Here comes the mong!

It is far better to be physically disabled than mentally, at least people treat you better if they can see some physical disability or at least infer one. I discovered this truism exactly four years ago today, when I was in some God awful town in Essex, that spiritual home of Thatcherism.

I walk with a stick, but for some reason I did not have one with me that night. To make matters worse, I had not then received any physiotherapy so my feet looked as if they were welded to my ankles and I walked with my arms outstretched on either side to balance myself. I didn't only walk like a duck, I must have looked like one, especially with the air of super concentration on my face as I tried to walk without falling over.

The fellow I was visiting loaded me into his car and we went to an Indian restaurant. The place was half full, with most tables by the door already occupied so I had to waddle as best I could about twenty paces or so to the first unoccupied spot. 

I can still remember the look of horror on the people's faces as they saw this apparition staggering past them:

Oh my God, it's a mong! What the fuck are they doing letting mongs out at night? Is the mong gonna sit near me? What if he starts dribbling? Strewth, I don't pay my taxes for this!

Nothing happened of course, much to the relief of the assembled diners, and in the fullness of time we paid our bill and I was helped back into the car.

A few days later and I was in London with a walking stick to hand. Another friend and I went to another Indian restaurant, with the main difference here being that this eating house was not as open plan as the first, so I really had to struggle to get past the line of tables to an empty one. Come to think of it I did almost fall once and a young athletic fellow dived out of his seat to grab me. The difference, however, was in the attitude of the diners, as reflected in their faces, all thanks to my walking stick:

Oh, look, that poor man can hardly walk, but isn't he brave to get about like that? So young to need a stick, he can't be more than 50, and he walks like my grandfather.Gosh it could happen to anyone, couldn't it? Bless.

The only real difference at work between those two restaurants was my walking stick. The lack of one at the first place led people to believe that the local nutter had walked in with his carer. A few days later a walking stick led people to correctly conclude that I have physical problems rather than mental ones.

More importantly, in London  with my stick I received nothing but courtesy and empathy from the people whereas just a few days earlier the vibes given out were a mixture of distaste and worry that I might upset everyone's digestion.

I suppose you are expecting a rousing conclusion, but I don't have one to offer you. I just know that since the 30 December 2009 I have never gone out without my walking stick. Never again do I want to see the looks of outright hostility that I saw that night.

But I'm Here for Mental Health

Tyneside Mind have produced a powerful new film about the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) which forms an integral part of the Employment Support Allowance claim process. In the film, actors depict the experiences of people who are supported by Tyneside Mind and have been through the WCA. Bloggers have been asked to publicise this ten minute video and I am pleased to be able to run it here.

Let's be honest, it is tough passing the WCA if you are of sound mind and fucked body like me, but if you have mental problems then it must seem as if the whole system is geared to do you over.

I don't think that is intentional, but it is an obvious by-product of the box-ticking exercise that the last Labour government introduced when they brought in this system and then paid the French company Atos to run it for them. The Tories are merely encouraging Atos to sail closer to the wind with their rejections of claims, but the flaw was inherent in Labour's wheeze.

What they wanted was a cheap and cheerful system that could separate the halt and the lame from the able-bodied. The ESA 50 form which all claimants have to fill in as part of their EA claim and the WCA which most of us have to go through aimed at putting people into one of three categories. The Support Group for people who are not expected to improve. The Work Related Activity Group for those who are expected to recover their health and go back to work, and the people who fail the tests and are declared fit for work immediately.

The problem is that people who have physical ailments can be slotted very neatly into one of the categories, but that is not the case with mental illness as the video shows. Just watch it and weep.

What is to be done? Getting the Tories out of office is an obvious start, because Tories are scum who should never be allowed anywhere near the levers of power, anyway. How to ensure that Labour, the party who introduced all this in the first place, do not simply carry on where the Tories left off is another matter and one that I do not have an answer for..

A few opponents of Scottish independence make their views known.

As the opinion polls show the yes campaign coming up on the rails, I thought it might be a good idea to show people the side of Unionism that Alistair Darling and Better Together do not want people to see. 

John Hughes, an appreciation of a fine man

I have just discovered that John Hughes, the Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, during my time there from 1983-85 has died at the good age of 84. His wife Violet, known to everyone as Vi died two weeks before him, which may suggest that he just gave up the ghost when she went. On the other hand, such was their obvious devotion to each other that the romantic in me prefers to think that Vi left John in the house whilst she went on to get things ready for both of them. You can read John's obituary at this link and the one for Vi is here. I don't want to repeat what others have already written so what follows is my personal appreciation of a fine man.

Ruskin College, Oxford, when I went there had strong links with the Trades' Union movement and most of the forty of fifty students who started there every year had links to that movement and many got into their college via union sponsorship and back scratching. On the first night of our two year courses, all the new intake were invited to attend a rather inedible dinner which was followed by a speech from John.

He welcomed us in that gentle voice of his to our new home and then in a very quiet, sad voice told us that since the college was founded in 1899 a ritual had taken place at that dinner at which each new Ruskin man or woman had been invited to stand up, to give their name and  their union to the rest. John said that it was like a roll call of British working class pride as miners, engineers, dockers and the rest all got to their feet one by one. As the roll call went on the voices became more and more defiant as the union names were given out.

I remember John saying that by 1981 it had all got too much to bear because by that year the students were saying which union they had formerly belonged to before going on the dole. John told us that he had dropped the ritual, and he did not say if it was ever going to start again. Most of use assumed that it would, but I suspect that the prescient John Hughes knew that the days of working class pride were over for many years to come.

Jumping forward almost two years to Trinity Term 1985 and I remember taking a rather lovely girl on to the river in a Ruskin College punt. I cannot remember her name but she had delightful Pre-Raphaelite hair and even more delightful breasts that moved of their own accord under her dress. I was supposed to be studying for finals, but the day was as lovely as the girl so I spent that afternoon on the river.

The next morning I was wandering back to my own college when I met John on a staircase and we paused to chat about that gorgeous weather. John told me that when he was studying for his finals he decided that if the weather was bad then he would dedicate the whole day to his books, but if the sun was shining he would go on the river. Looking me up and down, still wearing the same clothes that he had seen me in the day before, he then remarked blithely: "That strategy is not recommended, by the way."

It was during that time, Trinity Term 1985, that a Ruskin don  named David Selbourne decided to break the college apart if he could. Selbourne had been the great Marxist poster boy who decided to break with his past during the Wapping print workers strike by writing a piece lambasting the strikers and selling it to one of the Murdoch titles that was on strike. Needless to say all hell broke loose in the college.

