Labour leader Ed Miliband is eager to confront David Cameron on TV during the 2015 General Election campaign but, he claims, Cameron is scared of him.

David Cameron should stop “ducking and diving” and agree to take part in televised debates ahead of the next election, Ed Miliband said.

Cameron certainly has got good reason to be nervous of another TV Debate for in 2010 his weak performance is often credited with being the cause of the Conservatives failure to win an overall majority at that election. He had an open goal but the smooth PR man allowed himself to be Clegged.

But Milliband’s portrayal of himself as the alley cat fighter willing to take on anybody in the mean streets of TV politics is a hypocritical charade

Mr Miliband said: “I will debate [with] anybody. In the end that’s a matter for the broadcasters.

“In the end that’s a matter for the broadcasters” – and in that phrase he showed himself up to be a blustering windbag, using tough guy talk to cover up his own cowardice. Because that was his answer to someone who asked him if he would debate with Ukip’s Nigel Farage.

It’s obvious that Cameron and Miliband have made it crystal clear that they don’t want Farage, whose party’s polling now regularly parallels Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, to play any part in a TV debate. They have watched him hold his own with fellow panellists and audiences on BBC TV’s Question Time too often to fail to realise that he is a formidable debater with a message that resounds not just with disgruntled Tories but also with many Labour voters. Recent elections and polling show there is a great swathe of the working class who feel that Labour has sold them out to a metropolitan elite who despise them for their failure to grasp that mass immigration, multiculturism and the creation of a swollen class of work refusers subsidised by their taxes is the best thing since sliced bread.

Cameron and now Miliband are playing the usual establishment game of stitching us up to keep us quiet and, at present, the media is willing to play by their rules. The worn out husks of political parties that were once vibrant movements energised by mass membership are messing their pants over Ukip, as are their hangers on in the media and the lobbying “industry”

So let’s take the battle to the court of public opinion…..raise such a fuss that the media will have to sit up and take notice and shame the toadies of the political class at ITV, BBC and Channel 4 into admitting Farage into the debate.

Because we have a lever.

It’s not politics because the Grand Panjandrums of TV loath Ukip and all it stands for. But they have a higher love than politics. They worship RATINGS.

The formula is straightforward.

Cameron, Miliband, Clegg…..yawn yawn, universal narcolepsy

Cameron, Miliband, Clegg plus Farage…..ratings gold!!!

Bring it on…….

pic h/t

A vote for ukip will let Labour in says Alex Wickham.

It’s a mantra that we shall be hearing more and more over the months leading up to the next general election.  It usually begins with a statement that the author is sympathetic to much of what ukip stands for and, yes, for a long time Cameron and Co were badmouthing its members but Dave has seen the error of his ways and is now firmly committed to a referendum and immigration reform and will be “watching like a hawk…etc..etc…blah blah”

So now is not the time to be rocking the boat by putting ukip candidates in every seat (especially the marginals) and thus decanting a measure of the Tory vote and letting Labour in.

However, leaving aside the obvious issues (not all the ukip vote comes from former Tory voters / on many issues the views of Cameron and Miliband are interchangeable) there is one major flaw in the Wickham argument.

If it is assumed by many conservative politicians and pundits that a substantial proportion of Tory voters are willing to “desert” to ukip at the ballot box isn’t it a sign that Cameron’s party has alienated a significant element of their core support?  Shouldn’t Wickham and his friends be asking themselves why this has happened AND WHAT THE TORY PARTY SHOULD DO ABOUT IT?

In other words it is a problem for the Tories, not for ukip

While Cameron and his clique are in charge the Tory Party will be exactly like those abusive husbands who regularly beat their wives black and blue then sob uncontrollably and promise to reform when the wife threatens to leave.

For a few days they appear to be thoughtful and caring – then their fists come into action again.

Wickham’s cri de coeur is pure, unadulterated moral blackmail. It’s the eternal siren song of the dodgy salesman. Only a fool would buy into it and, this time, many Tory voters will say they have been fooled once too often….

Pic h/t

From his lofty eminence at the top of his pillar on the roof of the offices of The Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne, the Simeon Stylites of the political media casts his ascetic eye over the comings and goings of lowlier folk and occasionally enriches our muddled lives with exhortations to avoid vice and pursue only virtue.

Such a sagacious utterance sprang from his pen earlier this week when he offered David Cameron the silver bullet that would cause Nigel Farage and UKIP to crash to the ground in a sea of dust and broken bricks.

A vote for Ukip is a vote for a Labour government. Why can’t the Tories get this message across?

