Farage is a cocky little git, isn't he. He will probably do well in next week's European elections with his Brexit Party - formed in January and four months later leading the polls ahead of both the Conservatives and Labour. It's amazing what you can do with no manifesto, just a bit of concentrated chutzpah and a few million pounds. I really don't know what voters see in him, he is a simple breaker of things.
I think it's now common knowledge that The Brexit Party Ltd (TBPL) is actually a company and not a political party at all. UKIP was the same by the way.
On Companies House website six officers are listed (HERE) in TBPL's entry - although the true number is five. Catherine Blaiklok who founded the company (or party), is down twice, unless there are two people with the same name and DoB. She appears to be a serial resigner, having given notice twice, firstly on 28th March and again on 3rd May 2019. This was due to some anti-Islamic and racist statements she made on-line - as people like her are wont to do.
The company secretary was Michael Jack McGough who resigned on the 8th May because of some anti-semitism (at least they had a balanced policy in the middle east). Both Blaiklok and McGough had been members of UKIP (HERE) but:
"Like Farage and Blaiklock he [McGough] left the party over it's anti-Islam stance under its current leader, Gerard Batten".
I assume in Blaiklok's case, she actually left UKIP because they weren't anti-Islamic enough.
This leaves three officers. One is the new company secretary Phillip Victor Basey. He was apparently responsible for knocking UKIP's 2015 manifesto into shape before spending two months as their treasurer later in 2015. I assume his own resignation will be coming shortly, as soon as he gets round to making an anti-Islamic or racist tweet. Then there are the two active directors, the multi-millionaire Richard Tice and one Nigel Paul Farage.
Note our Nigel lists his occupation on the Companies House website as: Leader of a political party
With this one entry, so much about him becomes clear. After leading UKIP there can be no other position for Farage's exceptional talent other than leading political parties. He isn't a plumber or a PR man, no: he leads political parties. I assume he got The Brexit Party job by listing his CV on Monster and waiting for someone to call. Don't trouble yourself with all that election rubbish like the Tories just ring Nige. No doubt when the Republicans, or the CDU in Germany, or the Five Star Movement in Italy want a new leader Farage will be in the running.
There are also questions being raised about the small donations he said was funding TBPL. We are told these are mostly below the £500 threshold meaning the donors can remain anonymous, fortunately for him. But his website is open to abuse (HERE) and could apparently be used by bots to disguise large donations by splitting them into lots of smaller transactions. The sources of larger donations won't be known until July.
I also note he has another company called Thorn In The Side Ltd (what a card he is, eh?) to channel his income neatly towards much lower company taxes rather than the far higher personal type that you and I - mere mortals - are forced to pay. What beer swilling man-of-the-people doesn't have such an arrangement? I know from my own experience down at The Dog and Duck, everyone has either a service company or an offshore account in The Caymans. Crikey, nowadays you'd be a fool not to.
Anyway the return for 2017-18 is HERE. Thorn in the side (or TITS, shades of Del boy there) had a net income in that year of £390,969 calculated by the increase in current assets from £157,604 the year before to £548,573 in 2018. You can't see much more because it's filing is made as a 'micro entity' with a turnover below £632,000 meaning it doesn't have to make any other disclosure. The accounts were approved by 'the board' which is made up of Mr Nigel Paul Farage alone. Good isn't it?
We don't need to worry about where Farage's money came from in 2016 because Channel 4 revealed that it much of it was from Aaron Banks (HERE) to the tune of about £450,000 in housing, transport and security. This is apart from the £8 million that Banks donated to Leave.eu for the referendum campaign, money that the National Crime Agency (HERE) is still investigating after it was referred to them by the Electoral Commission on November 1st last year.
One has to wonder why Brexit was so important to Mr Banks that he was prepared to pump in a lot of his own wealth to get it? And why it has taken nearly seven months to show where the £8 million came from? Most people could do it in an hour or so - I would have thought.
