Morning after…

I was born at Lockington Hall, an 18^th century country house 20 miles NW of Leicester in the early hours of Wednesday November 20^th 1940. Alas this was not my family’s ancestral estate – it had been requisitioned by the Govt as a maternity home for expectant mothers from areas being bombed by the German Luftwaffe at the start of WW2……altogether 2000 of us young Brits were born there during those war years.

Starting on 7 September 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights. More than one million London houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London. My South London mum was six months pregnant when the London Blitz began. My dad had been called up into the army and was away “somewhere in England” manning anti-aircraft artillery. Imagine what it must have been like having to spend every night during the last months of your pregnancy down in a cellar hearing the crash of guns and bombs up above, never knowing if the next one was coming down on your house to blast you into kingdom come. Being evacuated to a peaceful rural mansion a fortnight before your due date must have seemed like a minor miracle.

In actual fact in November 1940 the area was not too peaceful. Just a few hours before I was born the Germans launched a devastating raid on nearby Leicester.

Before November was out mum and I were despatched back to South London and further air raids. Dad was granted some leave at times but in early 1942 he was sent off to North Africa and Italy and the next time I saw him was in 1945 when he was demobbed….

Mum, Dad & me…1941

Listen to most of the political class and media pundits talking about UKIP and there are two dominant narratives

UKIP HAS PEAKED AND WILL FADE AWAY AT GE 2015

UKIP IS JUST A PROTEST VOTE

Hmmmmm…..

UKIP HAS PEAKED AND WILL FADE AWAY AT GE 2015

John Harris at The Guardian

supporting Ukip is essentially an act of defiance and a hostile media is one of the forces Ukip’s most enthusiastic fans think they are resisting. Indeed, the place of the media in this story shows the rise of Ukip to be as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one.  Tellingly, a lot of Ukip supporters defiantly describe themselves as “English”, a deep, complex identity that transcends the dry stuff of elections and voting behaviour. At its core is a latent anger about snobbery and the supposed sidelining of the white working class, and antipathy towards most things considered “politically correct”, which can explode in response to stories and events that are said to fit that basic narrative. Ukip will not win all of the Westminster seats it is targeting, ……But make no mistake, Ukip’s support now runs deep and wide, the public’s faith in mainstream politics shows no signs of any revival and through 2015 and beyond, what Nigel Farage calls his “people’s army” is hardly likely to go away.

UKIP IS JUST A PROTEST VOTE Tim Black at Spiked

And this is why UKIP’s emergence is so potentially significant. The withdrawal of the party-political establishment from the public, its separation from the people it is meant to represent, has finally been seized upon. The emperor is wearing deeply unpopular clothes. Or to put it another way, UKIP is effectively confronting the political class with its own estrangement from vast swathes of British society. To those who have long been condescended to, whose views and lifestyles have been dismissed as backward or unhealthy, UKIP offers a voice. To those whose sense of dislocation amid so much politically championed social change have been ignored, UKIP offers a bulwark. And to those who have found little to vote for from the mainstream political melange, UKIP offers an opportunity. (It’s no surprise that a survey of UKIP voters at last year’s Eastleigh by-election revealed that over 20 per cent had not voted at previous General Elections.)

Fascinating….and what is strange is that both Harris and Black are left wing commentators. Strange that they can be a little more perceptive than the “experts” at supposedly right wing organs like the Telegraph, the Mail and Spectator…..but then they don’t have to keep in with Tory HQ

For just a few days after the No victory in the Scottish referendum last September there was much talk of the need to “do something” about England.

The prime minister promised a devolution revolution across Great Britain, including votes on English issues by English MPs at Westminster, as he hailed Scotland’s decision to remain inside the UK.

Polling data appears to indicate that “English votes on English issues” has the support of a clear majority of the people of England. How that could be done is obviously a matter of opinion. My own view would be relatively cheap and cheerful…no separate English Parliament providing yet another gravy train for politician and civil servants. Instead, when debating and voting on matters pertaining to England only (e g education, health) the Commons sits as a committee of English MPs only, excluding Scottish and, maybe, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs.

Simples…

Except that, suddenly, the Labour Party began to get nervous. Tapping their calculators brought forward the unappealing prospect of taking out 59 Scottish MPs from those “English votes”…hardly any of them conservative.

So the rhetoric began to change and devolving powers to “the regions” became the mantra – and you can see why. Not only could the boundaries of some of these “regions” be gerrymandered to fit the core Labour tribal vote but there would be plenty of new troughs for political and bureaucratic snouts to gorge themselves on taxpayer funded goodies.

