[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22121327

UKIP will "establish a bridgehead" in county councils across England and Wales at 2 May's local elections, its leader Nigel Farage has predicted.

The anti-EU party is aiming to capitalise on public concern over immigration, tax rises and wind farms.

It has traditionally done poorly in local elections but has gained more than 30 councillors through Tory defections in recent months.

A record 1,734 candidates are standing, just 22 fewer than the Lib Dems.

And with the UKIP riding high in national opinion polls, Mr Farage has predicted it will win seats in each of the 34 councils where elections are being held.

He has spent the past two weeks travelling in an open-topped bus, addressing packed meetings of supporters.

At the final tour stop, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, he told supporters in the town centre UKIP was drawing support from across the political spectrum, not just disaffected Tory voters as the media assumed.

The reason for this, he argued is that the "three so-called main parties" were led by "out of touch bunch of college kids" who had "never done a day's work in their lives".

Mr Farage is keen to maintain the momentum generated by his party's best-ever Westminster by-election result, when it came a close second to the Lib Dems in Eastleigh last month.

Mr Farage stressed that UKIP councillors would focus on local issues such as keeping council tax bills down and opposing new wind farms.

If elected, UKIP county councillors would "oppose every single wind farm application".

The party is also committed to cracking down on crime and anti-social behaviour, getting more police officers on to the street and handing more power to local people through referendums.

It has also promised to crack down on councillors' expenses and limit housing developments on green belt land and "unwanted out-of-town supermarkets".

Mr Farage wants to build a powerbase in local government to help win seats at Westminster at the 2015 general election.

Some pundits believe the party is also on course to win next year's European elections, beating the Conservatives into second place.

Any party which opposes new wind farms is worth my consideration .....

Wind farm contracts to increase energy bills for families

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ene...-families.html

Consumers could see bills rise in the coming years after “generous” deals worth £17 billion were agreed with energy firms delivering wind-generated power to homes, a report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has warned.

Under a scheme agreed by Labour leader Ed Miliband during the last Labour government, but implemented by Coalition ministers, the contracts guarantee that the power firms will be paid even if they fail to deliver energy to households.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the PAC, described the contracts as a “licence for the private sector to print money at the expense of hard-pressed consumers”.

The sharp criticism of the Government came in a report on the “elaborate” new system that licences companies to operate assets bringing wind-generated power onshore.

Energy ministers want controversial offshore wind farms to provide up to 15 per cent of the country’s electricity needs by 2020.

That will require around £8 billion of investment in infrastructure such as platforms, cables and substations.

The committee said that long-term licences awarded to energy companies so far “appear heavily skewed towards attracting investors rather than securing a good deal for consumers”.

Under the terms of the contracts the companies are guaranteed an RPI inflation linked income for 20 years regardless of how much the infrastructure is used.

The estimated returns of 10-11 per cent on the initial licences “look extremely generous given the limited risks”, the MPs said.

Ministers stand accused of failing to learn lessons from failed Private Finance Initiatives, with the committee warning that costs from the wind farm schemes will now be passed on to taxpayers.

[arista]

We Will See.


Depends on how many vote on the day

[Nedusa]

I think UKIP will win votes from disillusioned voters from both main political parties as both Labour and Conservative currently occupy the middle ground in British Politics.

It was always hoped the Lib Dems would be the third party the one that breaks the stranglehold of the other two. But recent events have probably sounded the death knell for the lib Dems and as a consequence the UKIP party could make major gains across all levels of government.

[Livia]

I thought UKIP would have been all-out campainging in my "blue" area. However, we've seen very little of them. Most Tories who have voted UKIP as a protest are slowing beginning to realise that splitting the Tory vote just lets the LibDems Labour in. They also realise that most of UKIP's best ideas are just rehashed Tory policies. UKIP is a party of bullet-points and bluster. You only have to look at their record in Europe, professing to be there to fight the corner for Britain, and then just not bothering to turn up.

