EU Referendum


The dregs of the dregs


14/12/2014



000a YouGov-013 sleaze.jpg

I wasn't thinking of returning to the Brand/Farage Question Time, but it's worth recording Amanda Platell's "take" in the Mail.

Asking how QT could sink so low, she notes that, "thanks to the gratuitous and cynically calculated pairing of Ukip leader Nigel Farage and Russell Brand", the programme "descended into pure farce - or rather into abusive, ugly, hate-filled TV". As several viewers put it on Twitter: this was the moment Question Time turned into the Jeremy Kyle Show.

Nevertheless, it was too recent for the show to have affected the YouGov tracker on which parties voters see as "sleazy and disreputable", a survey which included Ukip for the first time.

YouGov asked people to agree or disagree with the statement, "the Conservatives / Labour / the Liberal Democrats these days give the impression of being very sleazy and disreputable". To the Conservatives, 44 percent agreed it applied, 31 percent agreed it applied to Labour and 35 percent agreed it applied to the Lib-Dems.

When it came to Ukip, though, it scored 59 percent, occupying the position of being seen as the "most sleazy" party, a finding that fits neatly with the latest voting intention poll which puts the party at 14 percent.

This current level is down from the heady heights of the 17 percent the party was commanding on 5 December, the 19 percent it picked up on 15 October, and the 18 percentage points it has routinely been getting since it was picking up 13s in late September and early October.

This downturn may be one of those blips, as the polls are nothing if not volatile. But one suspects that the saga of the former Miss Ahmed has not done the reputation of the party much good. The Mail, for instance, notes that questions "are no doubt being raised as to the hasty, careless decisions that led to such a loose cannon being admitted in the first place".

In similar terms, is how The Times also puts it, stating of the former Miss Ahmed that Ukip faces a difficult question: how did a supposedly mainstream party allow someone with such a shaky CV to come within a whisker of being a potential MP?

Meanwhile much is being made of Farage's relationship with Enoch Powell, but of more importance are current relationships.

As before, The Times has led the way, telling us of tensions over the appointment of Neil Hamilton as the replacement candidate for the former Miss Ahmed. With his precipitate withdrawal over hints of "anomalies" in his expenses claims, donor Stuart Wheeler has threatened to withdraw his cash unless the former Tory minister is given the opportunity of fighting a parliamentary seat.

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Although some in the party saw his removal as a coup, the triumph has been short-lived as the preferred candidate (originally displaced by the former Miss Ahmed), Kerry Smith, has been outed as the author of homophobic, racist and obscene comments, as well as accusing Nigel Farage of corruption.

There seems no end to the tawdriness of this party, with Farage also embroiled in a low-grade "grade an immigrant" survey, which has the Mail on Sunday squawking with indignations.

And while Wheeler is talking about withholding cash, so it seems is Paul Sykes, who has told the MoS that he was making "no commitment" about future big donations to the party because that would "destroy" Ukip's bid to build up a grassroots base. No sooner said, though, and the Sunday Times has retailed a denial, with a spokesman saying: "If he is needed he will be there to help".

000a Mail-014 sleaze.jpg

The paper, on the other hand, reveals that David Soutter, Ukip's head of candidates, is under fire for letting the former Miss Ahmed through the net. He admits that one of the things that Ukip has lacked as a party is "discipline", also admitting that half his time is spent "weeding out the lunatics, the people who shouldn't be there".

Frankly, Mr Soutter is not doing a very good job, but then that is not easy when he is defending a party which indeed lacks discipline, and much else.

We read with some wry amusement the analyses of earnest academics, seeking to impart their wisdom on the nature of the party, and the reasons for its "success", but this is not a party in any normal sense. It is the dregs of the political process, the dregs of the dregs if you like.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that it is beginning to unravel, a party which, according to his archivist, even Enoch Powell would have disowned.

Says Richard Ritchie, Powell "could not possibly have sanctioned" a situation in which the Eurosceptic majority "lost to the Europhile minority because the vote was split". Mr Farage's "obsession" with EU migration also distracts attention from the real threat to Britain of the EU's "insatiable drive towards political union".

And therein is the read tragedy. Ukip, in all its ghastly manifestations, is giving Euroscepticism a bad name, one from which it will have difficulty in recovering. Our only safeguard, at the moment, is that Ukip itself is distancing itself from the EU issue to such an extent that it is seen more as an anti-immigration party than anything specifically to do with "Europe".



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