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Post by Admin on May 23, 2014 21:55:58 GMT
There’s much chat today about how important these results are for Ukip. Is it the earthquake Nigel Farage promised? Well, how does one define an earthquake. Some are pointing out that Ukip’s likely share of the vote – 22 per cent – is actually slightly down on 2013. Maybe, but the local results and the European results on Sunday will provide Nigel Farage and his party with a real bridgehead for 2015, in all sorts of ways. First, the European polls on Sunday will give Nigel Farage a much larger team of full-time paid MEPs from whom he can pick a front-bench team to relieve him of some of the burden of being a “one-man band” – perhaps 24 or so. True, he had around a dozen MEPs before (the figure kept fluctuating), but this time the Ukip high command has put a lot more effort into quality-control and tried to exclude oddballs and eccentrics. We will see how successful that has been. Second, the likely result on Sunday will provide Ukip with lots more money from the European parliament, up to 100 paid staff in one form or another and a network of regional offices. In short, a much stronger campaign infrastrucure. Under the rules, these resources are meant to be devoted solely to the parliamentary activities of MEPs. Again we’ll see about that. Third, more and more people are getting into the habit of voting Ukip. It’s become a regular, respectable thing to do. So Ukip’s European election vote this weekend may not crumble so readily as it did after the Euro elections of 2004 and 2009. Fourth, Ukip have rapidly been building up detailed canvass records of who their supporters are. These, in turn, can be used not just to garner votes, but to raise funds and recruit new members. The party has declared that this summer it expects to overtake the Liberal Democrats in membership numbers. It would not surprise me. Fifth, Ukip’s successes will put a lot more pressure on us broadcasters to include the party even more in our political coverage, up to and beyond the election. And it makes it all the harder to exclude Nigel Farage entirely from leaders’ TV debates. Sixth, each election gives Ukip more campaign experience. For example, several of the newly elected Ukip councillors in Rotherham today told me it was only after experience of the 2012 by-election there that they understood the importance of organising postal votes. This time they were a lot more organised to getting supporters to apply for postal votes and use them. And I think it unlikely that Ukip will ever again organise a carnival quite as chaotic as that in Croydon this week. Finally, today’s local election results, added to the results from 2013, give Ukip a detailed ward-by-ward guide map as to where their support and strength lies, and therefore the parliamentary seats they should “throw the kitchen sink at” over the coming year. Great Yarmouth, for example, and Rotherham.
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Post by Admin on May 25, 2014 23:36:07 GMT
More than half of Ukip's support in the European elections came from disenchanted Conservative voters, a poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft has found. In a survey of over 4,000 people, just over half of Ukip voters said they had chosen the Conservatives in the 2010 general election. Nearly 20% had voted Lib Dem in 2010 and 15% Labour. The poll also suggests that support for Nigel Farage may not survive into next year's general election - only 51% of Ukip voters said they would be likely to vote for the party in 2015. One in five Ukip voters is likely to vote Conservative, and one in 10 is likely to vote for Labour. The poll by Ashcroft suggests that most people who chose Ukip did so in dissatisfaction with the main political parties. Six in 10 Ukip supporters described their vote as a general protest because they were "unhappy with all established political parties at the moment". Before Thursday's election, Ukip leader Nigel Farage had urged voters to "send a message to Brussels – and the whole political class" by voting for his party. "I appreciate that many of you who intend to vote Ukip next week also intend to return to the Tory fold at the general election next year," he said. But he described a Ukip vote as a "free hit against a deeply complacent and craven political establishment". UK: North West resultsHere are the results for the North West. BNP: 32,826 Conservatives: 351,985 Greens: 123,075 Labour: 594,063 - 34% (up 13) Lib Dems: 105,487 Ukip: 481,932 - 27% (up 12) Labour has won three seats (up one), Ukip three seats (up two), and the Conservatives two (down one). The BNP and the Lib Dems have both lost a seat. Griffin, below, blamed Ukip for taking the BNP's vote. Asked whether the people of the north-west had rejected his party's racist and fascist policies, he said: "They've voted for Ukip's racist policies instead." He said the BNP wasn't finished, pointing to its sole electoral success at the local elections last week, when Brian Parker was re-elected for a third term in the Marsden ward of Nelson, Pendle. "That's the first seat we have won in three years. We are coming back," he said. He said he knew he was going to lose his seat in February when campaigning in the byelection in the Greater Manchester seat of Wythenshawe and Sale East, which was held by Labour. "We put in a really good campaign in Wythenshawe and got a fantastic response from the public and it didn't translate into votes – that's when we knew," he said. The BNP leader was elected in 2009 with 132,094 votes (8% of the total), pipping the Greens into fifth place. Asked how he would pay his mortgage now, he said he would be fine on the handsome pension awarded to MEPs after leaving office. Losing his job simply meant he would have more time to devote to grass roots political work, he insisted, saying: "I'm going to spend more time campaigning on the streets."
