There should already be no questioning of the inhumanity of Tory policies, given their concentration on tax cuts for the wealthy, starving the NHS and schools, and cutting benefits to those desperately in need. But the blatant and shameless attempts in the last 48 hours by Theresa May to exploit the deaths of the recent victims of terrorism for party advantage, are truly tasteless and sickening. The populist new pledge to “rip up human rights” is a further appeal to the basest instincts of society, while looking to seize the moment further to increase the powers of the state. The cycle of alienation will only be enhanced, causing more terrorism, by draconian state actions which inevitably will lead to injustice and grievance.

We have to stop the Tories. That must be the basis of any decent person’s vote. If you doubt me, just go down to a newsagent and look at the appalling front pages of today’s newspapers. The question is how to do it?

1) In Scotland, vote for the SNP. There is no constituency where an SNP vote risks letting the Tory in. There are scores of votes, especially in rural and in south central Scotland, where any switch of voters from SNP to Labour could gain the Tories enough seats to give Theresa May a working majority.

2). In England and Wales, vote for whoever is best placed to defeat the Tory. If you have a sitting non-Tory MP, lend them your support. So Lib Dems and Greens should vote Labour in Labour constituencies. That would, on current polling evidence, make almost all existing Labour seats safe. I make an exception for Birmingham Yardley where Labour voters should switch to the excellent John Hemming to get rid of the horrible Jess Phillips. In Hastings and Rye if Lib Dems vote Labour there is every chance to get rid of Amber Rudd, which is an aim every Lib Dem should support.

The Guardian have published a useful guide to some seats where tactical voting might be effective. I endorse it.

How to react to first past the post is a personal decision. But the danger of a continued Tory majority is so great that my own view is that anybody who is not hard right should, on this occasion, do what is practically most likely to mitigate it.

For Labour voters to vote to damage the SNP with the effect of electing Tories would be self harm. Lib Dem voters should find May’s attitude to human rights and to Brexit anathema. I am asking more Lib Dems to vote tactically, to support sitting Labour MPs, than any other group. This one time, the value of halting May outweighs the existentialist act of declaring personal allegiance. In the smaller number of constituencies where I am asking Lab voters to support Lib Dems, the same applies.

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I have been a political activist my entire life, though not always necessarily in the party sense. I have been deeply interested in every Westminster election since 1974, campaigned hard in many of them and indeed stood for parliament myself twice, markedly unsuccessfully. But I do not think I have ever been so emotionally invested in any election so much as this one. I really care about this.

Why is that? It is not connected with Scottish Independence, because I am entirely confident we shall get that shortly, whatever happens on Thursday. No, it is more that I care deeply about what is happening in England and Wales. I was born there, and am after all half English.

But England is no longer the country I grew up in. It has become nasty and intolerant, turning its back on the world, of which the deeply harmful decision to leave the EU is but a symptom. Racism has become commonplace. It should not be forgotten that Enoch Powell was marginalised politically for his views on immigration, but he would be comfortably within the Tory mainstream today.

Britain has turned its back on the United Nations. Ministers claim openly that consent of the Security Council for military intervention is no longer needed, because Russia can veto – ignoring the scores of vetoes exercised by the UK and US, especially on behalf of Israel. The judgement of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is simply brushed aside as Britain did not like it, when historically we have pressed other countries to follow the rulings in hundreds of cases. It has also become a major aim of government to leave the jurisdiction of the excellent European Court of Justice, which Britain led the way in founding. Britain is effectively repudiating the very concept of international law.

Added to this extreme xenophobia and loss of identification with the whole world of mankind who are not “us”, we have the abandonment of empathy and social solidarity at home. Government spending plans will reduce state spending over the next three years to below 35% of GNP. Which would be the lowest in the EU, except we will no longer be in the EU. Yet as our NHS shivers as it is starved of cash, as schools tout for funds from parents, as the disabled and dying are denied benefits unless they haul themselves into work, the country still spends £220 billion on Trident missiles to stoke a collective militarist ego.

The massive cost of Trident is best illustrated by this figure. At constant 2016 values, the total net UK contribution to the EU budget over 44 years 1973-2017 was £157 billion. Compared to £225 billion to renew Trident. That is a measure of how irrational the UK has become.

Wealth inequality has grown to astounding levels. An entire generation of young people are going to spend their lives paying rent to make the landlord class still more wealthy. The generation which got their education for free – Thatcher’s children – have forced those coming after to pay, pulling up the ladder behind themselves.

Finally, we have massive state surveillance, and an extraordinarily biased state propaganda machine and mainstream media, not just during the election, but all day and every day. This morning, on BBC Radio 4 a dreadful person named Andrew O’Hagan was allowed a ten minute unquestioned diatribe on the need for government to employ “battalions of thousands of people” to scrutinise and censor the entire internet. Amber Rudd was saying something similar shortly afterwards. And as I pointed out, the essentials of the Tory manifesto are extraordinarily similar to the BNP manifesto of 2005.

