Thursday 27 March 2014

Farage Clegg revisited

I was so upset at Andy suffering again from poor umpiring last night I had to curtail my blogg.

UKIP's big winning topic is clearly immigration. I wanted to run this as UKIP's number one issue in 2009. The late Malcolm Wood, Farage's presence in the South West vetoed it as it was BNP's big issue. Farage was, and still is, terrified of the connotatins of racism  attached to the BNP. Eventually the media have now conceded its not racist to talk about immigration so Farage has tackled it to UKIP's advantage aided by the disintegration of the BNP. Farage should be embolden by his success with this topic last night. Clegg will try to confuse the issue next time with his usual recital of dodgy statistics. Farage needs to get and master some stats himself to rebut Clegg's lies.

The most interesting facet of last night's  after debate discussion was how most of the media thought Clegg had one. The You Gov poll gave the electorate's view Farage 57%, Clegg 36% Don't know 7%. That did not stop the EU loving media pumping out numerous EU biased vox pops. The don't like facts they like opinions however ill founded but as Alan Sugar says, opinions are like arseholes, everyone has got one.

The London based media and the Westminster politicians have a profoundly undemocratic symbiotic relationship. They both need each other for their bread and butter. I used to be privy to Alastair Campbell's lobby briefings around the time of the dodgy dossier. The 6:00 news political correspondents spewed out Campbell's words verbatim as claimed exclusives. If they crossed Campbell their invite to the cosy briefings would be withdrawn and their sacking would follow. Who wants a political correspondent that Campbell starves of stories?

Jacky Smith picked up on this at 10:30 pm on Sky but she saw it as a big problem for the old political parties. It certainly is but its worse for Joe Public who speaks for him?

Don't be conned by programmes like QT where questions purportedly come from the audience. Its a heavily pre-screened audience selected to represent the BBC agenda. Then when you arrive at the venue you are asked to submit your question in writing. The BBC production team then select the questions that suit their agenda. Dimbleby is instructed who to take supplementary questions from, black faces and more important who not to take questions from, white faces. The questions selected are also media type questions that the politicians are used to.

Where politicians come unstuck is where they have to take random questions direct from an intelligent audience. These will be non-media type questions that politicians are unused to. Look at how G Brown came unstuck against Mrs Duffy at the last election. One of the social media types gave sound advice when looking at Twitter last night. Ignore everything from party spin meisters, around 95% of the posts, and look at the residual 5% from real people.

UKIP of course are up to the same tricks. I remember going to one of their leadership hustings where all the questions had to be pre-submitted and those selected by Farage placemen put to the candidates so where is democratic debate in UKIP?  Stone dead!

I weep for our country.

2 comments:

ALAN WOOD said...

The west has been cosseted for 68 years since WWII ended. The sacrifice of many ensured that the dark forces in Germany, Japan, Russia, and in recent times North Korea, then Iraq and Serbia were beaten off. But in much of the world there is still bloodshed and pain.
The diminution of the wealth of the USA, Europe and Japan through debt, a louche lifestyle & loss of technical superiority has allowed Russia and China to grow in military strength whilst that in Europe has been cut.
The USA is rightly worried hence the words of Obama and his cosying up to Merkel not Cameron.

The USA want a strong Europe and have supported the formation of the EU. They will not want UKIP to undermine that, especially when the next step is likely to be a new Treaty finalising the last piece in the formation of the United States of Europe with its own "defence" force.

Debt-ridden UK with reducing expenditure on our Armed Forces may not even figure in the plan. It will not matter to Obama (USA)and Merkel (USE) if UK becomes another Iceland with broken banks and a fishery protection vessel. We are becoming ever-more redundant to the plan.
Farage is showing how pathetic are the 3 main parties - frightened to debate and useless if they do.
The power of Russia and China may yet cause us to be like the Negro slaves of Africa - to be shipped to the new United States of Asia.

Eric Edmond said...

Agreed Alan. The EU lives totaliy under the protection of the US. We are slightly les dependent but not much.