Nigel, meet Pierre…

Here's 'Third Swan' by King Creosote and John Hopkins, from their collaboration Diamond Mine. I bought the album after hearing it repeatedly for months. It's the classic grower, and this is one of the more upbeat tracks on this melancholic, atmospheric piece of work.



Don't, by the way, buy albums by King Creosote or John Hopkins: KC's other work is so generically jangly-Scottish-indie that even I was bored to tears, and I own the complete works of 18 Wheeler, the BMX Bandits and Spare Snare (plus every side-project touched by Teenage Fanclub members). As for Jon Hopkins, well, he has an album called The Art of Chill 2. Enough said.

All this is helping distract me – or soothe me – from the marking. Not that it's bad, it's just that 40 essays on the same question can be a little wearing. Other distractions include the political car-crash that is UKIP (or should that be 'national car-crash' given that so many of you are voting for the English Poujade?). Does this remind you of anyone?

Poujadism, however, lives on. Anti-tax, anti-Semitic and anti-establishment … blend of gruff nationalism, direct action and arcadian nostalgia…

The curse of many extremist parties—bickering, indiscipline and lack of experience—was one reason for the failure. Another was more personal to Mr Poujade: he was a man of protest, not policy. Unlike other politicians…who have campaigned against vested interests, national decline and the abandonment of the traditional values of ordinary people, Mr Poujade had no serious remedies to offer.

He also had a gift for colourful, often coarse, phrases: he would take the side, he said, of “des petits, des matraqués, des spoliés, des laminés, des humiliés” (the little man, the downtrodden, the trashed, the ripped off, the humiliated) against “the vampire state”. He could play an audience brilliantly, pandering to every prejudice, and his followers could disrupt meetings. But, all in all, he was neither a thinker nor a strategist, merely a demagogue.

Although of course unlike Poujade, Nigel Farage isn't one of the petits: he's a hugely rich man whose former job – commodities broker – contributed to the despoliation of the social structure he and other conservatives purport to cherish: it's the central contradiction in free-market conservatism. You can of course take one side or the other, but Nigel appears not to notice any contradiction. He tried to hold a carnival in Croydon today which was a bit of a damp squib when the steel band realised they'd been hoodwinked and packed up: Nigel cancelled his appearance and local UKIP types declared Croydon unsafe and 'depraved'.

Perhaps next time he should book Half A Shilling:



Sadly, the British voters don't seem likely to consign Nigel to Poujade's fate

He ended his days promoting Jerusalem artichokes as an alternative to fossil fuels.

And of course Farage doesn't see any reason to need alternatives to fossil fuels.

The other distraction is the hacking trial. Yes, it's still going on. Rebekah Brooks' lawyer claimed today that it was impossible for her to have a fair trial thanks to 'sexism' – this from the former editor of The Sun – and 'negative media coverage' (ditto). I have a horrible feeling that the sheer complexity of the trial may result in some undeserved acquittals. Still, we can expect one of the Murdoch press's regular protests about being soft on criminals, can't we? Can't we?

Of Sluts, and Strikes, Or, Forward to 1912!

One of the interesting things about postmodernism is that with language and meaning sundered, anyone can appropriate it for their own purposes. 

Take this clip of Godfrey Bloom, Member of the European Parliament and former habitué of Hong Kong brothels, berating – and hitting – journalist Michael Crick for his supposed 'disgraceful' racism, after the Channel 4 hack pointed out that UKIP's conference material didn't stretch to a single non-Caucasian face.



This is the Godfrey Bloom whom this morning described women in politics as 'sluts' and referred to Africa as, well, see for yourself:



Somewhat unfashionably, I'm quite a supporter of 'political correctness', or to put it more simply, politeness. Anyone with a serious argument to make doesn't need to reach for personal, racial or sexual comments to further said argument. Bloom's dyspeptic accusation of racism is laughable on one level, but also dangerous: it's a deliberate attempt to render the term meaningless so that it can't be used against him and people like him when they say racist things.

Perhaps UKIP couldn't find a single black person for their publicity because they don't have any black candidates or even members. In a sense, their brochure may be honest at a deeper level: where other parties (and even some advertisers) feature people from ethnic minorities to look inclusive and progressive, UKIP is clear: they just don't want black people in their party. The leadership might not say so out loud, but the membership speaks volumes. They see all black people as foreigners and would happily see them deported. 

