by Godfrey Bloom
Euro sceptics (realists?) across the country must be as delighted as I am to see UKIP doing so well at the polls. As a founder member and not insignificant donor over the last 20 years I see at least a dim light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps an end to one of the most shameful periods in British history.
We must not forget the old Referendum Party, founded by James Goldsmith who nobly put a finger in the dyke until UKIP got fully mobilised, those early Kippers were derided and scorned like the early Christians, freezing nights delivering leaflets, money for meetings which were unattended and campaigns which were all but futile.
The original aim was simply a return to self-government: we sort of settled along the way for an in/out referendum, so success albeit with a rather shifty commitment from a dubious source. However for better or worse UKIP is attempting the difficult change from pressure group to political party. This requires the party to indulge in some navel gazing.
So far, humour me if you will, the political battle has been like a bizarre game of football. The establishment versus UKIP, the scoreboard shows them doing well, but how so? I would venture the establishment keep scoring own goals, immigration, criminal waste, social service failure, third world roads, ballooning national debt, huge defence cuts, ministries which remain not fit for purpose, the list is endless. Naturally the UKIP team dash up to their supporters, shirts pulled over their heads revelling in the glory, they gloat unashamedly in front of the TV cameras and who can blame them? Success has been a long time coming. But it is the establishment’s own goals that are producing the results.
But if UKIP want to be a political party, I am not sure they really do or even should, they must stop shirking the issues. Do they want to be a Conservative party in the mould of Lord Salisbury or the Liberal party of Gladstone, or indeed may I proffer a Liberal party of Rosebery? UKIP started out as a party of reform, low tax, libertarian and small government. This has been ruthlessly side-lined, I know I was a member of the party hierarchy when it happened.
Radicals, libertarians and tax reformers have quietly departed masked by swelling ranks of those who have flocked to the colours on the populist immigration policies and those with an eye to the political main chance. There are some very good ideas, UKIP has the only energy policy which will keep the lights on, but I got that ball rolling in 2006, the return of grammar schools to break the social mobility gridlock so beloved of the privately educated political elite, after all who wants to let in outsiders when you have stitched up the jobs for young Rupert and Charlotte . It is no accident that all the parties are led by public school boys.
The question has to be asked, if we get self-government will we just replace Brussels with Westminster? UKIP talk a good story about local democracy and referenda, but the party is actually run on the same basis as the EU, a veneer of democracy with occasional votes for the members with the results discarded behind closed doors if they got it wrong. Speaking invitations have to be cleared with head office, books for sale at conference are vetted, successful speeches on the platform mysteriously disappear from the recordings if one is not part of the in-crowd. The spin doctors re-brand to cover this in the way of traditional despots, ‘ the people’s army’, whenever you hear people’s or democratic you can be sure you get the opposite, the German Democratic Republic being the classic example, but there are many others.
We know, of course all the main parties do this but UKIP are supposed to be different. A very senior member told me the other day that the results justified all this, but the votes roll in because the electorate regard UKIP as new, fresh and honest. They see the leader with a pint, good bloke, but in a country where political journalism was more advanced it would not wash. Witness 13 UKIP MEPs in 2009: 7 lost or resigned the whip by 2014. Local democracy has been eliminated from party machinery, Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, UKIP’s most successful region is unrepresented on the NEC, the party’s governing body, as is Wales, Scotland and the North East.
Now it is a legitimate question to ask how a grass roots party was wrestled away from its membership. The answer is in the new constitution. The first was virtually a carte blanche for a member controlled protest movement. It led to all sorts of problems as the party gathered momentum. What was needed was a hand on the tiller, some tweaking here and there. What happened? The leadership recruited a smart lawyer to make the party a leader’s fiefdom. Outgoing Roger Knapman was horrified it gave so much power to one man. Power corrupts and absolute etc. etc. most members were to busy treading the pavement to bother too much about it, to my shame I include myself. It was only when membership cards started to be cut up by unelected party placemen I started to take heed.
