<![CDATA[UKIP MEPs]]> MemHT Portal <![CDATA[All To Play For]]> Back to Buckingham, where decidedly the die is not yet cast.

Our man in the frame is in ebullient form, notwithstanding having set a pace for many months now that would have crushed plenty of younger men.  Fresh from his immigration inquisition by Andrew Neil, he is ready to go out on the stump.

His take on where UKIP is in Buckingham?  Still too close to call, the potential result masked by the intervention of nearly a dozen independents. Nonetheless a strong sense of momentum, which is why he is raring to get the teams out on the road for one last push. The game is still afoot.

UKIP nationally? A good feeling here that we have been putting in a strong performance. Certainly if our street work later is anything to go by, UKIPs  message is getting across to all types of voter. Nigel also ponders on the degree to which voting UKIP is no longer a one-off protest vote but has become a matter of habit: this election should, he feels, prove that June 2009 was no flash in the pan.

Has he enjoyed the contest? Do ducks swim? His unbounded enthusiasm tells you that this fight has been one to enjoy. Being a natural campaigner and also being at ease with the attentions of the press, the response of the voters had been reward enough. It has, he adds, been great fun: now when did you last hear one of our careerist chums from the Old Parties looking as though they were enjoying being on the end of a public kebab?

High point? Going down Bridge Street in Buckingham and passing the New Inn whose occupants, suitably oiled, spot him in the street and erupt in enthusiastic banging on the windows. Inside a beery, cheery welcome, not least from the ample lady in the Bulldog T-shirt (what else?). This has become a UKIP outpost.]]> <![CDATA['Blue-remembered hills'? Not if UKIP has anything to do with it!]]> To Ludlow where I visit Christopher Gill, UKIP’s candidate and have a chance to revisit one of the most achingly beautiful parts of England.

It is said that A.E. Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was the poetry of choice of many who went off to the Great War, being a powerful reminder of the land which they loved and for which they were fighting. As luck would have it, the light is such as to produce, as if on cue, a perfect demonstration of why Housman used the phrase ‘blue-remembered hills’. Add to this a bright late Spring day and you have a chance to see the Shropshire Hills at their very best.

Christopher Gill has a distinct advantage here for he was Conservative MP for Ludlow between 1987 and 2001. At that time he took the view, rightly, that the Tory Party had so completely departed from its roots and abjured the principles for which it has stood for so long that he could no longer, with honour, defend the party to the electors of Ludlow. Thus he stood down: indeed even before the election of that year he had allowed his membership of the party to lapse.

At the heart of this decision lay the Tory Party’s policies over the European Union. That was not, though, the only basis for his departure. Like so many of UKIPs many recruits his view of the Tory Party was that it had left him and not the other way round. But undoubtedly the EU was fundamental to his choice.
]]> <![CDATA[Beer in Totnes: A Champion for Devon]]> Now a totally different kettle of fish, of which commodity more later. I have been privileged to be the guest of Jeff Beer and his family in the delightful constituency of Totnes on the South coast of Devon.

A day’s leafleting may seem an odd way to prise open the lid of a large rural constituency but Jeff reminds me strikingly of what Tory MPs used to be like but which so few today are: a solid pillar of his community to which he is committed by the bonds of public service as a local magistrate and by his sheer love of the place he calls ‘Home’.

His enthusiasm is unbounded. Not a professional politician as ‘we now understand the notion (though formerly a Tory councillor), yet withy clear ideas of what ought to be done and how to do them. And open to new ideas as I discovered for myself. And consistency would, I am sure, be his ‘motto’: His Tory opponent, Dr. Wollaston, he rightly castigates for flip-flopping on Europe. Chosen by open primary she is firmly adherent to the Cameroon Tendency which these days requires one to repeat the tired and risible old mantra ‘In Europe but not ruled by Europe’ a hundred times a day.

Things, however, may not exactly be going tickety-boo as she and her Tory claque (the same ones that kept the egregious Anthony Steen with his bottom comfortably in the Expenses Trough for so many years) have had a fright lately: and lo & behold, the good Doctor has suddenly discovered she is, after all, a Eurosceptic. She must think the good Burghers of Totnes are stupid, a tendency of the political elite of the Old Parties that has been ever more evident in this election.

