It looks like Christmas has come early for Will Scobie, Labour's parliamentary candidate for South Thanet, as it is reported in the FT that Nigel Farage UKIP leader, will stand against Conservative incumbent Laura Sandys.
I imagine that Nigel will take more votes off the Conservatives than he will from Labour, since much of Labour support comes, either from the non-working or public sector both of whom are dependent on government giving money away, from hard working people.
Scobie so far has yet to show his hand, apart from being much praised by his Labour cohorts, we don't hear much from him, whether studying politics is an appropriate path to a parliamentary career I don't know, I do know that those who've got some experience outside politics are generally more credible. I'd have some respect if Scobie spoke out about such things as the TransEuropa fiaso.
Certainly Farage will appeal to those mainly hard working people, who fear for the future as the European dream consists of being priced out of work and housing, experiencing squeezed health services and education, without any benefit whatsoever.
I've meet both Farage & Scobie and have to say that Farage doesn't talk in that abnormal way of professional politicians. Tough choice Farage who says the things people want to hear, Laura who seems to be her own person and young Will who says whatever the dinosaurs in his own party want to hear.
It seems to me that the least qualified and person, could get elected, Scobie is not a bad person just the wrong one at this point in time, still our electoral system is as it is.
This is only rumour at the moment, Tony, but it seems highly likely. Having cleaned up in the county council elections in Thanet, UKIP must view this seat as one of their best chances and who better to fight it, from their view point, than Nigel Farage.
ReplyDeleteI feel sorry for Laura Sandys because she has been a good constituency MP, but this will now become a tough battle for her, especially with many Conservative voters having been put off by David Cameron's antics.
The Equal Marriage saga drove away many party members and, although Cameron now regrets pushing through this legislation, it was ignoring his party over it in the first place the led to the move by many to UKIP.
I am inclined to agree with you that this could let in Will Scobie, though I suppose attitudes will become more focussed as the election nears. If the economy continues to recover will Tories return to their natural home rather then let Labour back in to screw it up again. Remains to be seen.
Yes I feel sorry for Laura, she does seem a good advocate for Thanet South, better than the last bloke.
DeletePlayed right UKIP could take both Thanet South and Thanet North.
ReplyDeleteSandys Gale and Scobie. If you lay with dogs ...........
"the European dream consists of being priced out of work and housing, experiencing squeezed health services and education, without any benefit whatsoever."
ReplyDeleteWhat a ridiculous thing to say.
How so 16 18 , maybe your in some insular enclave, in the real world the euro dream is frankly a nightmare for whom we can blame Blair, Brown and I suppose big Ed
DeleteActually it was Ted Heath that sold us out, Tony, but he had very little choice in the matter. It was either get us into Europe, or be outed for doing unmentionable things to little orphan boys on board the Morning Cloud.
DeleteTed Heath took us into a common market, but it was much later going into the Blair and Brown years that we went down the road of signing away powers to the EU, signing up to the Lisbon treaty and enshrining the European Human Rights legislation into our law.
DeleteSince Heath is no longer around to challenge your accusations and no evidence has ever been produced to justify such allegation, your small boys bit is very bad taste. That said, I suppose as some low life Labour creep you know no better.
Not many of the little orphan boys are around either, in fact most of them did not make it back to shore.
DeleteIf Farage stands it will make things very interesting, In the recent KCC elections UKIP certainly took most of their votes from the Tories but also from Labour, hence the 7 UKIP councillors and just 1 Labour now.
ReplyDeleteUKIP nornally wouldn't poll so many in a general election but the Farage factor will win a fair few over to his way of thinking. It will certainly put Thanet on the map and there will be a lot of media interest in the outcome.
Farage does not need to declare his hand for a long while yet why should he. The political scene can change a lot before the election is due. By then the torries may need to enter a pact with UKIP and as part of this Nigel could be offered a safe tory seat without the need to fight against a tory. Speculation on where he will stand at this point in time is irrelevant and the FT should know better.
ReplyDeleteAre only Private Sector workers hard working Tony? I'm so glad that from the middle of last year I became a Private Sector worker, although I'm still paid for by the state as I'm in reality a Public Sector worker who now makes the Governments figures look better!
ReplyDeleteWill you be telling Doctors, Nurses, Firemen, Police, the Army, Navy and AirForce that they are all no good lazy scum living off the taxes of hard workers like you? or will you recant your statement?
I couldn't agree more with the statement that this is an early Christmas present for Scobie. Farage is a self-proclaimed petrol-head, who believes in airport expansion and night-flights. He is hardly going to get an easy ride in South Thanet where the Tories who supported night-flights were driven out of town.
ReplyDeleteTwo thousand people out of one hundred and thirty two thousand opposed night flights. We shall see who gets driven out of town.
