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.

Staying on message...

If UKIP is a racist party then so is the Labour Party; so is every party. In fact Labour are possibly greater bigots because they vehemently discriminate against anybody who doesn’t agree with their absurd and contradictory notions of ‘multicultural equality and diversity’. According to this bizarre creed you are a racist if you are concerned about the adverse effects of rapid mass immigration but not racist if you ignore the prolonged and systematic abuse of white girls; it’s okay because the rapists are brown, see? You are a sexist monster if you hold open a door for a female but a defender of cultural determinism if you stand idly by as savages hack slices of flesh from between the legs of brown girls. Wait, I’m confused; is brown good or bad, now?

If you earn millions and stash your cash offshore you are either a predatory monster whose assets must be seized and redistributed or else you are a wonderful example of how hard work, gritty determination and talent can be harnessed to perform untold goodness. The only difference is where your allegiances lay; Labour tax avoiders are saints, Tory ones are the distilled essence of pure malice… and were there any prominent Ukip ones no doubt they would be both malicious and racist. Under Labour’s breathtakingly partisan political correctness the displacement of poor white communities is fine, so long as Pakistani ghettoes are allowed to take over their former homes. If ‘community cohesion’ required white flight then Labour would round up the cattle trucks.

And so we come to Rotherham, the most prominent example, among many, of the very worst outcomes of Labour’s social policies. If Labour really did want to make things better their best move would be to hang their heads in shame, resign their positions and shut the fuck up for a generation. So deep has their collective hive-mind embedded the barn door doctrines that they are incapable of seeing that their emperor has been naked for years. But no, while Rotherham’s failed children’s services and child protection officials have been dispersed to even more lucrative positions – in charge of somebody else’s children’s services – their local ‘Champion’ has the sheer brass neck to still wave the red flag.

As Nigel Farage went to Rotherham to help launch Jane Collins’ campaign to break Labour’s stranglehold on the area, Labour’s financiers, the unions, threw together a rent-a-mob to shout and scream ‘racist’ and threaten possible physical action. Way to go, Labour, deny freedom of expression with menaces… in the name of freedom of expression. Of course and as always, your speech is only free if you agree. The drum of cognitive dissonance must beat so hard in the inner ear of Labour activists that it is only bearable within the confines of crippling mental infirmity.

Andrew Neil made the devastating point that Labour’s handling of the Rotherham scandal was akin to the behaviour of the bankers with nobody brought to book and business as usual. If Sarah Champion thinks presenting a challenge to a failed administration is ‘playing politics’ what does she think brushing Labour’s failures under the carpet, crying racist, deploying brainwashed gobby thugs and continuing to ignore cries for change is?

When the allies march into the chilling devastation wrought by years of political correctness, segregation and blind adherence to dogma in the face of truth; when the photographs of victims finally being vindicated hit the world’s press; when the furnaces running twenty-four-seven destroying evidence are seized and shut down; when the perpetrators are finally brought to book, will their defence be “We were only following orders”?

Doing the maths

You go to work for forty hours a week and earn, being over 21, £6.50 per hour. That’s £260 which, after tax earns you the princely take-home wage of £233.62, assuming you are paid 52 weeks of the year. As a lowly cleaner/shift-worker/shelf-stacker this is your lot in life and it doesn’t even cover your rent and basic services, so the state steps in and helps out with a few thousand quid to keep you in your sub-standard, cold and damp private let and you struggle gamely on, juggling work, kids and what home life you have (television) in this life you never asked for.

Next door, the family on £26k a year in benefits, the equivalent of a salary of £34k, carry on their life of relative ease and never see you as you leave for work each day because behind their curtains they are sleeping away last night’s revelry; any night can be a party night if you have nothing to get up for. But hey, you say, that’s okay because it’s some other idiot’s tax they are spending, you get back many times the paltry £1371.68 you pay in each year and you believe that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

“Mustn’t grumble” your grandfather said and after all, you’re not living on the street and starving, we have a mostly-free health service and a pretty decent societal moral compass. But, still, a pay rise wouldn’t go amiss, so you ask… and you are denied. Mr Miliband says he will increase the minimum wage, but it turns out that so, too, will the coalition and in the same timescale. In a misty memory of a long-forgotten maths lesson you dimly remember that if wages rise, so will prices, but you don’t get a chance to observe this in practice because soon your hours are reduced. A rival firm, employing only migrant labour on sub-minimum wage is taking work from your employers.

With a sigh and a stiffened upper lip you take yourself off to the Job Centre to discover that few locals are finding employment and much of the background chatter is foreign, but at least they have plenty of interpreters on hand and will also help you claim all that you are entitled to. You worry a bit about that ‘entitled’ but, as you’ve worked pretty much since you left school you accept the assistance, promising yourself that it is only until you can find a decent job for reasonable pay. That day doesn’t come, of course and as you settle into a life on benefits you do the sums and realise you will never make a better living than this; you have joined the ranks of the forgotten.

If you observe that all the shop workers are eastern European and you suspect they are being exploited you are called racist. When you draw attention to the uneasy feeling you get when you see private hire cars parked up in a cul-de-sac with a gaggle of school-age girls making familiar with the drivers you are called a racist. Proffer any opinion that our society is becoming fractured into ethnic enclaves which do not mix and you are labelled a racist. Your memory of the Britain you grew up in is challenged; you are wrong – it’s always been this way, they tell you. Besides, Britain has for too long paid too high wages by comparison with the global labour market; you are lucky the immigrants are here to pay for your benefits.

In the balance

You do the maths again and can't make that last statement add up at all. And as for being a mere commodity on the global market, when did you ask for that? So what options do you have? Vote for change? You already tried that… and nothing changed. Now what? You express your frustration by flirting with Ukip… and they call you a fruitcake. But what else is there? You ask around and discover that you are not alone; many are abandoning the old order and tentatively grasping at the Ukip straw. It’s a cry for help – Ukip don't necessarily have any more of an answer than anybody else, but at least they seem to understand you and you want your problems to be recognised by somebody... anybody. So what do the Westminster elites do? They call you a loony. Everywhere you see the establishment flying the flag for anything but Britain, anybody but the British and denigrating all who object as 'closet racists'. 

