Politics

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Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage

 

One of the most unedifying spectacles in recent times has been the scandalous smear campaign conducted by the chattering classes against Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party, in the run up to today’s Local and European Elections. Farage predicted this would happen. As UKIP’s message begins to resonate with an increasing number of the electorate, it was inevitable the establishment would gang up on them sooner rather than later, borne out of a mixture of ill-concealed fear and loathing. But if I may offer a note of caution to David Cameron and Ed Milliband, it’s this. Loathing views that are increasingly held by the people you’re asking to vote you into office, might not be the smartest tactic. Same goes for selling newspapers and broadcasting news programmes too. These are your potential customers you’re bad-mouthing.

The level of scurrilous accusation, name-calling, muck-raking, mud-slinging and scaremongering that has gone on these last two weeks, as mainstream parties and their cronies in the press and at the BBC finally woke up to UKIP’s surging popularity, has taken the level of political discourse in this country to new depths. The almost forensic level of interrogation the party and its members have been subjected to, unprecedented among all the other parties, has actually made me ashamed of our so called free press. Completely biased, and grinding a shameless axe with every key-stroke, one hack after another has been queuing up to try and put the boot in, to dig up some sordid fact, make a grubby allegation, to see if they could make something ‘stick’. Anything. The way Nigel Farage has remained above it all, continuing to talk about real policy issues in the face of some gutter journalism, does him great credit. He emerged the only one sounding like a grown-up in an increasingly childish debate. And you know something else? Many voters like myself who resent being treated like children, or lectured to by prigs who think they have a monopoly on being right, are becoming more confirmed in our conviction that voting for UKIP is the right thing to do. The more this ‘Loony liberal lynch-mob’ (as Jeremy Clarkson recently referred to them) tries to tell me how I should think and speak and act, the more they drive me in the other direction. I like Nigel Farage. He’s a maverick. A rebel. He speaks his mind, talking the kind of common sense that the man and woman on the street understand. The kind of sense they’d almost forgotten politicians used once to speak, in this age of spin and sound-bite and fudge. Most worryingly of all for them, he’s got in spades the two qualities they most lack. Charisma, and gravitas. And I’ll be voting for him and be damned what they think.

I’ll be voting UKIP later today for two main reasons – Europe, and political disaffection. Firstly, I abhor the EU. I think it’s become a bloated bureaucratic monster that eats £billions of money each year that we haven’t got. We pour literally £millions into its mouth every day, as a net contributor, and seem to get mostly trouble back. This ultimate ‘big brother’ organisation is a far cry from the ‘Common Market’ of trading nations we joined forty years ago. This de-facto European Super-state which won’t be satisfied until it has its own army and own exchequer (god help us) into which it will pour your taxes, now sticks its nose into just about every aspect of life of every member country. It meddles with our laws and customs, telling us what we can and can’t do, over-ruling our own judges and overturning home-grown laws and customs that have evolved over thousands of years and are rooted in who we are as a nation and a people. The EU doesn’t give a damn. If it wants to make a law, it makes it, and imposes it on us whether we like it or not. Who voted for these faceless politicians and lawmakers who over-rule our nationally elected ones? I certainly didn’t. Do you know any? I’m sure I don’t know the name of a single foreign MEP. Yet these people now have more power over our lives than the democratically elected MPs we vote into our own Government. It’s completely insane.

As for the myth often put about by shameless Europhiles that leaving the EU will be disastrous for British business, it’s a blatant lie, little better than an unsubstantiated scare story, Nick Clegg’s favourite line. Some of the richest nations in Europe are thriving precisely because they chose to remain out of the EU. Both Norway and Switzerland (the WORLD’S fourth and eighth richest countries in terms of GDP) have been booming in their ‘splendid isolation’. Britain has always enjoyed, and always will, good trading links with many nations, which will continue whether we are in the EU or out. If we continue to produce popular British products and services that are in demand at competitive prices, other nations will continue to buy them. In fact, being in the EU actually harms our ability to trade oversees because it bars us from negotiating our own global trade agreements. The Americas, Asia, China, Africa, Russia and the Far East are all massive growing markets on which we should be increasingly focusing our attention, instead of worrying about paying protection money to some cosy cartel closer to home, as many Europhiles seem obsessed with.

