Is it time that we took a closer look at UKIP?

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The UKIP vote in Eastleigh rose from 3.6% in 2010 to 27.8% in the by-election on Thursday. It may have been because the party is mopping up the mid-term protest votes which traditionally went to the Liberal Democrats before they climbed into bed with the devil in May 2010. It may be because many people – wrongly - feel that the three main parties in Westminster are “all the same”, a feeling which the Tories have helped to create by transferring so much real power from democratic accountability to unelected and unaccountable corporations as they privatise everything on which they can lay their grubby hands. What I don’t believe is that this bubble of support for UKIP is because of the party’s reactionary, right-wing policies, which aim to take us back to the 1950s.

The one policy which everyone associates with UKIP is withdrawal from the EU. UKIP has claimed that by leaving the EU, the UK would save over £45 million a day plus £60 billion a year, conveniently ignoring any EU rebates and regional grants. I’m not sure where it gets those figures from, since the Treasury says that the UK paid £8.9 billion into EU budget in 2010/11 (out of £706 billion of public spending). The European Commission puts the UK's net contribution at £5.85 billion.

The EU is the UK's main trading partner, accounting for 52% of our total trade in goods and services; if Britain went for a clean break from the EU, its exports would be subject to EU export tariffs. Millions of jobs could be lost as global manufacturers move to low-cost countries within the EU, and Britain's foreign-owned car industry might well shift into the EU. However, withdrawal from the EU was the issue which UKIP exploited and which put it on the political map. With his half-baked promise of a referendum at some point in the future, the idiotic Cameron has increased UKIP’s credibility by showing that he’s afraid of it.

Cameron also said that UKIP is “full of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", and perhaps on that last point he could now be right. The Eastleigh by-election showed that UKIP is appealing to racists, causing one person on Twitter to refer to it as “the BNP for the Notting Hill set”. UKIP may be more subtle than the BNP, but it wants to freeze immigration, pandering to the Alf Garnetts who see all foreigners as problems, and has even thrown in the contentious claim that “multiculturalism has split our society”.

In December 2011, the UK had 88,179 people in prison, more per head of the population than any other country in Europe, yet UKIP wants to double the number of prison places. UKIP says that the £2 billion cost of building new prisons is negligible compared to the cost of crime, but it hasn’t factored in the cost of keeping prisoners in jail, which amounts to at least £40,000 a year for each of them. Yet UKIP would refuse to accept European Arrest Warrants, which could well mean delays for the UK in extraditing suspects from other European countries.

The NHS would be no safer with UKIP than it’s been with the Tories, since the party believes that “other models are worth considering to see whether lessons can be learned from abroad”. On education, UKIP wants to bring back grammar schools, so that we can once again tell about 80% of eleven-year-olds that they’re failures, while at the same time giving parents education vouchers, which would be a way of subsidising private school fees.

The cornerstone of UKIP’s tax policies is to roll the employee national insurance and basic rate income tax into a flat rate of income tax of 31%. There would be no higher rate tax, since UKIP perpetuates the Tory lie that the 50% income tax rate cost the economy money; it hasn’t, it has brought in £2.7 billion a year. UKIP’s policy would be a massive tax cut for the rich, far bigger than the one that’s being introduced by the Tories in April. Even greater inequality would be created by abolishing national insurance for employers.

UKIP policies, like so many Tory ones, amount to an attack on our rights. UKIP would put an end to most legislation regarding matters such as weekly working hours, holidays, overtime, redundancy and sick pay, while leaving it up to each employer to decide whether to offer parental leave. It says it would also scrap most ‘equality and discrimination’ legislation.

If you need any more reasons not to vote for UKIP, it denies climate change and would make increased defence spending “a clear priority, even in these difficult times”. It opposes equal marriage, would hold a referendum in each county on ending the hunting ban and would allow smoking in allocated rooms in public houses, clubs and hotels. It’s no wonder that UKIP has been likened to “the political wing of a Home Counties golf club”.

You may not like the EU, and you may think that after 38 years it’s time to hold another referendum on our membership. However, before you vote for a party that makes that its flagship policy, look a little more closely at what else you would be voting for at the same time.

