How not to oppose UKIP
I think it will be obvious to anyone who has spent more than five minutes reading this blog that I do not have a lot of time for the UK Independence Party or for their leader Nigel Farage.
Heaven knows that the pressure to explain your views in 10-second soundbites has been driving all parties towards overly simplistic solutions to complex problems, but UKIP's policies are oversimplified in the extreme and I find some of the comments from some of their candidates and officials to be at best foolish and at worst unpleasant.
I have a simple response to this - I will not be voting for them.
As UKIP has started shedding candidates and MEPs at a rate of knots over allegations of expenses-fiddling and racism, it had appeared that many other people were reaching the same conclusion.
How utterly daft then, that at the very moment that UKIP appeared to be on the verge of imploding, a bunch of intellectually-challenged bullies decided to turn Nigel Farage into a victim by staging a protest at the pub where he was eating Sunday lunch with his family.
By all means criticise Farage's foolish policies, but his wife and kids should be off limits. And I don't buy the argument that the protesters didn't notice that his family were there - there are photos of them surrounding his car and anyway they should have thought to check.
An attempt to justify the protest here by one of the organisers, a gentleman called Dan Glass, gives me the impression that Mr Glass is one of the few people in Britain who is even less in touch with reality than Mr Farage.
The Huffington post here shows up how badly the protest backfired.
Heaven knows that the pressure to explain your views in 10-second soundbites has been driving all parties towards overly simplistic solutions to complex problems, but UKIP's policies are oversimplified in the extreme and I find some of the comments from some of their candidates and officials to be at best foolish and at worst unpleasant.
I have a simple response to this - I will not be voting for them.
As UKIP has started shedding candidates and MEPs at a rate of knots over allegations of expenses-fiddling and racism, it had appeared that many other people were reaching the same conclusion.
How utterly daft then, that at the very moment that UKIP appeared to be on the verge of imploding, a bunch of intellectually-challenged bullies decided to turn Nigel Farage into a victim by staging a protest at the pub where he was eating Sunday lunch with his family.
By all means criticise Farage's foolish policies, but his wife and kids should be off limits. And I don't buy the argument that the protesters didn't notice that his family were there - there are photos of them surrounding his car and anyway they should have thought to check.
An attempt to justify the protest here by one of the organisers, a gentleman called Dan Glass, gives me the impression that Mr Glass is one of the few people in Britain who is even less in touch with reality than Mr Farage.
The Huffington post here shows up how badly the protest backfired.
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