Wow…something from an Anglican Bishop that would not go down too well at a North London dinner party? I kid you not…

Rt Rev Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, warned government policies promoting childcare were focused on the interests on parents returning to work and not what was best for children.

The Bishop was taking part in  a House of Lord debate about Samantha Cameron’s…whoops..David Cameron’s latest get-the-women-out-to-work-at taxpayers’-expense wheeze

David Cameron’s Childcare Bill offers to double free childcare for three and four-year-olds from 15 hours per week during term time to 30 hours. The Tories argue the measure will ‘help parents who want to work’.

The good bishop had the sheer audacity to imply that the so-called Conservative government’s plans were “putting pressure on parents and mothers in particular to be valued as economic units rather than having the most important role of parenting their children valued”.

He’s battling a lost cause, of course. We have been told that our rulers want another 500,000 more women in the workplace by 2016 and the new child care proposals will help the UK reach that target.

Why?

Who the hell said that? It’s a target we need to achieve and we need to achieve it, like, yesterday. Conveniently it’s a nice round number that can easily be remembered and constantky quoted, not like, say, 437,492. Whoever heard of a f###ing target like that?

OK – but why? What is the rationale behind that nice round plump quotable number?

It’s the EU, ennit….

According to the Treasury the target of getting nearly 500,000 women into work “would allow the UK to match the female employment rate in Germany and the second-highest overall employment rate in the G7 grouping of major economic powers.”2 The EU’s five year Gender Equality Strategy states that Europe has a target employment rate of 75% overall for women and men by 2020. 3 According to EU data4 the “UK was 1 of 10 countries to have reached the Barcelona targets for children aged 0-3yrs old. In the UK, 35% of children aged 0-3 were in formal childcare in 2011, although most (30%) of children were in part-time childcare”.

 …and those awkward mums who who don’t want to spend the pre-school years working but want to be at home caring full time for them are giving two fingers to the Barcelona target.

Trouble is that it’s not only the state that wants both parents working – there’s a whole raft of commercial interests that need parents to spend in order to increase profit. Spending is good and the advertising industry and its willing accomplices in the media exist to squeeze those extra pounds from our pockets and purses.

But ‘twas not ever the case. When we (both teachers) married in 1967 we knew we wanted a family but we were prepared to wait 3/4 years to put some money aside for the time when my wife would no longer be working. We had a mortgage for our modest suburban semi-detached that took a chunk of our income to repay but did not overstretch us (Building  Socieities in those days had very strict lending rules). During the four years before our firstborn we were very careful with our money. We went out to eat and/or drink very rarely. We did not take holidays but instead maybe went out on the odd day trip. Although we both liked to dress fashionably we were not slaves to style – and when the kids came along my wife gave up work to be a full time stay at home mum and we continued to be careful spenders.

Our only extravagance was a car. We’d seen mums struggling onto buses and trains with children and pushchairs and bags and  felt that a 1970s lower middle class family could do better than that. But it was not, of course, a new car. Like everyone else we began with a well worn second hand Ford Anglia. In other words (how old fashioned) we cut our coat according to our cloth. We “made do”…baked our own cakes, made our own squash, sewed a lot of our own clothes.

Eventually, once our second born started primary school my wife returned to a measure of part-time teaching and we were able to enjoy a few more creature comforts. But we never regretted the frugality of those early years. The love and interest and attention we (or rather my wife) was able to devote to our children could never be measured through quantifiable units – you cannot easily measure quality.

Today’s parents appear to be unwilling to make such sacrifices. A new car (or cars) seem to be de rigueur. Holidays abroad are simply a must-have. Restaurants and pubs now need to be children friendly so that meals can be eaten out and a lively social life maintained.

But this costs money – so both parents need to work to afford such goodies…which is why the government is pushing at an open door when, according to the bishop, it hints that a stay at home parent is…well…to put it bluntly a tad…unpatriotic…

 But debating the plan in the Lords, the Bishop of Durham warned the focus on childcare creates the impression ‘that a parent choosing not to work but to raise their child themselves is somehow not doing the best for the nation or the child’.

 Sorry, Bish old bean – you are just a voice in the wilderness…..(now where have I heard that phrase before?)