Nigel Farage is not a great reading man but he certainly did his homework on a Joe Stalin biography. In keeping with the genre the public persona genial chap supping a brew a man of the people, but the early hours knock on the door and Gulag is never far away. Now examine the breakdown in membership, no one ever does but it is vital to understand UKIP. There are the founder members of whom there are now very few, patriotic, well read, traditionally educated, loyal by nature, party politically naive. Pretty much me until only a couple of years ago. They did not join for any reward, indeed there were none. However in the last 3 years the membership has doubled, a single issue immigration policy although popular has swelled the ranks, this is a very mixed blessing and has brought a small but significant number of members with whom the old guard are uneasy. The sort of people Dan Hannan complained of a few days ago. I too have suffered with appalling language accompanied by ignorance and stupidity. These are not real Kippers but fellow travellers as fleas are to the dog. There are of course some fantastic new young professional people. But they assume the party was always run in this autocratic and arrogant manner. They will not stay, they are used to having letters answered and reasoned argument, not diktat from a Brooks Mews jack in office.
Hardly the party of John Stuart Mill of whom the leader speaks but I suspect has not read . If there is truly to be an earthquake in British politics UKIP needs to get its act together or history will judge it to be a damp squib and Nigel Farage another Jack Cade ironically beaten by an administration led by Henry VI, every bit as weak as Cameron’s coalition.
There are those who still remain in UKIP with the intellectual artillery to do this, deputy leader Paul Nuttall is more than capable of leading this debate and Douglas Carswell picking up the challenge, sweeping it under the carpet will leave us all with the usual Red/ Blue choice in May. The English civil war and the French Revolution lead to regicide but not reform, Napoleon or Cromwell’s Commonwealth were hardly worth the blood bath. I would not trust the UKIP leadership to draft a new constitution to replace the Bill of Rights if the one for UKIP is anything to go by. Yes, we get it on the EU and immigration, yes, the other parties have no answers either but being less hopeless than the others is not earthquake material. There is a growing tendency rather than bringing about major reform of the establishment there seems a desperation to be part of it. A demand for the perks of office, seats in the House of Lords, gongs of various descriptions, photo-opportunities on Remembrance Sunday (particularly tacky) but UKIP’s popularity grew by not being part of this. Yet UKIP appears to have caught political correctness in spades, grovelling apologies from the leader at the drop of a hat, Guardian approval now seems to matter, I am almost waiting for Farage to counsel us all ‘ to drink responsibly’.
UKIP have slid smoothly into the Lib/ Dem policy slot, reminiscent of the army cook sergeant and the recruit when asked what is in the steaming tureen, whaddya want it to be son? In the main UKIP now seem to stand for nothing in particular except anti-immigration, an enormous problem in a welfare state, but it is the welfare system that needs reform. Of this we hear nothing, nor will we whilst the ‘don’t frighten the horses’ policy holds sway. This inevitably means UKIP is in danger of going the same way, albeit the late comers in the hierarchy will have feathered their own nest by that stage.
Sean Gabb got it right when he raised the query post Brussels what sort of government do we want? UKIP at the moment is run with an iron rod by a small cartel of London based public schoolboys (sound familiar?) all of whom are or were card carrying members of the Conservative party, and donations come from the same source. There is no political earthquake, although there could be: this is about repositioning the Tories which is why the provinces in UKIP are unrepresented, and that is a missed opportunity. The Blair administration in 1997 had the same rare political opportunity, it could have been so much more.
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Excellent article. The difficulty UKIP face is that it’s now immigration that’s really shot them into the spotlight in a way that their traditional issues never did, or really could have done. They’ve backed themselves into a bit of a corner.
My gut says they can still use this to seize the initiative without becoming just an anti immigration party. It’s an unfortunate indictment of the state of politics in Britain that their current strategy to do this is probably the right one – lots of overly cheesy soundbites and “some of my best friends are…” A message simple and robust enough to get through to the millions of people who will never dig any deeper than what they see on the news.
