UKIP Spring Conference Is Not The Hotbed Of Intolerance That Their Opponents Claim

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

 

As protesters gathered in Margate to protest the UKIP spring conference, bringing with them their predictable and intellectually lazy accusations of racism and bigotry, quite a different scene unfolded inside the Winter Gardens conference venue: thousands of delegates stood and cheered as transsexual former boxing promoter Kellie Maloney, a long time UKIP supporter, gave an emotional address to the party.

From her speech:

“I am delivering a message about a group of people in society that I don’t believe are fully understood. Some people see us as very brave people, some see us as freaks. I see us as neither. I see us as human beings.

I don’t see myself as a transsexual, I see myself as a woman that had a [problem at birth, I have had it all my life and I am trying to help others.

I came here to deliver a personal message, and I was given the opportunity by Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall, who has previously sent me messages of support. They are the only party that have invited me to speak.”

Listen to the supportive wave of applause from the conference delegates as Maloney struggles to fight back tears while giving her speech.

Nigel Farage, in his closing remarks, then claimed with reasonable justification that “This party is open to everyone. Our only pride, our only prejudice is that we are patriotic.”

Compare this scene from the UKIP spring conference with the Republican presidential debate in 2011 where GOP delegates openly booed a gay soldier who asked whether gay people should be allowed to serve in the military. The response of that Republican audience in America betrayed a far greater level of antipathy toward equal rights for gay or transgender people than was in evidence at Margate today, and yet the perception of UKIP as a bigoted and homophobic party persists – sometimes fairly but often not so.

Is there an unwelcome, abhorrent element of racism and homophobia within UKIP? Yes, and it should be opposed and rooted out wherever it appears. But where it most definitely did not appear today was on the main stage or in the hall at the UKIP spring conference in Margate.

Racism, sexism and homophobia are problems within our society as a whole, not specific to any one political party. Hopefully we will remember this fact as the 2015 general election campaign unfolds.

Kellie Maloney UKIP spring conference 2015

We Need A British CPAC

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

CPAC merchandise

 

As UKIP’s spring conference gets underway, The Spectator makes lighthearted fun of the patriotic, themed merchandise available for delegates to purchase. And fair enough – some of it is quite kitschy. In fact, some of the trinkets remind one of the gaudy offerings you might find displayed for sale at the annual CPAC conference, currently underway in the United States.

Bloomberg reports:

The CPAC exhibition floor is about marketing, and advertising to conservatives is the same as marketing to anyone else: everything has to be unique, free, or superhero-themed. 

On the free stuff front, there are dozens of buttons, posters (including one celebrating the day President Obama leaves office), pens, steel water bottles, and other knick knacks people want more than need. The libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty gave out free “Stand with Rand” t-shirts to anyone who filled out a political philosophy form, with questions like “There should be no restrictions against law-abiding citizens owning firearms.” Each response (agree, maybe, and disagree) comes with a score, and the higher the score, the closer the attendee’s political philosophy is to Ronald Reagan.

All of which leads to some pressing questions: Why is there no equivalent of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, in Britain? And are not British conservatives and big government sceptics greatly in need of one?

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UKIP: The First 100 Days

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

UKIP The First 100 Days

 

If the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 starts to play in the background of the film or television programme you are watching, you can bet good money that something sad, terrible or otherwise wrenchingly significant is about to happen, if it isn’t already unfolding on screen.

What better piece of music to choose, then, when crafting the soundtrack for the scene in your fake documentary where a future UKIP government MP takes the stage at a conference to announce Britain’s tough new immigration policy?

One can guess the bias of Channel 4’s fictional UKIP: The First 100 Days by the mere fact that it was produced and shown on television at all. It continues a noble tradition of “what if” mockumentaries imagining what would happen if some terrible catastrophe were to befall Britain – a smallpox outbreak, major terrorist incident, and now, apparently, the election of Nigel Farage as Britain’s next Prime Minister. That the filmmakers consider a (thoroughly inconceivable) UKIP general election victory to be a calamity on the same scale as a global smallpox pandemic tells you everything you need to know when judging their level of impartiality.

In the opening montage, we are treated to the sight of a bald, white, working-class market trader casually referring to British Sikhs as one of “your lot” when greeting UKIP’s new Asian woman MP for Romford. Because that is just how all white working class people think and talk, rubes that they are, according to the received wisdom of the London-based middle class liberals who make these programmes.

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On Premier League Football And Income Inequality

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Premier League Wages Income Inequality

 

Isn’t it awful? The English Premier League has just signed a new television rights deal with Sky and BT worth a cool £5.4bn, while some of their employees earn only the minimum wage. What a searing indictment of our society, of capitalism itself!

Except, of course, that it is no such thing.

Presented once again with a golden opportunity – an open goal, as it were – to talk about real, tangible ways to improve the living standards and life opportunities for those on low incomes, the British left did what it now does best: furiously ignore the real problem, forget actually helping the poor, while training all of their rhetorical guns on a few wealthy scapegoats.

From the Mirror:

Despite a £1.78 billion pay bill last year, not a single top-flight club has committed to giving all ground staff and suppliers the £7.65-an-hour “living wage”.

Pampered players can earn eight-figure annual salaries – with England and Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, 29, pulling in £300,000 a week and Manchester City’s Argentinian forward Sergio Aguero, 26, £220,000 a week.

Veteran Labour MP Frank Field has written to all 20 Premier League clubs demanding action.

But he got just six replies – with not one club committing to the full rate. Sunderland said the issue “did not merit further discussion”.

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No, Greece Is Not The Word

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Greece Syriza Alexis Tsipras

 

Syriza’s emphatic victory in the Greek general election last week has seen many British left wing politicians and commentators embark on a series of gruesome little personal victory laps, as though the outcome of a vote in that small Mediterranean country represents some kind of teaching moment for the sixth largest economy in the world.

These delusions have generally taken one of two forms: either the hubristic belief that Syriza’s electoral success somehow lays bare the inherent shortcomings of capitalism in general, or that the installation of Alexis Tsipras as Greece’s new prime minister represents some long-awaited turning point in the fortunes of the European political left. Both of these exercises in wishful thinking are just plain wrong.

The leftists just about have a point, so long as one is content to think very simplistically and superficially about an urgent, festering problem. This line of argument basically says “Austerity is bad, and now that a strongly anti-austerity party has achieved electoral success elsewhere in Europe, all of our arguments in favour of increasing government spending levels forever have been vindicated”.

There is no shortage of this pound shop pseudo-intellectual grandstanding on display at the moment, from many of the usual suspects in the Labour Party and their sympathisers in the media. The Times of London reports:

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