John used all his skills as a negotiator as well as letting his basic humanity shine forth to ensure that the students agreed to sit finals. How he did it I have no idea, but at least one tutor told me that only John Hughes could have got everyone to agree to everything just long enough to ensure that we all sat our exams and got our diplomas.

To John Denis Hughes, 1927-2013, thank you for everything.

Staffordshire School Threatens Parents

This is, as the tabloids say, an outrage. The letter was sent by one Lynn Small, headmistress of a Staffordshire primary school to the parents of her charges. The letter informs the parents that their offspring are expected to attend an Islamic awareness event run by academics at Staffordshire University, that centre of academic excellence formerly known as North Staffordshire Polytechnic.

The letter also contains the threat that if a parent does not allow his child to attend, said child will have a "Racial Discrimination note" placed on his file. Note the capital letters there folks, and reflect that this bloody woman seems to think that capital letters are used to show that something is very, very important. The letter goes on to add that only a doctor's sick note will be accepted as valid for absence. In texts that were then sent out, the school demanded a fiver from all the parents to pay for this jaunt. That must have seemed like the piss in the shit sarnie to all recipients.

What was going on here? Probably the parents had been complaining about this proposed trip, so the school decided to show them who was boss. We need to remember that teachers, like social workers, are recruited from the crappier end of the lower middle class, and they often think that they are in some way superior to the parents of their pupils. The school may have felt that the parents were racist to the core and only a bit of stick would get them into a nice liberal line.  However, the parents went to the press and gave Lynn Small a nice dose of utter humiliation, with the local education authority then forcing her to back down.

The parents have won a battle, but must not think that they have won the war. While they are toasting their victory down the pub, the people involved in this nonsense will be doing what middle class types always do at times like this: having meetings to plan their comeback and then some weeks down the road, starting the whole thing all over again.

The parents should get involved in running the school, by becoming governors of it and by acting through their local councillors to ensure that stupidity like this never happens again. Alas, that is not how working class people behave, with the result that this insult to both them and their children will be repeated sooner rather than later.

What were you doing when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?

The world is divided up into those of us who remember exactly what we were doing when we got the news that John Kennedy had been shot and those who were not born at the time.

I was just seven at the time and the 22 November 1963 was the day that Father Christmas arrived at one of the main stores in Manchester. It was probably Lewis's, which in those days was one of the major stores in the city. Today the building is used by Primark to sell cheap clothes, but fifty years ago Lewis's dominated the city centre and the arrival of Father Christmas, and the switching on of the Christmas lights in that part of the city was something that we all anticipated.

Father Christmas would have arrived at about 6.00pm, and I have no idea if the store remained open after that time to allow for late shopping on the night. It probably didn't, as that was the way things were in those days. Anyway, my parents would have left Manchester city centre with me at about 6.30pm which funnily enough was the exact time that half a world away, President Kennedy's motorcade was passing through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, past the building where Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting with his rifle.

We got home and my father switched on the small, 19" black and white television that sat in a corner next to the fireplace. Britain only had two channels in those days and our set was usually tuned to the BBC, but whatever channel it was still took forever to come on as the valves that powered the set first of all had to get warmed up.

After about thirty seconds or so the sound came on, but the picture would always take another few moments to join it. Given what had happened in Dallas normal programmes had been cancelled, and the disembodied voice that was coming through the speaker was clearly talking about something important. Probably that was why my parents stopped doing whatever it was they had planned to do and gather around the set as the picture slowly came to life.

I can remember them sitting very quietly, ignoring me as I sat on the floor, and when I asked them what was happening I was told that Kennedy had been shot and injured.

At some point later in the evening in became clear that he was dead, but I do not remember when that news came through. I just remember the stillness in the house, with my mother who was normally bustling in the kitchen sat with her hands in her lap transfixed by the black and white images on the television. My father sat close to her, for once without his Manchester Evening News in hand, silently watching the events from across the Atlantic as they unfolded.

Gradually the house got back to normal and my mother went off to the kitchen whilst my father sat at the table reading his paper. Normality, of a very quiet kind, was restored.

Why are the Tories in terminal decline in Northern England?

There is a lot of Tory angst at the moment about the party's decline in Northern England. Following on the heels of their death in Scotland they have good reason to be worried. There is nothing strange about the death of the Tory Party in Northern England and they have only themselves to blame for the death rattle that began a generation ago. The first time that either of my parents voted Labour was 1983. I used to tease my dad that he was the only man in the 8th Army who voted for Churchill in 1945, so why did both of them choose Labour in '83? 

Partly it was because I was in the party and had introduced them to Michael Meacher, the local MP for Oldham West, and they liked him. However the main reason is that they regarded Thatcher, Tebbit and the like as scum.

My dad was a labourer at the Mather & Platts engineering factory in Manchester. He was a strong union man and if the Transport and General Workers' Union went on strike he was the first one out the gates. Funnily enough, he always told me that Sir William Mather was a "proper gentleman" and it was obvious that he had a great respect for Sir William as well as Mr Platt. He also had an atavistic loathing for the "jumped up little Hitlers" who were the foremen and charge hands at the factory. Funnily enough, he also had the same respect for his officers in the army that he held for Sir William Mather and the same loathing for the NCOs that he had for the factory foremen.

A lot of this may have been due to the fact that dad won a scholarship to the Manchester Art School in the 1920s and the fee-paying middle class types who were his classmates made his life a misery owing to the fact that he was from Hulme, which was an even bigger slum then than it is today. I once asked him why he did not just stick the nut on one of them as the middle class are essentially nothing more than gob on legs, but that wasn't the way he was wired up. Anyway, he left after a few months and returned to his old school and then did an apprenticeship only to be caught up in the Great Depression. He spent that on the dole interspersed with spells as a barman until the war broke out. Many years later his brother told me that there were two scholarship boys a year at that art school and the other one went on to help design the Festival of Britain in 1951. However, he was a type, not a working class lad from Hulme.

In the army my dad was treated with respect by his officers and the same respect was accorded him by the senior management at work after the war. All the earache he got came from the same type of people who had made his life a misery at the art school. It makes perfect sense that my parents voted Tory because the Tory Party under Churchill, Eden, MacMillan and Hulme were the type of men who genuinely respected working men.

The Tories that my parents voted for believed that every man had his place and that the place should be respected by all other men. My parents felt that way also. Thus It also makes perfect sense for Mr and Mrs Bell to have voted Labour for the first time ever in 1983. Thatcher did not respect the working class. That creature hated us and wanted to reduce us to penury and servitude.