Is it any wonder you are coming out of the closet?

They never learn...

Einstein, or somebody else clever, is supposed to have said that forever repeating the same actions, with the same undesired outcomes, is a sure sign of madness; much as banging your head against a wall will only exacerbate the pain of the first time. As they say, it ain’t rocket science, although Einstein may beg to differ. What it is though is plain old common sense. And by common I refer to the innate sense of justice of order, of right and wrong, primitive though it may be, of the common man.

Which is why it is almost painful to watch the old guard, both Labour and Conservative demonstrate their inability to think themselves outside the box against whose walls they are attempting to crack their skulls. Almost painful… with a side helping of glee and a hefty dose of incredulous fascination with just how ready they are to repeat the mistakes of the past. UKIP are racist fruitcakes, they said, as a result of which the racist fruitcakes – or as I like to call them, ordinary working class voters – switched their allegiance to the new kid on the block.

UKIP are nasty, they said; cue the further swelling of the ranks. Earnest thinkers pressed their heads together and came up with a new strategy…  Ukip are against immigration, which we all know is unremittingly ‘a good thing’, they announced. Meanwhile, the indigenous dispossessed, seeing the rising tide of mass, unskilled immigration overwhelm their local infrastructure came to different conclusions. And while Labour and Tory alike sought to paint those objections as bigotry, the parents of teenage girls abused by systematic imported sexual abuse on a massive scale sought out somebody, anybody, who would listen to them and make the right noises.

All along, the establishment parties have fought, not for the people who elect them but simply to retain their seats. And in that world of pure politics, where actions are the work of a lesser breed of ‘doer’ the solution is to keep on banging that head against the wall on which it is written that to maintain the illusion all is well is just as good as it being so. But down there in the common herd, where that repetitive denial of the truth and the refusal to examine the evidence causes real harm, what is obvious is that voters are despised by the political classes.

Even herds eventually learn from their mistakes and after a couple of generations of seeing the causal links between voting for Westminster and getting fuck all except castigation for their fears, the herd’s own head banging is stopping. All of a sudden the hated little people are banging instead the drum of support for a party of people much like themselves. Yes, the big boys are still claiming that Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell are merely expellees from the same posh schools as Cameron and Miliband, but those hollow taunts are falling on ears wilfully deaf to anything the old mainstream parties have to say.

Stitched up like a 'Kipper!

It may turn out to be a complete waste of time… and energy and hope and finger-crossing, but the same old solution holds little appeal for those who live with the consequences of traditional government. And if they are turning to Ukip in uncertainty, being castigated as stupid for doing so is a sure fire way of convincing them they are making the right choice. So, go on, Labour, go on Conservative, go on, Lib Dems, you carry on bashing and watch as your minions lift their heads up from your walls and simply walk away.

None so blind

A spitty little twitter spat the other night, between me and an out-and-proud lefty shouting about her credentials of ‘having spent 25 years of higher education in politics’ got me thinking. As usual, the clash was brought about by the failure, once again, of a self-proclaimed political expert to grasp what is bleeding obvious to anybody with a proper job and both feet on the ground.

Irony blinkers firmly fixed and utterly incapable of seeing those all around them making ‘the sign of the wanker’ in their direction, your lefty political theorist merrily ploughs straight ahead and tells you what’s good for you. How you should behave, what you should earn, who you should positively discriminate in favour of and what kind of weather is in your best interests; all blind to the realities of what drives humans to make it from one day to the next.

It’s as if Karl-never-had-a-job-in-his-life-Marx himself invented politics; virtually all concerted political movements are leftist in nature and on go the theorists, dreaming up ways of convincing themselves there will genuinely be a utopian future where we all put nurture before nature; if only they could stop the little people from indulging in original thought and individual action. Meanwhile, those on what is disparagingly referred to as ‘the far right’ are too busy making a living and fending for themselves to have the luxury of envy of what others possess; and as a result they tend to have far clearer understanding of the hopes and fears of ordinary workers.

John Humphrys said on the Today programme that the problem of immigration is a right wing issue, when in fact it is the very large, low-paid, unskilled sector of the work force who are most exercised and most disadvantaged by it. Those who welcome mass immigration are those who gain from it – a small and privileged minority of British society – or those who are blind to its downsides. Behind the heavy blinds of the lofty ivory towers, Ed Miliband’s policy unit no more understands the masses it believes it fights for than a sheep understands the workings of the ticks living off its blood.

Time after time the left-wing ‘thinkers’ do their thinking on behalf of the hoi polloi without ever actually consulting those same beleaguered legions, whose most likely reaction, post incomprehension, would be to tell them to do one. Today, Clacton’s forgotten denizens will, for good or ill, reject the traditional parties, just t see if there might be a better way. Will they also roar in Heywood and Middleton. Interesting times, folks…

Farage in Channel: Continent cut off!

In 1973, without consulting the country, Ted Heath signed us up to what was always intended as a grand federal project. In 1975 Harold Wilson honoured an election pledge to hold a referendum on our continued membership of what was then the EEC. Two thirds of those who voted did as they were told by the well-funded campaign to stay in and driven by a heavily propagandised fear of isolation and hardship, opted to remain. Since then those who have openly questioned the project have been derided as Little Englanders and worse.

We’ve had our ups and downs with the EU over the last 41 years, not least because of the lack of transparency of a system of government which has become increasingly unaccountable to those who pay for it. True or not we feel we are ruled by shadowy, unelected bureaucrats, detached from the often hard reality of those they impose on. To almost everybody in Britain the EU represents a clear loss of sovereignty but those born under EU rule appear to accept this as a benign thing, a necessary price. Propaganda works, you see. Overall a referendum will be a close-fought thing but even those who are very pro EU are still unhappy with the way this racket is run.

Yet even today, when it is clear that of those who voted - even after the smears and the backstabbing, the racist, homophobic, sexist labelling - a majority mobilised, braved the demonstrators at some polling stations and endorsed a party with zero presence in Westminster, the so-called ‘mainstream’ parties are demonstrating that they are anything but mainstream: The UKIP vote was a protest; we will try harder to get OUR message across; we’re sorry, we got it wrong (this from Labour); we hope that our supporters will return to us next year in the general election. It's still all about them - they still don’t get it, do they?

