We can all say stupid things when we’re drunk. The owner of a self-styled “progressive” American brewery, Kirk Bangstad, has just potentially proved this by responding to the latest attempt on Donald Trump’s life by reiterating an already existing offer to distribute servings of “free beer, all day long” as and when the President’s forehead finally does collide with a gunman’s bullet. Fresh from hearing how the assassination had failed, Bangstad used the social media account of his Minocqua Brewing Company to urge his “brother[s] and sister[s]” in the nation’s “Resistance” movement to reload and have another go.

Maybe Mr Very-Loud-Bangstad’s excuse would be that he had been drinking too deep from his own vats before posting, but the overwhelming likelihood is that he was stone-cold sober. Leftists don’t need to be drunk to say senseless things. But do Right-wingers? Here in the UK, our very own Labour Party would like voters to think so. Ahead of this week’s local council elections, Labour has been busily implying that being pissed when making policy is the standard modus operandi of its own greatest current political rivals, Reform UK and its perpetually booze-soaked leader Nigel Farage – and it has produced just the attack-ad to prove it.

In Vino Mendacium

As Labour’s ad featured phrases like “shit” and “narcissistic Pakistani”, the original cut was handed back by censors as inappropriate for early-evening broadcast, as the party’s PR people knew perfectly well it would be, thus gaining them some easy free extra publicity in the newspapers. A subsequently re-edited version (viewable here) features an extremely punchable and smug-looking actress sitting in a pub next to a foaming pint of ale, adopting the crude facial expressions and mannerisms she appears to think all working-class scum who vote Reform adopt after being exposed to a single drop of Carlsberg down at the Tattooed Arms.

Three-thousand sheets to the wind, the dipso despot gives voice to various supposedly ‘shocking’ opinions ventriloquised direct from genuine Reform drunkards at all levels of the party, ‘shocking’ opinions like “The funding of the NHS is a total failure”, “London has become a Third World shithole”, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people”, and “I’m a racist and I’m proud of it” – arguably, so are many Labour MPs themselves, but they’re racist against white people, so that’s allowed. Then, at the end, the actress puts down her pint, sobers up and comes to her senses, saying how she would never say sickening things like that in real life personally, and that the only way to silence those who would and thereby save the country from pending extremist dictatorship is to vote Labour this Thursday. And, if you believe that, you really must have had a pint or two. Of vodka. Laced with psylocibin.

Local elections in this country used to be about who would best be able to fix the potholes. No longer. Rather than patiently highlighting boring regional policy flaws, opponents of Reform UK in particular prefer to highlight stupid things opposition hopefuls have previously said on social media so as to pretend they are Nazis. Admittedly, some such posts do make this task rather easy. Nathaniel Menday, standing for Reform in Sheffield, is on record as praising the Nazis as being “real visionaries” (he says as “risky humour”), but one single Hitlerite does not an entire Einstazgruppe make.

To further reinforce the image of Reform being little more than an alcohol-fuelled gang of fascists, though, Labour has rushed out a special report, ‘REFORM: The People Behind Farage REVEALED’, featuring a number of careless quotes from the party’s current local council candidates. Its cover makes their Führer Nigel Farage look like some kind of wanted war-criminal.

Promoting the dossier, Labour’s Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, said the report proves that “Reform’s rogues gallery of wrong ‘uns are not fit for public office”. So speaks the man trying to push through repressive neo-blasphemy laws disguised as benign “anti-Muslim hostility” measures. Reed accused Reform candidates of “pushing vile racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories”, warning that, “from Swindon to Sunderland, these dangerous and extreme council candidates need to be shunned”. What if you live outside this particular specified geographical area? You still shouldn’t vote for the party, because otherwise genocide will occur. Reform’s alleged “repeated alignment with the fascist movements”, says Stand Up to Racism co-convenor Sabby Dhalu, make it “a dangerous party that must be kept far from power” because “history shows what happens when racism goes unchallenged”, i.e., what the equally historically aware Ilhan Omar recently referred to as “World War Eleven”.

Elective offence

Labour’s hilarious Big Book of Reform Nazis is well worth a read, if only for the ludicrous things men like Reed pretend to consider to be ‘extremist’ in nature. There are some genuinely dodgy statements to be found lurking in there, for sure. But other appalling ‘crimes’ include one wannabe councillor, James Bembridge, who dared to call NHS nurses fat:

Some NHS nurses are fat; I’ve known patients advised to lose weight by nutritionists so wobbly that taking diet advice from them would be like trusting Shane MacGowan to act as your dentist. Even Nursing Times admits there is a national epidemic of big fat nurses right now, with one in four being obese, slightly more than the average non-nurse population. So is Nursing Times an “extreme” outfit too?

