UKIP: Torygraph loses the plot.........

It may be a ‘given’ that the Daily Telegraph is the trade journal of the Tory Party but it has more of a resemblance to Pravda in its propaganda campaign against UKIP and Nigel Farage.

 

Leading the pack is Dan Hodges with his spittle-flecked charges that ‘UKIP is worse than the BNP’, ‘UKIP is racist’ and similar calumnies. This was the one who, against all the  evidence, stoutly maintained that Clegg had won the debate with Farage by a mile (and in which Farage was given a massive PR boost by Clegg).. When UKIP published campaign posters correctly pointing out that the lack of control over UK’s borders meant that British workers had to compete against Europeans who were prepared to work for wages that would not support a British family, a simple truth, they were condemned as ‘racist’ although when ‘European’ became a race is not explained.

 

Then there was their revelation that one of the poster girls was actually a UKIP employee, as if models had no place in advertising. This fell off the page in a day. Not to be deterred, there was the ‘shock’ story that a building worker who was unemployed because of cut-price European competition, and featured on another UKIP poster,  was a Dubliner. He would be prohibited under Farage’s immigration proposals, they said. Wrong! There has been complete freedom of travel between Ireland and the UK ever since the Republic was founded. Neither did they mention that he had been a British taxpayer for 10 years.

 

So that story bombed also.

 

When a luvvie of Jamaican origin complained that there were not enough black faces in British entertainment, a UKIP member was accused of racism when he suggested that perhaps the guy might prefer to live in a black country.

 

They tried to smear Farage with an expenses scandal over EU allowances for office expenditure. But this is one of the EU payments that is a ‘lump sum’ allowance that doesn’t need any justification. The EU is like that; if you are entitled to an allowance you get paid whether you want it or not. If you travel to Brussels by a budget airline you still get paid the full fare even if it is five times what your ticket cost. So that story had no legs and went nowhere.

 

Now here’s a funny thing.

 

The real expenses-fiddling story was when Maria Miller was forced to resign as a Minister for a bit of creative accounting with her housing claims. Every newspaper except one splashed the lady’s departure. The DT hid it away on Page 4.

 

And yet it was the first to expose the scandal. That was when Tony Gallagher was Editor until he was sacked by the new boss, Murdoch MacLennan, fresh from the Express and Mirror. Now that role falls to an American ‘the pointy-headed Jason ‘psycho’ Seiken’ (Private Eye’s description), the fifth Editor in ten years. He has no experience of Grub Street but a great deal with ‘Sesame Street’. Presumably he sees his task as persuading the DT’s Tory readers not to defect to UKIP.

 

But the DT is preaching to the converted and there are fewer and fewer of them  as its circulation heads south at speed – nearly halved in recent years.

 

The constituency that should be courted is Mondeo Man, the aspirational working class who want to better themselves and provide a good life for their families – ‘diamond geezers’ as they would be called along the Thames Estuary. None of the main parties represents them now. There is a political vacuum which Farage recognises. The chattering classes may mock him for his ‘fag and a pint’ persona but he sounds out opinion from ordinary people in the pub, not from people of one’s own ilk in metropolitan clubs and fancy restaurants. Like Boris Johnson, he comes across a bit of a larrikin which the English love.

 

The media strategy is all wrong. Until fairly recently it seemed as if there was a media boycott: UKIP simply wasn’t reported. Now they can’t get enough of Farage, and the more they attack him the more attention he gets. ‘The only bad publicity is no publicity’.

 

The public is not fooled. What they see is the bullying of a small party with no MPs.

 

They also see that the main parties are now running scared of UKIP.

 

As well they might after this week-end’s poll figures.

 

 

 

More racist twaddle.....

It has to be said that the Standard 6 noise-makers who can find a racist hiding under every bush are a rich source of entertainment through their sheer ignorance and stupidity.

 

One classic was the campaign against ‘Baa. Baa, black-sheep, have you any wool?’ because of its alleged association with slavery. That was cotton wool, you numpties, not sheep’s. Then there was ‘nitty-gritty’ which they claimed referred to the detritus at the bottom of a slave-ship, although the term is only about 50 years old. And ‘nig-nog’ which means a know-nothing or inexperienced person, much used in the army  to describe a new recruit.

