Kippered!

Well the weekend’s twittering offered lots of reasons for UKIPs notable gains in the local elections. These varied from frenzied, overblown exclamations of victory to some pretty interesting petulant grumblings about how insignificant it all was.  It was all very instructive as to the depth of some people’s beliefs in their parties and in many cases, their grip on reality. From some quarters the nonchalance, feined or otherwise, was deafening.

But whatever day to day influence the new Kipper councillors may bring to their local governments the real news is that they have the main parties rattled. Some say they will force a lurch to the right for the Conservatives at the same time as Labour appear to be courting the unions once more. (I say ‘courting’ although it’s much more like ‘being controlled by’.) Nobody really gives a damn about the LibDems, obviously but many welcome a new left-right divide creating, once more, a nice new fence to sit on.

I’ve explained the left/right thing before and my views are simple – big government is a left-wing thing, so any party continuing to do a Viv Nicholson (spend-spend-spend) with diminishing tax returns is left wing. If you go far enough to the right you get Nazis – one of the more well-known socialist ideologies (them and sharks, apparently, according to Discovery Channel afficionados) – so we need a centrist government who listens to the electorate and tries to accommodate its wishes rather than those of Brussels.

Of course UKIP haven’t a chance in hell of forming a majority government in 2015 by any stretch of anybody’s imagination.  And their dream of a return to the imagined bucolic Britain of yesteryear will remain ever in the pipe. But what they appear to offer, which no other party has demonstrated, is a willingness to listen. Yes the other parties say they’ll listen and ‘learn lessons’ and then they spend more tax money working out how they can ignore our wishes in the least obvious way.

But lately – the last fifteen years or so – they realised that they need not bother with the deceit. They can lie with impunity and get away with it. You can fool some of the people all of the time and most of the people most of the time… Thus Labour deny, over and over again that they fucked over and will fuck over again, the economy. The Conservatives lie, over and over again about their position on membership of the EU. And Nick Clegg’s rabble have lately become the poster boys for lying in general.

I really can’t imagine why a party of earnest amateurs drawn from real life and real jobs would appeal to ordinary voters in preference to that lot, can you? And if you’re wondering whether the politically naïve can govern you just have to consider the extent to which the current political elite complain that they can’t get things done because of the Whitehall mandarins. If the power is not within the grasp of elected members then what is the point of them?

I look forward to seeing the bumblings of Britain’s creaking bureaucracy exposed by the innocent, direct and repeated naïve questions posed by people yet to develop an internecine hunger for political clout at any cost. For sure, UKIP will change. If they ever get into real power they will also change for the worse, but that’s forgetting their real purpose, right here, right now.

Remember Ireland's Lisbon Treaty vote?

First and foremost is recovering our independence from outside control. Once that bridge is crossed and burned maybe the country can regain control of its own idiocies? And yes, yes, yes, I hear all the naysayers bleating about how a referendum bill is an impossibility. Well, when you say something is impossible, somebody somewhere is getting on and doing it.