Panic about Peterborough

The Observer today feels the fear as the Brexit Party seem to be doing well in the upcoming Peterborough by-election. The main objection seems to be that the Brexit Party is light on policies, says A Andrew:

the Brexit party doesn’t have any policies other than leaving the EU as soon as possible, ideally this morning – although Craig [a supporter] disagreed. “That’s nonsense. There are plenty of policies in preparation but you have to ask the leaders about that.”...The party chairman Richard Tice said that they had enough of the “waffle of things called … manifestos”,

I think that after the pathetic Remainer manipulations of Parliamentary democracy, most people are fed up with manifestoes that are never actually implemented. Why is it better to continue with that? TheObserver seems rather light on manifestoes too and turns to personal abuse as ever, this time with a light comic gloss:

For all his obvious concern about Peterborough, [Brexit candidate] Greene’s message was perhaps undermined, for many in the audience, by his haunting resemblance to the late great presenter of Cheggers Plays Pop.

There is Farage's dangerous populist rhetoric too:

“The establishment talk down to us,” said the career politician and former commodities broker. “They think we’re all thick, lazy, fat racists… They act as if they are the masters and we are the servants.”...after telling them that Britain’s real friends in the world were “the Canadians, the Americans and the Commonwealth”, he declared that they were fighting for “democracy, liberty, freedom”....It was Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Norman Wisdom in Man of the Moment.

Just below on the website is the news that is really causing the disquiet:

Nigel Farage’s Brexit party has surged into first place as voters’ favourites, according to a new poll. It is the first time the party has achieved top position in a national poll. The results suggest hundreds of Conservative seats are at risk.
The Brexit party’s support increased by two points to 26% of the vote in the latest Opinium poll – for the Observer – which asked people how they would vote in the next Westminster election....“While the usual caveats should apply about how much to read into Westminster voting intention polls, given the proximity to the European elections, the fact is that we might be less than six months out from a general election so these might become relevant very quickly.”

Meanwhile, N Cohen, recovering from his loss at the ending of Game of Thrones covered in his extraordinary column pre Euro elections, consoles himself with a revenge fantasy:

Both right and left should fear the justified rage of Remainers 

The story of the angry white working class is set and everyone is sticking to it...[But there is still] ...the new pro-European identity. Despite the “citizens of anywhere” jibe invented by David Goodhart and coarsened by Theresa May into “citizens of nowhere”, it is a patriotic identity.

Warming to his theme, Cohen develops a betrayal narraive:

Pro-Europeans instinctively understand, however, that Brexit has shredded notions of Britishness and not only by threatening the union and the Irish peace. Has ever a national myth been as thoroughly destroyed as the British belief that we are a commonsensical people who reject wild ideologies? The honoured idiots of some at the BBC [Really? Who?], the fascistic contempt of the Tory press for the independence of the judiciary, civil service and parliament [ha!] and the assurance of the Brexit party and the right of the Conservative party that a no-deal Brexit will hardly hurt at all show that whatever Britain may once have been, it is another country now.

Luckily, millenials see through it:

The reaction against the extremism on the right is cosmopolitanism, mobile and young. It can be intolerant, for no movement is without prejudices, and if it does not win in the end its members will feel a scaring alienation from their country...So great has been the backlash that, without any politician organising them, six million signed a petition calling for article 50 to be revoked. [well, there were six million unchecked signatures]...As the opportunities for compromise vanish, runaway rage will deepen. If I were a Labour or Tory politician, I’d worry it could blow me away.

There is a strange section on Labour policy:

The ignorance about the forces shaping the country is leading at least some in Labour to pretend that it can prosper if Corbyn sacks his far-left courtiers and pretends to convert to Remain. It’s as if socialist journalists [someone in the Staggers] believe that inside the modern Remainer there’s a Russian peasant struggling to get out. Our loving tsar does not want Brexit, they imagine us crying as we pluck the straw from our hair....The argument doesn’t work and not only because Tsar Jeremy has shown no desire to sack his evil advisers or come out for Remain. Few would believe him if he did. In the 21st century, it is not enough to mutter slogans. Voters demand that their leaders are authentic, especially voters as angry as Britain’s Remainers.

'Authentic' as in 'conforms, especially on social media, to currently fashionable conceptions of emotional intelligence, virtue-signalling and cosmo thinking'?