So the Cypriots have given Angela Merkel and the EU the finger – instead they have turned to Putin’s Russia

Cyprus turned to Russia for help on Tuesday night after the country’s parliament overwhelmingly rejected a tax on the deposits of bank savers.

Despite warnings from the EU not to touch the Russians with a barge pole Cyprus is looking for help from the KGB men who now rule Russia and have been using Cyprus as a “helpful” venue for laundering investing their hard earned “profits”

It could be seen as a smart negotiating ploy – calling the EU bluff. I would imagine there might even be a bit of panic in Brussels because if just one Eurozone member decides to go it alone politicians in Athens, Rome and Madrid will start having second thoughts and the whole Euro farce might start to unravel.

Prepare to add another notch for UKIP…

The Daily Mail picked up from The Commentator and UKIPIAN the case of Amy Rutland, the Labour Party official who fulminated against Eastleigh UKIP candidate Diane James on last week’s BBC Question Time (James, you might recall, very nearly snatched victory from the Liberal Democrats)

The question was about the impact that UKIP might have on the Tories future electoral hopes.

the camera swung to Amy Rutland, who launched a personal attack on the UKIP panellist, the Eastleigh candidate Diane James, calling her ‘disgusting’.
Miss Rutland, a politics graduate, claimed UKIP preyed on vulnerable people by ‘scaremongering’ about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to Britain.

fortunately Diane James remained unhassled and dealt with her in a calm and effective manner – and there it would have ended if some salient facts about Amy Rutland had not emerged over the next few days.

Rutland is South-East Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party

Although identified by Stephen Twigg, the Labour MP on the QT panel, merely as “a questioner from the audience” she had been with him at a meeting earlier in the day
Now in itself there is no reason why a political activist should not be present in the QT audience. But there is considerable suspicion that the BBC was aware of her presence and that the chairman, the millionaire David Dimbleby, not only picked her out but then kept her in the spotlight by highlighting her remarks and pressuring Diane James to react rather than answer the original question

I suspect that Dimbleby and the producers choreographed the whole scene hoping to unsettle UKIP’s Diane James (who had impressed the media at Eastleigh) and to undermine UKIP’s policy stance on immigration.

Unfortunately it has backfired on them. Rutland has gone underground and the Beeb is backpedalling furiously.

But never mind – it was all paid for out of our pockets via the BBC Poll Tax (and it’s likely that £450,000 goes each year to David Dimbleby)

That Eastleigh by-election, so the pundits tell us, is looking like a Lib Dem win although, in politics,nothing is a certainty until the votes are counted. Locally the Lib Dem machine is well established and their canvassing effective and efficient – but it could be that the most significant outcome of the election might well be not who wins but who comes third….

I suspect that another story next Thursday night will be how well UKIP does. They are surging there and I’d be surprised if they didn’t come a strong third. When I was down earlier in the week, I found it picking up voters off all three parties. It is getting disillusioned working class votes in Eastleigh town itself, which is a bit of the de-industralised north in Hampshire. While out in the more prosperous parts of the constituency it is picking up protest votes off the Lib Dems as well as playing on concerns among Tory voters about how sound Cameron is on Europe, immigration and tax.

Maybe a response to this piece actually hits the nail on the head

UKIP represents working class Britain, whether in-work, out of work, or retired from work. The other parties represent the wont-works, the on-benefits, the we-want- benefits, and the socialist state employees. And the penny is finally dropping. Voters : please don’t fall for the ‘don’t split the vote nonsense’.
At the heart of democracy is voting for whom we want, not for whom we don’t want.

There is a time in politics as well as in all things when one must eat one’s words (or some of them) and give credit where it is due. David Cameron’s speech was a good one, carefully crafted to bring out some home truths without sneering at our European partners as a bunch of Johnny Foreigners smelling of garlic and trying to seduce our women and steal our silver. By offering a straightforward in/out referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU in 2017 on the basis of a negotiated repatriation of certain powers he made a bold, and honest, commitment. There are none of the familiar weasel word which politicians conventionally use when making public promises – “almost certainly”, “certain circumstances”, subject to these conditions”.

There are always voices saying “don’t ask the difficult questions.”
But it’s essential for Europe – and for Britain – that we do because there are three major challenges confronting us today.
First, the problems in the Eurozone are driving fundamental change in Europe.
Second, there is a crisis of European competitiveness, as other nations across the world soar ahead. And third, there is a gap between the EU and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years. And which represents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is – yes – felt particularly acutely in Britain.

For once it was Cameron as Thatcher, not Cameron as Blair.

