- entry 2026/01/27

That's it, I'm done...

The next thing I know, I was on the floor, having somehow landed on my left knee and right big toe like an ungainly superhero landing gone wrong, and my arm was sore from instinctively pushing back so my jaw didn't slam into the table on the way down.
The chair? If this was a new-build home it probably would have put a hole in the wall, two and a half metres behind me, but since my walls are plaster over stone, it just bounced off and attacked the dustbin instead.

I think what happened is the little flat cushion moved with me, I thought there was chair there, there was not chair there, complicated sciencey-gravity mayhem ensued.

I had precisely two thoughts. The first was "What." and it took a few moments.

The second...

Bang! Bang! On the floor baby!

This is it.
This is what my life has come to.
Falling on my arse and comically misquoting The Love Shack in response.

I'm done.

Suella Braverman defects

It never stops surprising me the growing number of grifters, sorry, I mean Tory MPs, who are defecting to Reform.

The latest defectee is Suella Braverman, who opened her introductory speech by saying "I feel like I've come home", insulted her country, and some awful fawning in the direction of Britain's next Prime Minister, Nigel Farage.

Let's look at some of her blathering.

...because you believe passionately in the greatness of our country. You believe fiercely in its valour. You're not apologising for our history, you're proud of the vast contribution that Britain has made to civilisation for centuries.

Don't get me wrong here - Britain has made huge contributions to human civilisation. The age of steam, the Industrial Revolution, vaccinations, the bicycle, electric lights, television, the ARM processor that powers pretty much every smartphone and tablet... all British made.

However, one should also be aware of the many dark things in our history. While the United States, Israel, and Russia are duking it out as to who is The Bad Guy right now, when it comes to history we're good at pointing to Spain and Portugal (Latin America), Holland (South Africa), Germany (a war), Japan (difficult relations with neighbours even today), Germany again (a much nastier war), Russia on and off... but this finger pointing helps to deflect from the many things that Britain did that make us the de facto Bad Guys that all the others aspire to be. Opium War? Making the Irish famine worse? Doing the same in India? Boer war concentration camps? Introducing apartheid into the Union constitution? 245 years of abducting people from Africa and shipping them over to The New World to be slaves? (that's estimated to be around 3.4 million people) Carving up Africa? Carving up the Middle East? Carving up India? Carving up Ireland? The Industrial Revolution being powered, to a shocking degree, by children? (preferred because factory owners who were growing increasingly wealthy could pay children less) Losing the United States?

I'm not going to apologise for Britain's history as I had no say in it, and indeed people like me probably would have been in the workhouses (actually, truth be told, I wouldn't have survived being born), but when one celebrates the good things the country has done, it's only fair to acknowledge the bad - especially when so many of the tensions around the world right now are, well, kind of our fault.

But I guess Suella would prefer a revisionist history where the streets of Camberley are lined with unicorns and it rains chocolate sprinkles.

I too share that love of our country. I inherited it from my parents. They came to this country with nothing in the 1960s. My dad wasn't even 20 when he was kicked out of Kenya and came to the United Kingdom.

And, yet, as Home Sec Braverman kept pushing forward the hostile immigration system designed to deny people the sorts of opportunities that her parents took advantage of. <Dora> Can you say "hypocrite"? </Dora>

Honesty compels me to say this today: Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well. Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People don't feel safe. Our youngsters are leaving the country for better futures elsewhere. We can't even defend ourselves and our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage.

This is a frankly ridiculous lack of self-awareness. I just got up and walked around the living room a few times to think over the fact that she said this. It also gives me time to think about what I want to say here in order to keep it polite.

First of all, we can essentially discount Labour here. While they have been embarrassingly bad, you aren't going to fix fundamental problems in a mere year. Even if Labour had been brilliant, Britain would still be broken.

"Britain is indeed broken" - and who was running the country for the decade and a half prior to Labour getting into power?

"Immigration is out of control". As the former Home Secretary, who was sacked from her position (how bad to you have to be to get sacked as a Tory?) and then brought back (probably couldn't find anybody as batshit-Thatcherite as her), she is more or less admitting here that she failed. Immigration was her job. She somehow managed to spaff tens (maybe a hundred or so) million in taxpayer cash to Rwanda to ship out... nobody. Of course not, because it was ruled unfair to send people to the middle of Africa and then decide if their case had merit. Judges aren't as stupid as politicians. And the fact that the asylum system is a mess and decisions aren't being made because there's precious few people to make them? That's on her too. All part of the lauded Tory "hostile environment".

"Our public services are on their knees" - one word, austerity. It was quite clear back in the time when Cameron and that other one were banging on and on about austerity and cutbacks that one day this would come and bite us in the arse. Austerity is the opposite of growth, it's a step backwards. Go backwards far enough, there's practically nothing left. Well, that day has arrived. Things are an omnishambles. We can thank the Tories for that.

"People don't feel safe." - remind me, who kept cutting back on policing, took bobbies off the beat, gave them fantasy targets to chase, all while somehow failing to notice what was happening in the Met? Could it be.... Tories again?

"Our youngsters are leaving the country for better futures elsewhere." - why are you surprised? By implementing a shitty deal and trying to pass it off as "getting Brexit done" you took away their ability to freely move around the EU (work, play, girlfriend, retire...). Now going to France isn't that different, logistically, to going to Canada or New Zealand. Remember, also, that the country that they are supposed to love and be loyal to stole these opportunities from them. If they grow up thinking "hell with this, I'm out of here as soon as I can", can you really blame them?