For now, at least, we like to imagine we live in a western democracy and in a democracy the government is supposed to do what the electorate want, not the other way around. For several decades now, however, successive governments have sought to tell the people how they should behave and what they should think. And much of that diktat emanates squarely from a central politburo that has no accountability to the people it likes to pretend it is there to serve. The people of Europe are treated like squabbling children by the European institutions and comfortable commentariat alike. That is what yesterday’s result is about.

The EU Hokey-Cokey

Forget about pushing Toryism, Labourism, or whatever it is the LibDems support. It’s not that you are not getting your message across chaps – far from it – it’s that your messages have been roundly rejected. And given that we know there is almost nothing you can do to take back powers from Brussels while we remain in the EU, all your bluster about reform is just so much hot air. The British people want their country back. Find a way to do that and they might, just might, start to trust you again.

Nuts in May

Wow. Who would be a politician, these days? Never anybody’s favourite ‘profession’ outright loathing of the political classes now exceeds that for used car salesmen, estate agents and even Satan himself. There may be a few stalwarts clinging to a belief that their MP is in politics through a desire to make things better – and almost all of them really are, or were, at heart – but the majority opinion is that all MPs are in some form of conspiracy to ride the gravy train to Fat Cat Central.

So, onto this UKIP ‘racism’ business: I support one single aim of UKIP – exit from the EU federal project and that’s it. Over the years I have watched developments with great interest. At every point in the European ‘journey’ the people who have benefitted were those best placed to grasp opportunities and run with them; the entrepreneurs, the employers, the lobbyists and policy advisors - all of whom would have prospered, honestly or otherwise, under almost any regime; they are people who need no help. Those who have lost out are the workers, the employed and dependent on others to create work for them. Or as I like to call them, the majority.

Nobody in full time work should need state assistance, but wage suppression, fuelled by an oversupply of labour has made it normal for working families to be propped up by benefits. This is crazy, but any dissent has been met with blatant lies about the economics of uncontrolled, low-skilled immigration and accusations of racism. It may be racist to purposefully treat ‘others’ as second-class citizens but it is absolutely not racist to harbour a belief that foreign migrants are preferred employees when you are told you can’t even get a job interview unless you speak Polish, or that local jobs are only advertised abroad.

Framing any discussion about immigration as racist and dismissing as bigots those who have genuine fears is cynical in the extreme but the media, good little poodles all, have thoroughly bought into it. Perfect, except the voters that have been abandoned by all parties are not the sensitive, soft, liberal elites of ‘that London’ (which is as foreign to them as any far off land) but the displaced, frustrated and unheard inhabitants of Britain’s former working heartlands. Now that Labour is as detached from them as the Tories, is it any wonder they gravitate towards a party which appears to speak their language and echo their concerns?

One definition of madness is said to be repeatedly carrying out an action which always delivers a negative outcome, such as banging your head against a wall. Unfortunately, some people seem unable to stop themselves. The comprehensive, cross-party, mainstream media attack on UKIP in the last week has concentrated entirely on the charge of racism, but even where this is substantiated it is not having the desired effect. In desperation they seek not to alter their approach but to blame it on darker forces – the wall isn’t crumbling but they can’t bring themselves to believe they are using the wrong tool for the job.

It’s the only explanation I can think of for the extraordinary accusation by Nick Cohen that the media has gone soft on UKIP. I urge you to read it because what Nick thinks has happened is patently absurd unless you inhabit his rarefied world. Nigel Farage is the brick wall against which the opponents of UKIP are smashing their skulls to bits. He is the wrong target, as polling seems to demonstrate, with every attack on him being perceived as an attack on ordinary working people and driving still more of them away from the two main parties.

It’s also no good saying a vote for UKIP is a vote for Labour. In fact, pursuing the racist line is far more likely to draw in more former Labour supporters - parochial working folk are naturally xenophobic - but what I find amusing is this persistence with a losing strategy. This is the most exciting election build up I’ve seen in a long while. Of course ultimately it is but a two-horse race but while neither Labour nor Conservatives have much to offer those most disadvantaged by The European Question, is it any wonder that Farage’s Army – no matter how flimsy you judge what they offer – is a tempting alternative for the disgruntled?

Hitting the wrong target.

The political classes and the metropolitan commentators SAY they get this but they demonstrate by their repeated failed smear tactics that they just don’t. One thing is for sure – whoever gets in there will be both winners and losers; Labour isn’t good for all Labour voters, the Conservatives are not universally good for Tory voters but few people vote based on what is good for them. Right now, traditional politics is in the ring and I for one hope UKIP gives it a bloody nose in May. 

Power to the People?

So, Maria Miller finally resigns and I continue to resist having an opinion either way except to observe that while Tories were clamouring for her removal – as were the voters - the leader/s of the opposition seemed to be curiously tight-lipped about it all. Maybe I missed Red Ed’s impassioned demand for a ministerial resignation; maybe he was saving himself up for Prime Minister’s Questions, but something is very wrong here. A member of the government had misbehaved in a manner deemed, if not actually criminal, then deeply insulting to the office and to the electorate and yet the opposition were not baying for blood?

If ever there was a feeling of unease about corruption and collusion in politics the expenses scandal was surely it and yet nothing appears to have changed. Oh sure, they say, the whole system has been reformed; but why then, were the broken eggs not mopped up when the omelette was being made instead of being left to rot? The stench is so overpowering you have to wonder what else is going on, concealed by the all-pervasive miasma of sleaze. Is it any wonder that people despair of ever getting democratic representation?

It’s not very nice where I live. When Alan Bennett grew up here, literally just over the Tong Road from my humble abode, it was still pretty rough, but rough in that nostalgic, working class solidarity kind of way. Now - despite legions of apologists denying the facts – work is something many have never known. It is a stubbornly Labour constituency, a reliable seat despite the fact that the local MP, Rachel Reeves, knows nothing about the lives of her voters. The locals may be proud of one of their own, a butcher’s son, making it to Oxford but they are deeply distrustful of an Oxford PPE being parachuted in to exploit their loyalty.