Nigel Farage has written a knife sharp article about TTIP.  It is great stuff and I agree with every word. The trouble is by being willing to have it placed in Raheem Kassam’s Breitbart London he appears to be signalling that RK is an OK bloke…and that is a big mistake.

How Farage can write for a website run by a weasel like Mr Kassam who over the last few days has been sneering at UKIP and saying some odd things about Farage himself is a mystery. His recent outburst in the Guardian proves that Suzanne Evans and co were dead right about Mr Kassam….he shouldn’t be touched with a UKIP barge pole.

Nigel’s choice of Kassam  was one of the worst decisions he has ever made. Just when UKIP was beginning to be treated as a serious party this clown jumped in and acted like a throwback to the fallow years before 2010. A man who has no backstory of election campaigning became Nigel’s campaign aide – and didn’t manage to win the seat for him.

The keyboard warriors who infest Breitbart love him – I suspect those of us actual members who tramped the streets for UKIP (and are nearest to the voters) despise him

Kassam is a carpet bagging keyboard warrior who wrote Nigel’s tweets and advised him how to sell himself to the electorate. His campaign was so successful that Nigel failed to win the seat. Mr K is now spitting bile about UKIP via the Guardian/BBC who are still having orgasms about yet another opportunity to denigrate the party.

RK is peddling the myth that a handful of UKIP’s top brass plotted against him. Not true….it wasn’t “a few jealous insiders” who saw him as an accident waiting to happen – he was mistrusted at all levels from HQ to local branches.

As for Breitbart London during RK’s absence James Delingpole and Milo Yiannopou‎los had started to turn it into a website that fulfilled Andrew Breitbart’s original intention of showing that right wing writers could be witty as well as keeping  abreast with cultural fashion. RK’s return and their departure indicates the likelihood that the more discerning readers will surf elsewhere and the site will attract the tinfoil hat brigade and Russian trolls….what a tragedy.

Nobody can deny that the last two weeks have not exactly been been the greatest for UKIP as we shot ourselves in the foot over Nigels “unresignation”, the dispute over Short money and some loose tongues  It was a gift to our enemies in the media (especially at the Telegraph and Mail) and we simply have to bite the bullet until it becomes yesterday’s news and the inevitable Tory “failure to deliver” starts to hit the headlines.

In the meantime UKIP must continue with the process of establishing a lean, mean and professional party apparatus if it wants to shift up a gear and capture those extra six million votes that would transform it into a serious political force. Nigel is perfectly aware of his own strengths and weaknesses and the need to establish a more collegiate approach to leadership so that it becomes Team UKIP rather than Team Farage but he was probably justified in cracking some heads together to restore order.

Fortunately over the last year or two we have built up an impressive cadre of activists – Paul Nuttall, Diane James, Suzanne Evans, Steven Woolfe (and yes..Patrick O’Flynn) all come to mind but there are others. They have proved to be able advocates and staunch defenders both on TV and radio and have taken a lot of the strain from Nigel Farage’s shoulders

But, despite the unwanted media attention, we must not forget that nearly 4m voters supported UKIP candidates in the general election, we have one MP and hundreds of local councillors – and the control of one council. The party is putting down roots but it is still a fragile plant. Consolidation must be the priority for the next year or two, not just at HQ but also at branch level. We need to encourage all our members to play an active role in their local branches and develop a seeding policy to set up new branches in fallow areas.

Above all we must ensure that we keep hold of those 4m voters and attract another 6m by 2020 – or, how about this, in terms of percentages…25% of the votes by 2020, 50% by 2025. Let’s call it UKIP’s 25/50 plan.

A fantasy – well anyone who said in 2010 that UKIP would get nearly 13% of the turnout in 2015 would have been sectioned so why not reach for the stars?

Is anyone else as angry as I am about this UKIP infighting?

Nearly 4m votes, third largest support by far, one MP, two near misses, hundreds of seconds and very few lost deposits.

Significant swathes of support in traditional Labour areas in Wales and up north. Eastern areas still loyal. Numerous gains in local elections.

All this from a 2010 base of just above zilch. In fact one can bring it forward in time to early 2013 when our first significant gains in bye elections and local elections shook the legacy media out of its metropolitan comfort zone.

We should be celebrating, sticking it to the man. Rubbing their media noses into the mud for the abysmal failure of their orchestrated smear campaign….instead we are on the back foot, bemused by a public display of handbags at dawn from the party’s head honchos.

