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Another UKIP Scandal

Crampton and UKIP leader Farage

Only this morning I posted about the pitiful election leaflet we have received from our UKIP candidate. I was only out for a few hours but when I came back I heared of yet another reason, far more serious, for not voting UKIP on May 2nd.

One of their candidates in Sussex, Anna-Marie Crampton, has been told to stand down in the election, although her name will still be on the ballot paper, for alleged anti-Semitic remarks regarding the Holocaust. It seems she has also urged people to read 'The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion', a pretty vile hoax written around 1900 by Russian anti-Semites to justify their anti-Semitism. The story is covered in the Jewish Chronicle Online.

The problem with UKIP is that despite an army of staff, funded by their MEPs, they don't seem to use those resources to vet their candidates. Or maybe they just hope the more 'eccentric' ones will be able to survive a campaign without coming out with something embarrassing at best, utterly damning at worst.

Part of the problem is that the amount of coverage a party gets during an election campaign, such as the number of election broadcasts they are allocated, depends on the number of candidates they have. So pressure is put on branches to find candidates, at all costs, so an occasional nutter slips through the net. But it's hard to blame it on that when the photograph of a shamed candidate with her party leader is all over the internet.

UKIP is riddled with people who believe in conspiracy theories, especially Common Purpose and the New World Order. The problem is that people like Anna-Marie Crampton are exposed every now and then, as are other 'eccentrics' in UKIP, but what if the one that flies under the radar gets elected?

More on this story from The Brighton Argus.

UKIP-County Council Elections May 2nd

Nigel Farage-serious politician?

This week I had a UKIP election leaflet popped through the letterbox. I've now had Tory, Labour and UKIP election material. Comparing the three it is quite obvious why people who claim to be voting UKIP to pollsters don't actually vote for them when the real election comes around. To say the UKIP leaflet is amateurish would be an understatement. It is like a fourth formers first effort in the school mock election.

For a start it is only A5, and one side of that is blank. What a waste of space. But I suppose as the party has gone native squandering EU funds like that is now par for the course. But here is the start of the message from the candidate:

"I have decided to stand in this election for UKIP as I am sick of Conservative, Lib Dem and Labour local politicians taking me and my vote for granted and offering nothing in return, preferring to follow orders from their masters in Westminster."

Oh the irony. UKIP's masters sit in the EU parliament, including leader Nigel Farage whose grip on the party makes Stalin's grip on the USSR look tenuous. The party exists merely to keep their MEPs and their staff on the gravy train, hence the lack of serious effort in these UK elections. Just compare their literature this year with the standard they will produce for next year's gravy train elections. But the next paragraph on the leaflet goes on:

"If elected I will never follow a party line to the detriment of our area. I promise to represent your views and will always put our community first."

Well then, tell that to Nikki Sinclaire MEP. Nikki refused to sit with the UKIP group in the EU parliament because of the assorted homophobes, racists and other nutjobs in the group from various EU countries. Nikki was promptly expelled from the party and now sits as an independent MEP for the West Midlands. More on Nikki's treatment by UKIP here.

He then continues:

"Common sense solutions for a Britain independent, free and fair."

There is no explanation as to what the candidate or UKIP's idea of 'commonsense' is or what they mean by 'fair' or 'free'. Just empty rhetoric that means absolutely nothing. But there's more. The leaflet goes on:

"UKIP is a patriotic party that believes in putting people first. To shore up the collapsing Euro and (I think that should be 'the' rather than 'and') EU is now seeking to pull away the props of our national economy-control over taxation and spending.

Only UKIP will give the power to the British people to regain self-government."

Interesting to look at a few of the words in this little offering, or rather a few of the words not in this little offering.

Although the head of the leaflet carries the sentence 'County Council Election' the name of the county isn't mentioned once. It is actually Lancashire County Council.

County Hall is in Preston. This isn't mentioned once but Westminster pops up. As does the Euro and the EU.

