UKIP

Nigel Farage almost cost the Leave side victory in the EU referendum, the leader of the ‘Out’ campaign claimed yesterday.
Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave, said that without the Ukip leader’s intervention, the Brexit side would have won by 60 per cent to 40.

There only was a vote because Nigel drove Ukip’s tanks onto the Tory lawn.

There are all sorts of uncomplimentary things you an say about Our Nige and I’d even agree with some of them. But you’ve got to acknowledge the achievement as well. It all simply would not have happened without him.

Mr Farage announced an inquiry but said that it was unlikely to lead to suspensions or police involvement.

He said: “I don’t think that a political party can have an incident like this without having a look at it.

“I don’t see any need for the police to be involved, there are no complaints. Somehow I doubt people will be suspended.

“I won’t be on the inquiry myself. I suspect it will blow over and be looked back upon as one of these things that happens between men.”

There will be points for the spotters of feminist diatribes against this gross masculinity.

The point at issue was that there had been some talk of Woolfe moving over to the Tories. As, for an example, a certain DCB had done. Pity the punchee was who it was really.

The other alleged pugilist has immunity from prosecution as an MEP, I am hearing

The favourite to become the next Ukip leader has collapsed outside the European Parliament amid reports he was punched by a colleague.

Ukip said that Steven Woolfe collapsed outside the European Parliament following a “clear the air” meeting with colleagues this morning.

However party insiders told The Telegraph that Mr Woolfe was punched by a Ukip colleague following an altercation.

The Daily Telegraph understands that Mr Woolfe is suffering from bleeding of the brain after he was punched. One witness said he fell into a window after being punched.

Nigel Farage, who was reportedly present during the altercation, said: “I deeply regret that following an altercation that took place at a meeting of MEPs this morning that Steven Woolfe subsequently collapsed and was taken to hospital. His condition is serious.”

Facepalm.

Woolfe, I am told, "took off his jacket and invited him outside" – then there was the 'altercation'

— Asa Bennett (@asabenn) October 6, 2016

Venom between leading figures, donations drying up and membership falling…ANDREW PIERCE on how Ukip is on the verge of collapse

I had several such when I was a press officer. We even had the Times reporting that we wouldn’t be contesting the next euro-elections. The ones we did contest and the ones we beat Labour and the Lib Dems in.

It’s entirely possible such an article will be right some day. But at least we’ll be able to say we won before that happened.

In sack, of course:

Farage had to fight an extremely draining two-front war against these opportunist carpetbaggers during the referendum, as they sought to seize control of the party he built up from nothing while he was out winning the campaign.

Led by Douglas Carswell and Suzanne Evans, this cabal would utterly destroy Ukip. Yet they have reaped huge benefits from courting the party’s outdated national executive committee. This body is populated by a motley collection of amateurs; leftovers from a bygone age, when Ukip was a ragtag band of volunteers on the fringes of British politics. Watching them try to run the modern political movement that Farage built is like watching a team of circus clowns trying to carry out a pit stop at the Silverstone Grand Prix.

Yet the old constitution gives them power, and Carswell and Evans have lavished them with attention. They found a useful creature in the absurd figure of Neil Hamilton, a relic from the dregs of the Tory party best known for the “cash for questions” scandal and exactly the sort of representative Ukip doesn’t need.

Sigh.

That’s from Arron Banks, the major financial backer of the party. My knowledge of the internal details is well out of date but Jeebus did it used to be vicious. I assume all political parties are the same for the same reason it is in academia.

Ukip leader Diane James has quit the role after just 18 days.

Ms James said on Tuesday night that she does not “have sufficient authority, nor the full support” of Ukip MEPs and officers to reform party.

In a statement she said: “It is with great regret that I announce that I will not be formalising my recent nomination to become the new leader of the party with the Electoral Commission.

There’s a franchise and a movement out there. All it needs is a leader….

It’s as good an opportunity as anyones’ had these past 50 years, on a par with the SNP and SDP, to change the electoral landscape. Just needs someone who can ride it.

Surveying those who did run not sure the party’s got one though.

A “total ban” on Muslim state schools has been called for by Lisa Duffy, the Ukip leadership hopeful.

Ms Duffy, who is expected to be announced as once of the candidates in the party’s leadership race at noon today, has called for Islamic faith schools to be shut down in a bid to tackle radicalisation.

Sigh.

Bill Etheridge says he wants to see ‘a return to the days’ when prison focused first and foremost on punishment, and vowed to ‘rehabilitate without using significant financial resources’.

His measures include:

removing all luxuries from jails, including all electronic devices.
an automatic 10-year sentence increase for prisoners who attack prison officers.
locking prisoners in their cells for the first six months of sentences.
banning all visits over the same period.
a £40,000 annual charge on prisoners to be levied until ‘their assets are depleted’.

Idiocies like this were stamped upon and stamped upon fast.

I recall one version of a manifesto that lasted about 30 minutes as a result of things like this.

Idiocy.

Some may be tempted to dismiss Nigel Farage’s resignation on Monday as leader of Ukip as just another piece of characteristic impulsiveness. That Nigel, what a card, he’s always resigning. Did it in 2009. Didn’t last. Tried it after last year’s election. Didn’t last. Now he’s done it again this year. Always comes back though – the bookies still have him at 2/1 to lead Ukip into the 2020 election. So ignore it. It’s just Nigel. He’s not serious.

Maybe, but the context could hardly be more serious. And Mr Farage should take responsibility for a change. Britain has just voted to leave the European Union. Barely 10 days on from that historic decision, two of the people most directly responsible for winning the vote have simply walked away. Boris Johnson fronted the official leave campaign and has now thrown in the towel in the Conservative contest because he has been disowned by Michael Gove. Mr Farage fronted the lavishly funded unofficial campaign and he has quit too.

