Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

meanwhile, max clifford facing a very uncomfortable few years

sticky - i just walked past a newsstand and noticed today's lead headline from The Times

Labour's core vote hit hard by UKIP


obviously this must be about the eu elections and i have no idea about the rest of the of the article, but any thoughts or comment?

and ukip isn't middle class when led by NF, ex public school etc etc?????

i would have imagined labour voters going to ukip almost exclusively because of labour's (non)stance on eu and that good old chestnut of immigration

I see the Ukraine leader is leading the EU and the US. He runs a bankrupt country, but is leading Obama and others in G7. This country has become so important for the west that it is allowed to play with our livelihood.

Clearly, Ukraine has nothing to lose by playing dangerous games.

ukraine playing dangerous games? ...... wrong party surely?

if you actually meant russia, then she is indeed playing a dangerous game, for though russia has a stranglehold on that particular pipeline, don't forget that russia's economy is is in dire straits so also desperately needs the eu's income

Why these things can't be easily settled with a quick game of tug-o-war I do not know!

What UKIP Won’t Tell the Voters: The Fascistic Illiberalism at the Heart of the Party



Nigel Farage, Fuhrer of UKIP, whose policies allegedly include the removal of the vote from the unemployed and the sterilisation of the disabled.

I’ve reblogged another of Mike’s pieces from over at Vox Political, Does UKIP’s Euro election poll lead really reflect the People’s view? In it, Mike analyses some of the comments about UKIP posted on the Vox Political Facebook page. He concludes that UKIP’s electoral lead in the Euro elections is driven by disillusionment with the existing parties, rather than an outright endorsement of UKIP in itself. It’s a protest vote, caused by fears over mass immigration from eastern Europe. The article’s well worth reading for a glimpse into how people really feel about UKIP in their own words, rather than what UKIP’s own publicists and mainstream media commentators tell you.

I’ve remarked on how it is extremely suspicious and highly sinister that UKIP does not mention its domestic policies, preferring to concentrate instead exclusively on the issue of the EU and immigration. When you do find out about them, they’re horrifying. They have been described as ‘Tories on steroids’ because they advocate the complete destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. One of their policies, for example, is the removal of the worker’s right to paid annual leave.

But if one of the commenters on Mike’s Facebook page is to be believed, that’s the very least of it. The party has other policies that verge dangerously close to the Far Right. Bette Rogerson posted the following about them:

“Why would you vote for a party that says it hates Europe, but at the same time takes lots and lots of money from the European parliament? Why vote for a party whose members advocate policies like less tax for the wealthiest, cutting of maternity leave and forcible sterilisation of the disabled? Why vote for a party who wants to take the vote away from the unemployed? Is your job really that secure? Lastly but not least, why vote for a party which claims it wants British jobs for the British and then hires an Irish actor to model as a poor Briton whose job has been taken away by a foreigner?”

Various Conservative politicians and mouthpieces, like the Daily Mail, have also attacked maternity leave on the grounds that its an expensive burden for business. At times this has verged into attacks on women working, as the requirement to supply paid leave for women to have children and raise a family, according to the Tory Right, makes employing women prohibitively expensive. Thus it sometimes forms part of an attack on feminism and just about every attempt to give women access to jobs outside the home since the Equal Opportunities campaigns of the 1970s.

The really frightening stuff, however, if Bette Rogerson is correct, are the demands to sterilise the disabled and deny the vote to the unemployed. The sterilisation of the disabled was a major part of the eugenics campaign in Britain and America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was based on fears that the ‘dysgenic’ – the mentally and physically handicapped – would outbreed the sane, intelligent and able-bodied, and place an unbearable burden on the rest of society. By the 1920s, about 22 American states had passed legislation providing for the sterilisation of the ‘unfit’. It became a central part of the Nazi programme when they took power, with the Nazis themselves boasting that they had introduced nothing new in this regard. In propaganda films like I Don’t Want To Be Born the Nazis promoted the abortion of disabled children. Their eugenics programme finally culminated in the organised murder by the SS of mentally handicapped individuals taken from Reich mental asylums under the direction of Hitler’s doctor.

