Six houses, five cars, six yachts and zero self-awareness

Apr29 by weegingerdug

I didn’t watch the STV leaders’ debate as we had visitors, which meant I missed the moment that Malcolm Offord torpedoed Reform UK’s “We’re the party which is opposed to the elite” schtick. It was always bollocks, but on Tuesday night Offord slipped up. When you are cos-playing as the party which is on the side of ordinary people and pretending you understand their struggles in a cost of living crisis – which you unconvincingly blame on immigrants – what you don’t do is to make a play of your own great wealth and privilege, but that’s exactly what Offord did. He obviously believed that telling the Scottish Green co-leader Ross Greer that he had six houses, five cars and six boats was a flex and a power move, what it really did was to expose how hopelessly out of touch Offord is with the concerns of working class people. I thought Reform UK was supposed to be against small boats, or are they only OK when they’re owned by white multi-millionaires?

After boasting about his six houses, five, cars and six boats, Offord pointedly asked Ross Greer if he would not like more people like Offord in Scotland. Offord thought this was his gotcha moment, the moment he exposed the Scottish Greens as being anti-wealth, but he really just exposed his own greed and selfish acquisitiveness. Ross Greer replied “No” he doesn’t want more greedy and selfish people like Offord, pointing out that there are three times as many holiday and second homes in Scotland than there are children in homeless families. Walk along any high street in Scotland’s towns and cities and you’ll see homeless people begging in the street, a legacy of the Conservatives whom Offord was happy to support and to take a peerage from before he defected to Reform in pursuit of the seat in Holyrood the Tories never got him. Yet having been a prominent supporter of and donor to the political party which created the UK’s epidemic of homelessness, Offord boasts about his six houses.

Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie was dogged by the nickname Six Chips after he posted a pic of his taxpayer subsidised House of Commons dinner on Twitter with a caption about enjoying traditional fish and chips but the accompanying photo was of a posh restaurant’s idea of a fish supper, featuring an artistically arranged pile of precisely six symmetrically cut chips. Six Chips Bowie became shorthand for how out of touch and entitled the Tories are. Now along comes Six Hooses Offord saying – Hold my Dom Pérignon. You couldn’t ask for a better example of lording it over the little people.

No one needs two houses, and most certainly no one needs six. You can only drive one car at a time and no one needs five of them. It’s just greed and conspicuous consumption. Offord indulges himself in the acquisition of expensive property in order to fill the vacuum in his soul. Offord treats himself to costly toys while kids go hungry and people huddle on cardboard in shop doorways as he and his party demand tax cuts which will enable people like him to buy even more rich boys’ shiny toys and devastate the battered public services on which those hungry kids and homeless people depend.

There has not been a public figure who has revealed themselves to be so out of touch amidst poverty and so blind to their own wealth and privilege since Marie Anoinette said “Let them eat six chips.” Yet this is the guy who was hand picked by Nigel Farage to head a hard right populist political revolt in Scotland. The tone deaf privilege oozes from every pore – from both Farage and his multiply be-hoosed messenger boy in Scotland.

Farage has been referred to the Parliamentary Standards watchdog after he was forced to admit taking a £5 million gift from a Thai based billionaire, purportedly to boost his personal security, and, you know, to stop people asking awkward questions about the source of funding for his house in Clacton. Farage bleated about how he needed the cash as the Home Office will not pay his security, whining: “I’m very much on my own and will be for the rest of my life, and I have to face up to that grim reality.” Boo hoo. Farage has built a career and made a fortune out of making other people feel unsafe and unwelcome in Britain. Maybe he can go and hide out in one of Malkie’s six hooses.

It’s safe to say that Offord’s revelation has not gone down well. BBC Reporting Scotland took a wee break from pushing Labour attack lines about the SNP and asked Anas Sarwar about millionaire Lord Malcolm Offord admission of his multiple hooses. Unsurprisingly BBC reporter Andrew Kerr failed to point out that Sarwar is also a millionaire and like Reform, the Labour party is funded by other millionaires and billionaires.

However, to be fair to Malcolm Offord, I don’t think he’s hated because he’s successful, it’s because he’s a tone deaf opportunistic hypocrite who sold what passes for his soul to the frog faced fascist Farage and is happy to turn a blind eye to racism if it means he can add a seat in Holyrood to the collection of expensive furniture in his six houses.

Offord may be rich enough to own six houses, five cars, and six boats, but he still felt the need to claim significant expenses from the public purse for attending the House of Lords. Between December 2024 and June 2025, he claimed £34,340, which included over £23,000 in daily allowances and £9,598 in travel expenses. That’s over seven times the maximum a severely disabled person could claim in Personal Independence Payment or Scottish Adult Disability Payment over the same period. But upkeep on all those houses isn’t cheap.

Farage pockets millions in “personal security” gifts from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire, while Offord boasts six houses, five high end cars, six boats and a portfolio of stocks and shares. These aren’t exactly men of the people. They ARE the elite they claim to stand against. Whose interests will they really serve? If you think a man who got a peerage from the Tories after showering them with a six figure donation will work in the interests of Easterhouse or Castlemilk, I’ve got a six chip fish supper to sell you for fifty quid.

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Labour can’t be trusted not to do a deal with Reform

Apr14 by weegingerdug

I don’t usually pay too much attention to leaders’ debates in the run up to elections. They are invariably too shouty with the leaders vying to talk over the top of each other. Anas Sarwar is invariably the worst offender. On both the leaders’ debates so far, his behaviour has bordered on the offensive, he’s been rude, hectoring, entitled, and has done his best to interrupt everyone else. It’s precisely how you’d expect a rich nepo-baby to behave.

On the Channel 4 leaders’s debate on Tuesday, things were a little better than on the BBC debate the previous Sunday. Moderator Krishnan Gurumurthy kept better control of proceedings. Sarwar is far too used to BBC Scotland giving him a free pass.

We did learn something new in the Channel 4 debate. Sarwar was in full interrupty flow, attacking Reform’s Malcolm Offord over the comments of a Reform candidate who Sarwar claimed had said that Scots of Asian descent should be deported. I’m sure that’s true, Reform has selected some pretty unsavoury characters as candidates. Eventually, when Offord was able to get a word in edgeways, he said that this was the third time Sarwar had called him a racist and added: “This does not square with you coming up to me at the start of this campaign, bouncing up to me at Paisley Town Hall and saying we need to work together, Reform and Labour, to remove the SNP, that does not square.”

First Minister John Swinney had previously suggested that if the SNP don’t win a majority, Scottish Labour would make a “grubby, backroom deal” to run the Scottish Government. This was angrily denied by Sarwar, however a senior Labour source within the Labour party in Scotland told The Scotsman newspaper last month that the party’s election strategy is based on the expectation that Labour could be the only party capable of forming a government, potentially with support from Nigel Farage’s party.