Riding high in the polls Farage says voters want to be sure that no deal is put back on the table (HERE). Not only does he want to enrich himself, he also wants to impoverish the rest of us.
His remarks came as he had been canvassing in Lincolnshire. Farage said that if his latest party comes out top in the European elections, it will leave Labour and Conservative MPs fearful for their Commons seats. And, asked what a Brexit Party victory would mean, he said:
“It puts a no-deal Brexit back on the table. Parliament has taken it off the table. Our voters say, ‘Put it back on the table’ and, if we win, we will demand representation, with the government, at the next stage of negotiations.
“We have deadline now of 31 October and we want to make sure, our voters want to make sure, that, actually, no deal is being seriously thought about.”
Yes, I think we can be sure no deal is being seriously thought about, especially in Ireland, in farming communities, Sunderland, the West Midlands and plenty of other places which rely on exports to the EU. In fact not only is it being thought about, there are thousands who are worried sick about it. The CBI warned in January a no deal Brexit would threaten over 40 EU trade deals (HERE).
However, Farage's so-called 'surge' in the Opinium poll last weekend (HERE) should be taken with a pinch of salt. No doubt he'll do well in the European elections but I don't believe that will be as well as Opinium suggest. He also intends to field candidates in the next general election which means he is going to need around 600 people who can appear semi-normal and we know this is not going to be easy. The Brexit party will attract exactly the same kind of xenophobes, fruitcakes and closet racists as UKIP did. In fact many of them, as we can see already, will be straight from UKIP.
I think it's now common knowledge that The Brexit Party Ltd (TBPL) is actually a company and not a political party at all. UKIP was the same by the way.
On Companies House website six officers are listed (HERE) in TBPL's entry - although the true number is five. Catherine Blaiklok who founded the company (or party), is down twice, unless there are two people with the same name and DoB. She appears to be a serial resigner, having given notice twice, firstly on 28th March and again on 3rd May 2019. This was due to some anti-Islamic and racist statements she made on-line - as people like her are wont to do.
The company secretary was Michael Jack McGough who resigned on the 8th May because of some anti-semitism (at least they had a balanced policy in the middle east). Both Blaiklok and McGough had been members of UKIP (HERE) but:
"Like Farage and Blaiklock he [McGough] left the party over it's anti-Islam stance under its current leader, Gerard Batten".
I assume in Blaiklok's case, she actually left UKIP because they weren't anti-Islamic enough.
This leaves three officers. One is the new company secretary Phillip Victor Basey. He was apparently responsible for knocking UKIP's 2015 manifesto into shape before spending two months as their treasurer later in 2015. I assume his own resignation will be coming shortly, as soon as he gets round to making an anti-Islamic or racist tweet. Then there are the two active directors, the multi-millionaire Richard Tice and one Nigel Paul Farage.
Note our Nigel lists his occupation on the Companies House website as: Leader of a political party
With this one entry, so much about him becomes clear. After leading UKIP there can be no other position for Farage's exceptional talent other than leading political parties. He isn't a plumber or a PR man, no: he leads political parties. I assume he got The Brexit Party job by listing his CV on Monster and waiting for someone to call. Don't trouble yourself with all that election rubbish like the Tories just ring Nige. No doubt when the Republicans, or the CDU in Germany, or the Five Star Movement in Italy want a new leader Farage will be in the running.
There are also questions being raised about the small donations he said was funding TBPL. We are told these are mostly below the £500 threshold meaning the donors can remain anonymous, fortunately for him. But his website is open to abuse (HERE) and could apparently be used by bots to disguise large donations by splitting them into lots of smaller transactions. The sources of larger donations won't be known until July.
I also note he has another company called Thorn In The Side Ltd (what a card he is, eh?) to channel his income neatly towards much lower company taxes rather than the far higher personal type that you and I - mere mortals - are forced to pay. What beer swilling man-of-the-people doesn't have such an arrangement? I know from my own experience down at The Dog and Duck, everyone has either a service company or an offshore account in The Caymans. Crikey, nowadays you'd be a fool not to.
