Real time, Semi-Partisan tweets and analysis of the incoming European election results are accessible here.
There are a lot of moving parts at the moment. As expected, UKIP are performing very well and are still on track to win the vote in the United Kingdom. But interestingly, the Conservative vote is proving quite resilient in many areas – it’s the Liberal Democrats who are haemorrhaging support and staring the possibility of losing all their MEPs in the face.
Nigel Farage appears confident – even jubilant – on television, saying “Who’s to say what UKIP can and cannot achieve in the 2015 general election … Anything’s possible after tonight’s result”.
So far, London is dark – the returning officer is not releasing information from the various London regions individually as they become available, opting to release all of London’s results simultaneously. A much clearer (and more final) view of the new electoral map will be available once we know London’s verdict.
Whatever your political convictions may be, PLEASE make the effort to get out and vote today. People have given their lives in defence of our democratic right to choose our representation; the least we can do is take time to read up on the candidates/issues and make the trip down to the polling station.
Remember: those who can’t be bothered to get out and vote forfeit their right to complain about all things political until the next election.
For those who want to read a final Semi-Partisan analysis of the European election landscape before voting, click here.
The Telegraph has been carrying the amusing but unfortunate story of charity cyclist Matt Adams, who swerved off the road and dived head-first into the long grass after taking his hands off the handlebars of his bike to strike a victory pose for a photographer. There could be no better analogy for UKIP’s fortunes over the past five days, with the long asphalt road representing the election campaign and the wayward bicycle as the party’s newfound trajectory following a series of stunning self-inflicted wounds.
Conventional wisdom has it that following his contentious interview on LBC radio last week in which he made sweeping and deeply unpleasant generalisations about Romanian immigrants, Nigel Farage has lit a long fuse to the dynamite underneath his political career. The interview – which Farage’s chief aide tried at one point to halt – can be seen in its entirety here:
The blowback, even from fellow eurosceptics and normally reliable media sympathisers, has been intense and unrelenting, with even The Sun publishing an editorial denouncing Farage’s comments as ‘racist’. The nation’s opinion columnists cannot agree on precisely how soon UKIP will founder, but a strong consensus says that it is only a matter of time.
For this, neither Nigel Farage nor the party he leads deserve sympathy. Such is the degree of euroscepticism within the country, the level of pent-up rage against the political establishment and the smug deafness of the main political parties that a strong showing for UKIP in the coming elections was all but assured – and, until recently, deserved.
In fact, because few voters pay attention to LBC radio interviews or the post-game coverage in the wider press, the party may actually avoid facing the real consequences until after Thursday’s European and local council elections, by which time the narrative could have changed in their favour. But when reality finally catches up with UKIP, no one will be able to say that it was undeserved.
Up until now, normal, non-racist UKIP sympathisers have largely been able to cling on to the narrative that while there may be some unpleasant and noisy individuals at the margins of the party, their principles remain solid and the leadership strong. But Nigel Farage’s image of calm, steady leadership has taken a justifiable beating over the weekend, and while UKIP supporters may abide instances of nastiness or foolishness coming from isolated candidates at the fringe, it is asking a lot to expect them to look the other way when the very same misdeeds are being committed at the top.
Nigel Farage’s “car crash” interview has effectively combined with the antics of the fruitcake fringe to trap UKIP’s more moderate supporters – fervent eurosceptics or libertarians without a racist bone in their bodies – in a pincer movement, and they now find themselves very exposed to the blanket charges of racism and xenophobia emanating from hostile media outlets such as the Guardian and the Huffington Post.
The sad thing is that Farage & co. have been here before, but clearly failed to learn the lessons from their last foot-shooting extravaganza.
At UKIP’s last party conference in September 2013, delegates were enjoying buoyant poll numbers and a period of unexpectedly benign press coverage when one rogue MEP, Godfrey Bloom, managed to spoil it all for everyone by making sexist comments at a fringe event, and then hitting a journalist over the head with a conference booklet while making his escape from the scene.