DeleteTwo thousand people out of one hundred and thirty two thousand cared strongly enough about the issue to oppose night flights.
DeleteI fixed it for you. By the way, I live in Westbrook and I am an avid supporter of Manston.
It's fantastic news for Will Scobie. The LDs are facing annihilation at the next election and recent polls suggest that Labour will pick up 4 out of 5 votes from disgruntled LD refugees. With UKIP primarily taking the right-wing vote from the Tory party, young Scobie looks like a shoe-in. Under normal circumstances, the main parties would resort to dirty tactics to smear the front-runner, but Scobie is too young and inexperienced to have any skeletons in his closet or cock-ups under his belt. In fact, inexperience is going to be the only thing they can throw at him, to which he can easily respond - look where voting for "experienced" candidates has got you in the past. With his anti-night flights stand he will hoover up thousands of votes, not only in Ramsgate, but also in Sandwich and all of the villages. I say good luck to the young man. You're in the right place at the right time, so ride the wave - who knows where it will take you?
DeletePlease give me the number of your dream fairy, 11:44. How can you possibly predict what is going to happen in twenty months time when poll standings can change in a week.
DeleteYes, Will Scobie might win, but the hard facts are that Thanet South, in its various boundary forms, has been Tory since the year dot, apart from the Ladyman years which arose out of Aitken's fall from grace. Laura Sandys won the seat with a 7,000 plus majority which does not even made it a marginal.
To turn that over would take more than a few Lib/Dems voting Labour, and if Tony is typical of Lib/Dem thinking, that might be unlikely, or a few Tories voting UKIP.
General elections tend to take people back to the usual loyalties and away from mid term protest votes. Local night flights will have minimal impact on the national scene, but the economy could well be the major factor.
Also, in case you missed it, Farage says he fancies Folkestone & Hythe.
If Farage stood in Thanet South for UKIP he'd get Mr Flaigs vote anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you just come out of the closet Tone?
Closet which one, I think I'm still in Thanet north. I find it incredible how people like you demonise the likes of Farage for daring to say what most people think.
DeleteThey do it because... apart from the attention grabbing headlines that UKIP have they do not have anything else that is credible when it comes to the other 99.9% of what an elected official or Government would have to spend the majority of its time doing.
DeleteWhat is UKIP's policy on health? education? defense? the State?
and as for most people thinking what Farage says... obviously that's a falsehood given that out of 19,000 odd seats they only have 214 at Council level, have no MPs at all and the only people outside of Councils are those at the EU trough in Brussels!
Agree with Rob on UKIP: no policies at all. Farage does a good in Brussels criticising the EU. What exactly would he do in the UK Parliament? And as for Thanet he's just another career politician as with Laura using the seat for his own ends.
DeleteUKIP will be no doubt wiped out in the next election as ex-Tory elderly duffers like the Thanet lot.
Good question Policy? We will never know, I noted channel four news was particularly biased, digging for dirt which they found a bit like they mail.
ReplyDeleteSeriously what world do you inhabit.
The real world, unlike the world that exists only in your head! Why will we never know what Policies they have? surely they, like any normal party publish their policies, or will we never know because they don't actually publish anything of value?
ReplyDeleteWhere does channel 4 come into anything, unless you are using it to avoid having to argue the point that I raised that UKIP's political presence in this country is MINIMAL and the only people with Parliament in their title are all in Brussels earning vast quantities of money while screaming how the UK is being run by... err... Brussels!
I'd recommend a visit to one of those lazy public servants being paid out of your tax as it looks like early onset dementia may have started to take hold.
My real world involves working for a living with normal not sure what you maybe like your labour colleagues you don't do proper work
DeleteSomewhat bizarre comments from you Mr. Flaig. You seem to be saying that people who vote Labour don't do real work for a living. I would argue that many Tory supporters in the city don't do anything useful for the millions they pay themselves.
DeleteI don't think any political party has a monopoly on working hard. Many of us are working harder than ever and still only just keeping our heads above water. It is government policy to divide and conquer. So, they are attacking the public service unions knowing that people who work in the private sector and read the Daily Mail are stupid enough to fall for their vile propaganda.
You only have to look at the BBC web-site this weekend and the proposal to hold back the miserable 1% pay rise for people working in the NHS. You can bet your bottom dollar that this claw-back of salary won't apply to the managers and senior staff. It will apply to the cleaners, porters, nursing assistants etc. who do all of the hard and dirty work. And what kind of comments were posted on the BBC web-site? Yes, that's right - private sector workers accusing public sector workers of being lazy and unproductive, demanding that their wages and pensions be slashed, whingeing about the size of the financial deficit.
