Probably the party that were, up until this month, consistently 5-6% ahead of the Tories in yougov's polling reports. Provided Miliband stops wrecking his chances, that is.
Politics at Westminster | BREAKING: UKIP
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Probably the party that were, up until this month, consistently 5-6% ahead of the Tories in yougov's polling reports. Provided Miliband stops wrecking his chances, that is.
Up until this month.
Everything is moving towards the Tories. Imagine when election fever cranks up and Miliband's on TV every day. That's the end of Labour.
Not really, if anything it'll be good for Miliband. In the election debates, that is. The one thing I've noticed when he speaks publicly is that he actually answers the questions from the general public, rather than Cameron's method of listening for a couple of key words and just repeating some pre-rehearsed line.
It helped Clegg's image, and if it weren't for the fact that he was a Lib Dem it might have resulted in more votes. I know that UKIP are on the up, but we're still very much a two party nation. If Miliband can show that he's compassionate on TV then it might bring some extra votes to Labour. There's more to Ed's rise to leader than just Union votes!
And up until this month is still a key point. Labour were ahead for 24 months, and it'll take longer than a single month before we see if there's been a serious and sudden shift in public opinion.
I think you're pushing the realms of reality here. Ed's very good at talking to existing Labour voters, yes. I hear great reviews of when he's spoken to friendly audiences. His issue is actually convincing the swayers.
You must be the most positive Labour voter I've encountered recently.
But I'm not a Labour voter. Who do you think is going to convince the swayers?
No, I wouldn't agree with that characterisation.
Policies designed to help the poor - such as the welfare state, the NHS, the minimum wage, social housing, employment rights etc - are very much sustainable in the long term.
I believe the Tory ideology of privatisation of public services and culling of the welfare state is what has proved unsustainable. For example, the reason we have such a high housing benefit bill now is directly due to the Thatcher policy of selling off the social housing stock. Ditto the railways. And you will be able to add healthcare to the list if they manage to privatise that too.
Are you not? Who do you go for?
I think Cameron has become much more PM like recently and is a good speaker. I see him just doing it.
I don't think there's any real ambition within the Conservatives to privatise the NHS. There's an ambition to trim it down and to make it sustainable though.
I don't see any reason why the policies to help the poor you have listen necessarily have to be unsustainable, but the way Labour run them, they are. The cost of the NHS balloons as the years go by, and the cost of welfare, you have to accept, had become uncontrollable.
The problem I have is that Labour very, very rarely come up with any policies that fit into the 'help the poor' agenda which don't involve creating huge, perpetual burdens on the state. All of the policies you have listed, with the possible exception of employment rights depending on how it's achieved, involve spending a massive amount of money.
This is justifiable money, of course, in the most part, but Labour never present anything that is self-sustainable. It's all based around taking as much as possible from the middle classes to fund it, and invariably, debts are run up.
I'd turn your argument of easy crowds onto Cameron - under difficult questions he crumbles. Just look at the red mist descending upon his face every week during PMQs when things aren't going his way. If he acts the same way under pressure on a TV debate it's game over.
Miliband isn't as good a public speaker as Cameron is, but I can't see the TV debates being relaxed.
I was a Labour voter, but I've moved onto the Greens.
The TV debates are dead easy - all pre-planned, simple questions. If it was more off the hoof then yeh, Miliband might come across better.
Are the really that pre planned? Genuine question. If that's correct then Brown really screwed up with his creepy smile to the camera. That couldn't possible be the one that his team chose for him.
On the subject of Brown: he's actually a thoroughly decent guy in real life.
Brown was a lovely guy - not cut out for PM though.
The parties know what the questions will almost invariably be so they can plan them within an inch of their lives.
I bet Clegg's crib sheet, if he even gets invited, will just be a stick figure of a bloke being hanged with "You're fecked" written on it.
Brown was a better chancellor than he was a Prime Minister, but he did strike me as someone to trust more than Cameron and Clegg though, and I say that lightly, its more of the lesser of three evils.
Would make the Portillo moment look a bit tamer - http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/26/nick-clegg-and-lib-dems-face-battle-for-survival
Don't think any other Lib Dem bigwig wants this particular chalice before May 2015, even if the rank and file are begging for it.