Until the Tories relearn the way to appeal to working class people as working class people, and not putative middle class rabble, then they will continue to decline in Northern England.

Shavers Weekly

The wonderfully named Shavers Weekly circulates in the Edinburgh pubs, whenever the anonymous crowd behind it can get their acts together to produce a new edition. It has been running for over twenty-five years and has become an institution.

Normally in the run-up to the festival the standard headline "welcomes" the city's two million or so temporary residents but this year they did not manage to get that edition out so we have this version to entertain us as we head into a Scottish winter.

Americans seem to arrest New Dawn leader

Just watch this video of the New Dawn leader, Nikolaos Mihaloliakos, being arrested yesterday in Athens. At the 51 second point you can clearly hear an American accented voice that seems to come from one of the guards shout "let's go" as the politician is about to be hustled into a car.

Now this video clip could be a fake, with the voice dubbed onto it as a bit of agitprop to rally the faithful on the Greek streets. Or it could be that the Greek government does not trust its own security forces and feels the need to hire American goons from a company like Blackwater to do its dirty work for it.

Interesting, though, isn't it?

Godfrey Bloom is latest MEP to leave UKIP

Godfrey Bloom MEP has resigned as a UKIP MEP and will sit as an independent. He joins Marta Andreasen, David Campbell Bannerman and Mike Nattrass in taking his hook from the party since the last Euro elections in 2009. In the last parliament, Tom Wise  and Ashley Mote both had their hooks taken by Mr Plod and ended up as guests of Her Majesty.

The moral of this story is that for UKIP, getting people elected to the European Parliament is the easy bit. The hard part comes afterwards in keeping them out of jail or preventing them from resigning the whip during their terms in office. 

The 11 September Anniversary

Today is the 11th of September. Exactly forty years ago today the Chilean armed forces mounted a coup against Salvador Allende Gossens, the country's legitimate president, an act which led to seventeen years of military rule and the deaths of thousands. It was also an act that would not have occurred without a nod and a wink from Washington.

In spite of the heroic efforts of the small presidential guard at la Moneda, the presidential palace shown here under attack, the building quickly fell and President Allende chose suicide rather than submit to the whims of America's dogs.

The legacy of this coup still reverberates today. It led to future socialist leaders in Latin-America realising that attacking the elite was a waste of time unless they also went after the parasitic middle class which grovels to that elite. For instance, in Venezuela, the late President Hugo Chavez Frias made the degradation of the middle class a priority for his government. Following the failure of the 2002 coup, which demonstrated that he had full control of the army rank and file, Chavez Frias adopted policies of high taxation and high inflation that had the effect of encouraging the middle class to leave the country. At the same time, the tiendas populares, the government owned chain of shops ensured that the ordinary Venezuelan were able to purchase basic food stuffs at either cost price or sometimes even below it.

Chavez Frias had learned from Chile that winning an election is only half the battle as the enemies of the working class will then seek to undermine the new system just as they did in Chile. They failed in Venezuela because the new government realised that the main danger to socialism comes not just from the old elite, but also from the middle lass who are desperate to preserve their privileges. 

One good reason to vote yes for Scotland

I'm a Mancunian who moved up to Edinburgh over the summer. One of the women at my local chippy asked me what I thought of my new home and I told her it was just like Manchester with a different accent. She laughed and nodded her head, before tossing a few extra chips onto my already belly busting pile. The point is that Scots have more in common with the Northern English than either have with the people in Southern England. To my mind that is the only reason why a working class person should vote no next September, to avoid leaving the Northern English in the lurch.

However, if people back home are willing to take all the nonsense that the Tories and New-Labour conspire to give them, then why should I run the risk that my life will revert to being as horrible as  it was before I moved up here? As things stand, London is willing to give Edinburgh almost anything at the moment, but if there is a no vote then Scotland could find that Westminster starts clawing back those powers as the nationalist threat lessens.

To give you one example. The government here has now banned the sale of council houses. Prior to that they emasculated the policy by preventing new tenants from buying their houses. As I write, Edinburgh is one big building site as more and more housing association flats are built, with the help of the council and government. Jump forward a decade and we could imagine a Scotland that does not have a housing problem because most people will be able to get a house pretty much at will. The fear must be that when the English see this they will demand the same, so to prevent that happening Westminster would force Scotland to fall back behind a line drawn in London.

For this reason I will almost certainly vote yes to independence next year.

Femen is a man's toy!

I've always been a great admirer of Femen, the Ukrainian based feminist group that puts topless pretty girls in front of cameras and then encouraged them to mouth off about something or other. Not that I cared about any of the causes, you understand, but these girls are my kind of feminists, even though the girl on the far right in the photo below looks as if she might want to lay off the cheeseburgers for a couple of months.

I'm not the only cove with a soft spot for these little darlings, just look at these two cops who are clearly nursing a blue veiner each:

As for Vladimir Putin, there is no mistaking his delight as a protester flashes her fun bags in his direction. I don't know about you, but I kind of admire old Putin who comes over as a man who knows what his middle leg is for, unlike the gang of pretty boys that we have running our country.

Even the Guardian ran stories about Femen, usually written by fat women, but I doubt if anyone actually read their turgid prose, as I suspect that it was just added to to make the photos acceptable to the sisterhood - and give the chaps something to smile over. The Sun has its page three and the Guardian has its pieces on Femen and we all get something to perv over. I ask you, what is not to like about this situation?

Well, sadly it has emerged that Femen is little more than a front set up by a Ukrainian man Victor Svyatski to get his leg over. I can see how the strategy panned out, as he chose the girls and always made sure that they were the shag-worthy ones ones. Then he convinced them that they were getting genuine publicity for the cause when in fact all that was happening was that chaps were admiring the tits on display. After that it was really only a matter of deciding which little darling was going to be given the honour of polishing his knob that night, and I am willing to bet that the beauties were fighting each other to get into Vic's bed.

All this leaves me with one question: just how will the Guardian fill its perv quota now that the sisterhood will no longer allow it to be reported seriously, with all those photos just added in to illustrate the story, of course.

The social work industry harasses thousands of mothers

The English branch of the social work industry  placed 4,000 children on its at risk register last year when they were still in their mothers' wombs! Even by the standards of that most loathsome of state security agencies, this marks a pretty new low in the harassment of women when they are at their most vulnerable. 

I have had few personal dealings with these creatures, but for quite some time I did help to fight the good fight by using what little talent I have as a wordsmith to help agitate against their activities. I think that the time has come to start reprinting some of my older works here as they seem even more valid today than they were a decade ago when I first wrote them.