Nigel Ferage is a decent speaker. What he's not is a decent question answerer, as you'll see every time he's asked what his strategy is for withdrawing from Europe and how he's going to fund it. He just doesn't know.

[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22262031

James Landale

Deputy political editor

Nigel Farage makes Tories sweat.

So I thought I would spend an evening with the UKIP leader to find out why. We had a quick chat over a pint and then I watched him perform at a public meeting in West Sussex.

Here are a few conclusions:

Nigel Farage excites his party.

The meeting at the community hall in Watersfield near Pulborough was packed. The car park spilled over; there was traffic queuing down the road. Some 250 people chose to give up a bright evening in April to come to listen to a politician.

And inside the hall there was the kind of buzz that I have not seen for some time. It was standing room only. Unlike the rather staged public meetings involving the larger party leaders, people were engaged and excited. For some, it looked like fun. All this in leafy West Sussex.

Mr Farage intrigues voters.

In a show of hands, half the audience said they were not UKIP members. Many I spoke to said they were just curious. They wanted to come and see what the fuss was about. Many were mildly unhappy with the larger political parties they had previously voted for and were intrigued to give UKIP a look. There was a lot of grey hair in the audience but not uniformly so. There were some young people and a couple of parents had brought their kids along.

Mr Farage frustrates his opponents.

Some in the audience were Tories. Several were clearly riled by UKIP's success in stealing their voters. So why were they here? "You need to know your enemy," said one.

Mr Farage rides an anti-establishment wave with ease.

His pitch is that the three larger parties are virtually indistinguishable, led by a small group of people from the same political elite "who have never done a real day's work in their lives". He talks frequently of "the madness of the political classes".

And he skilfully ties his issues together. For example, he attacks wind farms initially by arguing that they do not generate energy efficiently. But he then talks about how subsidies for green energy represent a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. And one of those is a man called Sir Reginald Sheffield who, he claims, gets £1,000 a day for putting wind farms on his land. And he just happens to be Samantha Cameron's father. And so we are back to the establishment again.

Mr Farage has successfully broadened UKIP's appeal away from Europe.

The anti-European Union rhetoric is still there - the democratic deficit, the waste, the fraud - but now it segues into other issues, particularly immigration, and particularly immigration from Bulgaria and Romania. When he declares: "Now is the time to put the interests of our working men and women first", there was strong applause.

But he also wins support by attacking the planned HS2 high speed railway and county council waste and high salaries to their officials. Interestingly, he does not mention gay marriage but it does come up unprompted.

Mr Farage poses as the everyman politician, a ordinary man who fell into politics almost accidently.

He talks about his own life as a former financier - "I worked hard in the City for 20 years up until lunch time". He does self-deprecating better than most in a way that puts him on the side of his audience. "I am surprised to see so many fruitcakes, eccentrics, cranks and gadflies here tonight," he says.

Mr Farage has stamina.

For a man with a pretty damaged back following his plane crash in 2010, with a pretty unhealthy beer-and-fags lifestyle, he has extraordinary energy. His non-stop election tour of the country would test most politicians. But somehow, for now at least, he keeps going, even if he does need a cushion for his back.

Mr Farage has a network of unofficial party offices embedded in every community in the country.

They are called pubs. Every time I interview Mr Farage, there is always a pub close by. He uses them as unofficial offices and meeting places.

But more importantly he says: "every pub is a parliament". Pubs are where people talk and the spread the word. And for many, the word is UKIP. Food for thought perhaps for other parties obsessing about how best to use twitter and other forms of social media to get their message to the voters.

My conclusion:

Mr Farage's pitch is attractive to voters. "Stop moaning about the News at Ten and say you are going to do something about it," he says. "Give us a couple of bob. Put up a sign in your window. Bore your friends into submission."

And he is not without ambition. "I don't know what is going to happen in May, whether it will be a large dent of a huge explosion."

But he explicitly says it should be seen as a "dress rehearsal" for next year's European elections. "I believe we have the opportunity to win those elections across the entire UK and cause an earthquake across British politics. We are playing for very high stakes indeed. We are on the edge of a democratic revolution. Please help make it succeed."

