The Mail on Sunday commissioned Survation to poll just over 1,000 people about how they would vote if a General Election  was held this week.

The results?

LABOUR 37%

CONSERVATIVES  27%

UKIP 18%

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS  11%

(Survation interviewed 1,017 people on Friday Oct 11^th)

That’s right, as Iain Martin wrote a few days ago, despite the over hyped Godfrey Bloom “meltdown” and several subsequent weeks of non mention in the media, UKIP’s polling is holding up very respectably.

Oddly enough, the Mail “forgot” to say much about this aspect of the poll, concentrating instead on the fact that most respondents supported Adam Afriyie ‘s idea of having a referendum on leaving the EU in 2014 rather than 2017.

Since the Mail has never been at all friendly to UKIP and has consistently sought to undermine the party with sneers and innuendo  their lapse of memory is par for the course. But try to find any reference to this poll anywhere else in the media and you’ll draw a blank.

Hmmmmm…draw your own conclusions on this?

Meanwhile repeat after me

UKIP is just a flash in the pan so we’ll ignore them

UKIP is just a flash in the pan so we’ll ignore them

UKIP is just a flash in the pan so we’ll ignore them

Ah, media pundits and politicians, that must make you feel better…..

A lot of  nonsense has been written about the US Govt “shutdown” in  the UK media right across the political spectrum from the Telegraph’s extra dry Jeremy Warner to the wet lettuce BBC Obama shill Mark Mardell. Combine this with the high level of ignorance about the US political sytem here in Britain (matched only by the equally astonishing misunderstanding of “funny foreigners” by Americans) and you have as much chance of drilling down to the nitty gritty as a bricklayer trying to do some delicate brain surgery with a trowel. But the explanation of what is happening is as simple and straightforward as getting the gin out of the bottle (unscrewing the cap if your memory needs a jolt) according to the highly respected academic Thomas Sowell.

• The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going — except for ObamaCare.
• All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that congressmen there have a right to decide whether they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
• The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare.
• The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare.
• Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.

Read Sowell’s brief but soundly reasoned exposition here. Regard anything written about the shutdown that does not tally with those five key facts as either a malicious and deliberate lie or as a demonstration that the author’s understanding of American politics is on the same level as an earwig’s grasp of the second law of thermodynamics..

Believe me, this is why the BBC, the Guardian and the legions of the liberal left are fanning the flames of faux outrage over the Daily Mail. They want all the press to reflect only the “approved” world view of the taxpayer funded BBC.

God help us if that comes to pass….

Rather bizarre few minutes on BBC Daily Politics…Amjad Bashir, UKIP’s spokesman on Small Business (a Yorkshireman with a Pakistani background) being assured by Jo Coburn and two other white people that Tory Grandee Lord Heseltine was right in saying there was a substantial “racist” element within his party.  Mr Bashir pointed out that he, unlike Heseltine and the three of them, had experienced being the target of racism but never in UKIP.  Indeed he had been warmly received when he spoke at UKIP’s recent conference and was on the party’s short list of potential MEPs.

You could see the patronising look in their eyes……they had already filed him under “Uncle Tom”

After all a bunch of white middle class media pundits always know better…

The Grand Panjandrum of the Conservative Media, James Forsyth, has officially declared UKIP and Nigel Farage dead and buried.

Tory strategists talk of a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to dealing with the threat of Ukip on their right. The carrot is more robust Tory policies on welfare, immigration and human rights. The stick is the prospect of Ed Miliband as Prime Minister.

Not only have those brilliant “strategists” discovered the magic formula for collapsing the UKIP vote, the venerable figure of Bill Cash came forth and crushed Farage at a fringe meeting with one blow

Farage was harangued by Bill Cash for ‘not acting in the national interest’ and for making it less likely that there would be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

According to Forsyth Farage was then barracked by Tory MPs and had to slink away a broken man. Afterwards Forsyth scuttled up to a “cabinet minister” and described the scene with great glee. Said minister was astonished that the UKIP threat had been neutralised in just a few minutes and probably thanked Forsyth from the bottom of his heart.

Really, Mr Forsyth? Other reports of that Farage/Cash incident paint it in a far less one sided light. He didn’t come as a supplicant, seeking Cash’s blessing and reacted forthrightly to his rather patronising put down.