Which really rather suggests that Jeff has been making serious inroads into the Tory vote (unsurprisingly given Cameron’s duplicitous behaviour over Lisbon) and that they are worried that the Lib Dumbs might sneak in…or even that Jeff himself is sneaking up on the outside rails.

We talk at length of the sorts of problems Totnes faces. Second home ownership is a serious problem in some parts. The fishing port of Brixham faces the usual caprices of the Common Fisheries Policy. Jeff tells of his discovery that whilst we dump something like 800,000 tons of fish a year because of the quota rules (set for our fishing grounds by unelected and unaccountable foreign officials in Brussels), we are then forced to import huge quantities of hake from the fishing out of  fleets of the South Atlantic operating the west coast of South Africa and Namibia form ports such as Walvis Bay and Saldanha Bay. His judgement: “Bonkers”, and he is, of course right.]]> <![CDATA[Frank is Fighting Barking's Corner]]> To Barking. This is where the Labour has so far forgotten itself, its core vote and its traditions that it has created the conditions in which the BNP worm has been enabled to burrow under the skin like a parasite, there to fester.

This is, I am told, the singular achievement of Margaret Hodge, the incumbent Labour MP who has chosen to champion those who have, for the want of a better description, arrived recently in the borough as against those who are the white working-class citizens of long-standing residency. In housing matters, in particular, it is said that she is particularly unforgiving if anyone has the temerity to suggest that the Labour administration has favoured others on the grounds of ethnicity.

For in Barking even to hint at such a thing renders the supplicant liable to excoriation as a “racist” and an unfavourable response from the housing authorities. And we now know beyond a peradventure that such bullying attitudes come right from the very top. Gordon Brown let that cat out of the bag when he described a hapless but obviously decent Rochdale Granny as a ‘bigoted woman’ merely for having mentioned the issue of immigration to him.

Labour simply does not get it. So desperate are they to alter for ever and entirely without our consent the social make-up of British Society and thus to effect the grossest act of gerrymandering ever seen that they have become deeply intolerant of even the mildest reproof for their wanton behaviour.

Here then is the fertiliser upon which the BNP worm feeds. Barking deserves better than that.

Into the mix comes UKIP’s very own fighter – for real!

This is Frank Maloney, patriot and fight-promoter, who has understood the distress of the people of Barking only too well and has come to offer an alternative to the Labour-BNP politics of the cess pit.johnlockesblog@gmail.com ]]> <![CDATA[Nigel is WYSIWYG!]]> A correspondent writes:

WYSIWG Nigel....What You See Is What You Get.

Thus to Buckingham to see this proposition in action.

Tuesday could not be a finer day to be abroad in England: A warm, sunny spring day with the hedgerow blossoms bursting forth. Spring is here in all her pomp.

I am deposited in the centre of Town and my first sight is of two buses, both sporting large UKIP posters on their posteriors. This striking feature is later noted by one of the  foreign TV crews, in some amazement. Perhaps they don't do posterior posters in France.....

Yet try as I might to find it, there is little visible sign of the incumbent, Mr. Speaker (seeking reelection) and certainly no such posters on the back of anything let alone a bus.

Close by is the Old Gaol before which one of Nigel's opponents is declaiming to a TV crew. Apart from the media he is all but alone save for one curious onlooker who is not of voting age. The phrase 'one man and his dog' comes readily to mind.

So to the nerve centre, down a small shopping precinct that curls down to Waitrose.
]]> <![CDATA[For your delectation....and some Balls]]> From time to time I shall post for your delectation some of the horror stories about how the EU, more often than not aided and abetted by the Old Collaborationist Parties (That's the Labour Party, The Tories and The Lib Dumbs to you) have either been getting up to or are about to get up to. And also some other bits and pieces that take my fancy.

Here's a first taster to send a chill down your spine.

Lee Rotheram has an excellent report on how Labour, always keen to tell you that they have managed to obtain this 'opt-out' or that, in fact utterly subverts the whole purpose thereof by quietly signing up to a whole load of opt-ins.

A fine report and well worth the effort of reading it the better to understand how the EU goes about the business of integration.