For the record, if you are going to expand higher education down to almost primary school level, then the only way in which the bovine "graduates" of those "universities" are going to find employment is in local government. Capitalism is not as stupid as we on the left sometimes fondly imagine it to be, and any City institution will prefer the Oxford or St. Andrew's man over the wretched poly wallah, so social work is pretty much the only option open to these chancers.

They are the people who when I was a youngster were the foremen and chargehands in factories, and who used to strut around self importantly in overalls that were differently coloured that the rest of the shop floor. Today they manage to get into some wretched old polytechnic that has been allowed to degrade the name of university, and on that basis slither their way into a local government sinecure such as social work. As my mother used to say, they are the types who have got a class above themselves and need to be brought down a peg or two.

I have always regarded the middle class in general as scum who haven't got the balls to be workers nor the brass to be gaffers, but the lower middle class, many of whom come from my type of background are little better than graveyard rats to be taunted at every opportunity.

Time to start having the fuckers again!

Why are the Americans seeming to back away from bombing Syria?

President Obama has decided not to attack Syria without first seeking the approval of both Houses of Congress for the act. Congress does not convene until the 9th September, and he doesn't need their authority, anyway, as under the War Powers Act he can launch any attack he wants for 60 days. In fact, if Congress says nothing, he can carry on killing at will beyond the 60 days. All presidents have done that so why has Obama decided to hand the matter over to Congress?

Is it possible that Russia has drawn a line in the sand and has warned America that they will not allow their Syrian ally to be destroyed? I don't have any evidence for that, but since we went to war in 2003 on the basis of a student thesis, sexed up with some old tosh that Tony Blair pulled out of his arsehole, evidence doesn't seem to be needed in these post-modern times.

Seriously, the Senate will probably vote next week on this matter, but the House is unlikely to schedule it until the week after, at least. A joint resolution, which is what Obama is after, carries the weight of law once the president has signed it, and obviously it needs to support of both Houses of Congress.

What we have here is a grand old Duke of York situation where the army has been marched up to the top of the hill and then marched all the way down again. There has to be a reason for that and the most logical one is that Russia has quietly put the frighteners on. If that is the case, then the vote will be lost and the crisis has passed.

By the way, the French are now demanding that their National Assembly be allowed to vote on any attack, so even if I am wrong about the reasons for the Congress being allowed to vote, there is still a good chance that America will have to bomb alone.

All good stuff!

David Cameron: British Prime Minister or American puppet?

If this Tweet from Rowena Mason, the Guardian's political correspondent is true then we have proof that David Cameron, the British Prime Minister is actually acting in the interests of a foreign power.

Ed Milliband has played a wonderful game up to now, but can he raise the stakes and now go after Cameron? A motion of no confidence using this as evidence that the Tory is unfit to be Prime Minister should be put down as soon as possible.

Cameron is on the ground: now is the time to kick him until he whimpers.

Just how significant was yesterday's vote?

Just how significant was yesterday's House of Commons vote to prevent Britain going to war against Syria? Just have a look at this cutting from the front page of the Norwich Mercury of the 2 March 1782:

In case you are wondering about the connection, that vote was the last time to the House of Commons reigned in a government hell-bent on war. Back then it was the Tory, Lord North, who wanted to keep fighting the American colonists and that vote meant that the Commons was no longer prepared to continue the fight.

Yesterday, over 230 years later, the House of Commons reigned in another Tory, David Cameron, who wanted to sent the young men of Britain off to die in yet another of the imperial adventures that have so plagued the twenty-first century up to now.

That is how significant it all is. The Commons took control of the executive and made it toe the line and that has not happened on a matter of war for more than two centuries.

The final end of empire

Yesterday's vote in the House of Commons to reject a war against Syria may be the final nail in the coffin of Britain's imperial dreams, let's hope so at any rate.

In the aftermath of the Suez disaster when the Americans pulled the plug and demonstrated to London that the country could not move without America's permission, the British had two choices. They could have retreated into a post-imperial sulk, or they could accept the reality of the situation and work with it. Harold McMillan's telephone call to President Eisenhower when he genially said, "Over to you, Ike," shows which path the British ruling class chose to take. McMillan would later say privately that he saw Britain's role as being akin to that of the civilised Greeks vis a vis their thuggish Roman overlords. That analogy conveniently overlooked the fact that the Greeks who served the Romans were slaves, but we can see what he was getting at.

With the honourable exception of Vietnam, for the next half century our country acted as America's most loyal servant and all the talk of a special relationship could not truly disguise the fact that the relationship between Washington and London was more akin to that between a man and his dog than any true partnership between sovereign states.

This policy reached its logical conclusion in 2003 when President Bush gave the order to initiate the war against Iraq and simply forgot to tell Tony Blair. The point is that Bush was giving the order to British troops as well as his own. Blair's spin mongers had to run around in blue-arsed fly mode to spin that act of cravenness away.

What happened last night was the end of all the fantasies about "punching above our weight on the world stage," and the final acceptance that the days of empire are now over. It took a long time, but the House of Commons last night buried the last remnant to the old British post-imperial dream.

Is Ed Miliband running the show?

“No 10 and the Foreign Office think Miliband is a fucking cunt and a copper-bottomed shit. The French hate him now and he’s got no chance of building an alliance with the US Democratic Party,” said a senior government source. The fuckers are rattled! I cannot believe just how much the fuckers are rattled. Go on, Ed: your father would be proud of you today.

As Cameron got out of his car yesterday afternoon to walk into 10 Downing Street, a journalist shouted: "Is Ed Miliband running the show?"

On the evidence of the past few hours, that is exactly what he is doing and the government must be wondering just how will they explain their failure to their masters in Washington?

Syria: Labour forces a Tory climb down

What a difference 24 hours makes. Yesterday it looked certain that London would follow cravenly along behind their masters in Washington and lob a few missiles into Syria while the Americans sent hundreds into the country. Parliament was recalled to rubber stamp the move, because as we all know, our rulers are loyal to the USA and just have to support whatever nastiness that odious country wishes to pursue.

So what went wrong? By yesterday afternoon it was obvious that the numbers did not stack up for a victory in a Commons' vote so none is to be called for the moment. Just why did America's most trusted servants remember what their balls were actually for?

We are lucky in having a Tory government. Had Labour been in power then Miliband could have done a Blair and relied on his payroll vote coupled with the overwhelming majority of the Tory opposition to win the vote. Hard though it is for any normal person to believe, but having a Tory government came in handy yesterday because it is always easier for Labour to be true to its principles when it is in opposition.