I crossed the Tong Road on Monday night, to attend the UKIP roadshow - within a fondant fancy’s throw of the former Bennett household - and far from being surrounded by retired half-colonels from the shires, there wasn’t an obviously recognisable old Tory in the hall. Despite the true blue war machine pumping out warnings that a vote for UKIP is a vote for Miliband – and I’m not saying there isn’t a risk in many wards - this is a constituency in which the Tory war horse is always going to limp home riderless.

I’m not sure how many of the old working class actually signed up for socialism - I well remember the seventies and for most it seemed more about sticking it to the bosses than about any ideological struggle for proletarian rule. The well organised big unions may have waged class warfare but ordinary working men and women despise another class in Britain today – the career political class. As we took our seats in the well-attended, spacious venue an old boy plonked himself next to me and unbidden said, “I voted Labour all my life, but I can’t stand that Rachel Reeves.”

What I then witnessed was a clear demonstration of what Nigel Farage has repeatedly said of late, that far from simply denying the Conservatives, the upstart party will take substantial support from disillusioned voters leaving Labour. People are thoroughly pissed off with the two main parties and don’t generally care one way or other about the Limp Dems; all of them are utterly disconnected from the electorate who reject especially Labour’s 2010 proclamation that “British history has to be revised, rethought or jettisoned”. The biggest cheers went up for unreservedly old-British values and sentiments and every time the phrase ‘the people’ was used, applause spontaneously broke out.

I have to say, as an individualist I felt a little uncomfortable among rousing consensus but one thing was certain - UKIP’s message undeniably hits the spot. Reeves, Miliband, Balls, Cooper – what are they doing here in northern seats? It’s because they are relying on Old Labour solidarity even as they shit on the democracy it used to stand for. I’ve always had a mistrust of unchecked democracy, after all lynch mobs are a form of it and if Paul Nuttall, following his tub-thumping delivery of the UKIP message, had produced a noose I daresay we could have had a mob on our hands… an asthmatic, geriatric, wheezing, creaking mob maybe (and that’s just me) but a mob nevertheless. Maria Miller today; who’s next?

Mass Debate!

I’m pretty sure I know what I believe in, politically. A relatively small, minimal tax state that serves the people, providing defence, law and order, diplomacy, education and emergency services, leaving the rest in the hands of efficient private enterprise best suited to supply the needs as and where they arise. I’m also certain about the kind of society I want to live in. A self-reliant, well-educated, civilised and tolerant population of people with ambition but also with a sense of proportion, unenvious of those who do well for themselves and generous towards those who need help.

I’m a realist as well and I know that none of this is actually achievable, or at least not for very long. The big state cannot be relied upon to hold power without becoming corrupt and private enterprise cannot be relied on not to generate monopolies and wield state-like power itself. Populations similarly are largely incapable of becoming civilised without restraint. The fact is everybody has a part to play whether it be mover or shaker or production line drone. And whoever holds the reigns of political power can only ever shift the balance a little bit one way (state) or the other (private) while the population’s part in the process is to be perpetually dissatisfied.

But one thing seems to be self-evident – give people a living without exacting effort from them in return and they grumble less overall. So the greater proportion of people that are effectively kept by the state, the greater the momentum towards ever more government. Which is the entire problem with Europe. People are fond of saying they are pro-Europe, but anti -European Union; it’s the same thing. There is no country called Europe, but that is the ultimate aim of the EU. And given that its officials are appointed rather than elected, the daily output of the regulation machine goes largely unreported and its aim is ever more expansion and control, the EU resembles totalitarianism far more than it does democracy.

But in the UK, like many other countries in this union of soviets, where your behaviour is controlled by ever more edicts, the greater mass of people simply believe what they are told, that in is good and out is bad. That in is prosperity and out is squalor. That in is freedom and light, while out is cold and miserable and nationalistic and therefore nasty. Look at your passport; above United Kingdom it says European Union. In the future it will only say European Union and all two-and-a-half of our main political parties have signed up to that. But they daren’t say it out loud, which is why only Nick Clegg, with nothing to lose, is picking up the gauntlet Nigel Farage threw down months ago.

I sincerely hope Farage will wipe the floor with Clegg and I fully expect him to do so. Clegg’s standing is low, the LibDems looking as if they were prepared to sacrifice principle for the sake of power, but we already know the planks on which he will fight this battle. He will repeat, over and over again, the lines his masters have given him, about jobs, trade and peace and love and he will look slightly ridiculous. Farage, for his part will have to resist the temptation to get boisterous and to point and laugh because his greatest weapon is his sheer likeability and the tone of common sense he strikes. But I fear it may all be for nought in the end. 

A year ago, in sheer frustration at the refusal of any party to even consider an in/out referendum, I joined UKIP as a show of support. I never intended to be an activist and I have never believed – as some evidently do – that a party made up mostly of defectors would be capable of returning more than maybe one or two MPs, let alone form a government, but enough was enough and my protest was duly registered. But after the way the Wythenshawe by-election was fought by the local UKIP branch – mirroring the LibDem approach of altering policy to suit the local voter - I’m not renewing. Despite the mainstream media painting UKIP as ‘far-right’ (which they never were) I’m hearing far too much left-wing, big state, benefit state rhetoric just now.

Seeing how formerly Euro-sceptic ministers are now tight-lipped about their old views and handle their about-turns with barely a twitch, I have little hope that any new party would be able to retain their founding principles for long. You never get to hear why they converted, either. It’s like a sect, the EU-Moonies, where formerly sane people now recite Agenda 21 like the prayer that saved their lives. There is something rotten at the heart of the European Projekt (the Kinnocks, for one) and it looks more and more as if there is nothing we can do to escape it. By all means vote for UKIP where they have a real chance of election, but for goodness sake, whatever you do, don’t let Labour back in to finish us off for good. 

Save the Mail!

Nobody can seriously doubt that racism is an industry today, offering job opportunities at least the equal of anything the private sector can offer. Along with multiculturalism, politicised feminism, the unattainable nonsense of equality (often uttered as a component of the oxymoronic phrase “equality and diversity”) the whole racist narrative has become just another socialist fabrication; twisting words to frame others as uncivilised, un-‘progressive’, unworthy to hold any position of authority.

