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.

Blah blah blah….lessons learned…..monitoring……values driven….blah blah…..NHS…..envy of the world……

Stephen Pollard, editor of The Jewish Chronicle summed it up in a piece at the Telegraph

Mid Staffs inquiry: spare me the NHS drivel, please…… I really can’t take another second of the specious, misleading and hypocritical response to the Francis Inquiry into what happened at Mid Staffs.

Naturally the full force of venom is being directed at “the managers” with several people demanding that hospitals should be run by doctors and nurses. However, as one brave soul posted at Guido Fawkes

Let’s not forget that it is actually nurses who fail to provide basic care. Nurses are usually regarded as immune to criticism, whereas nobody likes beastly bureaucrats; nor do hospitals actually seem to be short of nurses, if the gaggles of chattering people milling around most NHS wards are anything to go by. We might need more doctors and orderlies and fewer ‘angels’.

Heresy – the nursing unions and the BBC won’t like that. But it was nurses and doctors who were actually on the wards ignoring patients, not “managers”

However we live in times rather similar to the early years of Imperial Rome where very few actually believed in the Roman gods – but most citizens made certain they were seen in the temples. In the UK in the 21st century it has been clear for years that the NHS is a blundering, inefficient and incredibly expensive monstrosity run almost exclusively for the benefit and convenience of doctors and nurses – a producer’s cartel very similar to those that, up until now, have controlled schools, police and the law. Yet in public we are required to make obeisance to this false god or face being burned at the stake..

prefacing almost every response to Mr Francis’ report has been the incantation that the NHS is our proudest institution and represents British values at their best.
If this is Britain at its best then God help us, because the NHS is an anachronism, a health system built on deference to authority, Whitehall knows best, government spends best and if you’re a patient then learn your place in the food chain, keep quiet and take what’s offered.

As one angry reader of Pollard pointed out

You can’t criticise the nurses, no matter how poor or uncaring they are, they are angels. You can’t criticise the doctors and consultants because they are better than us. You can’t criticise Whitehall because they aren’t listening. You can’t criticise the managers because they are counting the numbers given to them by Whitehall and you can’t criticise the NHS because its a National Treasure. The only people left to criticise are the patients and their families.

Sorry, Mr Francis – you’re just painting plague pustules with calomine lotion. The notion of a tax funded, “free” at point of entry health service is in itself the root cause of Mid Staffs and no amount of tinkering at the edges will resolves these endemic problems.

Time to put the customer in the driving seat?

After a decade of denials former Liberal Democrat minister and champion of wind farms Chris Huhne has confessed to being a serial liar

Chris Huhne, the former energy secretary, has quit politics and is facing a possible jail sentence after he pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice by asking his ex-wife to take speeding points for him.

Once seen as a serious alternative to current Lb Dem leader Nick Clegg the now disgraced politician is facing a probable prison sentence. But it only came about because maverick blogger Guido Fawkes clung to his case like a terrier. True, a couple of newspapers took an interest but it was Guido who kept his eye on this ball month after month.

Of course we would never have known anything if this rather seedy little man had not suddenly ditched his wife for his mistress in 2010 – yet another example of beware the fury of a woman scorned.

Schadenfreude – always a delight when a smug, liberal global warming fanatic who ticks every box for the BBC/Guardian chattering classes bites the dust….

£30b, 20 years to completion – see what happens when politicians get seduced into vanity projects like HS2. Plenty of photo-ops of ministers poring over maps, futuristic graphics, promises of reviving the north….don’t they just love it.

Of course we can predict the reality – costs will double/treble, incompetent management will cause delays, unions will blackmail progress and, by 2032 technology might well have made the whole caboodle outdated.

But just, for a moment, imagine what we could do to improve our shambolic infrastructure with £30b over five years – improve thousands of choke point road junctions with right turn lanes, mini roundabouts, traffic lights. Upgrade existing track and signalling on our existing railway network. Above all convert the A11 into a motorway into the heart of East Anglia. Ensure that the pathetic A303, supposedly the main route between London and South West England, becomes a dual carriageway along its entire length with no roundabouts or junctions. Do the same with the A30 and A38 into the heart of Cornwall and, while you’re at it create a south coast expressway using the A27 and A35.

Our road network has remained frozen for the last thirty years – nothing much has changed (apart from the completion of the M25) since 1980 – which was the year I first began driving regularly in France. In those days the Autoroute network was fairly limited and centred almost exclusively on Paris – and few towns had a bypass. Since then the French have embarked on a steady programme of motorway development and traffic circulation projects that has transformed the whole transport system – as well as a state of the art intercity rail network.

