Years of scaremongering by the press, successive governments and opportunist politicians have ensured immigration has become nothing more than a fetid, toxic swamp. Its rotten stink permeates politics as it competes to scapegoat and appear “tough” on people who come to live and work here. Basically, it’s who can fall furthest, fastest into a bottomless […]
Posts Tagged ‘Nigel Farage’
A Tory UKIP pact is emerging
Sep 21st, 2013 by Mark Seddon.In the 1970s the Conservative Party could still claim a membership of over a million. Two decades before that it was over three million and the Young Conservatives provided the principal dating agency for the sons and daughters of the aspirant middle classes. Today that membership has shriveled to 134,000. It has halved since David […]
Nigel Farage: the low rent Enoch Powell
May 8th, 2013 by David Osler.It’s something of a love that dare not speak its name. But Powellism has remained a major subtext on the British right for something like half a century, with the rise of UKIP marking only the latest incarnation of this ongoing infatuation. It may seem a bit of a stretch to compare a reactionary intellectual […]
UKIP’s catch-all makeover
Apr 16th, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Ugh, UKIP. They have a new party election broadcast peddling a shopping list of “nice things”. Not a single policy gets an airing (apart from leaving the EU, of course), but it does mark UKIP’s transition from an avowedly right-wing populist formation to an organisation that is all things to all people. Interestingly, this also includes […]
Why the rise of UKIP should worry the left
Apr 13th, 2012 by David Osler.Two Tory MPs are on the brink of defecting to the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage told the Independent this morning. He may or may not be bluffing, or course. The UKIP leader spoke after a recent survey put his outfit on 11%, the same degree of backing as the Liberal Democrats now enjoy. That […]