..in this country, who are STUPID enough to vote for Farrago?
Have you seen the treacherous swine today, waving his little “contract” and spouting nonsense while the telly feed him the oxygen of publicity in tankfulls? Why aren’t we seeing the election addresses of the various Monster Raving Loony candidates around the country as well; they make a lot more sense than he does.
Shall we run a book on this? What do you reckon? A million? More? Less? There surely cannot be enough people dim enough to believe a word he says?
Perhaps we could pursuade the Chinese to find room for them in one of their “re-education” facilities? Perhaps we should open our own such facilities? Maybe we just need to explain gently to them that they are, sadly, being royally shafted by Mr. Frog-Face? Or maybe just cut the crap and inform them that they are witless sheep?
Of course, we could try to change their minds in more subtle and enlightened ways with patient logic, informed reasoning and the promise of new net curtains.
I got banned from Twitter for calling him and that other cunt Morgan treasonous cunts. I stand by my statement.
@Vulpes: While I’m tickled by the idea of gulags on UK soil, the discussion/soft furnishings option is prob the best one to take? Whatever works!
Farage is a very odd duck, indeed. I’m not sure whether his media work fuels the politicking or vice versa. LBC’s bugnut weekday schedule brings us Eddie Mair at 16.00 – essentially doing an elongated version of PM with a lot of bleedin’ ad breaks – followed up at 18.00 with Nigel’s phone-in. It’s Down The Line re-imagined by HP Lovecraft.
I can’t get – and don’t want to get – LBC, but I’d pay very good money to see Eddie go three rounds with Nigel, no holds barred, last man standing, winner takes all, get-out-of-jail-free in the event of a fatality.
@Vulpes: I’m Team Mair*. As a radio broadcaster, Farage has no ability to think on his feet and his ‘patter’ the lightness of a mahogany dining set.
*In my BBC counter-factual, Eddie still presents PM and ‘Wossy’ still does the Saturday 10 to 1 show on R2
Tickled by the idea of Gulags on UK soil?
G4S run a few “detainment” centres you might be interested in…
@Moose: I was tickled by Vulpes’ suggestion of ‘re-education’ before he settled on light bribery and a good talking to as a more apposite solution to win hearts and minds. Detainment centres scare the bejesus out of me!
Yeah, I had to do detention once at school, we sat there and copied out an essay about frogs. Pretty grim stuff.
I always preferred lines to a detention; you could sellotape two biros together, in order to reduce the work load to an effective 33 lines instead of 66.
If you got caught though, the penalty got doubled and you had to use a fountain pen. Chiz. Rotters.
Yarooo!
Farage is so transparently self-serving, and such an obvious twat that you can’t help but doubt the mental capabilities of anyone who’s says they’re going to vote for him. It’d be nice to try and reason with them but it’s some sort of weird article of faith with them, and therefore it would be a total waste of time.
There are people who shouldn’t continue to breathe the same air as the rest of us. He is one
Fewer than a few months ago , it seems. Brexit Party are polling 4-5% from a peak of 20+% back in the summer.
I think even they were appalled by the shower of mad, bad and dangerous-to-know MEPs they sent to Brussels. It was a bit of a laugh, but this is serious.
They can’t vote for him anyway – he’s not standing. Among the list of constituencies they’re still standing in after the deal with BJ is Barking, I was pleased to see. How apt.
I want Public Service Broadcasting to do a Brexit album. Loads of sound footage to choose from. In fact, I hereby and herewithin claim proprietorial copyright on the aforebespoke idea. (Which I’m willing to sell to PSB, or anyone else really, for £17 o.n.o..)
‘The Race For Disgrace’© perhaps?
I’ll buy that off you for a tenner. Which should still see me with a profit of 7 quid o.n.o., no overheads, if I’ve done my sums right.
The Ten Million Aliens album is dominated by vox pops from the Trump campaign of ’16. It is, inevitably, a rather depressing record.
Rhodri Marsden (ex-Scritti Politti) has released a Brexit-themed disco album. No, really.
Apparently it’s pretty good.
The R4 public opinion mic was out and about in Corby yesterday. Most of the airtime was given to some old dear who was a full on foreigner-hating swivel-eyed NF supporter. How long did they have to hang around to find her, I wonder?
I go to Corby fairly regularly with Offspring The Younger and it seems quite nice. And many of the residents are ex-steelworkers originally from Glasgow.
I’ve lived in Northamptonshire for most of my life and only been to Corby three times. Tis a dirty word in our house, or the punchline to a joke (usually “could be worse, you could be in Corby”).
Well the best bit, obviously, is the road out. But it’s not as horrid as I was led to believe. The Northants countryside is beatiful.
The indoor skate park (where OTY and his pals can occupy themselves for 4 hours) is amazing.