Offord’s comment visibly shocked John Swinney, whom Sarwar had accused of playing politics with his accusation that Labour would do a deal with Reform. Sarwar has denied he’d enter into a ‘grubby deal’ with Reform in order to get himself into Bute House. But with Labour, there’s always what they say in public before the election, and what they do once they’ve got your vote in the bag. Sarwar and the Labour party have history of saying one thing in order to win votes, then doing something else once they have got the votes they wanted. You cannot trust a party of proven liars. Prior to the local authority elections in 2022, Labour denied that they do deals with the Tories in order to form administrations, but that is exactly what they did in a number of Scottish councils.

It was noticeable that Sarwar did not explicitly deny what Offord had said. He is certainly unprincipled enough to do a deal with Reform in order to keep the SNP out. Thankfully for everyone who values decency and humanity, for Sarwar – as the kids say – the math ain’t mathing. The polls are such that they would have to be spectacularly wrong, out by more than they have ever been in recent history, for Sarwar to be anywhere near being in a position to become first minister even with the support of another party.

What we did learn from this exchange is that anyone considering a tactical vote to keep out Reform cannot risk voting Labour. Labour cannot be trusted not to do that ‘grubby’ deal with Reform once the votes are in. We now have evidence of that from two independent sources, firstly the anonymous source within the Labour party in Scotland who told The Scotsman newspaper that Labour’s election strategy was based on their belief that Labour could form the next Scottish Government, potentially with support from Reform.

Now we have it straight from the horse’s mouth, with Offord’s claim that Sarwar approached him saying that Reform and Labour need to work together in order to keep out the SNP. Sarwar hasn’t denied that claim. It certainly happened. Labour is a party which has spent the past eighteen months pandering to Reform voters, of course it will do a deal with Reform if it considers it is in the short term interests of the Labour party to do so. In the constituency vote, only a vote for the SNP can be guaranteed to ensure that Reform is kept out of power and out of influencing the policies of the Scottish Government. Just what concessions would Reform exact from Labour in return for backing Sarwar as first minister? Would Labour pander to Reform’s dangerous climate change denial? Probably.

Reform is basically the extreme right wing of the dying Tory party, composed of the vilest dregs of a Tory party which has lost all credibility. No step is too far, no bar is too low, for the careerist and ambitious Sarwar, who knows he’s blown up his chances of a peerage after his ill fated attempt to force Starmer to resign. Sarwar has principles, and if the principles he’s displaying right now won’t get him into power, he’s got others.

Even so, Offord’s revelation is shocking even by the base standards of today’s opportunistic Labour party. This is a party that has shamelessly U-turned on the trans issue, inserting a transphobic policy into its manifesto despite that policy being voted down by members at Labour’s Scottish conference. This betrayal has even led Duncan Hothersall to abandon the party. Hothersall was editor of Labour Hame and a stalwart of Labour in Scotland for decades, he was a vocal supporter of Labour and Better Together during the 2014 indyref. But he won’t vote Labour now due to its transphobia and the leadership’s betrayal of the conference vote of the membership.

If the leadership of the Labour party in Scotland is willing to betray someone like Hothersall and the membership of the Labour party in Scotland in its unprincipled pursuit of power, you can be quite certain that Sarwar’s protestations that he’d never do a deal with Reform count for nought. Labour cannot be trusted. Labour must be annihilated at the ballot box and kept out of power until the current leadership are forced out and replaced by people who have not sold what passes for their souls to corporate money.

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The rapid implosion of Reform’s Scottish campaign

Mar26 by weegingerdug

As the saying goes, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. Within just a few days of Reform UK launching its Scottish election campaign to much fanfare and racist ‘jokes’ about tartan burqas, the wheels are already coming off Farage’s septic tank pumper wagon. The party has already lost no less than four of its allegedly rigorously vetted candidates, while its so-called leader, Malkie the Messenger Boy Offord has got himself in a spot of bother over a revoltingly homophobic ‘joke’ he made at a rugby club dinner which was too much even for the rugby club boys. What is it with Reform UK and unfunny and abusive jokes. Disguising your racism or bigotry as a ‘joke’ is a way of turning criticism back on those who call you out for your racism or bigotry. “The woke brigade are just humourless and can’t take a joke, it’s an attack on my freedom of speech.” We’ve seen that playbook being deployed so many times.

Over on the fascist cess pit that is Twitter, Reform’s support bots were claiming that the SNP has no right to criticise Offord because the SNP did not leap to condemn comments made by the late comedian Janey Godley. There’s a wee bit of a difference there. Janey Godley was not a member of the SNP, far less was she the leader of a political party contesting the Scottish election with pretensions to becoming the next first minister. She was never in a position to make laws or influence public policy, which is precisely what Offord seeks to do. So his making abusive statements about a minority group is far more relevant and concerning than anything Janey Godley ever said. Many others denied that Offord’s homophobia was indeed homophobic. The National printed it, and if you don’t think it was homophobic, that can only be because you’re a homophobe too. I’m not going to repeat the disgusting comments here but suffice to say it was homophobic because it relied on the old trope of reducing gay men to nothing more than an obsession with anal sex and additionally mocked the grief of George Michael’s bereaved partner.

It speaks volumes about Offord’s real beliefs that he thought such a comment was suitable to make in public. He has tried to weasel out of it by claiming he had had a few drinks, but the comment was made as part of a speech which Offord had prepared when he was very much sober.

Of course pointing out the vile bigotry that Reform UK scarcely bothers to hide will not deter vile bigots from voting for it. Farage himself claimed that the revelations about his schoolboy penchant for gross antisemitism and singing songs to his Jewish classmates about gassing Jews were only going to help his party at the polls. Reform has positioned itself as the party which says the quiet part out loud and as such provides a political home for racists, homophobes, and bigots of all types. But while pointing out and condemning Reform UK’s nasty underbelly won’t stop the prejudiced from voting for it, it does make it more likely that the decent majority who are repulsed by such sentiments will vote tactically in order to prevent Reform winning. The willingness of the electorate to vote tactically against Reform UK is not picked up in most opinion polling but it is certainly a factor in explaining why the party consistently under-performs compared to its polling figures in real elections.

This under-performance was seen in the recent Gorton and Denton by election which polling had forecast as a three way contest between Labour, Reform and the Greens which was too close to call. Even after polling closed Reform was still telling Sky News they expected to win by a narrow margin. In the event the Greens won by a landslide. It wasn’t even close. Reform did not take it well. In Caerphilly, the polls had shown Reform was in the lead but come the result, Plaid Cymru won handsomely. It was a similar story in the Westminster by election which Reform actually won. Reform’s candidate, the odious Sarah Pochin – she of the tartan burqa joke – scraped to the narrowest of victories, taking the seat by just six votes. Polling prior to the by election polling had given Reform a commanding lead and they were expected to win comfortably.

