Dear All
Ukip’s star is on the rise, the reason for that is people
are sick to death of the mainstream parties failing to listen to their concerns
and act on them. This isn’t something new that has just suddenly happened; it
has been going on for decades as the political class has become the political
elite and the political elite that don’t listen.
Working class people and their views have been effectively
frozen out of political decision making as parties treat them as people who are
to be ‘managed’ but not to be represented. In Scotland , the Labour vote has
collapsed to 23% in a new opinion poll, parties rise and parties fall, it seems
like the Scottish Labour Party is in line for a fall due to many factors, the
chief one being they have ignored the people who they are supposed to represent!
People will put up with that for so long before they write a
party off, in Scotland
as the Labour vote collapses, others such as the SNP have benefited not because
they are any different; it is just that in this stage of the cycle, people
aren’t aware that Nationalists don’t represent them either.
The current SNP con trick is to say that they are ‘standing
up for Scotland ’.
To try and ‘fix’ the Labour Party’s problems, MP Jim Murphy
has declared that he wants to be the Scottish Labour leader and ultimately the
First Minster of Scotland in 2016. It would be a huge mistake to think that on
the back of Jim Murphy having a good referendum campaign with his 100 day tour that
people will just flock back to Labour.
They won’t!
On the 20th of October 2014, the SNP Government’s
5 pence on a plastic bag tax was brought into force, prior to that happy event,
the SNP screamed about the injustices people of Scotland had to put up with.
Was the big historic injustice of working class people that
there wasn’t 5 pence on a plastic bag?
Holyrood is full of dross right across the political divide
because no one was standing up and saying, ‘why is this shite being debated in
this Parliament’?
A Parliament which you will remember that cost £440 million
pounds of taxpayer’s money to build, and is served by 129 MSPs and staff.
Can you as a punter name most of them, probably not because
most of them are sheep, most of them have achieved nothing, and most of them
are just there to collect the money!
In today’s politics, either side of the border, it isn’t about
who is popular, it is more who do you hate the least, who has the better
election bribe, doesn’t sound too good does it. As the political market becomes
unstable, new parties enter the market such as the Greens and Ukip. Ukip
however is the party that has real traction, the Claction by-election seen by
some as a one off delivered an Ukip MP, the first in history. Rochester and Strood may deliver a second,
Mark Reckless like Douglas Carswell was a former Conservative MP before he
defected. Bad enough for the Conservatives to lose Douglas Carswell but to have
two defeats will certainly worry David Cameron and his team at Central Office.
In Rochester ,
the Conservative candidate doesn’t look like a good bet by any means quite the
opposite in my opinion.
Immigration has become an issue which until recently was
simply ignored by the main parties, prior to this, anyone speaking out could
find themselves labelled as racist. Several attempts have been made by people
in different parties to brand Ukip as a racist party but it hasn’t worked. The
party has many people from all different types of backgrounds and minorities in
its ranks as members and candidates. Some senior Labour figures have been
engaged in trying to make Ukip appear unelectable, including rising star Chuka
Umunna. His take is to launch strongly-worded attacks on the 'absolutely vile'
views of 'racists' in Ukip.
As I understand it Ukip has a strong policy against racists
and will not accept people from organisations deemed inappropriate, Labour as
Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader has accepted former BNP councillors into it’s
ranks, playing the race card such as Chuka Umunna doesn’t work in politics, a
clear example was seen in Scotland during the Euro 2014 election where Alex
Salmond played the race card on behalf of Tasmina Ahmed-Shiekh. That idea was a
disaster; I voted Ukip and wrote articles in support of them getting a seat. It
was won by David Coburn, Scotland ’s
first Ukip MEP; he was the only candidate under the current voting system that had
a chance of blocking Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh getting elected to public office.
Tasmina Ahmed-Shiekh doesn’t deserve to be an MEP. Prior to
the Nicola Sturgeon campaign of 2011, she told me that she had done no activism
for 5 years. She does some work on Sturgeon’s campaign and suddenly she is MEP
material?
I think not!
As the Ukip bandwagon rolls and gathers momentum, it will be
increasingly attacked from all sides such as Chuka Umunna of Labour and Alex
Salmond of the SNP but it makes no difference, Ukip on the other hand could
improve their standing by having better crafted policies put in a more
professional and polished manner. One of the new people to start to speak out
against Ukip is Tony Blair, he has decided to enter the fight by saying curbing
immigration to Britain
would be a 'disaster'. Like a lot of what Blair says you have to separate fact
from fiction. In itself immigration is useful, all parties and that includes
Ukip see the need for immigration to help boost a country’s economy done fairly
and properly. No country in the world operates an open door policy on
immigration and for reasons of national security cannot afford to do so.
