Toby on Tuesday

 

'The Road To Wigan Pier'

 

                                                 

 

 

George Orwell, author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, “Animal Farm” and “The Road to Wigan Pier”, was among the greatest writers of the last century.   “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, his harrowing account of a Socialist dystopia dominated by the all-seeing presence of ‘Big Brother’, was probably his most celebrated and inspired work.   Yet knowing Wigan to be an inland town, I have often wondered about Wigan Pier.   But last week, driving to the UKIP Conference at Bolton’s Macron Stadium, I actually found myself on the road to Wigan Pier.   There was the signpost to it just outside Bolton.   Yet in truth the old Wigan ‘pier’ was a coal loading staithe on the Leeds-Liverpool canal, a wooden jetty demolished in 1929.   And Orwell used it to describe his bleak account of industrial poverty in Northern England during the 1930’s.   In brilliant prose, he achieved his aim of shaking the complacent, comfortable South out of its apathy.   But it is a measure of how much the North has changed since Orwell’s time that “Wigan Pier” is now a tourist destination and the name given to the visitor area around the revitalised Leeds-Liverpool Canal.  Yet although the industrial North no longer suffers the terrible degree of deprivation that it once faced, its social needs are still very great, many of the benefits of 21st century-life still do not find their way here and that was the theme of much of last week’s Conference.

 

The two speeches which struck the strongest chord as far as I was concerned were those from Paul Oakden, our Party Chairman, and Paul Nuttall, our new Leader.   And both were marked by the bruising campaign that our Party is now fighting in the Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election.   In my recent posts, I have written about the fascist left in Britain which, having lost the argument, is seeking to subvert all the rules of civilised politics to maintain its grip on power.   Free speech is drowned out and language is twisted in an attempt to bully voters into submission.   So I was naturally delighted when our Chairman likewise used to term ‘ fascist’ to describe the Labour Party’s tactics in Stoke.   Our canvassers have been threatened, our organisers abused and our property vandalised, while the Labour candidate himself, Gareth Snell, has reached down not so much into the gutter as to some foetid swamp that lies still further below the gutter itself.   And if you want evidence of this, you need do no more than google “Gareth Snell tweets”.   To see ‘Liberal fascism’ or  the ‘fascist left’ at work, then look no further that Stoke-on-Trent Central.   What is reassuring is that Paul Oakden recognises this and is not frightened to use language to describe it that is no more than the truth.   By contrast, Paul Nuttall, hardened and strengthened by his bruising experience, gave a stirring account of his ‘NewKIP’, his new party that will exists primarily to drive the rotten and decaying Labour Party from its heartlands.   For this, he earned a standing ovation last Friday.   With new policies driven by the demand to transfer resources to counter social deprivation in the North of England and elsewhere, he made an impassioned call for much of the Overseas Aid budget to be used instead to help those in need in our own country with the rallying cry, “Charity begins at home!”   And I can think of a host of other policies that will draw voters to us in a post-Brexit political landscape, including the looming scandal of HS2 and the long-running scandal of the House of Lords, now seeking as it is to undermine the Bill to trigger Article 50.

 

By the end of this week, we will know the results of the two by-elections in Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central.   UKIP deserves to win both, but having heard Paul Nuttall’s powerful speech and compelling new vision in Bolton last Friday, I am especially convinced that in him the House of Commons would gain an historic voice for the new politics.   It would be a voice for honest good sense which would resonate with just the same countless millions of ordinary British men and women who came out and voted “Leave” in last June’s referendum.   So many of them have been turned off entirely from politics by the likes of Labour’s candidate in Stoke, Gareth Snell.   And when George Orwell made his heart-rending plea on behalf of those in the North who suffered so much social deprivation in the 1930’s, he cannot have imagined that the Labour Party would ever allow itself to be represented by the likes of Gareth Snell.   Rather he would have wanted the reforms needed now, just as much as then, to be spelt out by a patriotic, sensible and honest figure like Paul Nuttall.   Last week, we by chance found ourselves on the road to Wigan Pier.   On Thursday, let’s do all that we possibly can to ensure that Paul Nuttall finds himself firmly on the road to Westminster!

 

Until next Tuesday!

Toby