I suspect and hope that Reform will also under perform in the Scottish and Welsh elections in six weeks time and will take fewer seats in Holyrood and the Senedd than current polling predicts. It only goes to prove that being showered in cash from billionaires does not automatically lead to a credible political party.

People just don’t like Reform UK and particularly loathe Nigel Farage. Tactical voting will be a significant factor in the Holyrood election in six weeks time. During the 2021 Holyrood election there was a concerted campaign by those opposed to independence to organise tactical voting against the SNP, this time round tactical voting against Reform UK will be much more to the fore.

Having already lost three candidates, that vetting was terribly thorough. On Thursday, Reform lost a fourth, former Fife Tory councillor Linda Holt. Holt had supported George Galloway’s Unionist zoomers’ All for Unity vanity vehicle in the 2021 election, after being announced as a Reform candidate, Holt came under fire for racist tweets she’d made about former first minister Humza Yousaf. On Thursday she resigned her candidacy, complaining about the lack of support she’d received from Reform, but to be fair, Malcolm Offord was far too busy trying to save himself from the consequences of his own bigotry to worry about saving Holt from the consequences of hers.

Meanwhile the party’s Scottish manifesto has been trashed by the Institute for Financial Studies, which called Reform’s tax cutting proposals “unserious”. The party’s plans to cut the number of MSPs, to align Holyrood constituencies with Westminster constituencies and to ‘review’ the powers of Holyrood every ten years have been branded as a naked assault on the devolution settlement and a cover for a Westminster power grab. Offord has openly spoken about removing control of planning permission from Holyrood as a means of forcing new nuclear power plants on Scotland.

Reform will certainly get some MSPs at this election, but I strongly suspect not as many as polling currently suggests. If their shambolic and unconvincing campaign continues to implode at the rate it’s going, they’ll be lucky to make it to May. We can but hope.

I won’t be posting again until Monday, it’s my other half’s 50th birthday and friends are coming from America, England, and Belgium to help us celebrate.

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Reform’s election denial is a cancer on democracy

Mar3 by weegingerdug

Nigel Farage is not taking the electoral humiliation dished out to by the voters of Gorton and Denton at all well. Farage lied multiple times at his press conference on the Monday after the vote which saw his hand picked candidate trounced by the Greens. Farage claimed that no-one who voted Green in Gorton and Denton has a job and he’s “certain” that Reform won most British born voters in the by-election, all this is based on zero evidence, just Nige’s feels, but not a single journalist present pushed back on his self-serving anti-democratic bullshit. The line that Farage is determined to maintain in his alternate reality is that the smug carpetbagger Matt Goodwin really won the Gorton and Denton by-election, at least if you don’t count immigrants. Not counting immigrants is exactly what will happen if Farage gets his way.

In that alternate reality of his, when Reform wins a seat it means that true Brits have spoken and we must all sit up and take notice, but when the Greens win a seat it means that Muslims are conspiring to steal elections and civilisation and the British way of life as we know it is imperilled. So for Farage, the question then becomes, how severely should the franchise be limited in response? And the right wing media claps in approval like trained seals eagerly awaiting the next morsel of Reform fish which will be tossed to it. Reform fish which rots from the head down.

With the unceasing help of the British media and the huge foreign donations that pour into Reform’s coffers, Farage’s ego has been massaged into such a state of entitlement that he thinks he’s answerable to no one and is simply owed power. His big problem is that bot farms don’t vote and he’s come to confuse the astroturfed bought and paid for support for his party with the real world. Back in that real world, for every person who has glugged down the Reform Kool-Aid, at least two loathe Farage and everything his billionaire funded hate project stands for and are quite prepared to vote tactically for the party best placed to give Reform a kicking. Farage cannot cope with his own unpopularity. Not one bit.

He has come to live in his alternate reality and cannot comprehend that there’s a real world out there where people see him for exactly what he is. They see right through the fake bonhomie to the reality of the nasty, lying entitled bully boy cosplaying a man of the people all the better to serve the billionaires on whose teats he sucks.

Farage is a fine one to talk about not working. Have his constituents ever seen him? Proving Farage wrong has become a national moral imperative. So let’s prove him wrong by being very clear about what Farage and his right wing supporters are suggesting with their dangerous democracy killing lies about being robbed in last week’s by-election.

Farage and Tice have a long history of screaming about electoral fraud whenever the voters reject their poison at the ballot box. In 2015 when Farage was leader of Ukip he alleged postal voting fraud when his party lost the Oldham West & Royton by-election. No evidence was presented. In 2019 he made the same allegation after his Brexit party lost the Peterborough by election. In the Peterborough case the Brexit Party launched a legal challenge. An expensive police investigation found no evidence of fraud. Farage’s party sought to challenge the result in court. A judge threw the case out and forced the Brexit party to pay costs.

Just as with the Trumpian Republicans whose election denial playbook Farage cribs from, there is no significant voter fraud, but the point is to sow doubt and division, and to put the blame for Farage’s failures on migrants and minority ethnic communities which bolsters the sense of white victimhood upon which Farage feeds. It also prepares the ground for vote suppression measures which will benefit Farage in the future.

In Gorton and Denton the claim is that that Muslim wives and daughters were going into the polling booth wanting to vote for a Reform candidate who has said that you’re not necessarily British if you hold a British passport,and who rejects the entire concept of Islsmophobia, but their controlling Islamicist husbands coerced them into voting for an unmarried, white woman plumber representing a party led by a gay Jewish man. Further, they claim that this occurred in sufficient numbers to give the Greens a 4500 vote majority over a Reform candidate who would otherwise have won. Sounds legit.

The most basic fact is that over 70% of those who voted did not vote for Reform. No amount of dummy spitting by Farage, Tice, or right wing columnists is going to change that. The unpalatable truth that Farage can’t swallow is that ordinary people just are not that into him. That was proven in Gorton and Denton, in Caerphilly, it was even proven in the Runcorn by-election which the polls forecast as a certain win for Reform with a majority of well over a thousand but in which Reform squeaked to victory by just six votes. Reform consistently performs more poorly in real elections than it does in polling, because in real elections decent people are prepared to vote tactically to keep Reform out.

As for claims of sectarianism, well perhaps Reform might want to stop constantly banging on about “Christian values.”

The bile from Farage because his party failed badly to win a by election which he was convinced was in the bag is an alarming sign that Reform will import the very worst aspects of US Republican politics into the UK. Trump’s Republicans have ceased to be a democratic party, indulging instead in voter-suppression, gerrymandering and the outright refusal to accept the result of an election they have lost. That is what Farage has in store for the UK. When a party refuses to accept the result of an election that it lost fair and square, democracy dies.