So continued Tory rule represents a political direction which appals me. This government is far to the right of Thatcher. The battles of the 1980’s represented a fight for survival of industrial communities, but this has a still more desperate feel. It is a fight for the very concept of public sector provision.

In Scotland we have the SNP to defend the values of basic communal decency. Now in England we have Jeremy Corbyn, a man alongside whom I have spoken and who gives the first real chance in a generation to voters in England and Wales to reject neo-liberalism.

This is why this election matters more than any other. The ultra-wealthy elite had succeeded in diverting the popular discontent at the wealth gap and falling standards of living for many, into xenophobia. Immigrants have successfully been scapegoated. The establishment have kept people sufficiently ill-educated, and sufficiently misled by the mainstream media, for this ploy to work.

The great question is whether the anti-establishment mood in the country has been irretrievably captured by populist xenophobia masking the intentions of the neo-liberals, or whether a return to an older tradition of genuine social radicalism under Corbyn can halt this trend. So on both sides of the equation this election is pivotal. Britain will become a nasty, uncaring, closed country to an extent I would never have believed possible. Or it will adopt policies of communal solidarity and public provision which I had almost lost hope people would have a chance to vote for again.

This is not any election. This one matters more than ever. This time, we should all really care.

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We cannot know what will happen on Thursday. There are huge differentials in opinion polls. We now know that the pollsters’ samples, demographically weighted to reflect the population in terms of age, geographical spread, and past voting intention, return very similar results. What differs is the extent to which they apply the additional filter of judging likelihood to vote, not by people’s declaration on this point, but by historic records reflecting the fact turnout is much higher among the elderly. That in itself has thrown a spotlight on the massive age differential in voting. The Tories are extremely dependent on pensioners. It is precisely the same age group that supported Brexit and opposed Independence.

There has been some drop in Tory support among the elderly in the election, but only in line with the drop in the general population. The abandonment of the triple lock, the dementia tax and the end of winter fuel allowance have not particularly dented the loyalty of the Tory grey army.

So if younger people want to stop the Tories, they have to get themselves to the polling booth at all costs. As for campaigning, almost certainly more effective than attending rallies or sticking leaflets through strangers’ doors, would be to sit down and have a real heart to hear with elderly family members and acquaintances.

A quick disclaimer. I realise there are a lot of wonderful people of pension age who are not Tories. I am not attacking the elderly, I am stating a plain and undisputed fact about voting breakdown by age.

It is also the case that there has been a very definite trend away from the Tories for the last month, and there is little evidence to suggest that has stopped. So today’s polls are not how opinion will stand on voting day.

But this election has been a great victory already, whatever the result.

Firstly, a genuine alternative has been put to the electorate in England and Wales for the first time in a generation. And Jeremy Corbyn has proved beyond doubt that left wing policies are popular. Refusal to endorse nuclear weapons, aggressive foreign policy, privatisation and austerity are indeed popular. With New Labour triangulating themselves right into the neoliberal establishment consensus, English and Welsh voters had no opportunity to express a radical view since 1983.

The careerist Blairites who had taken over the Labour Party argued that it would be electoral suicide not to adopt all the Tory policies. NHS privatisation, utility privatisation, PFI, benefit cuts, Trident, attacks on foreign countries; these are what the public want, said the Blairites.

Corbyn is now proving that was a lie.

Indeed, of all the opinion poll findings which give results such as strong public support for renationalisation of the railways, that which drives the stake deepest into the hearts of the Blairites and Tories alike is the YouGov poll on foreign policy. People are not stupid, and by a two to one majority people believe that our wars abroad cause terrorism here. That is why the furious Tory attack, that to explain is to support, bounced off.

A clear majority of people oppose our recent wars in Muslim lands.

It is precisely those of Corbyn’s views which the entire mainstream media, the Tories and the Blairites consider unacceptable, and which fall well outside the Overton window, which are popular. That explains why the attacks do not work. The victory of this election is that those popular views have been expressed widely, after years of being banished methodically from the airwaves.

If May wins, she will almost certainly not have the huge landslide she expected. Her honeymoon period is well and truly over and she now has a very negative public image. That is going to get worse as we are heading into a Brexit recession and a house price crash. I agree with every word of this extremely important article from Will Hutton. May’s support is almost entirely from hard Brexiteers who are going to crash the economy to satisfy their racism. That will quickly appear a very bad idea.

A May government with a small majority, possibly dependent on Ulster Unionists, running a disastrous policy and becoming ever more unpopular, is the best outcome the Conservatives have left in terms of retaining power. All the media’s horses and all the media’s men are not going to be able to put together again the ludicrous image they had constructed of Theresa May as a great leader, which fell apart at the very first public scrutiny.

If Corbyn comes to power, he will almost certainly have to be supported by the SNP, who I am proud to say have an even more radical platform than Labour, including scrapping Trident and reversing all benefit cuts. How many Blairites would defect to the Tories rather than support a Corbyn government with SNP support is an interesting question. But remember, most Blairites would sell their mother for a ministerial limousine. Corbyn’s position against the Blairites has been immeasurably strengthened by this campaign, and win or lose, his party leadership is safe if he wants to keep it. If John Woodcock etc. wanted to take themselves off to form a second Tory Party that would be no bad thing at all.