 

The latest to add to the gaiety of nations is reported in the Daily Telegraph. Here is what it says

‘Folk dances that involve 'blacking-up' are an English tradition and should not be regarded as racist, a Labour candidate for Parliament has insisted. Will Straw, the candidate in the marginal seat of Rossendale and Darwen, said people who claim it is offensive for rural English dancers to blacken their faces are ignorant of history. Mr Straw was criticised this weekend after posting an image of himself on Twitter with the Britannia Coconut Dancers of Bacup, a 150-year-old troupe of Lancastrian clog dancers who perform every Easter. Critics claim the practice is offensive, because blacking up has often been used by white performers to parody black people and culture’.

What the Bacup boys perform is a version of molly-dancing.

It is actually traditional to East Anglia. It was especially performed on Plough Monday every January. This was the day on which the local farmers hired their ploughmen for the season. These days it is usually performed outside the village pub (naturally), but inn earlier times it was often on the farmer’s lawn, accompanied by a plough  which they might threaten to use on  the lawn if no work was forthcoming. The reason why they wore women’s clothes and blacked their faces was so that they wouldn’t be recognised.

And how refreshing that a politician – and a Labour politician at that – is prepared to stand up for ancient English tradition and face-down the humourless nitwits who complained.

 

Wild West politics..........

There is more doom and gloom throughout the land coupled with a modicum of tension over the recent wild west episode of big rancher vs big government.

 

The background is simple. A cattle rancher in Nevada is grazing his herd on Federal land. His grazing rights, like those of many other such ranchers, are granted through a leasing arrangement on land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Recently, the BLM rallied federal agents to force the rancher off his land by seizing his cattle herd.

 

 

The reason given by BLM for this action was the rancher, Cliven Bundy, is not paying his lease money. 

 

Cliven steadfastly maintains the grazing land is rightfully the property of the State of Nevada and not the Federal Government. The latter, he argues, would only squander his payments in the BLM bureaucracy whereas if he paid his fees to the State, Nevada would use the income for the public good.

 

Thus, Cliven's refusal to pay his fees is politically and not economically motivated.

 

Surrounding ranchers, townsfolk, civilian militias and others rallied to Bundy's cause with verbal, group and even armed support. This is when Fox News got hold of the story and exploded it into front page headlines.

 

Their story line was that this is another example of big government exploiting a poor rancher who is busy raising beef to feed the American people. Woe is he and shame on our government for confiscating, or as it turned out, attempting to confiscate his cattle.

 

What with federal agents trying clumsily to round up the herd while equally clumsily trying to maintain crowd control, and a civilian militia that seemed to appear from nowhere bearing arms that included assault weapons, something had to give. In this instance, the BLM back down, released the cattle along with a few dead ones and retreated.

 

The cattlemen that meet for coffee every morning here in a small Texas town were pretty much unanimous in their take on the Bundy Ranch affair. Although we have no significant presence of the BLM here in Texas, we certainly understand the value of leasing grazing land.

 

These cattlemen feet that Bundy was clearly in the wrong and should pay his fees and have done with it. As strong supporters of the political right exemplified by Fox News, however, they were conflicted because Fox supports  Bundy.

 

In a clear extension of Fox policy to steadfastly condemn anything the Obama administration and its various organs does, they supported Bundy on the grounds that his rights had been abused when the BLM attempted to confiscate his cattle. The BLM should not have taken such a drastic step, but rather issued a lien on his bank account or some such paper measure to recover past due lease payments.

 

There is more to the story.

 

The newly appointed and approved head of the BLM, Neil Kornze, was strongly supported by the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. Kornze was Reid's former chief of staff, a fellow Mormon, and confidant if not lackey. The story goes that Harry Reid, Republican Senator from Nevada, has vested interests in obtaining BLM land for political and economic reasons of his own.

 

One theme goes that Reid was tied up with some Chinese solar panel manufactures seeking land in the US to install a solar energy scheme. Another is that Reid was providing land to one of his big political contributors. Having his ducks in a row, Reid sought to use BLM to redirect ownership or at least use of the Bundy Ranch land. Toward this end, BLM was instrumental in claiming the land unfit for cattle grazing because it was the domain of the endangered desert tortoise.

