Farage-oh!

I have harboured a mistrust of the European Union and of politicians in general since long before 1975. I saw union power cripple industries; wildcat strikes, flying pickets, one-out/all-out and often on a whim. Two minutes-worth of tea break, efficiency drives, mechanisation and more; any excuse it seemed, back in the sixties and seventies and the all-powerful shop steward would snap his mighty fingers and the crack would be heard across the land. But in one thing the unions and I were agreed; there was something rotten about Project Europe.

Then after Wilson’s victory in 1974 on a promise to hold the first referendum in our history I saw the way in which the two sides, pro and con, handled the debate. Despite the overwhelming feeling in the country that we lost something of ourselves when Ted Heath signed us up, the big money of the ‘in’ campaign bombarded us with the slick propaganda of fear. We were already in, they said, and it’s fine. To leave before we gave it a chance would make us look ridiculous. As a declining world power our voice could only be heard as part of something bigger. If we weren’t inside the Common Market we would be outside all markets. It stank. And as a result of that stink the British pinched their noses and voted against their heart.

Twenty years later that heart returned as Britain’s confidence had grown and a small new party was formed. Since then the Internet has allowed access to follow the debate in far more detail than hitherto and although there is no precedent to show we would be better off out, there is precious little to show we’d be better off in; but one hell of a dirty pile of evidence of corruption, coercion and a hell-bent agenda of eradicating the nation state. On pragmatic grounds the generation that got to vote in would now vote out. The generation that just missed out – me and millions like me – are even more certain we have nothing to fear from stepping outside. But move to the under-forties and the picture is blurred by a relentless message from Brussels that to leave would be suicide. It just wouldn’t.

But for Ukip’s dogged persistence we would simply not be discussing it at all. Conservative rebels have serially failed to bring their party to heel and many sit firmly on the fence, occasionally hopping to one side or another – I’m looking at you, Boris – whenever politically expedient. And Ukip would not have had the success it has had without the dogged persistence of one Nigel Farage. Red Ukip, Right Ukip; however the party has lurched, whichever vote it has courted I have always viewed it as a one-issue – one crucial issue – party.

They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This may or may not be what is happening with Nigel Farage right now, but now is not the time for the party to fall apart. David Cameron may or may not honour his cast-iron pledge for an honest in/out referendum but we already know he is 100% on the side of in and his whips will do their utmost to keep his dogs in line. You can say what you like about Nigel Farage and I know you will, but I am wholly convinced of one thing: we would not even be having the prospect of a referendum were it not for him.

Come the referendum...

Others have written at length about what Patrick O’Flynn has said and sharp are the knives, ready to carve Nigel’s early epitaph, but the political landscape might have been a sterile wasteland without his towering presence. As a one-man thorn in the side he has done more than any Euro-sceptic Tory to give the people of Britain the choice they never really had 40 years ago. So, I no longer care about whether or not Ukip is 'different', or whether the man at its helm is a true anti-politician or just like all the rest; none of that is important now. But the 'out' campaign needs a strong voice and there is no bigger and more coherent than Team Farage.

Things we won’t say, but are true...

I’ve been watching the debate unfold since Trevor Philips’ documentary on race relations in Britain, which was shown last Thursday night on Channel 4. He told us what we always knew, that his team thought – as did Ingsoc – that if you can prevent people from expressing ideas, they will stop thinking them. Oh, I well remember the New Labour days and saw 1984 being played out in front of my eyes on the telescreen daily, but as hard as I shouted out, the party faithful shouted me down. I thought then that it was only a matter of time before the book-burning began.

Phillips says now that he and his cohorts were wrong, but the book-burning has been underway for some time now, or it may as well have been. If you don’t have the attention span for in-depth analysis in print, where you can ruminate, cogitate, challenge, write in the margins and develop an understanding in your own time, how can you rear responsible adults with a real understanding of the world we live in? The Internet, for all its fabulous content, is largely used to disseminate information in pre-packaged, pre-digested, spat-out chunks of polemic and propaganda. That, porn, poker and pictures of kittens, natch.

