UKIP: Where is that surge?

After the European Elections we saw some pollsters, notably Survation, claim that their predicted share of the vote would have been correct if only people hadn’t mistakenly voted for Mike Nattrass grouping, ‘An Independence from Europe’.

A number of UKIP’s outriders on various forums and newspaper comment threads suggested that UKIP would have done even better in the election but for the media’s smear campaign against Nigel Farage and the party – this despite saying for weeks that the smear campaign would only serve to increase UKIP’s support and vote.

We also heard that polling was showing anything between 60-75% of UKIP voters would stick with the party at the General Election ensuring the party a record vote – fuelling claims from the Faragistas that UKIP could hold the balance of power in Westminster in May 2015 on the back of this ‘surge’.

So, what to make of two separate polls this week that show a uniform pattern?

This week’s general election poll for Lord Ashcroft shows UKIP down another two points, which is a repeat of last week, meaning UKIP has dropped four points in a fortnight.

Meanwhile, the regular poll for ComRes, showing the favourability rating of the party leaders, shows Nigel Farage has dropped six points on the index overall since April.

This isn’t a gloat.  This is merely confirmation of what we have been saying for some time.  There is no surge.

The European Elections were the outlet, for those who could be bothered to vote, to either stick by their party or register a protest safe in the knowledge the result is utterly meaningless.  This country could have sent 73 Monster Raving Loony MEPs to Brussels and it would not have changed a thing.

For too many people UKIP has become a religion.  Too many are setting aside reality and pushing arguments based on emotion and faith, they seem to have a need to demonstrate belief.  The problem is their faith is in a party which has missed open goals time and again and a man who has demonstrated his pledges are no more ‘cast iron’ than those of David Cameron.  The party is ignoring its core proposition and jumping on any issue where it thinks it can get votes.

The subject of leaving the EU is less important to the party’s supporters than stopping immigration – something UKIP cannot deliver because it has no plan and plainly does not understand the governance of immigration in the modern world.  Farage dived onto immigration simply to hoover up the votes of those who are vehemently against it.  As such the focus on leaving the EU is diluting month on month.

The current polling suggests that UKIP will be holding a bad hand in May 2015. It will not have a chip in the big game or be able to influence what happens in Westminster.  The only impact the party will have is to deprive some Conservatives from winning seats.  While that might make UKIP followers pleased as punch, it will do nothing to advance the cause of leaving the EU and will be followed by a slow decline as people peel away from the party, realising that supporting it is not making any difference.

These are not good times for the anti-EU side.

A dose of EU realism that the BBC seems keen to play down

Very curious.  Tuning in to Radio 4’s Today this morning, a little earlier than usual, I was able to hear a short interview of the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz.

While Richard has published a full transcript of the interview on EU Referendum, the words alone do not come close to conveying the bombastic and intolerant nature of the man.  But even that does not detract from the dose of realism Schultz injected into the confused morass of verbiage that passes for discussion about the fantasy of negotiated reform of the central pillars of the EU itself, or the in-out referendum that could not possibly be delivered with a treaty negotiation almost certainly well in train.

Perhaps this explains why even though the audio of the interview is contained deep within the UK pages of BBC online, it is not written up or commented upon anywhere on the BBC’s News page, Politics page, or even the Europe page.  It has to be searched for in the God-awful search engine on the site.  It has become the broadcast equivalent of the embarrassing ginger haired stepchild, being kept firmly out of sight, never to be discussed or mentioned again.  Which as I say is very curious.

Schultz was refreshingly realistic.  From his assertion that governments and heads of states such as David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and Nickolas Sarkozy, declare themselves to be the government of Europe, yet it is Schultz’s beloved parliament that comes in for media and public criticism; to the satisfying moment where Today’s pisspoor token asian female presenter, Mishal Husain, was slapped down for talking of the UK’s ‘relationship’ with the EU with Schultz saying…

The United Kingdom is a member of the European Union so to speak about relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union sounds as if the United Kingdom would not be a part of the European Union. It is the United Kingdom Government which is a co-legislator in the Council of Ministers. There are 72 members of the United Kingdom as law makers in the European institution, the UK is part of Europe so this description, our relationship with Europe sounds to me strange.

This is a point made repeatedly on this blog, so it’s nice to see it challenged, albeit by a federalist opponent.  One point Husain made that was useful was that MEPs are very well-paid parliamentarians and voters in the UK generally have absolutely no idea who their MEP is.  Schultz dodged this, choosing instead to compare turnouts here with the higher ones in Germany.  But as Political Betting just happened to point out today, we have a nonsense voting system in Euro elections that is designed in the interest of parties and their whipping systems, not voters.