Two other Reform anti-abortion ‘extremists’ – or ‘Christians’, as this particular duo would traditionally have been known – are implied to be a pair of pervs who want to legalise incest to let brothers and sisters more-or-less marry each other, wishing to “legalise civil partnerships between siblings”, as Labour puts it. Yet what they actually wanted was as follows: a mere legal guarantee that spinsterish siblings who cohabit in a completely non-sexual fashion may be easily permitted to inherit the other’s property following death:

Whilst it is perfectly okay for Labour to falsely accuse Christians of promoting incest, accurately accusing Muslims of doing precisely the same thing in terms of cousin-marriage (now officially encouraged by overweight NHS nurses in Labour-controlled councils like Bradford) is quite a different matter. Labour’s document exposes Caroline Panetta, a Reform contender in Bexley, as posting this incest-based anti-Muslim incitement to hatred:

Labour also likes to accuse Reform opponents of being antisemitic, as if they’re the ones going around stabbing Jews right now. Axel Tye, standing for Reform in Sunderland, once expressed a liking online for the famous Jew-baiting London wall-painting known as the ‘Freedom For Humanity’ mural. As, slightly more famously, once did Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of… oh yes, the Labour Party. Two Teesside Labour Party candidates (one of whom possessed the peculiar name Sheila Argument) also had to withdraw from council elections in 2019 after sharing this very same image:

So, evidently the Labour Party is full of “dangerous and extreme council candidates” of precisely the same Jew-hating kind Steve Reed warns us about too, then?

Candid candidates

Also in Sunderland, it is apparently deeply objectionable that Reform’s Glenda Hall doesn’t like the fact that Muslim grooming-gangs “rape our daughters”, which rather implies that the Labour Party does like this fact, particularly when there are ethnic minority votes in it.

Meanwhile, Sharon Barker, of Droylsden West, thinks Tommy Robinson deserves a knighthood:

That’s nothing. Labour thinks Keir Starmer deserves one.

Another candidate, Andrew Fishwick Mahon, once made a joke about a penis:

If Wes does, he can’t be a Muslim, unlike the below highly suspicious individual identified by David McCullough, standing for Reform in Manchester, a disgraceful satirical image which not only mocks Islam, but also the Left’s other ruling incompatible identitarian creed of transgenderism:

Taken together, all this does seem to strongly imply that the Labour Party now thinks it should be borderline illegal for people to make jokes. In which case, the party should surely also be denouncing the following Little and Large lookalikes, also standing for Reform UK this Thursday, as the biggest pair of Nazis of them all:

Lastly, Bob Jones, of Sandwell, jokingly imagines Ukraine’s allegedly corrupt President Zelensky lives in a giant golden toilet like a faecal Scrooge McDuck:

Bob also apparently “likes porn sites on Facebook”. At least he doesn’t promote them in Parliament, like Labour’s Samantha Niblett does. This is Labour’s dodgiest dossier since the days of Alastair Campbell. Let’s hope it doesn’t make any other innocent, wrongly-smeared people go out and slit their wrists in the woods.

Reformed characters

I do admit, there are some Reform UK council candidates too extreme to vote for; one, Angela Ross, used to be a “public sector diversity champion”, which is simply unacceptable. Another, Michael Felse, formerly acted as a drag queen for Pride Week – although he has since recanted, creating a new compensatory Reform UK anti-drag persona, Captain England, who sarcastically promotes not DEI but DICK, or Diversity, Inclusion, Cohesion and Kinship. “All councils should stop funding Pride events that bring little value to social inclusion and instead get on with the bread and butter council duties,” like emptying bins, Felse now says, showing he truly has Reformed his character.

What will be the likely effects of the Labour ‘Reform are Nazis’ hysterical smear campaign ahead of today’s local elections? The exact reverse of what it intends, probably. So out of touch with the general electorate are such scaremongers that they genuinely do not realise that, when exposed to evidence that Reform runners and riders hold ‘extremist’ views like thinking immigration is too high, Islam too aggressive and nurses too fat, there is a fair possibility this will simply make voters more likely to vote Reform, not less.

When are the authors of such desperately unconvincing anti-Reform horror stories finally going to learn that randomly calling anyone they disagree with “dangerous and extreme” because they can’t argue back against their non-Leftist political positions convincingly just doesn’t work with fed-up voters in this country anymore? At around 10pm on Thursday evening, when exit polls show Labour has been utterly exterminated inside the ballot-booths, hopefully.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.