Anyway the return for 2017-18 is HERE. Thorn in the side (or TITS, shades of Del boy there) had a net income in that year of £390,969 calculated by the increase in current assets from £157,604 the year before to £548,573 in 2018. You can't see much more because it's filing is made as a 'micro entity' with a turnover below £632,000 meaning it doesn't have to make any other disclosure. The accounts were approved by 'the board' which is made up of Mr Nigel Paul Farage alone. Good isn't it?
We don't need to worry about where Farage's money came from in 2016 because Channel 4 revealed that it much of it was from Aaron Banks (HERE) to the tune of about £450,000 in housing, transport and security. This is apart from the £8 million that Banks donated to Leave.eu for the referendum campaign, money that the National Crime Agency (HERE) is still investigating after it was referred to them by the Electoral Commission on November 1st last year.
One has to wonder why Brexit was so important to Mr Banks that he was prepared to pump in a lot of his own wealth to get it? And why it has taken nearly seven months to show where the £8 million came from? Most people could do it in an hour or so - I would have thought.
Riding high in the polls Farage says voters want to be sure that no deal is put back on the table (HERE). Not only does he want to enrich himself, he also wants to impoverish the rest of us.
His remarks came as he had been canvassing in Lincolnshire. Farage said that if his latest party comes out top in the European elections, it will leave Labour and Conservative MPs fearful for their Commons seats. And, asked what a Brexit Party victory would mean, he said:
“It puts a no-deal Brexit back on the table. Parliament has taken it off the table. Our voters say, ‘Put it back on the table’ and, if we win, we will demand representation, with the government, at the next stage of negotiations.
“We have deadline now of 31 October and we want to make sure, our voters want to make sure, that, actually, no deal is being seriously thought about.”
Yes, I think we can be sure no deal is being seriously thought about, especially in Ireland, in farming communities, Sunderland, the West Midlands and plenty of other places which rely on exports to the EU. In fact not only is it being thought about, there are thousands who are worried sick about it. The CBI warned in January a no deal Brexit would threaten over 40 EU trade deals (HERE).
However, Farage's so-called 'surge' in the Opinium poll last weekend (HERE) should be taken with a pinch of salt. No doubt he'll do well in the European elections but I don't believe that will be as well as Opinium suggest. He also intends to field candidates in the next general election which means he is going to need around 600 people who can appear semi-normal and we know this is not going to be easy. The Brexit party will attract exactly the same kind of xenophobes, fruitcakes and closet racists as UKIP did. In fact many of them, as we can see already, will be straight from UKIP.
Pretty soon The Brexit party and UKIP will look exactly the same and will go the same way.
This is inevitable. British society has more than its share of the sort of people that Farage attracts and is attracted to but unfortunately, there simply aren't enough of them to carry him to Downing Street or even into the House of Commons.
Farage and his base are made for each other. He doesn't practice dog whistle politics because he doesn't need to, his style is to offer ridiculously simplistic policies for complex issues and sell them in an authoritarian way tinged with a bit of subliminal racism. Just the thing his supporters demand. In the European elections he isn't even offering that - only a blank sheet with Brexit written on it. They don't know what it means but they do want it good and hard and as quickly as possible. This is said to be 'defending democracy'.
At the same time the BBC had an entirely unrelated story about how we are fascinated by con men and women (HERE). I say unrelated - some might think that they are.
Farage and his base are made for each other. He doesn't practice dog whistle politics because he doesn't need to, his style is to offer ridiculously simplistic policies for complex issues and sell them in an authoritarian way tinged with a bit of subliminal racism. Just the thing his supporters demand. In the European elections he isn't even offering that - only a blank sheet with Brexit written on it. They don't know what it means but they do want it good and hard and as quickly as possible. This is said to be 'defending democracy'.
At the same time the BBC had an entirely unrelated story about how we are fascinated by con men and women (HERE). I say unrelated - some might think that they are.