Of course I want to see May defeated and out of office, because Tory policies actually kill people. But I will not be too disappointed by a pyrrhic Tory victory.

A renewed Tory government will quickly become extremely unpopular as it flails in Brexit negotiations. It will be more right wing and authoritarian than ever, because those are May’s instincts when in trouble. As a Scottish nationalist, I have no doubt at all that the clarity of the choice between a hard right Brexit led Tory government, and Independence, can have only one result. Whether May or Corbyn is in No.10, I am confident this is the last Westminster election I shall have to endure.

If May sneaks back, Corbyn can continue with the work of recasting the Labour Party on popular and radical lines. Most importantly, boundary changes will give the chance for reselections to ditch a large portion of the Blairite rump. Still better would be a change of rules for mandatory reselection, where again the SNP shows Labour the way. And by next time Corbyn must face down the disgustingly blinkered and selfish attitude of the GMB, who love getting fat pay packets for working on weapons of mass destruction, and Corbyn must get a policy on Trident which he can defend without twisting himself in knots – again following the SNP.

If May gets back in, her government will collapse by 2020. Even a “defeat” on Thursday would not be the end, but just the start of a new dawn for popular radical politics,

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1) From 2010 to 2017 Corporation Tax in the UK reduced drastically from 28% to 19%

The UK now has notably lower corporate tax rates than most other large developed countries

On top of which HMRC has a particularly accommodating attitude to corporate tax avoidance.

2) But the corporations have not put any of the cash from this massive tax cut into investment

3) Rather all of the corporation tax giveaway has gone straight into the pockets of the rich, through massive executive pay increases and shareholder dividend increases.

I am sorry I could not find a more up to date version than 2015 of that chart, but it has got no better, and it illustrates well how since 2010 the corporation tax rate cuts in the UK – the green line – have resulted in a ludicrous explosion of dividends to earnings compared to international norms.

So the Tory corporation cuts have done nothing to help the wider economy at all, but simply lined the personal pockets of the already rich. It has almost no effect in stimulating the wider economy, and to reverse the cuts in corporation tax to pay for public sector investment is both prudent and likely to be effective in boosting economic growth.

In this hustings clip, independent candidate for Hastings and Rye Nicholas Wilson is linking the Manchester bombing to Tory support for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Home Secretary Amber Rudd can be clearly seen writing a note, passing it to the chairman and speaking to him. He then immediately intervenes to stop Wilson speaking and takes the microphone from him.

I don’t have the name of the chairman who looks like a corrupt, overfed, complacent, Tory, Church of England vicar straight out of Trollope. But as soon as I get his name, I will publish it.

UPDATE

What is happening to the understanding of democracy in this country? I just got a call saying the Residents’ Committee of the apartment block where I live were instructing me to remove the SNP poster from my balcony (It is a small A3 poster). My reply was extremely rude, I am afraid, and I have now put up a second poster.

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I expect some criticism for saying this. But allowing terrorism to disrupt our democratic processes incentivises terrorists. Personal attention seeking, and the idea that their self-sacrifice will have an impact on the world, is part of the deranged psychology that motivates suicide bombers. To suspend the election campaign again following another dreadful terrorist attack, actually will boost the prestige of the act in the eyes of their supporters and potential future terrorists. If we react in this way, we are promoting the chances of a wave of such attacks every time we have an election.

I abhor and condemn last night’s attack and am dreadfully sorry for all victims, dead and injured, and for their family and friends. But it would serve the memory of the dead better if we reacted by continuing calmly with our democracy, and showed that their killers cannot win, cannot affect us.

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UPDATE: Livestream from Independence Live added.

I am heading out now to Glasgow for today’s demonstration for Scottish Independence. I am hoping to speak at the rally, but am not quite sure at the moment if I will get to do that. If not, I shall just be one of the crowd, tramping along. If you recognise me, do say hello.

Over 20,000 people have indicated on Facebook that they are going, but I fully expect the BBC to ignore the event. They will be far too busy wandering around Glasgow, desperately searching for Tory voters they can vox pop.

Use of vox pops in this election has been deeply disturbing. They are a device under which the broadcasters can slip in views of the “ordinary man” which they might otherwise need to challenge. Just this morning Radio 4 Today had somebody calling Jeremy Corbyn a “communist” without contradiction. Last night Channel 4 News did a vox pop in Mansfield in which seven out of nine people interviewed were switching their vote from Labour to Tory. When I was in Merthyr Tydfil last week I was given an eye witness account of a Sky News team going around the town centre literally for an entire working day and finding only two people who were switching from Labour to Tory. Those two people were broadcast as the entire Merthyr Tydfil vox pop.