Sources used:-

http://www.ukip.org/

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

Indeed. UKIP has always attracted the drop-out and rugged individualist who is determined to plough life's farrow differently. The Great British Eccentric can always capture a place in the popular imagination, but the attraction for decent working-class, salt of the earth Brits is not so readily understood. Migration is a global phenomenon, and people whose only earning ability lies in their physical body's capacity will naturally go where such a capability is in demand. Better-educated locals can find better-paid alternatives to manual labour, so conflict ought to be minimal. British workers in particular have little appetite for menial tasks that foreigners will undertake, so the answer as usual is better education, not novelty-politics.

It is like Trump in America - brainwashed out of rational choice, the mugs will choose any opposition that looks cross enough.

Ukip elects Diane James as new party leader

So the one-trick pony party wants to be the official Opposition. But the ever-present uncertainty will always be, "When will Nigel want to stage another return?"




http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/ukip-elects-diane-james-as-new-party-leader/ar-BBwei52?li=BBoPRmx&ocid=iehp

Paul Nuttall, UKIP leader and candidate in the Stoke Central by-election
- He believes in NHS privatisation but deleted the fact from his website.
- He lied about having a PhD.
- He lied about playing football for Tranmere.
- He has now given a false address on his nomination papers.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/02/police-investigate-complaint-over-paul-nuttalls-stoke-byelection-bid

This was when Paul Nuttall led England to victory in the World Cup.....


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C44q_DtWAAA-XM_.jpg

Paul Nuttall really is the gift that keeps on giving

New Comedy Duo - The Two Shoddies

( Daily Mail   )

" It's good lies from me ; and it's good lies from him..."

Nuttall Speaks Out...

(liverpoolecho)

" I haven't had such a tricky time since I led the SAS raid on the Iranian Embassy..."

All political parties have their oddballs, but UKIP seems to have a greater number than most. We had Godfrey Bloom, who thinks that women should spend more time cleaning behind fridges, the donor Demetri Marchessini, who thinks women should be banned from wearing trousers and unmarried mothers should be smacked, and even a leadership election where one of the candidates was knocked unconscious. Diane James won that election but resigned as leader after just 18 days, and then Paul Nuttall got the job.

Zoe Williams writes how “Nuttall, described by commentators on his election to the leadership as a nightmare for Labour (some combination of his professional manners and common touch), will make whatever claim comes into his head (that he has a doctorate; that he’s on a charity board) if he thinks it will strengthen his case in the moment……..He has never mustered the slightest interest in accuracy at a political level, yet it is the emergence of nonsensical claims for himself – the professional football past is the most infantile, but in some oblique way the most lacking in respect – that put him in his own league.” And that’s before we get on to his biggest clanger of all, his false claim that he lost close friends at Hillsborough, while UKIP’s chief donor, Arron Banks, said he was “sick to death” of hearing about the disaster.

Then there is UKEP MEP Jane Collins. It’s only just over two weeks since she was ordered to pay defamation damages of £54,000 to each of the three Labour MPs in Rotherham (plus a bill of £196,000 for the costs of the case), after saying in a conference speech that they knew about child exploitation in the town but failed to intervene. The joke is that she tried to delay the litigation by claiming that as a member of the European Parliament, she enjoys a blanket immunity from any legal action taken against her. Here was an outspoken opponent of Britain's membership of the EU appealing for help from one of the Brussels institutions she detests.

You would think that Ms Collins might be a little more circumspect before spouting any more untruths, but no, she’s at it again. Her latest claim is that 'hundreds' of illegal immigrants are arriving in the UK each week and that she quoted that statement directly from Sussex Police. However, a spokesman for the force said their last public statement about illegal immigrants was made in April 2016. This has prompted Lib Dem leader Tim Farron to compare Collins to Trump, adding “no one can believe a word UKIP says on anything”. That's very true, Tim, but it's also what people were saying about your party and its 'pledges' not so very long ago.

Sources:-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/21/paul-nuttall-ukip-hypocrisy-hillsborough-working-people

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-38884762

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jane-collins-ukip-mep-illegal-immigrants-donald-trump-sussex-police-tim-farron-a7587136.html