My only means of retaining any trace of good humour is not to read the newspapers. The news that does seep in just sends me into despair.
Didn’t Chesterton say something to the effect that no journalist believes more than a tenth of what he reads in the papers?
What I am scared of is people NOT “getting on the bandwagon”.
By any rational calculation Mr Cameron and so on should have seen the growth in popularity of UKIP and moved either to make a deal with UKIP (a pact for the election), or taken the policy of UKIP, opposition to the E.U., and made it their own policy.
Instead we have the accepting of EXTRA money for the E.U. – and now the E.U. arrest warrant.
It is as if Mr Cameron has decided that he is not interested in winning the Rochester election – or the General Election, that loyalty to the E.U. is more important than winning the election.
Indeed forget the words “as if” – as Mr Cameron clearly does regard loyalty to the E.U. as more important than winning the General Election.
I am at a loss to explain it – and no local Conservative in Kettering (or anywhere else I know) can explain the line of the leadership either.
The national leadership really do seem to be prepared to lose the next General Election – loyalty to the E.U. is that important to the establishment elite.
The line seems to be that the Conservative Party and UKIP will go into the next election fighting each other (no pact – no agreement) and cut each other’s throats.
Then, with the smallest share of the vote in history, pro E.U. “Red Ed” Miliband becomes Prime Minister, or some other pro E.U. Labour Partly person becomes Prime Minister (if Mr Miliband falls under a bus or something).
And Mr Cameron appears to be content with this – himself no longer being Prime Minister and Mr Miliband, or whoever, being Prime Minister instead of him.
As long as the United Kingdom remains the slave of the European Union.
I can not explain it, I just do not understand it.
As with Mr Bloom’s other articles, this is a good one.
What used to be a fairly strong ‘buy’ for freedom minded people has now become little better than a mediocre ‘hold’ for exactly the reasons he lays out.
Mr Farage’s recent comments on the NHS illustrate this all too well; instead of standing by his earlier comments and making the tough but correct case for freedom of choice, he merely obfuscates and retires under cover of a smokescreen.
Along with the anti-immigrant rants, this might go down well with certain ex-Labour voters, but it merely points to a populist protest party rather than coherent policies to reshape UK politics.
Mr Bloom’s comments on welfare reform are especially important. It should be obvious that immigration problems are really just a symptom of the failure of the welfare state, yet Farage has resolutely avoided discussing the the issue. It’s easy enough to understand why, but it doesn’t make it any more excusable.
And in his complete failure to spell out what a post EU Britain would actually look like, Farage is once more ducking the issue. After all, what is the point of going through the trauma of breaking with Brussels if we just end up with more of the same in slightly different packaging?
We might expect these sorts of manoeuvres from the old parties – after all they carry far to much baggage to change direction now – but if UKIP wants to present a viable alternative to these, it will have to do better. Much better.
How ironic that just as Mr Carswell becomes the party’s first MP, the ideas that he stands for are fast disappearing from UKIP’s radar screen.
I think many people here would agree that something needs to change in this country and that we are sick and tired of the same old ‘three’ dominating everything. On that score, I believe most would support the UKIP for that alone.
The traditional political parties and positions have to be crippled and sent to the knackers yard to be put out of their misery and our misery. It seems to be the only thing worth a shot… however, that does not mean to say it will succeed or actually be any different from the general establishment.
When UKIP is sniffing around Rupert Murdoch (or visa-versa), when it is poaching the likes of Douglass Carswell (and some of his truly awful and typically treacherous ‘Tory’ views), when it backs down and grovels for forgiveness in the face of mass manufactured faux liberal outrage (eg. Mike Reads’ stupid song).
When it allegedly has a ‘UKIP Friends of Israel’ group within its mists, you can almost guarantee that nothing of any real significance will change in the future, particularly if they come to be influential as a group or influential as a party. The same puppeteers will be yanking the strings of the same career politicians in the stage-managed production shown to the masses as democracy and freedom of choice.
