When I first joined Ukip, I was attracted to the anti-establishment nature of the party. I don’t fit well with Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat bland establishment mediocrity – as I was reminded at a polling station with only those options on the ballot paper on Thursday. The Ukip of old loved to breathe new life into policy – whether it was no tax on minimum wage (raising the tax threshold to help the poorest earners, later part-copied by the Conservatives)
The flaw in the policy being, of course, that those on the NMW don’t experience the joy of tax…
Surely UKIP should be anti rule by Tehran as well as Brussels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controversy
Of course they should have been clearer why this is the case.
Also since when is 1 in 3 a tiny minority?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jan/29/thinktanks.religion
I wish UKIP got such a minority of votes.
I’ve been astounded by how useless the people running UKIP have been, of late. And this dates back to before the referendum. I asked someone then, close to the leadership, what plans were following a positive result. “Wait & see” was the answer. Still waiting. Unless total lack of coherent strategy was a planned position.
And it’s no excuse, Paul Nuttall going into TV debates without seeing a draft of the manifesto. He’s supposed to have been the leader. Leaders lead. If you can’t get on top of your own policy designers, you’re nothing but a stuffed dummy.
And enormously disappointed. There’s been a chance to create something new & different. Totally wasted.
@bloke in spain
Sadly it is not just UKIP who have had useless leaders.
I suspect the attraction of becoming a politician of whatever stripe is making rules. The attraction of UKIP for me was the unmaking of rules. Ditto teaparty. Hence sincere visionary leadership of such a movement verges on an oxymoron.
I may have imagined it (one of the failings of old age), but I seem to recall, in the dim and distant days before the referendum was announced, Nigel being asked what would happen to UKIP if we left the EU. His (very good) reply was that he thought it should disband because he didn’t see himself as a career politician.
Can anyone help me out?
“There’s been a chance to create something new & different. Totally wasted.”
UKIP was always a fractious rabble united only by campaigning on a single issue. The party was always divided between economic libertarians and social conservatives, so it never cohered around anything new or that different. However, it produced in Farage one singular politician of genius. And the rest is history.
“I recognise this policy”
How did that work out for you then? I wouldn’t go me, me, me if nobody voted for it.
You funny little man.
JC: it got adopted, in a watered down form, by the Government, which is a pretty good result…
Trouble is, Theo, absent the economic libertarians & with the lack of anyone with even average intelligence, let alone genius, you’ve just described the Tory party.
I’m glad to see that turnout increased in the 2015 GE and again in 2017. So tentatively it looks like taking people out of PAYE income tax did not make them apathetic about voting, a claim which was made by a few lefty nutters.
Correlation is not causation of course.
I want Nigel to either take back controlof UKIP, change it’s name and rebrand it getting rid of the useless members or start a new party. He has 5 years to get it up and running.
A fairly decent chap. I’ve known him tangentially for a couple of decades through Sheffield local politics.
We tried to encourage that in the late 2000s. Or at least to drop the “£” symbol—it seemed a little outdated by then, since we weren’t fighting the Euro-battle anymore.
As it is, it was the economic libertarians in UKIP that insisted that the party needed a whole manifesto in the first place. Hence the tax liberalism advocated by people like Timmy made it in.
Chasing votes, the party moved more and more to the economic left and the social right (at least on the issue of immigration).
DK
“The burqa ban was an odd choice for a first big speech of a campaign (and personally I disagree with such a blanket ban),”
Freudian slip ?
It seems raising PAs gained the government, Tory and coalition, no electoral capital at all. I’m sorry, but without that dividend there is no point in a policy or a measure.