One thing that Trevor Phillips said was that – shock horror – stereotypes are often largely true. He then went on to say some things that a white presenter would still have to couch in the most cautious of terms; basic stereotypical facts about race, nationality, socio-economic background – all the new-taboos. And while he disagreed with much of what Nigel Farage had to say he nonetheless recognised Farage’s charge that many on the left of politics had helped bring about the current shitty state we find ourselves in. Actually, I have some sympathy for Philips’ crusading because, compared to the seventies, we are in an undeniably more harmonious balance now, with young people far less likely to hold hideously racist feelings.

Unless, of course, that racism is turned on their own. There is a peculiar urge in the soundbite-attuned young to rebel against what wiser heads have organised; the very society that has raised them thus far. And such knee-jerk urges should debar them from a say in proceedings until their heads have levelled out and they have seen the true contradictions of human nature. The internet and social media of course, manages to maintain those child-like urges well beyond the age of majority nowadays, with yesterday’s attack on Nigel Farage and his family a typical example of a political agenda driven by sheer ignorance and none of the maturity of Phillips' stance.

Predominantly juvenile white protesters said: "We will not succumb to Farage's prejudice. We will create the world we want to live in. A world beyond UKIP.” Marvellous, kiddies. And do you have any idea what such a world would look like? A world where the expression of opinions with which you disagree are prohibited and such prohibition enforced by the threat of violence? You may have thought you were having a bit of fun and attacking ‘the Nazi’, but your own actions were far more Hitler Youth than anything Ukip has ever inspired.

It's happening again...

Things we won’t say but are true? Some people are stupid. Some people are ugly. Some people are idle. Some people work harder than others. Some people steal. Some people succeed and some shouldn’t breed. Some people are black, white, brown and yes – some people in Ukip (as in any party) are afraid of a world changing too quickly for those changes to be assimilated. But some people are too ignorant of anything that matters to deserve to live in a tolerant world that decent people have built and want to preserve. 

For England & St George!

It's St George’s Day and a recent survey shows that even though we may be secretly (and rightly) proud of our heritage, we are apparently scared of celebrating our patron saint’s day for fear of being seen as that most heinous of bigot – a racist. In my typical contrary way I tweeted that I favour the spelling ‘realist’ and as a result a few people ‘favourited’ that post but not many dared to publicly retweet it in agreement because, well, you never know how it may be taken.

It’s no surprise though, because even though the taunt of racist has become a parody now, with friends routinely outing each other over the tiniest of  twisted slights by deploying the R-Bomb, there is still some nervousness attached to it. There is, I believe, a legal definition which can be tested in court, but in real life nobody has the slightest idea where preference passes over into racism. For instance I would far prefer to work alongside a fluent English speaker with whom I share many cultural norms – not least because I like a laugh and a joke and punchlines rarely translate well - but does that make me a spitting Nazi? Yes, it would seem, to some.

So no wonder the knives were out for Nigel Farage with both mischief makers and concerned public alike determined to denounce a suggestion that an oversupply of labour depresses wages as racist. Racist? Yes, because these workers aren’t native born. This is a straw man fallacy. UKIP’s actual position is simple - open the borders to a plentiful supply of cheap unskilled Labour and those already here are at a disadvantage. That is a pretty simple economic realism which is hard to attack but wait, those cheap units are foreigners, therefore… You Racists! It’s almost as ridiculous as the witch quiz in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I confess to using it myself all the time. Ed Miliband’s dad was a Marxist, therefore Beaker himself must wish to enslave all of Britain under the yoke of communism. It’s a cheap jibe with which to express my opposition to another term under a Labour government, but it’s not clever. Ed would argue me under the table if I were to try and advance this as a serious political attack because it is lazy and wrong and who the hell am I anyway? No political commentator with any gravitas would ever support such a flimsy fallacy but Kay Burley threw caution to the wind and had a go anyway.