It is not only the broadcast media. The mainstream media do it too. Rabid unionist propagandist Severin Carrell of the Guardian managed to do a vox pop around Glasgow East constituency which did not find a single SNP voter (the SNP will probably get over 50% in Glasgow East) but did find Tories (they will definitely get under 15%).

The point of such vox pops is of course to convince voters that people like themselves are thinking a certain way, and perhaps they ought to follow. It also introduces further pro-Tory slant which does not count against one party’s equal time selection. What we know already from the opinion polls is that the vox pops the media have given us are massively unrepresentative of the population.

I have never yet spoken at any demonstration or event for Independence without some well-meaning people contacting me to warn me against the group organising the march. My view is that I will turn up pretty well anywhere and speak to anyone in support of Independence. I am not sure if I will get to speak today, and I have seen no indication of who the other speakers are. But I shall be there. I am getting so overweight lately I can bulk out the crowd quite a bit!

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Good finish by Corbyn on tuition fees. But overall not a clear win for either, with a peculiarly lacklustre audience. Probably better for May as she exceeded expectations by not positively falling on her arse.

Corbyn finally showing some real passion in responding to a particularly Neanderthal Tory. Dimbleby steps in to undercut him.

Nuclear destruction, IRA, anti-Semitism, Diane Abbott, Brexit – every dull Tory attack line been trotted out. Audience seem half asleep.

Corbyn being helped by some really nasty arrogant Tories being allowed questions on keeping people’s wages down.

Audience Adam thinks that firing a nuclear weapon would preserve his safety. No Adam you would be dust very quickly after that. Without a huge diminution in intelligence evidently.

Dimbleby “I may come back to education and the economy”… but let’s get on to the firing nuclear weapons Tory attack meme. More important obviously.

Corbyn should reference the continual vilification of Diana Abbott as a gross example of racism.

BBC kick off with Corbyn on Brexit followed by coalition with SNP – BBC exactly following Tory attack agenda.

May got out of that without major damage. Unsympathetic and flinty to nurses and slipped into prepared rhetoric on education, but less stilted than usual.

May getting through this OK, aided by the BBC having selected audience critics who are mostly unusually inarticulate.

May told a blatant lie about Diane Abbott wanting to remove terrorists from DNA databases. I don’t think this kind of slur really helps her.

May stuttering and stumbling horribly as she lies about whether her manifesto changed over social care policy

For Theresa May the BBC immediately steer the subject straight on to the Tories’ preferred subject of Brexit.

Britain’s pusillanimous reaction to Trump’s crazed decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change shows the stupidity of believing that Brexit Britain will be a mighty player bestriding the world stage. Britain is about to go down on its knees before Trump to beg for post Brexit trade access to the USA, so is in no position to stand up to him as France, Germany and Italy did yesterday. They issued a powerful joint public statement:

“We deem the momentum generated in Paris in December 2015 irreversible and we firmly believe that the Paris Agreement cannot be renegotiated since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and economies. We are convinced that the implementation of the Paris Agreement offers substantial economic opportunities for prosperity and growth in our countries and on a global scale. We therefore reaffirm our strongest commitment to swiftly implement the Paris Agreement, including its climate finance goals and we encourage all our partners to speed up their action to combat climate change.”

By contrast, we are expected to believe that May expressed her “disappointment” to Trump in a private phone call. Given May’s congenital inability to address any subject directly, and the new servility in Britain’s position vis a vis the United States, I think we can all guess how that went.

Britain is now a diplomatic non-entity. We are grovelling around the world for trade access, including the most dreadful displays of obeisance to the Saudis who export the ideology and the funds for terrorist jihadism. We have a buffoon for a Foreign Secretary, who is not regarded abroad with the friendly tolerance which Tory England extends to him because he is posh. We have the disgraced Liam Fox in charge of securing international trade.

I do not hold up the Paris Agreement as perfect or even adequate, but it was a huge stride forward in the international acceptance of man made climate change and the need to address it. Trump’s statement of renunciation yesterday notably failed to make any straightforward acknowledgement of the existence of man made climate change. We have heard much in this election campaign from the Tories criticising Corbyn’s hesitation to commit to launching nuclear weapons to destroy the planet. Yet the Tories are failing to take any kind of action to deter the true threat to our children’s existence.

Welcome to Brexit Britain, a diplomatic irrelevance, scrabbling for an economic niche, utterly devoid of principle.

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Online Tories are consoling themselves with two memes:

1) Michael Foot got huge crowds but lost in 1983, so Corbyn’s crowds mean nothing
2) Young people won’t turn out to vote

The parallels with 1983 have a certain validity. This is probably the first time since 1983 a genuine ideological choice has been put to the electorate in England and Wales. As a direct consequence of this, it is the first election since 1983 where the mainstream media has been effectively unanimous in extreme and naked bias against the leader of the Labour Party.

But there are important differences. An important and unexpected one is that, if we are considering crowd size, in 1983 the Tories could pull a big crowd too. Whatever her faults, and they were extreme, at least Thatcher was not a coward like May. She did open air street meetings and the passing public could get to them. Yes there were police around her, but it bore no relation to May’s constant hiding from the public. Do a google image search for “Margaret Thatcher 1983 crowds” and you will see what I mean. Thatcher could draw a crowd of supporters, without bussing them in or corralling workers in their workplace.