Remember, all threee major parties remain committed to our membership of the EU and with it the perfect joys of 'ever-closer union'.

The threat to our way of life is exemplified by the series of proposals coming down the line to 'Europeanize' our criminal justice system. Of this, more in good time. But here is a sampler of what the EU has in mind.

First Bruno Waterfield flags up in The Telegraph the plans for a European Public Prosecutor. As you read it, just ponder for a moment what one of the obvious attributes of an Independdent Nation State is? Yes, you've got it. It has to have, in order to enforce its will, its very own criminal justice system along with all the impedimenta that involves: a public prosecutor, a public prosecutors office, a court system, a police force, a system of law and, if the peasants get unruly, a militia to put them down. Oh, and prisons......I bet the EU Comrades just salivate at the thought of having prisons....so next time Nigel is deemed to be opposing Le Grand Projet too much.....

]]> <![CDATA[Tricky Questions for Cleggie]]> I had a lot of fun this morning listening to the 'Today' programme whereon Chris Huhne got himself in to self-righteous lather about this morning's press 'smearing' his Boss, Little Nickie Clegg. The Lib Dems, of course, never smeared anyone in their lives.

The reality is that these stories are rather lethal since they show, as they are meant to do, that Clegg has a major bit of explaning to do about his finances and that at heart he despises the little british blood that flows through his veins.

The implication of the Telegraph's report is singularly damning. It is that Clegg may have simply trousered amounts of money that were paid directly into his bank account. This would, of colurse, make him singularly beholden to the individuals  who paid him the money. It also thrusts a lance at the heart of his sanctimonious and self-righteous claims about the Lib Dems being squeaky clean on expenses and donations.

Hence the faux indignation of Huhne this morning. He knew a nice deep wound had been opened in the Clegg torso and that a steady exsanguination was taking place.

The Lib Dems, as you would expect, claim these payments are all entirely above board.  If so, why put them through Clegg's own bank account. That is not the action of someone trying to be open and transparent, is it?

]]> <![CDATA[Belgium: The Dead Parrot]]> When Nigel Farage made certain observations about the State of Belgium, The Euro Comrades got very hot under the collar. Shock, horror there was in abundance at the suggestion that Belgium might be, well, something of a non-entity, country-wise.

This provoked the Comrades into launching themselves into full 'Suppression of Free Speech' mode (which it does whenever it can when confronted with opinions it does not like) and, to cut a long story short, punished Nigel by stopping 10 days worth of allowances. Sweet, polite Jerzy Buzek, who likes to present himself as a rather serious but nonetheless avuncular type, doled out the maximum fine that he could.

These quasi-legal proceedings were, of course, an absolute farce. Even before the ink was dry on his appeal, the Collaborationist Parties were all putting it about that they had already decided to deny that appeal, long before they had either heard the merits of it or had a chance properly to discuss it.

Then when the appeal was actually heard, who should be presiding over it but old Uncle Jerzy himself. The EU has either not heard of the rules of natural justice or, if it has, has chosen flagrantly to ignore them. In short, it is a cardinal rule of natural justice that you cannot be judge in your own cause. Thus, for Uncle Jerzy to sit in judgement on his own case was as flagrant an abuse of the rules of natural justice as you could wish for. Yet we expect nothing more from the EU to which illegality is but the meat and drink of daily life.

]]> <![CDATA[Clegg will hamstring Cameron on Europe]]> So little Mr. Clegg thinks he is going to be PM does he?

Or at the very least to call the shots in a Tory-led administration....for the idea that he might prop up McStalin in office long after even the Labour Party have given him up for dead is to live in an unconscionable Absurdistan.

One of the shots he will be minded to call is on the EU. Cameron has, of course, already taken the stringing knife to both of his hamstrings by recalling Ken Clarke to his front-bench team where the latter merely has to raise an eyebrow to quash any incipient criticism of the EU. But just in case this needs reinforcing, in a Tory-Lib Dumb coalition Clegg would be able to enforce a pro-EU position out of all proportion to his party's popularity at European elections when the focus is on the EU's role in UK law-making.