It's easy to dismiss UKIP as the latest manifestation of red-faced blustering Tory golf-club bar bores calling for 'a small libation for my good lady wife' and dreaming of bringing back the birch. For good reason: that's what they are. But they're far more important than that. The UK has a shrill, rightwing media which concertedly plays on the prejudice of bourgeois reactionaries while tacitly encouraging the dominance of another group of rightwingers, the financial engineers. The little-Englanders attract votes for neoliberal parties through dog-whistle politics while the parties they elect get on with cutting wages, axing pensions, privatising hospitals, denying climate science and removing workers' protection. On some of these things, the UKIP voters agree with the money-men; on others, they just don't care. Currently, the rightwing newspapers loathe the Coalition government and use UKIP to drag the Tories further to the right, economically and socially. This contradiction in the strands of conservatism is encapsulated in Nigel Farage: while he talks endlessly about the conservative culture wars (hating political correctness, the little man being crushed by Brussels etc etc), he made millions in the City, exactly the kind of 'socially useless' gambling which erodes the supposedly 'English' or 'British' values many of his members purport to endorse. Given the opportunity, he would privatise everything in sight, yet his members are staunchly against the free-market free-for-all for which their monetarist cousins yearn. Farage wants a low-wage economy in which shareholders take what the workers should be paid: whatever he says in public, he knows that a globalised, mobile proletariat is key to maintaining this capitalist Utopia. Truly, being a conservative politician is to ride two horses straining to gallop in different directions. 

Giving UKIP the oxygen of publicity makes them seem important, provoking the Tory Party to chase their votes by shaping an even more reactionary agenda. We all know UKIP's leadership are bluff 'common sense' buffoons who'd steer the country into a ditch on their first day in office, or liek Farage, appear to be bluff common sense buffoons while actually pursuing a private agenda inimical to their own voters. But they're important because they're being given the opportunity to make the political running, despite their minimal size and lack of elected representatives. We're being dragged to the hard right. 

The Tories have accepted this drift from respectable conservatism to fringe lunacy as the price of power, becoming a Tea Party in tailored suits. So much, we'd expect: the Tories value political survival way above principle or ideology. But Labour should be ashamed. Ever since the dark days of Blair, the Oxford-Party HQ-SpAd-Safe Seat brigade who run the party have assumed that the working class is made up of thuggish racists. Needless to say, virtually none of these Bright Young Things have ever worked for a living, originated in the working class or lived amongst them. But they've read about them, and they know that White Van Man reads The Sun and hates Gypsies, women, foreigners and 'poofs' (his boss reads the Mail and expresses his identical prejudices in politer language). 

Rather than assume that a misinformed population has better instincts which can be awakened by discussion, education and reason, New Labour decided that it would be easier to pander to these prejudices, hence the vile race-baiting perpetuated by Labour ministers like Reid, Blunkett and Woolas, the immigration minister who claimed that 'illegal immigrants' and al-Qaeda wanted the Lib Dems to win in his constituency:

So what we now have is a political system in which all the major parties have decided that a) the voters are vile scum and b) their perceived prejudices should be adopted as party policy. UKIP is merely the latest boogie-man used by Murdoch et al. to make potential governing parties stay at heel. 

I'd like the Labour Party, at least, to return to the 1930s. Back then, it was forced by the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party to remain agile, radical and close to the electorate without adopting the darker impulses of the populus. It had confidence in the people's intelligence and goodwill. Now, we have parties which fear and resent the population, a political class which wants to be left to get on with things unhindered by the mere citizenry. One section of the left was Syndicalist. Their vision of the future was workers' co-operatives running each industry and negotiating with other industries to the people's mutual benefit, without government. You may or may not see this as a good idea, but the Syndicalists had a very keen eye for the pitfalls of representative politics such as the UK adopted. Here's what the 1912 South Wales Miners' pamphlet The Miners' Next Step has to say about political and trade union leaders' inherent conservatism:

In the main, and on things that matter, the Executive have the supreme power. The workmen for a time look up to these men and when things are going well they idolise them. The employers respect them. Why? Because they have the men - the real power - in the hollow of their hands. They, the leaders, become "gentlemen," they become M.P.'s and have considerable social prestige because of this power. Now when any man or men assume power of this description, we have a right to ask them to be infallible. That is the penalty, a just one too, of autocracy. When things go wrong, and we have shown that they have gone wrong, they deserve to be, and are blamed. What really is blameworthy, is the conciliation policy which demands leaders of this description.