Meanwhile Britain has been asleep at the wheel – often literally.

Still at least we can maybe invest now in a ticket to Leeds by HS2 and bequeath it to our heirs yet unborn to enjoy at some vague time in the future.

That sound? Don’t worry – its Brunel turning in his grave….

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage has a letter box mouth, eyes that look as if they will pop out on stalks at any moment and a face that seems to pull in different directions on the cusp of every grin. When he speaks he sounds very much like an on course bookmaker shouting the odds. His views are disdained by the media elite and the political class and you are unlikely to find him at any North London dinner party. He is a PR consultant’s nightmare….

….and yet he and the party he leads, long dismissed as a collection of nutcases, fruitloops and pub bores is edging near to 20% in opinion polls. When he appears on BBC Question Time, for years the graveyard of right wing pundits thanks to its chattering class chairman and an audience carefully selected to skew leftwards, he always goes down well. He also proves more than a match for the great and the good on the panel who discover much to their chagrin, that he is remarkably articulate and skilful in debate.

It’s not so much his euro sceptic views that win him support (though that must never be dismissed as a factor) but his very lack of smoothness, his everyman persona that immediately detaches him from our ruling class, the wealthy, soft figures like Cameron, Milliband and Clegg who have never really had long term experience of work outside politics and who began their rise to the top three quarters of the way up the ladder thanks to influential families and friends.

It is these characters and their cheerleaders in the media who paint Farage and his party as buffoons who could never be trusted to make tough decisions and run the country in an effective and efficient manner – as if their years of governing have not been years of failure consisting mainly of short term, short sighted and flashy “initiatives” threaded with lies and undelivered (and often undeliverable) promises.

Farage is an outsider, he is not of the political class and is not constrained by the conventions of that class. Have a look at this video – unlike many featuring Farage it is not a two minute sound bite designed to make public impact. Forget the cartoony face and the odd diction – just concentrate on what he is saying and then ask yourself if this man is speaking for you rather than speaking at you.

You might be surprised at your reaction.

This man may be political gold.

I have always liked reading Julie Burchill. I rarely agree with her left wing feminist views but she writes with spirit and passion. I would love to meet up with her in a pub and have a good old fashioned political argument over a few pints and a pork pie.

Lynne Featherstone is a Liberal Democrat MP who is minister for International Development in the Cameron/Clegg coalition = in other words she has been given a non job with a sack of taxpayers money to waste so that Guardian readers can feel good about themselves. She is a strident humourless feminist in the mould of Harriet Harman. I would rather stick my head in a bucket of sheep dip than meet her anywhere.

Burchill recently came to the defence of Suzanne Moore, another left wing feminist

Burchill took up the cudgels on behalf of her friend and colleague Suzanne Moore who was being monstered by the militant ‘trans’ lobby.
In a magazine article, Moore had remarked that modern women were coming under pressure to look like Brazilian transsexuals. Innocuous enough, but it sparked a firestorm of self-righteous anger and unpleasantness on Twitter, forcing Moore to close her account.

Burchill doesn’t do nuance.

Suggesting that “a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black and White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look”, Burchill proceeded to launch a stinging attack against the ‘trans lobby’, denouncing them as “screaming mimis”, “Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days”, and “bed-wetting transsexuals” who “have your c**k cut off and then plead special privileges as women”.

Twitter erupted in rage – or rather the Transsexual lobby and its fellow travellers within sections of the gay community had a hissy fit. The rest of us sat back and enjoyed the mud wrestling.

But then it became sinister

Ms Featherstone pursed her lips and tweeted

Julie Birchill rant against transgender community is absolutely disgusting – a bigoted vomit for which the Observer should sack her.

A few hours later the editor of The Observer DELETED BURCHILL’S PIECE FROM ITS WEBSITE.

So welcome to the Age of Leveson where a craven editor is so spooked by the public displeasure of a government minister that he spikes a story and grovels for forgiveness. It’s not Burchill who should be sacked – it should be the witch hunting neo NVKD Featherstone. How dare she use her position to censor a journalist for merely speaking her mind in a perfectly legal manner.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Strident lobbies will increasingly franchise politicians to crush free speech – which is why we must act now

I DEMAND THAT DAVID CAMERON SACK FEATHERSTONE FROM HIS GOVERNMENT FOR HER BIGOTED VOMIT AGAINST OUR BASIC RIGHT TO ENGAGE IN POLEMICAL DEBATE.

