Ukip

You don’t mean a thing if your seat ain’t a swing. As this saying goes, political campaigning in safe seats is usually a thankless task — unless you are Nigel Farage. Last week, he managed to pack out The Sage concert hall in ultra-safe Labour Gateshead for Ukip’s biggest ever-public meeting. By going back to the simple idea of touring the country (even the sceptical parts) and giving speeches, Farage is appealing directly to the voters left behind by the other parties. He told the 1,200-odd assembled crowd of my fellow Geordies: ‘We are here to say that Labour used to stand up for the people in this region, but

Despite a week of rather bruising media coverage, Ukip has moved into first place for next month’s European elections. For the second time this year, Nigel Farage’s party has overtaken Labour. According to poll by YouGov for the Sunday Times, just three points currently separate Labour and Ukip — still touching the margin of error: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/aVjwf/index.html”] Although Labour and Ukip may continue to swap places over the next few weeks, today’s poll also suggests Ukip voters are more likely to turn out on polling day. When asked from 0 to 10 the likelihood of turning out on polling day, 48 per cent said they definitely would — 34 per

At the start of the year, some of the air seemed to have gone out of the Ukip balloon. The party’s warnings about the scale of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to Britain hadn’t been borne out by events. But the debates with Nick Clegg enabled Nigel Farage to get his momentum back. In those debates, Clegg was too passive in the first one and then over-compensated in the second with the result that he ended up losing both of them. Clegg’s decision to not engage with Farage in the first debate meant that he missed his best chance to get under the Ukip leader’s skin. Strikingly, Farage admits to Decca

More trouble for Ukip this morning: it seems that yet another party official has some colourful views about ‘people of color’. David Challice, who is understood to work at Ukip HQ, once suggested that ‘cash-strapped Moslems’ should have multiple wives. In a bizarre newspaper advert placed in the Exeter Express and Echo in 2009, Challice said that he had found a ‘money spinner’ for ‘any cash-strapped Moslems’. He recommended that they should have ‘multiple wives in order to claim an extra £33.65 per wife in benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions’. An outcry followed, with Challice accused of racism. Challice later denied that the advert was racist; arguing that ‘…the mention of Islam and

Ukip is the Common Sense party that listens to ordinary people. So says Lizzy Vaid, who appears on the party’s European elections manifesto as someone thrilled that Nigel Farage’s party is ‘listening to what people want’. She should know: although Vaid looks like she’s an ordinary voter on the street, she is in fact Nigel Farage’s assistant and Ukip’s events manager. Well, it is Common Sense to vote for the party that employs you, after all.

Nigel Farage’s strategy for winning the European Elections is based around winning over blue collar workers who normally vote Labour. Ukip believe that they can use immigration as a battering ram to break through Labour’s defences in the north. One of the party’s campaign billboards unveiled last night simply says, ’26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after’. (I suspect that Ukip will welcome the controversy these posters are attracting because it will help amplify their message) Ukip’s argument is that it is the only party that can actually do something about immigration. Its logic is simple: as long as Britain is in

This morning’s edition of The Times reported (£) that Nigel Farage could face a probe into claims, apparently lodged by a former UKIP official, that nearly £60,000 of ‘missing’ European Union funds have been paid into his personal bank account. Mr Farage denies the allegations in strong terms and has invited EU officials to examine his expenses. This is not the first time that UKIP has faced allegations about fiddled expenses. Yet none of the mud has stuck. There are two reasons for this: nothing has been proved and few people appear to understand how the European parliamentary expenses system works (there is, for example, a less than clear distinction between

Who and what represents Britain today? Our country has changed significantly in the last few decades; but, a batch of YouGov polls published this weekend suggest that traditional notions of what is British remain remarkably unchanged. The public was asked to choose which prominent people they think reflect Britain today. Members of the Royal Family occupy four of the top five positions — the Queen, Prince William, Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge — while fifth spot is represented by the nouveau riche Richard Branson: David Beckham is the only mega celebrity to have made this list. There are plenty of actors present (Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Joanna Lumley),