Wow – what wisdom…

Only one thing wrong with that, Mr O – many former Tories are turning to UKIP because voting Conservative in 2010 has produced a government that on questions such as the EU, Global Warming, Human Rights, Immigration and taxation has sometimes made “conservative” noises but in terms of action has clearly placed the approval of the chattering classes and their house magazine at the BBC at the top of the agenda.

That’s the trouble of observing the world from the top of a 40 ft pillar – you don’t see much of what is happening on the ground….

Awaiting his trial David Cameron’s former right hand man and dining companion Andy Coulson is still watching the PM’s back over the growing support for UKIP. He has suggested that Farage and his party can easily be defenestrated via youtube with…

An attack video demolishing UKIP’s dark side, focusing on Farage’s “less pleasant and stranger utterances”

No doubt the posh twentysomething graduate interns at Tory HQ are already working on it so, wishing as always to be helpful to those callow youths, may I suggest this as an example of an obvious Darth Farage vote loser

Surely ordinary folk wouldn’t touch UKIP with a bargepole after watching it?

On second thoughts…..

Over the last fortnight or so those bastions of the right wing press, the Telegraph and Mail, have been feeding us the narrative that David Cameron has shot the UKIP fox by sounding tough on the EU and immigration, chatting to Tory backbenchers over a Downing Street BBQ and listening to elections guru Lynton Crosby – all on the basis of one poll (several others give a different picture)

Doubtless the bright young things at Tory HQ have been schmoozing the lobby correspondents and political hacks at the DT/DM who have responded accordingly. After all they inhabit the same Westminster political/media village and, let’s face it, that village is far away from Norfolk, South Shields, Somerset or even the London suburbs, not so much geographically as temperamentally.

This is why they find the rise of UKIP as incomprehensible – it simply does not fit within the confines of the political box that constrains their view. They can only interpret events in terms of Con/Lab/Lib because….well…that’s the way it’s always been, ennit….

What they have failed to grasp is the possibility that a bunch of outsiders, with little or no contact with media hacks, lobbyists, academics, civil servants and other members of the establishment elite should begin to insert themselves into the body politic by making inroads into the electorate.

UKIP might well dip in certain polling reports as the media files the party under B for Blip – but there are certain key points that the “experts” need to remember

UKIP now have a substantial presence on quite a few local councils, controlling one and either holding the balance of power or forming the opposition in several others – party members are getting the experience of local government.

Over the last few months tens of thousands of people have joined UKIP, getting the party closer to the first goal of overtaking the Lib Dems 42,000

The party is busily consolidating and professionalising itself, using the next few months to prepare for the EU and local elections next May.

Unlike Con/Lab/Lib these new members display a degree of energy and enthusiasm that has long since drained away from the established parties

Issues such as EU membership and Immigration have only begun to be part of public debate because for many years UKIP was the only party that consistently attempted to confront them.

Above all this, however, it is not just through “policies” that political parties begin to gain traction. It is when the rest of the electorate realise that a substantial number of their fellow voters are willing to nail their colours to the party’s mast.

There has long been a disconnect between ordinary folk and the political class, evidenced by lower voter turnouts and declining party memberships. Voters began politicians and the press and broadcast “journalists” who supposedly “hold them to account”   as performers in a carefully choreographed shadow play that demanded a submissive and silent audience which could only cheer or boo on cue….a bit like the BBC’s HIGNFY

But now UKIP has given the audience the opportunity not only to get up onto the stage but also the chance to send the old established “star performers” out of the stage door and onto the pavement…

….and, believe me, the old guard don’t like it – and they will play every dirty trick in the book to keep UKIP out of the loop and break it.

Fellow UKIP members – you have been warned!!!!!

Benedict Brogan, one of the best informed political commentators in the Westminster village, penned a piece in The Daily Telegraph on Cameron’s forthcoming cabinet reshuffle. One respondent , peter63, though admiring Brogan, wondered just how detached he and his colleagues across the media from the world outside the village…

for a certain kind of Titanic-watcher, I suppose there is some interest in seeing which way the deckchairs are rearranged before ship up-ends and goes down.

Nobody at the Telegraph seems to have an inkling of the watershed change in the public mood (at least, as that mood is outside London).

There is a new mindset in so much of the nation.   What IS fascinating is to observe how little this is perceived among the DT journalists – all of them highly talented and well educated persons.

It explains to me how the courts of France or Russia could in the last months of their ancien régimes have really no proper idea of what was to overtake them.

Worth a thought….

It has always puzzled me why such a smooth operator as David Cameron should have nailed his colours to the UAF (Unite Against Fascism) mast. Anyone with any sense of historical perspective or political savvy would have recognised the UAF’s true nature as a hard left designed “front” by looking down its list of officers.