My second reason for voting UKIP today is one of political disaffection. I’m just about done with most of the mainstream UK parties and the insipid, shallow, gutless, greedy, corrupt excuse for politicians who run them. Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, I’ve had them, up to here. This feeling has crept up on me in middle age as I’ve witnessed the gradual marginalisation, and eventual dying out, of a once widespread breed of courageous ‘conviction politician’ from the political landscape. People of the stamp of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn who, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, at least stood for something. John Major seemed a decent man, but every Prime Minister and leader of the other mainstream parties since then has seemed to stand for nothing more substantial than the goal of office itself. And they’d sell their grannies to get elected. When it comes to policies, beliefs, vision, you can’t put a cigarette paper between them. They’ve become indistinguishable. Driven by no higher ideal than their ambition for office, they try to be all things to all people, and end up being none, as they drift increasingly to the centre, merging into a grey, inoffensive, ineffective cloud of nothingness. Of absence. Our politicians aren’t there for us, any more. They’re there for THEM. They’ve sold off the family silver to private businesses that most of them will end up on the boards of. And as we’ve recently discovered, while these paragons of virtue are swift to condemn anyone else for stepping out of line, most of them have had their hands in the till the whole time, as the expenses scandals that are STILL being exposed, are demonstrating. Anyone else would have been sent to prison and been given a criminal record, yet most of them get away with it, simply because they made up their own rules. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as a famous person once said.

No wonder a growing number of British people are getting more and more disillusioned with mainstream politics. More disenchanted. More disappointed. To watch how the Lib Dems finally sold out on their beliefs at the last election, prostituting themselves as the Tories’ bitches just for the mere whiff of power (not even the whiff, but the illusion of a whiff, as it proved) was the final straw for me. Nick Clegg? Integrity my arse.

The only thing most politicians seem half-competent at doing these days is posturing on the world stage, getting us embroiled in foreign wars that are none of our business. Wars we no longer have the armed forces to prosecute properly, because they’ve all been sold to the scrap yard. Wars that are costing £billions in revenue, and the lives of brave servicemen and women. Those lucky enough to return safely home are invariably treated like dirt, or made redundant, by the Whitehall bean counters who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

All I know is this, you might as well blindfold me and ask me to pin a tail on a donkey, as ask me to choose between the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats at today’s elections. None of them represent me, or the things I care about, any more. They’ve ALL sold their traditional supporters down the line, along with their beliefs. Rubbish UKIP as much as you like, but at least they stand for something. They may not yet have MPs or be credible as a governing party in the immediate future, but they sure as hell can help change the debate, and bring an end to the political engineering that has been selling this country down the line for decades. For me and an increasing number of British voters, UKIP are the only party who seem to be standing up for some very important things we care about. Wanting to protect our jobs, our safety, our culture, laws and traditions, isn’t a racist agenda, as a few on the fascist-left have claimed. It’s a patriotic agenda. A dirty word for the lynch mob perhaps, but not for me. For too long we’ve let shadowy spin-doctors and corrupt politicians sell us down the line, at home and in the EU. Today’s our chance to stand up to them, and be counted. Our chance to start taking some of that democratic power back into our own hands. If anyone feels like me but hasn’t voted yet today, go out and put a tick in the box for UKIP now. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Farage. I’m putting my coat on right now and taking a stroll down to the Polling Station. If you don’t, or if you vote for one of the other mainstream parties, you’ll continue to get more of the same – waste, corruption, deceit, posturing, mis-management, war, and greed. Blair, Cameron, and Clegg. Need I say more?

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MP’s porn habit gives Cameron a blow

Will British MP’s online sex habit block David Cameron’s porn filter?

In July 2013 Britain’s much beloved Prime Minister David Cameron, possessed like Tony Bliar before him of his own saint-like infallibility, announced to the country that up to 95% of households in the UK would have pornography blocked by their internet provider, unless they actively chose to receive it.  Online porn was “corroding childhood” and “distorting” children’s understanding of sex and relationships, he argued.

Personally I beg to differ. Porn is no more provably corrosive than war movies or computer games, in my humble o. Your average guy is about as likely to go and whack off over his girlfriend’s nose after watching a pop-shot as he is to mow-down the school lollypop lady after playing Grand Theft Auto. Of course the nutters and freaks in society will always be with us. The evil, mad minority. They will do their crazy shit regardless of how careful we are. Bad is bad. But most normal people know where the boundaries lie between the harmless fun that can be had blowing zombies’ heads off on a computer screen and what is acceptable in real life. Same with porn. Lay off, Dave.

Cameron’s Big Brother proposal was described at the time by one of his own advisers, in less than charitable terms, as ‘absolutely ridiculous’. Quite how ridiculous became apparent this week when official figures were released revealing that over 300,000 attempts were made during the past year to access pornographic websites from the Houses of Parliament. That’s a lot of masturbation we’re paying for. No wonder they’re fiddling their expenses.

Following the shameful outing of thieving MPs during the great Expenses Scandal of 2009, is this but the latest example of our politicians (those paragons of moral rectitude) shooting themselves in the face, in terms of their standing with the public? If it does nothing else it illustrates perfectly the double standards often talked about sex, particularly the sex industry.

