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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The media narrative turns against the purples as the prospect of getting real MPs grows
The former Conservative MP for Tatton who lost out to Martin Bell in 1997 has been much in the news of late as he has tried to be selected for a winnable seat for UKIP at GE15.
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Apt, all considered....
Time to tell the fools that we are their masters....
I don't recall any UKIP-favourable stories in the 'join the Euro or die/Brexit = armageddon' FT.....
Like the Lib Dems (Rennard and so forth) they are just going to have to get accustomed to the media scrutiny that Labour & the Tories are used to that comes with proximity to power.
If only they weren't such frequent sources of great copy too......I have no doubt they will add greatly to the gaiety of the nation between now and May.....if not beyond.
Poor lambs......Its so unfair!
I think Dan Snow is right on the money.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/26/ukip-history-mps-government In any case I dont think it will effect UKIP's vote that much, because Farage is following the 25% strategy, just like Clegg is.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/12/nick-clegg-and-nigel-farage-are-pursuing-the-same-electoral-strategy/
As for Neil Hamilton: he's poison.
Playing the card that 'we're not like the other parties' is dangerous when you start to look worse.
Now their sexual harrasment bomb has blown up in their faces they've latched onto Hamilton. If only there was such scrutiny in the media of liblabcon candidate selection.......
TL;DR: If Labour and Conservatives hadn't spent so long disowning their socially conservative members, UKIP would be a 2% non-entity of a party.
Mention of “straight bananas” for example, was for a considerable while, always good for a laugh.
Watching the Christopher Jeffries docu-drama last night underlined for me how much some parts of our media would much rather sensationalise something than look at the facts.
Neil Hamilton Will Never Be Prime Minister
Why bother about which seats UKIP think they might win. Douglas Carswell will be the only man standing come 9th May, except of course in Trumpton where UKIP will be running the council.
I can never understand why it’s always “plucky little Britian” vs Europe. Last time I looked there were 20+ other nations who were EU members, and presumably they all have occasions when national interest appears to be at variance with what “Europe” says.
Do we never, ever, agree with anyone else, and do they all, always, gang up against us?
A terrific two-nighter over 3 hours and well worth watching if you missed it on ITV this week.
When you read scandalously undemocratic nonsense like this can you be surprised.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11286233/EU-judge-gives-Jean-Claude-Juncker-the-key-task-of-defeating-Euroscepticism.html
"Your mission is to defeat Eurosceptics, the EU's most senior judge tells the president of the European Commission"
Not a politician, a JUDGE!
Sorry but the media has already decided it hates UKIP and Ed Miliband, though on any particular day it struggles to decide which should receive the most ire.
Inheritance of Question Time with Farage/Brand = some real numpties on our Twitter line. Hope they crawl back to their caves by next week
But being defined by opposition to change is a rather negative view of how the world should be, and does allow a good deal of conflict ( should we return to eighties Thatcherism, fifties Butskillism, or thirties Imperial preference?). The easy barroom chat does not make for coherent policies.
Hamilton has a lot of support in the party, he easily came top in the recent NEC elections with nearly half the party voting him on. He is not a marginal figure in UKIP. Why he is so popular is a mystery to me. Farage does have a habit of cutting rivals down to size though, so the seeds are set for a kipper bloodbath. Whether this happens before or after the GE is not yet clear. If Farage is not one of the MPs in May then it will happen because of his humiliation, if Farage is MP then he will be even more dictatorial in the party.
The UKIP contains all the seeds of its own destruction, it is just a matter of how it plays out.
And I agree with you that, thanks to some serious financial mismanagement, including lack of effective regulation, many of of fellow EU citizens are suffering hardship. It is quite understandable that some will, in those circumstances, be attracted to sort-term, “populist” ideaqs, and parties promoting those ideas.
But yes, the President of the Commission DOES have a duty to combat such short-term views. Whether or not someone in Mr Skouris’ position should be saying so is, I agree, not entirely appropriate, but it doesn’t alter the fact that Mr Juncker does have such a duty.
