All's Well That's Carswell – or is it?

News today that Douglas Carswell – the original Conservative sitting-MP defector to UKIP – has left that party comes as little surprise: pundits and commentators have been expecting it for some time. He will now sit as an Independent.

Thus UKIP, which has never has had one of its own people elected to the House of Commons, has gone from no MPs to one (defector), and then to two with the second defection by Mark Reckless shortly after, then back to one a mere six months later, and now zero again, less than two years after the last General Election.

The timing of this move is interesting, coming as it does at a slightly odd time. Douglas states his reason as being the completion of the mission to leave the EU – but we haven't yet done so. Article 50 is to be triggered just four days from now, so if that was the reason why didn't he at least wait until then? The Referendum was held months ago, so that wasn't the cause either.

Apparently he has been liaising with senior Conservatives with the apparent aiming of rejoining his former party. I don't think that would go down well among the party's rank and file membership, and is something that I'd recommend be seriously pursued.

ANother ingredient in the mix is the possible imminent launch of UKIP big sponsor Arron Banks' new party, provisionally called the Patriotic Alliance. The feeling I get with that, though, is that he might be even less welcome there than back in the Conservative fold. I could be wrong.

In recent days, though, yet another movement has surfaced: this appears to be some kind of 'New UKIP'. While that is probably a dead-end route (the analogy of stopping digging when you're already in a hole of your own making springs to mind) it might provide a new home for Douglas C. I have no idea if that is even on his radar, but as mere speculation it is worth airing as one of the possibilities.

Behind all of this, though, I suspect is the realisation that UKIP – which I have long stated is a dead end – is dying, as polls and by-elections have been clearly showing. Here's Britain Elects' poll-of-polls graph covering the period since the May 2015 General Election…

The UKIP polling support is clearly moribund, with the resurgent Liberal Democrats looking set to overtake them shortly. This has been borne out in a large number of by-election results in recent months, mostly council seats but still telling a strong story. UKIP votes have been slashed from the previous election in many of the contested seats, down to between a third and a half of their former vote share.

I watch these closely, and every week (Thursday night & Friday morning) you'll find the results with my comments re-tweeted on my Twitter timeline. The writing is now very clearly on the wall – and perhaps this is indeed the best time to get out and make oneself nominally available to any suitably-positioned new movement that could do with having on board an established political figure to give it some weight.

That could well be the calculation at work here.

No More Kipping

The creation of a new political party by Arron Banks – long anticipated by some including myself (as I have mentioned before) – seems to have taken a step forward today, with the suspension of Mr Banks from UKIP. This was (he says) because of something he recently said about UKIP.

Now, this is a promising move, if it is handled in the right way. I have been saying (and showing) for some time that UKIP was always a dead end – and it has been proven true. I'd venture to suggest that a considerable majority of the electorate also now realise this.

Despite the boost given to them by certain pundits, movers & shakers, and being gifted votes as a protest party, their core vote was usually in single figures (I estimate 6% to 8% tops) as has been shown consistently in opinion polls and in particular in more recent actual elections, whether council or parliamentary. Note that each party has a core vote that will probably never change, plus other more fluid 'floating' votes, so the core forms just part of the polling/voting figure.

Most notably, the UKIP vote has in the majority of cases dropped hugely since the previous election in that seat, typically down to just a third to a half of the percentage vote they had the last time. I watch this every week, and tweet all the results, so they can be found on my Twitter feed.

So: what about this new party, then? I'd welcome it, because it is about time that the deadwood were to be cleared out from our nation's political scene – and that means Labour and the Greens, along with TUSC, as well as UKIP. None of them offers any real value in twenty-first century politics.

So far there are two problems with what has emerged today: Arron Banks seems to be thinking of it as a Mark Two version of UKIP, which would be the wrong approach. It has to be something new and fresh, not modelled on what has gone before, otherwise it will almost certainly mutate over a few years into being in the same situation as UKIP is today, and will never generate sufficient public confidence to become viable. They'll prefer the devil they already know.

The second issue is the likelihood of Nigel Farage being pushed to be its leader. Again, this will lead to the same kinds of difficulties that UKIP had for years in that it will become the Nigel Show all over again – a 'cult of personality'. That is not what is needed. Hopefully Farage's Trump association will lead to a full-time occupation on that side of the Atlantic, which will thus help save the new venture here if it should go ahead.

I wish such a new party well, especially if it does result in the dross vanishing from the scene. It could (and should) be much healthier for British politics, both nationally and (over a longer period) locally too. It just needs to be done right, from the launch onward, and all should be set fair to raise the bar hugely over the next few years.

Weaponising

I have touched on this previously, here and elsewhere, in the context of Labour Motions to Council – but it is much broader than that. This is the matter of weaponising an issue – or even a non-issue that is manufactured into a weapon that can be used to raise the party's profile and/or support, or be aimed against their political opponents, or (ideally) all of those!

