British Comedy Guide

I read the news today oh boy! Page 1,584

So with UKIP's success maybe the blinkered major parties will sit up and realise what the majority of the electorate want.

They've got to look at the most popular policies of UKIP and see why people voted for them.

And there's no point saying all UKIP supporters are mental racists. People are genuinely pissed off with haemmoraging money to Brussels to line the pockets of a few dictators who tell us what we can and can't do in our own country and look into stopping people flooding into our tiny island and sponging off the British taxpayer.

The Conservatives have found somewhere to haemorrhage money? :O

Quote: Chappers @ 23rd May 2014, 8:13 PM BST

So with UKIP's success maybe the blinkered major parties will sit up and realise what the majority of the electorate want.

Majority? Didn't they come fourth.....?

So, according to my calculations based on results declared so far, this UKIP surge has resulted in them having 4.05% of the total council seats.

Feckin' hell !

Quote: Oldrocker @ 23rd May 2014, 9:04 PM BST

So, according to my calculations based on results declared so far, this UKIP surge has resulted in them having 4.05% of the total council seats.

Feckin' hell !

Yes but what percentage of the vote?

Quote: Chappers @ 23rd May 2014, 9:06 PM BST

Yes but what percentage of the vote?

What does that matter? They can come second until the cows are blue in the face.

As Brutus says

'There is a tide in the affairs of men.Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune'

I more incline to think that the tide is going to go out for Farage now, not come in.

I suspect that at the general election UKIP will do rather better than they have done in the council elections (people care if the streets get swept, and know who is most likely to get the job done), but that they will not do as well as they are going to in the EU elections (no-one knows or cares what the European Parliament actually does, which in truth is not much, so no harm in voting for the loonies).

The interesting thing is whether UKIP can do well enough in the European elections to not make a UKIP vote in the general election seem like a wasted vote. If that happens they could start to win seats.

They will at any rate do well enough to take votes away from all three main parties at the general election, for rather different reasons, and that is going to have a very interesting effect on local results. The next general election is going to be a pollsters nightmare.

If UKIP do win a few seats it might be enough to prop up the Tories in government. Whereas the LibDems have keep the Tories more right wing economic fantasies in check, much no doubt to David Cameron's relief, a UKIP coalition would be a dream come true for the Tory right.

If Labour do not do more to retain the working class vote by setting out ome genuinely leftwing policies, then it could happen.

We will I think see a shift away from centrist politics, if not before the election, then after.

So UKIP do matter.

Interesting . .

http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-prime-minister

1. The nice politics professor on Radio 4 this morning said that the UKIP share of the vote has remained the same.

2. Your local councillor does not get to decide things like immigration. So voting UKIP in the council elections is either a) a protest vote or b)a really stupid thing to do. Having heard some interviews from people from Thurrock earlier, I suspect the latter in their cases.

3. Most of the UKIP growth councils announced early, leading to the headlines. London boroughs etc announced a lot later. No UKIP there.

4. When a party has very few actual policies (even Renny can only come up with a maximum of three, and he can't cite sources for any of them) it makes them much easier to vote for. You can impose your own views on polices on the party. UKIP can be whatever you want them to be, because they haven't nailed their colours to any particular mast.

5. They don't have any councils. They won't win a seat at the General Election. They have no power and they will never have power. They are not worth all this hysteria.

6. I wish the left had a similar protest vote option. Sadly we don't.

7. The main parties should not be scared of a debate on Europe. There are too many lies circulated about the EU, and a lot of that simply comes from a lack of information.

For example, for a long time UKIP were peddling that the European Convention on Human Rights was an EU device. They are in fact completely separate institutions. Membership of one does not affect membership of the other.

Here endeth the lesson.

Quote: Chappers @ 23rd May 2014, 8:13 PM BST

. People are genuinely pissed off with haemmoraging money to Brussels to line the pockets of a few dictators who tell us what we can and can't do in our own country and look into stopping people flooding into our tiny island and sponging off the British taxpayer.

This is the kind of attitude the political parties need to engage with. This is the perception but not the reality. Being part of the EU is a positive thing for our economy. The free movement of peoples is a positive thing for our economy (with benefit restrictions, which we have imposed).

