Nick Lincoln: Debate at Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

This is a reblog of UKIP PPC for Watford Nick Lincoln’s write-up of the IEA meeting I attended yesterday in Westminster. I shot the video clip below of Mark Reckless’ contribution, during which he notably states that a UKIP Government would abolish DECC.

The subject was Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement of the previous day.

Leading MPs from all the main parties were present, including our own Mark Reckless. The recurring theme of the debate was the deficit and the public sector debt.

For those that don’t know – and this includes our Prime Minister – the deficit and the public sector debt are two different things.

Owen Paterson follows UKIP’s lead and calls for scrapping of climate change act

Ex-Environment minister Owen Paterson is tonight delivering the annual GWPF lecture. In it he will say the climate change act should be scrapped. UKIP has been saying this for years and has had a detailed energy policy document out for years detailing better alternatives for a viable mixed energy policy. The full text of his speech has been published at the Spectator. Here’s an except:

The vital importance of affordable energy

But first, let us consider what is at stake. We now live in an almost totally computer-dependent world. Without secure power the whole of our modern civilisation collapses: banking, air traffic control, smart phones, refrigerated food, life-saving surgery, entertainment, education, industry and transport.

We are lucky to live in a country where energy has been affordable and reliable.

Yet we cannot take this for granted.

While most public discussion is driven by the immediacy of the looming 2020 EU renewables target; policy is actually dominated by the EU’s long-term 2050 target.

The 2050 target is for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent relative to 1990 levels. The target has been outlined by the European Commission. But it is only the UK that has made it legally binding through the Climate Change Act – a piece of legislation that I and virtually every other MP voted for.

The 2050 target of cutting emissions by 80 percent, requires the almost complete decarbonisation of the electricity supply in 36 years.

In the short and medium term, costs to consumers will rise dramatically, and the lights would eventually go out. Not because of a temporary shortfall, but because of structural failures, from which we will find it extremely difficult and expensive to recover.

We must act now.

Rise of Germany’s UKIP gives the EU another headache

German voters back AfD
[image credit: BBC]

Recent voting successes for the ‘Alternative for Germany’ party, which in some respects is similar to UKIP, have ‘upset the chemistry of German politics’ according to a Daily Telegraph report. Oh dear, how awful (!).

Report: ‘Attempts to discredit the party as a Right-wing fringe group have failed.’ A familiar tactic with the same result as in the UK.

Although they don’t advocate leaving the EU altogether, they are opposed to Germany being a member of the ‘eurozone’ currency union.

Przemek Skwirczynski: UKIP gets Tories to go Polish on gas, to all our benefit

Friends of Poland in UKIP chairman  Przemek Skwirczynski writes an excellent piece at the commentator:

Przemek Skwirczynski: UKIP gets Tories to go Polish on gas, to all our benefit

As a Pole, loyal to the UK, and therefore to the cause of freedom and original thinking, before joining UKIP over a year ago I perceived it to be the real Conservative grassroots, if not a kind of think tank for open minded people of whatever origin. By now it is obvious that UKIP serves as both grassroots and a think tank in one for both the Tories and Labour.

Whatever policies it comes up with get snapped up by either of the less imaginative mainstream parties.

One of such policies was outlined during UKIP’s September 2013 conference, where the party’s energy spokesman Roger Helmer MEP set out the clean energy case for shale gas (compared to other fossil fuels) but also pointed to what should be done with the gas revenues.

Using Norway as an example, Roger Helmer suggested that the UK should create a sovereign wealth fund through which it could reinvest the profits from fracking, as opposed to spending them on current consumption as was done with the North Sea oil revenues.

AfD jockey for position as EU group horse-trading stakes increase

Climate-sceptical German political party AfD has been trying to get a seat at the ECR EU-reform grouping table in order to gain domestic influence. But much as it would benefit David Cameron in numerical terms to welcome them in, Frau Merkel says ‘Nein!’, and Cameron needs Merkel onside to get a less federalist leaning EU president elected. Doubling his discomfort, if AfD is excluded, they will probably align with UKIP, increasing the likelihood of Nigel Farage’s grouping gaining enough support for a front-row seat in the European Parliament. This from The Irish Times:

With David Cameron in Sweden to haggle with other European Union leaders over Jean-Claude Juncker’s fate, his Tory MEPs face another difficult choice in Brussels.