In these polls, about 30% thought they were being 'gagged" in what they could say about some subjects, and in another poll, 50% believed Ukip were being treated unfairly by the media.
This may be a combination of unreliable polling and paranoia, but the view about "thought crime" also came from my union members who weren't particularly right wing or Millwall supporters.
With a proportion of the population of this mindset, the main parties may face a bigger struggle than they think to bring their voters back.
These voters expect bad publicity and to be called names - it reinforces their sense of grievance and it's why they defected anyway.
Policies are secondary.
We need a complete change at the top.
Sadly. “Twould be much better if he were. Might get some more serious candidates elected to the EU Parliament if it had more power over the Commission.
Remind me how UKIP are different from the other parties again?
'Turns against' implies a change of state. I'm not sure that's the case here.
UKIP paranoia may be caused by the fact somebody is out to get them. They have certainly been subjected to some aggressive hounding in recent months. First Carswell was personally criticised, until it became obvious it wasn't working: Reckless was likewise vilified, again with little evident success. The Bird/Bolter story would scarcely have registered above local rag rag level had it not appeared to cast UKIP in a bad light. When it transpired the lady was a fantasist and Bird guilty of little more than conceit, interest levels dropped close to zero. Now we have Hamilton, who was correctly judged to be an unsuitable candidate.
If the Wheeler story is true, he is unsuitable to be a sponsor, but on previous Press form we should be prepared for more smoke than fire. UKIP handled the Bird and Hamilton issues well. Maybe they're learning. Let's see how they get on with this new one.
If you are right, CD, they can afford to tough it out.
Btw, if anybody has yet to catch up on the denouement of the Bird/Boulter thing, Nigel Horne did a good summary of it in The Week.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/61754/sex-leaks-and-lies-basildon-brush-off-for-natasha-and-neil
But the kipper-style small c conservatism breaking out in right wing populism in Europe is at least as repellent, and also fails to engage with the modern world.
But the alternative is not much brighter: The Middle East is a basket case of islamic despotism; Russia is a kleptocracy, China is crushing dissent in Hong Kong; and even the American Dream has gone very sour. Canada and Australia are at least as troubled by multi-culturism as the UK.
Frankly, the world is in a bit of a mess; but Europe is the best and most civilised bit.
The only problem with that is that even if UKIP win half a dozen seats in other constituencies, Farage losing would be the media narrative - at least in the short term.
I am also not convinced that if he lost Farage would necessarily give up the leadership - bearing in mind he would still have 3 more years to serve. And that would be a recipe for chaos in the party.
Question Time is an entertainment programme
One wonders who else has crept through the defences?
Ukip if you want. The media is not for kipping.
Btw, CAP makes most sense in terms of German War Reparations - which is not to say it makes much sense now.
It's not an honest broker. It's slanted, inherently prejudiced at the highest level (we also saw this when Le Pen[sp] was stripped of parliamentary privilege over something she'd said). It can never get the sceptics back on-side because their suspicion is confirmed at every opportunity through failed audits, repeated plebiscites and the blatantly bias of the EU political class.
Imagine if we had a vote on a second EU constitution (the first having had its font changed and the title altered to The Lisbon Treaty), and we said No. Does anyone think that would stop it? We'd either have another vote, or the politicians would sign up to The Shangri-La Treaty, which would jumble up the order of the chapters and decrease the font size by half a point, but tell exactly the same story.
As it is, it's probably just bouncing around the mean. More polls needed!
But neither Bolter nor Hamilton were selected, so the system worked.
Other Parties have not always been successful in stopping unsuitable types from becoming candidates, despite greater experience and resources. You can probably think of as many unfortunate examples as me.
In alphetical order, we can start with Archer and Aitken. How many do you think we'll have by the time we get to Z?
So it might be more accurate, although obviously less fun, to say that both of them were rejected by UKIPs vetting process.
Incidentally, is Hamilton still Deputy Chairman of UKIP?
"Morning all and I reckon Neil Hamilton is about as likely to be an MP come 9th May as NPXMP."
You offering odds, or just shooting the breeze?
