It’s the 1st May 2014 and 44% of British voters have said they’ll vote for UKIP . That’s almost half of us saying they’ll vote for an even more right wing conservative party whose only appeal is a public school educated Tory banker who doesn’t think the Tories are tory enough and a shameless campaign scapegoating immigrants . The media have built up this guy and handed him his support on an ironic plate and now they’re collectively panicking as the joke becomes a reality.
You can’t look around your community and spot the Kippers…because they’re invisible. It’s a notion that gets into peoples brains and eats away at the part of the cerebral function that stops them normally turning into zombies that takes over the body propelling the empty shells of it’s victims headlong towards the polling station repeating dalek-like ‘we will take back control’ ‘too many immigrants’ ‘warning warning’.
Ridicule is (apparently) nothing to be scared of
And you can’t ridicule them, ridicule only makes them stronger. “But you said gay marriage caused the floods! You said Lenny Henry should go live in a country full of black people! You said rape isn’t possible in marriage and gay people can’t love each other! Your ‘common sense bus’ has just crashed into Portsmouth Railway station!! Come on!! Snap out of it!!”
Well, of course UKIP’s manifesto didn’t say that, just some of it’s members. No the UKIP manifesto said much more ‘sensible’ things like taxi drivers should wear uniforms, bring back the cane at school, bring back a flat rate tax for all (a bit like the poll tax, for instance), restrict numbers of ‘foreigners’ in football teams, re-educate people about Britain’s positive role in the slave trade and of course the crucially important issue ‘restoration of a dress code for theatre goers’.
However, non of this sticks to Teflon Nige, he simply disowns the candidates and then disowns the policies. It makes no blind bit of difference to the Kipping voters, they flock to him. He could probably offer to come round and personally chew off their ears and gaffer tape their heads to a kitchen unit and the blank voidoid of a previously sentient voter would hurtle zombified out of his armchair repeating ‘that’s clinched it for me, ukip all the way’.
Tomorrow belongs to Nige
And it’s also a bit like that scene in the film ‘Cabaret’ where one by one the normal smiley drinkers in a Bavarian pub join in a Nazi singalong until the whole room is a swaying mass of wild goggle eyed robots singing ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’. But UKIP aren’t Nazis, and even the BNP are so perturbed by UKIP taking their ground that they’re trying to portray them as ‘not real racists’ . In their recent broadcast they started off trying to show how ‘pro immigrant’ UKIP were compared to them. Then if UKIP are ‘BNP-Lite’ , the so called ‘English Democrats’ are a confused England for the English version and when you lump them all together the fact is that the political scene has been shifted horribly and dangerously to the right. And that needs leadership on the left to build a unity to confront this head on.
Today Ed Miliband has made a start by shifting the migrant argument back to the economic one. We’re all workers and the people who benefit from this division amongst the workforce and the shift to the right in politics are the bosses, the shareholders, the landowners and the International capitalists – the real political class that UKIP fail to identify because their leaders are in fact so much of a part of it that they need to con the rest of us into believing they’re instead some kind of alternative. They’re nothing of the sort.
Labour needs to lead on this one
Labour needs to speak directly to it’s voters and crucially to non voters, disillusioned voters and undecided voters and tell the truth about UKIP and put the story from the point of view of ordinary working people.
- UKIP is a party that opposes workers rights, thinks that job security is a luxury that should be paid for with lower wages and make it easier for employers to fire their staff at will.
- UKIP would cut Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) by more than half.
- UKIP would hand the whole of the National Health Service to private companies.
- UKIP would introduce a flat rate of tax, raising taxes for the poorest tax-payers, while the rich would pay much less.
- UKIP would scrap rules that prevent tax avoidance by big companies; and would scrap the legal right to four weeks’ paid holidays. It would also scrap other rights, like fixed working hours, statutory sick pay and redundancy pay.
- UKIP is trying to scare you about migration. Yes 2.2 million workers have come to the UK but 2.3 million UK workers are working around the EU. If capital can cross borders then so should labour be able to.
In the European Parliament, UKIP MEPs have consistently voted against measures to improve health and safety. For example, while asbestos is the single largest cause of work-related deaths in the UK, UKIP politicians continue to argue that white asbestos is “harmless”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s MEPs voted against a Labour-initiated European Parliament report calling for the removal of asbestos from all public buildings by 2028.
To Stop UKIP vote Labour on May 22nd
So when you go into the polling booth on May 22nd and when the next day 50% of the MEP’s we send back to Brussels (to, er, oppose us sending MEPs to Brussels) you may think that Farage has successfully deflected all attention from the real UKIP neo-Thatcherite agenda and distanced himself from the 2010 manifesto, but the voting record of UKIP MEPs speaks for itself. In the European Parliament, UKIP MEPs have voted against firm action on bankers’ bonuses, against tough measures on tax evasion and against a youth guarantee scheme that would give young unemployed people a guarantee of work, education or training. Well, that’s when they actually turn up, because UKIP MEP’s have the worst track record in Europe of actually attending meetings, yet oddly, one of the best when it comes to taking their expenses.
On May 22nd people can stop UKIP simply with a vote. The PR system of the European ballot means you vote for a Party not a person. The Tories are in freefall and down to below 20%, as most of their darker blue tories go over to the kippers naturally, the Lib Dems are in total collapse due to their catastrophic alliance with the Tories and down to 8%, the Greens are hovering well below the mark it would take to get elected and so would be a wasted vote so I would urge people to get out there, face down the kippers and vote Labour on May 22nd. Or else……we’ll remember that day, to continue UKIPs 50’s theme as ‘The Day the Brain Stood Still’….
Cllr Brian Smedley
Sam, the purpose of the article isn’t to sneer at potential voters it’s precisely to ask the questions you’re asking. Why would working class voters even contemplate voting for an even more right wing Tory party than the one we have at the moment and urges people to wake up before we all wake up back in the 1980’s again. People do want change and people aren’t happy with what’s on offer but UKIP is not the answer .
When the left stops representing the interests of the working class, you open the door to fascism. When have Labour been acting in the interests of the working class in this country? Certainly not in most of my lifetime. I appreciate you probably didn’t have anything to do with the graffiti on the poster but when it mentions join a union – why? What good will that do? Not only that but Labour are cutting their ties to the unions. It’s like Labour thinks being working class is a shameful thing. When I first started work in an office, years ago, I asked to join a union. Everyone laughed – no one in the office was in a union. Why not?! Call centres are modern day mills – unions should be actively recruiting. But I guess people are too afraid they might lose their jobs and unions are doing nothing to help this.
The MPs in parliament are mostly Oxbridge PPE students – they have no idea how most of us live. If anyone raises any fears about jobs, housing and immigration, they get labelled as a racist. Tony Benn was against free movement of labour. Why can’t the Labour party discuss this sensibly? Your whole article is sneering about a large section of the population (many of whom Labour have lost). You seem to think their opinions are invalid – or at the very least to be scorned. Maybe that is why, despite the god-awful right wing policies and the media accusations of racism etc the elections are likely to be a success for UKIP. Continue to laugh and sneer at your potential voters instead of listening to them and finding out why – WHY!!! – they are even attempted to vote UKIP.
Great stuff. But please use your spellchecker on “Tomorrow”.
Thank you Brian, It’s time we started punching like a heavy weight. Keep em coming, Shorter version of this as a leaflet would give our membership a boost.