This is another of those compare and contrast moments that so annoy UKIP supporters who read this blog, but which are covered here because UKIP ignoring such major issues annoys me so much.
The Times (£) is reporting that a proposed levy on financial transactions by the EU, which could wipe more than £3.6bn from the value of UK shares and bonds and is being challenged by the UK, looks set to be approved by the courts. This has huge implications for already low yielding pensions and investments for ordinary people.
You would think UKIP would be all over this, hammering away in the media, getting faces in front of cameras, churning out press releases, using their colourful website to demonstrate how the UK’s mythical ‘influence’ in the EU is just that, a myth, and lambasting this raid on finances that will disproportionately damage UK financial markets.
But in the media, nothing. On UKIP’s website, not a word. Another golden opportunity to make a powerful case for turning our backs on the EU has been missed.
Just weeks from its biggest election test ever in the European Elections, the UKIP website’s very latest news is two days old and concerns UKIP’s party election broadcast – and UKIP being the only party to campaign for St George’s Day to be a public holiday. There’s a priority for you. Has everyone from the London ‘freak show‘ nicked off early and gone to the pub again?
Four days ago the party declared that the European parliamentary elections battle was now getting underway in earnest. Yet presented with a huge EU related story, they are silent and the media instead hoovers up unchallenged comment from the pro-EU muppets and fiction retailers at Open Europe.
So what is UKIP doing?
Instead of fighting to get this country out of the EU, UKIP is down in the gutter fighting yet another wholly avoidable reputational battle because one of its candidates, a Zimbabwean no less, who starred in their election broadcast, was (yet again) not vetted properly and has been shown to hold some rather unpleasant views.
While it’s all very well for Farage to be angry and say this man ‘slipped through the net‘ there is something about the party he has moulded that sees it continually attracting oddballs and those with racist or intolerant views – and it is putting decent people off the party and the anti-EU cause.
The party is also fighting against mockery of its takeoff of British jobs for British workers in that poster campaign, as it transpires the actor posing as an unemployed British builder is actually an immigrant from Ireland.
These cock ups follow Lizzy the ordinary voter from Devon who will support UKIP, actually being Lizzy from London who is the party’s events manager and is now trying to stop explicit photos of herself engaged in sex acts being put into the public domain.
The only conclusion we can draw is that UKIP isn’t serious about getting us out of the EU. It is only bothered about winning a different game, but even that is something it doesn’t prepare for and ends up losing.
Of course, the moans and aggressive retorts will flood the inbox and the odd comment will be left here in an attempt to criticise me for ‘undermining’ the ‘only game in town’. But these are people who are ignoring the reality of how badly led and run the party is and how much damage it is doing to the anti-EU side. UKIP speaks for barely one third of voters who say they want to leave the EU. But it is seen as the anti-EU vehicle and these avoidable injuries are completely self inflicted.
UKIP’s long suffering decent supporters – there are many of them in the party trying to make it a viable, anti-EU entity – and those who want to see the UK freed from the EU, deserve better.
Autonomous Mind 
UKIP, AfD, here in Germany, and other similar partys throughout Europe, appear to be “Government” plöants, to give the public the IMPRESSION that “democcracy” ios going on.
The amount of missed goals makes it obvious that they are only playing lip service to the “anti E.U” stance.
Would not mind betting that all their money comes from mysterious, untraceable off shore accounts, paid into by the keepers of the Tory slush funds. (CDU slush funds here.)
I declare an interest. I want the UK out of the EU and have done so for over 20 years. I am not a UKIP member and live outside the UK.
That said, I do not understand what you want to accomplish Mr Autonomous Mind.
Just pissing into the tent from the outside ?
So UKIP have some faults. Yes.
But there are important Euro élections coming up. Why not support them and offer your obvious intelligence and insight to help them obtain a devastating defeat of LibLabCon ?
There is a time and place for independent criticism and there is a time for cooperation and teamwork.
Which applies right now ? The latter in my honest opinion
‘Some faults’, or fundamental, corrosive failings?
UKIP have rejected the support offered. Anyone who produces something Farage cannot claim as his own is marginalised, briefed against and eventually banished from the party, with people told that they weren’t up to scratch.
Teamwork should cut both ways. UKIP under Farage don’t do teamwork. You surrender yourself completely to the leader and his autocratic whims or you are the enemy, even when you try to help by pointing out errors or deficiencies.
What do I want to accomplish? See a party that truly does its best for the anti-EU side, rather than putting its own intrigues and the interests of its leadership first.
I cannot support an entity that is determined to take us down a path that will lose us a referendum, or leave the UK out on a limb because it has no plan for the UK after any Brexit. If UKIP loses Farage and becomes democratic, I would look again.
AM – I will admit that I am still a member of UKIP. I have been slated by our Farage loving cabal in our local party for stating things that are not in line with the ‘party(Farage)-line’. If there was a party whip I would have been out on my ears a long time ago. However, I have since been applauded for saying what needs to happen for this continuing horror of the EU to end and how UKIP needs to up its game. Article 50 for instance. I keep hammering away in the hope, and I don’t care what Farage says, that I can get through what really needs to happen. Basically it is what North/Booker, yourself and others have said. I am not a sycophant to you, I have never met you, or Dr. North or anybody other than local in the party. I may be pissing in the wind by staying in the party and I will re-evaluate my position (I sound like a politician or a football manager saying that!) after 2015 GE.Keep up the good work.
