While it was not the press conference Nigel Farage referenced in his tweet to me yesterday, this morning he was interviewed for over 4 minutes by Sky News’ Dermot Murnaghan, in Somerset, about the floods there. UKIP have put the full interview up on their website.
This from a man whose primary focus is allegedly fighting tooth and nail for the UK to leave the EU. Presented with yet another golden opportunity to highlight who really runs Britain, following his Farage on Friday piece before the weekend, and help voters understand and reflect about whether this is in British interests or whether we should determine laws for ourselves, he again passed it up.
Thankfully, Christopher Booker published a valuable piece about the EU’s role in degrading Britain work on flood prevention in his Sunday Telegraph column today. At least someone with a substantial profile has tackled this head on while the politicians and lamestream media tip-toe around it and do their best to avoid any mention of the part our supreme government in Brussels has played in making flooding in recent years far worse than it ever would have been.
With a sizeable number of UKIP members not seeing leaving the EU as the number one issue for the party, it seems the leader is one of their number and EUscepticism is being forced off the party political agenda to make way for other topics.
When will these hacks open their eyes to the reality of party politics?
The Tories’ obsession with their ‘brand’ patronises voters by treating them as shoppers, so writes Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph today.
It’s another of those commentary pieces that again goes around the houses to articulate and bemoan the hollowed out shell that now passes for party politics in this country, but consistently fails to seek and explain why this is the case.
That everyone now seems to think it’s normal to talk about the Tories as a “brand” shows how shallow, how surface-driven, modern politics has become. A brand, of course, is an outer mark, a stamp either burnt on to one’s skin or, in modern parlance, stamped on to a product or service for sale. That the Tories, especially their modernisers, have become myopically obsessed with this outer mark, with the lick of paint on the outside of their party and the question of whether a new, more youth-friendly lick of paint is required, shows how bereft of serious thinking they are. Embarrassed by the historical and political substance of the existing Tory Party, and lacking any newer substantial political ideas for taking the Tory Party forward, they obsess instead over garb, over prettification strategies, over imagery, like those annoying hip graphic designers who think style is everything and substance is so 20th-century.
As always the cause and the answer are clear; we do not have democracy. All that is left of the political parties is shallow, branded, tribal trivialities that are devoid of substance or ideas. This is for the simple reason that all the major issues concerning goverance of this country are decided by the EU. The UK is not a sovereign nation. Our politicians have some relatively meaningless shreds of control left in areas the EU has not yet taken or cannot bother itself with owning.
The only philosophy is the desire to hold office, no matter how powerless or meaningless it is. Of course there is the added incentive of pay and perks and the personal profile and future spin offs that come with such a position. But anyone who makes the argument that they want to enter party politics to ‘change things from the inside’ is clearly too ignorant of reality to be worthy of election in the first place.
One wonders how long it will take for this to dawn on people, particularly the talking heads, who remain incapable of joining together a few dots or reading about what our surpreme government was created to do and recognising what it has so far done. Bar a few notable exceptions, it seems the massed ranks of the lamestream media are either in denial or must have been subjected to a collective lobotomy.
Anyone who still clings to the belief that voting for a political party, namely UKIP, is the way to bring about a Brexit from the EU could do with thinking long and hard about the following opinion poll response from YouGov.
This is from a survey that looks at views of the parties in different parts of the country which doesn’t produce any startling conclusions – the Tories are less popular in the north while LAB had problems in the South outside London.
These YouGov numbers are very similar to what Ipsos-MORI found in August when they asked about liking and disliking parties.
This is not a dig at UKIP. It is just additional evidence that using the party political process to further the Eurosceptic aims of leaving the EU is at best flawed, at worst futile.
UKIP is the only party that has ever committed to leaving the EU, while the other parties are fully ‘on message’ with the Brussels machine and are either actively purusing further integration and dilution of the UK’s fabled ‘influence’ by way of enlargement, or are cheerleading such activity from the oppostion benches. The fact that UKIP is by far the most unpopular of a very unpopular set of party entities shows it does not have the capacity for a breakthough that would lead to any form of influence in the Parliamentary process.