For a moment let us look at this question from the leaders' standpoint. First, they are "trade unionists by trade" and their profession demands certain privileges. The greatest of all these are plenary powers. Now, every inroad the rank and file make on this privilege lessens the power and prestige of the leader. Can we wonder then that leaders are averse to change? Can we wonder that they try and prevent progress? Progress may arrive at such a point that they would not be able to retain their "jobs," or their "jobs" would become so unimportant that from their point of view, they would not be worth retaining.

The leader then has an interest - a vested interest - in stopping progress. They have therefore in some things an antagonism of interests with the rank and file.

The ordinary people, they say, are reduced to the status of fans at a football match: while they might have picked the team, they no longer have any say in how play is organised. For the Syndicalists, betrayal was inevitable. The leaders would go to London, sit in negotiating rooms with the opposition, visit their tailors, drink their whisky, pick up their discourse and before long, those outside would find it hard – to nick Orwell – to tell the difference between the pigs and the men. 

Reading today's revelations about New Labour's infighting in the dying days of the Blair regime, it's depressing to note that neither Blair's nor Brown's minions give a moment's thought to political principle, to the hopes and dreams of their party members or the people they're elected to govern. The people are an inconvenient embarrassment, carping and jeering while their leaders try to look dignified in the offices of The Sun or Goldman Sachs. Again, those miners knew what they were talking about in 1912: the leader

sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion. His motto is, "Men, be loyal to your leaders."

In order to be effective, the leader must keep the men in order, or he forfeits the respect of the employers and "the public," and thus becomes ineffective as a leader.

Paid-up members of what Sampson called 'the political class', this is politics reduced to a game of who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out. That lives, communities and futures depended on how they behaved appears not to have occurred to Blair, Brown, the Blairites and the Brownites. Bereft of any political principle, they'd read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and agreed that ideological differences were dead: we were all free market capitalists now (a weak argument demolished along with the Twin Towers) and all that remained was to bicker over who would referee the bunfight. As usual, the Tories were hatefully honest: they never believed that the war was over. Not until the last worker is reduced to peon status, the last job exported to some North Korean slave factory will they declare victory over us. There's no humbug in the Tory wing of the Capitalist Party, unlike the Lib Dems or Labour: they hate and fear us and aren't afraid to say so, sure that false consciousness will deliver them enough votes to be in with a shot of power at each election.

Ed Miliband shows signs of understanding this, but there's little hope of success without as much pressure from the left as there is from the right and the media conglomerates who serve as the PR wing of Big Money. Which brings us back to dear old Godfrey, Boris and Co. They're the jesters of Big Money. They raise a stunned gape at their knowing use of language and ideas previously thought beyond the pale. Like comedians relying on rape jokes, the shock diminishes but the ideas permeate into polite society, disguised as 'speaking your mind' or 'common sense'. Exaggerated by an echo-chamber media pursuing other private interests, their plain-speaking is seen as attractive to the serious politicians and we're dragged, one gaffe at a time, into a smaller, meaner, less hospitable, more suspicious condition. 

Other than that, I'm quite relaxed at the moment. Looking forward to teaching next week. Toodle-pip!

I For One Welcome Our Lesbian Queen

The Conservative Party is tearing itself apart over the mere thought of GAYS today. In particular, Sir Gerald Howarth – whose background is in the arms trade – is inexplicably scared of 'aggressive homosexuals' emboldened by the legal right to marry and spend the rest of their lives wandering despairingly round IKEA sniping at each other, while Norman Tebbit is worried about LESBIAN QUEENS:

“When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?’
“It’s like one of my colleagues said: we’ve got to make these same sex marriages available to all.
“It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I’d be allowed to marry my son. Why not? Why shouldn’t a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn’t two elderly sisters living together marry each other?”