It isn't only Labour that do this: the entirety of the Green party's existence is dependent upon weaponising environmental matters (including a lot of pseudo-science and other fakery) in order to impose their Communist-style policies of tax-and-regulation (i.e. theft and oppression) on us all.

This, though, is why the most visible aspects of Labour's activities are all over the place – what I call 'grasshopper politics' – as the only topics that matter to them are those that play to their lust for power and ways of achieving that. Okay, sometimes they have to 'play the game' and express a view on other matters (though they usually still play politics with them where possible) but with little enthusiasm.

One place you can always depend on finding Labour activists, including elected members, is on marches and similar – including today's NHS-supporting rally in London. Some of our local Labour councillors actually boasted that they would be there, as they always do. Hardly surprising, of course, as this is the most heavily weaponised issue in Britain today, even though Labour's position is entirely dependent upon deception and outright dishonesty.

Equally unsurprising is that this event was called and organised by one of the big trades unions, and in particular by its General Secretary – Dave Prentis of Unison. There is lots I could write about that, but it's all public knowledge nowadays and much more widely known than when I started discussing the big union 'barons' a few years ago, when few folk realised just how much the whole movement had already been subverted to Communist manipulations.

The lesson from all of this, though, is to watch what they do, and how every new subject that comes seemingly out of the blue is used by the Lefties in exactly the same manner as their traditional 'weaponised' topics, including groups of people – at least while they are of use to Labour et al.

Once upon a time that included blue collar workers, but they have generally outlived their usefulness so were dropped by Blair, and that changed situation maintained within the Labour leadership to this very day, as has been widely reported.

It is thus instructive to become aware of how public opinion and the political landscape are being manipulated entirely to serve party political ends, and have nothing to do with serving the public interest. After all, with so much attention being concentrated on minor issues such as Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (a recent 'big issue' with Labour all around the country) it means that big, important matters are being sidelined by that party.

I know from my own experience as an elected member on a Council, and from my decades in the Civil Service and other sources/inputs, just how little the Left serve the nation's interests and how much they try to block and generally oppose those of us who did and those who still do, if it serves their own purposes.

They always but ALWAYS put their own interests first, even if they are very clever at disguising that fact.

Social Engineering Revisited

This post augments the one I wrote on this topic a few weeks ago, and re-iterates part of that post, leading onto a third part soon...

One oddity in my locality is a council ward currently called Rochester East. Part of this was formerly the smaller ward of Troy Town, and it is there that the uncharacteristic proliferation of social housing is to be found. This view from Google Maps shows where much of this is situated.

The main chunks are the two paired long blocks running between Cossack Street and Princes Street (Glovers Mill and Burritt Mews) and the 'chunky' blocks between them (Hussar House and Lancer House), also much of John Street and Hoopers Road. There are a lot of Labour voters living in those places, unsurprisingly when one looks at their nature and pays attention when passing through – which I have done many times.

The origin of all this goes back primarily to the 1980s when the then council leadership (Labour at the time) arranged for all this to be built, in order to skew the demographics of what was an essentially Conservative-supporting area. It does seem very much out of place in that part of the world – but it did work.It gave Labour a permanent and highly strategic foothold in urban Rochester.

When I was first elected to Medway Council nearly seventeen years ago, Troy Town was indeed represented by Labour councillors, even though other parts of Rochester were Conservative. Now, it wasn't always quite as clear-cut as that, for historic reasons from before I moved to Kent and which I have never been able to get to the heart of dependably, only conflicting anecdotal material being offered; so I am now sticking with the period I know personally.

Anyway, even with ward boundary changes a few years after the Unitary Authority came into being, what then became part of Rochester East ward has consistently swung it for Labour, even when other seats they held in the wider Rochester & Strood parliamentary constituency area came and went (in Strood North and Strood South wards, for example) – and they are now the only two Labour-held seats out of the twenty-two in that constituency.

That is highly significant. Without the social engineering of some three decades ago, they wouldn't even have those two council seats. The demographic slant also helped them at parliamentary election level, though never enough to make an actual switch: it was only Tony Blair winning (and John Major losing) in 1997 that ensured that the Medway area had three Labour Members of Parliament from that time.

Actually, it is just two-and-a-half MPs, as one of the constituencies (Chatham & Aylesford) was and is only half in the Medway council area.

Anyway, this does show what goes on in politics and why it is done (because it works!) Any party can do this when it has the power to do so; but it is only Labour who drag whole areas downward for their own power-lust purposes, as is of course a very old story nationally. I think the practice first came to public attention back in the mid 'sixties, though I was too young at the time to fully appreciate what was going on.

The modern-day context is Labour's 'Refugees welcome' initiative, which leads into a whole new story for which the background information in this post will aid understanding. It is, though, a separate story, which I intend to tackle here soon...