Secondly, the seeming rush to war reminded more than a few people, especially on the Labour side, of 2003 and the similar rush to go off and start a war against Iraq. I honestly doubt if many people back then actually believed in all the weapons of mass destruction nonsense, but I suspect that many thought that it would be a cakewalk that would end very quickly, and bring tasty reconstruction contracts in its wake. The seemingly open-ended desire of the Americans to bomb Syria must have led many to speculate that if the air offensive failed then an invasion of the country was probably the next option. 

Finally, the intervention of Tony Blair in favour of the aggression needs to be considered. His remarks may have shifted more than a few Labour doubters into the opposition camp. People will have remembered his promises of a decade ago and the lies that were told to ensure that America's will was adhered to, and they would have remembered the price that our country paid in blood for that criminal adventure. In his own small way, Blair may have unwittingly helped to avert an immediate attack in 2013, something which must gall him if he ever thinks about it.

We are not out of the woods yet, and the suspension must be that the opposition parties will revert to type and support the USA when the chips are down. However, Labour has a wonderful opportunity to damage the government over this just by seeming to be reasonable and asking for more time to consider just what happened in Syria that may, or may not, require a military response.

The longer that goes on the weaker that the government will be, and that is something that we should all wish to see.

Attacking Syria: a rerun of Iraq

In early 2003 the United States was planning its war against Iraq. It's British client state was involved as a good doggie should, by yapping in support of that act of aggression, and then sending men to die in America's war. Ten years later the USA is now planning another attack on another Muslim country, with Britain tailing along doing exactly as it did a decade ago.

I was involved in that earlier debate and all it did was distract everyone's attention from the pressing matters at home - which let's face it, is where the real enemy lives.

Today parliament has been recalled to discuss this latest coming aggression, but this time I am not going to get involved in the debate. Our line should be that if the man can afford to piss millions up a wall in military action then that same man can afford to repeal the bedroom tax, an issue that is far more pressing for people of my class than a war against a country that most people could not point to on a map. So, the war is at home. We must not get involved in this latest debate, and all we need to say is that anything that is good for the employer class is bad for us by definition, and no further debate is needed.

Now then, how are we going to oppose the bedroom tax, universal credit and zero hours contracts?

Kelly-Jane Stone spills the beans

Meet Kelly-Jane Stone from Watford, and that photo is probably all you will ever see of her if Kelly-Jane has her way as the 26 year old is doing a runner. She has cancelled her Twitter and Facebook accounts, and has decided to be a very quiet girl indeed in the hope that she can avoid the bucket of shit that very many people want to see poured all over her.

She is a now suspended recruitment agent employed by the Transline Group in Hemel Hempstead. Her job was to find casual staff for Amazon, and her hobby was trying to ensure that the "suckers" who did not dance to her tune ended up losing their benefits. She even gloated about it on Twitter which is how it all came out:

Obviously she could not stop anyone's benefits directly as she is not employed by the job centre, but she could 'phone the joke shop and give them some tale about a person, so get the money stopped that way.

In case you are wondering, the man who calls himself Devil's Baguette has also deleted his account. This guy likes stealing money from youngsters, by the way:

I suspect that these two chancers will be hung out to dry, but we need to remember that their real crime was getting caught in public saying what most of them only say in private.

This is the middle class for you: vermin every one.

Russian anchorman's vents about homosexualism

Just one TV anchorman on a Russian channel, giving his views on homosexuality. You may think that he is a trifle over strident, but the audience do not seem to agree.

Channel Four accepts that UKIP is Thatcherite

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Andy Warhol said that one day everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Well, I have just had 15 seconds of that given to me courtesy of Channel Four TV. The station ran a UKIP story on Monday which included a very short piece about me at the 2.30 mark that I thought was very fair. Basically it stated that I was slung out of UKIP for joining in the general hilarity when Margaret Thatcher went off to fuel hell's fires, which is the simple truth.

It is also the truth that Fred McGlade, the full time organiser whose bout of pre-menstrual tension caused the rumpus in the first place, then tried to cover up his buffoonery by denying that fact in various press briefings, but I got UKIP to 'fess up to that truth last month.

Now then, does anybody really think that Northern English council estates will vote for a party that so clearly carries the Thatcherite torch? The Tories have already cut into the party's soft right underbelly with the promise of a referendum, and stories like mine, as they play out on the estates ,should be enough to ensure that UKIP does not get any working class seats either.

All in all the party looks fucked to me and they only have themselves to blame. What should have been a broad anti-EU coalition has become a narrow platform on which a diminishing band of small town Englanders stand.

Multi-ethnic Britain before the Second World War

A lot of nonsense is being written lately about the numbers of non-whites who lived in Britain prior to the Second World War. Quite why people want to create a myth that Britain was always the polyglot society that it is today is anyone's guess, but it is just that, a myth. Prior to the war the history of Britain was a history of the interaction between the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh.

That is not to say that a large empire with enormous trading links with the rest of the world would not acquire people from all over the world, and with that in mind please say hello to the scout troop at St. Paul's Church, Hulme, Manchester in about 1926. My father, Charles Bell, is third from the right on the centre row. Sat in front is a Mr Luis, and according to my dad he hailed from Ethiopia and came to Manchester as a minster and ended up leading the scout troop.The whole of Hulme was rather pleased that the scout troop had a darkie leading it and by all accounts it made them the envy of the city.

Less than a decade later, in 1935 to be exact, an Indian doctor named Buck Ruxton was waiting to be hanged in Manchester for killing his wife and maidservant in Lancaster. Over 10,000 people signed a petition is a failed attempt to save him from the rope, and towards the end of the 1980s I met a very old man from Lancaster who was still upset that Ruxton had ended up having his neck stretched.

"They shouldn't have done it. Morecambe didn't have one but we did," he said to me. 

"Had what?"

"A wog. He were the town wog and they hung him."

So, Manchester had an Ethiopian and Lancaster an Indian, but that does not prove that either city was anything but English with an admixture of outsiders who were treated as curiosities - rather as I was in the semi-rural part of Mexico when I lived there. People quite liked having an Englishman around, and might even have welcomed two or three more, but I doubt if they would have wanted to see the town taken over by us.

The history of this island is fascinating enough without trying to create a pseudo history that will not stand more than a few minutes of close examination.

Hiding Melons

This is seriously funny, trust me it just is.

