17/12/2014
I was travelling most of yesterday, down to London and back ... meeting people and plotting. The view from some long-term campaigners in the anti-EU movement is that, if Farage is still a prominent figure in the movement during a referendum campaign, we will lose.
Slowly, gradually, people are beginning to see The Great Leader through different eyes â and,
like this one, they can't all be dismissed as bearing a grudge.
If the fates of Ukip and its leader were not so important to the health of the anti-EU movement as a whole, we would not be bothering, but as long as there is a Ukip, then it is vital that its leader performs adequately.
And it's no good asserting, as one reader recently did on our comments, that the party needs help and advice. If Farage had taken advice from me in the past, I might have stayed working for Ukip. If I had, it wouldn't be in the mess it's currently in.
We would then be spending more time dealing with
stuff like this - new rules for businesses on VAT registration - although to little effect.
The group I was talking with yesterday agreed that the public no longer needs the flow of "EU red tape" stories to make the point. If they are not already convinced about the need to leave the EU, they never will be. What is needed is more about
how leave, and the benefits that can accrue when we leave â the "vision thing".
And that's the real problem with Farage and his party. On the increasingly rare occasions that they talk about the EU, it is in terms of how awful it is, their strategy based on the assumption that, if enough people dislike the EU, we can build a majority in favour of leaving.
The trouble is, that ain't so. We need a
positive vision - what I've dubbed the Stoke's precept: it's no use fighting for a negative object â you must have a positive one. It's actually nearly four years since I articulated that precept on the blog, and I've repeated it many times since â only to have it ignored.
In twenty of more years of Ukip, Farage has never been able to articulate a credible vision for a post-exit EU. And that's really why he should be dumped â the sixth reason: he has no vision.
