The Aged P

That The Political Class Is Puzzled By The Rise Of UKIP Is Proof They Have Lost Touch With The Real World..

Quote of the day re the emergence of Ukip as an important political player

The fact that some voters don’t seem to believe that voting Conservative leads to Conservative outcomes suggests something rather deeper and more significant here, a fundamental problem of trust.
The same logic applies to the argument the Ukip is a protest against Coalition, economic hardship and the rest. The current party system offers voters a mechanism for registering discontent with the governing party/parties: it’s called the Official Opposition, the Labour Party. The fact that some anti-Government voters don’t believe that voting Labour is the best way to hurt the Government again points to a deeper problem.
If the Conservatives – or any of the main parties, come to that – are going to be reconciled with Ukip voters, they’re going to have to do something more substantial than promising to “listen” and tweak a few of their own policies.

Last night observing Michaell Portillo’s discomfort in having to share a studio discussion with Nigel Farage was rather like watching a debt ridden aristocrat having to sell his estate to the self made millionaire who used to be one of his gardeners. I’m afraid many members of our political, media and cultural elite will be equally uncomfortable this morning….

Cameron’s Last Minute EU Referendum Hint…Is It Really “My lips make promises but I have the heart of a whore”?

“My lips make promises but I have the heart of a whore”

Meet David Cameron

There are indications that UKIP, whose supporters were once characterised by David Cameron as “fruitcakes and loonies” might do well in today’s local elections at the expense of Cameron’s Conservative Party.

On the day before these elections Cameron has hinted that there might be a possibility that in certain circumstances there could be a chance that the promise of an in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU would be enshrined by legislation

In an interview, Mr Cameron said the Conservatives needed to “demonstrate absolutely that we are serious about this referendum”.

Is this the action of a man you can trust?

How To Be A Highly Skilled Investigative Political Journalist Reporting On UKIP At The Daily Telegraph…#236:Rowena Mason

Interviewer: So, Rowena, as the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist, tell us how you got the UKIP story?

Rowena Mason: Someone from Conservative Party HQ sent me an e mail which I cut and pasted…….ermmmm, that’s it…

Interviewer: Thank you, Rowena Mason, the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist…

“Let’s Face It, Chaps, This UKIP Business Is All A Bit Of A Fantasy…..I Say, Could You Pass Me An Olive?”

One of those clever young chaps at The UK Spectator has poured some cold water over speculation that UKIP could do well, even win, should a by election be held at in the Portsmouth South constituency of beleaguered Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock.
Young Mr Jones points out that the Portsmouth South demographics indicate a younger population and, as we all know, only old people, hankering over a Britain that never really existed, support UKIP.

But we can expect the average Portsmouth South voter to be at least slightly younger — and therefore less likely to vote Ukip — than the average Eastleigh voter.

Moreover the Lib Dems are deeply entrenched locally, as they were in Eastleigh

And, like in Eastleigh, the Liberal Democrats dominate at a local government level — they hold 17 of the 18 City Council seats in the constituency (the Tories have one).

Therefore, he implies, let’s stop fantasising over UKIP and get down to good old fashioned traditional three way party politics…..it’s all a bit of a fairy story.

What he conveniently ignores, of course, is that the Lib Dems only won Eastleigh through the rather dubious organising of postal votes. On the day real time voters went massively UKIP because, during the actual campaign, voters were impressed by the party’s actual messaging (as distinct from the usual media inspired caricature) and the quality of the UKIP candidate.

Eastleigh has given the party a tremendous boost by proving that voting purple no longer a Raving Monster Loony Party moment. The media has begun to take the party a little more seriously, Nigel Farage’s Common Sense tour has played to packed halls and the national polls has shown UKIP pushing ahead of the Lib Dems.

This is not to say that the party would win in Portsmouth but the fact that a high tory outlet like the Spectator is engaging in a little agitprop shows that Cameron & Co are worried..

And so they should be…..membership is growing fast and a lot of these are from the younger demographic. Moreover they are not all disillusioned former Conservative voters. Some are from other parties and a number are people who were previously apolitical and who see the party as giving a voice to ordinary folk outside the metropolitan cultural elite.