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Post by Admin on May 26, 2014 22:59:37 GMT
Nigel Farage has said his "dream has become a reality" and UKIP is now the "third force" in British politics after it topped the European polls. With only Scotland left to declare, UKIP has 27.5% of the vote and 23 MEPs. Labour, on 25%, is narrowly beating the Tories to second place thanks to a strong showing in London but both parties have 18 MEPs so far. The Lib Dems, on 7%, are coming fifth behind the Green Party, on 8%, and have lost all but one of their seats. The full Scottish result will be known at noon on Monday, as the Western Isles does not count votes on a Sunday. It will be the first time a national election has not been won by the Conservatives or Labour in 100 years - and the first time a party with no MPs at Westminster has achieved such a result. UKIP topped the poll in six of the 10 regions to declare, with its strongest performance coming in the East Midlands, where its vote was up 16.5% to 33%. Labour topped the poll in Wales, the North-West of England, the North-East of England and London where it increased its share of the vote by 15% to 36.7%. Ed Miliband's party has 18 MEPs so far, an increase of seven on 2009, which was a record low point for the party. In his victory speech at the South East of England count, UKIP leader Mr Farage said: "The people's army of UKIP have spoken tonight and have delivered just about the most extraordinary result in British politics for 100 years." He said the three main parties in Britain had led the country into the Common Market but had "twisted and turned" over an in/out referendum on EU membership. "The penny's really dropped that as members of this union we cannot run our own country and crucially, we cannot control our own borders," said the UKIP leader.
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Post by Admin on May 30, 2014 22:10:52 GMT
The results certainly register on the Richter scale. UKIP has no MPs, but won 27.5% of the ballots in the European election and became the first minor party in over a century to lead in a national vote. It picked up 161 English council seats (having won 30 in total between 2009 and 2012). It could win a handful of parliamentary seats next year. More important, it could also take hundreds of thousands of votes from the mainstream parties, making the outcome fiendishly unpredictable. None of the mainstreamers fared well in the recently concluded polls. The Labour Party did best numerically, but fell short of expectations (see Bagehot). The Liberal Democrats shed ten of their 11 seats in the European Parliament and 310 council seats. Ashen-faced, the party’s leader, Nick Clegg, called the results “gutting and heartbreaking”. His position improved only slightly when on May 28th it transpired that a hostile Lib Dem peer, Lord Oakeshott, had attempted to destabilise Mr Clegg so cack-handedly as to force his main rival, Vince Cable, into a show of support. David Cameron came out best among Westminster’s leaders. Having spent months bracing the Conservative Party for a terrible result, the prime minister faced little criticism over the party’s numbers, which were poor, but no worse than expected. In the long term, however, he has most to fear from UKIP. Although it took votes from all the main parties, and increasingly worries Labour, Mr Farage’s army draws most heavily on former Conservatives. Polling by Lord Ashcroft, a Tory peer, found these provided more than half of UKIP’s votes in the European election. A YouGov poll taken on May 26th showed that 18% of those who had voted Conservative in the 2010 general election plan to back Mr Farage’s crew next year. The Tories are pulling out all the stops to keep it from taking Newark, a seat in Nottinghamshire, in a by-election on June 5th. Moreover, UKIP is strongest in Tory-held areas—as the results in Southend show. Three of the town’s wards switched from the Conservatives to UKIP, which helped cost the party control of the council. West Shoebury was one. James Moyies, elected the ward’s councillor with 46% of the vote, thanks the seaside bungalow-dwellers. Most are retired or work locally, he explains; they are the sort of aspirational working-class folk who left east London for a better life and started voting Tory under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. These are UKIP’s people: older, whiter, more socially conservative than the average, and disillusioned by a political elite they consider venal and remote. Farther up the hill, by contrast, the London commuters living on leafy, sinuous crescents have stuck with the Conservatives. The same pattern is evident in constituencies along the east coast and the Thames estuary; many, such as Thurrock, Great Yarmouth and Dover, are Tory-held marginals on Labour’s target list. The results of May 22nd suggest that the potential UKIP vote there—grey-haired, white-skinned and blue-collared—could be big enough to deny the Tories such seats; either by splitting the right and letting Labour in or perhaps even handing them to Mr Farage. But will those who voted UKIP stick with the party? In Lord Ashcroft’s poll only 51% said they would. Even that could be optimistic: in the European election in 2009 it won 16.5% of votes, but in the words of one UKIP source “buggered off to the pub” afterwards and slumped to 3.1% in the 2010 general election. UKIP’s membership actually fell between the two votes (see chart). In response its executive drew up a five-year plan to professionalise the party in time for 2015. Membership has since more than doubled and is now on track to overtake that of the Lib Dems. UKIP’s additional European seats could also mean a sharper media operation (MEPs have generous budgets). And staffers predict that its strong performance should attract fresh donors. Whether the plan will work is open to question. Turnout in the European and local votes was low, at about a third of the electorate. In general elections it is usually twice that, which should benefit the mainstream parties. The economic recovery should also help them (see article). And UKIP’s recent campaigns have been strewn with racist gaffes and chaos—including a carnival in south London that descended into a slanging match. The party has few firm policies beyond leaving the EU and cutting immigration. What is now indisputable, however, is that UKIP is not just another protest outfit. It could soon be Britain’s third-largest party by members—a crucial measure of its ability to do the envelope-stuffing and door-knocking that helps decide first-past-the-post elections. And in Mr Farage it has easily the most popular leader in British politics. Celebrating his European success in a hotel on May 25th, the UKIP boss ran into a tipsy wedding party. “Let’s start a civil war,” cried one reveller, before another led the group in a football-style chant of “There’s only one Nigel Farage”. It encapsulated the moment: cheerily off-key, brash and enamoured of its leader, UKIP’s people’s army is on the march.