As for the removal of the vote from the unemployed, this seems to be another throwback to the 19th century. The extension of the franchise enacted by Disraeli in the 1870s gave most working men the vote. But not all. The franchise was still connected to property and the payment of rates. Martin Pugh in his book, British Fascism between the Wars, points out that the idea of universal suffrage based on the rights of the individual, was rejected as ‘too abstract’ and French in origin. He makes the point that the undemocratic nature of the franchise, which also excluded women until 1918, was partly one of the factors that turned the Conservative Right towards Fascism. Large sections of the establishment were afraid and disliked the extension of the vote to all of the great unwashed, particularly groups connected with the Raj and the colonial bureaucracy. That makes sense. The British government of India was a European elite of official and bureaucrats ruling a vast sub-continent without any kind of democratic accountability to the millions they governed. They clearly took the same attitude towards their Indian subjects back with them to their fellow countrymen in the British working class.

More recently, Right-wing politicians and polemicists have also criticised the extension of the liability for jury duty beyond the traditional restrictions based on property qualifications. According to them, Roy Jenkins’ removal of the property qualification in the 1960s was one of the causes of the rising crime rate in the 1970s. Those with a proper investment in bricks and mortar were more socially responsible, according to these Right-wingers, and more aware of criminals as a threat to society than those without such property, who were consequently much more irresponsible regarding the proper punishment crims deserved. This was the point made by one such Tory writer, whose book was reviewed in the Financial Times in the 1990s. UKIP’s supposed policy to exclude the unemployed from the franchise does sound similar to this complaint.



Workfare: It’s almost Nazi forced labour under the Tories. Under UKIP, it would be the real thing.

And lastly, apart from the threat to democracy posed by the denial of the vote to the unemployed, simply for being without a job, it also turns the unemployed themselves into helots – state slaves – under the Work programme. I’ve criticised the government’s welfare to work programme, along with Johnny Void and many others, for constituting a form of slavery. At the moment one of the major factors stopping it from being real slavery is that those on the Work Programme still possess the franchise. They are, in theory, still electorally free. This would deny them that freedom, and so make them virtual serfs of the government and the private industries, to whom they would be rented out under the Welfare to Work rules. And needless to say, it would also provide a strong incentive for government and big business to shed more paid jobs, in order to create an army of state serfs denied the franchise and forced to work for a pittance in Jobseekers’ Allowance, rather than a living wage.

This is how the free citizens of the Roman Empire became the feudal serfs, labouring on the estates of the nobility in the Middle Ages, folks. See the relevant chapter on the decline of the Roman empire in R.H.C. Davies, Europe in the Middle Ages.

If this is all correct, and these are UKIP’s domestic policies, then Farage and his stormtroopers are dragging us back to the worst and most exploitative aspects of 19th century capitalism. It’s not quite Fascism, but very close. Oswald Mosley, the Fuhrer of the British Union of Fascists, in his autobiography, My Life, sneered at the concept of freedom under liberal democracy. For him, such freedom meant only the freedom for the poor and unemployed to sleep on a park bench. Mosley himself was a terrible man – a vicious racist and anti-Semite, who fancied himself as the British Mussolini or Hitler. But If this is correct about UKIP, then under Farage you wouldn’t even have the freedom to do that.

There's a simple solution to this Euro-elections sham

Westminster politicians are well placed to do a good job in Brussels and Strasbourg





By Boris Johnson

8:40PM BST 27 Apr 2014


It seems incredible that there is only a month to go, only a few nailbiting weeks until that climacteric in geo-politics – the chance for us all to flood to the polling stations, snatch our ballot papers and VOTE in the Euro-elections. Across this continent of 27 nations and 510 million people, we will be deciding who should serve us in Strasbourg and Brussels. It’s one of the biggest global exercises of democracy – and it’s a complete sham.


Let me ask you a question. No peeking at the internet; no conferring. Can you tell me the name of your Euro-MP? OK, I thought not. Can you tell me what he or she does?



More flannel here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10791873/Theres-a-simple-solution-to-this-Euro-elections-sham.html



But as usual, the best of it is in the comment section, people are a little sceptical of Boris:

Box of Frogs • an hour ago


Boris the 'wind sock' Johnson. Which ever way the winds of fortune are blowing he will be full of it.

sure as hell i have no idea who my MEP is


does anyone know what role any of the ukip MEPs play in strasburg?
did i hear, "they don't do anything other than trouser their juicy pay packets"?

Yes c, I suspect they fit right in on that aspect.

Do we really want UKIP MEPs representing us in Europe? Anyone who votes for UKIP is a fool. It would be like electing hundreds of Monster Raving Looney Party MPs in our election and then complain that they had no policies and were all crazy.

Whats the alternative?

If you vote for the usual suspects (the three stoogies partys), nothing will change.




Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

What UKIP stands For

These are anxious and troubled times. As crisis follows crisis, our politicians do nothing in the face of dangers rearing up all around us.

