UK politics: immigration the key?
Sunday 18 August 2013
 Despite this risible approach, the Independent on Sunday tells us that UKIP support in the latestComRes poll is standing at 19 percent, reflecting, it says, "the rise of Euroscepticism among the electorate". The findings appear to give some endorsement to Mr Cameron's attempts to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU, the paper adds. Actually, it does no such thing. Inasmuch as UKIP still has a policy on the EU, secret or otherwise, it is about leaving the evil empire. But, more to the point, since the ComRes survey itself focuses on immigration, the probability is that UKIP is capturing the neo-BNP anti-immigration vote, part of its transition from a dedicated anti-EU party to a general protest vote dustbin. Of some interest, though, are the headline figures on voting intentions. These show Labour's support up to 37 percent, while the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have slipped back to the share they registered last month, at 28 and eight percent respectively. The support for Labour as a party, though, contrasts with Mr Miliband's dire personal performance. He net personal rating has plummeting 17 points, with only one in five Britons – and fewer than half of Labour voters – now saying he is turning out to be a good leader of the Labour Party. Mr Cameron's rating also fell slightly, with three in 10 people saying he is turning out to be a good prime minister, but more than half saying he is not. Nevertheless, that keeps us in a position where Labour is more popular than the Conservatives, while the position is reversed for the respective leaders. That adds to the complications of predicting any election outcome, especially when we see a collapse of the Lib-Dem vote and the neo-BNP UKIP polling strongly. Ed Miliband, in fact, is facing a torrid week. Two Labour "heavyweights" (if there are such things) have "mauled his leadership". John Prescott has said that Labour had "massively failed" to hold the Conservatives to account or make its own case, and Lord Glasman, a guru to Mr Miliband, said that the Labour leader needed to prove that he was a "grown-up politician" capable of leading the country. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times has it that 69 percent of voters feel Mr Miliband is "failing to provide an effective opposition to the government". That is a rise of three points since the same question was asked early last month. That compared with 55 percent disapproving of the government's performance, with only 28 percent approving. With the voters effectively opting for "none of the above", it is relatively easy for demagogic politicians such as Mr Farage to hoover up the protest votes, so it would be a mistake to think that UKIP's performance can be directly translated in anti-EU sentiment. Incidentally, YouGov has UKIP's polling at 13 percent, as opposed to the 19 percent ComRes, perpetuating the wide spread in results between polling companies. But, whether you take the high or the low estimate, potential UKIP voters only represent a fraction of those who, in polls, are prepared to say they would vote to leave the EU. What is intriguing though is that the last time YouGov did an in-depth analysis of Labour supporters voting patterns, it found that immigration, far more than "Europe" was likely to trigger a switch in allegiance. On that basis , from a purely electoral perspective, Mr Farage is right to push the immigration button. That is best calculated to bring in the votes. But whether that advances the anti-EU cause is less clear. Certainly, the "secret squirrel" plan to leave the EU isn't going to help greatly, which means we are probably right to wonder what the real agenda of UKIP really is. Richard North 18/08/2013 |
Booker: delusion about the Middle East
Sunday 18 August 2013
 Booker is a brave man today, therefore, to pick up on the contemporary story of Iran and our "self-deceiving attitude towards the theocracy" in that country, which perfectly illustrates our inability to grasp the realities of Middle-Eastern politics. Quite apart from its ruthless oppression of its own people, writes Booker, the Tehran regime has a finger in pretty well every nasty pie in the region – as chief backer of the Assad regime in Syria and of Palestinian terror groups; as the shadowy presence behind the corrupt al-Maliki regime in Iraq; and even supposedly as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Yet again, recently we saw the West’s endless gullibility over Iran in the response of politicians and media to the election as president of Hassan Rouhani, hailed as a "moderate" and a "reformer" who might open the door to better relations between Iran and the West, not least over the ever-vexed issue of Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power. What so many in the West seem unable to grasp, Booker avers, is that Rouhani, like his predecessor Ahmadinejad, is just a creature of the real power in Iran, centred in the country's "Supreme Leader", the Ayatollah Khamenei. Rouhani may have been one of eight candidates (out of an original 800) allowed to stand in a horrendously rigged election by the Supreme Leader, but for more than 20 years he has been a key apparatchik of the regime, serving at the heart of its military, security and intelligence system. As far back as the 1980s Rouhani was deputy commander-in-chief of Iran's armed forces, before serving for 16 years as secretary of its Supreme National Security Council. In 1999 he led the ruthless suppression of a major student uprising, in obedience, as he said, to a "revolutionary order to crush mercilessly and monumentally any move of these dissidents". Between 2003 and 2005 he led those famous and futile nuclear negotiations, boasting of how he had fooled the West by "taking advantage of talks with Britain, Germany and France to forge ahead with the secret atomic programme". No sooner was he elected in June than he made clear that there is no way Iran will halt its nuclear programme. He has equally made clear that Iran will continue to give every support to Assad's murderous efforts to stamp out the Syrian uprising. His new defence minister, Hossein Dehghan, was a founder member of the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's equivalent of the Soviet KGB, responsible through its Qods Force for spreading terror across the Middle East, and he was one of those responsible in 1979 for the US embassy siege and the seizure of 44 hostages. His justice minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi played a key role in the 1980s in the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, most of them members of the People's Mujahideen of Iran, part of the countrys largest dissident movement, the National Council for Resistance in Iran (NCRI). Since Rouhani's election, thousands more Iranians have been imprisoned and scores hanged, many publicly, as a warning to any other potential dissidents. Yet this is the man we are told is a "moderate" and a "reformer". As the head of the NCRI, Mrs Maryam Rajavi, in June, told a rally of 100,000 Iranian exiles in Paris that their country cannot be described as moving towards "moderation" until its people have been given freedom of speech and the right to form political parties. All political prisoners must be freed and Iran must stop its "war-mongering meddling in Syria and Iraq" and abandon its wish to become a nuclear power. But the mullahs cannot allow any of this to happen, she went on, because it would bring their downfall. So the most dangerous and evil regime in the Middle East floats on. It is spreading terror at home and abroad, concludes Booker, but misrepresented in the West as a "moderate" new government with which we can hope to do business. Not least, it is misrepresenting its plans to acquire its own nuclear weapons, about which Rouhani has already deceived us once and doubtless has every intention of continuing to do so. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 18/08/2013 |
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