Instead of pontificating from his media perch why doesn’t Jonathan Jones get down to some real journalism and get out and about to find out why so many people are joining UKIP – and what they are doing to bring it closer to the corridors of power…

But then that would take expenditure of shoeleather and chatting with the great unwashed – and that would never do…..might miss a few cocktail parties….

On A Cold Tuesday Night In Tiverton Hall Is Packed Out For Farage & UKIP

…..and they say ordinary people are turned off by politics….

H/T Facebook UKIP

Former PR Hack David Cameron’s Tough Talk On Immigration Is Yet Another Scam…

Yet another pratfall for former PR man David Cameron as the massively hyped roadblock to immigration turns out to be a two inch high barrier of tissue paper.

A major crackdown by David Cameron on immigration was unravelling rapidly today after it emerged that it would only affect a small minority of foreigners in Britain.

Is anyone surprised? Scared stiff by the spectre of the rising popularity of UKIP his team of whizz kid advisers take a break from their school homework and x boxing and tell him to go ukip lite. The UKIP supporters are as thick as planks, they tell him, so just mention a couple of keywords (immigration and, before that, referendum) and they’ll all come flocking back.

So he puts on his serious “watching like a hawk” face and expects us to buy into his rhetoric.

Hot air

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,signifying nothing”

He knows and we know that any serious attempt to block EU immigration would be broken immediately by our E£CHR loving judges in partnership with hand wringing sob stories from the BBC/Guardianistas spearheaded by St Joan Bakewell. Cameron and his inner clique are from the Notting Hill end of the media/political elite. They despise ordinary people as mindless drones swayed only by Paul Dacre and the Murdoch press. Keep them quiet with a few buzzwords then get them back to their TV screens..

It won’t work this time, Mr C. You use the EU and the Lib Dems and Hacked Off as fall guys for your own core belief and that’s the same driving force that got you your achievement-free stint as a second rate PR man for Carlton TV.

Your core belief is simply the advance of David Cameron – and nothing else.

Times are changing, Mr C. We’ve woken up to your con game.

We just don’t believe anything you say any more..

Cyprus – Wow, Maybe UKIP Is Being Vindicated…Again!!!!

So the Cypriots have given Angela Merkel and the EU the finger – instead they have turned to Putin’s Russia

Cyprus turned to Russia for help on Tuesday night after the country’s parliament overwhelmingly rejected a tax on the deposits of bank savers.

Despite warnings from the EU not to touch the Russians with a barge pole Cyprus is looking for help from the KGB men who now rule Russia and have been using Cyprus as a “helpful” venue for laundering investing their hard earned “profits”

It could be seen as a smart negotiating ploy – calling the EU bluff. I would imagine there might even be a bit of panic in Brussels because if just one Eurozone member decides to go it alone politicians in Athens, Rome and Madrid will start having second thoughts and the whole Euro farce might start to unravel.

Prepare to add another notch for UKIP…

Did Dimbleby & BBC Producers Choreograph The Anti UKIP Question Time Incident That Has Backfired On Them?

The Daily Mail picked up from The Commentator and UKIPIAN the case of Amy Rutland, the Labour Party official who fulminated against Eastleigh UKIP candidate Diane James on last week’s BBC Question Time (James, you might recall, very nearly snatched victory from the Liberal Democrats)

The question was about the impact that UKIP might have on the Tories future electoral hopes.

the camera swung to Amy Rutland, who launched a personal attack on the UKIP panellist, the Eastleigh candidate Diane James, calling her ‘disgusting’.
Miss Rutland, a politics graduate, claimed UKIP preyed on vulnerable people by ‘scaremongering’ about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to Britain.

fortunately Diane James remained unhassled and dealt with her in a calm and effective manner – and there it would have ended if some salient facts about Amy Rutland had not emerged over the next few days.