What a betrayal of those millions of voters who disobeyed orders and went with UKIP and those platoons of volunteers who trudged the streets for The Purple.

Many folk are heaping calumny on Patrick O’Flynn and I suppose his asides to the media were not particularly helpful. But I have the impression that his outburst was sparked off by the unedifying catfight between elements of Team Farage and Douglas Carswell over the short money. Moreover I feel that Nigel made a big mistake in appearing to take up a position against Carswell on this matter. DC is the Tory version of Labour’s Frank Field – a granite rock of integrity against which even the stormiest waves of attack can leave no mark.

I love Nigel. His contribution to the growth of UKIP has been immense. No other political figure in recent times has had to endure such a vicious and unending campaign of denigration and vilification as this man – much of it, disgracefully, from the pages of the Telegraph and Mail. But he definitely fumbled the ball with the quite bizarre “unresignation” episode. It was quite unnecessary. He had given himself a period of grace of several months to reflect on his future as leader. By passing the temporary reins to Suzanne Evans he chose wisely for Suzanne made a favourable impression across all political lines with her handling of the media and the production of a manifesto so well presented that no hack or political opponent could tear even one page apart.

I suspect that elements of Team Farage suddenly panicked. The prospect of Suzanne taking over the mantle with ease raised made them recall the successful SNP transition from Salmond to a little known Sturgeon and proving that UKIP could survive and thrive beyond Nigel and, without Nigel there would be no Team Farage.

It seems clear that much of the “don’t go away for even six months, Nige” surge was as orchestrated as a spontaneous love in for Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Nigel’s mistake was to accept it at face value. It undermined the reputation that he had built up over the years as a plain speaking bloke who meant what he said.

In fact this episode of leaks and innuendo is merely the latest of a long line of poisonous anonymous “briefings” over the last year or so from disaffected elements within UKIP, many of them popping up at Breitbart where James Delingpole and others have been waging a subtle campaign against “RedUKIP” in the hope of returning it to its libertarian free market roots and targeting Farage because he was one of the first to notice that many disgruntled Labour voters were going UKIP. It’s almost as if the Delingpole brigade looked back to those halcyon days when UKIP had little electoral support but the few could comfort themselves with clutching their Ayn Rand books and being voices in the wilderness.

We cannot afford this. By this time next year we know that the Cameron mirage will have faded – he won’t be able to deliver on the referendum conditions, immigration or his Micawber like dependency of hoping something will turn up to pour into the bottomless pit of the NHS and Foreign Aid. Labour will still be tearing itself apart trying to be left and right at the same time.

You owe us that, Team UKIP. We are here in our masses, ready to cross the Rubicon and all we can see are the senior officers hitting each other with their handbags.

Knock it off, you lot – this is not about petty squabbles – we’re talking about saving the soul of our nation.

It begins….We now have incontrovertible evidence that only a few days after the Tories election victory the evil Murdoch and fat cat bankers have ordered Cameron to means test all hospital patients and send the poorest into forests for their operations – these signs attached to trees in a rarely visited forest in West Sussex are conclusive proof.

Naturally the illegal Cameron regime is spinning like mad and denying the accusation but we ask – what other possible reason could there be for these notices>

To rub salt in the wound we understand that the money saved will be used to erect a massive statue of Gove crushing starving teachers into submission right outside the offices of the NUT.

Comrades it is time to SMASH THE SYSTEM!!!!!!!!

We call on all revolutionaries to infiltrate the next BBC Question Time audience and cheer Diane Abbott, champion of the proletariat when she mentions “cuts”, “food banks” and “austerity”. Afterwards a collection will be held to support Lutfur Rahman, driven out of his position of Mayor of Tower Hamlets by fascist bully boys.

Will all revolutionaries please tell their parents to instruct the au pair to stay by the phone in case a solicitor is needed……

Sob story in the Telegraph today by James Kirkup demanding that UKIP “apologise” to DT hack Christopher Hope about the response of kippers to his “innocent” question at the launch of the UKIP Manifesto.

According to The Speccie it happened thus

Unlike the Liberal Democrats’ launch this morning, Ukip did take plenty of questions from the media — including from the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope. He asked why there was only one black face in the manifesto and the room exploded with boos and cheers — egged on by party staffers —  until a group of black and Asian supporters stood up and the jeers turned into applause.