‘That’s what people who live in shit holes always say’, as I have said to The Light’s daughter who lives in Bolton, with possibly less the full possible amount of sympathy. Really, Northampton itself is a terrifying flashback to the sort of 80s Britain I hate to think of the rest of the country becoming when Brexit bites. It’s the only town we have ever driven out of where my other half has insisted on making sure the car doors are locked from the inside.
I heard that. Where did they go? A bingo hall. Surprise surprise. A real cross-section of the public you get in those places, of course.
Do the Trouser Press baby.
Less then appeared it would be some months ago, but, sadly, I suspect that the impact of the Brexit party will not be in votes but in helping to swing the mood of a large part of the electorate into believing that voting Conservative is the best option this time JUST because they have a deal that they can pass if they get a majority.
This will be regardless of what the other consequences of voting them back in will be because lots of people can’t see past “getting Brexit done” even if their previous political affiliations were not with the Tories.
Add to that Corbyn’s personal ratings and as a staunch Remainer, I’m extremely pessimistic about this election and suspect that we’ll see a Conservative majority, possibly even a big one.
Not directly related, but this clip says something about the current climate. I suspect that you could do a similar thing on a lot of British streets about Brexit.
Yup. Gormless, ill-informed, muppets in huge numbers on both sides of the pond. And in every other country on the planet.
Democracy = run the risk of getting shafted by the STUPID people.
Alternatives? Nope. Not that I can see.
Putin is probably one of the least unpleasant examples of an autocrat in full possession of the reins of power. Depressing isn’t it?
Extremely amusing Ainsley! You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Trump really can do no wrong in their eyes.
The Top 6 places in the UK album chart are currently held by Westlife, Celine Dion, Michael Ball & Alfie Boe, Lewis Capaldi, Take That and Ed Sheeran, and an Oasis compilation has just spent its 324th week on the chart.
I’m going for “quite a few.”
… the people who put the records in the charts? Yes, all 200 of them.
So what’s in Farage’s Contract? Apart from “Your £200 is in one of my offshore accounts. Cheers!”
Nick a few half-decent ideas to fool the political illiterati, stick them in a pamphlet and top the lot with a sneakily included commitment to make offshore money gambling and tax evasion far easier than it is even today. Bank a fast fat killing then fuck off out of it quick. Result. Trebles!!!
Idiot-baiting cynical bastard, selling nonsensical guff to the credulous and the aged
Just saw this in Updates and immediately and erroneously assumed it referred to my record proposal to PSB, as outlined above.
Michael Ball and Alfie Bowe?
I think many of the older people who like Fromage are the same people who bought “Release Me” and prevented “Penny Lane”/”Strawberry Fields Forever” getting to no. 1.
Frank Sinatra – “Oh, he’s nice, ain’t he.”
The Beatles – Spawn of Satan.
There is nothing more alarming/entertaining than overhearing conversations between this significant proportion of the over-70s about the 60s.
It’s incredible.
For many I don’t think they knew the 60s was the 60s until they saw a documentary on it in about 1978.
I met one last year (born 1944) who spoke like he’d fought in the war and of all the sacrifices he’d made.
Youngsters today, they don’t know they’re born.
Didn’t see a fresh orange until he was 5 years old = entitled to elect morons to run the country.
You posted while I was typing my comment below. I still think there should have been an upper age limit on those allowed to vote on Brexit as it in no way affects those over, say, 75 as much as those who are still of working age. My dad only left the country twice in his life, lives on a final salary pension and the proceeds of the massive rise in house prices since he bought his 3 bed London suburbs house in the late 50s for three grand. He has no interest in foreign travel (used to say “all foreigners* start at Calais,” except he used a word more usually heard on Love Thy Neighbour) and little understanding of modern commerce and supply chains yet he got to have a say in his children’s and grandchildren’s future. I don’t see him very often, it’s bad for my blood pressure.
Admittedly I’ve got 3 years to go before I hit your notional voting cut-off age, but if some young whippersnapper tried that one on me he wouldn’t know what hit him. I was born 2 years after the war ended, so remember rationing and all that, but I know exactly when the 60s were and what happened, thank you very much. And Brexit is the worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to the country (and me) and I can’t wait for the liars, charlatans and rabble-rousers responsible to be put in the stocks and pelted with eggs.
As someone wise once said, the thing about generalisations is you’re just chucking a rock into a crowd and hoping it hits someone who deserves to be hit by it.
As you were.
Yeah, I know Mike. We’ve had this exchange before and I don’t really mean to generalise but at what point do you say, “You’ve had your go at it, it’s time to let the next generation have their turn?”
You’ll be pleased to know that as well as being younger, you don’t seem to be anything like my dad.