Michael Heseltine openly and clearly stated last week that UKIP is a racist party. Yet walk into most public houses with a regular clientele and you will find plenty of Labour voters who quietly and traditionally believe in the supremacy of British values over those of others. Visit a gentlemen’s club and likewise, Michael Heseltine’s peers whilst outwardly avoiding the question will harbour happy memories of when ‘playing the white man’ was a perfectly acceptable way of describing honourable behaviour. All parties must therefore be racist as framed by the race industry because all parties are peopled by humans beings.  

But so completely has the establishment swallowed the line that mere recognition of difference is racism and racism of any kind is a pernicious evil that nobody is allowed a dissenting view. When UKIP’s Amjad Bashir was invited on The Daily Politics to reply to Heseltine’s charge, Jo Cobourn and her guests were already predisposed to attack him for his party's racism rather than accept that his selection as a candidate MEP was visible evidence to the contrary and preferred instead to defend the EU fifth columnist Heseltine from any criticism. No wonder they all hate the Daily Mail.

Newly reinvented ex-alcoholic, ex-warmonger, ex-bully, ‘Saint’ Alistair Campbell said on Newsnight, that the Daily Mail represented “ The worst of British values posing as the best” in his spirited support of Ed Miliband in the good fight against their coverage of his father’s values. The DM’s response? “Campbell – who has spent the past week touring the airwaves venting his spleen at this paper – was the very architect of the Labour lie machine that has so poisoned the well of political discourse in this country.” Who do YOU believe?

Words are the weapons of politics; words and short memories. Thank goodness for the Daily Mail and its mission to tell the stories largely unencumbered by adherence to the socialist style book. While flying the flag for freedom of speech the left always want to shut down the dissenting voice. So much so that they could be American – no sense of irony whatsoever. And why shouldn't the Mail have an agenda? The left is perfectly happy with the political distortions of The Guardian and the Daily Mirror; surely they couldn't hold double standards? Perish the thought.

The Campbelliban in action

The way I see it, if the leftist machine is outraged enough to flood the airwaves with baseless and distracting accusations of racism, sexism, islamophobia, or just bad taste then the Daily Mail must have touched a nerve. And in case you think that their fight against creeping socialist ideology is unjustified, just stop to think how it was the police themselves who persuaded the only person to complain about Alan Sugar’s iPhone tweet to make a statement. As the DM might say, “It’s political correctness gone mad!” Or, as I'd put it, "Racism, my arse!"

EU Hokey Cokey

Politics can be confusing. I should know, I've been called a Nazi for some of my fairly mainstream views, yet I have no sympathy for parties like the BNP; as a matter of fact I abhor socialism, which is their underlying ideology. On the other hand I can see that unrestrained freedom has its downsides because I also believe we have a duty to help those unable to help themselves. According to the leftists this means I can’t be a Tory, yet at heart I'm pretty sure I must be.

If I support UKIP that makes me a fruit, apparently, or in the closet, or some such thing. Oh, for certain, wanting to regain control of the UK’s own fortunes absolutely must make me a racist, yet UKIP is the only party that expressly refuses membership to racists, which policy is then said to be biased against those who wake up and change their political allegiance. See? Confusing.

We wake up today to news that some experts are disputing the case made by some other experts for spending vast sums of money we don’t have on HS2, for benefits nobody can quantify and absolutely nobody except potential bidders ever asked for. And yet another bunch of experts are undecided about the state of BP and whether it has yet paid sufficient penance for daring to make so much profit before the Deepwater Horizon incident. In every arena it seems that those who are paid huge sums of money to know about things later turn out to have known fuck-all.

The thing I’m most confused about (I'm not really - the only way is out, but bear with me) and about which nobody really knows is the EU; are we having a referendum or what? And if we do, what is the likely outcome going to be? And will it make any difference, either way, to anything?

Everybody now knows, surely, that Heath took us into the Common Market on the lie that it was a trade agreement and not a massive plan to create a country called Europe. Some even insist that, worse than just a massive lie, the whole arrangement was and remains contrary to the UK constitution and is therefore illegal. But it was the Tories, the most patriotic party, that oversaw the move while Labour, the most natural of EU bedfellows, that wanted us out. Now, the opposite seems to be happening but I’m not so sure.

So, do the Tories want us to be IN or OUT of Europe now? What does the ‘revolt’ by half the Tory backbenchers last night mean, when they voted for an amendment to the Queen’s speech ‘regretting’ that she hadn't mentioned, at least in passing, the humungous white elephant blocking the door to the chamber? And does it make any difference what our supposed elected officials want if the EU says otherwise?

And what, exactly, does Cameron’s proposed Referendum Bill actually mean? I read Dan Hannan’s (as usual, brilliant) telegraph blog about it, but I've forgotten the detail. Does it mean there WILL be a referendum, or there won’t be one, or there’ll only be one if DC gets back in and doesn't ‘forget’ to hold it? Has he finally shot that elusive fox, or has he just given everybody more cause to suspect treachery?

At stake is the prospect of UK independence, or being forever shackled to an institution that can (and does) overturn democracy and rob private bank accounts or impose massive spending increases such as this demand for an extra three-quarters of a billion pounds per year at a time when everybody’s belts are tight. Surely there must be a massive case to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs? Yet there isn’t; there are only hollow words and two decades of unaudited accounts. Running a continent? This lot couldn’t run a corner shop.

But the confusion over Europe doesn't start and end with the Tories. Does anybody know what the increasingly desperate Labour party stand for now? And where are the LibDems with their EU hokey-cokey: in-out, in-out, shake it all about? They say that membership of the EU is low on people’s priorities, way behind jobs, immigration and the economy at large, but that doesn't mean people are actively pro EU. If anything, as the EU affects all of those important issues (and many adversely) it can be shown to be easily the top priority. In my life, which has been anything but parochial, I have met few people in favour, but a clear majority broadly against.

A dangerous game?

So, as the great propaganda machines of state creak into life expect two years of repeatedly and confusingly seeing answers to the following impossible questions.