Her straw man argument (and that of many others intelligent enough to know much better) goes thus: Nigel Farage states that a flood of cheap labour depresses low-paid workers’ wages. (This cannot be denied – it’s one of the reasons many employers love the EU; such people will willingly do work that it has become uneconomic for many British born to do.) He, like thousands of other people in public positions employs his wife, a person uniquely available to help him in a way possibly no other person alive could. But wait, she’s German, therefore (and you can almost hear the cogs grinding) he’s not only a racist, he’s a hypocrite!

It’s as if the massed ranks of the media and the political classes put aside their mutual grievances, held a meeting and agreed some battle lines. Time and again, instead of attacking the many chinks (racist!) in UKIP’s armour they went for the man himself on the flimsiest of pretexts, cynically trying to poison him with an oversupply of the oxygen of publicity and betting that if they told the tale often enough it would transmogrify from fallacy into fact. Bomber pilots used to say “If you're not catching flak, you're not over the target.” Farage must be bang on; he’s certainly rattled the cages of some big beasts.

Do you want this dragon slaying or what?

Well today we celebrate - quietly, mind you - that racist heritage of ours as we raise a glass to a Greco-Roman-Palestinian who suffered torture and execution over his beliefs but is remembered in our folklore as a dragon-slaying hero. Be careful what you wish for, many critics said of Nigel Farage yesterday, as they repeatedly lashed out at the figurehead instead of taking on his army. Wise words you might do well to heed. The traditional way of creating a saint is to start off by making him a martyr.

Happy Saint Nigel George’s Day!

Send in the Clowns

Well, the UKIP hate campaign has sprung into action over the weekend with newspapers and social media all lending their shoulder to the hamster wheel of rage to dish the dirt on this happy band of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists. To be fair, the primary sources of the criticisms fairly deserve it and it’s been a bit of an open goal on UKIP’s part, but it has also been instructive to watch the big party apparatchiks wheel out the guns of ridicule.

Support for UKIP’s home spun ideas is high. Who wouldn’t, disillusioned by the polished professional politicians marching in step to the party whip, be drawn to ordinary people expressing ordinary views that chime more honestly with the will of the electorate? So what that some of them have questionable beliefs; the official church has some downright wacky stories about sky-pixies and the afterlife yet such views are not only tolerated but venerated by many. And to criticise a religion whose beliefs are even more medieval and whose avowed intent is to convert or exterminate the infidel is tantamount to racism. 

So, on balance, rooting out a few embarrassing oddballs is a small price to pay for a refreshing breath of sanity in British Politics. Ken Clarke can say what he likes about clowns but he’s often been just a pratfall away from needing a squirty flower of his own during his long, limp-wristed career. For my part, unlike Ken, I want us out of the failed and always-doomed-to-fail Socialist experiment, the European Union, not least because then our leaders would be unable to hide behind their faux helplessness in the face of Brussels diktat. And on the outside we would be free to revitalise our own economy without having to endure the raggle-taggle band of gypsies, tramps and thieves coming soon to a soviet Europe near you. 

It must be a relief for the Tories and Labour to be able to poke fun at the amateurish antics of UKIP instead of, A) Trying to get the country out of the shit Labour put us in without being seen as nasty. Or, B) Coming up with a policy, any policy, that isn’t straight out of Coco’s Bumper Book of Circus Economics. Or, C) If you’re a Limp Dem, trying to work out what, if anything, you stand for at all. 

“But a vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour!” cry the Tories, desperate because UKIP is looking dangerously like splitting the political centre-ground vote. Labour, too will lose votes to UKIP but not in sufficient numbers to upset their stronghold constituencies, so it’s really all for the Tories to play for and all the Eds have to do is shut the fuck up and let the others slug it out to electoral defeat. Labour’s best electoral hope is that in the ensuing entertaining melee voters will forget what a fine mess they got us into. They can rest on their Laurels and rely on their die-Hardy tribal cross-scrawlers. 