Well, that’s something… I’ve done all I can for my own personal next generation, and as far as I can tell I’m not standing in anybody else’s way. I don’t see how depriving olds of the vote is going to solve anything, and anyway I keep being told that the ones dying off are cancelled out by new young voters. The younger generation who have been running the country since 2010 don’t seem to have achieved anything much…
They’re not young. They may not have chalked up very many years of life yet, but they were born ready-aged attitudinally, then fed through the Eton pipeline, which adds a couple of decades more, and then dropped into life at Westminster, which ages one terribly quickly I’m afraid. I mean look at that Cameron chappie, 90 if he’s a day.
My dad will be 91 in January and although he lived through the war, wasn’t old enough to be called up. I have heard it said that his generation “think they fought in the last war, even though they didn’t.” He won’t vote for NF though, despite voting Leave although I would expect him to vote for Boris.
I have been a big critic of Corbyn but now we are here – and it’s him or Johnson – I’m with Jezza all the way.
If the UK electorate vote for this Conservative government and give them a mandate to carry on running things, given all that has happened and everything we now know – then never mind the Brexit Party voters, I will have to conclude that the thickos have taken over.
I agree. And why can’t Corbyn stay neutral on Brexit? Negotiate some kind of off the shelf Norway deal – which should have been the direction from the start – and then put it to a referendum. Ditch all this year zero nonsense. Even for ardent leavers a Norway style deal could offer a stepping stone to something more concrete later on, depending on the circumstances. Why does everything have to be so binary and extreme?
It’s the only way to get all the fuss over before the hunting season proper starts.
In my hometown, the last public infrastructure project was the one approved by Dr Beeching. The local hospital has been sold despite being gifted to the town by a local benefactor. The roads are a potholed disaster area, excepting those that were resurfaced for the cycle racing. In the field behind our house an encampment of foreign farm labourers has been established.
For the local people, a vote for Remain would represent a vote for the status quo. I don’t think we are untypical in our circumstances.
Does it surprise anyone that The Brexit Party won the recent elections?
@kalamo how is any of this relevant to Brexit?
@davebigpicture – It shows how many Leave voters cast their vote in protest at the perceived status quo. The crumbling infrastructure and neglect isn’t immediately relevant to Brexit but it makes for a loud protest vote
I suppose I should have asked how Leave voters think leaving the EU is going to change anything.
Probably down to how pro Leave factions in 2016 spun Brexit as a panacea to all the ills of society. It is beyond depressing.
Yes, it is as you say. And this area is relatively wealthy. Go further north and the situation becomes much worse.
Do you think not being in the EU will improve the lot of towns like yours and if so, how, given that the UK will still have either a Tory or Labour government?
I have hope that there will be a rebalancing of the economy due to the spotlight being shone on the issues. As you suggest, it won’t have anything to do with being in or out of the EU.
I see there are yet more programmes about the war this week. I don’t care what Gary Lineker’s grandfather (or any grandfather) did in the war.
The continual remembrance of war, not immigration (that’s the good bit) is what has brought the country to its knees.
It all started in the dire 1980s with the Falklands.
I was thinking about this the other day. Like any boy who grew up in the 70s I read my fair share of jingoistic war comics (‘Achtung Schweinehund!’ and so on.) When The Beatles and other bands went to Hamburg, less than 20 years after the end of the WWII, was it regarded as them visiting enemy territory in some way, or was there a window when the war was put in the past in British people’s minds?
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Maybe you and many others here don’t give one….but many do give a Fuck what their ancestors did in “the war”.
Me …my grandfather was evacuated at Dunkirk….look it up…then fought in the Western Desert, Sicily, Italy and ended up guarding Vlasov’s Cossacks in northern Austria…again, look it up.
Every night they would hand over screaming, crying POWs to the Russians…only to here them beaten up then shot through the night.
When he was eventually demobbed and returned home he had been at war….and not seen England for three years….only to be jeered for not being in Normandy.
As he told me in later life..he did not give a flying fuck about Rock and Roll….no noise compared to being shelled by Germans.
Get some respect.
There’s a big difference between respect and fetishising.
My father had a fairly uneventful WWII, as it happens. Conscripted early on. Never fired a shot, never knowingly got shot at. The most danger he was ever in was probably going to Gibraltar, where he spent the majority of the war, on a troopship past the German U-boat patrols.
My nephews Russell and Chris both went into the military straight from school. They’d read and seen all the war movies, the comics, the Falklands reports on TV and in the papers, etc. etc. They wanted to be in the military, have adventures and fight.
Russell was sent straight to Kosovo after his training and spent his time protecting Serb OAPs from the vengeful local Muslims who would probably have liked to burn their houses with them still in them. He fairly quickly realised the Army was no place for him and got himself out when he could. Now a happily married man with 2 kids and doing OK.
Chris was the more reckless of the two, like a duck to water in the Royal Marines. Anti-piracy patrols off the east coast of Africa after his training and then two tours in Afghanistan. Killed by an IED near Sangin on the second tour, which was a complete fuck-up right from the start. He had been married for only a year to his long-term girlfriend. His mother never got over it and was severely depressed in the aftermath. She died recently after becoming ill and refusing to see her doctor or get any treatment.