Instantly, the tone of the press coverage changed and any conceivable bounce from the conference was lost. No-one summed up the feeling of frustration within the party at the time better than Nigel Farage himself, who said in his closing speech:
There have been once or two incidents today … There is no media coverage of this conference. It’s gone. It’s dead. It’s all about Godfrey hitting a journalist and using an unpleasant four-letter word. It’s gone. And we can’t – put – up – with – it. And I said to you earlier, we cannot have any one individual – however fun or flamboyant or entertaining or amusing they are – we cannot have any one individual destroying UKIP’s national conference, and that is what he’s done today, and I’m sad about that, but we can’t tolerate it and we have to act.
The anger and frustration was real and visceral then:
Strong words, and yet Nigel Farage has effectively managed to equal Godfrey Bloom’s feat of self-sabotage a mere eight months later, and just days away from what could be UKIP’s pivotal moment. Will Farage now turn that same withering, critical analysis on himself?
UKIP does not have a deep bench of political talent from which they can draw in times of emergency or turmoil. They have no one else as charismatic as Nigel Farage, no one cannier with the press, no one better at putting out (or genially dismissing) the various fires that the party’s lesser candidates so frequently start. But can UKIP abide this eleventh-hour implosion from their leader?
The media’s coverage of UKIP, like the political establishment’s attitude toward the party, was never anything close to being fair and balanced. But the slurs and accusations that UKIPers complained about just last week are nothing compared to what comes now. As far as getting any kind of message out via the mainstream media goes now, it’s game over. UKIP is a racist party. Euroscepticism is just racism repackaged. Libertarians are in bed with racists.It has already started.
UKIP may yet emerge from this latest self-inflicted crisis relatively unscathed. There may be too little time between Farage’s gaffe and polling day for the impact to feed through to peoples’ voting intentions. UKIP could yet win the European election, in which case the narrative and news agenda will completely change, allowing UKIP to find their feet – until the next campaign, when the video and audio footage will be unearthed by every hostile journalist in the country.
Even in this best-case scenario for UKIP, the LBC interview is an urgent reminder that they simply cannot go on existing in the public consciousness as a one-man party, where Nigel Farage alone serves as chief executive, chief political strategist, chief policy architect, chief salesman and chief damage repair technician.
This twenty minute radio interview, this “car crash”, also reminds us that some of UKIP’s principles – euroscepticism, libertarianism, that fervent anti-establishment spirit – are too important to be entrusted to any one single person, even the leader.
The British voters deserve a eurosceptic, libertarian party that they can vote for in good conscience and without fear of unintentionally consorting with or abetting racists, while moderate UKIP supporters deserve to be able to watch the evening news without constant fear or trepidation of the next scandal about to beset them.
Whether Thursday’s elections bring triumph or disappointment for UKIP, there are now many serious questions to be answered. The party’s weaknesses have been brutally exposed under the unceasing glare of media scrutiny and through calamitous self-inflicted crises. And without new faces and the immediate jettisoning of the party’s nasty rhetoric on immigration (and the block of undesirable votes that come with it), things will only get worse.
When the cyclist Matt Adams plunged headfirst from his bicycle off the road and into the verge, he hopped back on the seat and continued riding, thinking that he had “got away with it” – until he crossed the finish line and realised that he had become a minor internet celebrity. The internet always remembers. People always remember. And the electorate will remember how nasty UKIP managed to make themselves look over the course of the past week, not just when they vote on Thursday but also when the more important general election takes place in 2015.
Whatever the result of Thursday’s European elections, UKIP – and respectable British euroscepticism – will now be stuck in damage control mode for many months to come.
The European Court of Justice, in another inspired ruling, has effectively declared that EU citizens have the right to request that Google delete undesirable search results which may portray them in a negative light.
With astonishing disregard for freedom of information and a troglodyte’s grasp of modern technology and its administration, the court held that there are certain circumstances when an individual may petition Google (and presumably other search engines) to delete links to various sites which contain information deemed false, obsolete or irrelevant.