In actual fact it appears to me from the Speccie vidclip that Hope’s question was initially greeted with groans rather than boos…

However Kirkup hinted that poor Christopher might have been traumatised by the negative reaction. After all he is a Lobby Correspondent so much more familiar with the carefully choreographed world of the Westminster political village – and he does have an extremely “stressful” – lol – life (as you can see from his rather pooterish contribution to this brief report about The Lobby)

Well, if he is traumatised then it serves him right. It wasn’t a genuine information seeking question – it was a snide little piece of stirring that actually backfired as black and Asian kippers stood up to show their contempt.

Hope and his Telegraph colleagues have spent three years pouring scorn on UKIP and denigrating the party’s membership and supporters. There has been little (if any) attempt to make any serious analysis of why UKIP has grown. Instead kippers have been characterised as cartoon freaks.

What makes the whole affair even more laughable is that you would have to dig very deep into the online Telegraph to find a staffer with a black face. But Mr Hope, who is, we are informed, so knowledgeable about politics, didn’t know that Steven Woolfe, MEP, whose photo adorns the immigration section of the manifesto, is mixed race.

Perhaps he ought to get out of Westminster a little more often…

It must have seemed a good idea at the time at Telegraph HQ. In the wake of the BBC2 UKIP hit piece (“six months of filming, focus on four people”)the DT let loose their “showbiz editor” Anita Singh just to add a few knifecuts to the supposedly twitching UKIP corpse.

Well, folks, Anita delivered, in spades. Naturally she homed in on Cllr Rozanne Duncan’s “negroid” comments to imply that she had revealed the true face of UKIP – subliminally reinforced with a screenshot of a Times article on the subject. Then, just to add fuel to the flames she revealed that Ms Duncan not only smoked but also rolled her own fags….quelle horreur!!!!!!

But that was not enough for the “gifted and talented” Ms Singh. As a demonstration of her journalistic skills she showed a pic of Nigel Farage with a local vicar and poked fun at a UKIP official’s name…nudge nudge, wink wink, gedditt?

But for Anita the killer moment was when she was able to prove how UKIP members were so common and unsophisticated, dahling….they actually have collections of porcelain clowns…..oh  my gawdddddd. Who the hell are these people?????

Well, Anita, no doubt you and the other Telegraph hacks were screeching with laughter in the wine bar – there’s probably not a single porcelain clown in any part of Richard Curtis Land where you and your media/showbiz gaggle hang out. But in places like Margate and Thurrock and Clacton and Grimsby, well outside the metropolitan bubble, you’ll find quite a few….clowns, cats, shepherds…

Of course Cllr Duncan’s remarks were ill considered and the party acted quickly by expelling her. But if you look at it from another angle after six months filming that was the only major blooper that emerged – hardly a devastating indictment of the whole Thanet South UKIP membership.

But the fact that Anita Singh was so keen to sneer at the clowns says more about her and her media friends and their failure to grasp the significance of the UKIP surge than it does about the ordinary folk of the Kent coast.

A few days ago The Daily Telegraph sank to a new low in its coverage of UKIP. Of course it seems hardly possible that the circulation losing Telegraph could sink even lower in its coverage of UKIP. After all their hacks, no doubt under instructions from Tory HQ, have been merrily dumping on the party since early 2013 when Diane James nearly won the Eastleigh by election for UKIP and knocked a Cameron cutie into third place

Publicly dismissing Eastleigh as a blip, in private the editorial team reached out to Tory high command and offered to headline any item that appeared to show Nigel Farage and UKIP in a negative way supplied to them by Tory staff – be it true, half true or simply inadvertent. The Telegraph (and the Mail) gleefully went to work in the weeks leading up to the 2013 local elections.

UKIP won more council seats than they had ever won before.

Nevertheless during subsequent by elections, local elections and Euro elections the anti UKIP drumbeat continued – and the party continued to prosper both at the ballot box and the polls.