Mention is made of the EU taking control from Westminster over taxation and spending. Not once has a service provided by Lancashire County Council been mentioned, let alone a UKIP policy at that level.

Any party that can produce an election leaflet that fails to mention one single policy, that fails to mention one single service that the county council provides and fails to even mention the name of the authority for which the candidate is standing, deserves a sound thrashing on May 2nd.

Happy St George's Day

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

If You're a Scouser, Look Away Now!

They teach them young in Liverpool

I've been especially busy recently earning a crust, to pay the taxes that keep our bloated welfare state afloat, so I was shocked yesterday to hear that there had been a purge of people I'm acquainted with on Twitter.

Firstly freedom of speech means freedom of speech. There is a hackneyed old phrase that says; 'freedom of speech does not mean the right to shout fire in a packed cinema'. Fair enough, there are logical limits. But causing offence is an integral element of free speech. If I read something that I find offensive I have the freedom to continue reading or to stop reading. That is my right. Why should the writer, who offends me, be stopped from writing? But that is what is happening in our ever encroaching authoritarian, police state. Plod can't come out to deal with a burglary, but offend some oversensitive pillock and Knacker of the Yard will feel your collar faster than you can say.....well, something offensive.

It seems to me that social media is more like attending a football match than attending a heavy duty political debate or debating society. There is a great deal of macho posturing and outdoing of allies as well as opponents. We don't behave at a football match the way we do in the office, and people don't behave on Twitter and Facebook, in the main, the way they would on the hustings in an election campaign. I am speaking here of politicos using social media. Rather than reasoned debate aimed at converting opponents it is much more about trying to grind down opponents and boost your allies. If you don't like people on the right calling people on the left 'leftards', or even worse, then don't read them. If you don't like lefties throwing the word 'fascist' at anubody who disagrees with them, then don't read them. If you do, and engage them, expect it to get bloody but don't cry.

This week several heavyweights of the no nonsense, largely libertarian area of the internet have been purged. They have done nothing terrible. They haven't incited people to riot or to blow something up. They have offended somebody. For causing offence they have been banned from Twitter. In the case of Old Holborn his blog has also been taken down, whether by him voluntarily, or by the authorities forcibly I am unsure. But this link gives a good appraisal of Old Holborn's blog.

So what has Old Holborn done? It seems that he has upset Scousers and their questioned their famed victim status. From what I have found on the censored internet he questioned the accepted view of the Hillsborough disaster and the murder of Jamie Bulger. Old Holborn is hard hitting and controversial. As far as I am aware he put forward perfectly reasoned arguments that you may or may not agree with which, when I was at school, was what free speech was all about. Old Holborn, as far as I'm aware, has been writing on the internet for a few years and has survived. Until now.

Old Holborn may have caused offence but what happened to him says it all about modern Britain. His real identity, and that of his wife and children, were published on the internet as was his address. His mobile number was published and he has received numerous death threats. Threats have also been made against his employer.

But he chose the wrong target this time. He chose Scousers, and one of them complained to the police that he was upset.  You see the problem is that Scousers think they are so hard and tough, but offend one and it cries like a big baby. So the Old Bill felt Old Holborn's collar, for expressing a personal opinion. Old Holborn has been nicked and banished to some kind of internet Siberia.

Other people on Twitter have been banned after lynch mobs of lefties have hounded them after 'being offended'. I'm not aware of anybody on the libertarian right having anybody banned for being offended, although I have seen some appalling abuse fired at people by lefties. Libertarians believe in free speech. But that's for another blog post.

If you sit in your armchair watching TV, never uttering an opinion or taking sides in a debate then you'll be fine. But if you think that one day you might just, possibly, maybe want to say something that another person may not agree with then you should be very worried, you may find yourself nicked.   

Thoughts on the Thatcher Years

I joined the Tory Party around 1979, maybe 1978. Prior to Mrs Thatcher Ted Heath had been their leader, and I could never have got involved while he was there. But Mrs Thatcher was a breath of fresh air. Yes she made mistakes, who doesn't? But after the depressing, conflict ridden 1970s her vision and conviction were a breath of fresh air. I'm not going to write some heavy duty, academic style resume of 'The Thatcher Years', but a purely personal look back at those years.

