UKIP - the Tea Party of the 51st State

Forecast of Drivel Ahead - Farage has disowned his own party's manifesto

The United Kingdom Independence Party cites withdrawal from the European Union as its signature policy. Puffed up by a right-wing media, it has ridden on the back of xenophobic myths ranging from invisible hordes of Bulgarians battering down the doors of the Arrivals hall in Heathrow to invented tales of conspiratorial Brussels bureaucrats forcing Britons to eat nothing but straight bananas (though no one seems to ask where these are to be found either).

UKIP preys on worries about the poverty and social problems afflicting millions of Britons using manufactured fears about migrants and the EU while covering up the real causes - an ever greater hording of wealth by a tiny, rich elite; the widespread incidence of tax avoidance and evasion by large corporations; and the now near complete privatisation (or at least private contracting out) of our key public services.

But in fact, UKIP have a wide range of policies and stances that do not bear scrutiny set against the "party of the people" tone its leader Nigel "Blokey" Farage seeks to espouse. He is Everyman, supposedly, with his pint in one hand and fag in the other. He rarely promotes the fact that he made his money as a stockbroker (as did his errant friend and former colleague Godfrey Bloom, MEP), nor that he used to be an active member of what was at the time a fairly pro-European Tory Party.

Yet more than his past, which could be forgiven if he had genuinely changed his tune, Farage is haunted by his party itself, even although the party very much is him.

We have heard enough of late of bizarre but frankly quite trivial outbursts from strange UKIP members. The most prominent was Godfrey Bloom with his references to "bongo-bongo-land", sluts and bashing a journalist on the head with his agenda papers; then there was the town councillor who suggested the recent floods were God's vengeance for legalising gay marriage; and the county councillor who used Facebook to ask "Is tuna a real fish like ones that swim in water?"

"Trivial" not in the sense that these events and the attitudes they display are trivial, but rather in the sense that they pale in the face of much more troubling aspects of UKIP, its official policies and its supposedly sensible leader's own views.

Consider these issues, generally overlooked by the media:

- Godfrey Bloom, when a UKIP MEP, appeared in a video praising the French secret services for planting bombs on board the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" which caused an explosion and killed a photographer. You can see him in action by clicking here.

- in 2006, the European Parliament voted by 545 votes to a mere 13 in favour of calling on all member states of the EU to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to violence against women, treat rape within marriage as a crime and to ban and prosecute all instances of female genital mutilation. Who would oppose such a sensible, ethical motion? Well, UKIP did. All 7 of its MEPs who voted, including Nigel Farage, voted against supporting such steps to protect women. Doubtless they would claim it was to do with asserting British independence - but what comes first: making a political point or protecting vulnerable women and girls from violence?

- UKIP supposedly stands for the UNITED KINGDOM. But there is little resonance beyond England. Farage complained about being heckled by an admittedly loud and probably counter-productive demonstration when he tried to hold a press conference in an Edinburgh pub (to launch a by-election campaign some miles away in Aberdeen - possibly he didn't have a satnav that covered so far north?). But he might have reflected that the Scottish people who turned out to greet him may have felt slightly aggrieved by the leader of his party's tiny Scottish wing, Lord Monckton, who had described his compatriots as "subsidy junkies", playing on the wildly inaccurate theme that Scotland receives more public expenditure than it pays in tax.

And then just this week, having claimed that he was getting rid of five unnamed "barmy" MEPs (over a third of  his group in the European Parliament), Farage went off the policy rails himself, finally unmasking his inner Tea Party libertarian self.

First, in a speech to his former colleagues in the City of London stockbroking fraternity, he railed against laws curtailing sex discrimination: he insisted that women face no discrimination at all in the City workplace, though he then contradicted himself by saying that women who take maternity leave are by default worth less than men to their employers.

And now, he wants to legalise handguns - pistols - which were banned in 1996 after Thomas Hamilton used them to kill 16 primary school children in Dunblane in Scotland. Nigel feels the ban is "ludicrous" - perhaps he will launch his campaign to change the law in a pub in the town; I will be happy to buy him a map so he can get to the right place to justify his call.

But third and perhaps most telling of all, Nigel Farage has denounced the manifesto he and UKIP fought the 2010 General Election on as "486 pages of drivel" which he had never got round to reading and which he has now disowned.

And no wonder; this was a manifesto that promoted a "flat tax rate" - massive tax cuts for millionaires and substantial increases for everyone else; it opposed any regulation of banks in spite of the wave of bad practice and corruption revealed by the 2008/9 crisis; and it even planned to introduce compulsory dress codes in theatres.

