Rochester Round-Up

A sitting MP has been re-elected with far fewer votes than he managed last time.

He will certainly lose his seat to his own old party in May, and he is already engaged in a public feud with his new Leader, who makes up policy on the hoof.

The sight of Carswell and Reckless voting for Clive Efford's Bill to save the NHS, with Reckless even speaking in support of it, was too hilarious for words. NHS privatisation was, with Farage's amateur and dictatorial style, the reason for Mike Nattrass's secession from UKIP.

They were rightly torn to shreds by Dennis Skinner, who voted against the Treaty of Rome, against Thatcher's Single European Act and against the Maastricht Treaty, as well as having campaigned for a No vote in 1975 and for a Labour vote in 1983.

But UKIP has accepted what now seems to be the defining principle of British politics, that the heart and soul of England is the people who always voted Labour up to and including the 1992 Election. Those people have always voted Labour ever since, too. They always will. Thus speaks the heart and soul of England.

Still, UKIP may as well make itself useful, by campaigning for the abolition of prescription charges, of eye and dental charges, and of hospital car parking charges. Along with the renationalisation of the railways, of the utilities and of the Royal Mail, as supported by the majority of their (and of the Conservatives') supporters.

That white van man was a Conservative supporter in 2010 and will have voted either for that party or for UKIP in Thursday's by-election. He openly admits to having hung out his flags purely in order to annoy ethnic minorities. They will not have been offended by those flags. But he hoped and expected that they would be.

Emily Thornberry should have stood her ground. She grew up on a council estate, where the houses will not have had porticoes. In her childhood, or even in mine, next to no one would have known what that flag was.

Flag-waving in general is not very English. But until 20 years ago, if you had asked the English what their flag was, then they would have told you something quite other than that. Nothing invented by, of all things, the advertising industry can be said to be part of working-class culture.

Least of all something that was invented as an integral part of pricing the working classes out of attendance at live football matches by rebranding them as a posh boys' interest, in order to make possible a drastic increase in the price of the beer thus associated with them.