Nigel Farage

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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It Will Take A Far Better Comedian Than Al Murray To Make A Laughing Stock Of UKIP

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

 

Do you recognise this man?

You may remember him from a short-lived television sitcom a few years back, in which he played the self-important, somewhat sexist and xenophobic proprietor of a scruffy, down-at-heel pub. Yes, this is Al Murray the Pub Landlord.

Murray’s career has consisted primarily of wringing the same laughs out of the same jokes involving the same character, over and over again, year after year; if you’ve seen one of his television or stage shows, you have more or less seen them all. But Al Murray’s latest reinvention comes with a political twist – he is running for election as the Free United Kingdom Party (FUKP) candidate in South Thanet, the same constituency that UKIP leader Nigel Farage is contesting in the general election this May.

Murray’s apparent goal is to win a few more laughs (and a much needed publicity boost) by melding his stereotypical pub landlord persona with Nigel Farage’s pro-British populism, a process that is aided by their shared love of real ale; this is not complex, thought-provoking comedy.

The Spectator provides a taste of FUKP’s manifesto:

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Let’s Talk About Multiculturalism

Samuel Hooper11 Comments

charlie hebdo multiculturalism

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Let’s can the fake outrage and acknowledge a hard truth uttered by Nigel Farage

Eager to start making waves early in 2015, UKIP leader Nigel Farage hit the television studios today, giving interviews on Channel 4 News and America’s Fox News, to offer his thoughts on multiculturalism and the reasons behind the barbaric terrorist atrocity at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

Predictably, most politicians and commentators immediately rushed to criticise Farage, dismissing his remarks without ever stopping to look for the grains of truth in what he said. Was the intemperate rhetoric about a “fifth column” in Britain alarmist and potentially divisive? Yes, it probably was. But Farage and UKIP have continually raised important questions about the trajectory of Britain that others have wilfully ignored, because they preferred to bury their heads in the sand for short-term political expediency. And the fact that an idea is raised by someone with strong and rather pungent political views does not mean that it should not be discussed.

It should be pointed out that Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow provoked Nigel Farage’s extended comments with a teasing question asking whether the terrorist attack didn’t mean that we needed to tear down our borders completely and become one big happy family, poking the UKIP leader where he was sure to get an impassioned reply.

The key exchange on the Channel 4 News went as follows (it’s quite long, but in it lies the clue to the whole problem with the multiculturalism debate at the moment):

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2014: The Year Of UKIP

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Year of UKIP defections mayor Gloucester

 

“…the core question of our time is how we meet the challenge of globalisation, and how we retool or retire the idea of the nation state in response. You can agree with UKIP’s stance or despise it with every fibre of your being, but right now they are the only British political party to have identified the core problem and gone before the electorate with a proposed solution.”

‘Tis the season for Year In Review blog posts and breathless predictions about what more to expect in 2015. And while these can be good fun to write, and even read, it is safe to say that none of the political predictions, at least, are worth the paper they are printed on, or the real estate they occupy on your smartphone screen.

The truth is, nobody knows what will happen as Britain enters the seismic election year of 2015. The outcome of this general election is almost impossible to predict, and certainly cannot be divined by examining national-level polling that fails to take into account the furious dynamics that will come into play in individual constituencies. Those who confidently predict the total electoral obliteration of the Liberal Democrats forget the huge effort expended by many LibDem MPs to effectively ingratiate themselves with their local electorates, for example, while those predicting that Nigel Farage’s People’s Army will occupy multiple benches in the House of Commons after May 7 overlook just how punishing Britain’s electoral system always is to new and insurgent parties.

But if it is not possible to look forward with much certainty – though a hung parliament and some form of ‘confidence and supply’ minority administration led by either the Tories or Labour seems increasingly likely – we can at least look back at the year that was 2014, in order to see who has been right and who has been calamitously wide of the mark.

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We Can’t Have An Honest Discussion About Immigration Unless We Actually Listen To Each Other

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Immigration Debate UKIP Cover Ears Dan Hodges Samuel Hooper SPS

 

It has become fashionable of late to say that it’s high time  we had a frank, open and honest discussion about immigration.

Never mind that this empty platitude is primarily uttered by the same demagogues who owe their political or media careers to either whipping up excessive fears on the subject, or  sweeping it under the rug while smearing dissenters with the toxic charge of racism; that particular irony, though amusing, is beside the point. Zealots on both sides have come to realise that there is political capital to be made in positioning oneself as the straight-talking voice of reason, and pulling off that particular deception in the eyes of the voters requires going on the record saying how terribly important it is that we talk honestly about immigration.

Even casual followers of the news cycle will notice that the most strident calls for this long-awaited symposium on immigration funnily enough happen to coincide with each advance in the polls made by UKIP, or with every time that Nigel Farage contrives to leave the legacy party leaders looking impotent, or worse still, in active collusion with one another. This has led to accusations of cynicism – they’re only calling for a discussion about immigration now because UKIP are breathing down their necks, comes the predictable refrain. But in fact we have been holding a reasonably thorough and robust conversation about immigration for some time now – or, to be more precise, we have all been talking a lot about the subject. Where we have consistently fallen short, though, is the listening part, without which a truly meaningful conversation can never take place.

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