Assuming, of course, that he has the balls to do it…….

Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster) is the latest hired gun to join the “Let’s derail UKIP” offensive but in terms of broadsides a peashooter would have been more effective.

After a public row about same-sex marriage, Ukip have gone from smug to scared

What actually happened was that a spotty student type who was leader of a UKIP youth group had been interviewed on BBC radio and burbled as only callow youths can. He appears to be, from his utterances, a rather immature type of libertarian, blathering on about gay marriage, bestiality, incest etc. The UKIP leadership ditched him fairly quickly, not because of his views but because, as a party official he would be expected to publicly support party policy

Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster) thinks that UKIP has blown a gasket here and will immediately lose support.

I am not so sure about that.

Gay marriage is a massive issue amongst the media class but outside the North London dinner party circuit it remains a very damp squib – and this is exactly why people are taking a closer look at UKIP. Farage and company are very much not part of the political/media/academic elite, an elite which over the past fifty years has ridiculed and despised the views of ordinary people on issues like crime, immigration and political correctness. So using gay marriage as a stick with which to bear UKIP is a surefire loser.

As for the squashing of a pimply 21 year old narcissist….most of us are sick and tired of having to treat the immature views of youthful politicos as if they are of great import. They have little sense of responsibility, many of them catapult straight from university into some form of media/political internship with little, if any, long term experience of the real world of work – then, like Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Milliband they then have the audacity to lecture us on how we should behave.

Sorry Mr Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster), far from putting off potential support, giving a pompous and opinionated young whippersnapper a swift kick in the backside – and out of the door – will have most ordinary folk giving UKIP a standing ovation…..

Cameron is now bigging up childcare costs

Working mothers will be given thousands of pounds-worth of support for child care to help them to return to work, under plans being considered by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

Stay at home mums will be given an additional tax allowance to help pay someone else to look after their kids to get them back to work. But if they decide to remain at home to look after their kids themselves they will get zilch – even though they are creating the most stable, family friendly environment for those key formative years.

In effect Cameron is saying to those mums who want to stay at home that they are of less significance than those mothers who get back into the workforce as soon as possible. He is essentially devaluing motherhood and the concept of the traditional family – a strange move for the leader of a so called “conservative” party.

Time was that parents of young children accepted the fact that they had to downsize their own expenditure because there was now just a single earner….usually dad. So you made do with the same car for a few more years, you had the odd family day out rather than an expensive foreign holiday, restaurants and pubs became a fond memory, you kept the old black & white TV when everyone else had colour.

School hours and term dates were geared for education not for child minding. You were expected to keep your children with you rather than dump them in a crèche. Nobody complained because that was just the way things were.

But many of today’s parents don’t seem willing to make those sacrifices. They want to maintain their childless lifestyle. So both of them need to be earning as soon as possible – then they can pay someone else to look after their kids.

Now Cameron is saying that dumping your young children so that you can have the plasma TV, the expensive foreign holiday and the new car(s) is not only OK but you’ll pay less tax to make it even easier – so the rest of us will have to pay more to make up for it.

And he thinks it’s UKIP members who are odd?

WTF…..

News that all 800 members of SO6, the armed police unit guarding the UK’s political elite, are to be questioned over suggestions that – shock horror – some of them were a little economical with the truth over the Andrew Mitchell “Plebgate” affair has caused a bit of a ripple in the media.

The Met helpfully added that this investigation will cost about £64.000 and occupy 3,000 hours of police time.

Naturally Labour Party mouthpiece Daily Mirror found a rentaquote MP to sound off about wasting resources at a time of “cuts” and “police sources” (AKA the Police Federation) muttered about “witch hunts”……Labour politicians and Police Federation agitprop activists, of course, had previously milked the whole incident until the arrest of the SO6 officer when they then became strangely silent.

Some might suggest that the details of this police investigation and the accompanying press release have been deliberately designed to stir the pot again and paint the current government (which coincidentally is attempting to reform the police service) in an unfavourable light.

But that cannot be the case for we all know that every police officer is absolutely “wonderful”………

As the FT has recently suggested UKIP and it’s leader Nigel Farage are riding an anti-politics wave. The latest poll puts the party’s support at 15%, almost double the numbers for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats (8%)

Perhaps more people are beginning to agree with Nigel Farage when he says this…..I know I do……

“We just think it’s about time we started to put the interests of Britain and British people first.

“We’re run by a bunch of college kids, who have never had a proper job in their life.”