It is galling to see idiot candidates selected by Farage/Crowther dragging UKIP's name through the gutter with their insane, ill considered views and pub talk language. This is manna to UKIP's BBC and other media enemies who are successfully air brushing UKIP out of the campaign. Even Sky are now following the BBC lead and this morning despite showing the latest poll of pollls with UKIP on 14 % and the Lib Dems on 9% they talked incessantly about the LibDems and said nothing of UKIP. That is why UKIP's poll ratings have been steadily falling these last 6 months from 20%+ to14% or less. UKIP cannot control the media but they do not have to make it so easy for them by choosing such impolitic, imbecile candidates.
Where UKIP fails is that they do not have a people machine to convert poll ratings into seats. That involves having a well organised, well motivated group of activists on the ground. The LibDems have that and will convert their 9% poll rating to 20 or more seats. UKIP from their 14% poll rating may well end up with as few as 2 seats. Farage and his sycophant slime have destroyed the UKIP army on the ground.
UKIP has to learn how to play the system and recruit and organise its troops on the ground but It suffers from the too many Chiefs, not enough Indians. It needs to get rid of Farage and Crowther and get in people at the top who know how to win seats. Applause at Question Time massages Farage's already over inflated ego but it wins no seats. That takes years of hard graft building a local party machine and motivating their activists. Excommunicating loyal activists with a proven track record undermines local parties. To that end I will be interested to see how the new regime in my local Yeovil party fares on Thursday.
I am not anti-Farage. He like us all has his strengths and weaknesses and as in all walks of lif the trick is to maximise the impact of your strengths and minimise the impact of your weaknesses.
Here is a transcipt of Farage's Sky interview yesterday with Murnaghan a typical member of the London based sneeing media. It shows Farage at his best:
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, the rise of UKIP has been a talking point for journalists and a thorn in the side for the main political parties for most of this parliament really but if Nigel Farage doesn’t become an MP next week he will stand down as leader and the party will have lost its only star so could we be about to see the UKIP story come to an end? Well the UKIP leader Nigel Farage joins me now and he’s chuckling but it is a serious point isn’t it Mr Farage? I mean this time next week it could all be over for Nigel Farage if you don’t win that seat you’re after, you’ve said you’ll stand in ten minutes.
NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, about ten minutes is about right. It could be over for Mr Clegg, Cameron may no longer be leader of the Tory party, Miliband may be gone, Natalie Bennett may be gone, we all may be gone. All I was doing in saying that was really just stating the obvious, I need to win that seat, it’s as simple as that.
DM: But just to push that, would it be a tactic, would you stand again? You’d stand down because you haven’t won the seat or is it on the personal side of things, it’s all over, I’ve given my all and now I want to get back and you have talked about the toll the campaign has taken on your family and other things.
NIGEL FARAGE: One thing, if I say I’m going to do something I do it so I’ve said to if I lose I’ll go and I’ll now say to you I will still be here next week.
DM: Okay, you’ll say that but people will …
NIGEL FARAGE: I won’t just say it, I’ll believe it.
DM: Well of course and as the old saying goes, only the final poll will tell us that but a lot of talk, as you say there, about leadership in so many, in all of the parties. Is UKIP a one-man band, would it suffer without Nigel Farage as its leader?
NIGEL FARAGE: You’ve seen over the course of the last few months the Carswell’s, the Reckless’s, the Suzan Evans, the Steven Wolf’s, the Paul Nuttall’s all doing more and more of the mainstream media, coming on your show as well. We’ve seen probably the best manifesto any party has ever produced in the sense that it was independently verified and audited and we’ve become a much more professional party. I mean there are 5,000 standing for UKIP at the elections next Thursday and we’ve suffered fewer embarrassments with our candidates than the other parties have in this election so UKIP has moved on a long, long way.
DM: Okay, I was going to raise that a bit later but while we’re on the embarrassments do let’s get this out of the way …
NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, do, please.
DM: As you point out, exactly as you say there, other parties, many more embarrassments but yours seem to be concentrated in the rather damaging area for UKIP of ethnicity, of race, of people saying offensive things about that.
NIGEL FARAGE: Okay, fine, so we’ve had out of 5,000 fewer than a handful that have caused us a problem. Can I tell you that since January 1st there have been 300 councillors for the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative parties who have been arrested, imprisoned or sacked for crimes far worse than saying something nasty on Facebook late at night. What I’ve been saying about this for years is if we’ve got our bad guys, I’m the leader, I have to say I’m responsible for it but actually a blind eye is turned and I’m talking …
DM: It wasn’t that I was talking about, Mr Farage, it was the issues, you know what your critics say about you particularly on the left. People say that underlying it all it’s got a racist tinge to it and …
NIGEL FARAGE: Well it doesn’t.
