Tuesday 19 May 2015

LOL: Bizarre, Paranoid, Email from UKIP's Alan Bigwood to a Potential Christian Voter

In April a friend - tired of Nigel Farage and UKIP bollocking on about Christian values and beliefs wrote to UKIP seeking to find out whether Nigel himself actually went to church. It was a fairly straightforward request (see below). However, in typical style, the reply from UKIP's Alan Bigwood was anything but. His bizarre conspiracy laden ramble of half truth, no truth and downright lie reveals much about a party that claims to be progressive and liberal but is in fact anything but.

Between the Marxist conspiracies and Urban myths,  perhaps the most telling thing of all is that Bigwood fails to actually answer the question at all.


To UKIP Head Office

Z** P*******

To: mail@ukip.org
Hi There

It's been so refreshing to see UKIP actively seek the Christian vote and to try to put in place policies that will directly appeal to followers of Christ. 

I am a former Conservative voter who became disenchanted with David Cameron after his comments in which he said his faith "came and went". I and my husband C****  are now both actively considering voting UKIP. Can you just confirm for me that Nigel himself is an active church goer and where does he go to church?

Thank you and Gods Blessings Upon You

Z** and C****



UKIP Head Office <mail@ukip.org>
Fri, May 1, 2015 at 7:25 PM
To: Z*** P********* *******@gmail.com>
Dear Z** & C****,

Many thanks for getting in touch with us, and for your support. UKIP is firmly in favour of maintaining our culture and our heritage, and an integral part of that is of course the recognition of the huge impact that Christianity has had (sometimes with mixed results, it's true) upon our history for probably the last 1,200 years.


UKIP was the only Party to oppose Gay Marriage and although that political battle has been lost in the House of Commons, we are the only Party that is still seriously concerned about the (inevitable) pressure regarding Gay Marriage that will be exerted onto schools and churches, if they don't "toe the line" and start teaching that traditional ideas of Marriage are outdated and "so Last Century". The trouble with "progressives" is that they are so far out in front that they lose contact with everyone else, and they even come to think that it is incumbent on everyone else to "catch up". But when they are leading the way over a cliff, "catching up" is not always a good plan.

I must also make the point that UKIP is the only Party that wants to pull out of the EU, and yet the EU's Constitution made absolutely zero mention of Christianity. The architecture of the Parliament building in Strasbourg was deliberately designed to represent the Tower of Babel, signifying "unfinished business".  This isn't some zany conspiracy theory.  The EU is quite open about it and makes no concealment of that.   Man is in charge, not God. They even point out the scaffolding bars (part of the structure) winding around at the top, ready for the next level, should Man choose to go up another storey.

The EU is secular, Marxist in origin, and a self-serving Customs Union.  One small  (actually large) example:  the West African (native) fishing industry in countries such as Mauretania, Senegal etc has pretty much been wrecked. Corrupt Governments all down the coast have sold off their Fishing Grounds to the EU Armada, which comes along, sweeps the seas clean, and disappears again, leaving a raped wasteland. The local fishermen are left standing open-mouthed on the seashore. Teach me to fish and I will live forever?

I am not sure what church Nigel attends but he often confirms his Christian belief.

Please see the attached 2015 manifesto.  The full 76-page version can be viewed at the UKIP website www.ukip.org

Regards
Alan Bigwood

UKIP Head Office 

Thursday 7 May 2015

VE Day: Time To Stop Remembrance Of War And Celebrate The Legacy of Peace Instead



In the drawer next to my bed I have a plastic bag with my father's WW2 campaign medals in it. Given that I'm only in my mid forties this makes me fairly unusual I suppose. Indeed, growing up I barely knew anyone my age whose Dad had fought in the war and this was both a great source of pride and fear. Invariably the fear triumphed over the pride. Throughout my childhood, I had a recurring nightmare in which he was taken away to war again and didn't come back. My Uncle Charles was still in the forces in those days and had lost an eye and his sense of taste and smell at Tobruk, so it didn't seem so idiotic to imagine my Dad re-enlisting in the event of what felt, at the time, like the inevitable coming WW3. 

All of his closest chums were army chums. There was Tod, a fellow Sapper who had lost both his legs to a land mine and would take his artificial ones off and merrily throw them aside to go swimming; there was my godfather, Richard, who had won an MC in Italy and there was the irrepressible Basil, who had gone out with the BEF in 1939 and been lifted off Dunkirk beach in 1940.

Get them all together and there would be curry (Indian army officers) a bath full of booze and a cacophony of laughter. They were the most closely bonded, glorious, individuals I have ever known. They had seen adventure and seen death, they had feared death and often been half bored to death but they had all come through it together - and most importantly survived. They were kind, worldly and very, very funny. The very best vintage Englishmen.

As a boy, I would dress up in bits of Dad's old uniform and put on his Sam Browne belt and wage wars in my bedroom with plastic soldiers in which we the British always won and the grey little Germans were inevitably annihilated with toy building bricks and pillows. I would interrogate him for stories and always be a bit disappointed with his response.