 

This ploy failed miserably and was quickly dropped in favor of seizing Bundy's cattle.

 

One potentially unsavory aspect of the Bundy Ranch affair is that both Reid and Kornze are members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. This relationship can and has led commentators to opine that there is a more sinister aspect of the land grab which could reflect adversely on the Mormon Church.

 

In a more palatable vein, the US Government and a group of armed civilians came very close to confronting one another with extreme prejudice. Some say shots were fired, but there was no actual battle. Nevertheless, the rise and expansion of armed civilian militias is of deep concern. These militias are populated with extreme right wing individuals who are largely alienated from normal society, often congregate  in isolated areas to practice shooting their weapons, discuss scenarios for civil strife or just vent their anger over contemporary social and governmental trends.

 

They, like many others including local Texas cattlemen, are anxious for the Obama administration to end. The two years and some months that must transpire before that legitimately happens may be marred by activists like the militias who feel they cannot wait until Obama's term expires. Equally disconcerting is what will happen under the new POTUS come the 2016 election.

 

There is a growing sentiment here in Texas that the coming mid-term elections in November of this year will mark and end to the Democrat majority in the Senate and thereby facilitate containing Obama policies until his term ends. Obama has certainly lost a lot of popularity if the polls on that subject are to be believed.

 

He has also lost a large portion of what little support Obama had in the Senate now that Harry Reid has been tainted and most probably rendered ineffective owing to his land grab capers. Many feel that it is about time that Reid retired and he may well do so as his personal health is also an issue.

 

Reid is currently under the microscope and one should expect the dirt to fly by the truckload.

 

Israel & Palestine; trying to make sense of it all......

It is doubtful whether the contemptible academics who wish to boycott Israel, along with other groups hiding their anti-Semitism behind a charade of being ‘pro-Palestine’, have much understanding of what the conflict is all about. The average person is also baffled by the complexity of this never-ending saga.

 

In trying to untangle the issues, the beginning is a good place to start.

 

There is a common fallacy that the Balfour Declaration in 1917 triggered the eventual creation of Israel. Not quite. Here is what it actually said:

 

His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country

 

Note that it speaks of a ‘home’, not a state, (and also of the protection of minority rights). But it certainly led to an upsurge in Zionism and Jewish immigration into Palestine. This led to violence and terrorism between Jews and Arabs, with the unfortunate British trying to keep the peace under their League of Nations mandate, and so being attacked by both sides.

 

 Statehood had to wait until 1947 when the UN resolved that “Independent Arab and Jewish States, and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem shall come into existence in Palestine.”

 

So there we have it: the ‘two state’ solution that the parties are still (occasionally) talking about, plus the designation of Jerusalem as an international city. The way out of the impasse is for all parties simply to adopt Resolution 181.

 

If only it were that easy!

 

Arab countries responded by trying, in three wars, to annihilate Israel. The outcome was that they got thrashed and the Israelis got the Gaza Strip and the land from the West Bank of the River Jordan to the Israeli border plus the whole of Jerusalem.

 

As it stands, the two-state solution would entail Israel giving up its conquests. It went  part-way by surrendering Gaza, no great sacrifice. But it continues to populate the West Bank with Jewish settlements. Unsurprisingly, the Knesset has no enthusiasm for the two-state notion, although we have a political dichotomy here; polls suggest that two-thirds of Israelis would support it in some form.

 

What is not going to happen is a return to the original boundaries. This would displace about 600,000 Israelis who have settled in the disputed areas. Neither will Israel accept the ’right of return’ demanded by the Palestinian refugees. Sheer numbers would ensure the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Arabs already constitute 20% of the population.

 

Creation of a Palestinian state with contiguous boundaries would entail a whole series of land swops, difficult but perhaps achievable. About 100,000 Jews would be displaced. Gaza does not fit in, and both geography and logic suggest incorporation into Egypt.

 

If there is to be a successful outcome, a great deal of compromise must be deployed. So far this quality has been notably and almost totally absent. Peace may have to await a new generation that has not been conditioned by old horrors and preconceptions.

 

And that’s about as simple as I can make it!

 

 

 

So farewell, then, Grub Street!