Don't think any other Lib Dem bigwig wants this particular chalice before May 2015, even if the rank and file are begging for it.
Blair and Brown cosied up to them instead of sorting them out like Denis Healey would have.
The privatisation of the NHS has already begun I'm afraid - the big private healthcare companies' backdoor donations to the Tories should have been a clue. The cost of healthcare in the UK is low by international standards (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS) and the NHS has saved us hundreds of billions of pounds over the years as compared to the costs of a private system. It's about as efficient as any large organisation is ever going to be and a remarkably sustainable way of providing universal healthcare to the population.
As far as the welfare state, I believe it constitutes around 23% of public spending. Of that welfare spending, 47% (£74bn) goes on pensions. Jobseekers allowance is just £4.9bn. Housing benefit is £17bn. The sustainable way to reduce housing benefit would be to build a new stock of social housing and drive down private sector rents through reducing demand. That obviously doesn't chime with free market ideology though. The system we have at the moment is effectively just a public subsidy of private landlords, which is madness.
I think it is wrong to class these kinds of activities as 'burdens' on the state - the history of privatisation of key industries and services in this country shows that it rarely works and causes the real burden on the state. For the latest example, see Royal Mail - sold off on the cheap to private investors and now planning to cut back on its services and probably go into terminal decline.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics...-alan-sked-party-become-frankensteins-monster
Ukip founder Alan Sked: 'The party has become a Frankenstein's monster'
He may have founded Ukip, but Alan Sked's moderate, Brussels-boycotting party has gone rogue – and the academic is desperate to stop the bandwagon he first set rolling
Alan Sked founded Ukip as 'a non-sectarian, non-racist party with no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The founder of Ukip is trying to prove to me that, when he was in charge, the party wasn't racist. He's also trying to demonstrate that his Ukip wouldn't have had its snout in the European parliament's expenses trough, unlike its 2014 incarnation. "I had one here not so long ago," says Alan Sked, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, as he searches for a membership application form as evidence.
It's a tough task: his office, the LSE's Room E503, is a stranger to the declutterer's art – it's not so much overwhelmed with books and papers as booby-trapped by them.
Room E503 is historically significant for modern British politics. It was here that Sked formed the Anti-Federalist League in 1991; here, in 1993, that the Anti-Federalist League became the UK Independence Party. It is here, too, that Sked is dreaming up his third British political party. Called New Deal, its aim is to do to Labour what Ukip did to the Tories – embarrass it electorally and whip up latent euroscepticism. He's considering standing against Ed Miliband in Doncaster in next year's general election.
But, first, where is that piece of paper? "You see," Sked says as he hunts, "up until 1997 I managed to keep Ukip a liberal – with a small 'l' – centre, moderate party. Our membership application form from the time – ah, here it is! – shows how much it has changed."
He hands me the form. It makes for fascinating reading. In 1993, along with backing British withdrawal from the EU, prospective members had to be sympathetic to the following: "It is a non-sectarian, non-racist party with no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind. It does not recognise the legitimacy of the European parliament and will send representatives only to the British parliament in Westminster."
"They got rid of all that after I left," says Sked, who resigned the leadership shortly after the 1997 general election. He claims that the tolerant, liberal and democratic party he founded was taken over by rightwingers and that, outgunned and outmanoeuvred by Farage and other leading figures after that election, he had no alternative but to quit.
"They took out the bit about no prejudices against lawful minorities and, as soon as I disappeared, they all decided they wanted to go to the European parliament and take their expenses."
Alan Sked at the launch of the UK Independence party in 1993. Photograph: STR News/Reuters
But those changes alone don't make 2014 Ukip racist, do they? "The de facto leader of Ukip since 1999 has been a racist political failure," Sked counters. He means, of course, Nigel Farage. But even if Farage's recent statements about not wanting to live next door to Romanians suggest he is xenophobic, is there any proof he was racist when he and Sked worked together in the mid-1990s? Sked laughs at the question and recalls an incident from 1997 when the two men were arguing over the kind of candidates that Ukip should have standing at the looming general election. "He wanted ex-National Front candidates to run and I said, 'I'm not sure about that,' and he said, 'There's no need to worry about the nigger vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.'"
