A Vote for The Brexit Party is a Vote for the Tories

Nigel Farage played his hand today, but if you consider it for anything longer than a few seconds you'll see it's not as strong a hand as the mainstream media would have you believe.

In choosing only to stand in constituencies that are traditionally Labour strongholds, Nigel Farage has revealed to all that he knows his party have no chance whatsoever at election victory. Equally, he knows that the Conservative party have no hope in winning any seats in the predominantly leave voting north country and the south east. So, with his eye on the only chance at power he believes he has, a coalition with the Tories that will push a no deal Brexit through, he has decided to make this pact with Boris Johnson. 

But herein lies the paradox at the heart of Nigel Farage's risky gamble, or rather brainless plan; as even the leave voters within a traditional Labour constituency would rather die than vote Conservative, why then would they vote in the Brexit Party to return the Tories to power?

The only game that the Tories and the Brexit Party have is Brexit. But Brexit has long been a distraction in this country, a sideshow that has taken up three long years. This election is going to be fought on raising and improving living standards and the quality of life for all. This is how Labour are fighting this election and it is how they will win it. For Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, this election can only be about keeping us divided and distracted by Brexit, because when we are preoccupied by such deep divisions they can continue to impose upon us policies that only benefit themselves and their kind. 

The first rule of a class system is to keep the working classes fighting amongst themselves. Don't fall for it. Even if you want to leave the EU, please do not vote for the Brexit Party. Vote for Labour and ensure we get a deal that benefits everyone in society, rather than just the privileged few. 

Don't vote for Nigel Farage's mob, because to do so is to vote for the Tories. They are nothing more than Boris Johnson's enablers.

Vote Labour.

More BBC Bias

Yesterday a shambolic and dishevelled looking Boris Johnson made a right pig's ear out of his wreath laying at the cenotaph. Fidgeting during the two minute silence and approaching the cenotaph too early so that he was forced to step back into line, the biggest calamity was yet to come - he disrespectfully laid his wreath upside down.

(Incidentally, can you imagine the furore that would have occurred had Jeremy Corbyn made such a gaffe?)

Except you'd be forgiven for not noticing these errors if you watched BBC Breakfast this morning, because their report selected footage of the cenotaph from 2016 instead when, as foreign secretary, Boris avoided such a faux pas at the wreath laying ceremony.

The BBC think that we wouldn't notice the likes of Tim Farron and Theresa May stood in the line up and realise that this was archive footage.

The BBC were wrong.

The BBC think its audience are idiots. Idiots who are there to vote Conservative and protect the status quo. 

Let's prove the BBC wrong. Let's put an end to this ridiculous favouritism in our mainstream media next month. Let's vote Labour.

Why Labour is Literally the Party of the Future

Only the Labour party has the determination to unlock the potential of every child in the land thereby securing not only their future but the future of the country too.

Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party promise to transform the lives of every family for the better. They will do this be reopening the 1,000 Sure Start centres that the Conservative party so spitefully closed when entering a needlessly austerity driven power nine years ago. That's a Sure Start centre in every community and a radical expansion of child care in the UK.

Labour will also be putting an end to child poverty ensuring that every child of primary school age is given a free hot meal each day to aid their concentration and learning.

Compare this to Boris Johnson's Conservatives. If returned to power next month, they will ensure that 515 constituencies will receive less funding per pupil than in 2015. Only 17 constituencies will actually get a raise, and they are the ones held by the Conservatives.  Because the Tory party are only considered with looking after themselves and providing for their own future. They don't even want to acknowledge the child poverty issue that the UN recently highlighted. They prefer pretending that it isn't even happening, because it's not happening to their children is it?

But Labour aren't just looking to secure your children's future, they are also pledging that mothers will receive not nine months, but twelve months paid maternity. This will ensure that mothers can spend longer with their newborn babies and they will also have the opportunity to choose working hours that suit them.

You may have heard the Tories bleating this weekend about Labour's figures, that they believe (based purely on assumption - remember that the Labour manifesto hasn't actually been published yet) that the spending plans for such pledges are astronomical. But, after his consultation with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation amongst others, Oxford University economist Professor Simon Wren-Lewis argues that it is the Tories spending plans that are truly unsustainable...thanks to the needless black hole that is Brexit. Labour's spending plans are actually far more sustainable because they will increase taxes on high earners and the Corporation Tax, something that the Tories do not want to do, because that's hitting their elite friends. 

If you find it disgraceful that the Tories are essentially saying we cannot afford to achieve even the basic level of dignity that we all deserve, but they're still happy to fund, protect and bail out their friends, then vote Labour.

If you want your children to have the very best start in life, vote Labour.

If you want the UK to prosper in the future, vote Labour.

Please, please, please, vote Labour at the polls next month.

Silent Sunday: Remembrance

Out On Blue Six: Aron Wright

Anyone who doesn't fast forward through the commercial breaks or watches TV live will be familiar with this lovely song, as it's the music used in a very touching advert for Lloyds Bank, featuring the trademark black horse and its foal

The ad is a beautiful marriage of music and visuals, though I still maintain that horse isn't looking after the foal when it makes it walk across the icy lake first!

End Transmission

Plus Size Bond Girls: November

Bit late with this month's, but better late than never...

Sorry We Missed You (2019)

"Let’s get the cardboard off the concrete!"

Sorry We Missed You, Ken Loach's follow up to I, Daniel Blake is initially something of a slow burn affair as we are introduced to the family unit at the film's heart  and the alarming practices and pitfalls of freelance, zero-hour contracted 'service economy' of in-home carers and parcel delivery drivers. But when the storyline comes together and this family reach breaking point, Loach delivers a veritable gut punch to audiences, the ramifications of which will bruise the mind for some time to come.

Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) are a loving couple with two children Seb (Rhys Stone) and Liza Jane (Katie Procter). Thanks to the global economic crash in 2008 (y'know, the one that the Tories seem to believe happened because there were too many libraries in Wolverhampton) the family have been cheated of a mortgage and a home of their own, thanks to the collapse of Northern Rock and Ricky being laid off as a construction worker. Renting ever since, the family have got by thanks to Abbie's work as a zero-hour contract nurse, travelling around Newcastle to care for the elderly and seriously disabled in their own homes. But when Ricky hears about the potentially lucrative rewards he could get working on a quasi self-employed basis for a delivery company, he decides to take the plunge and convinces Abbie to sell the family car so that he can purchase his own van rather than rent a van from the firm at £65 per day. This decision has repercussions for the family; for a start, without a car, Abbie is now reduced to travelling to her numerous work appointments by bus, whilst their children have essentially become latchkey kids. A degree of self sufficiency is relatively fine for the bright and diligent Liza Jane, but for her older brother Seb, already at that 'difficult age', it is offers an all too tempting chance to drop out. Pretty soon his school work and attendance begins to suffer and he finds himself in trouble for fighting and shoplifting. Ricky knows he needs to be there for his family, to take Seb in hand and guide him back to the straight and narrow and reassure Liza-Jane that everything's going to be fine, but when he asks his supervisor, the bullet-headed Maloney (Ross Brewster, delivering one of the film's most striking characters) for time off, he quickly learns the grim reality of non-conventional employment where you only earn for the work you do and the targets you meet. Everything else is a deficit that will cost him big.

Ken Loach is hands down in the top three of my all-time favourite directors alongside Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke, so I'm fully versed in his movies and his style. I know for example that he almost always employs amateur actors, and I greatly appreciate the rawness and authenticity he can gain from such performers, but I wasn't quite prepared for the levels of amateur performances that is to be found in Sorry We Missed You. To be blunt, the acting (combined with the slow-burn nature) of even the central cast within the story did have me worrying at first that this might only stretch to being an average movie in the director's body of work. No disrespect to any of the actors, but they are not Oscar winners. With the exception of Katie Procter, the youngest member of the cast and a real find, there perhaps needed to be a little more light and shade and a greater degree of complexity and nuance to how they approach the characters, or more specifically Paul Laverty's dialogue, as some scenes do feel like they're just reading the lines. Debbie Honeywood is sometimes guilty of this, yet she is somehow never unconvincing in the role of the compassionate and caring Abbie and always gives the audience a sense that this is a genuine person rather than a film character who exists for just 100 minutes. Being a Mancunian (and Man Utd fan), Kris Hitchen is often somewhat reminiscent of Steve Evets in Looking for Eric, but despite his character's story being necessarily central to the film, he's often less interesting than Honeywood's Abbie. As the pair's oldest child, Rhys Stone is very good at portraying the sarcastic and truculent adolescent with an answer for everything, but he is less assured in moments that require him to bond with his on-screen family. The subplot involving his love of street art and his little crew of graffiti artists, unfortunately never really gets off the ground and I'm left unsure as to just what it was Laverty and Loach wanted to say here.

But Loach and Laverty are on much surer ground with the main thrust of the narrative, which you find yourself fully swept along with almost without noticing. As the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune beset the already struggling family you find yourself raw with their pain and angered by a system of employment 'rights' (or rather lack of them) that would make the Tolpuddle Martyrs wonder just what has actually changed in the 180 or so years since they were unfairly transported to Australia. It's here too that I have to take umbrage (as I often seem to do) with the Guardian's reviewer, Peter Bradshaw, who says;

"And here is where my qualm arises. Many people will see this film as a portrayal of real issues facing people – not silly old Brexit, which only worries people in the London bubble. Does the director himself feel like this? I don’t know. But I can only say that the European Union is the modern-day nursery of employment rights, and outside it is where working people will find more cynicism, more cruelty, more exploitation, more economic isolation and more poverty."

So Bradshaw feels that Loach's film needed to somehow factor in an  argument for Remain because it is only within the EU that we can enjoy employment rights? That would be an effective argument that I would be more than willing to get on board with where it not for the fact that Sorry We Missed You is casting a light on the kind of unfair and exploitative working practices that we, as a EU member, are already experiencing. I completely agree that Brexit will isolate us further and mean even less employment rights, but this is already happening and it's happening right now. We have long since been on the slippery slope and, frankly, it worries me that it has taken Brexit for those like Bradshaw in their 'London bubble' to realise this, if indeed they have. As far as I can see, the only solution to this problem of the gig economy is a Labour government.

Loach may be getting on in years, he may have scored a massive hit with his last movie, I, Daniel Blake, but make no mistake, he is not one to rest on his laurels. The cardboard may be off the concrete as the heartless, self-confessed hard bastard Maloney demands it, but Loach continues to hit that very same concrete running. He is no less angry here than he has been at any other point in his career and I hope that what he has to say reaches as wide an audience as possible. He doesn't reserve his anger just for his films either, look at his appearance on Victoria Derbyshire this past week where, in just twenty seconds, he nails the utter contempt the Tory government has for ordinary people. Watch the fat Tory twat roll his eyes when Loach mentions Grenfell, and it tells you all you need to know about these people.

One thing is for sure, Sorry We Missed You will make you reconsider the people who hand you your latest DVD or book purchase from Amazon. Be sure to smile and ask them how their day is going next time eh?