[Telegraph] The results aren't all in yet, but it's obvious what's happening: Ukip are the moral victors in yesterday's local elections. A party that was just two men on a golf cart ten years ago has placed second in South Shields and won county seats across the country. A few early observations:
1. The Lib Dems are at risk of becoming politically irrelevant. In South Shields they came seventh, a pathetic result for a governing party.
2. Ukip have helped to smash the BNP. By providing a non-racist Right-wing alternative, they reduced the BNP's result in the Spalding East and Moulton ward in Lincolnshire from 20.5 per cent in 2009 to just 3.9 per cent today.
3. Labour did well but its gains were only modest. It held South Shields (the kind of seat that a donkey in a red rosette could win) but on a lower majority. Miliband is not popular in southern England and that will prove a problem in 2015.
4. Dan Hannan's dream of a Ukip/Conservative coalition might actually happen in Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire -- a fascinating laboratory for any future pact.
But the big story is the rise and rise of a tiny party once derided by its critics as full of fruitcakes and closet racists. It probably won't gain any parliamentary seats in 2015: the electoral system is stacked against it and while Ukip's support is broad, it isn't deep enough in individual constituencies to win anything. This doesn't seem to trouble Nigel Farage who says that he sees his party as playing the same role that the SDP played in the 1980s -- driving the political agenda in his preferred direction. That statement could cause some controversy within Ukip because the party is split over whether it's a pressure group or a serious candidate for government. Farage is correct that its best shot at relevance comes from posing as the former, but the taste of victory in this round of elections could delude many activists that they stand a chance of becoming the latter. Success breeds success, but also hyperbole and vanity.
Either way, there's no escaping that Ukip has exploited the anger of a great many people. They're angry at the slow pace of reform coming from the Coalition, its prioritising of social liberalism over social justice, its failure to cut taxes for the middle class, its ring-fenced foreign aid budget and its poor economic record. The perpetually furious could have turned to Labour, but memories are long of how they spent all the money in the Noughties, and contempt is deep for Mr Miliband's student union style of politics. Many voters have reached the conclusion that the philosophical division between the parties is so narrow, that incompetence is so ubiquitous, that the personalities are so uniformly unreal that there really is no difference between the three main parties. Under those circumstances, why not vote for the anarchist fringe? Put a bit of stick about, as Francis Urquhart would say.
And then there's the personality factor. Cameron, Clegg and Miliband are all of a type: middle class, white, male, middle aged, middle-of-the-road, posh, suited and largely lacking in real world experience. By contrast, all the scandals surrounding Ukip this week only confirmed its accidental authenticity -- its refusal or inability to be anything other than crude, rude and painfully honest. It is also fun. Humour is very important in Anglosphere politics. For the English, wit is the way that we communicate fury, intelligence and love. There's something funny, and thus irresistible, about Farage with a cigarette in hand, hat on head, charming the voters with his market banter.
Yesterday, people voted Ukip partly out of anger and partly for a laugh. It's a very British revolution.
Update: Anthony Watts of wattsupwiththat.com has a nice little roundup of reports that Ukip is decidedly not in the Green (Britain-watermelon) camp. A nice bonus that will no doubt save the British taxpayer billions of pounds (or euros, or both).
#2
Many voters have reached the conclusion that the philosophical division between the parties is so narrow, that incompetence is so ubiquitous, that the personalities are so uniformly unreal that there really is no difference between the three main parties.
In 2012, President Obama famously won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mitt Romney's 27 percent. If all other factors remained the same, how large a percentage of the Hispanic vote would Romney have had to win to capture the White House?
But what if Romney had been able to reach a mind-blowing 70 percent of the Hispanic vote? Surely that would have meant victory, right? No, it wouldn't. Romney still would have lost, although by the narrowest of electoral margins, 270 to 268. (Under that scenario, Romney would have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College; he could have racked up huge numbers of Hispanic votes in California, New York and Texas, for example, and not changed the results in those states.)
The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.
#1
You know, maybe, if you put the conservative at the head of the ticket rather than as an after thought to appease your base outside of the Beltway, you might actually attract far more of your base.
#2
I think Romney would have won (probably did, given an honest vote count) once he tromped B.O. in the first debate. Remember, he held up Champ's suit and shook it real hard and and the entire country saw that it was empty. But after that Willard fell back into safe mode. Rather than tearing him up again in the last two debates he recited his talking points and bored the people who were waiting to jump up and down and cheer.
Had he done that, and he has the intelligence to do it, the enthusiasm would have carried through to overcome the 115 percent turnout in urban areas; the unusually large turnouts in the counties, made up of people we've never seen before or will again until next election; the unceasing stream of lies and half-truths saturating Florida especially, probably all the swing state; and his hilarious claim to have somehow created X million jobs in the course of his administration while unemployment somehow remained at the very same level it had been when he started.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/04/2013 11:35 Comments ||
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#3
Lots of fraud. No question. But Champ still got lower counts than he did in 2008. Romney couldn't turn out his own voters, mostly because they weren't his. They were Republican / Conservatives, and they were not excited about a guy who indistinguishable from Champ on so many issues.
Posted by: Titus Ulans4144 ||
05/04/2013 12:59 Comments ||
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#4
....a guy who indistinguishable from Champ on so many issues. Posted by: Titus Ulans4144
Your logic fails me Titus. I blame the "free stuff".
[Jpost] While Tehran is dissatisfied with the cease-fire between Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, and Israel, Cairo is doing its utmost to reinforce the calm.
Egypt and Iran are locked in a power struggle over their influence and conflicting aims in the Gazoo Strip, and Egypt appears to have the upper hand.