Most disappointing of all was his insistence that he had never actually killed anyone. My father, a Royal Engineer, had been a forward intelligence officer, tasked with going ahead of his division and literally seeing how the land lay. It was dangerous work, but the key was stealth. He had dozens of stories of hiding in ditches, or meeting members of the Italian resistance, or holding his breath just yards from German troops - but boys of ten raised on Where Eagles Dare don't want that. They want their Dad to have blazed a machine gun, blown up a castle and taken out half the SS. 

Just once did he come literally face to face with the enemy. While trying to find a good crossing point over a river he looked up and saw a Wehrmacht officer on the other side doing just the same thing. Dad confessed that his instinct was to sneak away, but just then the enemy soldier saw him and so he pulled his gun and took a quick pot shot before running frantically away. Unable to sleep that night, he tossed and turned in his canvas bed, half hoping and half fearing that he had killed another human being. That snapshot, I suspect, is what real war was and is like for most people in the thick of it.

My father was a Tory of the old school. Pin striped suit and military tie, he would often have a far away look in his one eye and despite his fairly decent war record would always insist that he had 'done nothing'. He only wore his campaign medals once and that was in 1995 when he and his old pals marched down the Mall. He didn't like show offs and was suspicious of 'men wearing gongs'. He loved Britain but confessed often that during the war itself he had little time for Churchill. 

He was also firmly pro-European. He had fought for it after all. Dad loved Italy and Italian cars and food and wine - and women. He believed passionately in the EEC and campaigned for it. In fact that was a fairly consistent theme among his group of friends. There are those who say we only entered for economic reasons but that wasn't how he saw it. He would often say how lucky I was to be the first member of the male line in three generations not to have fought in a war. I was. I am.

All of those men are dead now. My father went when I was still in my twenties and his dear buddies faded away within just a few short years of each other. Am I proud? You bet your socks I am. And that is why, increasingly, I feel it is time to call the official commemorations of it all a day. 

You see, these celebrations, whether VE Day, or D Day or even the Blitz no longer have much to do with the people who fought, or suffered, or came through - or didn't. It has been appropriated by the media, the politicians, the pundits, the near right and the far right. Take Farage, a man who to the best of my knowledge has no family at all who participated in either war. How did he spend the election day morning? Posing by a war memorial for photographs. What is the implication of that? That as a nationalist British party UKIP somehow owns a piece of those that saved us from Nazism. No. You don't own the war dead Farage. They were left and right, liberal and Tory, straight and gay, good and bad. They were, after all, not heroes or 'Britons' but human beings. But more than that, what they have left us an extraordinary legacy. The longest sustained period of peace and prosperity in our history. I have not had to go and fight in another pointless war and with any luck the same will be true of my children and grandchildren. 



So after this year celebrating the end of the worst conflict in history let us all move on. We should and must remember it, we should study it and learn from it, but we must remember most of all that its true legacy is not marble columns and fluttering flags - but peace. Time to stop remembrance of war and start celebrating that instead.

Saturday 2 May 2015

Royal baby BREAKING NEWS - your cut out and keep guide to the boring second by second coverage


Newsreader  
We now go live to our Royal Correspondent who is outside St Mary's Hospital. Nicholas/Sue/Dave what can you tell us?

Nicholas/Sue/ Dave  
Yes the Palace have confirmed that the Duchess of Cambridge is currently inside the hospital and given that she is nine months pregnant we can assume that she is probably going to have the baby in the next few hours, or days, or possibly a bit longer. This means that at some point, she will have a baby. The baby will almost certainly be a boy or a girl. If it is a boy there is an extremely high chance that he will be given the traditional title "Prince" whereas if it is a girl she will be known as "Princess". We don't know what the name of the baby will be at this point, but if it is a girl then we can reasonably assume that the baby will have a girl's name, while if the child is a boy he will be called something male. I can also confirm that even if he is a boy he will not be called George. He or she will be the fourth in line to the throne and remain so until something changes at which point he or she will become the third in line or even second or conversely the fifth or sixth. Or perhaps even the seventh. Or eighth - it really depends on how many other children members of the Royal Family have.

Newsreader
And do we have any suggestion as to what emotions the other members of the Royal Family have regarding this labour?

Nicholas/Sue/David
Yes at this point the Palace have confirmed that the Duchess of Cambridge is nine months pregnant and is inside the hospital. We know nothing more than that. In the past Prince William has said that he would love to have a little girl, but that he would be equally happy if he had another little boy. The Duchess herself has never commented openly on the topic, but one might reasonably assume that she will be happy with a boy or a girl. The couple have already had one child, Prince George, so we can say at this point that the new baby will almost certainly not be called George or even Georgina, although the latter still remains a possibility. If unlikely. The news was greeted around the world by other media outlets. Everybody is described as being "really delighted" by the news. Stephen Fry tweeted: "A baby will be coming soon that's nice" while Nigel Farage added - on twitter that it was "really important that everyone realised that we'd all be much better off under an Australian style points based system of labour." David Cameron, unusually perhaps, has backed Farage on this, while Ed Miliband  has added  that he was "very happy for the Royal Family but was trying to fight an election" and that maybe an airport could be named after the baby when it is born. Back to you in the studio Alistair.

Newsreader 
In other news thousands continue to die in ....

Roll Music and Credits.....