Government, Opposition, what’s the difference? It’s all become shades of “bigness”. With the UK Big-Government orbiting in the shadow of the Mega-Government in the EU, is it any wonder an alternative had to spring forth? And Lo…
In case you haven’t heard, Mr Reckless left the UK Tories, joined UKIP (the UK Independence Party) and just won the byelection becoming UKIP’s second member of Parliament. It surprised quite a lot of people. Analysts are abuzz: the electorate was not as old or white as the first seat UKIP won, and it was ranked 271st on the list of seats UKIP “might win”. Labor won just 16% of the vote.
People seem to like the idea of small government, lower taxes, and politicians who don’t promise to change the weather. Who would have thought?
Perhaps the mighty English will one day even win the right to buy powerful hairdryers, and serious vacuums? We dare hope!
UKIP’s victory was in many ways even more impressive than their triumph in Clacton. The ease with which they demolished a 9,000 Tory majority was striking and this after the Conservatives had strained every sinew to halt the UKIP bandwagon.
UKIP now insists no Tory seat is safe and has suggested other Conservative MPs are more likely to defect.
For the Tories the result was not perhaps the meltdown they had feared and certainly there is no indication so far of panic or calls for Mr Cameron to go. Senior Tories also believe they are poised to win back this seat at the general election.
For Labour not only was their share of the vote almost halved but there was also despair at the damaging tweet by their former shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry, seemingly mocking “white van man”.
As for the Lib Dems, not only were they again overhauled by the Greens, but they secured a derisory 349 votes – their lowest total ever.
Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, described the win as “massive” because it was the party’s 271st target seat. “Looking forward to next year’s general election,” he added, “all bets are off, the whole thing’s up in the air.”
Of course, there will always be some voices predicting that it’s all downhill from here. 😉
But I note the positioning of UKIP crosses the spectrum and they apparently did the hard yards of pragmatic campaigning:
In an article for the Telegraph, Prof Goodwin recently noted a marked increase in the professionalism of UKIP’s campaigning operation.
Since Clacton, it has been using voter identification system software, enabling the party to transmit different messages in different parts of the campaign trail.
Clacton’s Labour-leaning residents were therefore wooed with the UKIP candidate’s “opposition to the ‘bedroom tax’ and the need to punish bankers; Tory voters heard about the need for more GPs”, he wrote.
The same strategy was deployed in Rochester and Stood, he added, while the Conservatives “remain focused on a story about the national economic recovery, which even a quick look at the surveys would show is not being felt by most UKIP voters”.
James Delingpole is delighted, of course: “Why We Should ALL Be Celebrating “
The modern Labour party just doesn’t represent their interests any more. It’s unpatriotic; it’s largely responsible for the mass immigration which is costing them jobs and housing and school places and hospital beds; and it no longer cares about the workers – only about quangocrats and EU directives and immigrants and public sector parasites and tedious battles of no interest to any real person, such as “diversity” and “equality” and “heterosexism”.
A man called Oliver Letwin, a policy chief, apparently took the Tory out of the Tories, as Dellers describes it, then at the last minute, even he uttered the UKIP-like words of independence:
Which is what makes it so surprising that Letwin, of all people, was the latest senior Tory to be given permission by party HQ to talk weally, weally tough on Europe. If Britain didn’t get what it wanted in its European negotiations then it should consider leaving the EU altogether, he told students at University College, London – in a no-doubt, carefully-planned, eve-of-Rochester bombshell.
Why is this incident so significant? Because if it weren’t for UKIP’s burgeoning success, it would simply never have happened. Cameron’s Tories are centrist, Europhile, politically correct. But the march of UKIP has brutally forced them out of their squishy comfort zone and forced them to start thinking like real conservatives again. — Breitbart
Congrats to the fans of freedom in the UK!