Farage, predictably, won against his mocking opponents with 63% of Clacton voters casting their ballots for the far-right, mainly anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker polices, he stands for. When the result of the election was declared, the 30 opponents turned for the count in Clacton, but Farage stayed away, saying that the local police had said he should. — Internet

“Feminists are right

To insist that in this day

Housework should be shared

No one disagrees

Women bring in salaries

Genders should be paired.”

— From Baiku Chi Haiku by Bachchoo


Two cheers for free speech and the right to protest in Britain. The far-right leaders, in effect one single fellow called Daniel Thomas, better known as ‘Danny Tommo’ is said to be responsible for organising two protests.

The first one, gathering a few hundred demonstrators, all wearing balaclavas and dressed in black, disrupted road traffic and cross-channel ferries in Dover. It was, the local papers said, a loud but peaceful and hugely disruptive demonstration.

Last week, this same ‘Tommo’ called his supporters, who came from all over the country, to Portsmouth where a precarious dinghy-load of a hundred or so asylum seekers had crossed 170 miles of the English Channel from France, to land in the city’s harbour escorted by coastguards. The police, who were assembled to minimise disruption, were attacked by the protesters and a few suffered minor injuries. Some peripheral damage was done to vehicles on Portsmouth’s roads.

No arrests were made and no protesters suffered any assault. I note this, and don’t ascribe a third cheer to this demonstrative dimension of ‘free speech’, because last week at the annual conference of the far-right Reform Party, two women protesters who interrupted the speech of Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, were not simply escorted out of the room, but were savagely assaulted by the ‘Reformists’. These moments were captured by TV. We saw five or six men grab one woman, as she stood up and started shouting at Farage on stage. They punched her, pulled her hair and aimed kicks at her body as they dragged her out of the conference room.

The second female protester was treated in the same way and also hit with a metal crutch wielded by one of the Reformist thugs.

Readers of this column may recall the fact that this Nigel Farage was, and still is, under investigation for several donations amounting to over six million pounds which he received before he was elected to Westminster from a constituency called Clacton. He protested, and still maintains, that he broke no parliamentary rules as he received the five-million donation from a crypto- currency billionaire and tax exile in Thailand called Christopher Harbone. Farage claims the money was given to him for his ‘security’, but he hasn’t over years spent it on any such. To distract from the investigation, Farage resigned as an MP and stood in the by-election he thus caused. All the main parties boycotted this by-election, calling it a stunt, but over 30 jokers and parodic candidates entered the contest, the chief of these being a comedian who wore a metal bin over his head and called himself Count Binface. He got 26 per cent of the vote. Others, one dressed as a chicken, lost their deposits.

Farage, predictably, won against his mocking opponents with 63% of Clacton voters casting their ballots for the far-right, mainly anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker polices, he stands for.

When the result of the election was declared, the 30 opponents turned for the count in Clacton, but Farage stayed away, saying that the local police had said he should. Subsequently the police were reported as saying they issued no such caution. So Clacton’s Nigel was telling what British kids call ‘porkie pies’.

One of the main speakers at the Reform annual conference was a fellow called Zia (Uncle Tom) Yusuf, who was chairman of the Party some months ago, resigned and left the party for 48 hours and then rejoined as the director of efficiency. He is a close associate and influential voice in the top ranks of the party, though he is far from popular. His speech was mainly noted for its threat to overtake the Tory Party. I am sure the Tory leader Kemi (Aunty Tamsin?) Bad-Enoch took note, and will at the soon-to-be Tory Party annual conference retaliate with right-wingish challenges to (imitations of?) Reform’s anti-asylum-seeker-anti-immigrant appeal.

This year’s Reform conference faced a major embarrassment, to put it mildly. The evening before the conference began in Birmingham, Channel 4 TV broadcast a programme in which undercover agents, posing as possible financial donors to Reform, lured two of Farage’s top team into telling the world how they could turn illegal donations from foreign benefactors into seemingly legal ones.

The story broke nationwide. The two top officials were voluntarily suspended from the Party as their annual show began.

Of course, Farage dismissed these clandestine revelations as pub banter — just two guys bragging about how they could do a dodge. It never actually happened. True, but the banter was about cheating or circumventing the law, not upholding it. Ideal leaders of a political party that professes to be a government in waiting?

Since Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as PM, the Labour Party has experienced a slight ‘Burnham bounce’ — a rise in their percentage in the polls at the expense of Reform. Labour’s annual conference is scheduled for September 27. Will the ‘bounce’ progress to become a ‘body-liner’?

And, of course, if the parliamentary investigation into donations that Farage has accepted finds him guilty of breaking parliamentary rules, he may have to stand down as Clacton’s MP, necessitating another by-election. Will Count Binface stand and prevail the next time?

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