Brexit re-run - a suggestion for Remain zealots.

Let's get one thing straight about the furore concerning electoral over-spending by the Leave campaign.  If anyone has broken the law they should be prosecuted.

Now, let's consider the impact on the legitimacy of the Brexit vote.  A chorus of Remainers in the press and on social media have said that the process is thus flawed and there must be a re-run. 

They would, wouldn't they?

Leave's margin of victory was nearly 8%.  (Don't be fooled by the people who tell you it was 4% because 52 minus 48 is 4; 52 is about 8% bigger than 48).  That's a substantial majority.  It's hard to see that a bit less spending by Leave would have made much difference.  Besides, since the accusation against Vote Leave was that effectively they controlled the organisation which spent the money, even if they didn't spend it themselves it's evident that BeLeave, the other organisation, would have spent it promoting the Leave campaign in any event.

Thus the nub of the accusation is that money was spent the way that Vote Leave wanted, rather than the way BeLeave would have spent it if left to their own devices.  Not much of a charge.  Not much of a difference.

Now let's look at the overall spending figures.  According to the Electoral Commission, the Leave side spent £13.4 million on their campaign.  Remain on the other hand spent £19 million.  In other words, Remain got to spend half as much again on the campaign as Leave did.  And moreover the Tory Government spent £9 million (of taxpayers' money) sending a pro-Remain leaflet to every household in the land.  Thus the total spending on behalf of Remain in the months leading up to June 16 was nearer £28 million.

In other words, according to official figures, the Remain campaign spent more than twice the amount Leave did. 

And Leave still won by a margin of 8%.

Remain zealots should take their re-run and shove it somewhere dark.

Muslim terrorists and Twitter - I have a bad feeling about this

Last summer I wrote here about the aftermath of the London Bridge and Manchester attacks.  The thrust of this piece was that whilst the predominant tone of media coverage and comment was to the effect that none of this had anything to do with Islam, Home Office figures suggested that Muslims were about 80 times as likely as non-Muslims to be convicted of terror attacks; it seemed to me incredibly unlikely that this was some awkward coincidence.  Common sense suggested that mad losers adhering to a religion which inculcated the belief that those not of the faith were dispensible un-persons, were more likely than, say, mad loser golf enthusiasts to exhibit their derangement in acts of mass murder.

There are no doubt many ways of describing the people who continue, from their well-paid high-status jobs in politics and the media, to tell us that this is merely correlative and there is nothing to worry about; their wilful blindness reminds me rather of Enoch Powell's description of a nation "heaping up its own funeral pyre" (one of the few times Powell came pretty close to being right).

As a matter of curiosity, I opened a Twitter account last year in which I posted links to press reports (Guardian, Times, Telegraph, BBC) detailing terrorist convictions.  These were done without comment - I merely posted the links.  All the reports were of offences committed by Muslims.  Ironically, it was because I had seen a report of a Far Right non-Muslim terrorist conviction and attempted to post a link to it that I discovered my Twitter account had been suspended.  I have contacted Twitter in an attempt to establish why, but there seems little doubt that this will be because of the content of the account.

So there we have it.  If you post evidence which shows that in the overwhelming majority of terrorist convictions the perpetrators are Muslims, your voice can be closed down.  That seems to me to portend something deeply worrying about British society.  Don't point out something awkward.  I half expect the police at my door.

I'll post an update when/if I hear back from Twitter.