Well it wasn't the public sector workers who got rich during the boom times and it wasn't the public sector workers who gambled and lost when the economy went t*ts up. But it's the public sector workers who are being asked to pay for it.
I have a better idea. Anybody who overstretched themselves and borrowed too much money has to pay it back. Not just individuals but institutions too. If you're a property developer who built a shopping mall, knowing full-well that it would never pay for itself, YOU have to pay back the money. We'll have none of this nonsense where you declare yourself bankrupt and then start operating again under a slightly changed name. You can work for the rest of your life to pay off the debt you ran up.
Do you think that's not fair? Well, what's the alternative? The alternative is that the poorest people in our society spend the rest of their lives paying off your massive debts. I know which option I'm voting for (assuming anybody has the guts to offer this option at the election). Power to the people
You'd need too ask your leader I think.
DeleteReally Tony, the best you can offer is a personal attack in defense of your beloved UKIP?
DeleteI know it's Sunday and you've probably been resting your weary head, I know it's hard for you having to personally prop up the whole country from your meager wage packet while us Public Sector employees quaff magnums of Champers sitting on our yachts having caviar spooned into our mouths but.. really? Not a proper rebuttal? Nothing to show that I'm wrong? No links to clearly defined, well thought out, financially achievable UKIP policy on something as simple as say the defense of the nation?
I'll say it one more time... UKIP are a miniscule little group of people playing at being more right wing than the Tory party, they have no representation at Government level and only have 214 elected Councillors out of 19,000+, they do have MEPs who all earn mega Euro's and can claim for a shed load more on expenses sitting in Brussels.. all the time moaning that Brussels are stripping away the rights of the UK Government and calling for the UK to remove itself from the EU.
P.S. Tony, you do know that a Councillor is partly paid for by the people of the country so effectively almost a Public Sector employee whilst an MEP is primarily paid for by the people of the country so effectively is almost completely a Public Sector employee? Are these also layabouts?
DeleteThis distinction between public and private sector is spurious. Imagine the railways were owned by the government. Ridiculous, I know but hear me out. The government takes the cash generated by the railway and uses it to pay a worker. Now, imagine the government sells the railway to a consortium of shareholders. Now, the shareholders take the money from the railway and use it to pay the worker. It doesn't matter whether the railway is publicly or privately owned. The people who use it still pay the worker.
DeleteSo, it is with the entire public sector. Your child is educated at a school. You pay your taxes and the government uses this money to pay the teachers. If education were private you would pay less tax but you would have to pay directly for your child to be educated. Experience of successive privatisations tells us that it would be justified by claiming that the private sector is more efficient but that, after a few years, it ends up costing you far more than it ever did when the government owned it, because the shareholders have to be paid.
Woken at 6:45 this morning by a night-flight from Manston. Shan't be voting for Farage if he supports this kind of activity.
ReplyDeleteThat would have been the early KLM flight going over South Eastern Road then, I guess?
Delete9 17 it may be a shock to your system but many of us are either at work or on the way to work at that time.
DeleteThat you may be. On a weekday I would also be on my way to work at that time. I get home at around 19:00 and then do a couple of hours work at home each night. So, you don't have a monopoly on working hard or working long hours. On the weekend I try to get some rest so that I'm refreshed for the next week. Is it unreasonable of me to expect to be able to lie in beyond 6:45?
DeleteYou can lie in. You don't have to get up just because a plane flies over. Maybe you should move to Slough or Hounslow.
DeleteNeed to change your headline to "may stand" to make it accurate.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme, he insisted that the 2014 elections to the European Parliament were his main priority.
But the UKIP leader revealed he had been considering a bid to become MP for Folkestone.
He also said he thought PM David Cameron and his cabinet colleagues regarded UKIP as "the lower orders".
Mr Farage refused to be drawn on speculation that he would stand in another Kent constituency, South Thanet.
"I was thinking about Folkestone," he replied.
"But it doesn't really matter. I'm not going say where I'm standing... let's get the European elections out the way first."
Of course lets get the European elections out of the way! He will earn more and be able to claim for even more in expenses if he maintains his MEP seat than he would as an MP! He's not daft! the trough is way, way bigger in Brussels than it is in London!
DeleteMr Flaig was taken in long ago by the divide and rule politics of the Tory party, he may now be a UKIP man but to say most Labour voters are not hard working is a disgrace to millions of people who work just as hard as him but wish to see a fairer and more equal society where a decent living wage and guaranteed hours is for all of us and not just the fortunate.
ReplyDeleteFor the record I'm not unemployed and do not work in the public sector.
Good old Labour rhetoric, 10:20, about Tory divide and rule. What is more divide than dismissing people as 'toffs' simply because they have a couple of bob more than you or milking the rich until you drive them and their businesses away. A fairer society was that envisaged by Scargill whereby his members were sacrificed on the altar of his political agenda whilst he set himself up with a job for life and a grace and favour apartment in London.
