UKIP is the only political party gaining support in the latest round of opinion polls – shooting up to 14% and pushing the Lib Dems into fourth place.

Cue for a chorus of sneers from assorted politicians and pundits..

“False dawn”
“It’ll never happen”
“Protest vote”
Etc, etc etc

Dont be too sure. Although Cameron’s Tory toffs are down to 28% there is no really significant yearning for Labour’s Milliband and Balls….39% is hardly a massive endorsement, even with the full weight of the BBC behind them. A lot of Labour voters want stricter immigration controls and less taxpayer’s hard earned cash going to the feckless and indigent – and they don’t believe Labour economic policies will work.

Voters in general are extremely mistrustful of the political elite and their puppet masters in the media/cultural elite who love to speak on behalf of “the people”….who claim to know what we need better than we do ourselves..
A lot of us have hesitated to throw our lot in with UKIP because it did seem such a forlorn hope. Now even the broadsheets are having to take it seriously – the next few months could see a surge in membership and some serious money going UKIP’s way.

The times they could be changin’…..

A few weeks ago a majority of Americans voted to put the lunatics in charge of the asylum. That is essentially what Matt Welch was saying in a rather sombre piece at Reason – an article so depressing it ought to have had a health warning attached.

If elections are up-or-down assessments of politicians’ job performance, then this was a vote in favor of trillion-dollar annual deficits, bailout economics, and failing the minimum competence test of passing an annual budget. Federal policy for four years has produced lousy short-term results for the price of long-term insolvency, and now the characters responsible for this misgovernance have been given a pat on the head.

That’s right, despite Sarah Palin’s uncannily perceptive prediction in 2008, the USA wants more Styrofoam columns…..

So, just because Milliband and Balls are being constantly mocked in many of the public prints for their infantile money grows on trees rhetoric against public spending cuts, don’t imagine that our own band of lunatics cannot possibly party their way to power here in the UK in 2015….

Time to take to the hills?

MPs have hired a lawyer to challenge their own expenses watchdog in court to let them keep the profits from the sale of their taxpayer-funded second homes.

…..and I wonder who will eventually pay this lawyer’s fees?

h/t for pigs

As Alistair Thompson points out the biggest mystery behind the phone hacking scandal that spawned the Leveson Inquiry is why the police and the Blair/Brown Labour government turned a blind eye to this illegal activity. Yet this is a question still largely unanswered by the Leveson Report – and, of course, ignored by Ed Milliband, Ed Balls and Tom Watson who were very close to the levers of power in those Blair/Brown years.

Could it be that from 1996 to 2010 Rupert Murdoch supported the Labour party?

Strange, isn’t it, that the BBC and its clones amongst the left leaning punditry consistently beat a negative drum over Britain’s involvement in the Falklands and the first Gulf War while our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has created a mini industry of reports. exposures and dramatic reconstructions that serve to underline the “futility” and social costs of these campaigns. But, with Syria you get the feeling that the mood music is quite different. Months of BBC reporting, highlighting the activities and sufferings of the anti Assad rebels has built up the pressure for that most seductive of all messages – “something must be done”….

And now it appears that David Cameron is taking up the challenge

Last week, the Prime Minister visited a UN-run compound on the border with Jordan and saw the conditions being endured by tens of thousands of fleeing Syrians.
He said he was determined to do “more” and would be working with newly re-elected US president Barack Obama to up the pressure on Bashar Assad’s regime.

Doing more almost certainly means some form of military intervention – no fly zones, providing the rebels with weapons, sending troops to the Syrian borders to give humanitarian assistance

Wonderful words, Mr Cameron – and it’s true that the Assad regime is brutal, bloodthirsty and autocratic and some of the rebels want to replace it with a liberal democracy. However many of the others have a different agenda – and we all know what happened in Egypt.

However General Sir David Richards, Chief of Defence Staff has a dash of cold water for Cameron’s dream.

Our political masters are quite happy to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, but their appetite to exercise influence on the world stage is, quite understandably, the same as it has always been.
“Often politicians say to me, ‘Can you go and do this?’ I say to them, ‘With what?’

Exactly – we have been “intervening” for over a decade and at considerable cost for uncertain effect. It’s time to retrench and regroup and resist the temptation to grandstand on the world’s stage merely to satisfy David Cameron’s need to feel warm inside.

Let’s give Syria a miss and concentrate on sorting out our own problems…..

“Now we need to learn the lessons and move on. It’s going to be tough but we can do it.” says Alan Yentob, “Creative Director” of the BBC (£183,300 pa )

Meanwhile, in the real world, a comment here has a rather different take on this BBC farce..