Drivel indeed - but let's get this right: although he was not leader at the General Election, Farage was leader until a short time before, stood as UKIP's most prominent candidate and resumed the leadership a short time later. And for all that time up until today, this allegedly Honest Man of British politics, this straight guy who says it how it is, was standing on a platform of drivel, promoting policies he had never even read. Really? This is the man who plans to restore trust in politics?

Unbelievably, he has now said UKIP won't have any new policies this side of the General Election. So we will be being asked to vote for a party with no policies - apart perhaps from whatever Nigel can scribble onto the back of his fag packet while he queues for his next pint. What are we left with? An ability to say whatever UKIP want to say at the time, but watch out for a change next week? Or, more worrying, a licence to play up any and every prejudice without any accountability? It is rank populism - like the US Tea Party.

If we do ever leave the EU, if Farage has his way, the chances are we would be quickly incorporated into the orbit of the libertarian wing of the USA, a sort of offshore 51st State of America, open for international big business and complete with our own huddled masses to fill the sweatshops. Stockbrokers' stock would rise accordingly.

All thanks to Nigel.

What a bloke. And what a joke. But who's laughing?

The Boston Tea Party - UKIP and the End of Britain

Erm....thanks, but no thanks?

The Boston Tea Party was in full swing earlier today. In the area of Lincolnshire covered by the orginal town of Boston, the rightwing, populist United Kingdom Independence Party took five of the seven wards up for election. It was part of a major breakthrough for the party, which took 16 seats in all on the local county council to become the official opposition. Tonight, the BBC estimates its national vote share at 23%, eclipsing the junior coalition partner the Lib Dems and snapping at the heels of the Conservatives on 25%.

So who are UKIP?

Established over 20 years ago by anti-European Thatcherites who wanted to leave the European Union, it has an essentially elitist/populist rightwing agenda - anti-Europe, anti-immigration and anti-"benefits scrounger". It opposes controls on the banks and backs massive tax cuts for millionaires. It  supports a so called flat tax of around 31% of income (this would also incorporate national insurance) - meaning tax rises for the majority of people and substantial cuts for the elite. In foreign policy, it wants the same relationship with the EU as Switzerland and Norway enjoy - associates rather than members, seeking the benefit of multinational companies to the detriment of ordinary employees in the name of so-called competitiveness.

UKIP is headed by Tories - its leader, Nigel Farage is a former stockbroker and son of a stockbroker, and a former Conservative Party activist. Most of its leadership hails from the Thatcherite wing of the Tories. It is backed financially by big business and some very wealthy people, whom it backs in return. But it plays on a classic divide and rule agenda - struggling to pay your mortgage? Well, that's because of Asians/fake disabled people/slothful benefits scroungers, etc. Nothing to do with corrupt bankers or millionaire tax dodgers. The majority of its voters are former Conservatives, but it has also tapped into disillusioned former Labour supporters, playing to an anti-migrant agenda - in Lincoln, for example, against the eastern Europeans who have moved there to work in the agricultural sector. It offers divisive but powerful explanations for society's problems, playing on the fears of the vulnerable and by doing so reinforcing the hold of the elite.

Farage likes to portray himself as a blokey man-of-the-people, pint and fag in hand, although the velveteen jacket lapels and checked bonnet can't quite hide his hankerings for country squire status. And behind him are some fairly unpleasant characters. Never mind that in the last European Parliament, several of his MEPs ended up in trouble for fiddling their expenses, with one actually jailed, while more recently the sole female MEP left because of alleged bullying - one of his colleagues, Godfrey Bloom, who sits for Yorkshire, openly backed the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by the French secret services, apparently forgetting that a photographer was killed as a result.

UKIP candidates and elected representatives have called for a range of bizarre, antiquated practices, including not employing women of child-bearing age and taxing bicycles. Additionally and very oddly, they are committed to subsidising nuclear power to almost the equivalent of what they claim withdrawal from the EU would save the taxpayer. Like their Italian and American counterparts of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Palin's Tea Party, they portray themselves as anti-establishment when in fact they are both of the establishment and keener than ever to reinforce its hold over ordinary people.

But of course people often don't vote for policies - they vote instead for the narrative: and UKIP's narrative is straightforward - vote for us for a return to a mythical 1950s of white guys in pinstripe suits and bowler hats smoking in the pub on the way home from the office, polite kids, women in the kitchen, gays in the closet and a grateful Empire. They are the "Madmen" of British politics - for as long as politics remain British.

