UKIP


Not my MEPs

Going through an old hard drive yesterday, I came across the files for the “Nick Griffin is NOT my MEP” design I did when that disgusting little racist toad slimed his way to a seat in the European Parliament. It seemed appropriate to update the design.

Ann Widdecombe is NOT my MEP and Nigel Farage is NOT my MEP, are available on a variety of items- from T shirts to tea cups- in my Redbubble shop.


Brexit Blues

Oh well, that’s us fucked, then.

In the short term, it’s possible I’ll be a tiny bit better off, because the largest single day drop in the value of sterling now makes my few American book sales worth more. Of course, that’s going to be a tiny consolation when the inevitable slash and burn budget does its best to take away what’s left of everything that’s good about this country.

Almost immediately, the Brexiteers were saying that they hadn’t really promised all those things they promised. Which is nice.

Some people who voted Leave are trying to tell the rest of us that they didn’t mean it, really, and they’d take it all back if they only could. It’s hard to be angry at such stupidity.

The section of the Labour Party that lost the last two elections think that this is a great time to get Jeremy Corbyn out of the way, so they can start work on losing the snap election they hope will be called for November.

If anyone wants to set up a Kickstarter or Patreon that will ensure David Cameron doesn’t go a week without getting at least one email or letter that’s just a picture of a pig, I will try to scrape together some money to back it.

And if any Brexiteer wants to sneer and call me a bad loser, I’ll know that, if the tables were turned, they would have spent the day throwing the biggest toddler tantrum ever, whilst claiming that MI5 had stolen the result in some pencil based conspiracy.


Do you really want to be trapped on an island with these people?

So, we’re halfway into the second week of what’s going to be a tedious and depressing EU referendum campaign. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the country has already become bored and irritated by it all.

I’ll come straight out and say that I’ll be voting to stay in. There’s a lot wrong with the EU, and the only way to fix the problems is by staying in and arguing more effectively for reform*. Also, it’s naive to think we won’t be affected by EU policies if we leave. We’ll still have to meet the standards they set if we want to trade with them, and there’ll be a load of new restrictions on travelling, living and working on the continent.

My stance puts me in the unsavoury position of being on the same side as David Cameron, George Osborne and Tony Blair. I’ll live with that. Not least because of the incredibly low quality of so many of the Brexit supporters. A short list, off the top of my head-

Nigel Farage A caricature of the worst stereotypes of England made flesh. The only good thing I can say about Farage is that, whichever way the vote goes, he’s going to be even more irrelevant after June.

Boris Johnson A man who plays the buffoon in the hope that we’ll not notice all his cheap political game playing. And the fact that he is a bit of an incompetent. It’s hard to take seriously any claims that Boris’ stance is for anything other than the chance to be leader of the Tory party and possibly PM.

Michael Gove Gormless, useless little man, who has only got as far as he has by taking advantage of the friendship he has now betrayed with the Prime Minister.

Iain Duncan-Smith Let’s face it, Duncan-Smith wants out of Europe to save his own skin. He’s scared that a European court might one day hold him to account for introducing policies that have driven thousands of the most vulnerable to early deaths and pushed people to suicide.

Nigel Lawson Walnut faced former Chancellor who now makes millions of pounds conjuring up weak arguments for gullible climate change deniers to keep spouting, thus slowing down progress on fixing the greatest imminent threat to everyone’s way of life.

John Redwood Supposedly hyper-intelligent former minister, who was once known as the Vulcan, but now looks more like Dobby the house elf. Redwood’s highly intelligent and deeply considered opinion on matters of climate change and energy policy somehow always sounds like the sort of thing Nigel Lawson’s group has dreamt up for gullible climate change deniers to repeat endlessly.

David Icke Really. David Icke supporting something is the equivalent of having it stamped “100% guaranteed bullshit”.

These are the people who will be running this country if the referendum results in us leaving (well, apart from Icke, he’ll probably say something incoherent about lizards, then disappear back to wherever it is he hides). They are scum, and they’ll be even harder to escape from, because they’ll trash your chances of going to live and work in Europe.