In public no one has a good word to say about porn. Yet in private every man and his dog seem to be logging on to get their daily fix. This can be quite literally, as in the Houses of Parliament, or via the numerous pornographic fantasies we indulge during the course of an average day. I’m talking those innocent reveries involving seduction of the boss’s smoking hot p.a. in the disabled toilet after a drunken office party, the shameful quickie with your best friends’ girlfriend in the back of the car, the leisurely 69 enjoyed in your neighbour’s bed while he’s away on business. Not forgetting the random strangers we pass every day on the street and take home to deflower in our head-beds. God forbid our families and friends ever find a way to download these thoughts, discovering the guilty secrets we harbour inside. The filthy fantasies we all entertain, morning, noon and night.

I’ve written about this at length in Sex on the Brain, in which I explore the moral confusion surrounding our public and private sex lives. Who hasn’t, at some time in their past, indulged in a bit of light rape fantasy, either as victim or perpetrator? Okay, that’s a loaded word. Let’s say an S&M fantasy, a bit of the old tying up and gagging. A playful slap. Restraint. Yeah that one. Bondage, domination, mild coercion. Now hands up who would actually go out and do any of that stuff for real. Not many, right? But the fact is that most of us carry a whole bunch of this kinky stuff around in our heads that we’d never admit to, or do in real life. And if truth be known, none of us thinks we’re doing anything wrong. It doesn’t feel weird or sordid when we have these sexy thoughts. We don’t feel like depraved monsters. Because we aren’t. We’re just normal, doing what comes natural. Fantasising with our imaginations, filling in the gaps life can’t fill. Dreaming we’re rich and powerful like the movie stars we can never become. Getting the girl we know we’ll never have. Life puts all that beauty in the shop window and says no, you can’t have any.

Sexual desire is something we all experience, almost every day of our lives. It’s as ubiquitous as our appetites for food and drink, as necessary for our survival. That’s why the porn industry exists. Like the food industry. It’s there to market its product to us as desirably as possible, and make money out of doing so. It sells because it fulfils a deeply basic need. If nobody wanted it, it wouldn’t exist. Yet it’s become one of the most lucrative industries on the planet. So why does porn get such a bad press?

No one seems to have a problem with movies that portray graphic slaughter, murder and mutilation. Yet the minute a penis sticks its head into shot the world is outraged. One glimpse of pussy and squeamish politicians swarm from the woodwork howling in protest. I have a theory why this is, and it’s this. Religion. Our prudishness about sex is purely and simply down to our puritanical past. Surprising as it may be in our thoroughly secular modern world with all the knowledge science has placed at our fingertips about the universe and the evolution of humans in it, we are still largely ruled by bible-thumping leaders who have no problems firing cruises missile into cities full of millions, yet who, burning up with righteous indignation, would happily send a hooker to prison for the sin of having sex with another human being. I mean, it’s one thing to go off and do something manly like slay a nation of non-believers in battle, but doing a bit of furtive begetting on the side with your neighbour’s wife is completely beyond the pale. Stoning is too good a punishment for such sinners. Fire and brimstone awaits. If you’re watching porn, better prepare yourself for hell and damnation.

To such believers I would say this. Are you sure? Really sure? About what you do? What you believe? Your certainty about what’s right and wrong? For everyone? Who says? Prove it. Do you even know if your own spouse is faithful, for instance? I mean in body and soul? Remember Billy the BJ Clinton? JFK? Jeffery Archer? Edwina Currie? It’s a long list, and it’s a lonely existence being the spouse of a world leader. All those weeks you’re away from them on foreign visits, conferences, summits, not knowing what you’re up to. Those young, tall, fit bodyguards who have to stay behind and look after them. The gym-hardened bodies under the wide-shouldered suits. The testosterone-fuelled hardware packed inside. The holstered pistols with their capacity to sprout lead. The slabbed pecs. The karate knowledge. That’s a lot for a woman’s imagination to go to work on, during those long lonely evenings at home alone, when she feels horny and the kids are in bed. You think she only gets the urge when you’re around? What spaceship did you fly in on buddy? She may not be to everyone’s taste but personally I find Samantha Cameron’s innocent doe-eyed look a bit of a turn on. Especially with those figure-hugging business suits she wears. The pretend-demure flat shoes. The coy glances. For what it’s worth, yeah, I would. Is that a crime? If so I plead guilty. As for Michelle Obama, well, frankly most guys I speak to think she’s got enough body to take on three men at a time. You know something? I might just put me a little porn movie on tonight after dinner. Maybe download a few news bulletins online, about the Obamas and the Camerons. Run them together in my head, then go to work.

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