𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

“Sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end,” a not-so-wise man named Simon Dudley once said, adding: “It’s just how you go, right?” Well, I’m sure you’d prefer not to choke to death on smoke as your home burned around you, courtesy of unsafe cladding that is now strangling your block of flat in flames. For those not familiar with Dud, he was until a short time ago Reform UK’s housing spokesman. And he was stupid enough to venture this philosophical maxim while discussing the Grenfell fire, which killed 72 Londoners, injured 70 more and left 223 fleeing in terror.

What he was trying to do was advance the argument that one shouldn’t over-react to no doubt tragic outcomes by over-regulating the housing market and thus stifling our ability to build the homes Britain badly needs. He pointed out that fatal crashes don’t cause us to outlaw driving and insisted “you can’t stop tragic things happening”.

Nobody like this should be anywhere near housing policy in an insurgent party scrambling to unseat the leviathans of the Labour and Conservative parties.

Because he’s so ill-informed that he’s clearly missed the memo the deaths of these 72 people were avoidable, as established by the Grenfell Inquiry.

And he comes across as exactly the thing that Reform’s opposition want you to think of the party, when they’re not alleging fascism: callous capitalists who worship at the altar of the free market and oppose regulation at any cost, even when that cost is human life.

Reform UK have sacked Dudley, which is exactly the right thing to do. Parties that want to be taken seriously as an alternative to the tired old bandits who’ve ballsed up Britain for decades can’t afford to accommodate such inadequates.

Especially when they’re stupid enough to talk trash about the deaths of ordinary people. The very people they want to convince that they’re speaking up for against a Westminster elite who hear the cries of the masses as but a murmer through the walls of their mendacious metropolitan bubble.

Do you know which insurgent party hasn’t sacked a politician for offensive remarks about the deaths of ordinary Brits? The Green Party.

Those soft, fluffy hippies who wear bright colours and want more love. Who want to reign in the rich and deliver a better deal for ordinary people.

Unless you’re the kind of ordinary person whose daughter was blown up in an Islamist scumbag’s bombing of Arianna Grande’s Manchester concert back in 2017.

If you’re one of those lot, you might have caught Hannah Spencer on the campaign trail before she won the seat of Gorton and Denton, debating Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin on the BBC.

You might have seen her brain threaten an aneurysm when she was asked what caused that mass murder, before Goodwin pressed her, saying “why are these things happening?”

“Because people like you are dividing people,” she responded.

Despite my unwavering opposition to the Green Party, despite hearing something so stupid, so evil, I was inclined to be charitable to Spencer.

This was a heated exchange and it seemed that she’d lined up that response before comprehending Goodwin’s question and didn’t mean to say that the cause of the atrocity was right-wing Brits.

It was a messy exchange, with the pair talking over one another and Spencer talking past Goodwin. And she insisted “that’s not what I’ve said” in response to Goodwin’s “So I’m responsible for the Manchester Evening News Arena [terror attack]”.

That doesn’t change the fact that what she happened to say was exactly that: people like Matt Goodwin are the reason for children and other innocents are slaughtered in terror atacks.

She said what she said after being asked twice why such attacks are happening in the UK, which raises doubts at the very least over her comprehension skills.

And sitting back to sip water and enjoy the comfort of the presenter bringing a Lib Dem into the conversation just doesn’t cut it when you’ve said something so disgusting. A proper clarification, ideally mentioning what you actually think the cause of the attack was, is necessary.

Especially when you spend your time venting so much rage at Reform UK that it wouldn’t be beyond plausability to conclude you do blame all the evils of this country on people like that.

And when you spend so little time attacking murderous Islamists like Hamas despite talking constantly about Gaza.

It must be very comforting to live in a left-wing echo-chamber in which you can pretend that conservatives are fascists while ignoring a far closer analogue in a land with which you are obsessed.

To convince yourself that Reform UK are the reincarnation of the Nazi Party and to define your political character around opposition to its recruits, as opposed to shaping it around real-life Jew-killers.

At the very least, she or her party should apologise, admitting the remarks were clumsy and ill-timed as the result of being rushed out in a heated exchange.

Spencer is an avid poster on Instagram and, it must be said, a fantastically effective campaigner on the site. But her feed is too full of noble naivety and sixth-form silliness to fit in an apology for what she said.

Nor was there space for a statement among the Green Party’s press releases on its website. In fact, I’ve failed to find any apology for these remarks.

This simply isn’t good enough. If the Green Party wants to be taken seriously as a left-wing alternative for working-class voters, they need to do better.

Dudley and Spencer are opposite cheeks of the same overweight a**e, bursting with the calories of political stereotypes. And with the state that Britain’s in, we really should demand better.