Naturally they roped in their left wing allies at the BBC who sent Mark Easton to do a series of vox pops. He wrote an interesting post on the history of local government in England but but he framed the discussion with a subtle  piece of subliminal propaganda

Calls for English devolution raise a thorny but age-old question – how might England be broken up into regions?

Notice how with one of the findings of the BBC poll

Some 80% of people in England support having more powers devolved to local areas, a poll on devolution commissioned by the BBC has suggested.

“local areas” has suddenly morphed into “regions”

Now nobody would deny that there are some issues which justify some form of regional strategy (transport comes straight to mind) but there is no reason why existing local authorities cannot be involved alongside Westminster and other interested parties. To set up a completely new  layer of administration providing outwork for even more politicians and bureaucrats smells of only one thing..

Another Gravy Train – paid for by us….

Rod Liddle at the Speccie has gone all Dan Brown and reckons he’s cracked the UKIP code….it’s a London thing…

 I suspect that the real pull of Ukip in England is that the party, and Mr Farage particularly, are seen as a corrective to the vapid, flaccid, spineless, politically correct and wholly London-centric mitherings of what, until May next year, we must call the main three parties.

I do love it when media hacks and TV pundits who know frack all about UKIP and its 40,000+ members pontificate about the motives of its supporters and why it is rising in the polls. Fact is these scribblers and prattlers have long lists of contacts in the lobby and among the bright young things at party HQ (whose parents they know from their own Oxbridge days)…they are all constantly networking, sharing gossip and swapping nannies.

UKIP leadership cadres simply do not move in these circles and, until a couple of years ago, were, at best, politely ignored or, more often, treated with contempt by these hacks. Even today, like their political contacts in the three main parties they cannot bring themselves to contemplate the possibility that the tectonic plates have shifted. Come “real politics” next May they are convinced that UKIP will fade away and once again North London dinner parties will be where it’s all happening. – so why bother to cultivate any UKIP contacts?

Hence the tendency to treat the party in a similar way to those newly discovered tribes from the depths of the Amazonian forest. There are a few photos published in the Daily Mail alongside a report big on hype and short on facts, a brief flurry of media interest that peters out after six days – and then the whole story just..evaporates.

I suppose it was a bit like that in St Petersburg in the last few months of 1916….

The Telegraph’s resident guru on US politics, Dr Tim Stanley, puts the boot into Obama

The midterm elections were the reckoning. After six years of Obama, America finally passed judgement. And the Republicans won in Florida, Maryland, Colorado, Arkansas, West Virginia, Texas and the President’s home state of Illinois. This much is certain: no matter how disappointed the American people are in Barack Obama, the feeling will be mutual. One senses that he’s never been a huge fan of the voters.

You are a bit late catching this bus, Tim….some people pointed out in 2008 that electing an empty suit backed by the corrupt Daley machine who had zilch experience at running anything and was minded by a seedy collection of Chicago chic lefties and expecting him to guide the US through choppy waters just because he was “black” was a recipe for disaster. They were shouted down with cries of racist, not just by the usual Guardian/BBC leftists but also by pundits at the Telegraph who swallowed all the hopenchange bilge. Buyer’s remorse from the same stable is all a bit too late

But you can’t keep a pontificating pundit down. He also saw the midterms as a useful tip for No !0

The Republicans are breaking new ground with voters – and that won’t be lost on David Cameron………

In the midterms, America elected its first ever black female Republican congressman – Mia Love from Utah….. The future of the party is probably best represented by Susana Martinez, a Hispanic woman who comfortably won re-election as governor of New Mexico.

Isn’t it odd how “experts” like Tim always manage to post articles like this after the results are in. I’ve followed Mia Love’s political story in Utah for several years…never seen her mentioned by Tim before. Similarly with Susana Martinez (endorsed by Palin in 2010 BTW)…and he still leaves out Nikki Haley (a woman of Hindu heritage, Tim) who was successfully re-elected as Gov of S Carolina

He could have spent the last few weeks spotlighting many of these people with some in depth analysis but he stuck to vapid generalisations usually cut and pasted from the tame “conservative” pundits out of New York and Washington – then he falls into the default position of the commentariat by constructing a false alignment of two entirely different electoral systems

Remember when after 2008 Cameron was told to emulate Obama and go Guardian/BBC via hopeandchange? Remember when 2010 he won a huge majority when facing the open goal of the Blair/Brown inheritance?

Funny, I don’t remember that second one either…..