Supporters of this backward and anti-democratic move might argue that Google search results function in a similar way to road signs, and that just as a city has a responsibility to remove road signs that point to closed routes or demolished visitor attractions, so a responsible search engine should prune its records to remove links to outdated information. And this neat analogy almost holds together.
Nearly, but not quite. The difference, of course, is that Google search results point to information on the internet that is still very much in existence and potentially of great importance. Forcing Google to remove search engine results is akin to a city deciding that a prominent building should be removed from local maps because it has fallen into disrepair and become an eyesore. The building remains, and it is in the interests of many people that its whereabouts remain public knowledge, whether or not it causes embarrassment for the city council or town planners.
Already a growing list of people with shady pasts are coming forward with petitions to Google, in the hope of wiping the digital slate clean of their past misdeeds, as the Telegraph reports:
Since it was introduced, more than 1,000 people have asked Google to remove links to unfavourable stories. They include a former MP seeking re-election, a man convicted of possessing child abuse images and 20 convicted criminals.
But more concerning than the granting people the ability to falsely curate the digital history of their lives for potentially nefarious purposes, the court’s decision places a human being at Google – or wherever the decision over which records should be removed is ultimately taken – in the role of moral arbiter of what information is still ‘accurate’ or ‘current’, and what information the public has a right to know. No human being or committee should be vested with such power, least of all one that hears petitions from people or institutions with overriding personal reasons to meddle with the perception of their past.
(Even the publication of false information, after all, becomes a matter of historical fact when it takes place, potentially an important one – such as cases of libel or political misstatement – which should be preserved for easy reference by future scholars, historians or lawyers.)
Furthermore, the court’s ruling shows complete and utter contempt for the ability of human beings to filter good information from bad, and accurate data from the misleading. Even if it were the case that erroneous information about a person’s criminal past or business dealings existed online, people are equipped with the mental faculties to check and verify the information before acting on it. The court’s opinion holds the human capacity to reason in such scant regard that it effectively decides it must be the job of someone – Google, the courts, the Truth Committee, anyone – to filter our reality before we observe it, lest we find ourselves being mislead.
No company or entity should be able to build an online persona about us from the privacy of our actions and searches. Nor should anyone be able to erase legally documented history just because they find certain information unflattering. This is separate from the absolutely needed right to be able to remove my own personal posts or tagged photos of me posted by others.
One might expect that a ruling of this magnitude might prompt a response from the Prime Minister, but as is so often the case with matters of principle, David Cameron disappoints:
Asked by the Telegraph whether the ruling had any implications on freedom of speech, Mr Cameron replied: “I haven’t actually had a lot of time to look at this issue, so maybe I will have to get back to you on that.
“The basic principal that your information belongs to you is a good one, but I haven’t had a careful look at this, so I have to give you a considered answer another time.”
He added: “There you go – a politician who doesn’t know all the answers.”
It should not require many long nights spent poring over philosophical treatises and legal documents in order to form an opinion about the ECJ’s regressive ruling, but at least David Cameron is able to make a joke out of his total lack of conviction. For this blog, by contrast, the matter is quite clear-cut.
Our shared ideal of freedom and democracy requires as its aspiration (albeit never fully realised) the free and unfettered access to information on which to base our opinions and decisions. Establishing a precedent which says we cannot be trusted to distinguish current information from the obsolete, the relevant from the irrelevant, the true from the false, and setting up an intermediary system to do the job for us – which is what the European Court of Justice has so outrageously done – places the ECJ on the same morally repugnant ground as the internet censors of North Korea and the architects of the Great Firewall of China.
The people of Europe do not need the European Court of Justice, Google or anyone else to limit the scope of their information world. The justices wildly overstepped the mark, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
Note: The Guardian has a good explainer on the case which can be read here.
This is a screenshot of the Guardian’s top political stories taken from their website at 00.54 on Thursday 15 May, one week before election day.
All three leaders are attacks on UKIP in one guise or another. The first article points out that UKIP has experienced an unusually high degree of defections and resignations from the ranks of its 2013 intake of local councillors. The second basically suggests that UKIP supporters are paranoid and ignorant hillbillies to the last man, while the third deconstructs UKIP’s talking points on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria.
