The Aged P

Lord Ashcroft’s recent poll of Tory/Labour “Battleground Marginals” has actually thrown up some interesting figures for UKIP. If you look at Page 4 (Voting Intentions) there are four seats where UKIP are within eight percentage points of the leading party

The figures show that UKIP has certainly got everything to play for in these constituencies – and they give the lie to the current message of “piling up the protest votes and coming second”

Moreover, looking at the rest of the marginals in most of them an increase in support for UKIP will lose those currently held by the Tories to Labour and also deny them the chance of gaining Labour held marginals. So the possibility of UKIP MPs in the next parliament can no longer be derided as a “swivel-eyed” fantasy by the political class and their symbiotic partners in the media.

Looks like the “UKIP peaking and now on the way out” narrative being assiduously peddled by Tory HQ and their cheerleaders at the Telegraph needs to be filed under “False Rumours”…

The chaps at The New Statesman, the parish magazine of the chattering class left, have clearly not been paying too much attention to Planet Telegraph and the musings of Benedict Brogan and Dan Hodges who have used the Newark by election result to prove, beyond doubt that UKIP has shot its bolt and is now in terminal decline

Yet Ukip’s results in the 2014 local and European elections demonstrate the importance of blue-collar voters for Labour. These are the voters it has been haemorrhaging for over a decade; those who once sat at home on election day and are now coming out to vote Ukip………….This is a logical consequence of abandoning blue-collar Britons and becoming a party of the urban middle class alone.

Wow…..you mean winning Hackney with a coalition of young white middle class professionals and ethnic minorities won’t make much of an impression on those working class people in Rotherham and Thurrock? You know, the ones who never appear in colour supplements?

As John Denham, MP for Southampton Itchen, has observed, we need to recognise the pressures immigration has put on some working-class communities

But…but…but…I thought uncontrolled immigration was A Good Thing….

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?

The UK Spectator and its Coffee House Blog has always regarded itself as the intellectual power house of the Conservative Party. Of course I don’t mean the Conservative Party in the sense of the grassroots members in the cities and suburbs and market towns who do all the electoral donkey work delivering leaflets across muddy fields or damp council estates.

I mean the pudgy fingered public school lads and lasses who hover around Westminster buttering up Tory MPs and schmoozing with spotty Telegraph hacks hoping to either parachute into a safe seat or gaining a comment spot on the Telegraph….or both.

So, everything you read at the Speccie is viewed through the prism of Westminster gossip and is about as relevant to the politics of real people as the tittle tattle of the Imperial court in Moscow in January 1917

Therefore the Speccie school kids are unable to comprehend the nature of UKIP. They appear not to have had a presence at UKIP’s recent conference and, in general have made no attempt to get out and about the country engaging with the party’s membership.

So we get Isabel Hardman, in a feeble attempt to encapsulate the essence of UKIP digging up an obscure anecdote from a bit of Lib Dem soul searching after they squeaked narrowly past UKIP’s Diane James at Eastleigh

Or Sebastian Payne trying to pimp that relic of failed Maastricht rebellion Bill Cash as the hammer of Farage and producing a hacked e mail from the UKIP Press office as a mortal blow to the party’s credibility.

Then, finally, the genius Payne uncovers William “Syria” Hague’s Master Plan to pulverise UKIP into granules of dust

• Remind every voter that Cameron has offered a referendum on a renegotiated EU Treaty
• A vote for UKIP will let in Labour
• Errrmmm..that’s it, folks

….and they get paid for this????

The best riposte?

Who will listen to Hague? Honestly he is a man who has swallowed all his own beliefs for ‘power’ and control by the EU, Foreign Office and the USA. Yet another man who broke his promise on the EU to the people. 
Vote Conservative get broken promises and no in/out referendum. Just a ‘Do you agree with the changes we have made within the EU!! Mark my words.

Amen to that, my friend.

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…….

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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….

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Both Dan Hodges and Guido report that a slither of “Red Princes” are following in their fathers footsteps and offering themselves as Labour candidates for 2015

Dave Prescott is a member of quite an exclusive club, the so called “red princes and princesses”, whose parents are MPs or former MPs, and who will be contesting seats in 2015. Others include Will Straw, recently selected for Rossendale and Darwin; Euan Blair, who is said to be interested in one of the Coventry seats; and Joe Dromey, who was showing an interest in Lewisham.

Joe Dromey’s  mummy, of course, is Harriet Harman.

Have these young men no shame? Each of them has a parent who was at the very centre of the Labour regime that did everything in it’s power to destroy the very fabric of our country.

It burdened us with a mountain of debt and brought us into the longest lasting recession of modern times.

It allowed a foreign court made up of a motley collection of European academics to overrule the very fabric of our ancient common law

It willingly saddled us with an inefficient and expensive energy policy without any serious attempt to question the voodoo “science” upon which it was based

It deliberately allowed a massive influx of immigrants from every corner of the globe by reducing our border controls to a mere token

It led us into wars for the flimsiest of reasons without any notion of strategic overview and with an underfunded army leading to the killing and maiming of hundreds, maybe thousands, of our brave servicemen and women.

Rather than seek to place themselves in power over us once again perhaps these young men should atone for their parents’ shame by devoting themselves to the humility of good works by working as minimum wage care assistants or cleaners in homes for the elderly.

A few weeks ago a majority of Americans voted to put the lunatics in charge of the asylum. That is essentially what Matt Welch was saying in a rather sombre piece at Reason – an article so depressing it ought to have had a health warning attached.

If elections are up-or-down assessments of politicians’ job performance, then this was a vote in favor of trillion-dollar annual deficits, bailout economics, and failing the minimum competence test of passing an annual budget. Federal policy for four years has produced lousy short-term results for the price of long-term insolvency, and now the characters responsible for this misgovernance have been given a pat on the head.

That’s right, despite Sarah Palin’s uncannily perceptive prediction in 2008, the USA wants more Styrofoam columns…..

So, just because Milliband and Balls are being constantly mocked in many of the public prints for their infantile money grows on trees rhetoric against public spending cuts, don’t imagine that our own band of lunatics cannot possibly party their way to power here in the UK in 2015….

Time to take to the hills?

To all US Republicans – here is your statistics assignment for today

2008
Obama/Biden 69,456,897
McCain/Palin 59,934,814

20012
Obama/Biden 58,702,702
Romney/Ryan 56,455,982

Some useful information

In 2008 the Republican president was extremely unpopular, there was a financial crash, a worrying war and a media pushing two narratives – the possibility of wiping away the scars of racism by electing a black president and an orchestrated demonisation of the GOP VP candidate with lies and sexist insults.

In 2012 the economy was still broken, the worrying war was still simmering away and the Democratic administration was racked with scandals. The Republican candidates were clean cut, inoffensive and apparently competent politicians completely acceptable to the GOP establishment and the media.

( Note -you might find this extremely helpful)

Your task

Explain why the 2012 Republican ticket lost the election and got three and a half million fewer votes than the 2008 ticket
Please send your answers, accompanied with your apologies, to a certain lady in Wasilla, Alaska.

Thank you