For there is a further consequence - even if the Farage name has Gaelic rather than Saxon origins, UKIP is not British. It has little presence and even less interest in Scotland. For United Kingdom, read England .The party, for example, plays up the myth popularised by the right-wing media that Scots benefit financially from the English taxpayer. Lord Monckton, the party's deputy leader, recently depicted the Scots as dependent on "subsidies from Britain", ignoring the fact that Scotland actually contributes a larger per centage of public revenue to the UK Treasury that its population share merits - 9.4% of tax revenue from 8.4% of the population.

UKIP's rise mirrors the rise in English people identifying as English rather than British - in the 2011 national census, only 29% of the population of England viewed themselves in any way as "British", and 55% of UKIP supporters in one recent survey choose the option of "I am English, not British." or "More English than British." So the "UK" part of "UKIP" looks increasingly misleading, whatever Farage may claim to the contrary.

And so UKIP's successes today may further the view among a growing number of Scots that, faced with an increasingly neoliberal rightwing political consensus in England, it will bode well to leave an ever more fractious Union. This would free Scotland to preserve and develop a more egalitarian society independent of the somewhat harsher worldview that is emerging in English politics.

With UKIP working to repeat its showing in next year's European elections and Scotland voting in its independence referendum just a few weeks later, 2nd May 2013 could one day be looked back on not simply as the date of a surprising result in English local polls; it may also ultimately be seen as the day when the United Kingdom itself finally began to unravel.

And if you are reading this in Scotland, looking south at what is emerging between the rightwing Coalition Government, the continuation of neoliberal New Labour and the rise of the Faragists, why on earth not?

Back to the future or forward to the past - UKIP's ideal workplace?

To Serve and Protect...?

Just two weeks from now, England and Wales get the rather unwanted opportunity to elect Police & Crime Commissioners in 41 districts. These new roles, as covered in an earlier post, replace the somewhat more inclusive and democratic committees that have had oversight of the police service until now. The Home Office and the Coalition Government apparently believe that having a single "personality" in charge will somehow "restore trust" in the police system, according to its website.

Prescott running for Police Commissioner

Yet just precisely who are some of these personalities? As the Guardian showed, most are simply serving or former local politicians, with some ex-police and servicemen. Perhaps the most prominent is the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott who is standing in the Humberside region. Although now a member of the House of Lords, "Prezza" is still keen to make his mark in his native area. Given Labour's apparent inbuilt electoral strength there, he should be a dead cert; but with turnout likely to be the lowest in history, with predictions as low as 10 - 15% of eligible voters, any sort of upset is possible.

Facing Prescott is the UKIP candidate, one of their sitting MEPs, Godfrey Bloom. He has a checkered record in terms of his service as a Euro-MP for Yorkshire and Humberside, starting with all sorts of weird comments about women. In the police election, reducing the number of speed cameras and speed traps is one of his main concerns, in spite of their proven utility in reducing accidents and deaths.

But arguably one of the most controversial episodes for someone standing for a policing post was the film he made himself standing next to a Greenpeace boat applauding the bombing by limpet mines of the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Services back in 1985, a terrorist act which killed a photographer, Fernando Pereira, and sank the environmentalist ship. "Vive La France!" he intoned with a Eurosceptical smirk.

"Godders" seemed to think it was all a bit of a wheeze, though to be fair he had apparently forgotten about the fatality, which he found "extremely regrettable and indeed unacceptable" when I wrote to remind him back in early 2010. However, rather than go on to condemn the actual bombing, he wrote that

"The biggest threat to us today is not terrorism but eco fascism.  It is eco fascism closing conventional power stations, trying to stop the building of new ones that work.  Destroy whole communities with the ludicrous windmill fanaticisml Hundreds die every year of hypothermia, thousands more will join them after 2015.  Green taxes and significantly higher fuel bills will drive industry abroad and impoverish old age pensioners....." 

It seems that environmentalists ."..bear responsibilities for deaths on a much bigger scale than the IRA or Al-Quaeda, and all based on fraudulent and junk science of which ordinary people are now being made aware.

Yours sincerely

Godfrey Bloom"

So, if Bloom becomes PCC for Humberside, we may face some "interesting" new initiatives being proposed to the police in pursuit of his peculiar view of true crime. Voters beware.

And here, for the record, is Bloom's video: