“Let’s calm down, Ukip’s popularity won’t last” proclaims David Aaronovitch from the peaks of Mt Olympus in Islington

“Association with Ukip and the bigots in its core membership won’t help the Tories pick up those votes.” simpers bright young Tory thing Kate Maltby

“Nigel Forage’s earthquake seems remarkably short on aftershocks” sniggers The DT’s political guru Benedict Brogan (Remember Brogan’s insightful “UKIP slipping” prediction just before the recent elections?)

Only three of hundreds of articles about UKIP that have been scribbled by metropolitan hacks over the last few months. From the Telegraph alone you would set your chimney alight if you tried to burn them all at once. “Analysing” UKIP has proved a goldmine, especially for the mainly white middle class penpushers and keyboard tappers who infest the broadsheet “Comment” pages. Pontificating from their book lined studies in their million pound houses in Notting Hill and Islington they predict the future with the arrogant confidence of those Roman seers who would tell you your fortune after slitting open a live chicken and throwing it’s entrails across a glistening marble floor –for a few pieces of gold, of course.

The Roman seers can be given the benefit of doubt because they could claim to be operating at a time when a belief in magic and the powers of the supernatural was deeply embedded within the culture of the time.

We should not give our broadsheet hacks such an easy way out.

The fact is that not any one of them is able to make any prediction based on incontrovertible data. They know very little about UKIP. Since when did any of them make any effort to highlight anyone from the party other than Nigel Farage – apart from recycling any smear or innuendo dug up by unpaid interns from Tory HQ. How many times have they contacted local branches to get some sort of insight into who these UKIP members are and why they joined? Why is any interview driven by references to oddball quotes (both true and untrue) by a tiny minority of members?

It’s because they just cannot grasp the concept of a party that has managed to move from the outer edges of the political fringe to the centre of public debate within two years. It is a phenomenon that is as far from their view of the world as the ships and muskets of the Spanish must have been to the native tribes of America.

None of the leadership cadre has ever been a big player in the political arena. They are not regular attendees at North London dinner parties. They have never been part of the Westminster village. They do not mix or marry into the media elite.

Their voters are from deeply unfashionable places – Great Yarmouth, Lincolnshire, Rotherham, Dudley, Thurrock, and Portsmouth. Their roots are from both the Tories and Labour – and many have never had any interest in politics before.

It’s like an alien invasion. Who the hell are these people – and what do they want? Why are they here? It’s an intriguing moment when proper journalists should be eager to expend shoe leather in answering these questions.

Instead you get people like Aaronovitch blithely predicting the future course of UKIP without even cutting up a chicken.

Evidence based analysis? My arse!!! It’s more like Political Astrology…..

Stephen Glover in the Mail today

Anyone who has the remotest sympathy for the abused underdog will have felt for Nigel Farage as the major parties and much of the media have lined up to trash him.

How true….as Peter Oborne pointed out in a characteristically trenchant article a few days ago

Much of the media has obediently been doing the work of the three main parties. The BBC’s normally admirable political editor, Nick Robinson, interviewed Mr Farage in the tones one might employ for a convicted international war criminal.

Agreed – though maybe Stephen could have signposted this before the election? Anyway better late than never’

But then Stephen goes one hundred percent porkie pie…

 Most newspapers of Left and Right (though not the Mail) have depicted Ukip as an extremist party inhabited by fruitcakes, crooks or dangerous lunatics.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Did Paul Dacre or Lord Rothermere tell you to slip those brackets in, Stephen? Because the Mail, just as it did before the local elections of 2013, has been the pack leader in publishing and constantly recycling both the smearing titbits thrown to them by the industrious zero hours interns at Tory HQ and garnering unsubstantiated quotes from former colleagues of Farage who clearly had an axe to grind……leading to that surreal moment when the Mail had to settle out of court for spreading a false story about Mrs Farage.

Pull the other one, Stephen…..

The most surreal Dan Hodges moment of the 2014 election…in Croydon a white “anti racist” zealot labels a black UKIP member “Racist Scum”

Isabel Hardman at the Telegraph owned Spectator Coffee House blog on the UKIP street event in Croydon (I doubt if the fragrant Ms H would ever go further south of the river than a Clapham dinner party – it looks as if she “commented”…)

Ukip’s we’re-not-racist ethnic minority carnival in Croydon always looked as though it was going to provide plenty of material for sketchwriters and critics. It was another attempt by the party to showcase its non-white members and candidates, with local candidate Winston McKenzie on hand too.