Farage has denied that he said these words and always insists that he is not racist.
How did Sked feel to hear such language? Who uses such racist words unless they think they're addressing a fellow racist or suspects they can co-opt the hearer into sharing their racist agenda? Sked shakes his head. "I was shocked," he says. "I had never heard people use those words. At the time, others thought he was being funny. I didn't. They showed what kind of man he is."
Sked argues that far-rightwingers who have worked for the National Front in the past now work for Ukip. "If he [Farage] runs in South Thanet, his agent will be a man called Heale who was a National Front organiser in west London." Sked means Martyn Heale, Ukip's branch chairman in Thanet and former National Front branch organiser in Hammersmith. It was after Sked left that he was allowed to join Ukip, rising to become Farage's election agent in the 2005 general election.
"The party I founded has become a Frankenstein's monster," sighs Sked. "When I was leader, we wouldn't send MEPs to Europe because we didn't want to legitimise it. My policy was that if we were forced to take the salaries, we would give them to the National Health Service – they wouldn't be taken by the party or individuals. Now Ukip say they're against welfare cheats coming from eastern Europe, but in fact they're the welfare cheats."
Sked's suggestion is that Ukip MEPs do little to no work in Strasbourg and Brussels but take as much public money as possible in the form of salaries and, especially, expenses.
"They do nothing in the European parliament and take the money. They're no better than these people on [Channel 4 documentary series] Benefits Street. Farage has become a millionaire from expenses."Farage, of course, told foreign journalists in 2009 that he'd taken £2 million of taxpayers' money in expenses and allowances as an MEP on top of his £64,000-a-year salary. "There's no reason to vote for Ukip," says Sked, "because if they believed in what they said they wouldn't be there."
But aren't Ukip MEPs in Strasbourg and Brussels there to expose the workings of the European parliament, and aren't their expenses funnelled into promoting the party's message that the UK should get out of the EU? Sked giggles. "Oh, that's nonsense," he says. "They're hardly ever there. They just turn up for expenses. They don't turn up for key debates." And when Ukip does vote, he suggests, there's no party line. "When there were only three Ukip MEPs, the LSE European Studies institute found they voted three different ways."
Ukip founder Alan Sked: 'The party has become a Frankenstein's monster'
He may have founded Ukip, but Alan Sked's moderate, Brussels-boycotting party has gone rogue – and the academic is desperate to stop the bandwagon he first set rolling
Alan Sked founded Ukip as 'a non-sectarian, non-racist party with no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The founder of Ukip is trying to prove to me that, when he was in charge, the party wasn't racist. He's also trying to demonstrate that his Ukip wouldn't have had its snout in the European parliament's expenses trough, unlike its 2014 incarnation. "I had one here not so long ago," says Alan Sked, professor of international history at the London School of Economics, as he searches for a membership application form as evidence.
It's a tough task: his office, the LSE's Room E503, is a stranger to the declutterer's art – it's not so much overwhelmed with books and papers as booby-trapped by them.
Room E503 is historically significant for modern British politics. It was here that Sked formed the Anti-Federalist League in 1991; here, in 1993, that the Anti-Federalist League became the UK Independence Party. It is here, too, that Sked is dreaming up his third British political party. Called New Deal, its aim is to do to Labour what Ukip did to the Tories – embarrass it electorally and whip up latent euroscepticism. He's considering standing against Ed Miliband in Doncaster in next year's general election.
But, first, where is that piece of paper? "You see," Sked says as he hunts, "up until 1997 I managed to keep Ukip a liberal – with a small 'l' – centre, moderate party. Our membership application form from the time – ah, here it is! – shows how much it has changed."
He hands me the form. It makes for fascinating reading. In 1993, along with backing British withdrawal from the EU, prospective members had to be sympathetic to the following: "It is a non-sectarian, non-racist party with no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind. It does not recognise the legitimacy of the European parliament and will send representatives only to the British parliament in Westminster."
"They got rid of all that after I left," says Sked, who resigned the leadership shortly after the 1997 general election. He claims that the tolerant, liberal and democratic party he founded was taken over by rightwingers and that, outgunned and outmanoeuvred by Farage and other leading figures after that election, he had no alternative but to quit.