What would these lesbian queens be like? Well, I don't know if Wonder Woman is officially a lesbian, but she is the queen of an all-female society. Despite her love for impractical clothing made of nasty artificial fibres, I reckon we could all thrive under her enlightened rule:



I'm torn between despair for a country which seems to think that the only problem with the Tory Party's bigotry is that it doesn't hate Europe strongly enough, and hilarity. Cameron's aristocratic Conservatism has come slap bang up against a more visceral, less cosmopolitan one and he clearly has no idea what to do. A while back I wrote about UKIP's fore-runners in various countries: the Poujadists, the Know-Nothings and the Ham and Eggs movements. While reading Starr's excellent Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California, I came across the Townsendites. This mass movement was populist, appealed to poor pensioners by campaigning for decent pensions as a way to kickstart the economy, and tended to be anti-semitic. They were exactly the electorate UKIP is stealing from the Tories:

Urban ethnic blue-collar workers, even farm workers, might go left towards militant trade unionism, Socialism, even the Communist Party. The middle and lower-middle classes, by contrast, would move right. While industrial or agricultural workers felt permanently outside the system, excluded as a matter of enduring socio-economic structure, the middle to lower-middle classes, having once felt themselves to be on the inside, mainstream, then cynically ejected – by Wall Street, by the Ivy League patricians around Roosevelt, by international Jewry – felt betrayed and eager for retribution. Such resentment by the dutiful and the God-fearing, made to feel victims of their social superiors… feeling cheated by the very system they had devoted their lives to, had all the makings of a para-fascist crusade. 

And so it turned out: the police and the army turned machine guns on striking workers while helping vigilante groups allied to the Townsendites smash workers, unions and minorities across California and the US.

The parallels are striking. UKIP's supporters aren't the very poor: they're the Sun and Mail-reading classes. They resent an Etonian Prime Minister not listening to their reactionary 'common-sense' beliefs on everything from Europe to homosexuality. They're no longer very anti-semitic: just put 'Muslims' or 'immigrants' where the Townsendites talked of Jews. They do distrust international capital - although Farage made millions from currency speculation. Interestingly, Townsend was a hypocrite too: he made a lot of money from whipping up his campaigns, mostly through secretly selling ads in his publicity material.

The Townsendites fell apart fairly quickly, though some of the did end up in the Ham and Eggs movement. What will happen to UKIP once the burdens of office and campaigning start to take off the shine?

Nigel Farage's Ham and Eggs.

I wake up this morning to discover that the BBC is hailing UKIP's 'surprise' showing in the local elections, as if there's no connection between Nigel Farage's 14 appearances on Question Time and seeming omnipresence on programmes from The Daily Politics to Peppa Pig. This, despite not having a single MP, unlike the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the SDLP, Respect, the DUP and the UUP.

So today the media is in a frenzy. Who are these UKIP voters? Are they 'just' a protest vote? Will they disappear again? In response, various party hacks and commentators are replying in words of one syllable. Which isn't very helpful: as I say to my students constantly, everything is more complicated and therefore more interesting than it might appear. So here in no particular order and with absolutely no evidence or justification (my degrees are in English and Welsh literature), are my reckons on the UKIP phenomenon.

1. Electorates always look for simple answers, especially in hard times. This is why conservatism thrives to the extent it does: it specialises in reductive pandering. Look at Canadian PM Stephen Harper's quote of the week: now is not the time to 'commit sociology' he said, speaking of some iffy terrorist arrests. Similarly, the anti-climate science lobby world-wide specialises in reductiveness. We had a cold winter, they say. Where's your global warming now? They conjure up images of aloof 'boffins' engaged in some kind of plot against 'business' and 'hard-working families' (and they're usually funded by big business). This is the modus operandi of the Conservative Party of course, but they're at least slightly constrained by being in government. UKIP's entire manifesto is an appeal to the electorate's desire for 'straight answers' and 'common sense': any problem is the fault of 'bureaucrats', 'Brussels', immigrants or 'Bolsheviks'. Complication is the enemy.

This is of course the discourse of hegemony: by not addressing the complexities of any given situation, the status quo is reinforced. Take crime. There's considerable evidence that lead in petrol and other substances severely damaged brain function, and the decline in crime may be partially triggered by the ban on lead (note my left-wing qualifications there). But that's too complicated for the right. They need crime to be a threat, and sanctions to be morally clear. Hang them. Flog them. Bang them up. It's the only language they understand.