Since the earliest days of the Bolsheviks the authoritarian left have crafted “front” organisations that attract the soft left as self indulgent “ornaments” to mask the fact that the organisation is actually controlled by professional agitators. If, like me, you had been a trade union activist during the 60s and 70s you would have been constantly aware of how these people operate. At least the naive students attracted to such fronts can cite ignorance as their excuse. That someone like Cameron, with his squadrons of advisors, should have fallen for this just beggars belief.

But then if you delve deeper into the news over the last few weeks Cameron’s motives might be more rational than first glance might indicate.

Dave has obviously been rattled by the emergence of UKIP as a serious political force that threatens to make inroads not just into the Tory rank and file but also across party lines towards the urban working class. Sneering put downs from Tory ministers and tame political hacks have failed to dent UKIP’s reputation – indeed, since so many people hold both our political class and their symbiotic media elite in contempt, these attacks have backfired in spectacular fashion.

So the news that the agitprop merchants at the UAF, spearheaded by the dynamic duo of political has beens Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott, have now set their sights on UKIP as their prime target must have lit a little flame in Dave’s heart.

As recent events in Hove indicate the storm troopers of the UAF, a motley crowd of “students”, professional race card operatives and opponents of free speech have been given their orders to cause maximum disruption at any significant UKIP event particularly where Nigel Farage is present. The aim is to link the party with reports and pictures of violence and mayhem initiated by UAF with the hope that the public will begin to  associate UKIP with disorder by default – and turn back to the traditional parties.

So, as far as  Cameron is concerned…..job done!!!!!

Far fetched? You be the judge. But of course Cameron could, with one move, prove me wrong – by publicly disassociating himself from UAF….

An afterthought – how many UAF operatives have been present at these protests about the increasing authoritarian nature of the Erdogan regime in Turkey?

Just asking….

Do you still believe David Cameron – or do you, like me, suspect a con?

Maybe this Polish politician has let the cat out of the bag and the European political elite has been given the inside story.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski:Nick Clegg told me this afternoon it was extremely unlikely Britain would vote to leave EU #newsnight

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) May 29, 2013

They really think we are stupid. They believe their own agitprop that the the surge of support for UKIP is just a nine day wonder, a brief blip of protest that will disappear as the spin merchants and their media pimps attempt to switch the narrative. Tory Chairman Grant Shapps, we are told, has written a letter to local activists. William Hague might soon be wheeled out to assure the doubtful that all is well. Samantha Cameron should make herself available to secure the female vote.

They hold us in contempt – but they are rattled. Keep up the pressure and we can beat  them.

“My lips make promises but I have the heart of a whore”

Meet David Cameron

There are indications that UKIP, whose supporters were once characterised by David Cameron as “fruitcakes and loonies” might do well in today’s local elections at the expense of Cameron’s Conservative Party.

On the day before these elections Cameron has hinted that there might be a possibility that in certain circumstances there could be a chance that the promise of an in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU would be enshrined by legislation

In an interview, Mr Cameron said the Conservatives needed to “demonstrate absolutely that we are serious about this referendum”.

Is this the action of a man you can trust?

Yet another pratfall for former PR man David Cameron as the massively hyped roadblock to immigration turns out to be a two inch high barrier of tissue paper.

A major crackdown by David Cameron on immigration was unravelling rapidly today after it emerged that it would only affect a small minority of foreigners in Britain.

Is anyone surprised? Scared stiff by the spectre of the rising popularity of UKIP his team of whizz kid advisers take a break from their school homework and x boxing and tell him to go ukip lite. The UKIP supporters are as thick as planks, they tell him, so just mention a couple of keywords (immigration and, before that, referendum) and they’ll all come flocking back.

So he puts on his serious “watching like a hawk” face and expects us to buy into his rhetoric.

Hot air

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,signifying nothing”

He knows and we know that any serious attempt to block EU immigration would be broken immediately by our E£CHR loving judges in partnership with hand wringing sob stories from the BBC/Guardianistas spearheaded by St Joan Bakewell. Cameron and his inner clique are from the Notting Hill end of the media/political elite. They despise ordinary people as mindless drones swayed only by Paul Dacre and the Murdoch press. Keep them quiet with a few buzzwords then get them back to their TV screens..

It won’t work this time, Mr C. You use the EU and the Lib Dems and Hacked Off as fall guys for your own core belief and that’s the same driving force that got you your achievement-free stint as a second rate PR man for Carlton TV.

Your core belief is simply the advance of David Cameron – and nothing else.

Times are changing, Mr C. We’ve woken up to your con game.

We just don’t believe anything you say any more..