From the BBC:
UKIP has also dismissed claims in The Observer that the party's policy-making process in chaos.
The newspaper published leaked e-mails between party treasurer Stuart Wheeler and MEP Godfrey Bloom, in which Mr Bloom advises UKIP to adopt policies "off the shelf" from right-wing think tanks, because trying to reach agreement on where it stood on issues was like "herding cats".
A UKIP spokesman said: "I am glad they are discussing policies. So they should be."
UKIP actually did have a set of reasonably coherent policies for the 2010 General Election, but they binned them all in a fit of pique when they fell out with policy-overseer David Campbell Bannerman (who then defected back to the Tories anyway).
But why should UKIP bother with specific policies, let alone reasonably coherent ones? It's far easier just making vague promises to all sorts of special interest groups and hoping that none of them notices that the same party has also made equal and opposite promises to all the other special interest groups. Failing that, you just go for lowest common denominator stuff, like opposing the EU, immigration, new housing and windmills and hope for the best. Sound economic thinking goes straight out of the window of course (they have long said that they prefer "local sales tax" to "council tax" which is massively regressive and economically damaging, of course).
Simple fact is, political parties tend to do much better without troublesome baggage like "detailed and coherent policies", which only end up being misinterpreted by opponents anyway (wilfully or otherwise). The Labour Party has adopted the same strategy and it's not doing them any harm in the opinion polls either, is it?
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4 comments:
"political parties tend to do much better without troublesome baggage like "detailed and coherent policies"
Well it is ever so slightly more honest, in that instead of having a set of policies in their manifesto, which then are weaselled out of one by one, by not having any policies to begin with they can do what they like once elected, as they do anyway, but without having to do any weaselling.
B, agreed, as the Lib Dems have found out to their cost.
As one wag said of their recent conference "They are debating which policies they would have if they weren't in government."
Trouble is none of them ever propose coherent policies that stand up to scrutiny. If one did then it would be able to carry the arguments, but none do so none can.
MW "Simple fact is, political parties tend to do much better without troublesome baggage like "detailed and coherent policies", which only end up being misinterpreted by opponents anyway (wilfully or otherwise). The Labour Party has adopted the same strategy and it's not doing them any harm in the opinion polls either, is it?"
We and they might want to revisit this, this time next week, after Not Red Ed's splendid performance today, which does of course underline how sensible it is not to have policies, and especially not to have policies you can't convincingly explain :-)
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