So yes, Foot could indeed draw crowds like Corbyn. But May cannot draw crowds like Thatcher.

I had enormous respect for Michael Foot. His book The Politics of Paradise remains one of my favourites, and I once had the chance to discuss Byron with him. What the scoffers forget is that, prior to the Falklands War, Foot held very large opinion poll leads over Thatcher, consistently for two years. It was only the fit of extreme jingoism over the Falklands War, and the “Khaki election” Thatcher opportunistically called on the back of it, that caused Foot to lose.

The Tories have tried precisely the same trick on Corbyn that they tried on Foot; using jingoism against him. Indeed Paxman even referenced the Falklands War itself in his attack on Corbyn. But the world has moved on, and this simple imperialism does not have the pull with voters it did back in 1983.

To watch the Tory and mainstream media puzzlement that these attacks have not sunk Corbyn has been one of the joys of the last month.

But of course the biggest difference between now and 1983 is the existence of new media. Foot faced a very similar hostility from mainstream media, and public meetings, leaflets and local activists pounding the streets were all that he had to combat it. But now we have all those things plus social media. The impact of this cannot be over-estimated.

An article in Today’s Guardian shows that one blog, Another Angry Voice, is reaching more people online with its articles than the Independent and the Guardian, and that the Canary was in the same league as the two mainstream outlets.

I wondered how we do on this list, so I contacted the ranking company, Kaleida, and they replied that they had only analysed the sites the Guardian had asked them to. That makes the Guardian’s ethics pretty questionable in presenting a “top 25” when they had pre-determined who they were, but let that pass. Another Angry Voice is in any event excellent and to be commended on its achievement.

As is Wings over Scotland, which today published its readership figures for May:

That is a very strong readership for effectively a one man, pro-SNP blog. Which is also a fair description of our blog, which has an even bigger readership than Wings. I downloaded the same analytics to get the exact comparable figure:

So this little blog is getting 800,000 unique viewers a month. Some individual posts have been getting 250,000 readers. You have to remember when looking at newspaper circulations that nobody reads an entire newspaper and individual articles get a fraction of the quoted total readership. That is why AAV is outdoing the Guardian and Independent in those rankings.

When you add together the efforts of Scottish Independence supporting sites like mine, Wings, Wee Ginger Dug, Bella Caledonia, Newsnet and scores of others, the readership really does run to millions. On a UK basis, if you look at Another Angry Voice, Pride’s Purge, the Canary and again scores of others, the anti-Tory forces are finally at a combined readership that genuinely can offer an alternative influence to mainstream media.

On twitter the dominance of the left is unquestioned, with Labour Eoin a whole national campaign by himself.

This campaigning combination of old fashioned flesh pressing and meetings, with a social media reaching out to millions on millions, is very potent indeed. I participated in precisely this combination of activities, and saw how it enabled us to increase support for Scottish Independence up from 28% to 45% in the course of the referendum campaign. I have now witnessed it shove back a massive Tory lead in this general election.

It is an astonishing fact that the Tory campaign has been pushed to the point of disintegration by this social activism, despite having the support of the mainstream media, to the extent it is often impossible to tell which is the “journalist” and which is the Tory politician.

If only Michael Foot had been able to fight with the weapons of social communication now at all our disposal, and the support of citizen journalists against the media billionaires.

Which of course is the answer to the second Tory meme – that the Tories will win as the young will not vote.

It is by now notorious that the difference between different opinion pollsters is down to the extent by which they allow for differing turnouts between age groups and social classes. Those still showing a substantial Tory lead, are assuming the young and the dispossessed will vote in very low numbers, as has been historically the case. Those showing Labour close to overtaking the Tories, are accepting people’s own description of their likelihood to vote.

Precisely the same factors apply in Scotland, where the Tory vote is again heavily concentrated in the older population. I strongly suspect that the much higher propensity of the elderly to vote Tory is likely to be matched by a much higher propensity of the elderly to get their information from the BBC and other mainstream media sources. I believe this is likely to be the primary cause of the truly startling age differential in voting intentions.

I exect the young and less affluent will now vote in greater numbers than usual in general elections because, for the first time in decades, there is a chance to vote for a real change that will make a positive difference to their lives. Historically they were unenthused because there was nothing to enthuse them. Only in Scotland was there a realistic chance for most people to elect somebody who was not simply a shade of Tory.

Now there is real choice and they are enthused, be it by Corbyn or by Independence, depending on location, and they will vote.

But also they will vote because they are going to get reminded to vote on social media on election day, many, many times. That is something everyone reading this has to make sure to do. It is not just our individual responsibility to vote. It is our individual responsibility to make sure that everybody votes.

