Bin the lot of them

Alun Smith

Where do I start with Reform UK at the moment? I don’t know if it’s the heat playing tricks on my psyche or what, but they are really, really beginning to cheese me off now.

Honestly, it seems that everywhere I look there is a charlatan, a pretend person of good standing, just gaslighting us and taking the average person of these islands for absolute fools. Let’s start here.

Wales

Until a few days ago I’d never heard of an organisation called NO!Cymru. I urge you to check it out for reference. I’m not going to add a link because I disagree with them with every fibre of my being.

Now, I’d like to think that the absurdity of their title, NO! Cymru was deliberate, as in, they believe that Wales shouldn’t exist as a separate constitutional entity, let alone a sovereign nation. Sadly, though, far from being clever or sardonic, it’s likely to be yet another oversight by a clown-school of political cosplayers, who genuinely thought they could just put on an ill-fitting suit and get involved in serious, political work.

But, Reform and Restore, quite apart from sounding like the sort of detergent you’d buy in the pound-shop, are not the serious political force they think they are, and are trying to make you think they are, as is evidenced by their failure in countless elections.

Hundreds of councillors, at the expense of taxpayers, are leaving or being found to be on the wrong side of the law, with hundreds more simply standing up in councils across the land and readily admitting that they have no clue what they’re supposed to be doing beyond butchering a school assembly version of God Save The King or reciting the Lord’s Prayer, before, without the slightest hint of irony, going about the business of making life much, much harder for their constituents, harrowing the poor and the stranger alike in a most unchristian display of incompetent nastiness.

They are merely a badly thought out protest group at best and a thuggish, divisive football firm at worst.

They’re contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Look at that awful badge NO! Cymru are using. It’s like Bart Simpson has looked at the YesCymru livery and his juvenile, solitary brain cell has conjured an opposite.

In the Senedd, they raise questions about things that most of us, as Welsh people, simply take for granted. Of course we want to help people who are struggling, regardless of the colour of their skin or where they’re from.

Of course we want to make women and girls feel safe. Of course we do. ALL women and girls. ALL people, ALL of the time. We are Wales. We have Welsh values. Increasingly, the values of Westminster and England do not match our own.

In Wales, we have lofty ideals and ambitious dreams that are to be zealously and passionately reached for.

It’s interesting that unionists consider themselves to be the one’s striving to keep people together, but, when pressed, that togetherness only exists in the form of a master/servant relationship. Together, but not equal. Together, but where one is junior, together but where England is a knight and Wales is her squire.

They want the people of Wales to be subservient to the knights flag. The Jack. They want to remove the Ukrainian standard, the LGBTQ rainbow and I suspect, ultimately, Y Ddraig Goch.

The fact that NO! Cymru have been championed by a Reform MS in Steve Bayliss, really should be all you need to know about a company of grifters, a troupe of self-serving, Anglo-centric brigands, determined to consign Wales, Welsh history, Welsh futures and Welsh ambition to the landfill of England’s ruinous, soulless death-rattle.

We must meet that entitlement, that colonialism, that evil, with determination of our own and show these wrong-wingers the door. Dan Thomas has five of them to choose from.

If, however, that isn’t enough for you, check this out…NO!Cymru were asked by Nation.Cymru to answer as to why they had a sitting MS (Steve Bayliss), serving as an unpaid director for them, when they had previously said they weren’t connected to any political party.

In response, they threatened legal action! This prompted Nation.Cymru to dig a little deeper into the rabbit hole. It turns out, lo and behold, not only is Bayliss connected with NO! Cymru but NO! Cymru are connected to something called The Heritage Party!

Again, I urge you to check these guys out but, as an act of public service, I implore you to wear a hazmat suit, or at least some marigolds and some of that stuff the mortician uses, under your nose.

This is, by far, the most nausea-inducing game of six-degrees-of-separation in play right now. Or it would be, except…

England

My first thoughts are that this is already utterly repugnant. First of all, it involves Farage, so there’s a certain level of residual repugnancy to contend with anyway. Honestly, I have never known a public figure love the sound of his own noteless baritone so much.

Secondly…what the hell was he doing giving some sort of Insta-grampa, faux presidential address in the first place? Who in the hell does he think he is? And why, in the name of all that is decent, would the BBC platform him in that manner?

I know they didn’t produce it but they didn’t have to show it live. After all, he’s just an MP. One of eight. Well, he’s not even that now. I swear they are addicted to Reform and the psychodrama that goes with them. They are pandering to him and it’s got to stop.

I mean, sigh, he stood there, at what, his personal podium (?), desperately trying to appear statesmanlike in the manner of a Zelensky or a Trudeau or something, when in actual fact, the entire speech was one very long, very whiny list of lies, untruths and factual inaccuracies.

Or to put it another way, porkies. Trumpian doesn’t quite cover it, let’s be honest. And he keeps pushing this line that he’s the most physically attacked politician in history, when, in the last decade, two MP’s have been murdered. Shut it Nigel! Have some grace.

During the speech, he attacked Labour and the Tories and turned part of his ramblings into a full -on party political broadcast. That is really NOT ON.

He thinks, in his entitled, spoiled little gourde, that he’s doing Britain and Clacton a favour by resigning and then running again, in some messed up, delusional daydream, that people will still believe this man of the people bull.

He thinks he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Here’s the thing though. It’s money that wasn’t declared and it’s a mouth bigger than Zippy’s.

The establishment

Clacton will remember that he hasn’t set foot in the place since he was elected. He wants to frame the by-election as him versus the establishment, but Clacton now knows he IS the establishment.

He can’t win. If he loses the election to a bin, then he’s finished politically. If he’s not an MP, the police don’t have to wait to investigate him. If he wins the election, the parliamentary investigation into his finances just starts right back up again, presumably coinciding with the new investigation into Robert Jenrick and where he got the money from to run for Tory leader back in the day.

Meanwhile, by-elections cost taxpayers money. If he wins this one, he won’t win the next one. Not even if he remembers that Count Binface is not from Earth. He’s an intergalactic bin.

To beat him Nigel is going to have to ask some very embarrassing questions about space-boats….oh, hold the phone, that last one was a gag but, I’ve just learned that Aaron Banks (yes..HIM), has just questioned the legitimacy of the finances of Count Binface!!

What…how…wh…I mean, guys, I’ve done lots of panto, but this, this is something else.