"They took out the bit about no prejudices against lawful minorities and, as soon as I disappeared, they all decided they wanted to go to the European parliament and take their expenses."
Alan Sked at the launch of the UK Independence party in 1993. Photograph: STR News/Reuters
But those changes alone don't make 2014 Ukip racist, do they? "The de facto leader of Ukip since 1999 has been a racist political failure," Sked counters. He means, of course, Nigel Farage. But even if Farage's recent statements about not wanting to live next door to Romanians suggest he is xenophobic, is there any proof he was racist when he and Sked worked together in the mid-1990s? Sked laughs at the question and recalls an incident from 1997 when the two men were arguing over the kind of candidates that Ukip should have standing at the looming general election. "He wanted ex-National Front candidates to run and I said, 'I'm not sure about that,' and he said, 'There's no need to worry about the nigger vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.'"
Farage has denied that he said these words and always insists that he is not racist.
How did Sked feel to hear such language? Who uses such racist words unless they think they're addressing a fellow racist or suspects they can co-opt the hearer into sharing their racist agenda? Sked shakes his head. "I was shocked," he says. "I had never heard people use those words. At the time, others thought he was being funny. I didn't. They showed what kind of man he is."
Sked argues that far-rightwingers who have worked for the National Front in the past now work for Ukip. "If he [Farage] runs in South Thanet, his agent will be a man called Heale who was a National Front organiser in west London." Sked means Martyn Heale, Ukip's branch chairman in Thanet and former National Front branch organiser in Hammersmith. It was after Sked left that he was allowed to join Ukip, rising to become Farage's election agent in the 2005 general election.
"The party I founded has become a Frankenstein's monster," sighs Sked. "When I was leader, we wouldn't send MEPs to Europe because we didn't want to legitimise it. My policy was that if we were forced to take the salaries, we would give them to the National Health Service – they wouldn't be taken by the party or individuals. Now Ukip say they're against welfare cheats coming from eastern Europe, but in fact they're the welfare cheats."
Sked's suggestion is that Ukip MEPs do little to no work in Strasbourg and Brussels but take as much public money as possible in the form of salaries and, especially, expenses.
"They do nothing in the European parliament and take the money. They're no better than these people on [Channel 4 documentary series] Benefits Street. Farage has become a millionaire from expenses."Farage, of course, told foreign journalists in 2009 that he'd taken £2 million of taxpayers' money in expenses and allowances as an MEP on top of his £64,000-a-year salary. "There's no reason to vote for Ukip," says Sked, "because if they believed in what they said they wouldn't be there."
But aren't Ukip MEPs in Strasbourg and Brussels there to expose the workings of the European parliament, and aren't their expenses funnelled into promoting the party's message that the UK should get out of the EU? Sked giggles. "Oh, that's nonsense," he says. "They're hardly ever there. They just turn up for expenses. They don't turn up for key debates." And when Ukip does vote, he suggests, there's no party line. "When there were only three Ukip MEPs, the LSE European Studies institute found they voted three different ways."
A few days later, I ring Sked to get his take on last week's local authority election results. Political pundits are widely suggesting that Ukip's victories demonstrate the party's emergence as a fourth national political force. Sked says he expects the party's European ineptitude to be replicated in town halls: "I feel very sorry for voters who are now going to have as councillors people who aren't very sophisticated, who have no local government policies and who have no experience in running things. All Ukip is good for, if their behaviour in Strasbourg and Brussels is anything to go by, is taking public money."
What of Farage's suggestion that Ukip will hold the balance of power after next year's general election? "He's a fantasist. They always do well in Euro elections because they're the obvious party of protest, but the idea that they're going to come from nothing to be holding the balance of power is ridiculous. I don't expect them to get any seats."
Any vote for Ukip in the European poll, says Sked, was wasted. "If you elect a Ukip MEP, you're just going to elect another incompetent charlatan that you're going to turn into another millionaire. They go native in Brussels, take the expenses and the perks and do feck all."