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A multi-millionairess like all the Tory elite, Amber Rudd truly is every bit as horrible as the persona she exhibited on the BBC Leaders’ Debate this evening. A former banker with J P Morgan, she was also a director of two offshore tax avoidance asset management firms in the Bahamas. She never declared this and the information came out in a leak.

The refined journalists of the Financial Times are of course much more her choice for public engagement than having to stoop to discuss policy in front of the great unwashed, for whom she has a profound contempt. This is what she thinks of her constituents in Hastings:

“You get people who are on benefits, who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside. They’re not moving down here to get a job, they’re moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink.”

So why did she go to Hastings to represent such awful plebs? She explained that to her friends at the Financial Times as well:

“I wanted to be within two hours of London and I could see we were going to win it.”

According to the normally reliable CompanyCheck, as an MP Amber Rudd has constituted herself as a company, presumably for purposes of tax avoidance. That would of course give her a personal interest in low levels of corporation tax. But strangely Companies House itself has no company with the registration number given by CompanyCheck.

What Company House does have, however, are the records of Monticello PLC, a short lived company of which Rudd was a Director. It attracted many hundreds of investors who put money in, despite never appearing actually to do anything except pay its directors – presumably including Rudd. Trawling through its documents at Companies House, I find it difficult to conclude that it was ever anything other than a share ramping scheme designed to rip off its investors. After just over a year of existence it went bankrupt with over £1.2 million of debts and no important assets. I should be very interested if anybody can go through those records and come up with any different conclusion to mine.

Interestingly Amber Rudd’s father Tony, who died this week, had been debarred as a company director after being found to have asset stripped another investor vehicle, Greenbank Trust, and misused its assets to personal benefit. As with Emma Barnett, we again come across a wealthy Tory whose privileged upbringing was financed by the criminal behaviour of the wealthy.

It is a bit of a stretch to imagine that, nationally, Labour will get the 4.7% swing that would be needed to oust Rudd from Hastings. But perhaps it is not too much to hope that there may be a local revolt from the people she despises.

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The sectarian nature of the extreme attack by Tory politicians and mainstream media journalists (and it is genuinely difficult to tell which is which) on Jeremy Corbyn over alleged IRA links is extremely troubling. Not one MSM journalist or Tory has even acknowledged the existence of loyalist terrorists or British government atrocities, either by secret agents or in events like Bloody Sunday or the murders of Pat Finucane or Peter McBride. Yes, IRA atrocities were appalling. But they were by no means the only ones, and the Troubles arose from centuries of colonial injustice.

One reason this Tory attack does not have great traction is that everyone under 40 is more likely to have learnt a great deal of truth from the excellent film In the Name of the Father, than to have experienced the violence on both sides. The failure of the media in this election, while constantly raising the Troubles, to mention the Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four – for both of which Corbyn campaigned – does not stop people knowing those terrible abuses of state power happened. I speak as someone whose office windows were shattered by an IRA mortar.

So after all this truly dreadful Tory attempt to slit open old wounds to hold power, would it not be the most delicious irony, in the event of a hung parliament, if Sinn Fein finally took up their Westminster seats, in order to make up the numbers to support Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10?

We could have the most wonderful Labour/Nationalist coalition of the working class and the oppressed peoples of the islands – Labour/SNP/Sinn Fein/Plaid Cymru. And Caroline Lucas.

I do not in the least expect this to happen. But I am rather hopeful this post has severely annoyed some old Tories.

This post, and particularly the last paragraph, was not predicated on the YouGove poll predicting a hung parliament – I continue to have no faith in the integrity of that company. I started writing this yesterday based on my own feeling that we could be heading into hung parliament territory. I was however motivated to return to and update this draft by the YouGove poll.

I yesterday watched Michael Gove shouting (literally) about Jeremy Corbyn supporting the IRA and Hamas on The Daily Politics, looking like an agitated tomato in spectacles. Because the mainstream media and political class live in the same utterly unrepresentative bubble, they do not realise that the large majority of ordinary people do not share their detestation of the Palestinians.

Subsequently we had Theresa May spouting utter rubbish about Corbyn going “alone and naked into the negotiating chamber”. 99% of the actual negotiating is done by teams of civil servants. Neither May nor Corbyn would be alone, they would have the same civil servants. Plus Corbyn would of course have Keir Starmer QC.

May’s jibe was supposed to echo Aneurin Bevan but it failed entirely, as the possession or otherwise of a nuclear weapon is irrelevant to the EU negotiations. The entirely spurious “alone” was not in Bevan’s quote and I can find no rational explanation of what it was supposed to mean. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole irrelevant jibe was designed just to set up the titter at the image of Jeremy Corbyn naked. This really has been the most appalling Tory campaign imaginable, aimed at nobody but the nastiest kind of UKIP voter.

For the BBC to lead all its news bulletins on Corbyn’s inability instantly to recall the figure on childcare costs was puerile bias. Anyone can forget a figure. Politics is not a memory test. The attempt to reduce it to such is of course made heinous by differential application. When Tories have the same, perfectly natural problem of instant recall – as when the Chancellor was £20 billion out on the cost of HS2 – it gets nothing like the media coverage given to Corbyn and Abbott.