Britain in the 1970s

The 1970s were pretty dire in this country. Yet again Labour had bankrupted the country, with Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan going cap in hand to the IMF to bail out a busted economy.

Trade unions had the power to bring down democratically elected governments, wreck businesses by forcing workers out on strike, workers who were slaves to 'closed shops' where they couldn't work unless they joined a union.

Workers who dared to defy their union were routinely harassed, threatened and physically assaulted. So called 'flying pickets' would turn up at businesses that weren't on strike and blockade the gates intimidating staff to turn back, effectively bullied into striking by trade union bully boys.

We had to endure the three day working week and power cuts, because we didn't have enough power to keep the lights on. Football games couldn't be played in the evenings to conserve the power that would be wasted lighting the floodlights. I remember walking through streets of Manchester when we all carried torches because there were no street lights. The dead could not be buried because of strikes and waste mounted up in the streets as the refuse collectors spent months on strike, on a regular basis. Britain in the 1970s was almost third world. Indeed, I visited relatively poor Latin American countries in the early 1990s that were far more pleasant places to spend time than Britain in the 1970s.

Margaret Thatcher's governments dragged Britain into the modern era and away from the living nightmare that was the 1970s. Those old enough to have been politically aware in the 1970s should remember how bad things were, it just couldn't continue. What underpinned Margaret Thatcher's philosophy was that hard work should be rewarded, and that freedom depended upon economic success. Creating business creates wealth which creates jobs. The welfare state should be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. The left want welfare dependency, they can then claim to be the protectors of the poor and downtrodden, it is a cynical and inhuman position. Mrs Thatcher wanted to create a world where people didn't need welfare, where people could live independent of benefits and live with pride and dignity.

Britain in the 1970s

To the left Mrs Thatcher was wrong. She was an aberration. To the left the Tory Party was the party of grey men in suits who saw a woman's place as in the home. But the Tory Party, not Labour voted a woman as leader first. The left claimed the Tory party was full of toffs and aristocrats. Mrs Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer from a provincial town. Indeed even now the hate fuelled left use the language of the demented picket line to shriek about the Tory Party being full of rich toffs and posh boys, equality unless you fail to fit their bigoted stereotype it seems. Labour banged on then, and still do, about how women were discriminated against in education. Mrs Thatcher went to Oxford. They never forgave her for proving them wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Throughout the North of England and in Scotland there were Conservatives elected in 1983 when Mrs Thatcher was re-elected, and again in 1987. The myth that she destroyed the North and wrecked communities is purely that, a myth. Even John Major, against all the odds, won the 1992 general election after Mrs Thatcher had been ousted. Hardly a country that loathed the Tories. Quite the contrary, Mrs Thatcher garnered huge support among the working classes, support which has gone now with the steady move to the left of the Tories since 1992. After all, even Barrow elected a Conservative MP in 1983 and '87.

Strip down the hysterical reaction by elements of the left, pure venom and hatred, and they were concocted by one pretty vile egotist who became the darling of the irrational left, Arthur Scargill. It revolves around the final laying to rest of a dying industry, the coal industry, that had been gradually wound down by successive governments after nationalisation. Let's face it, the left love nothing more than a lost cause to whip themselves into hysteria. The miners were the perfect lost cause. Whole communities ripped apart by Thatcher? I don't think so. Sadly a few small communities around a few failing pits lost some jobs. But then again, chariot makers and bow and arrow makers lost their jobs too. It's called progress, whether we like it or not.

An interesting thing these last couple of days is hearing the left ranting about what she did to the Falkland Islands. What she did was to liberate a population, invaded and illegally occupied by a foreign, military dictatorship. I would have thought most right thinking people would applaud that.

