All’s Well That Carswell

It’s easy being UKIP; you don’t need policies, you don’t have any real responsibilities.

And that’s the way they like it.

I don’t think they actually want real power: governing a country, or participating in international politics, for example. Why would they? They’d have to deal with all those grotty foreigners for one!

They thrive at the local level. There they get to enjoy the quagmire of parochial NIMBYist politics where nothing changes and they can stand up for ‘community values’. But they don’t have any real responsibility: they get to continue to agitate with respect to the EU (which I don’t think they ever want to leave given it’s their meal ticket) and immigration without having the responsibility of being able to deal with it.

So when Carswell ‘won’ the by-election in Clacton (where there is no issue of immigration), it was a victory for their small minded brand of politics. Ironically though it represented none of the kind of sea change the party claims to represent: they had won an MP because he was already there. The only change that had occurred was the colour of his tie.

A couple of weeks ago I rang their freephone office number (no way would I pay to talk to these reactionary idiots) to ask their policy on both the environment (they hate windfarms) and welfare (they hate benefits). They still don’t have a manifesto and all they could do was point me to the members responsible for those areas – at least in the case of the former since they couldn’t’ find a welfare spokesman. Consequently all I could get from them was the email for massage loving science denying homophobe: Roger Helmer who, dismally, speaks for them on the environment. How ridiculous is that?

They cannot be taken seriously, and yet they have to be thanks to a toxic media that splashed the I word with the subtlety of a nuclear meltdown. People have tied themselves up in knots over the issue of immigration and yet, as James O Brien expertly exposed, cannot articulate why they support UKIP. Meanwhile NigelFarage aligns himself with the most vicious right wing politicians in the EU (of the sort even France’s Marine Le Penn rejects), just so he can keep his snout firmly in the trough. That’s why I say they don’t want out of the EU – it’s their bread and butter (but emphatically not a croissant – and you can keep your margarine too!).