On which point, my last posting was about the SNP’s excellent manifesto. It was perfectly possible to sit here in Edinburgh yesterday, paying a great deal of attention to the BBC, and have no idea whatsoever of the SNP manifesto’s actual contents. Equally mystifying was the Daily Politics’ attack line against the SNP. How dare they have policies for the UK when they cannot form a government at Westminster? Angus Robertson replied politely that these were the policies their MPs would advocate at Westminster, and potentially support the implementation of, depending on the electoral arithmetic. The BBC reporter flared at this and seemed outraged that the SNP have the temerity to stand for election at all. It was truly bizarre television.

We are seeing more truly bizarre television every day as the mainstream media are puzzled and disconcerted that the plebs are simply refusing to ignore their obviously correct preference for the Tory party, instead having this mad desire to think for themselves. The media remind me of the puzzled look on Ceaucescu’s face as the crowd started chanting against him. The utterly talentless Tory hack Anne McElvoy was on BBC Breakfast today oozing contempt for Corbyn and explaining why his forgetting a number on Radio 4 proved he could not govern. She appeared completely divorced from reality.

And finally, it is remarkable that the Mays’ appearance on the One programme last week was featured again and again on BBC Breakfast and even on Sky News the next morning, with BBC vox pops “showing how impressed the public were with her” and Tory commentators speaking about how lovely and ordinary she was. Last night Jeremy Corbyn was on the One Show, and by the starkest of contrasts I have found no coverage of it at all this morning.

As the polls continue to shift, there is one distinct possibility for the result of this General Election looming. The Tories might be the largest party but with no overall majority. In which case they would form either a formal or a de facto alliance with their friends in the Northern Irish unionist parties. This would either force the unionists to take ownership of hard Brexit and the consequent imposition of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, or force Theresa May to abandon hard Brexit and outrage her supporters. I suspect the former is more likely, and the consequences of unionist enabled hard Brexit for Northern Ireland would be immense.

I am delighted to say I can offer my full and unreserved backing to the SNP manifesto, launched today.

Key points are:

1) No Trident missiles
2) Full reversal of Tory benefit cuts
3) £118 billion of extra spending over the parliament for investment and to end austerity
4) Reversal of NHS privatisations
5) 50p top rate of income tax
6) Raising the minimum wage to the real living wage, and ending public sector pay caps.

There is of course much more and you can read the full manifesto here.

It is absolutely plain that there is a broad consensus among progressive parties in the UK, and that under Corbyn, Labour has regained the right to be considered a progressive party. Of course detail is not precisely the same, but Corbyn and the SNP are recognisably motivated by similar values of social justice. That is why I continue to urge Corbyn supporters in Scotland to lend their votes to the SNP in order to return the maximum number of anti-Tory MP’s to Westminster.

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UPDATED: Having spent the afternoon researching, the evidence tends to support Emma Barnett’s claim that she had been personally unaware that her family’s wealthy lifestyle was funded by the pimping and sex-trafficking activities of her parents. The emails between herself and her father about “whores” referenced by the Manchester Evening News, contained denials by her father to Emma that he remained involved. I therefore have here deleted my earlier entry which suggested the existence of these emails may argue against her claim of ignorance.

But it is the wealth of her background rather than the source of the funds which concerns me here. As a Telegraph and Sunday Times columnist, it is pretty hard to argue that Barnett is not “out” as a wealthy Tory – just like Robinson, Kuenssberg, Paxman, Andrew Neil et al. In choosing a Telegraph columnist to interview Corbyn today for Women’s Hour, the BBC yet again is making no attempt at all to hide the massive Tory bias of its political journalism.

These are some of the inevitable and automatic consequences of “No deal” with the EU:

1) A fenced hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, likely re-igniting the Troubles
2) 900,000 UK citizens resident in EU countries have to return back to live in UK
3) Tariffs on all UK goods exported to the EU, almost certainly triggering a major recession
4) Massive bureaucratic non-tariff barriers to British exports – sixty pages of forms for every consignment
4) No access to the Schengen database and other EU security and policing resources
5) British citizens need to apply for visas to visit EU countries and stand in two hour long queues at many EU airports
6) UK universities removed from World’s leading scientific and research programmes.

Those are just for starters. These are the natural consequences of not being an EU member. They could be seriously mitigated by negotiating a deal. But they are inevitably what “No deal” means.

I have not included the massive harm that would hit the UK economy if EU citizens were deported as a result of “No deal”, because that is not a necessary consequence. The UK could unilaterally decide to allow them to stay. Sadly such wisdom is improbable.

So when Theresa May states “No deal is better than a bad deal” she is talking absolute nonsense. It is a ludicrous display of machismo from the “leader” of a country which has put itself into an extremely weak negotiating position.

“No deal is better than a bad deal” went down very well with the leaders’ audience on Channel 4/Sky last night. It is shorthand for “we will reduce immigration and we don’t care how much it hurts us”. Both Brexit and the Tories represent at base a visceral xenophobia, nothing more and nothing less. The slogan appeals to racists.