This isn't perhaps the language one expects from a history professor, a former student of AJP Taylor and a world authority on the Habsburg empire. But Sked is an unusual academic who became so anti-EU that his students complained to former LSE director John Ashworth. Nothing came of the subsequent inquiry. Nowadays, though, it looks as if the LSE is restraining Sked from dispensing dyspeptic Eurosceptic jeremiads to impressionable youth. The man who was the LSE's Mr Europe in the 1980s now teaches courses on the history of the US and the rivalry between Prussia and Austria from 1618. He is currently finishing off his book Abraham Lincoln: The Critical History of an American Icon, due for publication next year, in which, he says, he will present the man venerated as "the great liberator" of African-American slaves as a "racist, war-mongering, illiberal president".
Sked reckons it was his experiences teaching at the LSE that turned him into a Eurosceptic. Between 1980 and 1990, he was convenor of European studies at the LSE and chaired its European Research Seminar. "I would meet all these European politicians and bureaucrats who came over, and the cumulative effect was that I realised it was time to get out. We had an Italian senator and MEP once. I said, 'How many mafiosi do you have in the European parliament?' He said, 'Oh, we only have about 12.' I spent 10 years meeting these loonies."
In the 1992 general election, Sked stood against Conservative chairman Chris Patten for the Anti-Federalist League in the marginal seat of Bath. Sked had experience of elections, having stood for the Liberals in 1970, but he had no history of humiliating Tory bigwigs. At a debate for the candidates, though, he did just that. "I stood up and said, 'Yes or no – do you apologise for the poll tax?' He had to say no. The headlines the day after said: 'Patten refuses to apologise for the poll tax'." Patten subsequently lost to Liberal Democrat candidate Don Foster – a scalp Sked claims was his.
"That remark cost Patten the election. I know he blames me for never becoming prime minister," says Sked. "So, if I did nothing else in my life, I did this one good thing. Considering what a mess he made of everything from the BBC [Patten resigned as its chairman earlier this month] to Hong Kong [Patten's was the colony's last governor], he would have been a dreadful prime minister. My life was not in vain if I spared the country that."
The anecdote is worth recalling, because Sked hopes to repeat what he did to Patten in Bath in 1992 to Ed Miliband in Doncaster in 2015.
As leader of his New Deal party, launched last autumn, Sked plans to stand against the Labour leader on a Eurosceptic platform. "My idea was, having created Ukip to put pressure on Tories on the right to make them Eurosceptic and campaign for a referendum, I would do the same thing for the left," he says.
But there is more to New Deal than Euroscepticism. It calls for the renationalisation of British Rail. Why? "The railway that's the most efficient is the east coast line and it's under direct control. The franchise didn't work. It came under public control and it gets the fewest subsidies of any rail company. It's rather silly when half the others are owned by the state railways of Germany. Why have we allowed the German state railways to run our railways when the British state isn't allowed to? It's madness."
So why has he, a former neo-liberal, plumped for state ownership? His reason is simple: "As Keynes said, 'When the facts change, you have to change your opinions.'" Sked has even been tweeting links to articles by left-leaning Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz that rail against income inequality – unthinkable for today's Ukip, whose own Twitter presence can be unwittingly hilarious.
"I'm basically a liberal, but we have huge inequality," he says. "My grand plan is that minority parties would manoeuvre the majority ones. This is my megalomania. I should probably be taken away by the people in white coats." Perhaps, but he's no more deluded or megalomaniac than the other ex-Ukip figure who set up his own party, former Labour MP and TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, who founded the widely forgotten Veritas party in 2005.
And he's no more deluded or megalomaniac, perhaps, than Sked's Ukip successor, Nigel Farage. "He's been de facto leader of the party since 1999 and he hasn't won a single seat [at Westminster]," says Sked. "How he thinks he's going to get the balance of power I don't know. He must be swallowing his own propaganda." But some voters believe that propaganda, in part because Farage has managed to charm parts of the electorate with his beer-swilling everyman image. "Behind that image is someone who isn't bright," says Sked, who recalls trying to give the public school-educated Farage remedial grammar lessons: "I spent two hours trying to explain to him the difference between 'it's' with an apostrophe and 'its' without and he just flounced out the office saying, 'I just don't understand words.'"