Is the EU: 

1. great/bad/brilliant/bad/superb/bad? Or is it, 
2. crap/good/shit/good/disastrous/good? 

Which way round is it? What was the question again? Does 'yes' keep us in, or does 'no' get us out? Do we cut the green wire, or the red? Nobody knows, so let’s get the hell out of there before somebody blows the bloody doors off.

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.

In Dreams

Part Two of Battersby’s Self Help Series is entitled “Aren't dreams rubbish?” It’s true because they are… because I said so.

“Sleep on it” they tell you, “things will look different in the morning.” Invariably they do, but that’s surely got far more to do with the fact that you wake up to a new day, rested and ready to tackle the problem. Or else, you’ve been tossing and turning all night long, solving the puzzles in a demented frenzy of exhausted non-sleep, before finally dropping off at 0430 for a fitful couple of hours of kip.

Does your brain genuinely sift through the crap at night, ordering the data, filing the facts and coming up with solutions? Or are dreams more likely just the outcome of the random firing of synapses merging incomplete thoughts and memories into a hotchpotch of images and sound that you somehow believe made some sense in the brief seconds between opening your eyes and actually waking up?  Nobody really knows, whatever they tell you.

Woody wind-chimes clink softly in the background, a counter cacophony to the reedy tones of the pan-pipes and the soft tinkle of an indoor water feature. Birdsong in the distance and maybe, if you listen hard enough, the plaintive song of a humpback whale trying to reverse climate change by crying out for krill. You lie in a hessian hammock, suspended by hand-twisted jute ropes between the reclaimed ship’s timbers in the urban Hobbit house of the dream analyst. Surrounded by ethnic art, mostly phalluses and fat fertility goddesses, the smell of bubbling lentils teasing your nostrils, you give yourself over to examination.

“Tell me all about it,” asks the analyst and then, “So what do you think that means?” Eager to share you spill out what you can remember and of course, it makes no sense. But you’re paying through the nose for this, so you launch into an outpouring of long-held anxieties, insecurities and angst and pretty soon, after the tears, after the cup of utterly gopping, lukewarm camomile tea, you’re writing out a cheque and booking another session.

The tea leaves, palm-reading, Tarot, phrenology, astrology… even the sacred ‘talking cure’… it’s all some form or other of cold reading, taking your money in return for giving you affirmation by helping you give voice to your own thoughts and dressing them up as remedies. Charlatans, dressed as confidantes, disguised as friends who live in beautiful houses paid for by you.

What’s my point? I’m not sure I really have one, actually… but wait. Why would any political party invite you to vote for it and its pretence that it will do anything good for you? Only because votes, like therapists’ appointments, mean income. Without your consent they can’t sell you their claptrap. Without votes they can’t feather their own nest while dismantling yours. The fact is, if you wake up and look around you, they need you more than you need them.

So today, vote for whoever you think best represents your local needs. Fuck the partisan bullshit, bollocks to the received wisdom, reject the ideology and go for a bit of self-help. If Kev, or Phil, or Sue or Stu floats your boat then don’t just dream about it, get out there and do it. Get yourself to a polling station and vote for what you believe in... or dream on.

Roaming Charges may apply

UKIP voters are racist clowns. That’s neat and tidy and easy to understand, isn’t it? By the same strain of logic Conservative voters are cruel, fox-hunting, Eton old boys and every Labour voter was born in a mineshaft and suckled by whippets. Aren’t lazy stereotypes useful? No, seriously, aren’t they? We use them all the time: tight Scotsmen, thuggy northerners, smelly Frenchmen, stupid Oirishmen, sex-mad Dutch, Law-mad Swiss, cold, efficient Germans... and thieving gypsy bastards. We use stereotypes in jokes because - get this - they're funny, so long as you don't take them seriously.

In the non-serious, topsy-turvy world of British politics, enslaving ever more of the population to feed and be fed by the state machine is compassionate Labourism, while letting people make their own decisions and keep more of their own earnings is nasty Conservatism. Nobody knows quite where the LibDems stand – seriously; I don’t know, do you? But sod all that, let’s put aside the enormous fundamental dichotomy of state versus individual and problems such as how to fix the economy and let’s instead draw the battle lines around racism.

Except controlling borders isn’t racism at all, is it? Yet that’s what the anti-‘Kippers want you to think. Nobody has ever seriously suggested curtailing the importation of skills. If we need doctors and scientists and engineers because two generations of dire basic education means we have insufficient capability from UK-born stock, then immigration may be the best short-term answer. It may even be an acceptable longer term policy. But unrestricted movement for all? What could possibly go wrong?

Racism is the deliberate marginalisation of people who are not exactly like yourself, preaching hatred of them and in the extreme, taking action against them. What racism isn’t, is preferring to associate with people of your own background, whether that be colour, nationality, language, customs or religion. I wouldn’t be comfortable entering a mosque in exactly the same way I wouldn’t be comfortable joining an evangelical choir. You may be happy doing both of those things and bully for you, but it’s just not my thing. That doesn’t make me a racist. As much as some on the left want it to become a thought crime, preferring the company of kin is just normal.

Mixing is also normal. Britain has always absorbed people from all over the world, many of whom have become as British as anybody else. Similarly we have spread ourselves over the globe, making a living and organically fitting in. Or not; if you don’t fit you eventually move on. Intermingling is not only normal it’s enriching and interesting and exciting. What isn’t normal, however, is Labour’s version of multiculturalism; forcing an indigenous population to not only accept immigration in overwhelming numbers, to not only actively promote segregation of new communities from old, but to render any dissent, any discussion, as racist.

 If it was normal we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune promoting it, legislating for it and educating children that it is. Forcing it down our throat, or as Labour liked to phrase it, rubbing our noses in it, was a policy doomed to backfire. There are some genuine, nasty racists out there, of that there is no doubt, but to label a white-haired old pensioner in the same way because she is bewildered at how all the counter staff and shelf stackers have foreign accents while the local school-leavers are drinking cider in the park is a feat of wilful malevolence only indoctrinated socialists could achieve.