Taxes and Government debt rise. Energy and transport costs soar. Unemployment is too high. The NHS and state education strain under a population increase of 4 million since 2001.

Another wave of uncontrolled immigration comes from the EU (this time Bulgaria and Romania). Yet the political class tells us the EU is good for the UK.

A gulf has opened between the ruling elite and the public. Because they must all follow Brussels diktats, each of the establishment main parties is now so similar voters have no real choice.

The EU controls Immigration, Business and Employment, Financial Services, Fishing, Farming, Energy and Trade. It seeks now to control Law and Order, Foreign Affairs and Tax. Only outside the EU can we start to solve the problems our country faces.

Return Power to the UK

• A vote for UKIP is a vote to leave the EU and recover power over our national life.

• Free trade, but not political union, with our European neighbours. We are the EU’s largest export market: they depend on us for jobs - not the other way around.

• Binding local and national referenda, at the public’s request, on major issues.

Protect Our Borders

• Regain control of our borders and of immigration - only possible by leaving the EU.

• Immigrants must financially support themselves and their dependents for 5 years. This means private health insurance (except emergency medical care), private education and private housing - they should pay into the pot before they take out of it.

• A points-based visa system and time-limited work permits.

• Proof of private health insurance must be a precondition for immigrants and tourists to enter the UK.

Rebuild Prosperity

• Save £55m a day in membership fees by leaving the EU and give British workers first crack at the 800,000 jobs we currently advertise to EU workers.

• No tax on the minimum wage.

• Enrol unemployed welfare claimants onto community schemes or retraining workfare programmes.

• Scrap HS2, all green taxes and wind turbine subsidies.

• Develop shale gas to reduce energy bills and free us from dependence on foreign oil and gas - place the tax revenues into a British Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• UKIP will abolish inheritance tax. Inheritance tax brings in under £4bn - less than a third of what we spend on foreign aid. The super-rich avoid it, while modest property owners get caught by it. It hits people during a time of grief and UKIP will budget in its 2015 spending plans to completely abolish this unfair death tax.

• Make cuts to foreign aid that are real and rigorous.

Safeguard Against Crime

• No cuts to front line policing.

• Make sentences mean what they say.

• No votes for prisoners - that’s what losing your liberty means.

• Prevent foreign criminals entering the UK - by re-introducing border controls that the EU forced us to abandon.

• Scrap the European Arrest Warrant, which sends British citizens to foreign jails without evidence, just to answer questions - replace it with a proper extradition system.

• Remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.

Care And Support For All

• Open GP surgeries in the evening, for full-time workers, where there is demand.

• Locally-elected County Health Boards to inspect hospitals - to avoid another Stafford Hospital crisis.

• Prioritise social housing for people whose parents and grandparents were born locally.

• Allow the creation of new grammar schools.

• Make welfare a safety net for the needy, not a bed for the lazy. Benefits only available to those who have lived here for over 5 years.

Free Speech and Democracy

• No to Political Correctness - it stifles free speech.

• The law of the land must apply to us all. We oppose any other system of law.

• Teach children positive messages and pride in their country. We want to unite through better integration.

UKIP is a patriotic party that believes in putting Britain first. Only UKIP will return self-government to the British people.

not intended as a party political ramp, but at least if you vote for the tories, and of course pre-supposing they get re-elected at the next GE, then there is the promise of a referendum
none of the others have other than a set and entrenched position

Well, you won't get different results by voting for UKIP as they won't have any power. It is just a wasted vote. Apart from that I am happy with the results except I would like a large majority for the Conservatives. People may complain about the lack of Conservative policies, but that is the result of being in a coalition. It is something supporters of parties have to put up with across the world. Coalitions are becoming the norm in many countries these days due to the emerging of new minority parties. Many countries have been in that situation for years. I don't think Germany has had a non coalition government since WWII. Italy has only had a handful of governments with majorities and they were under Burlesconi. Due to unstable coalition governments, Italy has had an average of one new government per year since 1946 with two governments each lasting only 11 days.

40054 - and the cost and how to finance same? .... i didn't suggest you were promoting ukip, but quite a number of those ideas are totally unrealistic to isolationist (a recipe for disaster) to downright scary

A vote for UKIP will give none of the above. It doesn't matter what UKIP stands for, they can't deliver anything.

hays - a large (75+ seats say) can have dangerous implications for all, and i don't care which party is the recipient of same, for there is then no effective control over some of the more loony policies that can or may be promoted

What about UKIP bringing back hanging.

I could send them a few clients!


They sound very much like the Looney Tory Right wing!