Cheers: ClipJunkie.com

UKIP's Future Looks Bleak

If you read the April postings on this blog you will know that I was engaged in a dispute with UKIP over a comment that I made when Thatcher went off to be toasted by hell's fires. Jonathan Arnott, the UKIP General Secretary, has now told me that I am no longer a party member for that comment, so it's time to take stock and try to reach a few conclusions about UKIP and its future.

In his letter, Arnott admitted that it was all due to the Thatcher comment. In fact, he even apologised that this had not been made plain to me earlier. Given that Fred McGlade, the Regional Organiser whose brain fart started this problem in the first place had been telling the press that the comment had nothing to do with the matter, this is an important, and amusing, turnaround.

Secondly, the letter then goes on to discuss a feud that broke out between some harridans from the Socialist Workers Party and a gang of UKIP members over a poster that the party had displayed in Manchester. I was only peripherally involved in that, but McGlade was briefing the press that it was all about that so I suppose that Arnott felt that it had to be dragged in, even though he had previously stated that it was all to do with my refusal to shed tears for Thatcher. Does this make sense to you? I tried to follow the argument, but I could not get my head that far up my arsehole to even begin making sense of it. The upshot is that Arnott thinks that I was nasty to some Trots... Yes, guilty as charged in defending what was then my party.

Finally, I had complained that McGlade had offered me a £230 sweetener to stand down, but had not wanted any receipts. I said that this looked rather like a bung, and Arnott's reply was that procedures may need to be looked at. In other words UKIP may stop paying people what look like bungs in the future, which rather begs the question how much of members' subscriptions have already been forked out with these type of payment?

Let me just summarise this nonsense: I failed to join in the wailing over the death of Maggot Thatcher and for that a supposedly independent political party suspended me. At the same time, a gang from another party, the SWP, were plotting against UKIP and I helped foil their plans. Instead of getting a crate of beer with thanks from the party, it is used against me by that party. Oh, and the party now admits that it may stop making dubious payments to people.

No matter what you think about me, this is all wonderful anti-UKIP material which I shall be only too happy to pass on to any political organisation that wants to use it.

I joined the part last year as it presented itself as the perfect vehicle of protest for people who were cheesed off with the current political set-up. As far as I was aware, UKIP was an anti-European Union coalition that sought to bring in all and sundry who opposed that organisation.

When I went to my first party meeting, it was explained to me that candidates for office are expected to fight their own campaigns under polices chosen by them. In other words, a candidate can select his polices from the UKIP manifesto rather as sweets are chosen from the counter of a corner shop. If elected, a councillor is not subject to any system of whipping and can vote as he sees fit. For a protest party this is a wonderful system, and it struck this old socialist as the perfect short and medium term solution to the lack of a serious working class party.

When UKIP asked me to run for them in the May 2013 elections - and they did, it was not as if I put myself forward - it was made plain to me that the campaign was mine alone to run and that I could expect little if any help from the party.

I then chose policies that I thought would appeal to the people of my working class district and I did that with the help of  Rob Burberry, the 2013 National Campaign Manager. In e-mails and telephone calls, Burberry helped create my leaflet and made suggestions as to its content with a view to improving its appeal to the people in my working class electoral district.

So when I made the Thatcher tweet expressing sympathy for His Satanic Majesty for having to admit the old whore into hell, I thought nothing more about it. The whole of the left was jeering, not at some addled old slag whose brain had long ago turned to mush, but as a reminder to those who worshipped her memory that we were still around and that revenge is still pending:

So why then did the UKIP full-timers have a collective funny turn? The only rational explanation is that the party is top-heavy with Thatcherites who shed bitter tears that Aunt Maggie is no longer around to tell them what to do.

The problem for UKIP is that it has now woken up to the fact that its support is spread evenly across the country and for that reason it is unlikely to win any seats in 2015. To get around that problem it needs  the support of the unskilled and semi-skilled working class voters who live on the vast, geographically concentrated council estates. Those people spend their lives in McJobs that are interspersed with long periods of unemployment, and are no longer represented by the middle class Labour Party.

On the basis that the party worships at the shrine of the Blessed Margaret, the notion that the drink beer, shag women, hate the boss working man is going to turn out for UKIP is too laughable for words.

On buying a tablecloth

I wanted to buy a tablecloth yesterday so I wandered along to Sainsbury's to see what they had. Finding a tablecloth was the easy bit, but figuring out how big it was turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. Needless to say the packaging only had the measurements in centimetres, which are just unfathomable numbers to me. I asked the girl at customer service what 180cm x 125cm came to and she looked at me blankly. Then she tried to find someone who might know, and when that fialed she scampered off to find a free computer so that she could Google it. Returning with a hapless look on her face she mumbled something about seeing if her desk diary had the information, which was when I told her to forget it and walked out without my tablecloth.

My next port of call was a discount warehouse that also sold tablecloths in the metric style that nobody understands. I found one that was 210cm x 150cm and I held it up to see if that action would inspire God to give me the size in feet and inches. Needless to say the bugger ignored me so I turned to a bloke who was stood next to me.

"Any idea how big 210cm x 150cm is, mate?

"Dunno, sounds big though, dunnit?"

"Yeah, but how big?"

"I think that 180cm is about six foot," he said, dubiously.

"I seem to remember that the wife told me that she was 1 metre 50 tall, and I think that's 150cm, isn't it?

"I suppose so," said the bloke.

"Well, I'm a midge's dick over six foot so this is taller than me," I said.

"And it's as wide as your missus is long," the bloke chipped in, happily.

"Should fit the table," I said, before thanking the bloke for his help.

So I got myself a tablecloth, but really, do we think that it is a good idea to use a system of measurement that very few British people even pretend to understand, on the principle that deep down inside we are all good European federasts?

Brigitte Eicke and her wartime diary

A quite wonderful diary that was written by a teenage girl in wartime Germany has just been published and is now being rubbished by the pure at heart. Der Spiegel says that she was "a cog in the wheels that kept Nazi Germany turning," and the Independent lambastes her prose as nothing more than a "banal account of everyday life."

Brigitte Eicke was 15 in 1942 and training as a secretary, who began writing the diary to improve her stenography skills. By all accounts she tells us about going to the cinema in an air raid, how she felt when her district was bombed and the joys of getting chatted up by some soldiers.

David Kynaston used a lot of similar diaries to write Austerity Britain, 1945-1951. None of the diaries deal with great events, and all are the accounts of ordinary people caught up in those extraordinary years. Yet I do not recall anyone damning those writers because they did not refer endlessly to the government and its actions.