It’s little wonder that Farage is cheerleading for Trump’s illegal war in Iran and wants the UK to get fully involved. Naturally the exact same newspapers which screamed “Take back control!” now want the UK to become an obedient poodle for Trump and blindly follow him into his illegal war in Iran. War is a big part of the authoritarian playbook. War takes over the news cycle. War protects the right from criticism. War allows the right to condemn those who oppose the war as unpatriotic. War grants authoritarian leaders emergency powers. War consumes everything else. For Farage, a war against Iran provides another toxic opportunity to paint British Muslims as dangerous interlopers that only he can deal with, a war on the enemy without quickly morphs into a war on the enemy within.

Climate change denial, racism, authoritarianism, English supremacism, and a crusade against women and minorities is all you get from Reform. Farage and his lackies want to put the clock back to burning fossil fuels and polluting the environment. They want to destroy communities and tell us our friends, family members, colleagues and neighbours are unwelcome invaders. They are a danger to us all. They are enemies of decency, humanity, kindness and compassion. They are alien to the truth. Reform must be shunned, shamed, and shocked by electoral annihilation. They are a cancer on democracy. The good news is that Reform is nowhere near as popular as it would like us to think it is, and that there is Farage’s big problem which no amount of bluster can solve.

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Cruelty built on lies, Reform’s immigration plans

Feb23 by weegingerdug

On Monday Reform UK’s home affairs spokes bigot the millionaire Zia Yusuf announced his party’s plans for the immigration system should we be unfortunate enough to see Reform UK take power after the next Westminster general election, which due to Westminster’s corrupt and undemocratic first past the post voting system could allow Farage and his minions to win a crushing majority in the Commons on as little as one third of the popular vote. Should this transpire, there would be virtually no checks and balances in the British political system to limit Farage’s exercise of unlimited power.

Reform’s plans for immigration are every bit as cruel and petty as you might have feared. A Reform UK government would create an agency modelled on Trump’s paramilitary thugs of ICE which would aim to deport hundreds of thousands of people, including many who arrived in the UK through recognised and governmentally accepted routes, who have obeyed all laws, abided by all the Byzantine settlement rules and regulations imposed by the Home Office, and paid the UK Government thousands of pounds in visa fees.

One of the nastiest aspects of these plans is that Reform intends to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) status, and replace it with a five year visa for which only those earning more than £68,000 a year would be eligible. Holders of this visa would not be entitled to treatment on the NHS or to claim any benefits. This is more draconian than even Trump’s immigration policy and it would make the UK one of the very few states anywhere in the world without a visa category providing for the permanent residency of foreign nationals who have met stringent visa conditions.

There are an estimated 430,000 people living in the UK with ILR, many of whom have lived in the UK for decades, are raising families here and have built their lives here. Reform’s vile plans throw them and their families into chaos and uncertainty.

As is typical of Reform UK propaganda, the party spreads lies and false information about foreign citizens resident in the UK. My other half is an American citizen who arrived in Scotland in 2019 on a spouse visa, so we have personal experience of the UK visa scheme and the arduous and expensive process of obtaining ILR. He was finally awarded ILR at the end of 2024. Throughout the five year qualifying period he was not eligible for and did not claim any benefits. One of Reform’s most common lies is that immigrants are only in the UK for benefits handouts. This is categorically untrue. Those in receipt of ILR can claim benefits and use the NHS freely but they can only do so after having proven that they can support themselves without recourse to public funds for at least five years. Only 2.7% of Universal Credit claimants are ILR holders, a third of whom are in employment, hardly the epidemic of foreign benefits scroungers Farage would have us believe in.

Migrants who come to the UK on family visas because they are the spouses or family members of British citizens are not entitled to benefits and may only use the NHS after paying an NHS surcharge to the Home Office on top of their visa fees. This charge is currently £1,035 per year for most applicants, meaning that those on a 5 year pathway to ILR – which the Labour government is planning to abolish and replace with a ten year wait – will have to pay a total of £5175 to the Home Office on top of their visa fees. For us the visa fees were £1,321 for the two and a half year duration of the visa, this then had to be renewed whereupon the same fee had to be paid again along with £2587 in NHS surcharges. Applicants have to pay this surcharge even if they are paying UK tax and national insurance. The surcharge must also be paid for each dependant child on the visa. For a family with two children this increases the total cost over a 5 year pathway to ILR to an eye watering £15,525.

Additionally, applicants must demonstrate that they meet the earnings threshold set by the Home Office, which is currently £29,000 annually per applicant . The income threshold is higher if the couple have dependent children. The main visa applicant must show evidence of earning an additional annual income of £3,800 (for the first child applicant) and £2,400 (for all subsequent child applicants), in addition to the £29,000 per annum minimum income requirement.

The visa applicants must also prove that they are resident in the UK, have suitable accommodation and are of good character. If the applicant is from a non-English speaking country they must submit proof of competence in written and spoken English. Technically, they could submit proof of competence in written and spoken Welsh or Scottish Gaelic instead.

While you can apply yourself, the complexity of the process is such that it’s advisable to use the services of a good immigration lawyer. If your application fails you don’t get your visa fee back.Using an immigration lawyer can add £1000 or more to each of the minimum of three applications or renewals you’ll have to make in order to get ILR (in our case the initial application, the visa renewal after two and a half years, then the application for ILR after 5 years. At each step you have to shell out thousands of pounds and submit reams of paperwork. The application for ILR costs £3029 but you don’t have to pay the NHS surcharge.

Once we had successfully negotiated all of this and my husband was granted ILR we thought that was the end of it. We had gone through a gruelling, stressful, and expensive process and finally got permanent residency for him. In total we estimate that we had spent over £15,000 and submitted over a kilogramme weight in documentation to get to that point.

Then we heard that Farage was planning to abolish ILR status and replace it with a five year visa which would be financially out of reach to the great majority of people, including us. We could not risk pinning all our hopes on the Reform UK bubble bursting, keeping our fingers crossed that they would not become the party of government in Westminster following the next general election. The peace of mind and security that we and so many other families in our position had worked so hard and spent so much to achieve was suddenly wheeched away. Hundreds of thousands of law abiding and hard working people with ILR have paid thousands of pounds to the Home Office, obeyed all the rules, cleared every hurdle, only for right wing British nationalists to go – HaHa! We’ve changed the rules, suckers.

So we were forced to take an additional step and submitted an application for British citizenship for my husband. This cost an additional £3700 including lawyer fees. His application was successful, and he will formally become a British citizen on 5 March, safely beyond the reach of Farage’s racist goalpost shifting.

We were able to scrape the money together to take this final step, but not everyone can. Those families are now facing very uncertain futures, dreading the prospect of ICE style raids on British towns and cities, sweeping up hard working law abiding people for the “crime” of being foreign. That’s the dystopian fascist Britain that’s in store for Scotland as part of this so-called union, cruelty built on lies.

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I’m delighted to tell you that just two weeks after the fundraiser was launched it has now reached its £5000 target. This is the fastest that the target has ever been reached. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed, I will reach out to thank you individually in due course.