After final talks today, they decide tomorrow whether or not to accept Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as Euro-critical allies in the new European parliament.

Welcoming the seven German MEPs would be a shot in the arm to the Tory’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) grouping, making it the third largest in the new parliament and giving a strong voice to the Tory Eurocritical reform agenda.

But they also know that opening the door to the AfD, which polled 7 per cent on May 25th in Germany, would unleash the wrath of Angela Merkel.

Cold shoulder

For two weeks, the German leader has been urging Tory leader Cameron to show the AfD the cold shoulder. She worries that having the AfD in an established political grouping would give them greater credibility and visibility as rivals to her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) ahead of state elections later in the summer.

 

With the AfD rising in the polls, the German leader is facing growing pressure from inside her party to present a clear political strategy to challenge – rather than ignore – the AfD threat.

Read the rest here

D-Day in Newark

Roger Helmer MEP

Canvassing in Newark

June 5th is polling day in Newark.  This is my fifth election since 1999. My second in a fortnight.  And my first Westminster election.  I’m the UKIP candidate.

Opinion polls are still putting the Conservatives in the lead.  I just can’t relate those numbers to our experience.  We’ve done a huge amount of canvassing, and on that basis we’re at least level pegging! Maybe better. In fifteen years I’ve never seen the kind of enthusiasm we’re getting here — on the doorstep, in the street, in the shops and the pubs.  It’s heartwarming.

Yesterday a colleague was walking in from the station (we’ve had hundreds of activists in town).  He was confronted with an Agence France video reporter.  “Can you help me?” said the journo.  “I need to interview someone who’s not voting UKIP, but I can’t find anyone”.  “Sorry” said my colleague, “but I’m afraid I’m…

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Andrew McKillop: Death Cross Mix for European Energy : No Future

Guest post from Andrew McKillop

Death Cross Mix for European Energy : No Future
by Andrew McKillop 29-03-2014

Play With the Toy Until it Breaks
Commentators have begun to focus on the “moving average” of always-unrealistic energy policy and programs in the European Union, easily finding that they signal a “bearish outlook” for future energy supply in Europe – but certainly not for energy prices.  In fact not only the poster child victim of the EU’s mix and mingle of often-extreme policies – electricity, but also increasingly gas and then oil – faces a supply outlook that almost inevitably has to be down. This is despite, or because of, ever-rising energy prices, led by electricity price rises! Prices are driven up by a death cross convergence of political, economic, financial, technical and even cultural “life style” factors. In the poster child country for European “energy transition”, German household electricity prices are around 25 euro cents per kiloWatthour in early 2014, pricing their power at an oil equivalent (1600 kWh per barrel) of around $540 per barrel equivalent. Can we be surprised that German electricity consumption is falling?

Elected: I’m now vice chair at my local UKIP branch

We held our local UKIP branch AGM last night where I was elected as vice chair and webcomms officer. I’m looking foward to working more closely with my committee colleagues Craig Sweaton (chair & media comms), Anne Murgatroyd (secretary) and Phil Banks (treasurer). The mainstream media is mis-portraying what UKIP stand for, so I thought I’d republish this short piece from Stuart O’Reilly at Oxford University to counter the misinformation:

Stuart O’Reilly

There seems to be an awful lot of misinformation about UKIP. And believe me, if the discourses were true, I would certainly not be a member. We’ve had a few problematic characters: Godfrey Bloom and David Silvester being those that Oxford students will probably be the most familiar with. But our goals are far too important for us to be deterred by such people.

‘UKIP dislikes immigrants, right?’ Wrong. The vast majority of immigrants come to Britain to contribute, socially and economically. But our immigration system is flawed. We have a huge oversupply in the labour market, particularly in relation to unskilled and low skilled workers. It cannot be right that our government increasingly adds to this problem by having an open-door policy. The result is that wages are driven down, people are exploited and unemployment remains relatively unchanged. UKIP want a points-based system that does not discriminate against people from Africa, Asia and South America as the government’s current policy does.