Had this dairy been produced by a British girl then it would be hailed as an example of British pluck under fire, and how the people were determined to carry on with their lives as all hell raged around them. Brigitte is German so cannot be given the same treatment. She should have written an anti-Nazi screed to be taken seriously by people who were not even born when those terrible events were happening.

It is quite amazing to see the way in which modern, middle class liberalism seeks to set the terms of debate by presenting one narrative as heroic, or at least acceptable, and damning another as unacceptable and all because the work is not what the reviewer wants to read.

Especially when they are the same type of narratives written by the same type of people.

The Betrayal of the Working Class, Part Two

In the final paragraphs of part 1 of this blog I gave an example of the way in which the white working class, particularly males, were betrayed by “New” (liberal-left) Labour , citing Deputy Leader Harriet Harman's so-called “equality” proposals on employment.

Harman, the privately educated daughter of a solicitor and a Harley Street surgeon, and niece of the Countess of Longford, proposed that all groups of workers who could be designated by sexual orientation, religion, colour, ethnicity, age, disability and sex, had recourse to law if they claimed discrimination in employment opportunities on any of these grounds. Only white, heterosexual, able-bodied males, most of whom would, by sheer weight of numbers, be working class, were disbarred from doing so.

This was further proof the party had abandoned the utilitarian socialist left principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” for the narrow, liberal-left policy of championing diversity and minority rights, mainly those of immigrants, deliberately encouraging multiculturalism rather than emphasising integration into the long established, social and cultural structures of the host nation.

It was the liberal-left's equivalent of China’s cultural revolution. But unlike in China, as far as these cultural revolutionaries were concerned the UK's existing and long settled working class was irrelevant, even a hindrance to their objectives. Mao’s “Red Guards” aimed to destroy the “four olds” – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas – by using peasants and workers to shatter the traditional ways they wanted replaced. But with Britain short on peasants, or even a proletariat in the Marxist sense, the liberal-left looked to other groups to achieve a rejection of past values.

For them minority rather than workers’ rights, coupled with multiculturalism, middle class liberal guilt over racism and what they considered the iniquities of  colonial “exploitation” - even residual shame over the slave trade despite the fact that that British imperialism had been at the forefront of ending it -  would be used to fracture the traditional structures responsible for what they regarded as the privilege, patriarchy and sexual repression that had blighted society in the past.

As far as the last two were concerned though  the attitudes of some of the new cultures now  embraced were often less enlightened than those of the host nation – eg: the treatment of women and gays by many Muslims, blacks and Afro Caribbeans.   But as was so often the case with these new ideologues such was their arrogance and belief in the “rightness” of their ideas any inconvenient contradictory evidence was ignored.

It was as if the ethos now driving them  was that if their policies proved detrimental to the WWC then so be it because they too were one of the “olds “, as much a part of the outdated traditional societal structure as the aristocracy and the Tory middle class.

In fact many people who would now smugly describe themselves  as of the new “concerned,  and caring” middle class, had little difficulty supporting these new policies as their employment status, financial  background and post-codes ensured relative immunity from their effects.  New immigrants settled in Tower Hamlets and Hackney not Hampstead, Islington or the affluent suburbs.

Although the class structure of the UK had not changed fundamentally the political philosophy of the growing middle class who were now a dominant force, certainly had.   This was centre left liberal rather than Tory and much more willing to accommodate Britain’s own cultural revolution.   

Forget the aristocracy, they were dinosaurs facing extinction or eccentric conversion to new causes, and in the new politics the WWC were equally antediluvian.  “Sun readers and chavs” whose votes equated to mob rule. Or as one particularly arrogant believer in the new politics put it “majoritarianism (sic)  hijacked by the tribal” proving, if proof was needed, the new ideology was neither liberal nor democratic.

The WWC's alienation  from the political process may have been disguised in recent years by the fall in voter turnout at general elections, down from 85% in 1950 to 60%  in 2001, the lowest for six decades. In '05 it rose to  just above that and in 2010 turnout of 65% was still the third lowest in 60 years. But by sheer weight of numbers it is statistically inconceivable that this reduction was due to anything other than working class abstention.     

“New” Labour victories relied on its move to the centre ground of politics with new “enlightened”  middle class liberal-left voters doing enough on such low turn-outs to compensate for the loss of its old working class constituency, many of whom no longer bothered to vote for a party from which they were estranged by policies they felt were often directly detrimental to their interests.

The essay from which this extract has been taken focused on the betrayal of the WWC by the intellectual left.  However we are now beginning to see something  similar on the Conservative right and this time it's traditional Tory grass roots supporters who are being betrayed.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Cameron's  enthusiastic, but as many Tory traditionalists would say,  unnecessary pursuit of gay marriage. In this they'd be joined by many from the working class and, it would appear, less strident members of the gay community itself, particularly as he has no mandate for such legislation.

Cameron himself may not have used  the phrase “swivel-eyed loons” to describe his party's long-standing members.  But when any new leader makes a virtue of “de-toxifying” the party he's inherited, and one of his most senior  ministers describes it's stance on issues which many traditionalists  previously supported as “nasty”, it's hardly  surprising they too are beginning to share the sense of disenfranchisement and betrayal inflicted on the white working class by the intellectual left.

* * *

This two part blog was supplied by Colin Harrow and was extracted from his essay “The Betrayal of the White Working Class by the Intellectual Left.” After a working life as a journalist he retired as Managing Editor of Mirror Group Newspapers

However he was born in the East End of London and has never forgotten his working class roots. A lifelong “Old” Labour supporter he describes himself as being on the radical left, a “Blairite” as in Eric (George Orwell) rather than Tony.

Although retaining an interest in politics in retirement he has re-invented himself as a painter and his work can be seen on www.colinharrowart.co.uk  

The Betrayal of the Working Class, Part One

This two part blog was supplied by Colin Harrow and was extracted from his essay “The Betrayal of the White Working Class by the Intellectual Left.” After a working life as a journalist he retired as Managing Editor of Mirror Group Newspapers

However he was born in the East End of London and has never forgotten his working class roots. A lifelong “Old” Labour supporter he describes himself as being on the radical left, a “Blairite” as in Eric (George Orwell) rather than Tony.

Although retaining an interest in politics in retirement he has re-invented himself as a painter and his work can be seen on www.colinharrowart.co.uk  

One of the most significant changes in UK politics since the 60s  has been the Labour Party’s abandonment of the white working class as its natural constituency..

For most of the 20^th. century its vote gave the  party its legitimacy. Without it no Labour government would have been elected.  Labour was first and foremost the political voice  of the working class.   However their relationship has now changed fundamentally and the growing alienation of the white working class (WWC) from its former natural political ally means it has been all but  disenfranchised.