I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

New polling and Reform may have peaked

Feb21 by weegingerdug

I’ve been blogging a lot this week, which is what happens when there’s nothing on the telly except the Winter Olympics. All power to those who enjoy that sort of thing, but watching people sliding down a mountain in the snow with two planks strapped to their feet leaves me cold, pun intended. So my lack of televisual entertainment is your gain, or possibly loss, I’m not going to judge.

Anyway I had intended to take a bit of time off, but gobshite that I am, there have been a few developments I’ve not addressed so far which may have an impact on Scotland’s hopes of escape from this on-going car crash that calls itself a union. It’s a union in the same sense that I have a full head of long flowing locks, something that exists only in fantasy.

Anyway, what is real, and yah boo sucks to be you YouGov, yet another opinion poll has just been published with headline figures the exact opposite of the seriously dodgy YouGov poll published earlier this month which purported to show that levels of support for independence have hardly budged since the 2014 referendum. Friday’s poll from Find Out Now, commissioned by The National newspaper, puts support for independence on 53% while 47% would vote against, with don’t knows removed. This comes hot on the heels of a poll by Norstat which put support for independence on 51%.

I’ve previously blogged about how the methodology employed in YouGov’s polls on Scottish independence systematically undercounts the true level of support for independence and artificially boosts the level of opposition to it. The Norstat and Find Out Now polls which both showed a majority for independence and came in the same month as a You poll which claimed that the level of support for independence has hardly budged since the referendum in 2014, confirm that YouGov’s polling on the issue is methodologically suspect. YouGov is now the only polling company which still habitually returns polls showing majority opposition to independence. YouGov’s polls on Scottish independence are now more about providing political ammunition to parties opposed to independence than about assessing the true level of support for independence amongst the people of Scotland.

The Find Out Now poll makes for some seriously dire reading for the Labour party in Scotland. Not only does it show that Labour could lose almost half of its seats in Holyrood and fall to fourth position behind the SNP, Reform UK, and the Scottish Greens, it also shows that Anas Sarwar’s do or die attempt to oust Keir Starmer has died not done. While 70% of Scots think that it was right to call for Starmer’s resignation, 75% say Sarwar’s call will have no effect on how they plan to vote in May. Just 8% say that it makes them more likely to vote Labour, while 17% say it makes them less likely to vote for a party which has been unmasked as an irrelevant branch office by Sarwar’s vainglorious demand. This is hardly the political gamechanger which Sarwar hoped it would be. Indeed, all he has done is to reveal just how desperate things are for the Labour party in Scotland.

While this poll confirms the findings of other recent polls in pointing to a pro-independence majority in Holyrood composed of the SNP and the Scottish Greens – Alba is not polling remotely close to the level necessary to get any of its candidates elected and its continuing existence as a political party is now being called into question – this poll also shows that Scottish voting intentions are not immune to the constant barrage of attention and platforming given by the British media to the bide-a wee-home for Tories that is Reform UK, a party which asserts that it can fix broken Britain by providing another shot at electoral success for the Conservatives who broke it in the first place.

We face the hideous prospect of Reform UK becoming the second largest party in Holyrood, while they will be comfortably outnumbered by the SNP and the Greens, never mind by the other anti-independence parties, they will still have significant representation on Holyrood committees and as the largest opposition party will get prime place at First Minister’s Questions, which will give them an important platform from which to spread their racist anti-immigrant bullshit to scaremonger about the LGBT community, and, perhaps most importantly, to hinder the development of Scotland’s vital renewable energy industry with their climate change denying nonsense and the lie that the pursuit of net zero is the real reason for high energy bills in Scotland. All of this offensive deceitful far right Anglo-British nationalist slop will be eagerly lapped up by a Scottish media which is currently in desperate need of a new Saviour of the Union.

However, while it may not come in time to affect Reform’s performance in the Scottish election in May, there are a few welcome straws in the wind which suggest that Reform UK’s appeal may have peaked. Polling for the Gorton and Denton Westminster by-election due to be held on Thursday suggest that the Greens are narrowly ahead and may snatch the seat from Reform, which has thrown everything into the contest and whose victory is eagerly anticipated by the right wing press. Increasingly the English and Welsh Greens are being seen as the most credible party to defeat Reform in England. That’s very good news for supporters of Scottish and Welsh independence as the English and Welsh Greens support independence.

There are also some signs that the wheels may be starting to come off Nigel Farage’s one man bandwagon. The councils in England which are controlled by Reform have been mired in chaos and controversy. Despite being elected on a promise to reduce Council Tax they have all increased it while at the same time axing vital council services. Reform is discovering that like Keir Starmer, the self-serving lies you can get away with in opposition will find you out once you are in power.

Over the past few days there has been a slew of defections from Reform UK to a new party which is even more vile and far right than Reform is. Nine Reform UK councillors have defected to Restore Britain in the week since it was set up by Rupert Lowe, elected in 2024 as a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth. Lowe left Reform after an acrimonious falling out with Farage, Reform wasn’t big enough for both their egos. Lowe’s new party, Restore Britain, espouses nakedly racist policies and Christian nationalist policies essentially identical to those of the far right National Front in the 1970s and 80s. Restore Britain is ethno-nationalist and has attracted support from white supremacists. Lowe’s party asserts that possessing a British passport does not necessarily make you British and seeks the mass deportation of millions of people, particularly targeting minority ethnic communities. The new party has received the backing of Elon Musk, who will use his social media platform and immense wealth to promote it.

Lowe has previously called for the abolition of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. His new party calls for a “single, uniform legal system” across the entire UK. This policy appears to be targeted at Sharia Courts, which contrary to far right disinformation are not supplanting the English and Scots legal systems. Such Sharia courts as exist in the UK are legally non-binding arbitration and mediation services which are used by observant Muslims in civil and matrimonial cases. However Restore’s policy is incompatible with the existence of both the Scottish legal system and a Scottish Parliament with law making powers.

Restore Britain is a far right English nationalist party. It is essentially fishing in the same pool of voters as Reform UK, painting itself as the real anti-establishment party of the hard right, a task Farage has made easier by stuffing Reform full of the dregs of the Tory party.

Restore Britain is a deeply unpleasant party, espousing views that not so long ago were confined to the lunatic fringes. Yet due to the normalisation of the far right by the British media these disgusting views are becoming mainstream. No support for Restore Britain anywhere is to be welcomed, but this new party may succeed in peeling off support from Reform UK and reducing the number of its candidates who get elected.

One way or another, all this confirms that the UK’s political system is irredeemably broken. It cannot be fixed, both Reform UK and Restore Britain are peddling lies. They stand for nothing but the increasing enrichment of the wealthy at everyone else’s expense, the devastation of civil and human rights and the rape of the environment. Independence is Scotland’s only way out.

Update: Literally seconds after publishing this piece I learned that Kenny MacAskill, the leader of Alba, has announced that his party will not be contesting May’s Holyrood election. In his message to members he states that the continuing existence of Alba is now in question. This means there is now a lesser chance of the pro-independence vote being split in May’s election.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

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The choice facing Scotland is independence or fascism.

