Jazz-Hands

Today’s Daily Telegraph decided to jump on the ‘tactical voting guide’ bandwagon.

If you thought they would be any more objective than The Guardian or any of the other adult comics masquerading as newspapers in the UK, you’d be wrong.

Here’s what they had to say at the start:

Which seats are there where the Tories haven’t won since 1992 or ever AND where they finished behind a Kipper on over a fifth of the total vote cast AND where the Tories got less than 30% in 2017 (ie. where the Kipper vote wasn’t all disgruntled Tories and where a lot of the locals will never, ever vote Tory)?

Crunched the numbers and the answers are three – Houghton and Sunderland South, held by Labour with 59.5% of the vote; South Shields, held by Labour with 61.5% of the vote; and Rotherham, held by Labour with 56.4% of the vote.

In other words, seats where you can put a Labour rosette on a tin of Pedigree Chum and still no one else has a hope in Hell of winning – ever.

This almost makes the Liberal Democrats ‘electoral pact’ with the Greens and Plaid Cymru look fair and unbiased.

It makes no allowances for Hartlepool having not only a Brexit Party MEP, but nine councillors in an area where the Labour hegemony has collapsed over the Brexit issue (70% of the vote) and where most locals would sooner shoot themselves than vote Tory – a common electoral phenomena north of the Pennines where the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and the Deindustrial Revolution will haunt Conservatives for a century.

It also goes against the bookmakers own predictions – where the Brexit Party are second.

(Source: Paddypower – who did the best at predicting the various constituency results at the last general election).

The Daily Telegraph has told its readers to vote Conservative in every general election since the 1930s. But that won’t have affected their criteria for telling Brexiteer voters to back the Conservatives in all but two impossible seats.

If this is what a pro-Brexit paper is advising its pro-Brexit readers to do, you can guess for yourselves what their ‘tactical advice’ for Remain voters will be like.

Another General Election, another cack-handed piece of research by ‘the envy of the world.’

Taken from their own website and Twitter.

It is debatable whether the British National Party candidate David Furness is a BNP candidate at all, as he’s currently involved in a court case with the party chairman Adam Walker over the rights to the party and its millions in the bank, but the party is in such a muddle with Walker holding the purse strings but Furness what active membership still exists in London that it’s anyone’s guess. That Walker failed to stand in Bishop Auckland (his home seat) again just as it has become a high profile seat suggests he’s lost control of everything bar £5 million in legacies.

One thing is certain, don’t bother asking Hope Not Hate or Searchlight as they’ll not have a clue as usual!

Technically, the list could be longer still, as anyone standing under any designation other than Independent must be registered under the Political Parties Register for the UK – including local Residents Associations and Ratepayers Groups which have long contested elections in the UK.

One of those moments you despair of the human race.

Thanks to a bunch of incomers raising a ‘racism’ issue which wasn’t there to begin with (the usual cosmopolitan commuters or retirees which are the bane of most rural folk’s existences from their arrogant attitude that the existing residents are all ‘dumb yokels’) , Devon County Council’s roads department is going to have to spend money redoing all the road signs going into Bideford – this will come out of the part of the budget allocated to Bideford for routine road repairs.

Former Raving Loony Stuart Hughes will be raving mad – he’s had his work cut out for almost a decade trying to bring Devon’s roads up to scratch, and this is exactly the sort of self-indulgent nonsense cash-strapped rural authorities can well be doing without.

It’s now got to the stage saying anything which is in a different context would be a racial term automatically makes it ‘racist’.

This isn’t combatting racism, this is bullying: looking for offence for the excuse to have your boot on someone else’s neck – before looking for excuses to next put a rope around it.

The Christian churches used to be terrific at this, just to show they could. Certain other religions still have such powers, and it is no coincidence all coincide with the nastiest, most repressive, more backward countries on the planet.

But stopping those morally clubbing everyone else for supernatural reasons  – ‘my god says so’ – has only resulted in the skeet vacuum being filled by those doing so for the poisonous ideological reason of ‘political correctness’, and for the exact same motives – having their boots on everyone else’s necks.

In all the places of the world for this to occur, there is an irony to picking on Bideford, ‘the little white town’ so named because all the homes were whitewashed with lime (a common enough occurence in the West Country and other coastal areas where lime could be easily made by burning seashells) in a futile attempt to stop a cholera epidemic (the scourge of the 18th and 19th centuries until modern sanitation caught on). If there was ever a place where it would have its work cut out keeping the buildings white, it would be Bideford – the home of Bideford Black!

Look at the intensity of that black. It seems blacker than the black you see today, a black from a bygone, gothic age. You’d be right to think so. The chemically produced artificial black pigments you may get today are cheaper, but none can match the intensity of this natural product.

Bideford Black is – or rather was – a pigment which came from the town’s meagre coal seams (enough for Bideford, nowhere else) and lasted longer than the local coal mines did. Two hundred years to be precise. Because of its clay quality, it was especially useful for colouring anything needing to be water resistant.

Boats and the rubber for tyres became reliant on Bideford Black, which made the town prosperous where the mine’s did not. It was used by Max Factor for their trademark black mascara. Australian aboriginals even bought it for ceremonial body paints because it was so durable.

The one problem was after Bideford became the Little White Town, locals faced a constant battle with the residue of the Bideford Black mining blowing in the air and back onto the town, resulting in a constant battle to keep their buildings pristine until the end of the industry in 1968.

Perhaps if those foolish Guardianistas looking for excuses to scream ‘racist’ knew more about the people they were talking at (‘at’, never ‘to’ and certainly never ‘with’!), they would learn matters aren’t always so black and white as they seem?