There are costs to rapid mass immigration; we have paid them and will continue to pay. It may take a generation or more to recover our equilibrium. Ed Miliband is reluctantly accepting that now and hoping that a grovelling apology for what they did will make you all forget. But don’t you dare forget and don’t you dare vote for the fools that brought it about. Britain now is far more racist than I can ever remember and certainly more racist than before we needed all that ideological re-education. You might want to take note that we’re also poorer, more divided and less optimistic than at any time since the early nineteen-eighties.

Given that UKIP’s principle aim is to take back the controls that will allow us to rebuild a stable Britain, the racist taunt just looks to me like a lazy, unprincipled way to avoid a serious debate on the way ahead. On this issue at least, it looks to me Like Tony Blair is still in charge.

Ken Clarke - Can I do my Paki joke now?

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.

Everybody's got one.

You have a vote. Just the one. A single, solitary voice in a cacophonous sea of sibilant pleas. A white noise of need with every breathy wish slightly different from the next. To each his need, goes the Marxist aphorism, but my needs are not your needs and yours not mine, so we’ll settle for something in between, if you please.

You didn't always have a vote and that was a shame. But if you thought that being given one solved that problem, think again. Because you may as well not bother scribing your ‘X’ unless you understand what it might do. Disraeli was against expansion of the franchise, believing an increase in voters would bring into parliament "a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief". Wise words.

The best you can do with your single vote is to add it to others in a way that reduces the number of selfish and obscure mediocrities. How’s that working out for you, voters? Since at least the nineteen seventies there has been an upsurge of that very type of parliamentary member; the opportunist career politico, elected exactly as Disraeli foresaw. Now it’s rare to find any other kind.

Being a good leader does not mean being popular. Few successful bosses are liked by all their employees and those who are are rare indeed. Everybody delights in the tawdry stories that portray world figures in a dim light. In Britain particularly, the schadenfreude runs deep in our psyche. So when it comes to electing our leaders in the national pissing contest we call a general election we really should avoid, at all costs, casting our vote on popularity; that’s how Nick Clegg got in. (Don’t worry, he’ll be off to Brussels quite soon.)

Whoever gets in has to be on the side of Britain, because once they’re in our votes no longer matter. We were sold to Europe in 1973 without a vote being cast. Binding promises to give us a say in our relationship with the EU have been broken. Treaties are signed without consent and wealth is plundered at the whim of unelected officials. If you think the last point is exaggerated, put yourself in the place of a Cypriot saver - as their banks open today for the first time in two weeks – being told how much of their own money they may see.

You think a vote for labour will maintain your welfare lifestyle? Look around you. What wealth we have will be driven away as closer European integration means we have to spread the love ever more thinly. Your life will only get poorer as the population grows in the wrong way. You think a vote for the Conservatives will give you a vote on Europe? Don’t bank on cast-iron Dave’s hollow pledge; he has already said he will fight to keep us in. You like the Libdems? Then you’re not wise enough to have a vote.

Which leaves UKIP. Of course they won’t form the next government. Of course they don’t have all the answers. Of course they are not all uniformly attractive and popular people. Of course there are one or two nutters in there – me for a start - that goes for any party. But think about this, my vote-wielding chums. The other parties are suddenly turning nasty. The trash talk before the fight has started. To the LibLabCon troika, UKIP is the most unpopular smell in the air right now. They must be doing something right.

 You have a vote. Just the one. In 2015 you will have just one last chance to do the right thing for Britain. Don’t vote on party lines. Don’t vote for your narrow, short-term, personal interest. Between now and the general election register your concern and make your protest heard. In every local election, in every by-election, rattle those old party chains and vote for UKIP. Labour won't desert their EU masters, but you can make the Conservatives listen; make them change. That way, come the general election you might just have one final chance to vote against the EU.

Getting Better Yet?

I watched Made in Dagenham on Sunday afternoon. Ah nostalgia – they don’t make it like they used to, do they? A heart-warming story of the days when Trade Unions had a noble and valuable role. It was made very clear in the film that Labour was the party of the working classes and a creation of the well-intentioned unions. I can remember as a boy believing, as did my mother, that Barbara Castle was a paragon of the conviction politician, determined to bring about change and improvement. Good for her.

But the film also made clear that the unions themselves had a role in their own decline with the caricature of Bernie Inn Diplomacy; whole days off work for a ten-minute meeting, management and union officials alike ‘playing the game’ and missing the overall point of their existence and in fact often working against the interests of the very people they represented. Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, they told the women, we know best.

In their heads they had the stirring words of the Communist Party Manifesto Chapter II and longed for “[The] formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” And blindly followed the party plans to destabilise society and reform it in the image of a utopia imagined fully a century earlier.

And here we are today. Where Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini failed, Monnet and Spinelli and Herman Van Rompuy have played the long game and what we see all around us is a world that Marx may well have approved of. Marriage devalued, education defunct, religion fragmented and nobody trusting anybody else. A universal welfare society with ever more members, creating ever more precious 'equality'. To each according to his greed, from each according to what we can screw out of him. Down and down we sink.

Barbara Castle would have been would have been horrified to see where this was going, but the old Labour Party was too blunt an instrument to get any further than the 1970s and the enterprise culture of the 1980s destroyed collective action for good. That’s why New Labour had to be invented and why it had to embark on a programme of ‘progressive’ socialism to sell to a largely freed proletariat the notion not of unity, but of infinite merry variety. “Look at us, we’re fucking lovely!” said Tony Blair, “Things can ONLY get better!” (Few heard when he added, “…for me.”)

And all around Europe Marx’s other little helpers helped themselves to the reins, placed them in little Angela’s hands and helped her cracked the whip. Crack – there go the borders. Crack - there goes your currency. Crack – there go your freedoms and now you dare not speak out you belong to us. The Glorious Fatherland Project is almost complete.

Adolf Groucho Herman Marx

What is happening in Cyprus can and will happen elsewhere. You can see it happening, but you are powerless to resist. You can feel it coming for you and your family, but you have nothing left with which to fight it. Being IN Europe means entirely controlled BY Europe. Things can only begin to get better when we are out. And the EU's representative on earth, Dave-Ed Camiliclegg will NEVER let you have a say in that.