But Schultz did not duck away from the main message he wanted to get across, his vision for the EU after Barroso.  It was a clear message for David Cameron, Open Europe, the Fresh Start Group and the likes of the self serving Matthew Elliott, who all seem to think the EU can be brought to heel and made to reform to suit their deluded vision of an EU – where the political is replaced by the economic.  Schultz wants:

… to fill the gap between citizens and between member states in the European Union. That some have an enormous profit and others pay. And, because I’m speaking with BBC, the United Kingdom as a full-fledged member of the European Union. That would be my vision, a United Kingdom which is taking part in the development in a common Europe and not speaking about a specific relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom.

No reform agenda in sight. Economic carrots dangled to maintain political power seeping to Brussels.  There is a disconnect between what Cameron and his front organisations think they can ask for and get, and what the EU mandarins are prepared to give.  At some point, sooner rather than later, reality is going to bite and the UK’s political class is going to realise it is powerless unless it accepts the one option it has always rejected out of hand – leaving the EU.  Small wonder the BBC, having chosen to put Schultz on before the bulk of their Today audience tunes in, has chosen to bury this story as deep as they can.  It doesn’t fit the establishment narrative.

No, the EU has not gone off the rails; we are seeing what was always intended

The Tories are at it again, pushing their lie that the “Common Market” started off with good intentions and somehow went off the rails.  It is laughable because this argument cannot withstand the merest wisp of a breeze of scrutiny of the substantial mountain of evidence that underlines the truth. What we are seeing is what was always intended.

The European project has not lost its way or gone beyond its original plan.  It is firmly on track to achieve what its architects set out to do.

But that doesn’t stop the likes of John Redwood and an assortment of nice/nasty but dim Europlastics in the Conservative Party, and their corporatist proxies such as Open Europe, from chuntering about a mythical renegotation of UK membership and wider reform of the EU, because the union has supposedly gone further than they ‘believe’ was intended.  These people need only to trouble themselves to read the substantial body of documents and speeches by the European project’s leading lights, dating from the present all the way back as far as the end of World War I, to see how deluded and ignorant their ‘off the rails’ argument is.

While the EUphile media in the UK laps up the Tory ‘off the rails’ lie and reports the faux fightback it as if it were a defining issue of our time – because like the media the Tories want to keep the UK firmly under the control of the supreme government in Brussels – in reality this hoo-haa is just for domestic consumption by a British audience, to service the vested interests of corporations that benefit from EU membership and rule by bureaucracy, while the negative consequences of membership are experienced by ordinary people as the democratic process is eroded and the capacity of people to effect change is eradicated.

But in the corridors of EU power, this renegotiation/reform ‘debate’ so beloved of the Europlastics barely registers, as Mary Ellen Synon explained to the Bruges Group recently, because David Cameron reassured the EU last April that he would not take Britain out of the EU just because a referendum result was a vote to get Out.  Renegotiation and reform is a singularly British monologue and it doesn’t even make it into the EU’s in-tray.

The fact is there is no great crisis of confidence in the EU.  In fact the EU is supremely confident and relatively content with its patient implementation of the decades-old plan, hatched by the likes of Monnet and Salter, to develop one overall government for all of continental Europe.  It was never about creating a continent-wide free trade area.  The customs union was not the aim, just a consequence of creating a single political jurisdiction. In José Manuel Barroso’s own words, the agenda is ever closer union and ‘the EU needs to be big on big things and smaller on smaller things’.  Governance is a big thing and the EU will be big in governing, as per the long standing plan.

The European project was always intended, slowly and deliberately, to relegate national governance to nothing more than a rubber stamping operation.  By keeping nominal national governments in place, the distracted and barely cognisant populus would retain an impression of national sovereignty where none exists.  The Tories are either too stupid to read the evidence and grasp this; or too dishonest to admit it, lest their complicity in this long planned and slowly implemented subversion of national self determination is eventually recognised, understood and punished by the electorate.

Until the reality of the European project, and the EU it has spawned, is understood so people see the lies, delusion and misrepresentations for what they are, we will never have an honest debate about the UK’s future and this country’s place in the world.  Remember, those suitcases on the baggage carousels at Brussels airport so vividly described by Mary Ellen Synon in her Bruges Group speech linked above, have stickers that say “Europe is my country”, not ‘Europe is my free trade area’.  The reality of what has always been intended is no secret. It is ludicrous in light of so much evidence that the Tories are allowed to get away with their lie.