Nick Palmer is 4/11, if you need a guide price.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/11288932/The-Blob-gobbled-up-Michael-Gove-now-its-coming-for-David-Cameron.html
If this country is to make way in a very very competitive world in the future we absolutely need to ensure we have a genuinely well educated workforce. The educational establishment is dead against this. Defeating the Blob is a matter of national importance. Really. The Blob poses a greater risk to our national future than terrorism.
He has experience of politics, is well-known and some people seem to like him. He's obviously totally unsuitable for public office though and if Wheeler can't see that, UKIP will just have to do without his money.
They could probably find other rich donors if they needed to. They are running consistently mid-teens in the polls. Some rich bas*ard will take them up.
Really - is that what rightwing commentary has come to?
No wonder they won't vote for you.
Toton & Childwell Meadows (Broxtowe) result:
CON - 54.5% (+5.8)
LAB - 26.0% (-3.5)
UKIP - 19.5% (+9.8)
FWIW, I generously think that is more good than bad. But to maintain fairness and balance, they need an effective and transparent appeal system. They do not have one---or not yet.
There is certainly a shortage of good UKIP candidates. But that shouldn't be a surprise. Most people who would obviously make a good MP will have joined a different party.
There were lots of local factors, not least clear skies all day but heavy rain in the evening, but one point of wider interest is the LibDem dog that didn't bark. There was no LD candidate this time, and normally you'd expect that to help Labour. I didn't see much sign of that on the doorstep - the LD vote was just dissipating, to all parties and abstention. That's different from parts of the constituency where the LibDem 2010 vote was essentially a Guardian vote - conversion to Labour in those areas is massive, while in yesterday's ward (mainly a middle-class commuter area) Guardian readership is I suspect negligible. So I wonder if the Red Liberal phenomenon needs to be broken down by demographics for punters weighing up constitutencies, and it will be much more marked in places like Cambridge (which Labour hopes to win from 3rd place) and much less so in areas where it was basically NOTA.
Not the 'Shoo in for Palmer' then ?
Hopefully Nick P will be along later to explain it. Meanwhile, it appears the 4/11 against him winning back his seat is too short. Perhaps some bold PBer will offer something a tad more generous.
You open for business, SquareRoot?
Good luck anyway with your Party ambitions, whatever they are now. Maybe the post of Deputy Chairman will become vacant soon?
So low IQ ...... not always.
Remember, Hamilton proved very publicly he was the victim of a monstrous injustice, twice if you include the time he won damages from the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation in the 80s.
Con ................ 291 (-1 seat)
Lab ................ 299 (+1 seat)
Lib Dems ......... 29 (unchanged)
Others ............. 31 (unchanged)
Total ............. 650 seats
Surprisingly, there's still seemingly little or no account taken of the surge in support for the SNP.
My wife finally resigned and left as she said at the time "the children were just simply political cannon fodder to these people"
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx
There have been some suggestions here this morning that the odds of 4/11 about you retaining Broxtowe are a bit short. Stick around. We may be able to pick up a bargain.
Report into the success of London primary schooling points out that the diversity of pupils is the biggest determining factor.
http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2014/november/london-effect.html
Nevertheless the point remains, Labour should have taken it and didn't.. I guess it must have been the heavy rain after all!
There's only issue with it.
It's not an EU force, and is not subordinate to the EU in any way shape or form.
In 1987, the French and Germans put together a brigade - The Franco-German Brigade - which could be deployed when both countries agreed.
That has since been expanded, and five states are part of Eurocorp. They are: Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemboug and Spain. In total, Eurocorp has maybe 6,000 troops associated with it. (Most of these are the original Frenco-German brigade, and are French or German.)
But Eurocorp is not an EU force.
Edited extra bit: left the original message, as amending it might make replies look weird.
That was somewhat clumsily worded. Mass immigration would be a better way of describing what's happened, and why we have some backward cultural enclaves.
Carman: "I suppose you refuse to listen to anything you find disagreeable."
Hamilton: " Not really. I'm listening to you."