John Page

I hope for a new leadership which will trust, help and encourage the members and branches, rather than just sending them out on exercises like the petition which are as well planned as the Battle of the Somme.

One way to do this is training.

Another way to help members may be to make information more easily available to them. The internet's ideal for this.

As a rough and ready experiment I've started http://eucosts.blogspot.com/ .

It will only have occasional entries, whenever I see something about the financial cost of the EU to the UK (or someone [hint!] tells me about a piece) - it's not intended to be about anything else. My thinking is that something like this could build up to a better reference source than (say) the UKIP website.

(NOTE: I'm not saying a blog would be the way to do this - but I do think this is the sort of experiment an innovative leadership should be prepared to try; and of course drop if it's not helping.)

I've posted a quick bit on shoe tariffs there this evening.

I've also posted a snippet on EU regulation in Germany in my main blog - again, it includes a useful number, I think.

Finally, opposition to police force mergers is a UKIP policy. I've pulled recent news items into another separate blog. Once you see several news items together from around the country, patterns start to emerge and I believe it's easier to follow what's happening. This keeps members more informed, and it can produce ideas about issues to raise locally.

Personally I want to see a new leadership using the web to help branches and members become more involved and more effective. If the centre helps members more, members can help the party more.

At the moment it seems to me the centre does very little to help members, and just sees us as the poor bloody infantry to be paraded for the occasional stunt, or to stand on street corners in a doomed petition campaign.

Members of the party, we deserve better than we're getting.