The event did not go as planned, apparently, so UKIP could learn lessons from the Tories

The Conservatives have become increasingly control-freakish about their big campaign days, excluding the press in favour of selected broadcasters so that the party can stage manage every moment as much as it possibly can.

The Tory party “stage manages every moment as much as it possibly can”……which is exactly why it has become less like a political movement and more like a corporate PR show where the audience is as much part of the stage managed presentation as BGT. UKIP is a living, vibrant force of nature driven by an enthusiastic membership – sometimes shambolic, always passionate – the equivalent spirit of a village fete. This might be the reason that it retains a certain measure of popularity.

Secondly, and sadly, Ms Hardman has had months during which she could have visited Croydon and met up with Winston McKenzie and other black Croydonians and asked them why they supported UKIP…you know, Ms H, do an actual bit of shoeleather journalism. But no, you would much rather pop down there and mock Mr McKenzie and his friends……indeed there is almost a hint of a sub text here, y’know, coconuts, Uncle Toms, stoogesw…real black men and women or Sikhs or Hindus or Moslems would never support UKIP

A shallow, cheap and patronising piece of hackery….

That the Telegraph, Mail and other papers had reached an agreement with Tory HQ that they would be fed the details of UKIP candidates making questionable/oddball statements (usually via Twitter/Facebook) in return for ignoring  or downplaying similar remarks/actions from the candidates of other parties is blindingly obvious. Low level, zero contract Tory interns provided a similar service during the run up to the 2013 local elections.

The process is straightforward enough.

The names of these UKIP members are  inserted multiple times in successive articles about UKIP in order to give the impression that a) they are legion and b) to imply they are just the tip of an iceberg.

The next stage, however, is the most important. The writer must create an atmosphere of frenetic mass disapproval as if the whole nation in pubs, shops offices and homes puts aside all other topics in order to declare their shock/horror, or, as the Mail often puts it, UKIP is once again “engulfed in controversy”

Ukip is taking a pounding, but will it make a difference? The polls give the party first place on Thursday in the Euros, but anyone reading across the papers would wonder how that can be. The main parties must wish there was a bit more time to go before polling day, as they reckon the tide has further to turn ( Benedict Brogan)

Similarly the pundits will big up someone who “fearlessly” tells Farage (or any other Ukipper) that he/she is  “Racist – Xenophobic – Fascist – Fearmongering – homophobic – Islamophobic etc etc” and applaud them for “stopping the UKIP bandwagon in its tracks” or even engineering a “car crash”. LBC’s resident pseudo socialist, the middle class public school educated 40 something white blowhard James O’Brien is the latest in a list that includes Tory politicians Eric Pickle and Anna Soubry.

Just think of all the trouble that could have been saved in the Thirties if LBC’s James O’Brien had been around to interview European party leaders. It was O’Brien, you’ll remember, who cross-examined Nigel Farage on air last week and derailed the Ukip leader’s election campaign ahead of Thursday’s vote (Iain Martin)

Over egging the pudding, Mr Martin? In Telegraph anti UKIP world fantasy reigns supreme….a mouthy talk radio host is transformed into James the Hitler Killer…

Thus is created the all important Narrative, the implication that many ordinary folk are so easily swayed by “bigotry” or “anger” that their unsophisticated minds simply cannot know what is best for them and they need to be guided back onto the proper path by those wiser souls who have true insight.

Trouble is it appears to be only those “wiser souls” in the political and media metropolitan bubble who are “engulfed” in the “car crash” “pounding” that they have created from their own imaginations. The ordinary voters do not appear to be taking any notice of the media’s anti UKIP fenzy at all…

 I wonder why?

“It’s OK Mum, he promised me an IN-OUT, but only in 2017 when it’s legal.”

H/T Guido Fawkes

The pundits at the Telegraph and Spectator went into overdrive with the latest Guardian/ICM poll and the changes since last month. Reading between the lines (and remember that Brogan and Hardman especially have a hot line to Tory HQ) the Tories are quietly confident that it’s all in the bag, all part of the master plan that will see them coasting to victory in 2015

Support for Labour drops six points as Tories take lead in latest ICM poll. Labour support falls to 31%, Conservatives rise one point to 33%, Lib Dems are up one on 13% and Ukip rises four to 15%

Only one problem – Tory support has virtually stayed the same, as has the Lib Dems. One party. Labour, shows a decline greater than the margin of error.  One party shows an improvement greater than the margin of error – UKIP.

