Thursday, 7 November 2013

Making Plans For Nigel?

Mark Simmonds in the Member of Parliament for Boston and Skegness. He is also the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

However, he is not one of this evening's panellists on Question Time from Boston. Nor is any member of the local council. Nor is anyone from any local newspaper or other media outlet.

Instead, we may look forward to the opinion on electronic tagging of Vicky Pryce, who will of course be wearing her own electronic tag, or else will very recently have been relieved of it.

Benjamin Zephaniah will face Nigel Farage, who will be making a rare appearance on the BBC in general and on Question Time in particular.

Are Farage and his party the worthy recipients of the considerable constituency the main media voice of which is Peter Hitchens's column on the Mail on Sunday? We are about to find out.

Energy prices are likely to come up. When he was last on, a fortnight ago, Hitchens called for a return to this country's vast reserves of coal, to the Central Electricity Generating Board, and therefore doubly to public ownership. Will Farage?

HS2 would also be a good bet. Last time, Hitchens called for the railways to be renationalised and, as far as possible, for the Beeching process to be reversed. He repeated both parts of that in his column this week. Will Farage say the same thing?

UKIP's policy and Farage's oft-repeated view are at absolute variance with the position of Hitchens on the subject of drugs.

Seven out of 10 UKIP supporters, the same proportion as the population at large, want to renationalise the Royal Mail. Does UKIP? Does Nigel Farage?

Sunday trading is unlikely to be mentioned, but exactly where UKIP and its Leader stand on that issue would be worth knowing in view of the fact that, on this, Peter Hitchens agrees with the very explicit policy of the Labour Party.

Indeed, Hitchens has said that he would support in 2015 any party that promised, both to repeal the Government's further deregulation of Sunday trading, and to renationalise the railways.

One party is already halfway there officially, and its Conference, usually never unanimous about anything, passed without dissent a motion to take back both the railways and the Royal Mail into public ownership. That is the inexorable logic of its existing official stance, and in the case of the railways it could be done for free.

But that party is not UKIP. Perhaps until tonight. Within the next two and a half hours, we shall find out definitively.

8 comments:

  1. Out state schools are officially the worst in the developed world (the OECD survey tells us nothing we didn't already know) and England, ( now the most crowded space in Europe) is set to become a crammed, multicultural nowhere-land composed of strangers. 73 million of them-60% of whom are immigrants.

    Meanwhile, the country is awash with crime, come rely unpunished by our pathetic Roy Jenkins justice system, soon to become even more pathetic as we award the vote to prisoners.

    And all Lindsay and Owen Jones ever write about is nationalising energy.

    You're so hilariously out of touch with what's happened to this country, that its no longer even funny.

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  2. Take it up with the 70 per cent of people who agree with us on this issue. And, for that matter, who agree with Peter Hitchens on this issue. Is Nigel Farage one of them? We still do not know.

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  3. I didn't say I disagreed with you-simply that energy prices are not the only problem we have.

    And, according to the latest polling, the majority of the public agree with us (and not Owen Jones) on grammar schools and mass immigration. And, indeed, the death penalty.

    The political elite are a million miles away from the views of most people-except for BBC Question Time audiences.

    Two weeks in a row the audience has wildly applauded mass immigration-and this weeks show was in Boston!

    A place that now has East European shanty towns appearing in people's gardens.

    A place whose people rose up in support of Peter Hitchens when he had a spat with its Tory Councillor over mass immigration.

    From what planet does the BBC get its audiences? Are they all from a student union drinking society?

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  4. No.

    The claims made about these audiences cannot possibly be correct. Think on that.

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  5. I'm simply saying that the audience views are sharply at variance with public views, as expressed in polls.

    Every poll-even the Independents YouGov poll-shows majority opposition to mass immigration (hence Cameron's posturing on the subject) yet BBCQT audiences are ecstatic about it.

    I suspect it may be that working class people are less likely to apply for the show-and that conservatives (fearing for their reputations if they speak their minds on TV) are also less likely to apply.

    In today's climate, it takes a brave person to defy political correctness.

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  6. Oh, get over yourself! That last line is possibly the most pretentious thing that I have ever read.

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  7. I wasn't talking about myself.

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