Douglas Carswell resigns from UKIP

Douglas Carswell has resigned from UKIP and will sit as an independent MP.

In a statement he said that the split is "amicable".

Carswell was never a traditional UKIPper, rather a fellow traveller who aligned himself with UKIP to achieve a common goal. He hoped a parliamentary party would steer the party down a more professional, less reactive path and whilst he had some success influencing behaviours at the top, some of the grassroots membership have been reluctant to see UKIP professionalise.

Whether Carswell should have stayed in UKIP or left the party as he has done, his relatively short time in the party has been marred by pretty embarrassing behaviour from people who should know better.

Many in UKIP are calling for Carswell to resign as he did when he defected from the Tories but he says that he won't be doing so as he isn't crossing the floor.

Carswell dismisses rift rumours as "mischief making"

Douglas Carswell has told the media to stop "mischief making" about his relationship with Nigel Farage.

Rumours were circulating yesterday (almost certainly from the anti-UKIP "research" team in CCHQ who have been running the dirty campaign against UKIP since 2013) that there is a rift between Douglas Carswell and Nigel Farage. The rumours were dismissed yesterday by Farage and then again last night by Carswell. Even their families have been spending time together apparently.

We can expect more of this sort of thing as the election gets closer and the Tories and Labour become increasingly desperate.

UKIP - The Great Realignment Of British Politics Finally Begins

It is difficult to know what to celebrate the most - Douglas Carswell's fantastic victory in Clacton or John Bickly's very close second in Heywood and Middleton.

What is now absolutely clear is that the great realignment of British politics, so long prophesised, is finally underway. 

Some quick points:

• UKIP is rapidly becoming the party of the indigenous working class, displacing working class Toryism in the south of England and challenging Labour supremacy in the north.
• Both Conservative and Labour are retreating deeper and deeper into their regional heartlands and can no longer really be called national parties. Labour's vote evaporated in Clacton, as did the Tories in Heywood and Middleton. 
• UKIP is now surely the only serious challenger to Labour in it's post-industrial heartlands.
• The Labour vote is now realigning in tune with the modern party's middle class leadership and Metropolitan obsessions. Labour has sucked up a very large proportion of the previous LibDem voting middle classes at the same time as losing large amounts of working class supporters to UKIP.
• Despite our advances deep into Labour territory, thanks to the huge public sector vested interests and the dependency culture deliberately created by Gordon Brown, the Labour vote remains very strong in their core areas and will be difficult to break down. After all, after the Rotherham revelations a party with Labour's track record should quite properly cease to exist, and yet it is still winning by-elections in the kind of places similar to those badly affected by such terrible scandals.
• The LibDems are destroyed as a national party, doomed to total humiliation except where they have strong local incumbency factors in their favour. They will lose hundreds of deposits at the next general election. However they may well still hold the balance of power afterwards because of their still strong localised concentrations in support.
• Judging by the idiotic comments and spin from the LibLabCon parties after tonight's debacle, of which the victory address by Labour's Liz McInnes was the most ridiculous, the political class (a) continues to treat the voters with contempt by insulting their intelligence and (b) still doesn't know what has hit it!

Douglas Carswell: It's great to be part of UKIP

Survation poll for Mail on Sunday predicts "UKIP by-election bloodbath" in Clacton

Tomorrow's Mail on Sunday has the results of some astonishing Survation polling in Clacton following the defection of Tory MP, Douglas Carswell.

With the headline "Cameron faces UKIP by-election bloodbath" the Mail reports that 64% of voters in Clacton intend to vote UKIP and 91% of those because they like UKIP or Carswell. The Tory spin that voting UKIP will let Miliband become Prime Minister has failed to resonate with Clacton voters with 69% saying it makes no difference to their voting intentions.

Ladbrokes, Paddy Power and William Hill all have UKIP and Douglas Carswell odds on favourite to win the Clacton by-election:

Ladbrokes: UKIP 1/10

Paddy Power: UKIP 1/7

William Hill: UKIP 1/4

The full results in tomorrow's Mail are as follows:

Why Open Primaries Are A Dumb Idea

An undeniable attribute of the modern Conservative Party is that it has a large number of radical thinkers amongst it's number, mainly sitting on the backbenchers of the House of Commons: Steve Baker, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Andrew Tyrie to name but a few. It's great crime is that it largely ignores them. Instead, it's leaders are cynical, visionless blue-bloods who regard government as little more than reactive management of change in the sorry Tory tradition. One of the huge benefits of the rise of UKIP will be the emancipation of such original thinkers from the dead hand of Toryism in future.