These are additional reasons as to why I personally think Mr Bloom is right, although I am sure he would disagree with me on my reasons.
But I think this is the trapping of party politics in a “controlled” machine. To not see or understand that it is largely controlled and a bit of a sham is a real detriment when it comes to appreciating why nothing ever seems to change. It is exactly the same in the United States, only much more obvious and concentrated.
Mr Bloom suggests, rightly, that UKIP seem to be wanting to enter into this mainstream world of professional politics and the organs that play along with it. Well, of course! That is the way the system is, that’s what has been orchestrated so it remains so closed and narrow in agenda. It is pretty much a necessity to do so!
They have to cosy up to the big backers. They have to cosy up to certain manipulative cuckoos in the nest to gain the wider acceptance and backing throughout all manner of influential organisations and institutions they have sway of, including the media. Life can be made very difficult for them if they do not lace certain palms with silver or make the right kinds of noises in their direction.
They obviously also have to try and appeal to as many voters as possible in the current “mainstream” and with the “mainstream media” fed imbeciles in this country, in order to claw their way to the top of the polls and the election results. Politics is indeed a popularity contest, and UKIP want to be popular and are thus ‘populist’.
This likely means watering down anything you actually stood for, appealing to everybody on all things as much as possible, ultimately having two faces….just like the rest of them.
The NHS was in the news again today with UKIP. Apparently an old video has appeared saying they would like to privatise it off, yet in recent months they have been saying they wanted to protect the NHS as it stands. It is typically two-faced and the incoherent ramblings of a group that want to be populist on all sides.
I was recently visiting a friend of mine in hospital (who had Clostridium difficile) and her parents are traditional Conservative voters who have been looking for a change.
They knew I was nationalistic and conversation went to the support and rise of UKIP and how great it was that Douglass Carswell had defected from the Conservatives the week before – and they said they would like to see many more Tory MPs also defect to UKIP. They were excited by it.
I was too polite to shoot them down, but I could not help but think that would be the worst thing to happen – more useless Tories gripping on to their useless and failed ideologies!
What have the “conservatives” conserved over the last 70 years? NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING. They have lost ground to liberal-leftism on almost ALL aspects of society. They are now often proudly parroting the same “hard-left” positions, policies and attitudes that would once be shocking to the “Conservative” party of yesteryear!
UKIP has hardly fallen far from their tree either, particularly if they are recruiting such people into the party.
When I heard Douglass Carswell on the radio the other month discussing immigration I knew all too well where he and those like him would like to send UKIP. All the platitudes you’d expect from Labour and Conservatives were there, and he even had the arrogance to suggest he wanted to “modernise” UKIP views on such things and “bring them into the 21st Century”.
It was extremely infuriating to listen to.
I might even be open to the suggestion that UKIP is being subverted by the likes of Carswell and the Murdoch Press in their eagerness to push forward this populist rise and in doing so neutralise any real break from the normality.
But then again, what else can they do? They are a political party…..they cannot stand as an ideologically pure micro-entity on the outside and remain true to their beliefs – whatever the hell they actually are. (More Tory-Atlanticist Zionist Ass Kissing Globalism and corporatism like the others, I’d suspect).
They need to rapidly get seats at Westminster, capture the wave of support, try and ‘move and shake’ with all the elements established by the establishment!
Given that they are at least shaking things up, I will probably cast my vote for them. However, I am under no illusion whatsoever that anything radical will change. Mr Bloom is right to warn that even if we left the EU, we could still be ruled by the agendas and attitudes that drive it, even from the future ranks of UKIP MPs.
Given the very real project being worked on to integrate Africa into Europe, complete with “free movement of circular labour” etc (no, I am not kidding), getting out of the “European immigration” thing before it gets any worse would be fantastic as far as I’m concerned.