Finally the bright young things in the Telegraph officers mess have begun to grasp that their two year offensive has been a dismal failure and they have admitted such in a recent, rather pathetic cri de Coeur

If Labour’s performance in the long general election campaign has thus far been so risible, why do the polls remain so close? For the simple, frustrating reason that the British centre-Right is split. While Labour is stuck at around 30 per cent of the prospective vote, the Tories fail to build up a comparative advantage because so much of their support is sapped away by the Ukip revolt. Yet Ukip’s supporters ought to consider the warnings of businessmen and think carefully about the consequences of dividing the centre-Right and letting Labour back into power by default. Labour is anti-capitalist at a time when the country desperately needs innovation and enterprise. Its accidental victory could indeed be a “catastrophe” for Britain.

Yes folks, it’s the familiar Vote UKIP Get Miliband Ploy – the old ones are the best ones, after all.…

Ignoring for the moment the assumption that UKIP supporters are fans of big business, multi nationals and corporate tax avoidance let’s just ask ourselves why the Telegraph failed to answer the obvious question – why is so much Tory support “sapped away” by the UKIP revolt – and why, instead of burying their heads deep into Cameron’s posterior for two years hasn’t the Telegraph given some attention to analysing this phenomenon and made a serious and sympathetic attempt to understand it rather than encouraging the sneering, dismissive put downs peddled on an almost daily basis by their political hacks.

The answer, I fear, is that the Telegraph, like much of the metropolitan media, is targeting Richard Curtis Land, those parts of London where the bright young things supposedly chatter at dinner parties and network about servants, food, fashion and culture and where the Tesco shelf fillers, taxi drivers and hairdressers are peripheral to the action, like the sentries or country yokels in a Shakespeare play.

Trouble is that the Richard Curtis strategy isn’t working. The Telegraph is remorselessly losing circulation, alienating much of its old core readership without gaining the “bright young things” while UKIP is gaining support from those very “peripherals” who feel they have been left behind.

Sad for it was once a great paper…

Wow – the Electoral Commission decided to do a bit of a clampdown on fraud by cross checking the electoral roll with other public data sources and – guess what – 5% of “voters” in Bradford appear to have vanished into thin air….

The new, more secure system requires people to register to vote individually, rather than allowing one person to sign up an entire household, and was designed to clamp down on electoral fraud.

Of course those “ghost voters” didn’t boost the numbers for Bradford’s two MPs Lib Dem David Ward & Respect’s George Galloway, both well known for their anti Israeli views……

Interesting post at Conservative Woman by Nicholas Booth helpfully deflating the Al Murray balloon and – shock/horror – questioning his motives in claiming that he will be standing against Nigel Farage in Thanet South.

I doubt Al Murray (or his alter ego, The Pub Landlord) will be doing any door stepping in the constituency but, if he did, what sort of returns would he get? How likely is it that even one householder would suddenly be convinced that Ed Miliband is the best man to bat for Britain on the international stage? So, what can Al Murray’s motivation be?

Here’s some news just in. His publisher – Random House Penguin – is launching a new Al Murray product to coincide with the election publicity campaign. Given the long gestation period of a book, this must have been months in planning.

Murray is a moderately amusing one trick pony entertainer. His background, of course, is very “posh” but, unlike James Blunt, he covers his origins up with with a mockney accent (in character, natch) and has fashionable liberal/left views. Above all his alter ego is constructed to caricature and demonise the white van men. Thus, naturally, he escaped the sneers of Chris Bryant re posh boys/girls dominating our cultural scene.

While he remained merely a marginal showbiz celeb very few of us gave him any thought. But the move into “politics”, while probably a very shrewd PR move by his managers and agents in terms of media coverage, has made him a legitimate target for criticism – and he doesn’t like it. A man who makes belittling and embarrassing individual members of his audience a big part of his act appeared to be very sensitive to such slings and arrows when they were fired at him on Twitter (see @almurray) complaining of name calling etc.

For people like Murray satire is very much a one way street…

But the prize for the biggest Murray blooper must go to former left wing Daily Mirror hack Tom McTague, now slumming at at the Mail. After a well researched in depth investigation into UKIP ace reporter Tom came out with this gem about Farage

His election bid was also dealt a blow after stand-up comic Al Murray announced he would stand against Mr Farage as his TV character ‘The Pub Landlord’.

I’m sure the man who duffed up Nick Clegg and is making both Labour and the Tories very nervous is shaking with fear at McTague’s revelations….