Two of the Conservative Party's greatest thinkers are Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan, co-authors of The Plan and in Carswell's case, The End Of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy. Many and perhaps most 'Kippers will be familiar with these books and the ideas they contain but, if you are not, there is much to recommend them and much that the average UKIP activist would probably agree with.

After the recent furore over candidate selection and the activities of UNITE in the Falkirk constituency, both Carswell and Hannan have once again been touting their idea of Open Primaries for candidate selection, the central idea being that the candidate for a given party should be selected by the electorate of that constituency rather than just the party concerned.

However, open primaries are not one of their better ideas.

The main weakness of open primaries is that it seems to suggest that the only point of a political party is to win elections in the short term. In fact, like any institution, a primary responsibility is to be the custodian of the beliefs and ideals that formed it, even if these are currently deeply unpopular. Of course, over time the party would naturally wish to convince the electorate that it's beliefs are right, but it is not technically necessary for it to actually win a constituency in order to do so. For instance the Greens, and latterly UKIP, enormously changed the terms of the political debate prior to having any parliamentary representation.

The great risk of open primaries is that it would render the cultural memory and capital of a party redundant. Imagine, for example, the case of a strongly libertarian party within a deeply socialist constituency. Your ideas are currently profoundly unpopular with the electorate but you hope with hard work, debate  and tenacity that with time you will start to convince them otherwise. However, your parliamentary candidate is selected by an open primary. Naturally, the candidate from your party who would be most likely to win would the one who was the least in tune with your party's ideas but most in tune with the current thinking of the electorate. Thus your candidate is highly likely to be a bland centrist rather than a fire-breathing radical. The former stands a much better chance of being elected, but the latter has a much better chance of igniting and shifting the terms of debate. Furthermore, parties would be prey, even more so than they are today, to falling victim to careerist shysters who would use a party machine solely for the purpose of their own ambitions. There is also the further issue of the expense involved, which may favour wealthy candidates over poorer ones.

This, from afar, seems exactly what happens in the United States of America, where open primaries are commonplace. Politicians are mostly exceedingly rich people, seem virtually interchangeable between Republican and Democrat, and seem to practise "exquisite followship": every issue is polled to death before the candidate will make up their mind.

Many would say that is precisely the issue we have now in the UK, and they would be right, but that is because of the ruthless centralised control modern party hierarchies exercise over local constituencies. A much more ideal situation than open primaries is to leave a local party in power of candidate selection, with the central party authority only stepping in and overruling selection in extreme circumstances.

That said, Douglas Carswell still has some interesting ideas on party organisation that UKIP should look at stealing, before his own dozy party finally wakes up (and they will have to sooner or later, given how membership is in free fall). His central idea is to spotify party membership, where individuals sign up to all sorts of membership packages based on the policy portfolios they support. Here, he really is onto something - sooner or later parties will have to adapt to the internet age and social media and the concept of the diffuse network. Like all political parties, UKIP are currently wedded to the old model, something we should look at changing as a matter of urgency.

William Hague says we need a law to protect democracy from the EU

The EU Bill had its first day of parliamentary scrutiny today and it was a bit of a farce.

Me and Dave have checked the instruction
book Gordon left behind and Dave says we
can have a referendum. Scouts honour.

Tory MP, Bill Cash, has tabled a number of amendments to make it do what it says on the tin and fellow Tory MP, Douglas Carswell, called it a "bogus EU bill". Labour MP, Yvette Cooper, describes it as "badly drafted and contradictory".  William Hague, meanwhile, describes it as "the strongest defence of national democracy put in place anywhere in Europe".

It's an interesting comment from Little Willy.  He says it's the strongest defence of national democracy anywhere in Europe.  Why do Switzerland, Norway, Russia or any of the other countries in Europe that haven't stupidly signed themselves up to the EU project need a law to defend their national democracy?  They don't because they don't have the EU trying to steal it from them.

And surely this is the first time a front bench MP from one of the pro-EU parties has admitted that we need laws to defend our national democracy from the EU, that the EU is actively trying to undermine our sovereignty?

An unexpected and presumably unintentional admission from the Tory Foreign Minister that the EU is working against our national interest.