ReplyDeleteDriver typifies left attitude with his applause for the butcher Giap on his blog site and a proclamation that he 'kicked some ass.' He sure did that alright killing millions of his own people, continuing the slaughter even after the war was over in his purge of the south and driving hundreds of thousands more to their deaths as they tried to flee the country in flimsy craft.
As Labour lurch back in a leftward direction, after Tony Blair had made them a centre ground party for a while, all the old rhetoric is resurfacing and it most certainly does not promise a fairer society. A scarier one perhaps!
So not only do you insult the Labour Party in your continuing capaign, but now you malign those who happen to vote Labour. You are no democrat and in no way can you call your self a "liberal". You should join UKIP, or a party further to the right; you will be more suited there. Your continued membership of the Liberal Democrats - assuming they haven't chucked you out - puts you in the "charlatan" category.
ReplyDeleteWhy should a Liberal Democrat do other than malign the Labour party and its supporters? It is not a system whereby everybody who isn't a Tory must therefore be a leftie. Some of us, fortunately, have something between the ears, have witnessed the disaster every socialist government ever has enacted on its people and can actually see through the fairer society crap. The poor old Russian peasants once believed that before they finished up in the gulags.
DeleteHow sweet that somebody actually believes that socialism and democracy go together.
DeleteWhereas Tory and Capitalism go together? as long as it's socialist capitalism right? where the people pick up and pay for the capitalism when it fails right? not true capitalism based on free markets where Governments don't pass laws to bypass free-markets and provide subsidies or levies on the populace to prop up industries that haven't adapted? Not true capitalism where even something like privatising the Royal Mail cost the tax payer £12 billion before the sale went through? or where year after year the companies providing say the railways get given public cash yet fail to be able to do something simple like... er run a train service?
DeleteCost the taxpayer £12 bn, just where do you get such ideas, Rob. The tax payer was never going to see any return from owning Royal Mail which, for much of the time, has been a drain on the public purse. Whatever the sale of a percentage of it will raise will go into the national coffers reducing the need to raise that money from elsewhere, like the tax payer.
DeleteTrue Labour have been scaremongering that it has been under valued, but they hardly have much expertise in the world of finance. Truth is, nobody actually knows until the share price settles and all this Labour hysteria might influence a few folk to apply for more shares than they can really afford in the hopes of a quick killing. A financial adviser that did that would get his collar felt.
Truth is, Rob, whatever your criticism of Tory capitalism, Labour have just never been able to run the public purse efficiently and, as such, are in no position to advise anyone on matters financial.
William you have me confused for a Labour Supporter.
DeleteThe £12 billion is bit of a throw away figure, it doesn't refer to what anyone though the RM was worth, its a figure used to highlight what its pension scheme (now publicly owned) may cost the tax payer over the coming years, over and above what it is already paying out, personally I think it's going to be a lot higher (we paid in an extra £1.2 billion from the public purse in 2012/13 alone).
The RMPS was backed with £28 billion in assets, this asset pack will be/has been sold and the cash raised will pay off debt, not invested where it could grow but sold (like that idiot Brown did with the Gold).
By selling the RMPS assets the Government (by which I mean the TAX PAYER) will be/is now completely liable for the pensions of, I believe, 900,000 members of the now closed pension scheme.
oh and I thought I made it abundantly clear, what the Tories preach isn't capitalism as defined by any leading academic in the field, either alive or dead. It's like saying New Labour was socialist when in fact it was centre-left.
What would Nick Clegg think of your obvious eye-fluttering admiration of Nigel Farage, Tony Flaig? Or have you at last ended your charade of being a Liberal Democrat? You little old political charlatan, you. UKIP's policies are clearly much closer to your own instincts than those of the Liberal Democrats. And your belief that only you have worth and have any work ethic, that only you have the answers, and that all public sector workers are wastrels aligns you on a personal level with your new political hero too. I bet purple is now your favourite colour.
ReplyDeleteAnd before you return with your usual rant that those who disagree with you are all conspiring reds under the bed, I have nothing whatsoever to do with the Labour Party.
All very smart, 10:24, but what are the policies of the Liberal Democrats which seem to vary as to whether one is listening to Clegg or Cable. The latest gulf between them seems to be over the Guardian's exposure whilst Simon Hughes has an agenda all his own.
DeleteA question for you, Anon, does anyone actually care what Nick Clegg thinks and does he even know himself?
I don't care what Nick Clegg thinks either, but then again I didn't put myself forward as a Lib-Dem candidate in local elections - unlike Tony Flaig!
DeleteSays labour flunky, top marks 10:24
Delete