DM: Well of course you’d deny that but a lot of your candidates and former candidates, the people that you have disciplined, have been saying things which are pretty awful about, as I said, ethnicity and race.
NIGEL FARAGE: Some of our people have said awful things and some of the other parties have had people actually convicted in court of racial assault so I’m happy to answer this but please, when you interview the other leaders ask them the same question. Can I just say to you that at this general election what we’re seeing in UKIP is a big rise in black and ethnic minority candidates for UKIP and voters for UKIP.
DM: How many have you got?
NIGEL FARAGE: Well we have got over 60 black and ethnic minorities standing for us in the general election and across the other thousands of council seats I don't know but a lot, a lot and the whole thing has changed and we are getting a lot of good votes amongst those communities too.
DM: Okay, well at least you are not going to sit here and tell me you are going to form a, or maybe you are, an outright majority government after the next election, that would be way beyond your capabilities and I suppose your ambitions. What are your ambitions in terms of influencing things? It’s all down the Conservative side isn’t it and you have already got that pledge for a referendum.
NIGEL FARAGE: The one thing that I got wrong in this election campaign, completely wrong, was I thought Miliband would promise an EU referendum, I thought he’d do it with about the same degree of sincerity that Mr Cameron did it but I thought he’d do it. He hasn’t done it.
DM: And that would give you both options.
NIGEL FARAGE: That would have given us an option. We want, our primary goal for that brilliant UKIP manifesto to be put in place, the precondition is that we have to get back control of our country, we have to get back control of our borders and that means getting a full, free and fair referendum. So Miliband, much to my surprise, has completely turned his back on the idea of giving people a say. Mr Cameron has made a referendum promise albeit he broke one before, he vacillated, he’s been all over the show on this. If that referendum is going to happen and if it is going to be a full, free and fair referendum, it will need UKIP there to hold his feet to the fire to make sure it is conducted properly.
DM: And your ambition would be to make him have that referendum this year but he says part of the referendum has to be after a renegotiation and he could hardly get that together and achieve what he would want to achieve in just a few months.
NIGEL FARAGE: There is no renegotiation. I was with Jean-Claude Juncker three days’ ago and there were two things that the British people would want renegotiated, one is the supremacy of law and they are not going to concede that. Our supreme court will still be beholden to two other courts, one in Luxemburg and one in Strasburg but secondly, and perhaps crucially, is this issue of the free movement of people and what Juncker has said and what Mr Tusk who runs the Council has said and what the real boss, Mrs Merkel, has said is that there is no negotiation on this so why waste a couple of years when those things are already off the agenda?
DM: So is this a red line? Lots of talk about red lines of course but if you are talking to Conservative representatives you say you hold that referendum in 2015?
NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, there is no reason why we can’t do that.
DM: But is that a red line?
NIGEL FARAGE: Absolutely, we need to have that referendum and we need to have it now.
DM: And if not we will vote against you in a Queen’s Speech, if you don’t offer to hold it now?
NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, that’s how I feel about it but can I please just say this to you, here we are, four days to go before a general election, I’m not blaming you but the whole debate today that is going on through the newspapers and through all the multi-channel discussions is about who is going to get into bed with you next Friday morning, what we are not …
DM: But that’s the best you can achieve isn’t it, from UKIPs point of view?
NIGEL FARAGE: What we’re not doing is we are not discussing policy. I mean really do in these last four days need to get real and talk about the policy choices that are offered by the different parties and that to me is the great frustration of this campaign. Look, our national debt has doubled in the last five years, this isn’t being talked about. 624,000 people came as migrants to Britain last year – that isn’t being talked about.
DM: Quite a lot of people left though.
NIGEL FARAGE: Either way, it’s still a massive, massive net figure but we are not really talking about the housing crisis that is confronting young people in this country today and I just think we need in the last four days to start talking a bit more about policy.
DM: And it is how much of that policy you could insert through the influence that UKIP holds on a bigger party. How many seats, what’s your back of the envelope calculation? Obviously you think you’re going to get in and Mr Reckless and Mr Carswell, how many seats are you basing your assumptions on?