Right-wingers are Manichaean. They see the world in black and white, even if their leaders quietly have  a more nuanced view. (Farage is a millionaire currency trader, so clearly has more economic insight than he lets on). This is not new: hard times produce extreme parties - most famously the Nazis but there are plenty of movements more akin to UKIP. Weighing up complexity is hard and boring. Voters don't want to do it. Politicians don't want to do it. They want to pretend that there are simple causes and easy reasons. Who ever won an election with the slogan 'It's Complicated But We'll Do Our Best'? Which leads me to:

2. UKIP might easily be considered the Tea Party of the UK. It's loud, largely supported by older people (whom I suspect split between the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) and incoherent. Famously, the Tea Party calls for the abolition of federal government, while its pensioner supporters draw heavily on federal Medicare and Medicaid to cope with the depredations of private healthcare.

Someone who really doesn't understand where Medicare comes from

It's this refusal to engage with the economic and cultural aspects of life which mark them out as reactionary and as a protest party: imagine a UKIP government trying to decide on a Public Sector Borrowing Rate, or the acceptable level of atmospheric NO2.

All the parties are rushing for the simpleton vote, but UKIP is more explicit. However, they're not the first. There will always be a section of the electorate which yearns for immediate gratification and simplicity. Apart from the Tea Party, there was the Ham and Eggs movement in California, which started off demanding federal pensions, family values and hatred of bankers (shading, unfortunately like Britain's Independent Labour Party, into anti-semitism), and became a minor hard-right lynch mob whose leader was eventually arrested for pro-Nazism as the US became embroiled in WW2.

Ham and Eggs had 'all-girl bands', pep rallies, picnics, chants and songs, as well as a plausible and important original cause. They had a clear message and a sophisticated media strategy, flooding the airwaves with catchy slogans and the message that 'they' were out to get the little man. And just like UKIP, Ham and Eggs had prominent campaigners with shady and often criminal histories. (For more on Ham and Eggs, Starr's Endangered Dreams is an excellent history of California in the Great Depression.

Ham and Eggs weren't alone. We can also look at the Know-Nothing Party, active in the middle decades of the 19th century.

They were even more like UKIP: briefly the most prominent 'nativist' party, they held that America's problem was… immigrants. In particular, Catholic immigrants, especially German and Irish ones, as this Know-Nothing cartoon demonstrates.

Like Northern Ireland's unionists, they believed that Catholicism meant obedience to the Pope and anti-democratic values: these apparently progressive beliefs quickly legitimised racial hatred and reaction. Membership was only open to white Protestant males and most supporters were middle-class. So it was a party founded on reductive, racial stereotypes and an overwhelming sense of paranoia, that 'they' are coming to subvert some apparently core American values.

Just like UKIP appears to be doing, the Know-Nothings or American Party capitalised on the political exhaustion of the established parties and captured a swathe of territory in an upsurge of what we might call protest voting. Voters came from all parties, having rejected the lethargy of established politics in the face of the most pressing political issues: slavery (many Know-Nothings were opposed) and the scourge of alcohol. Yet – and I suspect this is a problem facing UKIP – movements which expand massively in a short space of time are liable to be vulnerable. As UKIP is finding, policy is hard to define off the cuff, while a radicalised membership may produce candidates with seriously extreme views and political histories.

Like UKIP, the Know-Nothing voters were often those of the lower middle class who view the political establishment with considerable suspicion (often rightly) but from the reactionary right. UKIPs voters are social conservatives, rather than radical neoliberal capitalists. Farage is a conundrum here: his fortune is derived from neoliberal capitalism, yet his entire manifesto is a cry of pain at the damage wreaked by it upon Britain and British culture - a contradiction also facing the Conservative Party over the past few decades. He likes a fag (Americans: this means cigarette), a drink, a visit to lap-dancing clubs: he's Jeremy Clarkson's idea of a Bloody Good Bloke, while at the same time being the product of global capitalism.

UKIP's answer is to pretend that there isn't any such contradiction, as is Cameron's. As such, it's insulting: they hope the members and voters don't make the connection between, say, mass unemployment and globalisation, or economic liberalisation and social liberalism or immigration. The only solution is to campaign solely on cultural issues and ignore economics: gay marriage and school curricula press the buttons of conservative voters whereas banking stability doesn't.