Sked recalls, too, the letters of complaint he received from Salisbury, when Farage stood for Ukip in 1997's general election. "I remember one that said, 'I'm very glad your candidate believes in education, but until he learns to spell it, I'm not voting for him.' That's the kind of person people are voting for when they vote Ukip. Why does anyone have time for this creature? He's a dimwitted racist."
What of Farage's suggestion that Ukip will hold the balance of power after next year's general election? "He's a fantasist. They always do well in Euro elections because they're the obvious party of protest, but the idea that they're going to come from nothing to be holding the balance of power is ridiculous. I don't expect them to get any seats."
Any vote for Ukip in the European poll, says Sked, was wasted. "If you elect a Ukip MEP, you're just going to elect another incompetent charlatan that you're going to turn into another millionaire. They go native in Brussels, take the expenses and the perks and do feck all."
This isn't perhaps the language one expects from a history professor, a former student of AJP Taylor and a world authority on the Habsburg empire. But Sked is an unusual academic who became so anti-EU that his students complained to former LSE director John Ashworth. Nothing came of the subsequent inquiry. Nowadays, though, it looks as if the LSE is restraining Sked from dispensing dyspeptic Eurosceptic jeremiads to impressionable youth. The man who was the LSE's Mr Europe in the 1980s now teaches courses on the history of the US and the rivalry between Prussia and Austria from 1618. He is currently finishing off his book Abraham Lincoln: The Critical History of an American Icon, due for publication next year, in which, he says, he will present the man venerated as "the great liberator" of African-American slaves as a "racist, war-mongering, illiberal president".
Sked reckons it was his experiences teaching at the LSE that turned him into a Eurosceptic. Between 1980 and 1990, he was convenor of European studies at the LSE and chaired its European Research Seminar. "I would meet all these European politicians and bureaucrats who came over, and the cumulative effect was that I realised it was time to get out. We had an Italian senator and MEP once. I said, 'How many mafiosi do you have in the European parliament?' He said, 'Oh, we only have about 12.' I spent 10 years meeting these loonies."
In the 1992 general election, Sked stood against Conservative chairman Chris Patten for the Anti-Federalist League in the marginal seat of Bath. Sked had experience of elections, having stood for the Liberals in 1970, but he had no history of humiliating Tory bigwigs. At a debate for the candidates, though, he did just that. "I stood up and said, 'Yes or no – do you apologise for the poll tax?' He had to say no. The headlines the day after said: 'Patten refuses to apologise for the poll tax'." Patten subsequently lost to Liberal Democrat candidate Don Foster – a scalp Sked claims was his.
"That remark cost Patten the election. I know he blames me for never becoming prime minister," says Sked. "So, if I did nothing else in my life, I did this one good thing. Considering what a mess he made of everything from the BBC [Patten resigned as its chairman earlier this month] to Hong Kong [Patten's was the colony's last governor], he would have been a dreadful prime minister. My life was not in vain if I spared the country that."
The anecdote is worth recalling, because Sked hopes to repeat what he did to Patten in Bath in 1992 to Ed Miliband in Doncaster in 2015.
As leader of his New Deal party, launched last autumn, Sked plans to stand against the Labour leader on a Eurosceptic platform. "My idea was, having created Ukip to put pressure on Tories on the right to make them Eurosceptic and campaign for a referendum, I would do the same thing for the left," he says.
But there is more to New Deal than Euroscepticism. It calls for the renationalisation of British Rail. Why? "The railway that's the most efficient is the east coast line and it's under direct control. The franchise didn't work. It came under public control and it gets the fewest subsidies of any rail company. It's rather silly when half the others are owned by the state railways of Germany. Why have we allowed the German state railways to run our railways when the British state isn't allowed to? It's madness."
So why has he, a former neo-liberal, plumped for state ownership? His reason is simple: "As Keynes said, 'When the facts change, you have to change your opinions.'" Sked has even been tweeting links to articles by left-leaning Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz that rail against income inequality – unthinkable for today's Ukip, whose own Twitter presence can be unwittingly hilarious.
"I'm basically a liberal, but we have huge inequality," he says. "My grand plan is that minority parties would manoeuvre the majority ones. This is my megalomania. I should probably be taken away by the people in white coats." Perhaps, but he's no more deluded or megalomaniac than the other ex-Ukip figure who set up his own party, former Labour MP and TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, who founded the widely forgotten Veritas party in 2005.
