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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » UKIP as a political party – one of the big casualties of Brexi
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » UKIP as a political party – one of the big casualties of Brexit
Love this pic.twitter.com/A0lylpFIRJ
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More than the greens and arguably more than the Lib Dems?
But never underestimate the idiocy and arrogance of those with political ambitions. UKIP will crawl on for a while yet I think as a vehicle for successive non entities seeking to get themselves elected.
It may be interesting.
He has a worthwhile lead and it would be huge news for the US/Trump/NAFTA if he were to win.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/02/18/biden-public-and-private-hints-run/k8qmHTh98vItVrpHjD183L/story.html
It's always hot and sunny in Mad Max.
(Lobrador / Labrador - get it?!?)
I also hate that argument because I doubt many people know the name of their MP either, because for most normal people (ie people not on PB) politics is an event that happens once or twice a year, with minor updates from the news when things happen.
There's actual practical work to be done, almost irrespective of which mode of exit we plump for. Holes to be dug. Fences erected. Lorry parks and so forth. In the mean time, we've had a Boris speech ( vintage 2016), May saying nothing useful and now Davies waffling on about Mad Max.
If we end up half-in, half-out, the running sore in British politics will only grow bloodier. One side will feel betrayed, the other that they have a foot inside the door to rejoin.
Though not even PR would save UKIP now it has achieved its primary purpose of a UK out of the EU
And they will still want to complain. There is a chance (and a fear for TSE) that they will join the Conservatives if they are mad enough to elect someone like Leadsom or JRM to be leader; if not, they will still want a home for their views.
The key for UKIP's future existence is to find a central complaint to build on, something to get such people's ire up. Ensuring Brexit is Brexit isn't enough - at least at the moment.
But in the medium and long term, there is certainly room for a backwards-looking party that might appeal to both left and right wings of political opinion.
If only UKIP would stop embarrassing themselves and do something similar. Never mind Fairy Liquid, I'm still on the same packet of tea for the last four leaders or so.
If Labour hadn't been occupied by the far left I might be looking in that direction.
Everything else is up for grabs. All that talk of betrayal is strictly for the golf club bores.
It's hard not to argue UKIP has had a huge impact. Without the very real possibility of the Conservatives losing significant votes to UKIP, there'd have been no referendum and without that commitment no Cameron majority in 2015.
Had REMAIN won, UKIP would have still faced an existential crisis. The only thing worse for them than losing was winning. Most parties keep their ultimate objectives suitably vague in order to stay in existence. UKIP didn't - they wanted a Referendum on our membership of the EU in which they would support us leaving.
Had they folded in July 2016 nobody would have argued. Unfortunately, the last 20 months has been a catalogue of disaster and they now fade inauspiciously into the night. Without Farage they were lead by tenth raters like Bolton and Nuttall.
Farage is no titan but he embodied and voiced a strand of opinion beautifully at the right time. In essence, UKIP was his vehicle and he succeeded.
It also heavily influenced the Conservative Party completing that party's journey from being the most pro-EU of the main parties to the most sceptical. Farage and UKIP didn't start that - Thatcher did with Bruges (arguably) but Farage picked up the banner especially in the post-1997 Conservative wilderness years and his impact, through UKIP, was to bring through a generation of emboldened sceptics in the Conservative party who left a more pro-EU leadership under Cameron with no choice but to accede to the Referendum.
The Leave victory and the government's decision to end free movement and leave the single market and customs union has been a disaster for UKIP as they have little to protest about
And, as I've said before, triangulating for the centre ground doesn't work in a binary choice, as presented in a referendum. It may be that Cameron simply didn't realise how sceptical so many people were.
I do wonder how things would've gone had Remain won 52% (I suspect the grumpy broadcast media would now be calling for unity and that the public's will must be respected), or had Cameron not offered the referendum at the 2015 General Election.
Making Jeremy Corbyn look somewhat normal is their big achievement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xGt3QmRSZY
(or here: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/01/brexit-really-incompatible-single-market-referendum-campaigns-revisited - for those who prefer written evidence)
We were warned repeatedly that a vote to Leave would mean leaving the Single Market ( if people really want to contend this point, I'll trudge off and get the videos of Cameron and Osborne saying so, and a piccie of Chukka's bus, hope it's not necessary). Other than that, no guidance as to our destination.