My last proto-UKIP is the Poujadist movement. They won't like this one: it's French. But Poujadism is the very essence of UKIPism, expressing the fears and suspicions not of the proletariat, but of the small business classes. Pierre Poujade led the insurrection of the single trader, the small town, the backwater, against the depredations of taxation, distant governments and Big Business. For a short time, his movement was huge, appealing to the classic sense that 'real France' was essentially a France of sleepy towns, community leaders and shopkeepers, all the things being swept away by Capital and modernity. Like UKIP, Poujade appealed to nostalgic reactionaries: ruralism at home and Empire abroad were being abandoned, and his constituency regretted these losses. Yet the Poujadists fell apart because they knew only what they didn't like: modernity. They had no programme other than the magic return to the simple life (the astonishingly stupid basis of almost all post-Independence Irish politics too).

The Know-Nothings fell apart over the issue of slavery in the approach to the Civil War: like any American Party with national aspirations, the cultural and economic divide between its Southern and Northern aspects was too great to bridge. Ham and Eggs were a one-issue party which collapsed in the face of other political issues. The Poujadists only opposed the modern world.

Will this happen to UKIP? My suspicion is that – like the BNP before it – the burden of responsibility will break it to some extent. BNP councillors were manifestly unprepared for the necessary drudgery of political work. Once you're in power, you can't blame unemptied bins, budgetary tensions and bus route problems on 'Europe' or 'immigrants'. Farage et al. appeal to the Golf Club constituency: those blow-hards who repeat Daily Mail nostrums over a stiff gin-and-tonic to other people like them without the slightest concern for other perspectives, classes and values ('stand to reason' is their slogan). UKIP's older, suaver, more middle-class appeal will continue to attract conservative voters through its populist, anti-elitist politics, and I do worry that it will operate as a ginger group, perpetually forcing the Conservative Party to tack even harder right and in the process shifting the entire political spectrum.

Personally, I don't get UKIP, but I'm not in their target demographic. I'm a metropolitan liberal. I think that the EU, for all its faults, has protected the British worker against the worst instincts of British governments, Labour and Tory: working time, health and safety, rights to organise, human rights etc. etc. Which is very sad.

I'm not nostalgic for empire (my Irish passport prevents that). I don't think that the British Empire – or any other empire – was a force for good. I like the complexities of modern life. For instance, I once asked a UKIP candidate why he wasn't a Welsh or Scottish nationalist. After all, he'd explained to me that super-states were wrong, that 'Brussels' was distant and uncaring about the fringes, that a federal currency couldn't take into account local economic needs. OK, I said. Isn't the UK a 'super-state'? A single language has been imposed. A single currency and interest rates which serve the needs of the City of London aren't suitable for Tredegar or Clydeside. The UK government didn't reflect the votes cast by Scotland or Wales. Nobody in Wales or Scotland voted for the Union. The response was a confused stutter which took in a weird amalgam of something called Britishness which seemed to be unquestionable, and promoted the Empire as the fruits of these combined nations. Oh, I said. So you do like some super-states, like the Empire? You just want to be in charge of one rather than participating in one. The conversation ended without further examination of the substantive issues.

UKIP's appeal is in telling simple narratives to a constituency which really believes in a selective view of the past. It harks back to empire, to social stability, to conservative truths. Its ideal world is suburban, white, heterosexual and suspicious of change. It provides simple causes to complicated problems. Europe. Immigration. Cosmopolitan gays. (For a vision of the UKIP nation and an exploration of the neoliberal/social conservative tensions in the Tories, I strongly recommend you read Julian Barnes' wonderful novel England, England). As such, it attracts not just Conservatives and BNP voters, but conservatives from all parties and classes. Don't forget that Labour has a large anti-European streak, though its roots are in socialist suspicion that the EU is a capitalist plot. Former Labour voters disillusioned with the party's other policies may not make the distinction between left Anti-Europeanism and UKIP's version, and working-class Labourism has always been socially conservative. There's a huge constituency out there which sees Westminster politics as elitist and disconnected: they want their atavistic beliefs represented, and UKIP is the ideal vehicle. Simply put, it's Top Gear friendly, the political wing of Littlejohn's You Couldn't Make It Up reactionary suspicion. However, I do think that the burden of office will expose them and their ideas quite quickly.