Rutland is South-East Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party

Although identified by Stephen Twigg, the Labour MP on the QT panel, merely as “a questioner from the audience” she had been with him at a meeting earlier in the day
Now in itself there is no reason why a political activist should not be present in the QT audience. But there is considerable suspicion that the BBC was aware of her presence and that the chairman, the millionaire David Dimbleby, not only picked her out but then kept her in the spotlight by highlighting her remarks and pressuring Diane James to react rather than answer the original question

I suspect that Dimbleby and the producers choreographed the whole scene hoping to unsettle UKIP’s Diane James (who had impressed the media at Eastleigh) and to undermine UKIP’s policy stance on immigration.

Unfortunately it has backfired on them. Rutland has gone underground and the Beeb is backpedalling furiously.

But never mind – it was all paid for out of our pockets via the BBC Poll Tax (and it’s likely that £450,000 goes each year to David Dimbleby)

Maybe UKIP’s Stand On Immigration & Taxes Is Striking A Chord…..

That Eastleigh by-election, so the pundits tell us, is looking like a Lib Dem win although, in politics,nothing is a certainty until the votes are counted. Locally the Lib Dem machine is well established and their canvassing effective and efficient – but it could be that the most significant outcome of the election might well be not who wins but who comes third….

I suspect that another story next Thursday night will be how well UKIP does. They are surging there and I’d be surprised if they didn’t come a strong third. When I was down earlier in the week, I found it picking up voters off all three parties. It is getting disillusioned working class votes in Eastleigh town itself, which is a bit of the de-industralised north in Hampshire. While out in the more prosperous parts of the constituency it is picking up protest votes off the Lib Dems as well as playing on concerns among Tory voters about how sound Cameron is on Europe, immigration and tax.

Maybe a response to this piece actually hits the nail on the head

UKIP represents working class Britain, whether in-work, out of work, or retired from work. The other parties represent the wont-works, the on-benefits, the we-want- benefits, and the socialist state employees. And the penny is finally dropping. Voters : please don’t fall for the ‘don’t split the vote nonsense’.
At the heart of democracy is voting for whom we want, not for whom we don’t want.

Never Expected To Say This But Cameron’s EU Speech Was Absolutely Spot On….

There is a time in politics as well as in all things when one must eat one’s words (or some of them) and give credit where it is due. David Cameron’s speech was a good one, carefully crafted to bring out some home truths without sneering at our European partners as a bunch of Johnny Foreigners smelling of garlic and trying to seduce our women and steal our silver. By offering a straightforward in/out referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU in 2017 on the basis of a negotiated repatriation of certain powers he made a bold, and honest, commitment. There are none of the familiar weasel word which politicians conventionally use when making public promises – “almost certainly”, “certain circumstances”, subject to these conditions”.

There are always voices saying “don’t ask the difficult questions.”
But it’s essential for Europe – and for Britain – that we do because there are three major challenges confronting us today.
First, the problems in the Eurozone are driving fundamental change in Europe.
Second, there is a crisis of European competitiveness, as other nations across the world soar ahead. And third, there is a gap between the EU and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years. And which represents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is – yes – felt particularly acutely in Britain.

For once it was Cameron as Thatcher, not Cameron as Blair.

It‘s a canny move. It might well have for the moment shot the UKIP fox, which had been threatening to bite at Tory heels – though I suspect that puttting a bet on predicting Nigel Farage’s political demise would not be the wisest of moves.Indeed one could argue that Cameron’s offer has been forced on him by the impact of Farage And UKIP. However Dave has left Labour in complete disarray. As for the Liberal Democrats, who in 2007 were supporting a referendum, they are busily backpedalling, calling the idea unhelpful.

This must be sweet music to Tory ears – those champions of the “people” Clegg and Milliband boxing themselves into a corner and saying actually we, the great and the good, not the public, should decide these matters.

The fact that political has beens like Mandelson, Clarke and Heseltine are against a referendum is clearly a badge of honour considering that all three were once fervent advocates of joining the Euro. Add the French and President Obama to the mix and it must be drinks all round.

The only voice that matters in all this is the one that emanates from Berlin and Cameron must be pleased that Angela Merkel is not going negative on the idea of having a second look at the power relationship between the EU and member states.

Maybe, just maybe, Dave might have a bit of backbone after all……