Jeremy Paxman failed to push Theresa May at all on the stupidity of the “No deal” slogan yesterday, instead just giving her the opportunity to repeat it again and again to the applause of morons. I like to believe that Theresa May is not stupid enough to believe what she is saying, but the more I see her…

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There are enough viewers for the televised questioning and interviews of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May tonight to have some effect on the election. May finished with a very positive reaction from a substantial section of the audience to the repeated assertion that “No deal is better than a bad deal” with the EU. She was playing to her xenophobic, UKIP-leaning core support. Why this kind of deranged nonsense is apparently not alienating more urbane Tories in greater numbers, I do not really know. I presume they believe they can control her.

I think that Corbyn came over as calm, likeable and humorous, whereas May came over as tense and unpleasant. Again the tension and narrowing of the eyes when asked a hostile question was truly striking. But what struck me most was another quite stunning demonstration of media bias.

Paxman interrupted Corbyn while he was answering very much more often than he did May. But the true bias came over in the selection of questions asked.

It was widely reported in the Sunday press that the Tories were to refocus their failing election campaign on Brexit. So what did Paxman concentrate on in his interview with May? Brexit. He opened the short interview on the subject of Brexit, and crucially he returned to Brexit for the closing three minutes, allowing May to repeat again and again the slogan “No deal is better than a bad deal”, which obviously was going down very well with her supporters in the audience.

Paxman appeared to be asking for clarification of what it meant in giving her the chance to repeat it again and again, but made no argument as to why it is a fantastically stupid idea in this context.

By contrast Paxman spent the entire interview with Jeremy Corbyn on no subject at all except the Tory chosen subjects to attack Corbyn – alleged support for terrorism, reluctance to fire nuclear weapons or murder in drone strikes, lack of support for patriotism/the monarchy.

The equivalent treatment for May would have been to spend the entire time focused on the Labour preferred subjects – the NHS, education, benefit cuts for the disabled. In fact, Paxman only grilled May on security, immigration and Brexit, the chosen Tory subjects, other than a token reference to social care, on which Paxman let off May extremely lightly over her lying about the U-turn on the manifesto.

While Paxman’s questions were superficially hostile, by choosing only favourite Tory subjects he gave May an easy get-out. The equivalent fake-hostile question to Corbyn to allow him onto a favourite subject would be “You say you will abolish tuition fees. But surely the economy cannot afford that?”

There were nil such questions allowing Corbyn to move on to one of his favourite subjects. May received nothing else. Paxman is an openly acknowledged Conservative. That was very plain this evening. But despite all his efforts, Corbyn will still have shaded it with all except those primarily motivated by racism.

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There has been a steady decline in the SNP vote in Scottish opinion polls during the General election campaign, and a steady recovery in the Labour vote from a very low base. At the same time, support for Independence has been stable or even growing – the latest Scottish poll asking the question puts support for Independence at 54%. And digging down into the data tables of recent polls, the concomitant is indeed true. A quarter to a third of those currently identifying as Labour voters in Scotland support Independence.

As I have frequently demonstrated, the Scottish electorate is indeed substantially to the left of the English electorate on economic issues. This is not a myth. What appears to be happening is that some Labour voters who deserted the party when the SNP were substantially to the left of Labour, are returning to Labour enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign.

I was down this weekend at the Merthyr Rising Festival and it is impossible not to be swept up in the joy that so many people feel at seeing a genuine alternative economic policy offered by Jeremy Corbyn at an election for the first time in a generation. Renationalisation and an end to austerity, and an ethical foreign policy, are things to be excited about. I get it – a sledgehammer is being taken to the blockwork surrounding the Overton window. Who would not want to show support for that?

The latest opinion poll shows
SNP 39%
Conservative 29%
Labour 25%

Not including this, the last poll of polls showed
SNP 42%
Conservative 29%
Labour 22%

(All polling referenced can be found on the Scot Goes Pop website linked above).

The iniquity of the first past the post system is such, that the drift of support from SNP to Labour risks handing up to a dozen seats to the Tories, while potentially gaining only 2 or 3 seats for Labour – and only from the SNP.

If Labour continues, despite Manchester, to advance in the UK wide polls it only requires a further swing of perhaps 2% from Tory to Labour before polling day before we are potentially in hung parliament territory. It therefore could be absolutely essential that the combined Labour/SNP MP’s outnumber the Tories. It would be a huge tragedy if the Tories were to get an overall majority simply because some Scottish voters who like Corbyn switched from SNP to Labour, and thus let the Tories in.

The case of Edinburgh South is arguable, but Edinburgh South aside, there is no constituency in Scotland where for Corbyn supporters to vote SNP risks helping the Tory. I realise that tactical voting is a complex ethical question, but if you want your vote to have practical effect, rather than act as a form of personal expression, it is essential that Scottish Corbyn supporters vote SNP, and most especially in rural constituencies.

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