NIGEL FARAGE: I don't know, I don't know but what I do know is this, there has been a really big attempt over the last month to talk down UKIPs prospects. Every day editorials, UKIPs on the slip when actually UKIPs on the rise, our poll figures are steadying. There is also some quite considerable evidence now of what is called the ‘shykipper’, people who will vote UKIP but won’t tell pollsters they’re going to do so. I’ve got a feeling next Friday morning some of the liberal metropolitan elite may wake up with a bit of a hangover.
DM: But don’t you think that appeal from the Conservatives is getting through, particularly about the issue of a referendum? There you are, it is only the Conservatives who say they will deliver that and if a UKIP voter is in danger of depriving a Conservative, particularly a Conservative member of parliament or ex-member of parliament who has been very close to UKIP and pretty eurosceptic, if they are in danger of depriving them of a seat aren’t they in the end going to vote for the Conservative?
NIGEL FARAGE: I think that’s wrong for two reasons. Firstly of course there is this misconception that still goes on that UKIP voters are former Tories and increasingly the Tory percentage of the UKIP vote gets smaller and smaller as we pick up more Labour people and as we pick up people that did not vote in 2010 which is now a very significant chunk of the UKIP vote. In Rochester only a third of the Reckless vote which won him the by-election had come from the Conservatives in 2010 so that argument arithmetically is irrelevant but here’s the political point – people that have left David Cameron since 2010 have left him because he’s covered the country in wind turbines, he’s slashed our defences, he’s overseen massive rises in immigration …
DM: Wind turbines, is that an issue?
NIGEL FARAGE: For some people out there it is, yes and he has also spent the first half of the parliament saying it wouldn’t be in the national interest to have a referendum on EU membership and they know … hang on, those voters know that the only reason he is even talking about a referendum is because of what UKIP did, growing through the 2012/13 period and that actually if they really want a referendum, because this man has broken his word before, that if they really want a referendum they need UKIP MPs.
DM: Would you prefer a different leader to the Conservative party if … there are a lot of ifs here but with say Boris Johnson, would you find someone like him easier to deal with?
NIGEL FARAGE: Well I’m not a Conservative but if I was a Conservative I would like to have a leader who was actually a Conservative and that perhaps has been part of their problem.
DM: Nigel Farage, thank you very much indeed, the leader of UKIP there.
If you use any of these quotes please cite Sky as the source.
3 comments:
I rather agree.
I suspect we will do a lot better than the pollsters expect, though an interesting scenario would be if Nigel fails to win but we pick up quite a few seats.
I have difficulty believing the polls, lab + con is unlikely to better 61% and possibly much lower. Also I can easily see the Greens in double figures and lib dems much lower than they are polling.
Turnout is on the up historically, but newspaper readership is almost irrelevant now, yet the polls still weight by readership. Which paper do they think Greens read, or UKIP for that matter?
The SNP are our biggest ally up north. It is one thing to vote for whichever donkey wears a red rosette but another if that donkey is being whipped my Mary Doll Nesbitt.
Been on the end of the 'strange' choices made in candidates and had to burn a BNP supporting one in the media. Rumours that such candidates are 'preferred' have been put to me more than once.
Saying that though the branch I founded is young it does put out 15 or so people on action days so it will be interesting to see what difference a ground game makes.
Why were you banned? People like yourselves being banned really puts me off helping.
Mr Fairfax,
The main reason I was kicked out was for not blindly supporting Farage's opaque party finances. As an elected member of the NEC I was jointly and severally liable for UKIP's debts yet we were given no information as to where the money was coming from, where and why it was being spent and how, where and by whom these decisions were made. I only knew that if things went tits up financially I was liable. Farage's position was sometimes ex-officio and as then an unelected member he would in my opinion have escaped liability.
I was very unhappy. It was responsibility without information or control and of course and the Electoral Commission were asking questions. Farage is a serial litigant but the UKIP NEC would have had financial responsibility,
We had no input to policy. Bannerman now a Tory who was then in charge of policy asked my opinion on one of his little efforts. I replied it was garbage and just a mish mash of reheated failed Tory manifesto pledges. Farage eventually seems to have agreed with me but only after he used Bannerman to formulate a dodgy dossier against me so they could vote me off.
Bannerman got his MEP slot and later defected to the Tories. Pearson, Farage's place man leader did not know what was in the 2010 UKIP manifesto which Farage then publically rubbished
Whatever Farage says UKIP does not do democracy.
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