Tony Blair says Labour cannot get into a race for voters by apeing
Ukip policies. Blair and the Labour Party were responsible for the disastrous
social engineering experiment which saw a huge rise in immigration that damaged
the social cohesion in Britain .
It was done by the use of a lie that the influx was needed on economic grounds;
later the Labour Party was to admit that was a lie. Just as Labour is losing
the working class vote in Scotland
to the Nationalists, down south they are losing the working class vote to Ukip.
Ukip’s slogan of ‘enough’s enough has real traction with the
people down south as Clacton aptly shows, other factors in Clacton were Douglas
Carswell’s hard work as a local MP, you have to take this into account as well.
Tony Blair said Labour must be 'really careful' of saying
things that suggested Nigel Farage's party are justified in their policies. If
they weren’t would the current UK Conservative Government be tackling the
immigration problem to drive down the figures? Tony Blair is a man out of his
time, does he expect the Labour Party to do likewise, sooner or later, Ed
Miliband will have to face a choice, side with the majority view of the British
people or forfeit any chance of forming a government in 2015. Miliband isn’t
seen as Prime Minister material; he will further reduce his chances if Labour
doesn’t appeal to the wishes and desires of the people.
Blair’s intervention comes as Ed Miliband faces the prospect
of Labour being defeated by Ukip in the election of a new police and crime
commissioner in South Yorkshire . The contest
was sparked by the resignation of Labour’s previous police commissioner Shaun
Wright; he stood down in the wake of the Rotherham
child sex abuse scandal, where an estimated 1,400 children were abused over 16
years by Pakistani criminal gangs. A defeat for Labour would be seen as a major
blow for Ed Miliband whose Doncaster constituency lies in the South
Yorkshire police force area.
As politics is politics, Ukip has exploited the child abuse
scandal to attack Labour. Last week, the party launched a poster featuring a
young woman with the slogan:
‘There are 1,400 reasons why you should not trust Labour again’.
Apparently some people in the Labour Party didn’t want to
upset social cohesion by speaking out.
The people who put Labour in this position are Labour, the
professional political elite who don’t take seriously the public who they are
supposed to represent; now things have changed, there is a genuine alternative
and that alternative is Ukip which is taking voters from Labour and also the
Conservatives. The sense of panic in the political elite class is seen by how
the government is trying to woo voters with an EU referendum in 2017.
Ukip’s policy is that they want Britain out of the European Union,
I am a fan of the European Union, the idea on the surface is great, the
application is less so. The recent bill to the UK for £1.7 billion pounds
payable by 1st December is a bombshell which few ordinary people
will understand given Britain is gripped by austerity, the bill is for Britain
‘doing well’.
Do the working class people using food banks consider that Britain is
doing well, no job, no hope, no future and no one to stand up and put their
rights centre stage!
That was until Ukip entered the political market.
Across Europe , other people
are concerned about how the European Union project doesn’t address their
domestic problems and encroaches on sovereignty issues. The EU in order to go
forward needs to return to a former time along the lines of the Common Market,
were trade was the glue that binds. A
policy which I would like to see adopted is my idea for a EU internal
immigration policy which sets a criteria for people wishing to move to another
EU country, free movement of Labour has been abused, that abuse has resulted in
crisis and that crisis has effected social cohesion.
The Labour Party under Ed Miliband can simply put its head
in the sand and hope it all goes away, but the reality for Miliband is that
‘trouble’ exists for him on both sides of the border between Scotland and
England, and it doesn’t look like he has answers to the question of Ukip or the
SNP eating into his vote.
His professional political elite who have their own agenda
are finding that the public don’t want them any more. Recently a friend of mine
put it this way, he never left Labour; Labour left him. His family were rock
solid Labour supporters but Labour has more or less lost his entire family as
voters. He repeatedly tried to get Labour representation on a number of issues
concerning his family only to find the elected Labour representatives failed to
help or at best provided risible advice and effort.
Why elect someone who will not represent you?
One of the guys, my friend sought help from is a Glasgow
Councillor, who also works for Labour MP Willie Bain and MSP Paul Martin, three
taxpayer funded salaries, but my friend didn’t get the value of three taxpayer
funded salaries. And if elected people don’t want to work, there is no one to
hold them to account, that doesn’t just apply in the Labour Party, it goes
right across the board.
If Labour MP Jim Murphy is elected as leader, he has a huge
task to win back voters in Scotland
just as Ed Miliband has a huge task to win by voters in England . The
disenfranchised have found one thing, their voice; it is now being effectively channelled
by Ukip.
The tide of public opinion has turned and who wants to be on
the wrong side of destiny. Especially when the mainstream parties have been
found out as serving only the professional political elite at the expense of
the many who are genuinely suffering!
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
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