The concern is not that the Guardian’s stories necessarily lack truth or validity. But it is glaringly apparent from the choice and placement of the stories on the homepage – to the total exclusion of any other coverage – that there is a concerted effort underway at the newspaper to chip away at UKIP’s credibility and support. Given the dearth of articles analysing Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat policies it is clear that the newsroom’s finite resources are being used disproportionately to undermine the insurgent party, whilst allowing the established parties (even the hated Tories) almost completely off the hook.
Note also what is entirely absent from The Guardian’s political coverage of the local and European elections, not just tonight but over the course of the campaign as a whole:
No coverage of the latest polling numbers and UKIP’s strength vis-a-vis the established political parties.
No probing or questioning of the Labour and Liberal Democrat stance, which is to refuse the British people a referendum on continued membership of the European Union, despite the widespread public support for such an in/out debate.
No discussion of the ‘state of the union’, i.e. the budget, the misuse of EU funds, the incidences of corruption and the increasingly pervasive influence of corporate lobbyists in Brussels.
No discussion of proposed EU-wide financial transactions taxes, their pros and cons and their likely impact on the City of London and the overall UK economy.
No discussion for the parallel campaign for the presidency of the powerful European Commission.
A visitor to the Guardian’s website might reasonably conclude that the main three national political parties in Britain have inexplicably gone into hibernation, and that UKIP have been given the run of the house. But while it is certainly the case that UKIP have consistently provided the most attention-grabbing stories (thanks in large part to policies with grassroots appeal and a leader who doesn’t have to practice looking genuine in front of the mirror every morning), it is unforgivable for a national newspaper to so thoroughly abdicate its responsibility to cover the also-rans.
The Guardian prides itself on having a readership that is a cut above the rest in terms of book smarts, education and general worldliness. But even accounting for their audience’s generally left leaning stance – let’s not deny anyone their political biases and preferences – you would think that among these luminaries there might be some basic level of curiosity about what the other parties (you know, the ones who actually have MPs and win elections) are up to this election season.
Not that this lack of curiosity provides an excuse – even in its apparent total absence, a political editor might think to include an article or two on the policies and strategic positioning of the other parties, just as a byproduct of doing their job properly. And yet the Guardian (and many others) are content to follow the heard and serve up a constant stream of anti-UKIP sentiment to the exclusion of everything else.
For anyone still wondering, this right here is the reason why UKIP remain in contention this election season, despite the unremitting volley of negative press coverage (yes, some of it self-inflicted) and attacks from all sides of the political spectrum:
The Guardian – not to mention the leaders of the three main political parties – seem to have forgotten two rather endearing truths about the British people for whom they claim to work and speak. Firstly, the British cannot abide a bully, and anyone with even a modicum of sympathy for any of UKIP’s positions is likely to feel that the party has been unfairly singled out for criticism.
But secondly and most importantly, we British love an underdog. You can sense Nigel Farage’s frustration and impatience every time one of his improperly-vetted candidates or publicity-seeking spokespeople says something outrageous or defects in a blaze of negative publicity. One gets the impression that UKIP’s leader is fighting a solitary David and Goliath-style battle against the establishment and against the odds, very much alone. And as the immature party apparatus creaks and groans around him as it tries to fight a national campaign, one catches oneself rooting for the man. Or at least, 31% of the voters do.
When the European elections have taken place and the dust settles, much will be written and wondered aloud about how UKIP performed as well as they did given the unified forces ranged against them. Responsibility will be parcelled out, to the great recession for making people dissatisfied, to the expenses scandal for making people distrustful of mainstream politicians, to the people themselves for being credulous fools with borderline racist tendencies.
In short, the blame will be placed everywhere but the one place that it most belongs – at the feet of the smug, left-liberal bloc and their terrified counterparts on the right, who are witnessing a groundswell of legitimate dissatisfaction and demand for change from the British people, but see only a pesky political mosquito to be swatted out of existence.
Semi-Partisan Politics 