Just for the record Clegg, through whose veins precious little British blood flows, and who was the consummate insider as an MEP between 1999 and 2004 (his foreign background means that he can talk about the lack of a future for Belgium as a nation state to the Flemings in Vlaams and the Walloons in French), is the most pro-EU leader of one of the Old Collaborationist Parties we have ever had. Even that old traitor Edward Heath would have blushed to suggest some of the things that the Lb Dumbs say about the EU and that is saying something.

]]> <![CDATA[Dave, By Appointment to HMQ, Snake Oil Salesman]]> Here is yet another example of what we are coming to see as Dave's stock-in-trade which is that he says to the person in front of him at any given moment what he thinks will be most emollient to that person's ears whilst at the same time saying something diametrically opposed to the audience on the other side of that same topic. In short Dave is as much of a snake oil salesman as Smuggo Blair ever was.


Thus we have Dave's desperate attempt to don Margaret Thatcher's mantle - he is unfit to lick her boots, by the by - talking big about tackling 'vested interests' whilst at the very same instant his right hand man has been sending quite different messages to one of the very worst vested interest, the bully boys in the Unions.


Further to my earlier post about Boris Johnson's obeservations on the topic of saying one thing to the EU and another to the British People, Dave is fast acquiring a reputation as a serial liar to match that of Gordon Brown. So here we have him telling the electorate that the Union Thugs who bankroll Labour (and are, in their turn, bankrolled by Labour out of Taxpayer's money) will be brought to heel in the full knowledge, as the FT tells us, that his right-hand Union specialist, Richard Balfe has made it plain that the Union gravy train will keep rolling along.


These are the unions that are about to trash millions of people's travel arrangements over the next month or so. Dave, however, thinks they should be appeased. And so it shall be, just as he will appease the EU Comrades.


Hat-tip: ConHome

]]> <![CDATA[A Little Hatchet Job]]> Nigel Farage's autobiography, "Fighting Bull" is out tomorrow. It will, he promises me, be a good read. And if, to coin a phrase, it matches his ebullient style, it will be all of that and more.


But here's a little story from Iain Dale which reminds us that some parts of the gutter press - yes, folks, The Times is perfectly capable of getting down into the gutter just like the rest of them - like nothing better than to hit below the belt. Hence this tale which might be set alongside The Times' article whose title tells you perhaps all you need to know about it.


This is par for the course. The establishment naturally fears UKIP and its 2.46 million votes last June and fears Nigel Farage.


They fear his winning in Buckingham, indeed it makes their blood run cold. Dave and his chums are sweating hard lest he actually gets in and starts saying all those things that Tory backbenchers would just love to have the freedom to say were they not Whipped within an inch of their lives.

]]> <![CDATA[Another Pertinent Question from Boris]]> Boris Johnson asks why we should, in effect, be subsidizing young people from all over the European Union to take up University places that might otherwise go to Britons. Why indeed?


It seems that EU students are flooding in to benefit from the generous financial arrangements they can enjoy as EU citizens:


This year British universities are educating 62,000 students from other EU countries, and applications for next year are up 36 per cent. They are flooding in from Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere, and they are not only taking 5 per cent of the places, but they are also receiving colossal subsidies from the UK taxpayer. The subsidy for teaching is put at £4,000, and then they have the heavily subsidised £3,255 in loans to pay for the tuition fees, a loan that only becomes repayable once they have left university and reached a certain level of income.


Nobody has yet explained to me how the Treasury is supposed to make sure that they eventually cough up. Are we really going to pay to send British tax officials tramping up dusty tracks in Sicily or knocking on doors in Warsaw to find out whether or not a former EU student at a UK university is earning more than £15,000? Add in the subsidies from Scotland, where EU students don't pay tuition fees at all (unlike English students, I might say), and you can see a vast transfer, by the British taxpayer, directly in favour of the education of foreign nationals.


There is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe. The French and the Germans don't pay for the training of our nurses or bus drivers. Why are we paying for their students? The traffic is almost entirely one-way, in the sense that very few British students go to study in continental Europe.

]]> <![CDATA[Let's Whack Wicked Dog Owners!]]> Here's a great vote-winner. Let's force everyone in the country to have their dog microchipped and force the owners to take out compulsory insurance. That'll be £30 for the first service and £200-£300 per year for the second.   Kerchingg......next please!