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Post by Admin on Sept 3, 2014 14:35:55 GMT
For those of us who remember the great hopes pinned on Hungary 20 years ago, the landslide re-election of Fidesz leader Viktor Orban, after all he has done in office, finishes off all illusions. “Something has gone very wrong in Hungary,” says Charles Grant from the Centre for European Reform. Indeed, and one of reasons is the destructive effects of EMU and the euro “convergence play” that has caused such damage in Central/Eastern Europe over the last fifteen years. In Hungary’s case it led to a flood of cheap capital into the country, a fiscal bubble and an erosion of competitiveness. It also led to a rush into the euro and Swiss franc mortgages, and business debt, which blew up once the bubble burst and the Forint crashed. This has since been followed by EU-IMF rescues, austerity packages, and years of quasi-slump, all made worse by the rolling disaster of the broader EMU debt-deflation crisis. Growth was 0.9pc in 2008, -6.8pc in 2009, 1.3pc in 2010, 1.6pc in 2011, -1.7pc in 2012, 1.1pc in 2013, (IMF data). This is dire for what should be a fast-growing catch-up economy. Hungary should be an Asian-style tiger eyeing 5pc growth rates given its post-Communist past and access to EU markets. Variants of this have occurred across much of Eastern Europe, a region that is barely growing even though its per capita income is half or even a third of the EU average. This defies gravity. Such a bad performance can occur only if the policy structure is deformed. Hungary is not alone. Quasi-depression has taken its toll on the post-Communist democracies and societies of several EU states. We have not yet heard the end of the story in Latvia, so often cited by the EMU evangelists as a success story even though output is still far below 2007 levels. It is the Russian-speaking blue-collar class that bore the brunt of mass unemployment, while state policy was set to protect a middle class with foreign currency mortgages. We should not be surprised that two-thirds of Latvia’s ethnic Russians (27pc of the population) support the annexation of Crimea. Slovakia came within a whisker of election the nationalist SMER a week ago. I have argued many times that the whole structure of EMU and pre-EMU has held back much of the ex-Communist bloc (Poland excepted) in a low-growth trap – compared to where it should be, the relevant marker. I don’t wish to rehearse these points now. My old friend Daniel Hannan tells me not to be too harsh on Victor Orban. The previous government was led by ex-Communists who reinvented themselves as Social Democrats, stole what they could, made an utter hash of the economy, and appointed their wives (literally) to be judges. The whole rotten system needed a purge. Fidesz has obliged. Yet the picture is surely darkening. Pianist Andras Schiff refuses to perform in Hungary, close to becoming Europe’s anti-Semitic hotspot. “I don't even set foot in the country, not even as a private person," he told the BBC. He is outraged by the new Horthy statue in Budapest, the celebration of a “war criminal”. He accuses Horthy of sending half a million Jews to Nazi death camps. Mr Grant says the revanchist sweep over the weekend should shake out of our complacency. “It is quite alarming that Fidesz and Jobbik have won so much of the vote. Jobbik is a fascistic party that this scary in a way that Ukip, Le Pen, and Geert Wilders are not scary.” Commentators have been using the term "far Right" too promiscuously to denigrate any Eurosceptic or souverainiste movement they dislike. Ukip is broadly a free-trade, Atlanticist party, fully anchored in British democracy. It has nothing whatsoever in common with Jobbik, or Greece’s Gold Dawn, or any of the ultra-chauvinist parties jockeying for attention in eastern Europe, and not only in the east. Nor does it have anything in common with Fidesz for that matter. Those who claim that EMU austerity policies and the boom-bust structure of monetary union (and its satellites) have done no lasting damage to Europe’s political cohesion have spoken too early. Hungary is sui generis – like all countries – yet it is not hard to count four or five other EU states that are nearing a 1930s lurch. We can argue about definitions but in my view Hungary is no longer a fully-functioning democracy. The EU threw the book at Austria over a decade ago when Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party joined the government as a junior coalition, and before it had done anything wrong. Yet the EU Council is almost silent now that it really does have a test on its hands. The question for the rest of us is whether we want to be part of an EU treaty club that now includes authoritarian regimes. Just remember, any Hungarian magistrate can issue a European Arrest Warrant for any British citizen on British soil – or a French, or German citizen, on their soils – without having to mount a prima facie case or submit proper evidence. And they do exactly that. Hungary is fast becoming the biggest single reason why we may have to leave the EU.
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