I am conflicted as I would like to have stayed in the EU but not the EU of Junckers and the federalists but I would also like to be a free trading Nation not hindered by an unelected Euro elite in Brussels.
I am of the opinion the only way to lance the boil is to exit the EU and review attitudes once we have had a period as an Independent Country. Any successful attempt to keep us in Europe through the single market or customs union would create a chasm so large in our politics I doubt we would get over it in a generation.
AS far as TM is concerned she is hopeless at decision making and for that reason she has to go by Mid 2019. Yesterday's speech on tuition fees and Universities identified so many important issues but then she kicked it into the long grass with a one year review. This cannot go on beyond Spring 2019 and if she is still in power by then even I would send in a letter to Graham Brady, even though I am only a humble member.
As for her successor most of the candidates are white, pale and stale, and it must come from the new intake and probably another female.
This honesty may surprise some who have identified me as a TM apparatchik, but I am not, and I am saddened that she has not proved to be the leader that this Country so richly deserves.
And as for Corbyn I cannot find words to express my contempt for his politics.
We are in a really difficult place as a Country and how this pans out over the next couple of years no one, and I mean no one, can predict
Andrew Neil completely tore apart that pack of disreputable lies when it was released and its embarrassing that so many are still using it shamelessly either out of ignorance or not caring that its full of lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9dKcjfeVTs
UKIP left licking the dishes and their fatal wounds ....
Cameron being pro-EU but less than a full-blown federalist may also have meant that he thought the EU centre of public opinion was more positive towards the institution than it was. And perhaps he can't be blamed too much for that. Even those of us who are sceptics thought, for a long time, Remain would win easily (something like 60/40). Were we wrong? Or was the campaign simply so dreadful that, in a contest between grossly exaggerated woe and grossly exaggerated complacency, people believed the positive fiction over the negative one?
The bias I describe also applies very much to journalists. Sometimes they act in such an obviously partisan fashion it seems they cannot conceive that other people might think in a different way. When reporting on declining migration statistics, one Sky journalist described them as "worsening". If you're pro-mass migration (the stats were still well into six figures for inward net migration) that's true, but if you're anti-mass migration that's not the case. And if one were to seek to be objective, the term wouldn't be used at all.
I think (to ramble some more) this is also starting to apply not merely to the language that we use but the meanings different groups attach to the same terms. "Human rights abuses" can mean everything from evicting illegal squatters after a decade on a farm, to the concentration camps of North Korea. Sometimes I think we're finding inter-group discussions more difficult because precisely the same terms can have wildly different meanings, so the speaker says one thing and the listener hears another.
/endramble
Please explain to me how it is possible to take the words 'nobody is talking about threatening Britain's place in the single market' out of context.
It was a lie at the time he told it anyway, as it was patently obvious that leaving the EU would mean leaving the single market - that's one of the things that tipped me to Remain.
But to suggest that he didn't say it - well, all I can say is you remind me of Richard Dawkins trying to explain that Stalin's support for the League of Militant Godless was not somehow state-sponsored atheist terrorism. Do not think that is a compliment!
As it happens some like me did (and still do) argue for EFTA and EEA membership to remain in the Single Market. But not the Customs Union which would be an idiotic decision.
With Bolton gone, I could see a UKIP leader less reasonable than he is (for all his faults, he was not one of those) winning the leadership election on such a platform.
Ignoring it was not politically sustainable.
I just cannot see them going quiet.
And yes, the lack of a unifying coherent platform is a problem. But one might evolve, or be created.
Edit - also surprised you think it has to be someone from the new intake.
There are lots of Tories with experience, there are Tory MPs who are competent and even a few who overlap both groups.
My answer is: yes. I quit one of the big four for a smaller firm, and a less intense/stressful life.
You only live once. No-one really cares about you after you've left. Your family and friends do.
If you're not enjoying it, and you can afford it, then I'd recommend looking for other opportunities. It might be the best thing you ever do.
I found the hardest bit was actually motivating myself to apply. Once I had another job offer in my hands I felt so much better, and starting at a new firm isn't half as bad as you might think it is.
They can poll 4/5% all they want but if votes cant be cast then the result of a GE can change dramatically.