So long as the Tories and their proxies are allowed to keep presenting their distorted and false narrative unchallenged, the British people will never be able to make an informed decision about the central and vital question of who should run Britain.

Please help more people to understand the reality by spreading it far and wide, in general discussion and on comment threads.  It’s time that people had the chance to  debate and decide Britain’s future in an informed way with knowledge of the realities, not the politically-motivated myths that currently hold sway.

The most powerful rebuttal yet to David Cameron’s deceitful ‘Norway Fax Law’ claims

If, dear reader, you read nothing else this week, please click on the image below and take a few minutes to read the most powerful rebuttal yet to David Cameron’s claims – also made by others such as Nick Clegg, Roland Rudd, John Cridland and others – that Norway outside the EU has to accept EU laws without having no say over them.

The rebuttal of Cameron’s falsehoods and description of the reality for Norway comes not from a mere observer, but the State Secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, Anne Beathe K. Tvinnereim.

Tvinnereim not only shoots down Cameron’s claims with factual reality, she also corrects the previously reported pro-EU motivated claims of Norway’s Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide.  While the pro-EU sycophantic UK press – particularly the BBC – uncritically reported Eide’s claims that Norway has no influence over EU laws (most of which originate at global level where Norway represents itself and has direct influence), it transpires they were challenged in Norway itself and were a personal opinion not reflected by the majority of Norwegian people.

For the reality that Cameron, Clegg, Cridland, Rudd and other EUphiles pretend does not exist, so they can keep the UK trapped in the political clutches of the EU, click on the image above to read the whole piece.

A frank assessment and reality check

Some people might consider the op-ed in Germany’s Spiegel less frank and more brutal.

Either the commentary from a rabidly pro-EU newspaper on the continent offers a reality check for the UK’s doggedly pro-EU Prime Minister, and the deluded Conservative rump which continues to kid itself and others that they can secure the return of a handful of largely meaningless powers to the UK and launch complete restructuring of the European Union into the bargain:

His party still hasn’t forgiven him for failing to clinch an absolute majority in the last election. They see the coalition with the Liberal Democrats as a humiliation. The EU is their way of exacting revenge on Cameron for that. It’s part of the reason why Cameron sees Europe mainly as a party political problem.

By trying to satisfy his radical backbenchers with the referendum pledge, he’s launched into a game he can’t win. The EU’s other 26 governments won’t let him opt out of parts of the existing accords because that would prompt others to demand concessions of their own. The Europe-haters in Cameron’s party won’t be satisfied because the leeway they want from Brussels isn’t politically achievable.

Exclusively among the constituents of the EU only Cameron, his europlastic lobby fodder amd the majority of the British media believe in his fantasy renegotiation narrative.  The tragedy is they have come together and taken advantage of the wishful thinking of a largely uninformed public to con them into believing it is real and achievable and the only option that results in ‘less Europe’ and maintains access to the single market.  As Spiegel points out somewhat unhelpfully for the dreamers:

The important questions still haven’t been answered. What exactly does Britain expect of Europe? What laws and regulations does Cameron want to change? What parts of the treaty does he want to opt out of? And above all: How in heaven’s name does Cameron propose to persuade the German chancellor, the French president and all the other European leaders that he should get to pick the raisins from the cake while everyone else gets the crumbs?

The truth is Cameron has no idea.  His speech was a gambit to stop the leak of Conservative members to UKIP and arrest the groundswell of anti-EU sentiment among a frustrated public.

Nothing that Cameron can achieve will negate the issues that have been turning an increasing number of people against EU membership.  Power will remain in Brussels, laws and regulations will still be handed down for the British to implement, billions of pounds will be sent elsewhere within the EU at the expense of the vulnerable in this country, unfettered migration of low skilled, low earning EU nationals will continue, British economic interests and trade deals will continue to be compromised and diluted to suit the ‘common’ interests of other EU states.  In short, the UK will not belong to the British.

If the EU membership debate interests you, do read this

David Cameron’s interviews on radio and television about the ‘UK in the EU’ debate have been leading the news today.  There have been many myths, distortions and misrepresentations deployed by Cameron, various leading Tories and front organisations such as Open Europe in recent weeks.

To start unpicking fact from europhile fiction, Richard has started addressing the technicalities and correcting some of the points that Cameron has made, publishing the facts in an informative post over on the EU Referendum blog.

If you have even just a passing interest in this EU membership debate, I cannot recommend his post highly enough.