The Aged P

I defy anyone not to want to head for the toaster after reading this from Chapter 8 of “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame

 “When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries”

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…

This is a real feminist…….a member of the Kurdish Women’s Protection Unit fighting ISIS

Remember Brenda Leyland, the lady who killed herself last October after being doorstepped by Sky News crime reporter Martin Brunt who accused her of being a “twitter troll” for posting “abusive” tweets about the parents of missing Madeleine McCann?

There appears to be a bit of a mystery about how Brunt got the tip off.

One report said that he came “into possession of a dossier of alleged Twitter “trolls” which had been handed to police by a third party”

But another claimed “Brunt approached her after a dossier of tweets about the McCanns was passed to him by a source, whom he declined to reveal”

You would have thought that, since she took her own life soon after Brunt’s approach, the coroner should have pursued the question of the source a little more closely;

Did it come from the police – in which case was it passed to Brunt from a police officer?

Who obtained the information and gave it to the police in the first place – and how was the information obtained?

Did the source by pass the police and send it to Brunt directly?

But the coroner thought otherwise.

The coroner said she could not compel him to reveal it and that Brunt was not accused of any criminal offence.

All very strange – especially when the police told the coroner

Her tweets did not constitute a criminal offence

In which case one might ask why didn’t the police simply close the file.

Am I the only person who thinks there are still some questions to be answered about this affair?

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…

At the end of yet another pointless article about education in the Speccie this gem appeared

I believe that Teachers become stale due to teaching the same subject year after year after year……I have often wondered if they would benefit from having a six/twelve month sabbatical (retaining their pay and pensions etc) so that they could work in similar occupations as their pupils might eventually choose.Then they might have a clearer idea of the importance of their profession.

Otherwise, they are like politicians, who attempt to run the country, but have never had a ‘real’ job.

As a former teacher (comprehensives 1964-1999) this “real job” remark used to make me smile as we managed an establishment of 1000 pupils, 100 staff (teachers and support) a large rambling estate and a £2m budget.

Nevertheless in the 1980s we duly obeyed our political masters when we were told how much we could learn about management from the business sector. So a lot of government funding went into arranging courses where we public sector drones could gather pearls of wisdom from management gurus telling us how their companies (IBM, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer) did it so well.

We gawped as those business suited golden boys and girls sketched their diagrams, lovingly caressed their bullet points and brainstormed us with bolt-ons and blueskies and, of course, thinking out of the box.

Naturally, being overpaid and underworked taxpayer bleeding public sector drones with little idea of the “real world”, none of us were nasty enough to even feel a slight tremor of Schadenfreude when, at the end of the 80s we learned that IBM, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer were underperforming quite badly due to management failures.

After all we didn’t work in the “real world”….

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……