Wonder where those UKIP votes are coming from?

Meet Laura Wilkes

Laura Wilkes is Head of Policy and Research at the New Local Government Network. Laura joined NLGN in November 2013 after a number of years at the Local Government Information Unit, where she led policy programmes on Community Budgets, local government finance, economic development and citizen coproduction. Prior to this, Laura worked in local government and is a graduate from the National Graduate Development Programme.

Yeah yeah she’s a classic Think Tank Labour drone so was so astonished at seeing a Pakistani chap leafletting for UKIP that she forgot all protocols and tweeted about it because surely in her little world UKIP IS RAAAAAAAACISTTTTT.

Anyway she soon realised she had committed the cardinal leftist sin of humanising UKIP – so she deleted the tweet.

Unfortunately or her the eagle eyed scourge of all right on middle class liberal/left trolls LittleBlueDr had nailed her…

https://twitter.com/LittleBlueDr/status/465533086785363968

No wonder our ruling class just don’t get UKIP….

A couple of days ago Isabel Hardman at The Spectator’s Coffee House blog briefly let her mask slip when she cavorted with glee over the selection of Roger Helmer as the UKIP candidate for the forthcoming Newark by election

His selection as the party’s candidate for the Newark by-election is a gift for CCHQ, which now needs a teaspoon rather than a spade to dig out awkward comments the MEP has made.

The Speccie , like The Telegraph (both owned by the rather secretive Barclay brothers) has, since the beginning of 2013, consistently sought to undermine UKIP either by constantly recycling and repeating the remarks of a handful of oddball members and, between the lines, implying that they reflect the opinions of the party’s ever increasing membership.

It’s the oldest trick in the book – guilt by association. Strangely, however, they never appear to use reports of the antics of many of our current set of MPs to push that implication to its logical conclusion – that Parliament is full of fraudsters, drunkards, gropers and liars.

Hardman is comparatively new to the Westminster media village so her lack of nuance could be put down to experience. Not so her DT colleague Benedict Brogan. He has been reporting on politics for many years and, until recently, could be relied upon to provide an insightful and perceptive analysis of the political scene.

Over the last few months, however, his comments about UKIP have followed the DT/Speccie line of recycled put downs and sneering asides, arousing suspicions that, like Hardman, he is working quite closely with Tory HQ.

But even a worm can sometimes turn and it looks as if Mr Brogan might well have decided to re-assert his independence

Will Mr Helmer make a difference? He’ll certainly attract publicity for the Ukip campaign. He’s up against the typically vanilla candidates chosen by the main parties……………………………Yes, Newark is ripe territory for the Ukip insurgency. It’s the ideal place to give Dave a bloody nose. The Tories can’t make too much of Mr Helmer’s behaviour, because his most egregious remarks were made when he was a Tory, and the party did nothing about them then.

Perhaps BB had a preview of this report in The Guardian

Ukip’s Newark byelection candidate Roger Helmer was greeted like a celebrity as he launched his campaign to be the party’s first MP – in a sign his controversial comments about rape and homosexuality appear to have had little effect on the electorate.

The 70-year-old was cheered by market traders as he visited the Nottinghamshire seat, which was vacated by former Tory Patrick Mercer after a lobbying scandal.

Helmer will be hoping to replicate and build on Ukip’s previous byelection gains, which has come from a tiny proportion of the vote to take second place in five of the past seven contests

It’s rather strange, isn’t it, that a paper which would appear to be diametrically opposed to most, if not all, of UKIP’s political positions, should actually go to Newark and report on Helmer’s campaign and treat him fairly in an interview when the Telegraph/Speccie are content to rely on their own self generated caricatures.

Cameron’s Palace Guard, perhaps?

Scribblers at the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator (both owned by the Barclay Brothers) have made much of the recent Policy Exchange report which predicts that Britain’s non white population (currently 14%) will be 30% by 2050. They use the report to knock UKIP (quelle surprise) and chatter on about “diversity”

Strange how all these Speccie/DT scribblers celebrate “diversity” and tell us how good it is for those of us who make up  the great unwashed – yet there is very little evidence of “diversity” in the ranks of the scribblers themselves. They are almost universally white and could hardly be described as multi ethnic (but I suspect their cleaners, nannies and gardeners are…..)