Ukip talking Turkey

Who are, or were, the UKIP Women’s Board? They were a Facebook group that existed briefly and seems to have deleted itself.

Here’s what they did.

There’s a Facebook group called Women Against UKIP. They joined earlier in 2014, and they now have upwards of 5000 Likes.

At the end of May, Women Against UKIP had upwards of 3000 Likes, as I recall.

As you can see from the screenshot at the top right, taken on 4th June, in four days UKIP Womens Board had 3153 Likes. Quick work in four days! A lot of women must support UKIP!

Yes. 3185 women support UKIP. Aged between 18-24. In Istanbul.

Should the Euro Elections be declared invalid?

Have you heard of form UC1?

You’re not alone if you haven’t – the Electoral Commission makes no mention of it on its About My Vote website except as an “additional form”. UC1 is a form that EU citizens from outside the UK / the Republic of Ireland, have to fill in if they want to be able to vote in EU elections in the UK. It’s brand new – it seems to have been decided that this additional bureaucratic stumbling block was necessary sometime last year.

EU citizens who register to vote in the UK can’t vote in parliamentary elections, but they can vote for local councils and in EU elections if they’ve opted to vote in the UK rather than in their home country. It’s unlawful to register in two locations and vote twice, but it’s unlawful for anyone to do that, and UK citizens don’t have to fill in a separate form saying “I haven’t registered twice and I won’t vote twice” in order to be allowed to vote.

UKIP: Against free speech

There’s a poster that’s been live on the Internet for a while. UKIP don’t like it, obviously, but apparently one UKIP politician likes it so little that he actually tried to get the police to have it taken down.

I was quite doubtful about this blog when I first read it, because it seemed so improbable that any politician would do anything so damaging to his own party.

[Update: But apparently that Cambridgeshire UKIP councillor is not the only UKIP representative to think the police’s job is to stifle criticism of their party: Ukip’s South East chairman Janice Atkinson and her fellow candidates Patricia Culligan and Alan Stevens have written to the police this week demanding they arrest any protester who calls them “fascists”.]

Yesterday afternoon as I was debating whether to continue watching some lame James Caan movie about midget submarines, I was disturbed by a police officer peering through my lounge window. I do live on the ground floor, so not as surprising as you may have imagined. I went to the door and there were two constables there. The first thing they said was that there was nothing to be worried about, they just wanted to come in for a chat. Not something that has ever happened to me before, but I showed them in and sat them on the sofa.

They wondered if I was the Michael Abberton on Twitter and I said yes. Then they said this was in relation to a complaint that had been made by a certain political party in relation to tweets I had published about them and one tweet in particular which talked about ten reasons to vote for them. The PC wanted to know if I had made that poster. I explained that I hadn’t but it had been doing the rounds on Twitter for a while, and so I had decided to see if these claims could be verified.

Because it’s my choice

Over two years ago, I wrote a blogpost outlining why I thought those who were opposed to same-sex marriage were also opposed to safe legal abortion. (Human Rights: Abortion and gay marriage).

In 2004, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) won the general election and had as a manifesto commitment, lifting the ban on same-sex marriage in Spain. In 2005, Spain became the third country in the world in which same-sex couples can marry. In 2011, the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) won a majority, and had in their manifesto commitments to roll back access to safe legal abortion, and to have the Constitutional Court consider re-imposing a ban on same-sex marriage.

Courts and judges, upholders of law and order, have in general proved to be supporters of keeping marriage legal, because unmaking lawful marriages is disorderly, and to the judicial mind, disorderliness in marriage law is anathema. In 2012, so it proved in Spain: rather than fall into the unutterable confusion of declaring that seven years of marriages would no longer be recognised, the 2005 law was upheld.

UKIP weather

David Silvester, elected as a Conservative councillor for Henley-on-Thames (pop. 10,000) resigned from the Tories and joined UKIP in 2013 to protest David Cameron’s support of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act. A local paper published his letter about same-sex marriage causing the floods on Saturday 17th January 2014.

David Silvester quit the Tories for UKIP over #equalmarriage: now claims gay marriage causes flooding #ORLY? http://t.co/zZsLSZWWtd #Henley

— lgbt.co.uk (@lgbtcouk) January 18, 2014

On Sunday, following a small social media stir, founder of @UpikTips started a new Twitter account that evening: @UKIPweather, which has now tweeted 18 times and has over 100,000 followers – a phenomenon which brought David Silvester’s comments into the mainstream news. (For contrast, UKIP’s official Twitter account has only 36,300 followers.)

EXTREME WEATHER WARNING! Tonight for the first time, just about half past ten. For the first time in history it's gonna start rainin' men

— UkipWeather (@UkipWeather) January 18, 2014

Say no to the Daily Express. Say no to racism.

At 4:44pm today, the Daily_Express twitter account posted this:

Say NO to limitless migration. Say NO to a new influx from Eastern Europe. Sign our petition and we can STOP this: http://t.co/5X2e5V6JM3

— Daily_Express (@Daily_Express) November 2, 2013

This was originally posted as a Promoted Tweet, for which the Daily Express were paying: