Ukip

We might this week have seen some scrutiny of UKIP candidates, but so far we’ve seen little scrutiny of their policies. But the better the party does, the more policy scrutiny it will start to come under. This is what makes UKIP’s changing tax policy so interesting. It tells us a lot about where Nigel Farage is trying to take his party. At the last election, UKIP was committed to a flat tax. There is an intellectual purity to this idea – see Allister Heath’s book on the subject – but it is hard to sell to voters as it would result in ‘the rich’ paying a lower rate. After

David Cameron’s refusal to say ‘UKIP’ on the radio today was rather entertaining, but it does highlight a strange problem that the Conservative party has brought upon itself for these local elections. Here’s his exchange with Martha Kearney, which you can listen to below, from 8m 49s in: Cameron: ‘My role is to get around the country and I’ve enjoyed doing it in the last couple of weeks, to get around the country and to talk about the government’s policies, local policies, what the Conservatives are doing. I think there is a real appetite for…’ Kearney: Is it a strategy, not to say UKIP? Cameron: No, not at all, it’s

Dirty tricks against UKIP by the establishment are not a new phenomenon. Though in recent days the Conservative party have been found engaging in them, there are far more striking examples from the recent past. On 25 May 2001 the Spectator published a piece by Norman Tebbit that deserves to be far better known.  Tebbit recounts the tale of two serving or former British intelligence agents who infiltrated first Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum Party and then UKIP. Tebbit gives examples of how UKIP’s efforts were derailed during the period in which these agents were inside the party. It is important to stress before directing you to the Tebbit piece below that

Kenneth Clarke has always seemed, to me, a decent sort. By far the most likeable and least lordly and arrogant of those Euro-wanking wets who plagued Thatcher and, later, Major. Nonetheless, he is always wrong. About everything. If you are ever in doubt about where you should stand on a particular issue, find out what Ken’s thinking and immediately think the opposite. You won’t go far wrong. And so it is with his branding of UKIP as ‘closet racists’. It seems almost superfluous to say it, but of course it is not racist to feel a bit uneasy about the levels of immigrations we have endured in this country of

If UKIP thinks it is the victim of a smear campaign in the run-up to the local elections, then it needs to have a little think about whether the chief smearers hail from UKIP HQ itself, or CCHQ, as Paul Nuttall claimed they did when he appeared on the Sunday Politics earlier today. This evening, one of its internal smearers took to the airwaves to remind voters of a few other interesting aspects of the party’s character. Godfrey Bloom, the party’s MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, gave John Pienaar an interview on his show this evening in which he reiterated his belief that businesses shouldn’t employ women of a

Nigel Farage was on Question Time again last night. This was hardly unusual, but what was interesting was that the UKIP leader U-turned on one of his flagship policies. When he spoke at a press lunch on Tuesday, Farage accepted that UKIP’s flat tax policy was ‘incomplete’, but that UKIP’s aspiration was to have taxes as low as possible. Last night, asked whether he still wanted a flat tax, he said: ‘It was in 2010, but it isn’t now, and don’t tell me about manifestos: you haven’t even got one!’ Simon Hughes pressed him on what his tax policy was, to which he replied: ‘We will have no tax on

Talk of a by-election in Portsmouth South has been growing, fuelled by allegations against MP Mike Hancock. And, in a speech to the parliamentary press gallery lunch yesterday, Nigel Farage claimed Ukip could win it. The reasoning is simple: Ukip are on the up, and they came within 2,000 votes and 5 percentage points of a win in Eastleigh, so surely they can go over the top in another Hampshire by-election where the Lib Dem incumbent has had to step down amidst a scandal. Of course Ukip could win — but its chances may not be as high as that reasoning suggests. Indeed, Farage himself seems to think his party

Nigel Farage joined lobby journalists in Parliament for lunch today. Like many of his hustings, it was a box office event, and indeed like many of those campaign trail appearances, he made plenty of the same jokes that those who follow him about have heard many times before such as the one about being married to a foreigner, and about the problem with the Westminster bubble: ‘They look the same, they sound the same, God! They’re dull! I mean, they are not much fun to be with.’ Farage, of course, is fun to be with. He was sporting a red rose for St George’s Day, and decided to regale journalists

It’s not a surprise that since the eurozone crisis began, support for eurosceptic parties has risen across the European Union. But behind the noise from leaders such as Nigel Farage and Beppe Grillo, how much of an impact will they have, particularly on next year’s European elections? The party that stole the headlines in the past few weeks was Alternative für Deutschland, but compared with the rest of Europe, Germany is late to the party when it comes to eurosceptic movements. AfD belatedly provides the country with its own anti-hero party. Just 3 per cent of Germans currently intend to vote for AfD according to the latest poll, but another

How seriously should we take Nigel Farage? He’s an exceptional politician but when UKIP did so well at Eastleigh I suspected they may have peaked. I went along to test my theory at a UKIP rally in Worcester last week, expecting to find a few hardline Eurosceptics huddled together in a room and I wondered how the audience would compare with that of the old BNP rallies. What I found was quite different: it was mobbed, Farage spoke very well – speaking about housing, unemployment, school places – essentially, UKIP is trying to reposition as a patriotic party of the working class. I write about this in my Telegraph column

The only Tory more Tiggerish than Michael Fabricant is the party chairman Grant Shapps, and perhaps that’s why the two work so well together on campaigns. But even the jovial Conservative vice chairman is exhausted after the full-throttle Eastleigh by-election. Fabricant was shouted at in the street by a voter who, thinking he was a Lib Dem, harangued him about Chris Huhne, and one voter placed notice on a wheelie bin telling campaigners to dump their leaflets there, not through the letterbox. But in spite of that, from the glowing way he describes the campaign, you might be forgiven for thinking the Tories won it, or at least came second,

Who are all these folk jumping on Nigel Farage’s bandwagon? Ukip — which received just 3 per cent of the vote in 2010 — is now averaging about 11 per cent in the polls. Its rise has fuelled all sorts of speculation about where its supporters are coming from and why they’re turning to the party. Today, YouGov have thrown a bit of data into that speculation. They’ve combined the results of all their February polls, which sampled 28,944 people including 2,788 who said they’d vote Ukip. The results are a mixture of the expected and the surprising. First, the expected: most of them voted Tory in 2010 — 60