A vote to stay could be the first part of a double whammy. First, do serious damage to the careers of the would-be leavers by rejecting their campaign. This will have a knock-on effect of destabilising, maybe even splitting, the Conservative party**, offering an opportunity for more sensible parties to sweep in and kick them out at the next election.

It might not happen, but I’m an optimist.

*And kicking out all the UKIP MEPs. Really, is there anything less useful than a UKIP MEP? They’ve been elected to something they want the country to leave, and their constant refrain is how terrible the EU is for Britain. They could use their positions to fix those problems, and make things better for thr UK. But then, that would show that the EU is capable of doing good things for Britain, making the case for staying in. So UKIP MEPs must just sit on their hands and make things worse, because it’s the only way they can achieve what they want. They’re actively making things worse for us, under the pretence that they’re working to make things, somehow, better.

**Actually, either result could have this effect. But In is the best for the majority of us.


UKIP are racist? Who’d have thought

Labour won the Oldham West and Royton by-election yesterday, with UKIP coming in a distant second. Nigel Farage, who had been claiming their candidate was going to win easily, has gone straight to blaming immigrants

In multiple interviews, he insisted that mass immigration and the increase of ethnic minorities meant democracy had “died” in parts of Britain.

He repeatedly cited a report he claimed to have read in the Guardian last Saturday.

“The northern correspondent of the Guardian wrote last Saturday that she knocked on the doors of a street in Oldham where nobody spoke English, nobody had ever heard of Jeremy Corbyn, but they were all voting Labour,” he told the BBC.

“So there is a very large ethnic vote in this country in our inner cities. They vote Labour indeed and in one of the boxes last night it was 99% Labour and almost the electoral process is now dead in those areas.”

He went on:

“What I’m saying is that mass immigration, the change to our demographics in Britain… is fundamentally changing politics. The system is widely open to fraud and there is an ethnic element to British elections which we’ve never seen before.”

It goes without saying that the Guardian report doesn’t mention streets full of immigrants, or masses of people who don’t know who Corbyn is, but will vote for him anyway.

The race baiting and immigrant blaming started before last night, though. I follow the RSS feed of a Salford UKIP activist’s website. It’s an incoherent and often painful read, which feels like you’re being fed snippets of his stream of thought after a couple of lunch time beers. He posted a variation of Farage’s lament this morning, but, on Monday, he posted this-

UKIPThink

Something to think about
11/30/2015
10:10 pm
Swinton South UKIP
mole45

According to the 2011 census more than 50,000 of the 220,000 population in Oldham are from an ethnic minority. There have been some reports that some Asian voters have lived in the area for more than a decade and do not speak English – but will vote Labour.

It’s worrying to me in a sense that parties could bow to the minority sector to maintain it’s power base no matter what the view of that minority was. The figures are from 2011 i would not be surprised if those figures are inflated dramatically today.

I’ve posted a screen shot from my Netvibes feed, because the original post isn’t there any more. Perhaps he had a think, or maybe someone suggested he remove it. Either way, a UKIP activist on Monday was making the same sort of claim that Farage is today.

I hope the defeat in Oldham is a sign of the great UKIP deflation that’s long overdue.


Are UKIP fighting for irrelevance?

Nigel Farage is believed to have forced UKIP’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to refuse his resignation despite opposition to the plan. Breitbart London understands he considered reneging on his commitment to resign before he even made the announcement on Friday.

The source for this story- Breitbart- is not the most reliable, so take it with the requisite amount of salt. But, at the same time, it does sound like the sort of shambolically bad behaviour you’d expect from the Kipper in chief.

Source: Farage Forced Through Leadership Confirmation – Breitbart


The Kippers have joined the tinfoil hat brigade

No, we’re not out of the #GE2015 woods yet… Ukip voters have been venting their frustration at Nigel Farage’s loss in South Thanet by claiming to vote was rigged to keep him out of parliament.

It’s not going to rank up there with the conspiracy theory greats like 9/11 and Diana, but there will always be someone who just won’t let this delusion go.