Feb18 by weegingerdug

A major new poll was published on Wednesday which confirms other recent polls in showing that Scots are on track to elect a pro-independence majority to Holyrood in May’s election. Even better, this new poll, carried out by More in Common, shows that the SNP are within striking distance of winning an absolute majority in Holyrood in their own right. Seat projections from this poll put the SNP on 64 seats, one short of the majority which First Minister John Swinney is seeking, and which he claims wil guarantee a second independence referendum. Given the highly fragmented nature of the opposition, the possibility of an SNP majority government is tantalisingly close. However most polls, including this one, which projects 9 Holyrood seats for the Scottish Greens, tell us that Scotland is on track to elect another Scottish Parliament with a pro-independence majority.

The poll makes dismal reading for Labour and the Tories, who are both projected to lose heavily. Labour would fall from the 22 seats it won in the 2021 election to just 16. Labour’s internal polling no doubt points to a similarly dire result, which is probably why Anas Sarwar decided to regale a disbelieving Scotland with his best impression of a man who hardly knew Keir Starmer and wouldn’t vote for him if he had.

Meanwhile the Tories are facing catastrophe, dropping from the 31 seats they won in 2021 to a mere 12, a complete humiliation for Russell Findlay, if there was ever a politician who deserved to be electorally humiliated, it’s Findlay. Who knows, on these figures we might even finally see the back of Murdo Fraser, the Ralph Wiggum of the Conservative party in Scotland.

But before we get too overjoyed, the well-deserved catastrophes facing Labour and the Tories are coming about due to the rise of an even nastier and even more overtly English nationalist party, Farage’s little helpers, the ghouls of Reform UK, most of whom abandoned the Tories because it wasn’t right wing and nasty enough. According to this poll, Reform is set to overtake both Labour and the Conservatives and to become the largest anti-independence party in the Scottish Parliament with 17 MSPs.

Reform claims to stand for ordinary British people but it is led and funded by multi-millionaires, wants to reduce the minimum wage, and reinstate the two child cap on benefits, the biggest single contributor to child poverty in recent times. If you’re struggling on the minimum wage, Reform wants to make you struggle even more. Those tax cuts for its millionaire backers need to be funded somehow.

The party is hostile to the NHS as a publicly funded universal healthcare system which is free at the point of use. Farage has previously spoken in favour of a US style insurance based system, but he’s kept very quiet about that of late as he knows it’s electoral kryptonite. Had such a system been in place when I suffered a stroke in 2020, even with good insurance I’d have been facing a bill of a couple of hundred thousand pounds. That’s the typical out of pocket expense for Americans who suffer a stroke as serious as the one I had and who like me are left with significant life-long disabilities as a result. As it was our only out of pocket expense was on snacks as my other half was stress-eating.

Reform have also refused to guarantee that they would maintain the triple lock on state pensions. State pensions in the UK are already amongst the lowest in Western Europe, under Reform the UK’s elderly could fall even further behind.

Farage has taken aim at what he described as the “lunacy” of maternity leave while Matthew Goodwin his candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election has called for women and girls to be given a so-called “biological reality check” and for the introduction of a “negative child benefit tax for those who don’t have offspring”. In Goodwin’s universe the role of women is to get pregnant early and often and what they really need is for a man to explain female reproductive biology to them. What they don’t need, apparently, is maternity leave or subsidised childcare.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is literal fascism. Reform talk a lot about grooming gangs and the threat which they claim migrants, asylum seekers and trans people pose to women and girls, but they have nothing at all to say about the epidemic of violence and abuse which women endure at the hands of cisgender heterosexual men from white British backgrounds. Neither does Reform have much of a problem with the scourge of online misogyny from the likes of Andrew Tate and his followers or the sexist and abusive images of women created by Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Reform talks a lot about freedom of speech, what they really mean is the right to insult, intimidate and abuse women and minorities. Reform is not so keen on extending freedom of speech to those who dare to challenge racism or who seek to set the record straight on the many crimes against humanity committed in the name of the British Empire.

This poll tells us how critical it is that independence supporters turn out and vote for a pro-independence party which is actually capable of winning seats at May’s Holyrood election. That means voting SNP in the constituency vote and SNP or Green in the list, no other pro-independence party is polling anywhere close to the level needed to win seats on the list. Personally I am voting SNP in the constituency, here we have a great SNP candidate in the shape of Katie Hagmann, and I will also be voting SNP in the regional list vote, the SNP often picks up a list seat in the South of Scotland region. The choice facing Scotland has never been starker. It’s independence or fascism.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Reform UK’s authoritarian project for power

Jan28 by weegingerdug

The American author and poet Maya Anjelou famously wrote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” That has never been more true than where we are now in British politics with the rise of the far right, the performative cruelty it espouses and its dehumanisation of minority groups. Reform UK has repeatedly shown us who it is. It speaks of fixing “Broken Britain” yet it is stuffed to the gills with the dregs of the Tory party who broke it in the first place. Its leader Farage refuses to acknowledge never mind apologise for the multiple allegations that he engaged in a years long and systematic pattern of racist bullying when he was at school.

Farage talks about challenging the elites, yet he and his party leadership are privately educated multi-millionaires and Reform is bankrolled by the super-rich. The party is the most blatant and dangerous example of astroturfing ever seen in British politics and it is no coincidence that Farage chose as his messenger boy in Scotland a multi-millionaire best known, in as much as he’s known at all, for his astroturfing Vote No Borders campaign during the Scottish independence referendum campaign.

Reform has been ably assisted in its rise to prominence by the predominantly right wing British media, and a BBC which takes its cue as to what it deems newsworthy from that media. This is because for all Reform’s talk of challenging some amorphous liberal elite, Reform really represents the best chance that the rich and powerful have of strengthening their grip on power and wealth and maintaining it indefinitely. The left behind working class communities amongst which Reform trawls for support with the tried and tested tactic of blaming migrants and LGBTQ people, the Jews and degenerates of the 21st century, will quickly find that their already difficult lives become orders of magnitude worse should Reform ever take power at Westminster.

Reform UK has just published a policy document titled Restoring Justice. It is Reform UK’s version of the American hard right’s Project 2025. The policy is being presented as a response to public frustration with crime, courts, policing, and borders. However it is actually something deeply sinister, a plan to reshape and centralise the British state, limiting the right to due process, introducing mass surveillance, and concentrating power in the hands of Farage himself.

Farage seeks to make permanent changes to how law, rights, and accountability operate in the UK. The proposals put forward by Reform would fundamentally hollow out Britain’s already weak and ineffective mechanisms for holding power, particularly the power of the prime minister, to account.