The reaction of elements on the left show that Britain, since Margaret Thatcher, has slipped into a moral decline that may not be reversible. We now have the children of the sixties in charge, and can see all around us the results of the liberalisation of society since the sixties that even Margaret Thatcher couldn't halt. The lack of respect, the inhumanity, the vile insults and civil disorder that greeted her death are a symptom of our decline, and show the danger that the brainwashed moral bankrupts of the left still pose.

Margaret Thatcher RIP

Welfare Police State

When I heard that Greater Manchester Police were banging on about people having a go at Goths and Punks having committed 'hate crimes' I thought it was an April Fool's joke a little late. Then I heard an interview with a senior officer and I realised that it really is GMP being a bunch of wet, pinko liberal arsewipes trying to ingratiate themselves with 'sections of the community' while alienating, which they don't seem to realise, the vast majority.

When this idiot was being interviewed I fell deeper and deeper into despair. The interviewer kept asking him if this meant that an attack on a Goth would get more resources than an attack on a bloke in a suit and tie he kept wriggling until I almost felt sorry for him. Well actually, I ended up wondering how he'd ever managed to become a copper, let alone a senior one but that's beside the point.

When I was at school I was taught that we were all equal under the law. No longer it seems. So-called 'hate crimes' apparently get priority meaning that somebody else, somebody who isn't the correct race, the correct sexuality, the correct sub-culture or whatever, is going to get second class treatment by the police if assaulted, abused or anything else. Another example of the tyranny of the minorities.

Before some leftard starts having a pop about me being some kind of 'ist' I'm not. I believe that the full weight of the law should be brought to bear on any criminal, whether motivated to carry out a violent crime against somebody because of their sexuality or because of which football team they support. It's surely commonsense isn't it?

Then this week we've had whining in the football fraternity about homophobic chanting against Brighton supporters. Again I misunderstood at first and thought that being gay must have become a prerequisite for supporting Brighton FC. But no, it was opposition fans having a pop at the liberal culture of the town with the country's first Green MP by chanting 'does your boyfriend know you're here?' at Brighton fans. Now, maybe I'm being all hard and macho but I hardly think that's going to drive any self-respecting gay person to weep any more than chanting 'you fat bastard' at me will drive me to a bottle of whisky and a gob full of paracetomol. Sodding hell some people really should  look at what hatred really is and get a sense of perspective.

Now if I've upset, or offended anybody please do not read any further. You've been warned.

I've spoken to a few people about that evil bastard Mick Philpott this week. The general consensus being that we hope he gets a bit of corporal punishment when he's in chokey from his fellow campers. Indeed a couple of us pondered the satisfaction to be gained by getting imprisoned if you could be guaranteed access to Mr Philpott. But on the whole I decided that wasn't a very good, or very practical idea.

I know that certain newspapers and politicos have been attacked for daring to link the welfare state with Philpott's crime of torching his own home and killing six children, but I think they are right to make a link. There is a problem in this country when the authorities hand over ever more of our cash in benefits to scum like Philpott who breed children to sponge more money from the system. Personally I would scrap child benefit, why should people receive tax money for having children? If they can't afford them don't have them.

In the case of Philpott didn't alarm bells ring that he was living, with two women and sixteen children, in a three bedroomed council house? If we have to waste money on social workers aren't these the kinds of cases they are supposed to sort out? I suspect their attitude would have been to tolerate Philpott and his harem as just another lifestyle choice. It wasn't the welfare state that made him do what he did, it didn't make him a vile psychopath, but it certainly created the environment for his evil to be enacted.

Fair enough, the country isn't full of psychos like that, but the welfare state has created a culture where the lazy, the feckless and the irresponsible can survive comfortably without having to trouble themselves with the responsibilities and hassles of those who work to pay their taxes to fund the parasites.

If welfare benefits aren't too high then why do so many people from eastern Europe come here to work despite us having so many unemployed? They work hard and evidently find coming here worthwhile, so benefits are quite obviously too high. Just a shame we don't have a government strong enough to deal with the problem.