UKIP may not give a toss about the future inhabitants of this land, they may well want “fewer Poles” and “more Indian engineers” in a “fairer system”….but I do give a toss and I’d much rather we can hold our own politicians to blame and had apparent control over our borders than not.
[…] that some voters are repelled by UKIP’s “extremism”, which even seems to have Godfrey Bloom crying […]
As Richard North tirelessly, but apparently in utter futility, points out blaming the EU for globalist collectivism is to entirely wide of the mark. The fact is the current political class in Britain, including UKIP, are a bunch of collectivist, thieving, corrupt, evil (to the point of crimes against humanity), scumbags who are fully on board with destruction of individual liberty because in their own narrow cases being in the political class in such a situation makes them a top dog. Take a look at that evil son of a bitch Tony Blair making money like a bandit as a “peace envoy” in the Middle East. His head should be on a pike outsides the gates of Tower, not that poppy bullshit.
The only thing worse than the politicians are the dumb as a bag of hammers f*ckwads who vote for them in the belief they’ll get something for nothing and anyway f*ck you jack I’m all right.
So, er, John, we then also have to consider how it was (because it was, and it happened, and we allowed it) that we let the buggers “in power” get to be like that then.
As I pointed out the average voter is as dumb as a bag of hammers and stupid enough to believe there is such a thing as a free lunch. Stupidity and venality begets evil.
That’s true, but we have to think of something to do about the main strategic problem. The “voter hammer dumbness” problem has been deliberately visited upon the voters themselves, while these poor people weren’t looking, by the GramscoFabiaNazis.
So what then must we do?
I am, as War Secretary, looking from now on, for answers from people. Sometimes I am terminally-depresed by our side’s general status, and sometimes I am not. This instant is when I am not.
I don’t think you can blame the GramscoFabiaNazis for lack of general intelligence. Well, maybe to some extent given the dysgenic trend of rewarding single mothermood and penalising hard working people. Learning is in the learner not the teacher. It’s a fundamental problem of human nature (and the inadequacy of the average person) and I have no good ideas what to do about it apart from appealing to a rational system of ethics and morality. Go back and watch http://www.amazon.com/The-Nazis-Warning-From-History/dp/B00097DY66 and listen to the interviews (the commentary is painful, I admit). Most ordinary people are only to happy to have the power of the state backing up their petty prejudices. Most ordinary people are too dumb to understand why there’s no such thing as free lunch. Sadly a lot of smart people are easily confused by faulty reasoning. There’s no easy answer. It’s an amusingly Discordian conundrum where I’m forced to have faith in the power of reason applied to evidential reality and in the supremacy of truth, as the antidote to existential despair.
I say that we have to keep some sort of perspective here.
Yes I fully expect that if UKIP were to gain power – rather improbable – most of the buggers will turn into GramscoFabiaNazis in a few years if not sooner. I mean to say, to be a “Mover And Shaker” – it’s lovely! You can “have anyone you want”…. There’s big personal money in oppressing liberty, and “firms” will kill each other in the rush to “deliver solutions”, to “Councils” and to “The Public Sector Movers-and-Shakers”. Even traffic warden-Gestapo-droids now wear sound/video/cams on their chests, to “capture motorist-behaviour-data”. Someone had to sell that to the bastards, and _got money_ .
I saw a slogan on a van in Bootle, a couple of years ago. it was some outfit that “does stuff in social housing”. It said:-
“WORKING WITH PARTNERS IN COMMUNITIES TO DELIVER SOCIAL SOLUTIONS”.
Personally, I think we are lost. But if UKIP bought us a bit of time, then maybe our children or grandchildren might get liberated by ChIndoRussia. That nation contains several billion people that may decide and quite soon that they like some more individual liberty, and want to sell things to others that if liberated could pay. And they might aggressively-sneer at the outfits that will by then be in charge here in the UK.