“But David Cameron WILL give us an in/out referendum!” cry the Tories, knowing full well that such an undertaking is not within his gift unless the Conservatives win an outright majority and DC’s avowed and stated intention to campaign to remain firmly in the EU camp offers voters very little confidence that he would actually keep any such referendum promise. I am fifty-five years old and I am still waiting to be consulted on this issue which I believe is central to our ability to thrive in the world. 

Nigel Farage has said that Ken Clarke’s comments display contempt for UK voters and if the Conservative Party wants to understand the mood in the country they would do well to heed that view. Because that is exactly how a significant proportion of the electorate feel towards all the main parties. While the Bilderbergers like Ken plot to keep the country communist, ordinary people want to know in whose name they are being sold down the river.

So, a Scotsman, a Paki and a Jew walk into a bar... 

Of course it is right that UKIP should have vetted candidates more thoroughly and of course it is natural that the oddballs be outed but while all that is going on the current administration and opposition should be asking themselves just why it is that a potentially election-swinging number of ordinary voters might actually prefer a clown to a ringmaster.

Fact or Fiction? Pick your faction...

So Boris arrives at the Conservative Party Conference to a rock-star's welcome. Mobbed by the press and adoring fans, the man who 'has no ambition to stand for Prime Minister' might just be the Tory's best  bet for re-election in 2015. Who would have thought it? In X-Factor Britain nobody wants to hear bad news from the straight man, but they'll happily suck it up for the comedy-geezer.

In other news actor Damian Lewis may have incurred the wrath of some Southern rednecks for his part in the US TV hit, Homeland. Mistaking actors and their beliefs for those of their characters' is a commonplace modern occurrence. It's less common for actors to confuse their own beliefs, but Arnold Schwarzenegger must have had a bump to his head because suddenly he can remember with some clarity what he ACTUALLY said about Hitler back in 1975. Oratory, my arse.

All these stories feature a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. In an age when live, on-the-spot, as-it-happens information is available as never before, the propagandists have taken advantage of the populace's lack of critical analytic skills to spread lies and paranoia via the simple expedient of overwhelming the audience with a stream-of-consciousness, non-stop ticker-tape of political white noise.

Listen to the radio, see the party conference delegates take to the stage, watch the 24-hour TV news and see how data is presented to represent any and all arguments. Labour put up the higher earners top tax rate, the coalition brought it half-way down, but what does it mean? Labour say this is the equivalent of giving millionaires a £40k cheque. The Conservatives say the Laffer curve predicts, nay demonstrates, that more tax will be paid by such people. The Libdems think it's something to do with stand-up. What YOU think, sadly, will likely not be determined by facts but by which version of the story you've already decided is true.

Politics seems a lot like the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy version of espionage - who is working for what end? It is simply impossible that all Conservatives hate poor people, or that all Socialists want a return to nationalisation or that all LibDems are simply a bit dim. (Actually, that last one is probably a bad example - they are a bit dim.) Is it cruel or kind to want people to be self-determining? Is it progressive or crazy to believe in equal outcomes for education? Is a federal Europe a vaguely 'good thing' or an exploitative blight on the economies of all the countries it has infected?

Where people appear to be determined most of all to tell the truth as they see it and report on the facts of the matter, they are met with slander and mud-slinging and simple nay-saying. Witness Nigel Farage's frequent well-aimed verbal missiles in Brussels, yet see how The Rompuys and the Barrosos simply shrug and carry on dipping their hands in our pockets. At least the UKIP message on Europe is consistent.

But are the Conservatives or Labour (we know what the Limp Dems want) FOR Big Europe or AGAINST it? They won't tell us outright, which is interesting. Why won't they tell us? I think it's because they haven't quite worked out how to present the fiction they think we want to hear in order that we'll cast our vote in their favour, so that either of them can then then take us further into Europe, against apparent majority democratic opinion, while appearing to give us a choice in the matter.