That said: what happens in the meantime? The Tories will try to recover UKIP's voters by fuelling xenophobia and other dangerous far-right instincts, despite the reservations of their globalist wing. Labour, I fear will do the same, as it has at every opportunity for 30 years. New Labour is particularly guilty of this. Having never met or come from the working classes, its policies clearly assumed that they were all closet racists who required appeasement, and I don't think this has changed much, though I do think Ed Miliband's a bit cleverer than this. Instead of trying to persuade voters to change, Labour repeatedly decided to pander. It's a failure of leadership and responsibility. Yes, many voters are concerned about immigration, Europe and so on: often because cynical newspapers and parties have seen these as easy buttons to press. But I happen to think that the British electorate largely isn't racist, isn't paranoid, isn't reactionary and is capable of sophisticated responses to social and political problems.

The only problem is: which party will dare to be the first to test this theory that voters are grown-ups?

Anyway, sorry for the long rant/lecture. I'm no more politically astute than anyone else, and of course everything I say is informed by my privileged position. But I thought you might be interested in the background and history.

I didn't come here to talk about my policies!

Refreshingly, some political parties don't spend their money on consultants, image advice, PR men and media spinning. Here's Lord Pearson, leader of UKIP, the golf club equivalent of the fascist BNP. It's worth watching all 4 minutes.



Perhaps he should have invested in some media training after all…

UKIP bats for Britain once again

The MEP and former leader of UKIP (now led by an even madder Lord Pearson - europhobe, homophobe, climate change denier, xenophobe, religious bigot, expenses fiddling millionaire) Nigel Farage has reminded Europeans of British charm and good manners with a tirade of personal insults ('the charisma of a damp rag'; the appearance of 'a low-grade bank clerk' amongst other things), attached to a description of Belgium as a 'non-country'. He accused van Rompuy of being unheard of because 'I've never heard of you', which only displays his insularity - van Rompuy was Prime Minister of Belgium.

All rather cheeky from a man with all the charm of bird flu from an artificial country rammed together via conquest and bribery.

Here's the great leader - clearly a man of taste. Well done Nigel, diplomatic as ever.

Today is shrouded in gloom

I won't be around much today - 2 four-hour meetings to check every student's grade. What joy that will be.

Meanwhile, contemplate this: that the British people have largely chosen the landed aristocracy, followed by petit-bourgeois racists in the form of UKIP, and a significant chunk have voted for racial violence, holocaust denial, pigmentation-based discrimination, Nazism and moronic anti-politics.

You'll soon find out that the Tories can't blame the poor for everything, UKIP can't blame Europeans and the BNP can't blame black people, Muslims and Jews. When they start cutting public services and handing them over to thugs and wideboys (I accept this process is already under way), just remember this: you voted for it. (Not my regular readers of course).

A quick plug

For two events: Cruel Brother (named after an old ballad, or the mirror of Pentangle's 'Cruel Sister' album, or Rachel Unthank and the Winterset's album of the same name?) and the Deer Friend are performing this weekend, at the Chindit on Friday night, and supporting an ex-member of Fairport Convention at the Newhampton Inn on Saturday. Highly recommended folk/rock stuff, everybody. I'll hopefully be at the Chindit, depending on whether I have to go to Cardiff that day or early on Saturday.

Before that, however: please vote tomorrow. As long as you aren't planning to vote UKIP, Tory or BNP. If you are, the elections are on Friday. I always try to vote at 7 a.m. so that the Tories are losing straight away.

UKIP's poor relations also caught cheating

Merciless Public picks up on the story that the BNP's latest leaflet turns out to feature lots of happy smiling white people who aren't, well, British - or even British resident. 'Why we're all voting BNP' headlines some headshots of, amongst others, an Italian photographer's parents - and they aren't fascists. The images were from a stock photography site. Presumably the BNP couldn't find any supporters proud enough to pose - or any without a swastika tattoo on their foreheads. Two Americans feature, as well as an unfortunate British soldier who told the press that the BNP are 'scumbags' and 'I wouldn't vote for them in a million years'.

A few weeks ago, I objected to UKIP using Churchill to oppose the EU, despite Winston's keen support for a United States of Europe. Now, a BNP campaign seems similarly deceitful. It claims, much to the fury of religious leaders, that Jesus would vote BNP and quotes this legendary figure: 'If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you' (John 15:20). Presumably they couldn't find a biblical reference for 'wogs out'.