European elections are a chance to protest - or register support - by voting for a party based on its values, policies and objectives, largely free from considerations of the ability to govern (though current competence in government will matter). There is no way, for example, that the Greens would have polled as they did in 1989 in any other kind of election (indeed, in the local elections that year, only a few weeks previously, they didn't do anything like as well).
Even under FPTP, the irrelevance to many of the European elections combined with UKIP's stance on the EU would have produced a substantial protest vote for them - probably little different from that which they actually got. It wouldn't have netted them any MPs in 1999 or probably 2004 but that wouldn't have mattered. As with general elections, their mere presence and the size of the vote they attracted would have had an impact - as the Greens' 'success' in 1989 did in boosting the profile of environmental concerns. By 2014, by contrast, UKIP could well have won far more than they actually did under PR.
membership is the best option but we rejected it.
I am often accused here of being a Remainiac. I don't mind but I don't think it a particularly accurate insult. The point is, I don't think Brexit will work, at least as people voted for. The fact we voted for it doesn't magically make it work. We have to decide whether we are prepared to be a vassal state or accept the consequences of not being one. Wishful thinking gets you into the hole but it doesn't get you out of it.
Now as it happens, Hannan was a fringe figure. I don't recall Farage, or Gove, or Johnson saying anything similar. But it gives the lie to the claim that no-one was saying we could stay in the single market if we voted leave. It would be more accurate to say, as @John_M does, that it was one of a number of claims made in the overall campaign that looked dubious (we could add Osborne's punishment budget in, for balance).
I cannot understand why leavers and indeed remainers think that exaggerating their claims and making simple statements where complexity and nuance is needed advances their cause. It doesn't. It merely makes them look ridiculous. Admittedly in the case of the good Mr Thompson this is his default state of being, but I'm slightly disappointed you've gone down the same route as I have always respected you as a poster even if I don't think we'll ever agree over Michael Gove!
(And @Big_G_NorthWales - I'd upvote that fifty times if I could.)
Well, it's half term. I am off on holiday to recharge my batteries and be ready for the punishing run to the finish line on these new exams.
I wish everybody a very happy and productive week.
I also wonder if Clegg now thinks it was so wise to block it during the term of the Coalition....
As long as Corbyn doesn't get his hands on power the country will be okay.
Oscar Wilde comes to mind.
Yesterday was a good example. Her analysis of the problems caused by the student loan system was reasonable and candid, not seeking to hide the role her own party had in the creation of the mess. But there was a total lack of leadership or ideas of how to resolve it. Instead we are having yet another review, delegating the task of finding some sort of solution to someone else, albeit within restricted financial parameters which will make their task pretty much impossible.
And then we have this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43121642
The new apprenticeships which she has sought to promote as a part of the solution are really struggling, being seriously underfunded and more than a bit patchwork. And yet they should be key to our economic future and productivity issues.
I fear that the old cliché of being in office but not in power is applicable. Time is a wasting and there are so many concerns to be addressed: education funding, training, housing, social care, a drug epidemic, the horrendous consequences of care in the community/neglect, our transport infrastructure, the facilitating of new industries...the list is almost endless. Whilst it is convenient for Brexit I am really not sure that we can continue to mark time like this.
If the UK doesn't want a hard border and the Irish don't want a hard border, and the UK and the Irish are comfy with localised trade crossing the border unchecked, what's the problem?
You may have voted to Leave
Those with something to gain
Will have voted Remain
To see politicians on the TV telling me it was a "tidying up exercise" if I recall the phrasing correctly reeked to me of patronising "there, there, run along little voter, you need to leave all this constitutional stuff to the big boys".
They promised a vote, on second thoughts saw they would go down in flames, so pulled the vote and went ahead anyway. Fools, idiots, dunderheads. We could have sent a signal at that point that we were not happy with further integration, and all 28 have a rethink, but we were denied the chance.
Cameron, in whom I placed some hope of something real, in terms of a renegotiation, clearly did not have much of a clue about the head of steam that had built up, and his attempts were laughable, as to be fair was the attitude of the EU leaders who also were utterly clueless as to the real possibility we would vote out.
So the die was cast, better off out and independent. Hopefully, as I have said in the past, when it's all calmed down in ten years or so, we end up as Canada to their USA, or something along those lines.