In Reform UK’s rewriting of the definition of justice, human and civil rights are no longer seen as vital protections of the dignity, freedom, and humanity of UK residents, citizens and non-citizens alike. Rather, human, civil, employment and environmental rights are recast as impediments to the right of the state to act as it sees fit without hindrance. This is a document which paints legal challenges to the exercise of state power as abuses, not as the safeguards they really are. Human rights are cast as irritating impediments deployed by leftist activists who seek to block the true will of the British people rather than the essential protections against state overreach that they really are.

When that state is governed by a party like Reform UK, which has just selected as its candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by election a man who believes that being born and brought up in the UK does not necessarily mean you are British, this redefinition of justice as the absolute right of the state to act as it pleases becomes a dangerous recipe for the kind of fascism that was defeated at such an appallingly high cost in the first half of the last century.

Despite its title, this policy is not about restoring order and justice, it is about entrenching inequality and removing the right to due process from those Reform UK has deemed to be non-British. For those of us in Scotland, Wales, and the north of Ireland who wish to remove our countries from Westminster rule, this is a deeply alarming development.

The document proposes a bonfire of human and civil rights with the evisceration of the ability of the courts to limit the state’s power. At the same time policing powers are greatly widened. The document supports stronger stop and search, broader arrest authority, and reduced scrutiny of police conduct. There is no acknowledgement of how such measures have historically affected minority communities or how accountability failures erode public trust. The assumption is that fewer constraints on police power automatically produce better outcomes. Reform also wants to give the police the right to take the biometric details of anyone who has an encounter with the police. It’s a recipe for an authoritarian surveillance state.

The document foresees the creation of a British counterpart to ICE, the paramilitary force ostensibly created to remove violent foreign criminals from the USA but which Trump has deployed as an occupying army in states which do not support him where it has murdered citizens monitoring its abuse of power while it raids work places and detains citizens and non citizens alike. Reform wants to bring this abuse of state power to Britain’s streets.

The document talks of the building of a concentration camp, supposedly for undocumented criminal offenders. We know from the USA’s experience that thousands of law abiding hard working people will be swept up too. When the right to due process and legal redress is removed, no one is safe from state overreach and the abuse of power.

Reform will bring about a massive expansion of the prison population, promising mandatory life sentences for anyone with three convictions, meaning the prisons could bulge with those with life sentences for minor non violent crimes condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the new concentration camps Reform promises to build. Yet at the same time Reform vows to slash the amount the state spends on incarcerating this ballooning prison population, meaning thousands will be confined in inhuman conditions of insanitary brutality while politicians preen about being tough.

At May’s election all of us who value humanity, decency and the rule of law must vote to oppose the cruelty and authoritarianism of Reform UK. For those of us who support independence the choice is easy, vote SNP in the constituency vote and SNP or Green in the regional list vote. No other independence party comes close to the level of support needed to get candidates elected. For those who do not currently support independence, they need to ask themselves whether they are more afraid of independence or an authoritarian fascist Britain in which the NHS is replaced by an insurance based model and public services and state pensions are gutted in order to give tax cuts to the rich.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested. I intend to go ahead with this in the new year but am having trouble collating a list of the emails of everyone who currently supports the blog monthly.

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Reform’s Scottish ‘leader’ – the FIFA Peace Prize of Scottish politics

Jan15 by weegingerdug

Spare a thought for poor wee Malkie Offord, over the years he’s thrown hundreds of thousands of pounds at the political scene in a bid to make himself relevant, firstly with his ludicrously misnamed and suspiciously well funded Vote No Borders astroturfing campaign during the 2014 independence referendum, a cringeworthy campaign which made no impact at all despite strenuous efforts on the part of the BBC to present it as a grassroots initiative. It was quickly rechristened Vote Nob Orders by the genuinely grassroots Yes movement and soon died of embarrassment. There is no evidence that it had the slightest effect on the final outcome. The campaign was most noted for making the false claim in one of its adverts that following independence, sick Scottish children would be denied treatment at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, a nasty and scaremongering claim which was made without consultation with the hospital which angrily insisted that the claim wasn’t true and demanded that the advert was withdrawn.

Malkie then threw £150,000 at the Tory party in an attempt to get elected to Holyrood, only to be rewarded with a lowly position on the Tory list in the Lothian region during the 2021 Scottish elections and failed to come close to getting elected. His selection as a list candidate did not go down well with other Tories, who slated it as “cronyism” and angrily told the Edinburgh Evening News: “It seems all you need to get an endorsement is to have deep pockets.”

Later in 2021 his efforts to buy himself into politics paid off when he was appointed as a Tory peer to the House of Lords. In his maiden speech he spoke of his support for the UK’s Net zero objectives, arguing that the UK could demonstrate global leadership on climate change by cutting emissions while continuing to grow its economy. Having seen that the Tories are never going to regain relevance in Scotland, he’s now jumped ship to Reform UK, a party which is vehemently opposed to Net Zero. It’s almost as though Malkie doesn’t have any principles at all beyond his own ego and deep belief in his entitlement to political influence. Who’d have thought it?

On Thursday it was going to be Malkie’s special day, the day when he’d finally get to be the centre of attention, or at least to bask in as much attention as Nigel would allow him to have, which wouldn’t be that much, because Nigel is to attention as a black hole is to light, he sucks it all into himself and destroys any competing light sources in his orbit. Malkie, who has a vast ego of his own, is learning that the hard way. At Reform’s Scottish press conference Nige announced to the press that he’d hand picked Malkie to be his messenger boy in Scotland. It was always going to be the Nigel Farage Show, Malkie was just a support act.

Malkie’s official title is leader of Reform UK in Scotland, but given that Reform UK does not actually have a separate Scottish organisation, or any Scottish specific policies, and no one has elected Malkie to be the head of this phantom party, his authority derives entirely from being personally selected by Nige, who could deselect him just as easily if Malkie doesn’t play ball, the title of Scottish Leader of Reform UK is as real as the FIFA Peace prize which was recently presented to Donald Trump by an obsequious Gianni Infantino. Being the Reform UK Scottish leader is very much the FIFA Peace Prize of Scottish politics, it’s a meaningless invented title of no significance given to a right wing politician to placate his huge ego and sense of entitlement. Malkie only got it because Reform UK’s sole MSP, the hapless Tory defect, sorry, defector, Graham Simpson, has all the charisma and charm of a torn plastic Lidl bag fluttering forlornly in the branches of a dead tree.

But life comes at you fast in politics, Malkie didn’t even get to be centre of attention adjacent at his first big press conference. Things quickly went off the rails as Malkie was malkied by the news that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had booted Robert Jenrick, her erstwhile competitor for the Conservative leadership out of the shadow cabinet and suspended his party membership with immediate effect after receiving what she described as “clear, irrefutable evidence” that Jenrick was plotting to defect to Reform in a way that would create maximum political embarrassment to the Conservative party. That must have been bad given that the Tories main political talent lies in embarrassing themselves.