That will play well on the doorsteps this spring to the pensioner who has his two Jack Russells for company since his wife died.....


Here is a supreme example of the sort of thing to which I adverted but yesterday. This is Fascist Labour in full control mode. Let's think up yet another way to sting the ordinary law-abiding people of the United Kingdom out of some more of their hard-earned money. And while we are at it let us employ, at Taxpayer's expense, a vast army of Dog Wardens and the like to enforce this singularly bad proposal. Let's invent a few more new crimes while we are at it. And let us give ourselves the right to interfere yet again with the Citizen's right to quiet enjoyment of his or her private property.

]]> <![CDATA[Meat And Drink For The Birds]]> Comfort food.....when things are going wrong we all seem to have something in the pantry or the kitchen to which we turn at moments in our lives when all is not plain sailing. Me, I like a really good Shepherd's Pie - lamb, not beef - which seems to do the trick. For others it is chocolate. I once met a nice Spanish girl who announced that 'chocolate was her perdition'.
 

Anyway, some of us are content to chase away the blues with a modest plate of something. But how about this as a means of easing the pains of the day? The Times tells us today that Baroness Ashton of UpMoscow has decided to seek solace from the cares of her job by getting you and me - the Taxpayer - to pay for her to have her own Private Jet.

As The Times points out, Brussels being what it is, if she has one then everyone will want one. Barroso, von Rumpy-Pumpy, The President of the Council, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all will soon be after their very own Learjet. But why not? They are, after all, the essential accoutrement of all aspiring Banana Republic Dictators: why should the Proto-State, The EU, be any different?

]]> <![CDATA[Is THIS your kind of country?]]> "Hundreds more town hall staff to get police-style powers" says the Daily Telegraph. And all at huge cost which will add loads more onto Council Tax Bills, including, no doubt, the appointment of some over-paid Jobsworth to supervise them, another to look after their elf 'n safety and yet another to produce a PR plan for them.....The development under this Labour Government of a huge array of people and the means to spy upon and harrass their fellow citizens should come as no surprise, however, for it is, and ever has been, the wont of Socialist Governments to seek to control the lives of people and then to try and enforce that control by large dollops of snooping on them.

Winston Churchill understood  this well. In the 1945 General Election he made that very point about Socialist Governments. Sadly he made it at about the worst possible time he could just as the UK was coming off the back of the Second World War in which Socialist Ministers (most of whom were, by comparison with the present bunch of wastrels, decent , patriotic, if politically deeply misguided, men) had lately served as competent ministers in Churchill's wartime coalition. This is what he had to say on the matter:

]]> <![CDATA[Londonshire?]]> Now here's a how-de-do.

Some idiot - I have restrained myself from something stronger - at an outfit called the  North Northants Development Corporation, so the Daily Telegraph reports, is to launch a campaign whose aim is to rebrand, without so much as by your leave, the fair county of Northamptonshire as "North Londonshire". I mean, just how obnoxious can you get? 

Apethorpe Hall, Near Stamford
  Apethorpe Hall, Near Stamford
 
Northamptonshire is one of the undiscovered gems of England (and long may it remain so) with some quintessentially English countryside and villages within its borders. Now some wazzock comes along and wants to associate it in everyone's mind with London.   
]]> <![CDATA[A-Poaching We Will Go!]]> Welcome to our revamped blog on the UKIP MEPs web site. I am John Locke and I shall be bringing to the table  a healthy mixture of news, views, gossip and, of course, the occasional plump pheasant of a story poached from the great estates of Our Great Emperor......or should that be Emperors?
 
No one quite knows if the self-effacing Herman van Rumpy-Pumpy is the boss round here or whether it is in fact one José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in his guise as Prime Minsiter of Spain and thus the man who heads up the current Spanish Presidency of the EU (confusingly at home he is technically the President of something quaintly known as 'the Spanish Government': how very twentieth century!) Or is it Portuguese fixer José Manuel Barroso, Presdent of the European Commission. The answer remains open as I write. Us forelock-tugging peasants must sit idly watching impotently whilst these three jostle together for the title 'Primus Inter Pares'' as the three of them circle around the rutting place like three testosterone-filled stags, each bent on proving that he is the strongest and fairest of them all. ]]>