Are they really claiming that a Jewish asylum seeker (his parents fled to Egypt as soon as he was born, if you believe all this stuff) would identify with the BNP, who seem to me to be the likely persecutors? Clearly this Jesus bloke didn't have a problem with Arabs (unlike Israel now) and would no doubt be defending Muslim families from the BNP in Stoke, Blackburn, Gaza and elsewhere. I seem to remember that Jesus's people didn't exactly thrive in various countries in which the BNP's friends came to power.

I note that they've chosen a horrible sentimental Caucasian-style image of Jesus, of the kind that abounded in my Catholic schools. Perhaps they don't know where he was allegedly from.

Friday's conundrum (again)

Today's Friday Conundrum is quite simple: who really needs a slap?

My list is obviously endless, with Hazel Blears at the top, but taking in people with hairstyles, Tories, entire categories such as advertising and PR workers, 4x4 drivers, litterbugs, UKIP, anyone who uses their mobile telephone as a music player, Steve Quitterill…

Let's get UKIP

This is what the Advertising Standards Authority told me when I inquired about complaining about UKIP's disgraceful and cynical appropriation of United States of Europe enthusiast Winston Churchill for their grubby little campaign:

Dear Dr [Vole]

Thank you for your e-mail to the Advertising Standards Authority.

Advertising or marketing communications whose principal function is to influence votes in local, regional, national or international elections are exempt from the advertising Codes so we are unable to investigate complaints about these.

Kind regards

Cynical Ben, in an earlier comment, suggests that this means we can found a 'Nick Griffin is a Twat' party and save up for posters proclaiming this principle. Anyone up for starting a kitty? We could extend it to UKIP as well.

Gawain Towler - rushed off his feet

The little-Englander defending UKIP's appropriation of pro-EU cheerleader Winston Churchill for their grubby little campaign (in the comments on my earlier post) turns out to be Gawain Towler. He told North Dorset's UKIP party (held in a phone box) when they made him their prospective parliamentary candidate:

“From the age of 14, when at school in Iwerne Minster, I have dreamt of fighting this seat, I am honoured that the membership chose me last night”.

The last few years must have been a living nightmare for poor Gawain, who spent the years between 14 and 40 years old working for, and repeatedly standing in elections for, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party (some unions are OK, I see, Gawain). Well done for your 8.22% (fifth out of six) in Glasgow Kelvin - what made you jump ship?

But Gawain - surely a busy, Brussels-based UKIP press officer should have more to do than post disingenuous blog comments. I bet Alastair Campbell had someone to do it for him, but then he worked for an organisation which was slightly more than a golf club-cum-masons lodge for red-faced ranters specialising in fraud.

I reproduce this photograph of Mr Towler (on the right) without comment, other than to note that they think it's good publicity.

UPDATE: I asked the Advertising Standards Authority if they had regulatory powers over political ads. Unfortunately they don't, so the lying turds can carry on lying.

Cheating dishonest UKIP scum

You may have seen this billboard for UKIP (BNP for the Mail-reading accountancy classes), the United Kingdom Independence Party, recruiting Winston Churchill to their anti-European cause. (As an aside, how do they manage to oppose the European Union while defending the United Kingdom Union?). The accompanying election poster declares, amidst a load of largely inaccurate bullshit, that Winston wouldn't let it happen. 

Er… let's see what Churchill (largely a bad man with the necessary skills needed to save Britain in its darkest hour) had to say about a United Europe shall we?

"I wish to speak to you today about the tragedy of Europe. (...) Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. (...) The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany."

Winston ChurchillSpeech at Zurich University 19th September 1946

(http://www.historiasiglo20.org/europe/anteceden2.htm)

Now UKIP might claim that Winston wanted an EU to keep France and Germany peaceful without Britain necessarily being a member, but there's no denying that he was a fan, and the Franco-German union is merely 'the first step'. Even better than this, fact fans, is his plan presented to Parliament in 1940 for a united British-French nation. Eat that, a-historical little Englander bigots. 

(I'm an itchy, intolerant leftwinger. Traditionally the left sees the EU as a capitalist plot, whereas the right sees it as a socialist plot). In many ways, they're both right - but I'd rather have a reformed united Europe than the centre-right government we have now).