Going for a song.

In Aladdin, there is a fundamental flaw in Abanazer’s plan to get his hands on the magic lamp. New lamps for old; something for nothing? It makes no sense - who would fall for that? Well, every year we all do, willingly, as the familiar scenes of yore play out on the stage. “He’s behind you!” we cry and “Oh no he isn’t!” What a hoot and how illogical it all is. Thank goodness we don’t conduct our everyday lives like that. But wait, someone’s coming!

Oh, it’s okay, it’s just the ugly sisters, Harriet and Yvette, spinning some poison against poor old Baron Osborne and being mean to Nadine. The Labour Party, in the role of the broker’s men eagerly grab whatever small victories they can and meanwhile Boris ‘Buttons’ Johnson takes up the slack as comic relief. It’s a right pantomime is British politics and currently playing the dame, David Cameron is desperate to give his Twanky a good airing in Brussels. What a crock. (I said crock) 

How about new MPs for old? Or better yet, why not go for OLD MPs for new? Because all any of them seem to do nowadays is spout the same old rubbish and as far as I can see, the next election will be fought entirely on the same tired old stereotypes with hardly a policy to be seen: Labour will be portrayed as the fiscal simpletons who believe in magic beans, while calling every government policy a tax. The Conservatives will be the potless Toffs, hooraying it up as the manor roof falls in and blaming the previous owners. The Libdems will provide noises off and the occasional pratfall and the Greens will play the part of ‘a tree’ all the way through the second act. 

UKIP will, of course, be cast as some form of throwback pirate racist, sporting an eye patch and cutlass and leading a Blackamoor on a leash. Secretly, the audience will want to cheer for them and subvert the plot, but the conventions of pantomime are etched in stone and they must instead boo and hiss, lead on by Bonnie fucking Tyler as Dick Wittington. Or is that Eurovision? As if it makes any difference. 

Because in politics, as in pantomime, even though we all know how it’s going to end, we suspend disbelief for the duration of the performance. We know Nigel Farage doesn’t eat roasted black babies for breakfast. We know George Osborne doesn’t dine on swan, probably, and we’re damned sure Ed Miliband doesn’t know one end of a Findus crispy pantomime horse pancake from the other. (Nobody knows what Clegg stands for - he's a LimpDem, after all.)

The propaganda machines of the three main parties will concentrate not on the truth, not on what is best for Britain, but whatever maintains the good old traditions of the political pantomime. They will swashbuckle their way into the final act, knowing that, even when somebody fluffs their lines or misses their cue, the audience will cheer them on to the same old ending – the one where Brussels always wins and we remain Britain Hardup in perpetuity. 

So you lot out there - yes, you - if a vote for Lib/Lab/Con is a vote for the EUSSR and this time you don't want the same old ending, you have a duty to listen and learn and wise up. Don't let the curtain fall on British sovereignty.

But who gets your vote?

So, come on Nigel, buff up that eye patch, shampoo your parrot (not a euphemism) grab a flagon of grog and let’s go for a last act with fireworks. If the EU is going to win anyway, we can at least give them a bloody nose in the process! 

State of the Nation

Nobody in Britain has won a general election in thirty years. Parties no longer gain power because of their brilliant alternative visions or their brave new policies, but because the electorate gets fed up with their ever-improving lot and adopts a grass-is-greener mentality. We don’t so much vote in elections as vote for evictions, Big Brother style. 

Then the new boss – same as the old boss – simply reverses all the policies it opposed in government except the ones it thinks might lose votes. Every now and again somebody – yesterday it was David Cameron - tries to pretend they are truly different, but then carries on with policies such as the so-called Bedroom Tax with no hope of achieving anything whatsoever except maximising resentment… on all sides. 

We are a rich and generous nation; British fair play was once a watchword for civilised behaviour the world over and whatever the recent re-writing of history tells us, the world actually once was a far better place for having Britain in it. Not any more it seems, because as we get sucked further into the Eurobattoir mincing machine we come out the exact same nondescript shade of minced horsemeat as any other. 

I walked down Town Street in the People’s Socialist Republic of Armley on Saturday and discovered my old veg shop is now a Polish food market. On the same short row two other shops are also now ‘international’. What colour, what joy, comrades! But at least they serve customers who actually came to Britain to find work; we should be grateful. 

But no; the natives sit around in tee-shirts and shorts in winter, the heating paid for by those who have to choose whether to eat or heat and they don't give a damn. Occupying council houses larger than they might actually need, while those who pay their own rent make do only with what they can afford is unjustifiable. But so, too, is evicting people from lifelong homes. 

The coalition must have anticipated this reaction, so the only conclusion is that, along with Pastygate and Plebgate, the so-called Bedroom Tax is actually intended to throw away the last chance we have to govern ourselves. Despite a dire need for some radical reforms the Conservatives have failed to dominate their minority partner in government and curb the crippling welfare state.

It all feels so nineteen-seventies again; even more so with the looming threat of a possible energy crisis. So it is simply incredible that, against the backdrop of this new resurgent class war, we are about to open our borders wide to people who will not be coming here to work and will not have even a morsel of whatever meagre scraps of British scruples remain intact. We are going to sell our country into a form of economic slavery to an ideal so far removed from British values it may as well be a simple tyranny. 

You won’t lurch to the right, Dave? Charming choice of word, but you won’t need to – you’ll be nudged off your perch in 2015 when the Conservative Party loses their last ever general election. Shortly thereafter we will be quietly subsumed into an EU government. Of course, ersatz elections will continue, maybe even for a decade or so, but whatever you call it, the government will never change again. 

On Saturday night, after my stroll among the proles, I joined UKIP. I may not vote for my local candidate – the incumbent Labour puppet is, after all, the adenoidal Edbot, Rachel Reeves, who has a massive majority - but I will back whoever will give me the best chance I will see in my lifetime for me to say NO to Europe. 

I don’t think the Conservatives have a hope in hell of getting back in as it stands, so only one party currently offers even the faintest glimmer of hope that we can register a desire to retain our sovereignty… How much longer will we even be allowed to have a monarch? I wouldn’t be surprised if, right now, the Queen is shitting herself.

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.