A bad egg

With American pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer increasing their bid to take over AstraZeneca, spokesmen for No. 10 Downing Street reiterate their commitment to allowing the free market to operate unfettered.  They are having a few discussions with Pfizer to ensure that it is not a complete asset-stripping jobbie, but this is the same Pfizer that made more than 2,000 people redundant in a research facility in Sandwich, Kent a few years ago.  The same Pfizer that is only doing the deal because it is sitting on a vast capital stockpile and wants to avoid paying US corporation tax (as takeovers are exempt).  AstraZeneca is developing a lucrative range of new cancer-treatment products but the shareholders might value jam today over jam tomorrow.  Nativism can inhibit markets and cost jobs (Tata has done a good job with Range Rover because it was allowed its takeover) but also can ensure that a country keeps companies that have a natural affinity for their heritage.  It is said that that Kraft has not been a good custodian of CadburySchweppes.  The coterie in No. 10 (or Boris Johnson, cheerleader for selling off British companies to foreign companies that have little interest in this country) can scarce think beyond the verities of their economic textbooks in their PPE courses.  From Cameron's circle, only Michael Heseltine, who resigned from the cabinet in 1986 over the government handling of the Westland sale, has raised doubts.
Of course, from UKIP, whose leader is an ex-City trader, not a peep, illustrating how they are happy for Britain to sell itself off to the highest bidder.  Such avid free marketeers, they even propose a flat tax where those doing low-paid jobs pay the same tax as billionaire hedge fund managers.  It's not surprising that Nigel Farage got egged yesterday.  The police bundled the assailant away despite the man not actually touching Farage (as slow-motion footage reveals) and the boys in blue doing no such thing when Ed Miliband (and others) were egged by a man in south London.  As in eastern Ukraine, are the police favouring one political side over another?
I got UKIP's leaflet for the local and European elections through the letterbox.  Straight in the long-life recycling bag!  Their campaign is so riddle with lies that why should I waste my time (to the extent that it was recycling collection the next day and it went in the bag as I was putting it outside)?  For any ordinary political party, it would have been a horrendous ten days.  But such is the disillusionment with traditional parties, that insurgent groups can capitalise, just like Alex Salmond's SNP who revel in portraying themselves as outsiders against the 'Westminster elite'.  So numerous candidates can be revealed as closet racists and homophobes, a party worker can disingenuously appear in political broadcasts as a mere 'ordinary voter', a poster campaign against EU migrants has an EU migrant representing a 'jobless Brit'.  Further, it says 26 million people in the EU are after British jobs, neglecting to say that two million of this total are from the UK, not to mention that the entire unemployed population in the EU will not be migrating to the UK.  Farage has found to have been acting very shadily in regard to his EU allowance (despite the notorious absentee rates of UKIP members in the European parliament), saying he could do what he likes with it, despite laying into MPs over expenses - initially, he said he was happy for an independent audit before retracting that a few days later because he would not submit to an independent audit because no-one else does, even though everyone apart from UKIP and the BNP does submit themselves to just that.  UKIP's finances are more murky than the European Commission.  The Times, falling out with Farage after he chose The Daily Telegraph for a webchat after his debates with Nick Clegg, alleges that he has squirelled away his money in tax-dodging offshore accounts.  As with all his bravado, his announcement that he would sue The Times has quietly fallen off his agenda, proving that he may be wiser but not as brave as Jonathan Aitken.
Yet none of it matters.  The more the mainstream media attack Farage, the more the general public tune out, not wanting to believe an 'establishment' attack on someone presenting himself as a folk hero.  Like George W Bush (although with more energy than the lethargy displayed by the former US president when on campaign), Farage uses working-class language to sell elitist policies; the Democrats in contrast were accused of using elitist language to sell working-class policies, but the British parties feel obliged to define themselves against UKIP but just flounder in their vacillating reaction - attack or ignore?
It is not unique to Britain.  In the Netherlands at the turn of the century, there was the rise to prominence of Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant, cigar-chomping politician who used his homosexuality to make Dutch voters believe him a centrist, no matter his outrageous anti-immigrant rhetoric and demands for a 'cold war' with Islam.  He was very dangerous and it looked like his List party would become the largest in the Dutch parliament during the 2002 general election.  Then he was assassinated by an animal-rights activist who said he wanted to stop a man who scapegoated Muslims and targeted the weak in society to gain political power.  The List party, without its founding figurehead, collapsed, becoming a moderately sized party in the Dutch parliament (which List members regarded as a disappointing result) before vanishing without trace in all subsequent elections.
UKIP is not a direct match for the List party (the latter advocated women's rights) but both have a loathing for the European Union and hostility towards immigration and both have charismatic leaders, without whom they would disintegrate rapidly.  Farage is the glue for UKIP.  Who else would step into the breach? The EU gravy train passenger and deputy leader non-entity Paul Nuttall? The disgraced posterboy for cash-for-questions Neil Hamilton?  If Farage fell under a bus tomorrow (not that he would be caught dead near public transport), UKIP would still post decent polling at the forthcoming elections but they'd struggle to come first in the EU election and they would become flotsam and jetsam on the political scene as they fractured and splintered - Farage had to return as party leader because that was exactly what was happening when he first stepped down.  With the backing of tycoons Stuart Wheeler and Paul Sykes (former Conservative donors), UKIP may not be a flash in the pan between general elections.  And we should be afraid, for as shown during Farage's debates with Clegg, tub-thumping soundbites trump calmly reasoned facts for the public at large.