The news media have lost the plot. They are churning out stuff that might interest them, but certainly not the public.

 

For example, SKY News is constantly screening 30-minute ‘specials’ on the missing plane, although there is no story, only speculation. It has a daily ‘special’ on the South African murder case, as if we cared. When Geldof’s daughter was reported dead as a ‘breaking news’ item, they completely wiped the next programme, ‘Business Live’, and showed the same three or four pix of the deceased with tags – no report or commentary or any other sound. She was not known for anything except being Saint Bob’s offspring.

 

The Sunday Times splashed the Geldof  story over three pages of the New Review.

 

The print media is dying. I have given up on it apart from The Economist and the Sunday Times. Apropos which, I begin by putting at least half of the bundle in the bin unopened. I usually get to Page 23 of the main paper before finding something to catch my interest

 

The Guardian is on life-support and is becoming beyond parody to the dismay, no doubt, of Private Eye. Two of its star columnists are aging women, Polly Toynbee who inhabits Socialist la-la land, and the egregious  Alibhai-Brown who sees a white racist lurking behind every bush.

 

The DT top brass are now carpet-bagging Yanks who know nothing about the Street of Shame. Familiar names disappear – Heffer, Delingpole, Congdon, Randall and others. Its circulation is rapidly going south.

 

 The success story is the Mail which has the world’s largest on-line readership.

                               

The biggest print circulation is the Star. The last time I saw a copy, I counted 32 boobs but found no news whatever.

 

What does that say about us?

The Ukraine? Putin's welcome to it!

The spat between Russia and the Ukraine continues to absorb the media and bore the rest of us

 

Russia is welcome to the Ukraine. It is so utterly corrupt that it makes Nigeria look restrained. It is estimated that 80cents in every dollar is purloined from the public purse. The former President lived in a breath-taking mansion along with a huge collection of classic cars, antiques and other valuables. He is said to have trousered $70 million, no doubt ably assisted by the City through ‘tax-efficient offshore vehicles’, as money laundering the loot is now called.

 

It is dirt poor, with a GDP ranking of #52; it is poorer than Egypt, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. It produces steel and grain and not much else. It is a Third- World country. It would fit neatly into the Russian scheme of things.

 

Whilst he is at it, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Tsar of all the Ethnic Russians, might like to take back  Romania and Bulgaria, two more Third Worlders,  and include them in  his new Great Eurasian Economic Zone.

 

How they qualified for membership of the EU is a mystery, as is the motive of the EU in courting the Ukraine; it has nothing to offer in return.

 

The basic criteria for joining are stable institutions, the rule of law, human rights, and protection of minorities, and a market economy.  Both countries would be hard put to meet at least three of these.

 

Bulgaria has a GDPppp world ranking at 93, with 20% of the population below the poverty line. It is noted for public corruption and  organised crime. Romania is even poorer, coming in at 99 for GDPppp and 22% under the poverty line. Both have very suspect judicial systems, although a British subject is liable to be dragged off to either under the European Arrest Warrant which can be issued by a ‘judicial official’ for something that is not a crime under English law without any evidence connecting that person to the crime or that any crime has been committed at all.

 

As for human rights and protection of minorities, just ask the Roma.

 

And whilst he is about it, Putin might care to take Hungary, where neo-Nazism appears to be perfectly acceptable with the Jew- and Gypsy-hating Jobbik Party gaining heavily in the polls and skinhead neo-Nazis march around bearing the flag of the notorious Arrow Guard that helped with the Holocaust in Hungary (which we tend to overlook was on Germany’s side during WW2).

 

EU eastwards expansion is incomprehensible. Unless, of course, the real ambition is to recreate The Holy Roman Empire,  the First Reich.

 

O and Michelle uncoupling?

Rumors abound over O and M having serious marital problems. Several weeks ago I noted an article on this subject in the leading rag of our yellow press, the National Inquirer. Several days later this item was picked up by your Daily Mail which dutifully cited the Inquirer. I found this odd as the credibility of the item was seriously ratcheted upwards in the process. A week or so later, Rush Limbaugh, a popular right wing radio ranter commented on the item citing not the Inquirer, but the Daily Mail.

