Toby on Tuesday
'Whose Policy?...'
“Just listen to the way a lot of politicians talk about
the public. They find your patriotism distasteful, your
concerns about immigration parochial, your views about crime
illiberal, your attachment to your job security
inconvenient. They find the fact that more than seventeen
million voters decided to leave the European Union simply
bewildering.” No, that wasn’t Nigel Farage speaking. It
was the Prime Minister, Theresa May, addressing last week’s
Conservative Party Conference. And the truth is that the
new Government has purloined not just great chunks of our
General Election manifesto - on the EU, on taking the
low-paid out of tax, on grammar schools and much more - but
has even purloined our actual language too. It seems
extraordinary that the country has, within just four months,
rejected the Blairite settlement of the past 20 years and
finds itself with what is really its very first UKIP
Government.
Of course that is what makes politics
endlessly fascinating, but it does leave old UKIP with a
serious challenge, not just the challenge of finding a new
leader who can restore confidence to the Party, but who can
also create a new identity, a kind of NewKIP. It’s that
new identity, which can retain the loyalty of the nearly 4
million voters who supported us at the General Election and
add millions more, on which everything depends.
And here it’s worth a visit to the online journal
HeatStreet for an article by the bookies’ favourite to
succeed Diane James as UKIP’s new leader, Steven Woolfe, on
http://heatst.com/world/
On Sunday, Theresa May hinted at a possible
bill to reform the House of Lords – something of which I am
personally supportive...I hope the Prime Minister lives up
to expectations and delivers on her promises, especially on
Brexit and immigration controls. There is still much to
achieve in this post-Brexit world. We in UKIP will
continue to take a pragmatic view to everyday politics – we
will continue to fight for what we believe in, but we will
oppose and support the Government where necessary – to build
a happier, more confident UK.”
So there you can see some of the ideas which will shape
the new UKIP. There is an immense amount of work to do as
UKIP shapes its identity for the coming post-Brexit world.
But what is so marvellous is that politicians can even start
to talk in these terms. The days of Ministers being at the
mercy of EU Directives and the so-called European Court of
Justice are drawing to a close, which is the great
liberation of our time. And the extent of our escape
becomes clearer as the whole EU project sinks deeper into
the abyss. Of course it existed primarily for the benefit
of German industry and the German banks. But where the
British and US banks recapitalised and restructured
themselves after the banking crisis, the German banks failed
to do so.
Of the two largest banks, DeutscheBank is now
struggling with a $14 billion misselling fine imposed by the
US Justice Department which could wipe out its remaining
reserves, while Commerzbank is laying off 10,000 staff and
suspending dividend payments. And to think that Britain’s
Euromaniacs saw the German economy as a role model into
which we would need to integrate our own. By a miracle the
British people chose in June to avoid that fate and thus
escaped disaster. So in this post-Referendum world, in
which we have what is in essence a UKIP Government, a kind
of NewKIP will have a vital role to play under new
leadership. It will not be easy, but our journey has never
been easy and we will make as great a contribution to
Britain’s public life in future as we have in the past
generation!
Until next Tuesday!
Toby
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