All these overpaid troughers, whether Quango CEO’s, Council Chiefs, MP’s or BBC really do think they deserve shedfuls of money from us, the poor sods who have to pay for them.
It has to end, and end now. I am sick of hearing “we must learn from this” and “we must move on” endlessly.
These overpaid incompetent people must be thrown off the public payroll without huge sums of cash as a reward for their incompetence.

Nail…..meet head….

Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News, gets paid £340,000 per annum. Every penny of that comes out of our pockets and purses via the poll tax (aka TV Licence). In 2006 she authorised a meeting of “climate change experts”. As a result of this meeting the BBC decided to abandon its golden rule of impartiality on the issue of climate change. Now that must have been some meeting so what was said and who were the people who said it?

Strangely, despite the fact that the meeting was partly financed by the taxpayer via the BBC, it has proved incredibly difficult to find out because Helen Boaden doesn’t want us to know. She thinks it is sufficient for us be aware that she and the rest of the BBC elite found the discussions at the 2006 meeting so convincing that they decided to classify the critics of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) as unworthy of equal consideration.

However, for six years the BBC has been fighting a Freedom of Information request to name the 28 people who so impressed Helen Boaden at the 2006 meeting. Currently lawyers for the BBC are trousering wads of taxpayer’s cash defending this stance at an Information Rights Tribunal. The person requesting the information, Tony Newbery, is merely represented by himself. Fortunately for Ms Boaden the presiding tribunal judge appears to have disallowed many of Mr Newbery’s questions.

I wonder how Ms Boaden would have reported such stonewalling when she was named “Radio Industrial Journalist and Campaigning Industrial Journalist of the Year by the Industrial Society in 1990 for her investigation into safety standards in the oil industry.”

How ironic that the BBC, which ferociously attacked the Blair government for being economical with the truth over the reasons for joining in with the American attack on Iraq, should now be unwilling to provide us with any hard evidence concerning an event which led them to break its longstanding tradition of impartiality.

The key fact, of course, is that much of the “evidence” for AGW has, in the years since 2006, has been undermined by some inconvenient truths. So much so, perhaps, that Helen Boaden would prefer to keep her own “dodgy dossier” safely under lock and key in the bowels of the BBC…..

The bastion of the left at the UK Guardian appears totally nonplussed at the result of a poll which discovers that working class voters are not particularly enamoured of those policies so much favoured by the chattering classes at their North London dinner parties – uncontrolled immigration and massive transfers of taxpayers money into overseas aid.

Could that possibly be because it is the working class areas of the big cities and small market towns that that find their schools, social services and social housing overwhelmed by the influx of immigrants and never the comfortable middle class suburbs or cosy commuter villages wherein dwell the self perpetuating political, media and academic elite? An elite which constantly lauds the glories of “cultural diversity” and “community integration” while maintaining a convenient distance from the realities of their guilt induced dreamworld.

One reason why the left elite hated Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher so much is that they connected with vast swathes of working class opinion and were not afraid of courting the disdain of that elite – unlike the current Tory leadership which deliberately jettisoned that legacy and paid the price with their failure to win unadulterated power in 2010.

Until the Tories have the courage to cease yearning for the approval of the BBC/Guardian chattering classes they might find themselves withering on the political vine and possibly being edged out by alternatives – UKIP, anyone?

The times they are a changing…..

So Brighton City Council goes beyond parody and proposes to abolish titles like Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms on all official forms and messages because they upset “the Transgender community”

Green Party deputy leader Coun MacCafferty said: ‘Trans people aren’t necessarily male or female and sometimes they don’t want to be defined by their gender.
‘Putting Mr and Mrs on a form is completely useless.

As a fully paid up member of “the Gender community” if I lived in Brighton I think I would immediately be “upset” by this bizarre proposal. However, in the spirit of moderation, I would suggest the following compromise.

Keep the four accepted conventions of “gender” address and add a fifth for the “Trans people”…….Tr……then everyone could be happy….

Result!!!!!

From the inimitable Benedict Brogan’s Morning Briefing e mail….

The Tories are also worried about how they can legitimately exclude UKIP if the party wins the 2014 European elections, and over an extended series of debates “sucking the Oxygen” from the rest of the election campaign.

..lol…

During their public discourse messrs Cameron, Clegg and Milliband dismiss UKIP and their leader Nigel Farage as an opportunist one trick pony better suited to the circus ring than the serious arena of political debate. But in private they also watch BBC Question Time and not only recognise how articulate and persuasive Farage can be on a whole range of issues but must also note how he CONNECTS with such a large cross section of the audience.

Those three empty suits, none of whom has really had a long term proper job before entering politics, would be messing their pants at the prospect of facing Farage in a TV debate….