Whilst I think most of the Conservative party genuinely want the best for Britain, I honestly don’t think Cameron gives a toss about Europe or Britain’s standing in it, he sees it like a few years serving in number 10 before he goes on to directorships or the usual gravy train for ex politicians.
Except this isn’t a game. There’s a country at stake and they don’t give a toss abous us, just who gets to strut about at conference and look good in a supportive Sunday newspaper.
If UKIP do well it might be enough to either force Cameron out in favour of someone, anyone. Oh but Miliband might get in? So what, it would make no difference. I despise the labour party but at least I know what Len McClusky and Ed Balls stand for.
@scottishcalvin,
The ruling core of the Conservative Party have been pro-EU since the late fities. The grassroots has always been doubtful about the idea. Cameron is just attempting to carry on with the line he inherited, which is floating the ridiculous idea of reforming the EU into something it was never intended to be and doesn’t want to be. Time is running out for it, but it might get the Tories to the next GE more or less intact and without resolving the question of whether they are for or against being a member of the EU. The reform crap is an elaborate and successful ruse to avoid that question , while we are dragged further in.
I’m inclined to agree about Cameron. He’s a safe pair of hands in the eyes of the Tory brass and his main concern is not to rock the boat and keep the reform scam going. I don’t believe he would have gone as far as he has unless he was convinced that the Tories were going to be kicked out at the next GE.
Quite simply, this is campaign tactics. UKIP have already garnered most of the support from the Conservatives that they are likely to for the EU elections in May. Their aim now is elsewhere.
The Labour, working class vote, that has been neglected for generations by the Islington set that run the Labour party, are now UKIP’s target. They don’t care about pensions, they probably haven’t got one outside the state pension. They care about jobs and immigration, and UKIP are tactically hammering those points home.
Give these voters one whiff of support for the city, and they will be gone back to the ranks of the socialists before you can say ‘Lehmans’.
My experience talking to people around the UK is that a lot of it’s just attitude. The main 3 parties are patronising and see themselves as Westminster elites. That’s certainly not always the case on the ground with the local MPs and councilors but it’s the “Shut up, we know best” view that they get drummed in by the media, whether in regards to Immigration, Europe, Lifestyle, Thoughtcrime…
Ed Milliband maybe does care about the poor, I’ve never met the man, but he definitely comes across in the media as a patronising pillock who’d be the first person in a company to run to HR screaming a political correctness grievance at the sign of a joke in the pub. The same is true with Clegg, though to a lesser extent Cameron. Farage actually seems normal and someone who speaks his mind or who you’d invite to have a drink with after work. Trying to spin that away or spin the other leaders into looking less aloof is nothing but counter productive. Cameron at least gets that, which is why he’s not gone anywhere near the Scotland debate, he know’s his weakness and doesn’t try to spin in.
The big test in May will not be how well UKIP does but what the regional swings are. In the past they’ve already picked up the protest tory vote in the heartland. The landslide though will be delivered by the working class fed up of being nannied or coerced by the likes of the BBC, people who never set foot north of Islington and those who think the Nudge concept should be renamed ‘Shove’
A question that is KIND of related.
We have a “UKIP” here, the AfD.
In the last few weeks we have had many cases where the commy bastards have been destroying, setting fire to, removing, the AfD campaign posters.
Does this happen with UKIP there?
http://standuptoukip.org/
The majority of UKIP members are decent and upstanding people. The failure is on the part of the leadership, which has courted intolerant people with racist views in order to bolster numbers, and played the immigration card in a xenophobic fashion.
It is not right to tar all UKIP members with the same brush. However it would be nice if the leadership was held to account.
UKIP have been active over the FTT
https://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/72380/
http://www.paulnuttallmep.com/?p=3154
http://www.ukipmeps.org/news_699_Financial-Transaction-Tax-a-deliberate-assault-on-the-City.html
Although last month’s court case was only an interim ruling. In the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner wrote
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner/10788943/Another-European-attempt-to-hijack-our-national-sovereignty.html
But let’s not jump the gun; it’s not yet law and, in its original form, quite unlikely to become so.
He believed that there would be another opportunity to mount a fresh challenge, after the final draft was out. It was expected just before the European Parliament elections.
For now, the case (against UKIP) is adjourned?
Case adjourned? Er, no.
Two of those links you point to are from 2013 and Nuttall’s comment was not a response to the latest news during a European election campaign, but came in February before the latest insights into what was happening became known.
How on earth could UKIP not make use of this during this election? Asleep at the wheel as usual. If you want to defend UKIP and try to justify their incompetence then you need to do better than this.
For the first time in many years I’m not sure who I will vote for. UKIP were the Party up until now but there’s been far too many hiccups. That’s not saying the rest of the Wetminster crew are angels. But to overlook £3billion is not a minor oversight. There’s been warnings all over the place about financial disaster yet none as far as I am aware have a clue. The media won’t report it as it’s my guess they’ve been zipped.