Oh and by then, they’ll have all the weaponry. So the Uk-GramscoFabiaNazis will cave in, as they must, just like Gorbachev’s USSR did in 1989. So our grandchildren might experience something like what Czech and Slovak children experienced, in the early-to-mid-1990s. My Director will bear me out here, for he knows even more about this sort of matter than I do, although we were both involved there in a way. I merely associated freely with lots of really nice and friendly Moravian students in Brno and Vyskov, who were initially depressed, thinking it would take years, but rapidly gained traction and felt things were going good. It didn’t take long. (They’re all happy and successful now, so that’s all right.)
I think the “English Question” and immigration are fantastic issues to work on. Power to the Shires says I since our metropolitan elite complex can corrupt the best of souls..
UKIP has become immensely successful at garnering support — many are enamoured of the party — so I don’t think that it would have caused that much damage and loss of members if Nigel Farage had defended his comments on private healthcare and the NHS. Suzanne Evans, Deputy Chairman of UKIP, who I otherwise consider to be very talented and at ease before the camera, was recently on Question Time attacking zero-hours contracts as well.
A complaint is that UKIP is focusing too much on an anti-immigration message, but it seems to have gone unnoticed that the party line on this issue has actually softened. A couple of years ago, Farage was strongly advocating for a five-year freeze on all immigration, whereas now the party seems to be at pain to point out that it is in fact pro-immigration — it merely advocates that the UK, as a matter of principle, should determine in its own immigration policy. John Bickley, who came a narrow second in the Heywood and Middleton by-election, went as far as saying that UKIP would not necessarily reduce immigration; it could even increase it. What matters, he stressed, was that we set our own immigration policy.
UKIP was always much more hardline than this, particularly when we could confidently say that the party had, at the very lease, a libertarian ethos. Its appeal was its rejection of the mainstream and the politically correct, but sadly it appears to buy into the idea that it must ‘professionalise’ and water down in order to be electable.
No, no, no!
I personally think that Farage occasionally bends to political correctness, but probably only tactically so, and he often resists the temptation to apologise (eg for comments about Romanians) and brazens it out and manages to win the argument in the end as a result. So you are right on some of this, but in general this is a sore loser’s piece by a man who lost his position in UKIP.
The reason UKIP is centralised is because of the tendency of some MEPs and others to “mouth off” unnecessarily. In a free society, claiming that floods were God’s punishment for homosexuality – as one councillor did – would be laughed off as a “colourful remark” by a splendid local councillor. But in the current context, it counts as either gross stupidity or an attempt to torpedo the rise of UKIP. Similarly, Godfrey, some of the things you are quoted saying are simply foolish in the mouth of someone claiming to want to see our national sovereignty restored. For this reason, “off-message” members of UKIP are sidelined. Farage has to do this. To fail to do this would turn UKIP into an absurdly unprofessional outfit.
I’m afraid exit from Europe, an end to immigration and multiculturalism are the key to our future – welfare reform is much, much less important. The NHS and all the rest of it – are secondary issues. National sovereignty has to appeal to people who have widely differing views of what we would do with it.
[…] UKIP: Whither the Bandwagon?. […]
At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam may I invite readers to visit my website http://www.camrecon.demon.co.uk . It is called “The Party System and the Corruption of Parliament”
It was created with some considerable mental effort by me and with many thanks to the late Wing Commander Leonard Young. There is pretty much everything you need to know about what is wrong with the party system – i.e just about everything complained about in the previous replies regarding UKIP. Ther are even some pertient quotes from the famous Edmund Burke whose plaque adorns the wall in our Market Town of Malton. N Yorks.
With regard to the business of “package manifestos” ( for those who can be buggered to read my website at all) a much more detailed explanation/link of that crucial factor should be posted on the site in the next few days.
Meanwhile I assure you that there is more than enough to be going on with..
I do admit to ONE serious error. Instead of having 5 year fixed terms we should revert to the Crown only assembling Parliament when it needs money, as in days of yore. It should very happily put a stop to all sort so current problems like excessive legislation and excessive expenses claims.
I look forward to hearing from a few of you via the links?