All of a sudden none of the press pack wanted to ask Malkie about his pretend new job. They were only interested in the other Conservative opportunist.

Reform presents itself as the party which is going to shake up British politics, but it is stuffed to the gills with former Tories. 14 former Conservative MPs, mostly from the swivel eyed end of the Tory party have jumped ship to Reform, as have hundreds of former Conservative councillors. Jenrick, if he does indeed join Reform, would merely be the latest. The list of former Tory MPs now in Reform includes such luminaries as Nadine Dorries, Andrea Jenkyns, and Ross Thomson, collectively the political embodiment of “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.”

Reform has 21 councillors in Scotland, all but two of whom are former Tories. Reform is not a new party, it’s merely a new vehicle for the very worst aspects of the Conservative party which ran the Tories into the ground, wrought havoc and despair on the country as a whole, and who now seek to save their political necks with a cynical and astroturfing rebranding campaign funded by millionaires. Offord’s new political vehicle is as much an insurgent force in British politics as his Vote No Borders was an authentic grassroots campaign. But it’s no surprise that the self-seeking Offord is able to deny Reform’s racism to himself and claim it’s a party which stands for ordinary working class people. Reform is really Vote Nob Orders Mk II, no wonder Opportunistic Offord feels at home in it and is happy to abandon his former commitment to Net Zero and his claimed belief in no borders in return for a pretend title and a seat in Holyrood.

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Farage’s new tartan puppet

Jan12 by weegingerdug

On Monday, Nigel Farage preened his insufferably smug way through a press conference at which he introduced the latest opportunistic Tory defector to Reform UK. This time it was Nadhim Zahawi, who was very briefly the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson. Zahawi was later found to have paid a seven figure penalty to HMRC for irregularities in his tax affairs which Zahawi insists were “careless and not deliberate”. That scandal led to Zahawi being forced to stand down as the chair of the Conservatives. Most Tory defections to Reform are opportunistic, it seems that Zahawi’s was more opportunistic than most. There is no former Tory who is too disgraced for Farage to accept.

When you stuff your party with ex-Tories who are best known for their serial scandals, it does not bode at all well for your promise to bring about the reform you claim the British political system so badly needs. It all sounds very like Keir Starmer and his promise of change, but with added fascism, and since Starmer is pretty authoritarian himself, that all points to a massive anger and disenchantment with Farage should he succeed in getting into Downing Street, by which time it may be too late.

The Tories have told friendly members of the press that Zahawi defected to Reform after being turned down for a peerage by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Zahawi has issued a predictable denial, which we can file under “He would say that wouldn’t he?”

Zahawi is from a wealthy and well connected family of Iraqi Kurds who came to the UK as a nine year old as a refugee from Saddam Hussein. Now he’s in a party which had it been in power when he was a boy, would have made him remain in Iraq. So we can add hypocrisy to Zahawi’s opportunism and penchant for sleaze. Zahawi’s story is not exactly that of an impoverished refugee lad made good, his father was a millionaire businessman and his grandfather was Governor of the Central Bank of Iraq from May 1959 to November 1960 and later the Iraqi Minister of Trade.

Zahawi was one of the richest members of Parliament, only Rishi Sunak was worth more. Despite a net worth estimated to be as much as £100 million, in 2013 he was forced to repay part of a £5,822.27 expenses claim for his energy bills after it emerged taxpayers were paying for the electricity supply to his stables. There’s a Reform UK man of the people for you. By this time if you haven’t realised that reform is as much on the agenda of Reform UK as protecting the devolution settlement is on the Labour party’s, you haven’t been paying attention. No party composed of carpet bagging opportunistic Tory millionaires is ever going to work in the interests of ordinary working class people.

Talking of man of the people, on Thursday the frog faced fascist is due to slime into Edinburgh to announce who is going to lead Reform UK in the Scottish elections in May and who will lead the Reform UK contingent elected to Holyrood. It is widely expected that that man – and it will certainly be a man – is that other carpet bagging opportunistic millionaire Malcolm Offord, a man awarded a peerage by the Tories for services to making them a £150,000 donation. It’s highly unlikely to be the party’s sole MSP, the turncoat Tory Graham Simpson, a man with all the charisma and charm of one of those cheaply printed catalogues for cleaning products which gets stuffed through your letterbox before being consigned to the recycling bin.

Offord isn’t exactly blessed with charisma himself. He’s bought his way into politics, leveraging his wealth in return for influence, first in the Tories and now in Reform. Offord is best known, insofar as he’s known at all for his astroturfing Vote No Borders fake grassroots campaign during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, about which the BBC disgraced itself by effusively publicising on the main News at 6. Now Mr, sorry Lord, Vote No Borders has decided he’s rather keen on borders after all.

The truth is it doesn’t really matter who Farage anoints as nominal leader of the McGhouls of Reform, he will be Farage’s creature, with no authority other than that bestowed on him by Der Fuhrager. Even Anas Sarwar has more credibility than that. Quite incredibly even the accounting unit known as Scottish Labour is more of a real party than the Scottish branch office of Reform UK, which is merely the Scottish franchise of a private company masquerading as a political party. Reform in Scotland is a so called party with no specifically Scottish policies other than a determination to use Holyrood as a platform from which to bang on about its opposition to immigration – which is reserved to Westminster – and its opposition to net zero – energy policy is likewise reserved to Westminster.

Many of those in Reform do not even believe that there should be a Scottish Parliament, their candidates are standing for election to a Parliament which they do not believe should exist and for which they have no policies. These are the people who claim to stand for meaningful change, yet they can’t even change their underwear from the skid marks of Tory sleaze and opportunism. A party which claims Britain is broken but which is filled almost entirely by the Tories who broke it is not about to reform anything , not even the names of those who benefit from the sleaze.

With the BBC and much of the Scottish media desperate to find a new Saviour of the Union now that Anas Sarwar is a busted flush, they will turn to bigging up fascists, because they are more afraid of Scotland becoming a normal prosperous northern European nation than they are of far right Anglo-British nationalism. Watch out for Farage’s tartan puppet to be hailed as the man who’s going to take on the SNP and lock independence back in the Union flag themed shortbread tin. But the non leader of a non party who is the puppet of a man who is widely loathed in Scotland will quickly find out, like Anas Sarwar before him, that his career will be limited to yelling SNP Bad from the sidelines.

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

Tag Archives: reform-uk

Six houses, five cars, six yachts and zero self-awareness

Labour can’t be trusted not to do a deal with Reform

The rapid implosion of Reform’s Scottish campaign

Reform’s election denial is a cancer on democracy

Cruelty built on lies, Reform’s immigration plans

New polling and Reform may have peaked

The choice facing Scotland is independence or fascism.

Reform UK’s authoritarian project for power

Reform’s Scottish ‘leader’ – the FIFA Peace Prize of Scottish politics

Farage’s new tartan puppet