And he's no more deluded or megalomaniac, perhaps, than Sked's Ukip successor, Nigel Farage. "He's been de facto leader of the party since 1999 and he hasn't won a single seat [at Westminster]," says Sked. "How he thinks he's going to get the balance of power I don't know. He must be swallowing his own propaganda." But some voters believe that propaganda, in part because Farage has managed to charm parts of the electorate with his beer-swilling everyman image. "Behind that image is someone who isn't bright," says Sked, who recalls trying to give the public school-educated Farage remedial grammar lessons: "I spent two hours trying to explain to him the difference between 'it's' with an apostrophe and 'its' without and he just flounced out the office saying, 'I just don't understand words.'"
Sked recalls, too, the letters of complaint he received from Salisbury, when Farage stood for Ukip in 1997's general election. "I remember one that said, 'I'm very glad your candidate believes in education, but until he learns to spell it, I'm not voting for him.' That's the kind of person people are voting for when they vote Ukip. Why does anyone have time for this creature? He's a dimwitted racist."
That'll go down well.
I know, I just can't take this man seriously. I saw the Italian MP quote, and I think its just the MP taking the piss imo.
Pretty good except Bromley and Havering aren't really London more Kent and Essex.
It sounds like Miliband has been talking to ******* Harman, condescending to the electorate and refusing to own to any errors during Labour's reign. This current speech of Miliband's is a fine example of why Labour shall probably struggle next year.
The right wing are always moaning about the burdans of regulation, you cant blame a lack of it for markets failing when you've got what you wanted
Yeah the left are so clever too with their ill-thought measures like the EU-led cap on bonuses. Obviously replacing a variable staffing cost with a higher fixed cost base will banks rebuild their balance sheets. Idiot legislators playing to the galleries.
I've never claimed thats a good idea, but you haven't engage with my point. The right wing free market belivers can't blame a lack of regulation for them blowing up the worlds economy
It's a bit more involved than that. You had Republicans deregulating the banking sector, then the Democrats pushing home ownership through TV ads. The financial crisis was driven by a whole host of factors.
This is so obvious I can't believe how little is being made of it.
It was driven by the irresponsibility and greed of the finance industry.
Indeed. Although I think Jippy's point is that they were colluded with by politicians from both ends of the political spectrum (assuming we accept that new labour were ever a left wing party)
Politicians in the US contributed to subprime but a political push for wider home ownership does not translate into crazy lending policies nor creating fraudulent instruments on the back of them (I still don't know why European banks who bought that shit didn't sue the issuers). In the UK Labour were foolish with light-touch but the finance industry were claiming they could regulate themselves and they were the ones who played casino economics.
It really isn't. Banks sold each other debts which in their greed for ever greater profits caused them to lend recklessly. Most of us just wanted a roof over our heads with the security that comes from owning your own home.
Is that true though? Didn't buy to let schemes play a bit part in the sub-prime crisis? It's definitely been a big issue in Europe. In a way, the financial sector reflects the collective avarice of people as individuals.
Buy to let was just another group for the banks to sell mortgages to, each mortgage could be sold onwards, they didn't care who they lent to
Don't disagree with that. Just taking you up on the idea that the whole cluster-feck was driven by people looking for the security that comes from owning your own home.
I'm speculating, to be fair, as I have no idea about the exact figures. I would guess that an awful lot of those sub-prime mortgages were brought by people whose motivations were more about getting rich than owning their own home. Could be wrong though.
Basically yep- there was pressure on lenders to make the home ownership dream possible. I'm not saying the banks don't deserve a lot of the blame, just that the regulators and politicians also come out of this badly.
Many firms bought into securitised debt as a diversifier, given we have had a 20 year plus bull-run in credit. Many of the CDOs were AAA-rated by the major ratings agency, effectively ranking them as safe as gilts. There have been umpteen major law suits since. Just google 'sues over CDOs' and you'll see what I mean.
Buy to let was more of a UK issue- the real damage was done in the US.
Did anyone get any money back? And why didn't RBS and co sue for billions?
RBS sued others and got sued itself I think. It all went quiet a while back though- not sure what settlements were made but there defo were a few in the US from memory.