We know that The Spectator and, to a slightly lesser extent their fellow Barclay Brothers employees at the Telegraph have been peddling this line about UKIP for quite a while. But I suspect this position is not at all based on hard facts. It is either a classic example of wishful thinking or the Forsyth is so enclosed in the Westminster bubble he has little, if any, contact with the real world.

The fact is that Cameron and his clique captured the Conservative machine thinking they could win power by being Tony Blair. It was a disastrous miscalculation.

Rather than locking in the Conservative base and – like Ronald Reagan – building out from there, creating a winning coalition around a couple of big, unifying themes, they rushed to what they thought was the middle, attacked some of their existing voters and activists, and created the space for Ukip’s rise.

However much the Tory “strategists” and their media lapdogs like Forsyth try to big up the shifts and twists of their party’s priorities those who already vote UKIP and the millions more who are moving in that direction are doing so because, if they are not Tories, they have lost faith in the political class, and, if they were they simply do not believe anything Cameron says.

The vote UKIP get Miliband scaremongering so loudly pimped by Forsyth and the “strategists” is an empty threat. Many would argue that, beyond the rhetoric, a Miliband regime would be little different from Cameron/Clegg – EU friendly, High Tax, Corporate Crony and Nanny State. But in opposition the Conservative Party, without the perks of power would collapse like a powdery fossil leaving a resurgent UKIP as the only effective alternative to rule by Big Government.

No, Mr Forsyth, UKIP is here to stay.

UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is angry because the Daily Mail drew attention to his father’s Marxist views. I think Benedict Brogan hits the nail on the head…

But the key point surely is that Marxism hated – hates – Britain. It hates our institutions, our economic model, our democracy, our independent media and our freedoms. And before the Marxists and their chums lost the argument, it wasn’t just some academic debate played out around the dining tables in well-heeled north London neighbourhoods: it was deadly serious. Yes, there is something distasteful about trashing a dead man’s reputation, and by the same token something noble about the way Mr Miliband and other politicians have risen to his defence. But Ralph Miliband, however well intentioned, was on the side of those who wanted to turn Britain into something dreadful. It is a testament to how comprehensive the defeat of Marxism has proved to be that the Cold War is all but forgotten, and our politics are repulsed by its harsh truths.

The UK Spectator and its Coffee House Blog has always regarded itself as the intellectual power house of the Conservative Party. Of course I don’t mean the Conservative Party in the sense of the grassroots members in the cities and suburbs and market towns who do all the electoral donkey work delivering leaflets across muddy fields or damp council estates.

I mean the pudgy fingered public school lads and lasses who hover around Westminster buttering up Tory MPs and schmoozing with spotty Telegraph hacks hoping to either parachute into a safe seat or gaining a comment spot on the Telegraph….or both.

So, everything you read at the Speccie is viewed through the prism of Westminster gossip and is about as relevant to the politics of real people as the tittle tattle of the Imperial court in Moscow in January 1917

Therefore the Speccie school kids are unable to comprehend the nature of UKIP. They appear not to have had a presence at UKIP’s recent conference and, in general have made no attempt to get out and about the country engaging with the party’s membership.

So we get Isabel Hardman, in a feeble attempt to encapsulate the essence of UKIP digging up an obscure anecdote from a bit of Lib Dem soul searching after they squeaked narrowly past UKIP’s Diane James at Eastleigh

Or Sebastian Payne trying to pimp that relic of failed Maastricht rebellion Bill Cash as the hammer of Farage and producing a hacked e mail from the UKIP Press office as a mortal blow to the party’s credibility.

Then, finally, the genius Payne uncovers William “Syria” Hague’s Master Plan to pulverise UKIP into granules of dust

• Remind every voter that Cameron has offered a referendum on a renegotiated EU Treaty
• A vote for UKIP will let in Labour
• Errrmmm..that’s it, folks

….and they get paid for this????

The best riposte?

Who will listen to Hague? Honestly he is a man who has swallowed all his own beliefs for ‘power’ and control by the EU, Foreign Office and the USA. Yet another man who broke his promise on the EU to the people. 
Vote Conservative get broken promises and no in/out referendum. Just a ‘Do you agree with the changes we have made within the EU!! Mark my words.

Amen to that, my friend.