When this happens to any section of society it is an affront to social justice. But when those affected are the largest single population group it threatens  democracy itself. Universal suffrage becomes a hollow pretence.   

People who feel unrepresented create a political vacuum, and when numbered in millions and parties like the BNP wait in the wings, warning bells should ring, not just within the Labour party, but in the country at large. 

The rise of parties on the far right in Europe who've capitalised on working class resentment over  immigration, cannot be ignored.  By moving its focus away from the interests of the WWC Labour has committed the biggest act of betrayal in British political history, and their acknowledged policy on immigration has been a major factor in this.

Peter Mandelson's recent statement  that Labour encouraged mass immigration, even to the point of sending out “search parties,”  and his admission that this had created employment problems, confirmed it, because those most affected were the WWC who constituted the bulk of the UK's workforce and it was their jobs that were most likely to be taken by immigrants.    

Mandelson's admission followed “New” Labour advisor Andrew Neather's revelation that the party encouraged immigration to make the UK “truly multicultural” and to “rub the right's noses in diversity.”   In fact  most of the  noses rubbed in multiculturalism and diversity belonged to  those without whose votes Labour would never have enjoyed a day in office. 

The old socialist left values Labour once espoused, based on the Utilitarian principle of “ the greatest good for the greatest number” had mutated into those of the modish, middle class,  metropolitan, metro-sexual,  liberal-left elite  obsessed with individual and minority rights. 

Their goal of inclusivity and special protection for minority groups, often out of all proportion to their numbers in the population,  was relentlessly pursued in all areas of public life even if this was at the expense of long-settled communities and meant air-brushing some of them, particularly  WWC males, out of the picture of British society.   

An example of this can be seen in the post office of a small town in the north of England (no doubt replicated elsewhere) where there are three shop window sized display posters promoting the GPO as “an essential part of everyday life.”  They are the only posters displayed.

One shows a young, mixed race boy, the second a woman in a sari carrying a young girl, and the third a Eurasian man also with a child.  The racial mix represented bears no relation to the town’s population which is overwhelmingly white.  

A second example was provided when I recently applied to renew my passport.  Of the 20 or so sample head shots advising how to present picture identification to accompany the application more than half showed either a mixed race male or an Asian/mid-eastern woman wearing a headscarf.  The others featured an elderly white woman or a child.   

There was not one representation of a white male. Seeing these would lead a visitor from another planet to conclude that white males, and in fact white women other than the elderly , were as much aliens in the community as the visitors themselves.

Of course minorities should not be ignored, or sidelined.   The extent to which any society protects their rights and includes them as full members of the community is a vital measure of any claim to call itself civilised. 

But to do so by pretending the politically acceptable image of society is one in which the  majority population is marginalised  is madness.   Minority rights should never be subservient to those of the majority.  They are equal.   But when they are given precedence, particularly when this is detrimental to the majority population in social housing and other public services , is not only perverse but a recipe for disaster for any political party promoting such policies.

However for the new liberal left any new minority group that could be identified and used “to rub the right's noses in diversity”  appears to have been automatically championed, invariably at the  expense of the WWC.

A clear demonstration of this was Harriet Harman's proposals on “equality” in employment giving employers the right to use race, ethnicity and sex as the ultimate arbiter in their choice of who should, or should not, be given a job. 

As the majority of employees in Britain are WWC males they were bound to be most affected by this legislation as every other group who could claim to designate themselves by sexual orientation, religion, colour, ethnicity, age, disability and sex, had recourse to law if they alleged discrimination in employment opportunities on any of these grounds.

Only white, heterosexual, able-bodied males, most of whom would, by sheer weight of numbers, be working class, were disbarred from doing so if they felt they had been discriminated against in favour of a member of one of these other groups.    They would be the sole victims of such “affirmative action.” If ever proof was needed of “New” (liberal-left) Labour's betrayal of the WWC it was Harman's so-called “equality” proposals.

Concludes tomorrow.

Fleeing an outraged husband

Was this Brazilian clip staged or did it all really happen? Given what I know about Latin America all I can say is that the crazier it seems the more likely it is to have really happened.

Support the Faroe Islands

The Faroe Islands, population just under 50,000, are being threatened with economic sanctions by the European Union. Although under the Danish crown the Faroes have complete autonomy and are not part of the European Union. Fish make up 95 percent of their exports and the fishing industry amounts to fully twenty percent of the GDP. The territory has increased the quota of mackerel  that Faroese boats can catch and now Brussels wants to starve them into submission with a threat not to allow fish to be exported from the Faroes into the EU. To her eternal shame, Scotland has sided with the EU over this, obviously forgetting that is the country becomes independent then Edinburgh may very well want to control her own waters in the interests of her own fishermen, which is all that the Faroes are trying to do. 

Hopefully the Faroes government will find new markets for the fish that the EU will soon no longer buy. Hopefully also people will rally behind this rather brave small nation as is stands four square against the bullies from Brussels.

Is a leftist UKIP possible?

Professor Doctor Alan Sked, who founded UKIP twenty years ago, has been interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph. He argues that the party really is full of headbangers, and goes on to speculate that a new, leftist anti-EU party is needed. This is my take on his argument:

The chances of a leftist UKIP being created are about nil, I should think. Given that the Liberals messed up the whole idea of electoral reform for at least another generation, that is probably no bad thing as any such party would get nowhere.

I accept Alan Sked's point that UKIP is in many ways the party of those sad arsed losers who dream that Mummie Maggie is going to return and make everything right for them. I found that out to my cost when I joined in the gloating at the old harridan's death and had my candidacy for the recent elections removed. So, yes, the party has to decide if if is a fan club for that creature, or a coalition that wants to get our country out of the EU.

If the former is the case then UKIP is doomed, because working class people on council estates are not going to vote for a Thatcherite party. If the latter becomes true then the party needs to start living up to its claimed belief in localism and leave local parties to fight local campaigns. The people of Surrey may very well love their privatised world, but Oldham never voted to lose its collectivist municipal services and would probably vote to have them back.

This amounts to having two parties, one working class and the other not, under one roof. As has been pointed out to me before now, that will not hold in the long run, but as I reply, in the long run we are all dead, anyway. If it holds long enough to force the referendum to be held on the EU, then UKIP will have served its purpose.

An investigation is currently being mounted by the party into my treatment. I shall await the outcome of that before deciding if UKIP really can become the electorally successful coalition that I want to see.