It‘s a canny move. It might well have for the moment shot the UKIP fox, which had been threatening to bite at Tory heels – though I suspect that puttting a bet on predicting Nigel Farage’s political demise would not be the wisest of moves.Indeed one could argue that Cameron’s offer has been forced on him by the impact of Farage And UKIP. However Dave has left Labour in complete disarray. As for the Liberal Democrats, who in 2007 were supporting a referendum, they are busily backpedalling, calling the idea unhelpful.

This must be sweet music to Tory ears – those champions of the “people” Clegg and Milliband boxing themselves into a corner and saying actually we, the great and the good, not the public, should decide these matters.

The fact that political has beens like Mandelson, Clarke and Heseltine are against a referendum is clearly a badge of honour considering that all three were once fervent advocates of joining the Euro. Add the French and President Obama to the mix and it must be drinks all round.

The only voice that matters in all this is the one that emanates from Berlin and Cameron must be pleased that Angela Merkel is not going negative on the idea of having a second look at the power relationship between the EU and member states.

Maybe, just maybe, Dave might have a bit of backbone after all……

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage has a letter box mouth, eyes that look as if they will pop out on stalks at any moment and a face that seems to pull in different directions on the cusp of every grin. When he speaks he sounds very much like an on course bookmaker shouting the odds. His views are disdained by the media elite and the political class and you are unlikely to find him at any North London dinner party. He is a PR consultant’s nightmare….

….and yet he and the party he leads, long dismissed as a collection of nutcases, fruitloops and pub bores is edging near to 20% in opinion polls. When he appears on BBC Question Time, for years the graveyard of right wing pundits thanks to its chattering class chairman and an audience carefully selected to skew leftwards, he always goes down well. He also proves more than a match for the great and the good on the panel who discover much to their chagrin, that he is remarkably articulate and skilful in debate.

It’s not so much his euro sceptic views that win him support (though that must never be dismissed as a factor) but his very lack of smoothness, his everyman persona that immediately detaches him from our ruling class, the wealthy, soft figures like Cameron, Milliband and Clegg who have never really had long term experience of work outside politics and who began their rise to the top three quarters of the way up the ladder thanks to influential families and friends.

It is these characters and their cheerleaders in the media who paint Farage and his party as buffoons who could never be trusted to make tough decisions and run the country in an effective and efficient manner – as if their years of governing have not been years of failure consisting mainly of short term, short sighted and flashy “initiatives” threaded with lies and undelivered (and often undeliverable) promises.

Farage is an outsider, he is not of the political class and is not constrained by the conventions of that class. Have a look at this video – unlike many featuring Farage it is not a two minute sound bite designed to make public impact. Forget the cartoony face and the odd diction – just concentrate on what he is saying and then ask yourself if this man is speaking for you rather than speaking at you.

You might be surprised at your reaction.

This man may be political gold.

Well, just when the great and the good were hoping that UKIP might be losing momentum because Dave was going to make His Great Speech about having a vote on renegotiating that EU directive on turnips rather than a straightforward in/out referendum the genie jumps out of the lamp and grants Nigel Farage and his party three golden opportunities.

The speech is still some way off but already dire warnings have been issued by “business leaders” (bankers – yeah, they have proven to be so upright honest and businesslike) – CBI (aka big global corporations) – and assorted suits. “We will lose out on exports to the EU” they cry. Excuse me? Presumably EU countries buy our stuff because it meets their needs, not out of charity for the UK.

Then some smooth US State Department poobah says that President Obama wants us to stay in the EU as a bagman for the USA since the French and the Germans, who actually run the EU, have never been fond of America. Also, of course, Obama and his henchmen are still wedded and glued to that old 1950s shibboleth of regional superstates – after all they are working hard to undermine the powers of the individual US states and upgrade federal power (Obamacare, Stimulus, gun control etc). A Washington/Brussels Axis would be so much easier to manage with no pesky politicians upsetting the apple carts – just the bureaucrats and diplomats codifying and making deals in cosy conferences.

Then, of course, the entry of the ultimate cartoon character, the German..

Gunther Krichbaum, chairman of Germany’s European affairs committee and acting as Angela Merkel’s ventriloquist’s dummy, used a visit to Britain to condemn Dave’s referendum tactics. “Ve distrust allowing ze voters to have any say in ze way ze EU is run. Ve know vot ze people vant much better than zey do und ve vill not be blackmailed into renegotiating ze EU Turnip Directive” (well he didn’t actually say that but it sums up the gist of his blathering)

With the carpet being pulled away from under Dave’s feet his Master Plan (kick in/out into the long grass by waffling on about renegotiation) is already looking like last weekend’s pizza. Several of the Tory government’s big guns have noticed UKIP snapping at their heels in recent polls and are leaning towards a referendum on in/out rather than one on a cobbled together list of renegotiated powers.