Does that mean I believe in some Euro conspiracy to enslave us all? Would it really be all that bad if we all cosied up together in the tractor factories and sang workers' songs into the never-ending twilight? Is it really so bad that successful, productive countries will forever give up their advantages to prop up unstable, inefficient administrations? A cautious yes to all three, but that's just me...

The EU Gulag swings into action

It all comes down to what you believe... or what you want to believe. Do you vote with your head, or with your affiliations? What, indeed, would Boris do? Listen to the facts, believe the fiction... pick a faction. So, nailing my colours to the mast, as the party which naturally has my ear refuses to come off the fence, my particular faction is UKIP. Say what you like about my choice, but they are the only party who are telling me what I want to hear.

Acute angina? Thank you very much!

Apologies to regular readers for the paucity of posts thus far this week; there's nothing like a day in the Acute Medical Unit to focus the mind on the important issues of the day. Thank goodness I had the presence of mind to take my Kindle along as I was rushed into an assessment which took the best part of a day, on and off.

Actually, rushed is a tad specious, as it took four days of discomfort and a bit of nagging from somebody-who-knows-better before I deigned to allow the NHS to confirm my diagnosis. In fairness they were all very thorough, patient[sic] and courteous, batting aside my concerns that I was wasting their time and my entreaties that I was only there because I was nagged. The diagnosis? Indigestion... we think.

So, there's nothing to see here, move along the corridor smartly and try to avoid staring at the mad-haired Scots lady trying to manoeuvre a fag past her nasal oxygen cannula whilst reciting... well, it could be anything really, it's in Scottish. Avert your eyes, also, from the grossly be-tattooed, multiply pierced, heavily pregnant teenager and her attendant posse of identically clothed 'individuals' - they're the future, they've got rights, you know. (There should be an exam, really there should.)

With all due respect for the long-suffering staff, the last place you want to be if you're ill is in a hospital. But I'm not, so it's all good. And I did get to put in a spot of reading. Whatever you think of UKIP and in particular, Nigel Farage, you can't deny he has to be one of the most colourful and charismatic politicians out there, right now. In the AMU I was reading Flying Free, his engaging memoir in which he sets out his stall for a retrenchment, at the very least, of our role in Europe.

I've blogged about Europe before; about how I was just one year too young to make my feelings known in 1975; about how I never trusted the shifty Ted Heath and about how I have yet to hear a single fact-supported argument for the travesty of democracy that is the European Union. Nigel's book pointed me at a number of avenues for further research and I append a few links below.

But I don't need to 'do the math' as they say. I don't need to study dry old economic theories and European war histories. I don't need to peruse a balance sheet of pros and cons.I don't need to do any of those things to know that Europe is pure poison. Free movement of people across borders? I used to have that anyway; it was called a British Passport. In fact, even as a post-war, post-empire nation, Britain had far more respect and possibilities than we will ever have again if the spectre of costly, corrosive, creeping Euro-Everything is not halted.

And just as against the Nazis - whose European ambitions were so close to those of the EU Commissioners - the English Channel is a natural border between the European mainland and the last free country this side of the Atlantic. All you need to know about the three main parties is that not one of them has made any serious noise about withdrawing from Europe. What they have all been complicit in is handing over ever more power  while flatly denying it.

Now I'm not saying that UKIP is the answer to all our ills, but surely a party willing to draw the line has to be a better bet than all the governments willing to hand over £19.2bn per year, or if you prefer, £53m per day, to the unelected, unimpeachable, bureaucratic nightmare of Brussels.

Yeah. Fuck you, Britain!

If you have a spare hour, have a read/watch of some of these:

http://www.ukipmeps.org/uploads/file/ReferendumStichUp.pdf

http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2777-nigels-birmingham-speech

http://campaignfortruth.com/CTE/realfaceinfo.htm

http://www.forvik.com/index.php/documents/the-eu

See you at the referendum!