Even UKIP supporters shouldn’t feel sorry for Nige, he’s still and MEP and can carry on over claiming his expenses whilst failing to work for the British people there for a few years.

Source: #ThanetRigged: Ukip Voters Think There Was A Conspiracy To Keep Nigel Farage Out Of Parliament


Pity the poor, picked on Kippers

I didn’t watch the opposition leaders’ debate on Thursday, but I’m guessing that it didn’t go so well for head Kipper Nigel Farage. I can tell this by the number of UKIPies whining about the “Left-leaning” bias of the studio audience. Here, for instance, is Salford UKIP’s moan. They complain that

Of the 200-strong audience, about 58 were Conservative or Ukip supporters while about 102 backed left-leaning parties – Labour, the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru or the SNP. The rest – 40 – described themselves as undecided.

The Daily UKIP (Express) put it that 2/3rds of the audience supported left (ish, in the case of Labour) political parties because, scandalously, they had been recruited to be as close as possible to the political make up of the country as a whole. It seems no-one has told Nigel that he isn’t the most popular person in the country, the second coming of Clarkson, from whose fundament the sun will never set. Despite the horrendous bunch we’ve suffered for the last five years, the country is mostly to the left of Nige.

And if the anger against reality wasn’t enough, the numbers don’t even support the complaints anyway. This was the opposition leaders’ debate. 4/5ths of those leaders were from left(ish) leaning parties yet, only 2/3rds of the audience was to the left. Farage’s constituency (the purple gang are just Tories with higher blood pressure, after all) was over represented, as far as the parties in the room went.

If UKIP can’t handle the fact that a lot of people disagree with their Dear Leader, then perhaps they’re better off not getting any power.

(Full disclosure- I’m standing for Salford council as a Green in the Langworthy ward. You should vote for me. If you’re not in Langworthy, you should vote for your own Green candidate as a proxy way of voting for me. :-P)


Vote for Policies

Unlike the polls that the papers and TV news always report on, Vote for Policies is an assessment of what policies the people of Britain would vote for. It’s possible I’m biased- because Green policies are much more popular than the polls would have you believe*- but I think the site’s results should be part of the wider media coverage of the election. Rather than seeing what today’s message failure has done to Ed or Dave’s popularity, how about seeing what people think of their policies.

Take the test, it could be enlightening. Also, it has now been brought up to date with all the released manifestos.

*As I write this, the Green Party is third, after Labour and the Lib Dems. Add the Scottish Greens to their rating and they edge, just, into second place.


More from the moron party

Some of UKIP’s brightest stars are so stupid that they’re beyond parody. Roger Helmer, UKIP MEP for the East Midlands, thinks he has the answer to climate change.

I guess Roger locks himself in an insulated room with a massive heater as soon as sunset comes around, because otherwise he’d turn into some sort of grotesque purple ice sculpture. How do he and his colleague who thinks burning fossil fuels is the only thing keeping plants alive muster the intelligence to even get on the train to Brussels?


UKIP is the party for moron based life forms

According to UKIP, or, at least, the UKIP member who should know, there were no plants before the Industrial Revolution happened. This is not a joke, this really is a statement in the European parliament by UKIP’s agriculture spokesman Stuart Agnew MEP.

Yes, in UKIP land, if we cut human carbon emissions to zero (we can hope), then all the plants will die. Because, obviously, the only carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the excess we’re pumping into it to screw it up.

The ‘but plants need CO2!’ argument is a very old, very dumb climate change denialist meme. Maybe Stuart Agnew really is dumb enough to have fallen for it, or maybe he’s craven enough to take the carbon industry money for repeating it and thinks UKIP voters are too stupid to see through it. Either way, he’s too stupid to keep his job. Sadly, we can’t vote him out in May’s elections, but we can try to keep UKIP out of the House of Commons.

Don’t vote moron.

(via Vox Political/Pride’s Purge)


VoteMatch- find the party with the policies you want

VoteMatch lets you check what you want from your politicians against what they’re offering, in this case in next month’s Euro elections. Unsurprisingly, I agree most with the Greens. It’s always a relief to find you’ve chosen the right party.

