Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 May 2016

Spectator EU referendum debate

At the end of last month the Spectator magazine hosted an EU referendum debate featuring former Labour leadership contenders Chuka Ummana and Liz Kendall, along with Lib Dem MP and former deputy PM Nick Clegg for the remain side. Whilst MEPs Daniel Hannan(Tory) and Nigel Farage(UKIP), and Labour Eurosceptic MP Kate Hoey batted for the Brexiters.  Andrew Neil was the host.

Even though I am a moderate Brexiter, I definitely agree that Hannan, Farage and Hoey won the debate.  The Remainers kept using fear tactics such as the loss of trade and the loss of social chapter and environment protection policies that came out of the EU. Trade is based on satisfying need, if the EU countries need UK goods and services then those countries will still buy those goods and services regardless. As for the social chapter policies, these can be legislated post-Brexit.

Ummana made the disingenuous statement that the USA and Australia has higher immigration than the UK, this was promptly dealt with by Farage who reminded Chuka that the US and Australia are substantially larger than the UK.

Hannan was the standout debater. Kendall was the best of the Remainers and Clegg managed to make strategy gamers sound articulate(I'm a strategy gamer BTW). Even though Hoey was the weakest of the Brexiters, she grasped the facts better than all of the Remainers put together.

The main problem for the Remain side was that they could not put a positive case for remaining inside the EU.  This is kind of depressing as it should be based on the intellectual argument rather than fear.


Saturday, 14 May 2016

David Ward

Few things depress me in life, but one of them is how nasty people keep rearing their ugly heads in public.  A few weeks ago that just happened.

Former Bradford East Lib Dem MP David Ward was elected as a councillor in Bradford.  During his tenure as MP, he made several horrendous anti-semitic comments about Jews in relation to Israel Palestine conflict, including the one below on Sky news.
He was then suspended from the Lib Dem whip and followed it up with this little titbit that compared the Palestinian situation to the holocaust


Ward lost his seat in the 2015 general election but now despite all of this the citizens in a part of Bradford have elected him as a councillor.  In the midst of the Labour antisemitism scandal, Nigel Farage said that Labour antisemitism was to do with Labour appealing for Muslim votes due to the institutional antisemitism in the Muslim community.  It seems that this appeal to a very low common demoninator is happening in the Lib Dems and in the left generally.