I was going to write a different article, but then I read more articles from various political pundits and changed my mind, so instead you have a slightly rambling article which probably isn’t going to say anything new. We are thankfully now out of political conference season, not quite sure what purposes these conferences do any more other than raise funds and get the select parties free TV time but anyway. What’s been interesting is how much time the political punditry (which as I’m writing this, should include myself) have spent talking about UKIP. Every other parties conference seems to have had a UKIP angle, almost with the exception of UKIPs where the story was all about Geoffrey Bloom.
What I find odd is that an awful lot of those articles seem to be trying to tell us that UKIP are either:
1) dangerous evil bigots
2) an irrelevant joke party
3) made up of disaffected voters who’ll all go running back to their proper party come election time
except of course for the articles which are worrying about how UKIP will split the right wing vote (which ignores all of the left wing UKIP supporters, well ex Labour at least). These narratives then develop into how UKIP should do some sort of deal with the Conservatives so that Labour don’t get into power, after all there’s Dave’s cast iron guarantee and promises to renegotiate so everything else is just “small differences”. All of this is pushing me towards a probably foolish conclusion which is that UKIP are actually a serious party with serious potential and this has the “establishment” worried. Hence we see the pundits flailing around wildly to find reasons to write UKIP off, hoping that some of them will stick, and we have the “accidental” images of Nigel Farage with Hitlereque mustaches due to “technical glitches” or badly placed microphones. Not to mention the interesting habit so many commentators/papers/sub-editors have of saying “Ukip” rather than “UKIP”, it’s a small thing but it’s telling. At this moment in time if a relatively new and small party has all sides of the establishment gunning for them and is getting this much attention saying why they don’t deserve this much attention, well I figure they must be doing soemthign right.
For my money any pact with any of the main parties would defeat the point of UKIP, for myself at least I support them because they’re not the other parties. If I wanted one of the other parties to get in I’d vote for them. If the other parties want my vote then they need to put forward policies that I support and convince me that they’ll keep to them. Don’t just say “Don’t vote for party you agree with vote for us, or the other lot will get in”. It’s that sort of thinking which has got us to the corrupt parliament we now currently enjoy. Both the politicians and journalists need to be reminded how democracy is supposed to work, apart from by electoral fraud no party can have it’s vote stolen. No party has a right to anyones votes, if you want my vote persuade me that you support what I support, that you’ll keep your promises and that you are the best option. Ah but they’ve said when we try to pin Mr Farage down on details he’s evasive and doesn’t know what he’d do if he got into power. To which I say so what, the election isn’t tomorrow the world will have moved by then all we need to know now are UKIPs principles (yes principles, I hope we all remember that political parties used to actually have them). Also as the other parties have demonstrated so well with the mainstream press in the past is if you go into detail you’re on a hiding to nothing as no journalist has ever written “politician has good well thought out policy”.
So I say good luck to UKIP the establishment from all sides is sending a clear message that you’re a contender and even if all you do is make the other parties actually listen tot he voters and try to make policies we can support and stop playing the “Vote A, or get B” card then that’ll still be a huge improvement on the omnishambles we have today.