For me the most lasting memory of my evening with UKIP is this one thought.

In past elections Nigel Farage asked voters to "lend us your vote", a tacit acknowledgement that voting UKIP was a temporary, protest vote. Now however he doesn't say that. He now says "give us your vote".

'Ferauge' on the 'hústhing' ..... very European .....

[Livia]

Still no sign of UKIP in my area. All our posterboards are up, all out literature (except Get Out The Vote stuff) has been delivered, and just one leaflet in one division out of twelve from UKIP. I think they may have overstretched themselves. My area is almost completely blue with a few tinges of yellow. Just ripe for UKIP, and yet... nothing.

[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21894316

George Osborne is not the only one looking to Canada for salvation; Nigel Farage is too.

But while the chancellor has merely hired a Canadian financier to run the Bank of England, the leader of UKIP is seeking to emulate a political revolution that swept the country in the 1990s.

You may remember the Canadian Reform Party. They were the populist, right-of-centre, small state, low tax, anglophone party that came from nowhere in 1993 to win 52 seats in Canada's federal parliament.

Reform routed the Conservative Party - which was left with just two seats - and soon became the official opposition. For years the right in Canada were split and the Liberal Party flourished until eventually Reform and its successors merged with the Conservatives.

Last week the UKIP leader travelled to Ottawa to meet the founder of Reform, Preston Manning, to find out how he did it, how a small, insurgent, west coast party took on the political establishment in the east of Canada and won.

Mr Farage shared a platform with John Howard, the former Australian prime minister, before an audience of 1,000 people at a conference run by Mr Manning's political foundation.

This is what Mr Farage told me he had learned:

1. The by-election that Reform won in 1989 was crucial in convincing voters that a vote for them was not as wasted vote. Expect UKIP to throw everything at its next chance for a seat in Parliament.

2. Reform had, he says, a good slogan - "A common sense revolution" - that reflected Reform's anti-establishment, blue collar agenda. Expect a similar slogan from UKIP in this summer's local elections.

3. Reform had a foundation, an organisation that promoted its views and carried out research. "There is a big gap in UKIP's armoury and that is a foundation," Farage says. "Margaret Thatcher had the IEA. We need a UKIP-friendly think tank."

4. Reform's greatest influence came in changing the Conservative Party with which it ultimately merged, in what Mr Farage, as a former City man, describes as a "reverse takeover". No one can ever say that UKIP's leader lacks ambition; he is clearly aiming high and long. "Doing a deal with the Conservatives is not uppermost on our agenda," he says. "It is not something I would consider until after the next election." But the idea has clearly crossed his mind.

Key fact: Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister of Canada, was first elected to the Canadian parliament in 1993. As a young MP for the Reform party.

Interesting .....

[Livia]

"Expect a similar slogan from UKIP in this summer's local elections."
The election is one week today. He's leaving it a bit late to release anything with a slogan on it. And anyway, again... these are local elections. They're being fought on local issues.

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Livia

"Expect a similar slogan from UKIP in this summer's local elections."
The election is one week today. He's leaving it a bit late to release anything with a slogan on it. And anyway, again... these are local elections. They're being fought on local issues.

My apologies - I should have included a publication date for that article - I didn't check - it's 22 March 2013 - UKIP have adopted "A Common Sense Approach To Immigration" as ONE of their slogans.....

[Livia]

Oh right, thanks Omah. Have you had a lot of UKIP activity in your area? We're all a bit amazed... everywhere we thought they would target they've just not shown up. Some areas have UKIP candidates standing but no one but the Conservatives seem to be canvassing.

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Livia

Oh right, thanks Omah. Have you had a lot of UKIP activity in your area? We're all a bit amazed... everywhere we thought they would target they've just not shown up. Some areas have UKIP candidates standing but no one but the Conservatives seem to be canvassing.

Yes we have a candidate, but we've had no calls, no literature and there's no candidate profile on the internet .....

[Livia]

Strange... I thought UKIP were going to try to capitalise on their by-election success.