I agreed with more BNP policies than UKIP ones. Don’t worry, they still came out last and second last overall.


Why I’m making sure I’m registered to vote

I had a panic yesterday, because I’m not sure whether I’m registered to vote, and the European elections are coming up. I filled in an online form, and should soon be getting the paperwork needed to check and, if necessary, fix the problem.

Here’s one reason why those of us in the North West should vote Green-

I was voting Green anyway, but the chance to get rid of Nick Griffin makes it even better.

If you’re considering voting for a slightly less racist party with a gurning toff as leader, just bear in mind that UKIP aren’t very good at keeping track of their own money* and choose candidates who like to victimise six year olds and call for enforced sterilisation of the sort of people they think shouldn’t be breeding (can’t find the link for that right now, I’ll try to provide it later).

Maybe I won’t wait for the paperwork to arrive. Maybe I should use this site to download a registration form and get it sent off.

*That’s the euphemistic way of saying that Nigel Farage has been accused of raking in expenses and donations which may have been used for anything other than party business. They’re still allegations at the moment, the “other” expenses may turn out to be legitimate. You never know.


Nigel Farage distances himself from MEP over ‘Muslim code of conduct’ – theguardian.com

Another week, another racist moron crawls out of the UKIP woodwork. No wonder Farage complains about all the attention the party gets about its idiot wing. (Actually, it’s more likely that UKIP has a tiny sensible wing attached to an idiot body made up of almost every one of their senior members.)

Batten, who was on Wednesday campaigning for Ukip in the Wythenshawe and Sale East byelection, told the Guardian this week that he could not see how any "reasonable, normal person" could object to signing the charter, which calls on Muslims to accept equality, reject violence and accept the need to modify the Qur’an.

via Nigel Farage distances himself from MEP over 'Muslim code of conduct' | Politics | theguardian.com.


Nigel Farage has no clothes on

Apparently, UKIP are scrapping their last manifesto completely and aren’t going to announce any of their new policies until after the European elections. You’ll just have to vote for them* and hope you get what you expected if they get in.

Why does this shower of idiots keep getting air time to spout nonsense?

Nigel Farage disowns Ukip's entire 2010 election manifesto | Politics | The Guardian.

*don’t vote for them


Live by bullshit, die by bullshit

UKIP is, and always has been, built upon an empty foundation of fluff and fact free rhetoric. Nigel Farage has gained himself a high media profile by saying stupid things that he knows will get him attention. Never mind the facts, lets have some mild racism, Little England short-sightedness and a pint.

So, now that he’s got where he is through talking crap (and not being called on it by most of the media), he doesn’t have any right to bleat about being hard done by when one of his councillors gives the world the comedy gold of gay weather. Even less so when his defence includes the claim that said councillor had form for stupid and bigoted remarks before his defection to UKIP from the Tories. Obviously the Cream Tea Party were too desperate to score points poaching Mr Silvester to see if he was liable to say the sort of thing that would embarrass them.

BBC News – UKIP leader Nigel Farage attacks 'gay floods' coverage.


The United Kingdom Idiots Party?

A UKIP councillor for Henley-on-Thames has claimed the recent floods are due to Prime Minister David Cameron ignoring his warnings on legalising same-sex marriage.

David Silvester, who defected to UKIP from the Conservatives in 2012 over the issue, made the comments to his local newspaper the Henley Standard.

“The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war,” he said.

Blaming the gays for natural disasters used to be the province of a certain kind of mind-searingly ignorant American politician. Now it looks like Britain’s own Cream Tea Party is taking them in on this side of the Atlantic. The media (and other politicians) in this country needs to stop fawning over Farage and co. and start properly questioning the weak bases of all their policies and pronouncements.

Next time someone at the BBC opts for the lazy option of booking a member of UKIP for Question Time I’d like to be able to slap them until they give a Green or proper independent the time and exposure that the Clown Party are stealing from them.