Originally posted by Shallow BlueI am no spokesman for UKIP. In fact, I would have preferred it if they had never existed.
And yet, she's closer to the truth than Nigelle Farráge ever was.
However, I have watched with a fascinated bemusement as all the main political parties have adopted a strategy to deal with them which has basically amounted to:
1 Ignore them (mistake)
2 Dismiss them as a protest party/irrelevance (mistake)
3 Insult them (mistake)
4 Repeat 1-3 at regular intervals
Yet they continue to rise in popularity. They say madness is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
If UKIP ever get real power, which I hope they won't, anyone who has adopted strategy 1-3 should recognise that they were partly to blame.
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Originally posted by Rank outsiderYou're not wrong, there, either. Part of the problem is, I suspect, that the normal ways of dealing with a political opponent don't work for populist parties.
If UKIP ever get real power, which I hope they won't, anyone who has adopted strategy 1-3 should recognise that they were partly to blame.
You can't reason with them - populists don't reason, they shout. If you try to reason with (or even simply against) them, they only shout harder.
You can't reason with their voters, either. People who vote for this kind of party either don't listen to reason, because they're, well, look at the average nutter-in-the-pub; or they don't listen to you, because they've long been sick and tired of your same old political arguments - and, it must be said, in the case of the ConLaServaBourTive party, often justifiedly.
So what to do? Use their methods against them? Doesn't work, a normal party can't use such blatantly invented arguments. There are some things even a politician won't stoop to, and Nigelle will stoop to them all. Basically, they're stuck, trying to have a conversation with a windbag, and I don't know how to solve the problem, either. Except for making the 60 million (or in my case, 18 million) not be Mostly Fools, which isn't going to happen.
Originally posted by Shallow BlueYes, I appreciate that - funnily enough, his dad's best book (Parliamentary Socialism) demonstrates that the rot in the Labour Party set in even earlier than that, when industrial unionism was formally rejected post-Mond and conference democracy slowly curtailed.
Mate, Labour haven't been left-wing let alone socialist since Tory BLiar came to power. And don't think for a second the Milli-bands will change that - their poor old "communist" (read: not Daily Nazi-level fascist) father is spinning in his grave like Wiggo's dynamo.
Frankly, if you want to vote left-of-centre in the UK at the moment... you'll have to emigrate.
I have no particular faith in Ed Miliband (I voted against him in the leadership election), but I think he's pretty Wilsonite, the main difference being that there'll be no return to prices and incomes policy or profit taxes -if you look at the leaders before him all of them bar Foot came from the right, which is where the Shadow Cabinet is drawn from anyway. The facts on the ground are that the Overton window has moved far to the right even since Blair, and that Miliband has at least attempted (and failed, admittedly) to change the tone of that debate ideologically with reference to predistributionism, partial renationalization, price freezes and the living wage in a way that any of the Blairite alternatives or the Liberal Democrats (and it's now difficult to say whether the Blairites in Progress or the Orange Book Liberals are further to the right) could not do.
Having said all that, I think the most helpful practical moves at the moment for most people will come from cheap unionism, participatory budgeting (aka Vallejo), rent controls, workplace democracy and the end of the Right to Buy, which Enfield Council has demonstrated can be accomplished within the law. Unfortunately, there's a political dimension to all this, as you can see from the way two Tory landlords filibustered a majority in favour of the Revenge Evictions bill last week:
Originally posted by SuzianneThis is broadly true, except imagine a Tea Party/John Birch society membership composed largely of people who (completely oblivious to the views of Sarah Palin, Barry Goldwater or anyone else) vigorously supported nationalization, thought Obamacare's main problem was that it was not properly socialized, and that the US energy companies needed to be restricted by price controls.
Yeah, so pretty much like the Tea Party over here.
The reality is that UKIP's support is over-stated and over-amplified, and mainly the result of temporary factors, much like the rise of the Liberal Democrats in the late 1980s. Their ideology is libertarian in theory and completely opportunistic in practice, with their current programme representing a 180 degree turn not only from their last manifesto, but several weeks ago, which is increasingly resulting in their own leader failing to know his own party's policies: