Polly parachutes into Stoke - and usefully teaches us something

Labour journalist Polly Toynbee was parachuted into the city centre for a quick photo-opportunity at the Hanley YMCA at the weekend. Inside a small steel-fenced secure garden she posed for photos alongside the Labour Party candidate and some Church of England bishop or other. The result is her quick article on Stoke in today's The Guardian newspaper. I say "quick" because — although her article reports a half-dozen pro-Ukip remarks noted by Labour's doorstep election canvassers — there's no indication she stepped outside of Labour's steel-ringed bubble during her brief visit. She does however leave the city's undecided conservative voters with a rather useful observation from London...

"In Westminster I hear some Labour MPs secretly hoping a Stoke loss would ignite a "Corbyn must go" move. What folly, since a Ukip win could set off a Scotland-sized landslide [in England], from which Labour may never recover under any leader."

Thanks, Polly. Some conservative voters in Stoke might have been mistakenly assuming that another Labour victory wouldn't be so bad — since it would keep the useless dithering idiots of the Labour Party in charge until the next General Election. I mean, who wouldn't want that? They're such fun. There are more laughs each week skimming through their incompetent squirmings in The Guardian and the New Statesman than there are in a copy of The Beano. So we don't want to trigger an anti-Corbyn coup and thus spoil that fun, by hoisting some possibly-competent evil schemer like Tom Watson into the leadership.

But now Polly has usefully confirmed that a Ukip victory in Stoke Central could make posterity see Stoke as the place where the rotten corpse of socialism was finally buried for good. Many conservatives might not have quite yet realised what a opportunity we have here to make history. If Polly is correct then many could be rather proud of a tactical Ukip vote, given what an utter disaster state socialism has been for the last 100 years. For some, having the honour to screw down the coffin lid on that horror might be worth a month of being called "racists" by hysterical London journalists, and then having to chuckle at Ukip's hapless Nuttall and his tweedy menswear for a few years.

But, then... London has been spluttering such empty names at us for a very long time now. We're actually kind of used to it, Polly, so your threats that we'll be tarred and feathered for a Ukip vote are not as scary as they would have been ten years ago. Been there, done that, with Brexit. Few of us have university degrees, but we can see through a brick wall given enough time and a bit of careful thought. As was proven with Brexit, when we didn't just see through the brick wall of 'Project Fear', we smashed it down. As a result we can now see that such ugly words as "racist" and "bigot" have largely lost their meanings, through the Guardian-reading elite spraying such words at everyone who expresses a sensible opinion that's slightly to the right of the mild-mannered John Major. Such perpetual cries of "racist" by the left bring to mind a wise and ancient fable called "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", which modern leftists have obviously never read or heard of. I presume that New Labour long ago replaced the tale in our schools with "The Boy Who Adopted the Wolf and Started a Wolf Sanctuary run by a Feminist Collective", which perhaps explains their ignorance.

Their calling everyone 'racist' for 20 years has unfortunately even emboldened a few real racists, since the word has been drained of its old power through misuse. But I'd say that most Stokies have the common sense to be able to tell a serious far-right racist from some drunken student idiot who just made a silly joke, or from a researcher who stated an undeniable fact that was then deemed 'politically incorrect', or from a bloke who proudly flies a crisp English flag on his allotment, or some lonely Burslem pensioner who once read a BNP leaflet in 2003 and put it in her front window. Not that there are many real far-right nationalist racists left in the UK these days, since we're one of the most tolerant and welcoming nations on earth. According to the anti-fascist researchers, they number no more than 400 in the whole UK, made up of roughly 250 thuggish types and another 150 who can actually read a book...

“Neither the facts, nor the evidence at hand, point to a rise in the organised far right [in the UK]. Its decline is bordering on terminal: it is smaller and more [organisationally] badly behaved than people would care to imagine.” — Hope not Hate’s research director Matthew Collins, in the left-wing online magazine Left Foot Forward, July 2016.

In that sort of climate many conservative voters may think it worth braving a few harsh words from London journalists, by holding their nose and voting for Ukip, just to get a chance of making history by dancing on the grave of socialism.