 

Yesterday, I was at the supermarket and noticed another headline in the Inquirer. These weekly magazines are traditionally stacked in a rack along with other red tops at the checkout counter. This time it was blatantly reported that the O and M marriage is over after Michelle had 'stormed out' of somewhere.

 

The above is indicative of how dreadfully boring domestic politics have become here in the States. The public has been made immune from anything intelligent or in-depth by habitually tuning in to Big Brother type newscasters claiming to have a monopoly on what's really happening in our nation's capitol. They drone on and on about the most trivial and distorted events while totally neglecting anything at all that is happening outside the country.

 

We are approaching mid-term elections in November. The word on the street is that the winners of these elections will be overwhelmingly republicans. This is because O has made such a balls-up of our economy, race relations, welfare system and national health care that even his stalwart democratic supporters are abandoning ship in an effort to save their political careers. The end result is a bunch of gutless, thieving and lying pretenders swimming in the Washington muck like drowning rats.

 

The sad truth is that the thinking American public is beginning to loose its confidence in our leaders and in the ability of our political system to tackle and resolve major, or even minor, public issues.

Nick &Nigel v. Dave & Ed? Please, no!

It is unsurprising that the Nick ‘n Nigel show has led to demands from UKIP that Farage be allowed to take place in the ‘leaders’ debates’ on TV in the run-up to the next General Election. This begs the question as to whether such a debate will or should actually happen.

 

Hopefully, not! We have quite enough to put up with at election time without being inflicted with this quartet. We don’t vote for ‘personality of the year’; we vote for a government.

 

Like many bad ideas this has been filched from the US. But there it has a point. Presidential elections are a contest between just two personalities. It is vital that Americans know more about the candidates than what is fed to them by the spin-doctors and attack ads. By and large they have tended to elect the most convincing candidate, starting with JFK vs. Nixon. The soundness of that choice was justified when Tricky Dicky became POTUS.

 

This is totally irrelevant to British elections. We don’t elect Prime Ministers. Of course, if once in office the PM is found to be seriously wanting there is every prospect that he will cost his Party the next election. But he is in danger of being dumped by the Party before that stage is reached.

 

The debates UK-style imply that we should elect the best snake-oil salesman. They puerilise politics.

 

The chattering classes got the Clegg vs. Farage debates completely wrong. This was not a ‘Top of the Form’ debating  contest. There was no winner or loser. It was a heaven-sent opportunity for the leaders of two minority parties to set out their stalls to a very large audience -  party-political broadcasts by other means, commercials for UKIP and Libdem.

 

They were on the same side. UKIP and the Libdems are not primarily in competition with one another. UKIP sees its market as the disenfranchised white working class, Maggie’s Mondeo Man whom the Labour Party has long ceased to represent, and ‘conservative’ Tories who regard the present leadership as spoilt toffs, a metropolitan elite with little experience and less understanding of life outside the Westminster cocoon, and who are devoid of political principles or conviction.

 

Clegg’s pitch is in the opposite direction, the former Libdem voters who deserted to Labour because the Libdems were seen as not sufficiently ‘left’, only to find that neither is the Labour Party, which is in ideological limbo.

 

Neither party will take many votes from each other, but whereas one is facing obliteration the other is on a roll. Both need to land the floating voter, and such is public disillusionment with politicians of all stripes that there are more than ever of them.

 

So will we see Nigel squaring up to Dave, Nick and Ed on SKY at peak time?

 

Hopefully, Dave will be sufficiently Prime Ministerial to say ‘ This is an election to choose the next Government, not a bloody beauty contest!’.

 

But don’t hold your breath.

 

*****************************

 

What UKIP stands for:

 

The economy: Abolish inheritance tax and NI. £77 bn. reduction in public sector. But they seem to have quietly dropped their ‘flat tax’ idea, although they do want to simplify the Tax Code.

 

Health: Decentralise to County level with elected members. Return hospital management from non-clinical managers to Matrons.

 

EU: Out!

 

ECHR: Out, along with the Human Rights Act.

 

Immigration: Five-year freeze on permanent residence permits. Points-based work permits.

 

Climate change: Scrap wind turbines. Sceptical.

 

Gay marriage: against but support civil partnerships.