Where is any drop of moral seriousness, or any ounce of public responsibility, in that? There seems to be none in either man. Both Mr Johnson and Mr Farage were willing until less than a fortnight ago to do anything, to say anything, and to rubbish anyone who disagreed with them in the cause of leaving the EU. Yet they never once said what leaving would actually look like. They mocked anyone who expressed concerns.

Yet, having won, they simply walk away.

The model of someone in politics to achieve a task, that done to leave politics, just doesn’t seem to gain traction in Guardian minds, does it?

That most in hte trade are mere careerists is obvious, but the possibility of someone being principled seems to escape them.

Statement from Nigel Farage

I have decided to stand aside as Leader of UKIP. The victory for the ‘Leave’ side in the referendum means that my political ambition has been achieved. I came into this struggle from business because I wanted us to be a self-governing nation, not to become a career politician.

The peerage ought to be a done deal but will they actually give him one?

President Martin Schulz says speeding up of UK exit being considered after ‘continent taken hostage because of Tory party fight’

It’s actually because Schulzie just cannot put up with much more of Nigel taking the piss out of him in the Parliament.

And aren’t we rather looking forward to that first speech that Nige does give there? Wonder if the crowd will even let him have the floor.

Clearly and obviously this should be so. The problem I’ve got is that I can’t quote work out what he gong should be.

To peg it to something, Dave gets an Earldom (if he wants it) for having been PM. Getting us out of the EU is clearly worth more than that. But perhaps not quite as much as the Dukedom that Churchill turned down. So, I’m currently pluming for a Marquessate. What the old Viceroy’s of India used to get upon retirement, seems about right.

Can’t use Kent as the title, pity. But then we don’t need to use a county, we can use a town. Of Ashford?

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.
The fine French kings came over in a flutter of flags and dames.
We liked their smiles and battles, but we never could say their names.
The blood ran red to Bosworth and the high French lords went down;
There was naught but a naked people under a naked crown.
And the eyes of the King’s Servants turned terribly every way,
And the gold of the King’s Servants rose higher every day.
They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind,
Till there was no bed in a monk’s house, nor food that man could find.
The inns of God where no man paid, that were the wall of the weak.
The King’s Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak.

And the face of the King’s Servants grew greater than the King:
He tricked them, and they trapped him, and stood round him in a ring.
The new grave lords closed round him, that had eaten the abbey’s fruits,
And the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots,
We saw their shoulders moving, to menace or discuss,
And some were pure and some were vile; but none took heed of us.
We saw the King as they killed him, and his face was proud and pale;
And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.

A war that we understood not came over the world and woke
Americans, Frenchmen, Irish; but we knew not the things they spoke.
They talked about rights and nature and peace and the people’s reign:
And the squires, our masters, bade us fight; and scorned us never again.
Weak if we be for ever, could none condemn us then;
Men called us serfs and drudges; men knew that we were men.
In foam and flame at Trafalgar, on Albuera plains,
We did and died like lions, to keep ourselves in chains,
We lay in living ruins; firing and fearing not
The strange fierce face of the Frenchmen who knew for what they fought,
And the man who seemed to be more than a man we strained against and broke;
And we broke our own rights with him. And still we never spoke.

Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain,
He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:
We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

They’re not going to forget us now, are they? For we have indeed spoken yet.

That immediate market reaction could just be speculative, but I doubt that. The fundamental uncertainty will flow through into a significant decline in investment, which will lead to recession, inevitably.

The decline in the value of sterling should logically lead to an interest rate rise but that would tip many UK households, and in turn many UK banks into financial crisis. Preventing this will require massive injection of funding from the Bank of England but not for investment, but just to keep banks afloat.

At the same time tax yields will fall, inevitably. Balanced budgets are now animpossibility.

Pound falls. This makes British assets cheaper. It also delivers a large dose of stimulus to the domestic economy. As in, you know, 1993?

This thus causes less foreign investment and a recession?

Hunh?

He went on: “And we’ll have done it not just for ourselves, we’ll have done it for the whole of Europe.

“I hope this victory brings down this failed project and leads us to a Europe of sovereign nation states, trading together, being friends together, cooperating together, and let’s get rid of the flag, the anthem, Brussels, and all that has gone wrong.

“Let June 23 go down in our history as our independence day.”

I’m still pinching myself. This isn’t some masterly piece of maskirovka, disinformation, is it? Someone’s hijacked the entire internet and posted false results?

There’s one individual to credit for Brexit, one Nigel Farage.

No, most certainly not, I do not credit him with convincing everyone. But we would never even have been allowed to answer the question, it would never have been posed, without the past 20 odd years of Farage continuing to demand that we do be asked. No Ukip no referendum. And, having worked for the organisation myself, stood for it as a candidate, no Nigel and Ukip would not have survived.

It’s been a long campaign and perhaps not perfectly played but Dear Lord there’s one individual who has made a damn difference.

Hurrah!

And what a 90th birthday present for our Our Own Dear Queen, eh?

Labour’s Future, Why Labour Lost in 2015 and How it Can Win Again, to be published this week, says the party is losing socially conservative voters to Ukip in droves, while appealing most to metropolitan liberals who tend to be better off and to have been to university.

And metropolitan liberals do not a majority make….

A teenage boy was left ‘feeling like a terrorist’ after anti-extremism police questioned him for looking at Ukip’s website at school.
Joe Taylor, 15, was reported to officers by teachers who also discovered he had looked at BBC footage of a march by the English Defence League.
Staff at Wildern School in Hedge End, Hampshire, acted on the Government’s counter-terror Prevent scheme that obliges schools to monitor children and report signs of extremism.

Sigh.