"We can't even defend ourselves" - is this a tacit admission that Britain's nuclear deterrent has rusted and is now useless? Because, last I checked, Britain and France were the only two countries in the EU with nuclear weapons. Indeed there's a bit of a legend regarding the "Letters of Last Resort" that Prime Ministers give to submarine captains to be opened if, and only if, they believe that the country no longer exists in any functional form. Of course, whether or not Britain can defend itself depends a lot on who is attacking and why. If Germany were to go to war with Britain, again, I can rather imagine Starmer saying, quite simply, "stop this nonsense". Actually, I can imagine a lot of German citizens saying it first. If the United States is the one attacking, it's game over no matter how you spin it.

"and our nation stands weak and humiliated on the world stage" - the country that sucks up to the Americans while insulting their neighbours, who willingly pulled out of a large trade bloc that they were only sort-of just on the edges of anyway... and being run by people who are so willing to screw over their own citizens that they paint Human Rights as a bad thing. Britain, right now, is a joke. And given that Labour has screwed up so badly that there is a very real possibility of Reform being the next government, this situation is not going to improve any time soon.

We can either continue down this route of managed decline to weakness and surrender

Hasn't that been nearly fifteen years of Tory policy?

Or we can fix our country, reclaim our power, rediscover our strength.

Suella, dear, the British Empire is no more. So what power is this that you are speaking of? And as might have been noticed by Labour's dilly-dallying, fixing the country is very easy to say but much much harder to actually do.

I believe that a better Britain is possible.

So do I. I also believe that a better United States is possible. The thing is, the architects of the current disasters are the very last people who should have anything to do with fixing the problems. These are problems that they created, taking them and their corrupt mindset to Reform is not fixing anything, it's just the disease metastasizing.

Today I am announcing that I resign the Conservative Whip [long pause for much applause] Done it. Done it. I resign the Conservative Whip and my party membership, my party membership of thirty years, it's gone. It's over today. And because I believe with my heart and soul that a better future is possible for us, I am joining Reform UK.

Another rat leaving a sinking ship. But on a more serious note, why does an MP jacking in her party affiliation, the party and pledges that people voted for her for, not immediately trigger a by-election? If she did the right thing, the people would support her and she would still have her constituency. But, you know, this seems a lot like a sort of bait and switch on the electorate.

I'm not going to go any further as she was nice enough to say the big stuff right up front, so I think the major points have been covered. It's coming on to nine pm as I write this, I want to go to bed with some pasta and watch an episode or two of Patience, and I swear to god that if I have to listen to her aggrandising Farage's ego again I'm going to throw up into my mouth.

We try to cure cancer in a person by cutting out the disease. Braverman, and those like her, are the disease. As a high-ranking Tory, she is implicit in Britain's decline over the past decade or so. It doesn't matter what flag she flies or Whip she holds, her world view and mentality is unchanged. Indeed, one could say that this jump is merely a cynical attempt to ensure she still has a job after the next election. But make no mistake, all these important Tories are the disease. They screwed the country as Tories, and they'll do it again as Reform.
If you want actual change, if you are serious about trying to fix things, then people like that need to be ejected.

And everybody needs to get real regarding Britain's relationship with the EU and drop the laughable idea of a big powerful Britain on the world stage. That world no longer exists. That era no longer exists. You need allies these days. Reliable allies. And lots of frictionless trade, otherwise what is it that you're even good for as a country? What's going to keep the lights on at night?

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jgh, 27th January 2026, 23:25

I'll pull you up one one thing there. "We" never abducted anybody from Africa, Africans enslaved fellow Africans and sold them to Portugese traders, then Spanish traders, then we thought "we can have some of that", and they sold them to British traders.    Fairly soon after the nation recoiled in collective horror and for the FIRST TIME IN HISTORY a single nation made it its mission to stamp out slavery.

jgh, 27th January 2026, 23:30

"Immigration is out of control"    God, my lungs hurt, I was drinking there.    "Immigration is out of control": says an MP who was part of the governing party and government that oversaw THE HIGHEST IMMIGRATION LEVELS the country has ever seen IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE. The non-self-awareness there has its own event horizon.

Rick, 28th January 2026, 15:05

"Fairly soon after"? The UK was getting rich off shipping slaves across the ocean for two and a half *centuries*.    Maybe the collective horror was the eventual realisation of what the country was involved in.  But, then, I would imagine today having children working long hours in dangerous situations would be considered horrific, but it was normal for a certain social class in Victorian times.

Rick, 28th January 2026, 15:07

Oh, and did you notice, the EU has just come up with a deal with India that is far ahead of the one that the Tories were congratulating themselves over?    Okay, they now have to ratify it with the member countries and since it's the EU that'll take a geological timescale, but still, shows what is possible, particularly when a former ally seems to derive some perverse pleasure in messing with them for the lulz.

Rob, 29th January 2026, 14:08

Coincidentally, yesterday, before I read this, I hit a panicked phone call from my daughter upstairs. She'd been sat at her desk, turned and leaned over to pick something up of the bed, and landed on the floor with the chair on top of her. (big relatively heavy office chair on wheels.) I managed to refrain from laughing, but know you are in good company!

Rob, 29th January 2026, 14:15

Had not hit. Sigh.  I've always been a liberal voter/occasionally even a member. But it's increasingly looking like a lost cause these days. They never recovered from going into the coalition and becoming the scapegoat for all that went wrong. I'm looking at the greens, and the video they just put out, which is pretty impressive actually. Let's see how they do in Gorton at the upcoming by-election. (for which I'm half glad Andy Burnham won't be allowed to stand. He's not done a half bad job as GM mayor, and it's not inconceivable that Reform might take that job if he'd had to give it up. That would have been a nightmare for those of us in the area!)

Lord Palmerston, 31st January 2026, 01:45

ISTR saying in 1848: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow"    or in brief, "countries don't have allies, only interests"

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