Which is why Nigel Farage’s UKIP has been given this good fairy gift. A banker, an American and a German telling us that we shouldn’t even have a referendum on our relationship with the EU? That will make most of us even more determined to demand one – because, oddly enough, what is good for global banks, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel does not always align with what is good for Britain.

Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster) is the latest hired gun to join the “Let’s derail UKIP” offensive but in terms of broadsides a peashooter would have been more effective.

After a public row about same-sex marriage, Ukip have gone from smug to scared

What actually happened was that a spotty student type who was leader of a UKIP youth group had been interviewed on BBC radio and burbled as only callow youths can. He appears to be, from his utterances, a rather immature type of libertarian, blathering on about gay marriage, bestiality, incest etc. The UKIP leadership ditched him fairly quickly, not because of his views but because, as a party official he would be expected to publicly support party policy

Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster) thinks that UKIP has blown a gasket here and will immediately lose support.

I am not so sure about that.

Gay marriage is a massive issue amongst the media class but outside the North London dinner party circuit it remains a very damp squib – and this is exactly why people are taking a closer look at UKIP. Farage and company are very much not part of the political/media/academic elite, an elite which over the past fifty years has ridiculed and despised the views of ordinary people on issues like crime, immigration and political correctness. So using gay marriage as a stick with which to bear UKIP is a surefire loser.

As for the squashing of a pimply 21 year old narcissist….most of us are sick and tired of having to treat the immature views of youthful politicos as if they are of great import. They have little sense of responsibility, many of them catapult straight from university into some form of media/political internship with little, if any, long term experience of the real world of work – then, like Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Milliband they then have the audacity to lecture us on how we should behave.

Sorry Mr Jake Wallis Simons (novelist, BBC broadcaster), far from putting off potential support, giving a pompous and opinionated young whippersnapper a swift kick in the backside – and out of the door – will have most ordinary folk giving UKIP a standing ovation…..

As the FT has recently suggested UKIP and it’s leader Nigel Farage are riding an anti-politics wave. The latest poll puts the party’s support at 15%, almost double the numbers for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats (8%)

Perhaps more people are beginning to agree with Nigel Farage when he says this…..I know I do……

“We just think it’s about time we started to put the interests of Britain and British people first.

“We’re run by a bunch of college kids, who have never had a proper job in their life.”

Hey, folks – President Obama and his team do not like all this stuff happening in Britain about the rise of UKIP and growing support for the UK getting the hell out of the EU.

They don’t like the Eurosceptic signals being given out by a David Cameron who is very worried that many conservative voters outside the Notting Hill metro elite bubble are abandoning his party and shifting to UKIP.

“It is important to state very clearly that a strong UK in a strong Europe is in America’s national interest,” said a senior US administration official. “We recognise national states but see the EU as a force multiplier.”

Well, Mr President, surprisingly enough we feel that serving America’s interests is not the primary function of any UK government. We would dearly love to have a government whose lodestar was always putting the interests of the British people at the top of it’s agenda

Funny isn’t it that an American administration which has consistently failed to pay due regard to our shared political and cultural traditions should be putting pressure on us to stay in the EU for the sake of the USA.

The EU is a bloated bureaucratic monstrosity, inefficient and corrupt

Maybe that’s why Obama loves it so much….after all he did cut his political teeth in Chicago….

UKIP is the only political party gaining support in the latest round of opinion polls – shooting up to 14% and pushing the Lib Dems into fourth place.

Cue for a chorus of sneers from assorted politicians and pundits..

“False dawn”
“It’ll never happen”
“Protest vote”
Etc, etc etc

Dont be too sure. Although Cameron’s Tory toffs are down to 28% there is no really significant yearning for Labour’s Milliband and Balls….39% is hardly a massive endorsement, even with the full weight of the BBC behind them. A lot of Labour voters want stricter immigration controls and less taxpayer’s hard earned cash going to the feckless and indigent – and they don’t believe Labour economic policies will work.

Voters in general are extremely mistrustful of the political elite and their puppet masters in the media/cultural elite who love to speak on behalf of “the people”….who claim to know what we need better than we do ourselves..
A lot of us have hesitated to throw our lot in with UKIP because it did seem such a forlorn hope. Now even the broadsheets are having to take it seriously – the next few months could see a surge in membership and some serious money going UKIP’s way.

The times they could be changin’…..