represent you, it will actively hate you.

And it will do so well, it will get somewhere in the region of 40 seats. It will elect Farage after a campaign of utter sewer level vitriol. And it will prop up a Tory government with a leader so spineless and in need of support, she will end up governed by the gabby, fag breathed, frog eyed loser sat next to her.

What’s the point of Labour?

By 2020, Labour will be dead. Corbyn will not go anywhere, and the very special leadership election system established by Ed Miliband means that he can’t be effectively removed as the membership is very much in the pocket of Momentum. There’s very little to add here. Without a major change in Labour, it’s toast, ad the Lib Dems have such a long road to go on the get back to where they came from, they’re toast too. 

Your choice in 2020 will be the right, the further right, a dead duck or a donkey.

The great imponderable – Scotland

We now know that the SNP are officially looking for Indyref2. May has to give ground here – though that said, electorally, Scotland is dead Tory territory, is basically an SNP stronghold, and can’t get any more. Westminster can say no to another Referendum, and this is exactly kind of great imponderable decision on which Prime Ministers are made. How does May react? The spirit of the Westminster/Scotland means that UK Gov would probably agree to another Referendum but the bone of contention will be when this should be held – and in this, are the problems. May has two options – during the Brexit negotiations, or in the run up to a General Eelction when she wants to appear a strong, committed and successful leade, and, by that point, may have very little to work on barring whatever deal we end up with. Losing Scotland in a Referendum that UK Gov can’t really prepare for or fight would bring on an immediate General Election in the middle of the Brexit negotiations, and after that, I’d say all bets are off for what happens next