Rememberance is not about glorifying war, it is about “commemorating the fallen”, those who died during WW1 & WW2.
Visit Thiepval, or one of the many other memorials in the Somme, and you won’t see any army recruitment posters or comics featuring Tommy sticking it up Fritz.
Have a look at https://www.cwgc.org/
The hope is, by reminding each generation how bloody awful war is, they won’t start another one.
And then, next Nov 11th, buy a poppy and put a few quid in the tin.
In the interests of full disclosure, Mrs F’s father and brother both spent their working lives with the CWGC. My BIL has 250 dead Germans at the end of his garden in a village just outside Lille. They were all in their teens and twenties.
The CWGC do an amazing job. My Great Uncle is buried abroad – died one week before the Armistice, and the whole area is immaculately preserved.
Those are better testaments to those who went before than cheap and easy TV.
I’m sure I’ve told this before, but we stopped at Thiepval on our way to my BIL’s birthday party. Mrs F was raised in the CWGC house next door, one of many during her 18 years in Le France. “I remember this house, my brother and I used to play cowboys and Indians around the headstones.”
I was so taken by the view – I’d never seen so many white headstones (they fill the panoramic view of the whole valley, all the way to the horizon) that I burst into tears. The offsprings were primary school age and asked when we got back into the car “Why are you crying, Dad?”
I appear to have something in my eye as I type this.
This. A tour of the WW1 battlefields should be compulsory for all whose view of the world wars is informed by Battler Britton and Commando – which has been going since 1961, I now learn.
My grandfather was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915 – or so it is assumed, they never found his body. He is remembered on a wall along with over 20,000 others with no known grave at Dud Corner Cemetery – so called because of the number of unexploded shells found there after the war ended. I’ve been there several times – an intensely moving experience.
I keep hoping he’ll be ploughed up and given a proper burial – happens all the time, apparently. The odds are against it I guess. Fortunately for me he found time to sire my father before he went.
A visit is compulsory for French and German schoolkids, I believe. You know, the ones whose politicians don’t keep going on about The Blitz Spirit and Dunkirk and all that rhetorical crap.
I don’t want to be called names but each family has a different experience of wartime. My grandfather was also at Dunkirk. When he returned, he didn’t receive a hero’s welcome from the family because he was a violent drunk and the family were afraid of him. He signed up for the money and was furious to learn that most of his earnings were sent directly back to his family.
In the wartime years, the family lived a simple life (my granny, five children) but regular money came in and that was not the case when my grandfather was around. They lived in Bradford, which was mostly spared (just the one bomb, I think).
My mother, 12 at the time, remembered VE day with very mixed emotions. My granny left the house, returning after a few days, after reuniting with my granddad. My mother looked after the oldest (special-needs) sibling and the three young ones most of the time by then anyway. However for all that time, she had no idea if either of her parents were coming back at all and how they were all going to cope.
My mother always talked about how she ‘ad it tough in that Yorkshire way – but she really did. Very little talk in those days about what happened in the family home, and very little has been shared with me. Everyone’s gone now. But I fear the worst. An auntie told me that if I read Angela’s Ashes, it would give an idea of what it was like but hinted that their upbringing was far worse than that. Again, this wasn’t a brag, it was said with cold, matter-of-fact certainty.
As you can gather, he wasn’t a very nice man. I met him in the mid 70s, in hospital just before he died – he was wearing pyjamas, he had a bald head and looked quite severe. Didn’t say hello to me at all. That’s about all I can remember. The family didn’t exactly flock to his funeral.
None of this is to play down the heroism shown by the people who fought in the war. I just think as time moves on we need to acknowledge that the pages of Hotspur weren’t real footage.
The people who remember life outside of the EU are the ones that wish to leave. Hoping that they will die or painting them all as stupid bigots is not a strategy I would have wished to follow.
Eh? I’ve met plenty of people who recall the pre EU days, and voted remain for that very reason.
Most of the leave voters I know work for UK companies, do no business outside the UK and only travel there for the occasional holiday. Those who have some non UK experience are obsessed with avoiding tax and any form of regulation.
I remember life outside of the EU. I voted remain because I thought things improved, generally, once we were in. I don’t believe going back, especially after a significant length of time, is ever a good decision.
I have to agree that hoping the Brexiteer pensioners will all die soon is not a good look for the Remainiac extremists. Suggestive of ageist bigotry.
Dismissing all Brexiteers as ignorant bigots is much too simplistic.
Although it is true that the ones I personally know all have no experience of anything much outside the UK apart from holiday destinations they have spent a little time in, there are only a couple of Brexiters that I know who I would class as bigots. There are a few remainers I know that I would class as bigots too.