Not Beyond Our Ken

His style may not always be to everyone's taste (nor is mine), but Ken Bell writes:

I don't know what the rest of April 2013 is going to be like, but it has been a roller-coaster up to now and the damned month isn't yet half over. It started with me as the UKIP candidate for the Pendle Central Division of Lancashire County Council and then on the 8th I was offered money to withdraw my nomination, with the implied threat that if I didn't take the bung then the party machinery would be turned against me. The fact that the party does not have a machine was something that I only discovered when it was too late to do anything about it. Never mind, we live and learn.

So sit back and let me show you around the world of minor party politics where the egos are massive and the issues trivial. I promise to make it as entertaining as I can. The basic rule for this blog is that there are no rules: you can say what you like and I will not censor you. The exception to this is if you want to use my toy to advertise your products - sorry, but that is not allowed. Other than that feel free to add whatever you wish to the debate.

The blog was set up to explain the events of the past few days, but when that is done I will keep it going to provide myself, and you I hope, with some entertainment from time to time. I am an old Labour man so for that reason I find New Labour revolting in the extreme. Thatcher and Blair had one thing in common: they both believed that people who always vote Labour could be safely ignored. In the old days a man like me could vote for the Communist Party as a protest if Labour were going too far off the rails, but that party's collapse meant that the working class was left unrepresented, so along with millions of other people I just lost interest in party politics.

Last year a neighbour asked me to help him with his claim form for Disability Living Allowance. A week or so later a friend of his then knocked on my door and asked for help with a housing benefit problem. Over the next few months a steady stream of people began to ask for help, with the result that I became a sort of one man advice office. The numbers were not great, probably no more than one or two a month, and I was happy to help people out; they are my neighbours after all.

One of these people jokingly suggested that I should be on the council, and I laughed along with the remark, but later I began to think seriously about it. I already had a small base of people that I had helped and who would, perhaps, give me a punt if I asked them nicely. I did the sums and reasoned that if their families turned out for me as well then I had the makings of a couple of hundred votes in the bag even before I did very much.

I knew very well that this was not enough to get elected so I needed a party behind me, but which one? To be honest, these days all the parties are desperate for activists as more and more people disengage from a system that only seems to represent the socially liberal, economically conservative metropolitan elite, so I reckoned that I could take my pick.

The thought of having anything to do with the Conservatives leaves me feeling in need of a bath, and their Liberal-Democrat satraps are no better, so both were out of the question. New Labour did not want my vote so it wasn't going to get it, and the British National Party probably wouldn't have me on account of my mixed race offspring. Besides, they were heading towards extinction, anyway, so only a fool would hitch his wagon to that wheezy old nag.

That left UKIP, a party dismissed as the BNP in suits, the party of fruitcakes and weirdos, but which was coming up inexorably on the rails. I decided to dig a little deeper to try and find out if they would provide an agreeable home for an old leftist, and was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

It had always struck me that the idea of staying in the European Union from a leftist position was cracked. The Tories under McMillan had been the party that first mooted the idea of Britain signing up to what became the EU in the 1960s, then it was Edward Heath's regime which took Britain in a decade later. Thatcher signed up to the single market, and today the most vociferous supporters are the Confederation of British Industry, the economic wing of Toryism.

Labour had opposed the whole idea under Hugh Gaitskell with his 1962 thousand years of history speech and it was the Communist party and Labour left that had united to campaign against Britain remaining in the organisation in the 1975 referendum. Labour is still the only major party that has ever had a full withdrawal form the EU in its election manifesto and the Communist supporting Morning Star is the only daily newspaper that has consistently opposed the whole capitalist adventure. There is nothing right-wing about opposing the European Union - quite the reverse.

The problem was that UKIP had a reputation as the voice of saloon bar fascism, but a quick trawl around my old North Manchester stamping grounds showed me that more than a few of my old political cronies and drinking partners from the 1980s had made their homes in UKIP. One bloke told me that when he had signed up he was the only member for miles around so if he wanted to turn his branch into the Petrograd Soviet, circa 1917, then that was up to him.

Very well, so UKIP was an independent political party that was united around the idea that Britain would be a better place if it left the European Union, but flexible in other areas.  That struck me as fair enough and on that basis I joined last year and that was why I agreed to run as an official party candidate in the May 2013 county council elections.

UKIP's policy structure is very idiosyncratic, with the party manifesto being little more than an uncosted collection of policies, which candidates can dip into to create a personal list of priorities for their campaigns. If elected, there is no whipping system to keep anyone in line, with each councillor being answerable only to his constituents. In other words UKIP can be seen as a vast umbrella beneath which refugee socialists from other parties can gather, to run candidates in working class districts such as Nelson, Lancashire. For their part the men of the shires can run their people in the leafy villages and so long as everyone sticks to their own areas and chooses their own goodies from the same sweetshop, then the party should hang together.

My campaign began well and by the end of the first couple of days I had already given out a dozen or so posters, with mine being the only ones seen in any Nelson house. I was already reasonably well known as the bloke who helped people fill in their benefit claim forms, so I had a mental list of contacts that I could go to and remind them of just what the Tories had in mind for them and their families. When asked what UKIP would do I could reply quite honestly that I had no idea, but that my policy was to defend them against the council pen pushers who collaborate with central government in making ordinary people's lives a misery. "If they can pay for an army of fat social work rabble then they can pay you your council tax benefit in full," was a good line that always went down well with my target audience.

Apart from that my campaign was pretty bog-standard, with the proviso that as a semi-cripple who walks with a stick and is in near constant pain, I obviously could not walk around my district and had to rely on party friends to lend a hand with the leafleting campaign. Other than that I behaved as any other candidate, and then like thousands of others I joined in the celebrations on the day that the gates of hell opened to receive Thatcher.

Which was when someone in UKIP had a brain fart of quite entertaining proportions. 

Stay tuned, folks.