BASILDON BOY

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co....w_and_com.html

Tories, UKIP, and other debating matters

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday


From now on, rather than trying to deal with individual e-mails, I'm hoping to debate as many important subjects as possible here on this weblog.

I hope you'll understand that I cannot reply to every single point made, or each individual. But I will try to deal, as thoroughly as I can, with as many as possible.

Let me deal first of all with UKIP, and what looks remarkably like an organised campaign of postings. I am not hostile to UKIP. I just decline to endorse it. And that's not out of fear - I continue to attack the Tory Party for its uselessness and hopelessness, and confidently expect that, not long hence, most other columnists will be doing the same thing. I've become used to being a few years ahead of them.

First of all, UKIP is, like all small parties, prey to faction fights and backstabbing. People who are interested in power, but have none, tend to take it out on each other because the stakes are so small. I wonder if all my pro-UKIP correspondents realised that their party was about to run into the problems it hit at the weekend, with complaints of money going missing.

Well, I was not surprised. This sort of thing happens to such groups and the question must arise "Who told the papers?"

I also wasn't surprised by the silly, doomed flirtation with Kilroy, or by the twerp who went on about women (even 34-year-olds, I suspect) cleaning behind the fridge.

The whole outfit is not just amateur, and on shallow foundations. It has a blazer-and-cravat feel to it which limits its appeal to the same sort of areas where the Tory Party still stumbles about in its prolonged death throes, the Southern English middle classes. But the movement I hope for, which with luck will chuck New Labour into the sea, will have a far wider appeal than that. If it doesn't, it won't be able to do the job.

So, while I rejoice at every Tory vote and pound that defects to UKIP, because my objective is the downfall of the Tories, I don't feel either the need or the desire to praise UKIP itself. And the more I get pestered and badgered to do so, by people who seem to have decided not to understand my position, the more critical and dismissive of UKIP I shall be.

mkpdavies

So there.

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Labour, Lib Dems

Millennium3

Pretty reasonable summary of where UKIP is to my mind.

eublues

OK, so what does he want to replace the Tories?

Millennium3

'The whole outfit is not just amateur, and on shallow foundations. It has a blazer-and-cravat feel to it which limits its appeal to the same sort of areas where the Tory Party still stumbles about in its prolonged death throes, the Southern English middle classes. But the movement I hope for, which with luck will chuck New Labour into the sea, will have a far wider appeal than that. If it doesn't, it won't be able to do the job.'

Yet to materialize!

eublues

Sounds like what Kilroy was promising for a few weeks - now he's concerned about allegedly distorting mirrors in M & S and insisting that mosques should admit women wanting to pray.