EU regulations are usually limited to stuff like agriculture. I cannot think of a single EU law that has adversely affected my life.

The things that really get people wound up (right to die etc) are from the European Convention on Human Rights.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20448450

Quote: Jennie @ 23rd May 2014, 9:51 PM BST

They won't win a seat at the General Election.

Why not? The Respect party has a seat, and they're a much lesser party.

Respect are a completely different kettle of fish as they simply flit from place to place creating bandwagons in places with a very particular, homogenous electorate.

Like with Martin Bell's election, something very specific and very local needs to happen to get the required swing.

UKIP are not going to find a constituency made up of a sufficient number of UKIP voters. Where will Farage go? Where is his best bet?

Quote: Matthew Stott @ 23rd May 2014, 8:58 PM BST

Majority? Didn't they come fourth.....?

Exactly! From the reporting, you would think otherwise. The majority of the electorate soundly rejected UKIP.

Now now Jennie the left has the Green party who are trying, ever so hard to convince people they're the radical protest vote.

Poor old thingy their one MP is trying ever so hard to get arrested, knocking coppers hats off and everything. Like a sufragette in a tshirt.

But yes UKIP have merely achieved what the BNP did a few years ago. A brace of council seats and a few MEPs, followed by being voted out of almost all of them.

They're a none story, if rather funnier and more charming than swivel eyed, squirrel muncher Griffin.

Quote: Jennie @ 23rd May 2014, 9:51 PM BST

This is the kind of attitude the political parties need to engage with. This is the perception but not the reality. Being part of the EU is a positive thing for our economy. The free movement of peoples is a positive thing for our economy (with benefit restrictions, which we have imposed).

EU regulations are usually limited to stuff like agriculture. I cannot think of a single EU law that has adversely affected my life.

Speaking as a civil servant it it creates an enormous amount of work for me, and I do find the imposition of one size fits all solutions on such a rag bag of nations a bit daft (even if most of them just ignore EU legislation), but the EU on balance probably does some good and no real harm. It is difficult to see how we could withdraw without damaging trade (in order to have free access to EU markets we would probably end up having to comply with EU regulations without being able to vote on them), though it would give us more freedom to protect UK economic interests against EU competition, not that our politicians, who are free trade ideologues to a man, could be trusted to make good use of that freedom.

Immigration is the issue that has swept UKIP along. Economic theory is that immigration is a good thing, and our country is very much run by economists. Unfortunately economic theory is always twenty years out of date, if it was ever right to start with. Statisticians have purported to prove that immigration is a good thing, but I work with statisticians a lot and frankly I have more faith in astrologers. Certainly with a question as complicated as this there are too many factors, too many intangibles, too much to which must be assigned arbitrary costs and benefits, too much which can be left out.

But even if immigration is good for the economy, that is not necessarily the same as being good for individuals within the economy. The popular perception, and quite possibly the reality, is that it increases competition for jobs and drives down wages. That keeps down the cost of goods and more particularly, as we no longer manufacture anything, services. This is wonderful if you are in a well paid job; not so good if you are unemployed or on minimum wage and trapped in rented accommodation. But the real time bomb for the politicians is that even those with well pay jobs and their foot on the property ladder are seeing their children leave uni with huge debts, worthless degrees and no prospects other than to compete with immigrant labour for minimum wage jobs. The tide of feeling against immigration is only going to increase.

And contrary to what the politicians would like you to believe when they blithely smear UKIP voters as closet racists, it is not the immigrants that people hold to blame, it is the politicians. The benefits of mass immigration has been an all party consensus in the past couple of decades, even if only the LibDems have been naive enough to admit it (it almost certainly cost them a breakthrough share of the vote at the last election).

UKIP, who personally I think are ghastly, might or might not make some kind of breakthrough at the next general election, but they are not going to go away, or at least the immigration agenda is not.

The libdems look dead and buried

Which could be interesting

All the polls suggest, Labour will win the next GE by just a few seats and have to go into a LibLab coalition

But

The way the libdems popularity is plummeting , they won't even have enough mp's to form any coalition!?

So if labour couldn't form a coalition government, even if they got the greens to help

Would this mean the Tories could form a coalition with ukip, even though they won less seats than labour ?

Cos if so, I'm emigrating to Nepal

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