 

What the Libdems stand for:

 

The opposite of all the above.

The Great Mail Robbery..

 

‘Few things are more agreeable than seeing your neighbour fall off his roof……..’

 

At PMQs, Miliband called Cameron a ‘dunce’ over the Royal Mail sell-off. Cameron called Miliband a ‘Muppet’ for Brown’s sale of half Britain’s gold reserves at the fire-sale price of $275/oz. (around $1300 today) losing between $5 bn (Treasury figure) and $9 bn (Daily Mail). Just a normal Wednesday in the Commons, then.

 

But the scandal of the Royal Mail deserves far more investigation than a yah-boo-sucks exchange between Ed and Dave.

 

After the outburst of self-congratulation by the Government on the privatisation of Royal Mail, it now turns out to be a lash-up. Not for the City gents who have made millions, of course The first-day profit after the IPO was £750,000,000. But certainly for the British people; at least the posties made something out of it.

 

The split was 30% retained by Government, 10% allocated to Royal Mail staff and 60% to the IPO. There were 17 ‘priority investors’ who were given a special price of 260p in return for a promise to hold onto the shares in the interests of ‘stability’. They quickly reneged on this, and about half were sold soon after the launch. The share price rose to 615p (currently around 560p).

 

So who were these priority investors, the privileged and fortunate few who made a killing out of the UK taxpayer? How many shares did they get at this knock-down price? How much profit did they make? The Government refuses to tell us.

 

It could have been avoided if the Government had followed Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Tell Sid!’ approach, allowing ordinary people to buy a limited number of shares at a fixed price in advance of the IPO as part of her ‘property-owning democracy’ philosophy that would create an entirely new class of shareholders. But that was before politics became the exclusive preserve of the metropolitan elites.

 

Who is the architect of this shambles? Step forward  the egregious Cable. He must surely be due for an early bath.

 

Truly, after hubris comes nemesis.

Farage, Putin amd the establishment....

It is abundantly now clear that the political and media establishments are running scared of Nigel Farage. He is the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’; he speaks like and for ordinary people. This is absolute anathema to the chattering classes who believe that the Common Man is just that; common, and so must be kept in his place by those who know better.

 

But what worries them most is that he is both a politician and one rapidly gaining popularity amongst the proles who also happen to be voters. So it  is necessary to rubbish him. The latest establishment propaganda is to present Farage as some kind of populist fascist whose hero is Putin the neo-Nazi.

 

Someone called Mathew Holehouse who describes himself as ‘political correspondent on the DT and looks (and probably is) about 16 years old has joined the totally artificial hullaballoo against Farage for saying that he admired Putin ‘as an operator’ who stitched-up the US over Syria, and for giving voice to the widely-held view that the crisis in the Ukraine was a result of EU meddling which created a bidding-war with Russia.

 

What Farage actually said was that he admired Putin as ‘an operator’ i.e. one who fixes things so that he gets his own way. Well, so he does, and that’s a fact, not an opinion. Farage had nothing more to say about him that was to his credit.

 

The chatterrati fail to understand a particular characteristic of the British. They like a larrikin. That is why every time Boris Johnson gets into yet another scrape his popularity rises. Blair continues to be liked because everyone knows that he is a bit of a scallywag.  Farage, with his scandalous and politically-incorrect love of Rothmans and real ale, comes across as ‘one of us’. It is impossible to imagine Cameron, Miliband, Clegg or any other of the metropolitan elite as ‘one of us’. Contemporary politicians are more likely to fiddle their exes or ‘come out’ than they are to commit Johnsonian gaffes or be locked out by the missus for being a naughty boy as per Nigel’s recent fall from marital grace.

 

What of Putin?

 

Putin is a 19^th Century throwback who lives in a world of fantasy. He believes that he can force former Soviet bloc countries back into the arms of Russia by political and economic destabilisation and intimidation. He has been pretty successful so far. His seizure of the Crimea got a ‘tut-tut’ from Obama and Europe. Obama is criticised for being limp-wristed, but Georgia was seized by violence using tanks and heavy kit; many people were killed, homes destroyed, people displaced. Bush never lifted a finger. As Nigel says, he is an operator.

 

And unlike Farage, there is nothing whatsoever to like about him.