Instead the focus should be on having a single non-party political ‘No to EU’ type campaign that brings together all the various Eurosceptic groups to push a clear and easy to understand message about ‘Who should run Britain?’ ensuring the real issue – that of political sovereignty – is not swamped by the deceitful focus on economics and big business interests.
Such an alliance of groups, that allows the respective groups that are part of it to preserve their identity, could more effectively raise the necessary awareness of the impact of EU governance and counter the Europhile lies that have been ignored by UKIP for narrow party political reasons. Sharing the load, the groups can establish a single shared platform to give an honest counter to the flood of nonsense filling the media, making the campaign the ‘go to’ destination for comment and insight.
A non-party ‘No to EU’ alliance established now – before Tory proxies like Matthew Elliot can undermine the ‘out’ side with irrelevant arguments and diversions – could build significant support around the country, and coordinate the right time to apply pressure to individual MPs and candidates to support an in-out referendum in return for endorsement, rather than get bogged down in fighting an election with candidates and all the problems that entails.
Taking the party political route will ensure we never arrive at our destination. It’s time to take this essential issue out of the control of the increasingly untrusted and deceitful political class and have a genuine grassroots campaign fought on the real issue – sovereignty.
By rights and in keeping with electoral convention, in the first County Council election results that were announced on Thursday night, UKIP should only have managed to win a handful of seats.
To have won 42 seats before the main bulk of the contests have even begun counting, against a backdrop of a concerted smear operation by the Conservatives against UKIP candidates and the absence of anything that could be fairly described as an effective UKIP local organisation, is a stunning result. This reveals the depth of voter anger with the mainstream parties runs far deeper than perhaps even we realised.
Cameron, Miliband and Clegg will be very fearful men this morning and with good reason. Make no mistake, if the UKIP advance continues with the results to be announced on Friday this election, and the forthcoming European elections in which UKIP were already expected to do well, could represent a game changer in national politics ahead of the 2015 General Election. The results could be that significant.
An unexpectedly high tally of seats to accompany a strong percentage of the overall vote is likely to bring about several things. Firstly, UKIP can expect more scrutiny, but significantly more air time and coverage in the media to present their narrative – albeit in need of urgent improvement and cohesion. This will result in more potential voters taking a look at the alternative to the mainstream parties, which could lift UKIP’s support even higher.
Secondly, with something now approaching a local base developing, we can expect to see an increase in dissatisfied Conservative councillors defecting to UKIP, as they become confident they have a fighting chance of still being re-elected outside the Tory umbrella. Don’t underestimate the vested self interest of electoral prospects informing the decision making of councillors, many of whom are sick to the back teeth of Cameron’s evisceration of conservative principles and policies.
Thirdly, with wider coverage and evidence that UKIP can win seats promoting more confidence, party membership can expect to increase in the coming months. Crucially for UKIP this would also result in more money – and there could now be a real prospect that some current Tory donors might consider switching their money to UKIP, as electoral success from virtually no base will show their cash could be used to achieve some tangible success.
Fourth, the EU referendum strategy, which Cameron has developed around the idea of batting it away into the long grass beyond the next General Election – and only then if the Conservatives win, which is now looking a more distant prospect – is likely to unravel. Internal pressure within the Conservative party to address the issue much sooner in an effort to arrest UKIP’s progress, will be deafening as the non-wets assert themselves with electoral evidence of the strength of their argument.
In politics, momentum should never be underestimated. A combination of opposition to EU membership, anger over immigration, and the opportunity to protest against the cosy mainstream political stitch up and reject the main parties, has given UKIP momentum.
What matters now is how it’s used. As this blogger has always maintained, with Farage at the helm things have the capacity to fall apart quickly and people might find the party is all fur coat and no knickers. There are a number of risks but two in particular that stand out.
First, that the lack of cohesion on policy due to Farage’s refusal/incapacity to ‘do detail’ results in contradictory statements and voting which embarrass the party. Second, that Farage’s autocratic control of the party, which because of its relative size makes him more powerful comparatively than Cameron is over his Tories, means some unsavoury candidates have slipped through the net and as they are exposed – make no mistake, the media poodles will pore over them continually – they bring the party into disrepute. There is a greater than average chance that UKIP proves to be its own worst enemy for the reasons this blog and others have trailed for many months.
We now wait to see what Friday’s results bring.