While Tehran is dissatisfied with the relative durability of the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, and is pushing Paleostinian armed factions to violate the truce, Cairo is doing its utmost to reinforce the calm, which it views as serving Egypt's national interest.
Egypt is actively neutralizing attempts by Iran to send representatives and arms to Gazoo.
Meanwhile, ...back at the shattered spaceship, Fffflirgoll the Arcturan slithered stealthily toward the control room, where the humans had barricaded themselves... Qatar has invested massively in the Gazoo Strip, donating $452 million for construction works. The Gulf state's investment is having a moderating yet growing influence on Gazoo as it helps the Hamas regime consolidate its illusory sovereignty and economy.
As a result, tensions between Shi'ite Iran and Sunni Egypt, Qatar and Turkey -- which is also seeking an influence in the Strip -- are on the rise.
It's safe to assume that Hamas will do everything it can to maintain the truce, so that it can continue its efforts to deepen its foundations as the rulers of an Islamist enclave, wedged between Egypt and Israel.
Hamas is enjoying its new-found legitimacy in the Arab world and would like to avoid an Israeli air campaign or ground offensive. Its efforts are not always successful, but they are ongoing.
Hamas's armed wing, Izzadin Kassam, is disciplined and obeying the cease-fire orders.
Proof can be found in the lack of response to Israel's targeted air strike this week on a Salafi-jihadi weapons manufacturer who was linked to a rocket attack on Eilat from Sinai last month.
Hamas is seeking economic independence in Gazoo, while dealing with acute energy and water crises and inflation in the housing market.
Gazoo now buys all of its fuel from Egypt -- some 30 million liters a month. Its sole power plant has priority as a recipient of the fuel, a product of Hamas's efforts to reduce cuts in the electricity supply.
Qatar donated 30 million liters of fuel to Gazoo last year.
But complications in its delivery from Egypt means that only 10 million liters have arrived in Gazoo.
The regime is also levying taxes across the Strip to raise funds for itself.
Meanwhile, ...back at the shattered spaceship, Fffflirgoll the Arcturan slithered stealthily toward the control room, where the humans had barricaded themselves... Hamas is moving forward tentatively with an Islamization program.
Changes include police shaving the heads of youths with Western hairstyles, and passing into law the segregation of boys and girls in schools.
But Hamas is afraid of moving too fast or drastically and upsetting its population.
It appears as if Hamas's ambitions to solidify itself as a regime will act as a restraining force on its jihadi ideology, although unexpected incidents could remove that restraint at any time.
The imminent demise of the regime of Bashar Assad has been announced on numerous occasions over the last two years of civil war in Syria. But the regime has held on. Despite some advances by rebels in the south of the country in the early months of 2013, Assad shows no signs of cracking.
Indeed, in the last few weeks, the momentum of the fighting has shifted somewhat. Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance. The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt itself to the changing demands of the war.
#1
Who has the will now.The rebels are from many countries. What homeland is theirs. What profit is to be gained. Throw more money but don't send our troops. I think the way out is only to work a deal with Putin. Give him what he wants for Russia and he will give up Assad. I think Obama has tried that. He failed because he dithered too long in my opinion. As the tide has turned so has the EU and US fortunes. I think the Kurds may yet do well also the Christians. Turkey will fair poorly. They backed the wrong horse. They haven't done much correctly for some time. The odd man out.
#2
Dale, DON'T throw money at them. If the Chinese want to give their money directly fine but let's not launder it for them.
I'm not sure that getting rid of Assad is in our best interest, given the alternatives.
Let the Kurds claw out a homeland from Syria, Iraq and Turkey if they can. Hope the "rebels" decimate the Hezzies but I don't think an AlQ based state is an improvement and might be a real disaster.
#3
It is imperative we keep some sort of fairness in play here. Say 45 45 10 on the cash and money side.
If one side gets desperate, well, then's the time to arc-light! (glug) then lay low again.
#7
bigjim:
"For once, just once, why don't we stay the f*ck out of what doesn't concern us."
If it weren't for the weapons that might go astray, that could be the smart approach. Not just chemical weapons, but also MANPADs and such.
Think Libya times 10.
In Star Trek lore, the Borg was a collective of servile drone operatives that sought to assimilate other species into its "hive mind." Personally I prefer "goodlife",but VDH wields a mean allegory.
Something akin to that creepy groupthink arose when the Obama administration took power and sought to reformulate the so-called war on terror. Almost immediately, Obama operatives suggested that radical Islamists were no more likely than any other group to commit acts of terrorism. In fact, the very idea of terrorism -- not to mention a war against it -- was supposedly a Bush-administration construct unfairly aimed at Muslims.
The result has been that ever since 2009, various members of the administration collective have sought, each according to his station, to bring us into the network of not associating Islamism with terror. And the Borg have certainly been diverse, as all sorts of political appointees, opportunists, and career officers plugged themselves into the hive. Obama may have killed ten times as many suspected Muslim terrorists by drone as did Bush, but we were to assume that the fact that there were no Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist victims of Hellfire missiles was irrelevant.
Various members of the Defense Department soon were plugged into the new narrative of "this administration" and, as good automatons, were eager to spread the Borg directives. A memo sent by the Defense Department's security office to Pentagon staff members read, "This administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror.' Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'"
The hive thinking quickly spread throughout the Obama administration's intelligence apparat, as even those who once worked for George W. Bush and, in fact, had been deeply embedded in the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism efforts were drawn into the Borg -- quite willingly and for careerist reasons.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In 2012, President Obama famously won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mitt Romney's 27 percent. If all other factors remained the same, how large a percentage of the Hispanic vote would Romney have had to win to capture the White House?
