Awesome to see enthusiastic UKIP activists all over Frome Town Centre today with Peter Richardson who was talking to local people.

Peter is UKIP’s candidate in the Somerton and  Frome by election on 20th July.

It was amazing to meet so many locals saying they will vote UKIP.  Peter will make an outstanding MP for Somerton and Frome, He stands for people, not politics,  and he will give local people a real voice in Westminster. 

Vote UKIP.

UKIP Bath & Somerset Branch is delighted to announce that Sqn Ldr Peter Richardson (R’td) will be standing as the UK Independence Party’s candidate in the Somerton and Frome By-Election.  

This unexpected by-election is on Thursday 20 July and was triggered by the sudden resignation of David Warburton the sitting (Conservative) MP who stood down following an investigation by Parliamentary authorities into claims of sexual harassment.

There will be eight candidates in the by election.

Peter is a military veteran and parish councillor. He is a local man who understands local issues. He has the moral courage to fight for what matters with truthfulness, transparency and integrity.

Establishment politicians have let us all down over a long period. A vote for UKIP is a vote for a real person, not a career politician. 

If you live in Somerton and Frome, please consider voting for change by voting for Peter Richardson on 20th July.  

Corruption is not what it used to be.   In the eyes of the Public, those days of yore and brown envelopes stuffed with cash, things were far more straightforward – not  commendable of course, but pretty unequivocal.  Nowadays, however, a particular word has morphed into something more insidious and downright dangerous.    When referring to computers, for example, a corrupt program usually means that the thing is doing something other than what you were intending it to do.   This can be catastrophically detrimental, despite its appearing to be working quite normally.

In much the same way as a computer program can be corrupted, various national institutions continually throw up outcomes which defy logic and decency, resulting in bad, flawed and unreliable end results.   These are then misrepresented to the trusting Public as the considered judgement of those wise people who have long regarded themselves as infinitely superior and of unimpeachable integrity, as we all know.   On numerous occasions, we have been sold a particular pup in the fields of medicine, law, education, politics, science, etc. and other important areas which fundamentally affect our lives   These are, however, often totally at odds with the truth.   A good example is the Great Postmaster Scandal, when it was a computer error all along.   The fact that this was grudgingly and finally admitted only after years of official high-level denial demonstrates something much more reprehensible and sinister in every way.    Likewise the contaminated blood debacle.

At the time, life went on for most of us and wasted away for those others.   Weeks, months and years of some people’s lives were being summarily squandered or destroyed, never to be regained, and all because of ponderous and institutionally corrupt systems.

Our  judicial process is complicated and multi-layered.   It needs complete reform, a so-called root and branch job.   Unfortunately for us mere mortals, because of the way things are, this is most unlikely to happen simply because of who would have to carry out such reforms?   Those comfortable, cosily cossetted turkeys are never going to vote for Christmas, that’s for sure.   Eureka!  We have just discovered the third certainty of life, after death and taxes.

That’s a very vague glimmer at best.   We know the worst – those illogical mild sentences we frequently read about.   Then there are those mysterious ‘family courts’ ominously cropping up in the newspapers from time to time.   They give rise to a lot of hot air and outrage, but then things soon return to an often deeply flawed normal.   And so it goes.    In each and every case of tragedy, triumph, trial or tribulation, you’ll find some kind of lawyer with a hand stretched out.   What price ethics at times like this?   An ex-politician’s wife springs nimbly to mind for some unaccountable reason.

While on the subject of PMs past, it has been suggested  that the wonderful, much vaunted Irish ‘peace’ deal was so ably and expertly negotiated unilaterally and without proper due parliamentary process or consideration for a specific purpose.  Surely it could not have been simply a trade-off unconditionally to liberate numerous convicted murderers, thugs and low life in return for ensuring the consequential safe passage of an otherwise prime political target.   Now would that be a cynical thought, or top-level collusion?    The fact that, once again, more Paras are still being hounded for doing an impossibly difficult job all those years ago by a biased official process further reinforces this idea of institutional corruption.

Of other cases more recent, the mysterious circumstances surrounding the fate of Dr David Kelly have never publicly been made known.   Somebody knows, but why the official cover-up?

Currently, the re-emergence of the strange happenings regarding the death of the private investigator Daniel Morgan throws up some important questions, especially since much relevant information had been locked away in an office in Scotland Yard, or so it appears. We are now told that the local fire brigade had to break open the safe to recover it.    Wouldn’t you think the police might know a few old lags who would have welcomed the chance to practise their skills?

Now we hear that Mr Sunak has reneged on that solemnly declared commitment to abolish the whole tranche of EU regulations.     We are all the much poorer for being betrayed by those very people we trust to act in our best interests, whatever they may be.   However you look at it, corruption’s not what it used to be – it’s much worse.

Ivor Jones
UKIP Bath & Somerset Branch
Representative for Bridgwater & West Somerset

In the light of the current spate of organised vandalism perpetrated in the names of Eco This or Stop Something Else, haven’t we seen this kind of near mass-hysterical action before?

With certain obvious exceptions, most of the activists appear to be in the teens to early twenties bracket, and of a comfortable so-called middle class group.

In any event, they have been persuaded that this business of ‘climate change’ which has steadily become some sort of cult, is about to destroy all life as we know it.

In reality, the world’s climate has been changing since the ‘Big Bang’ and will continue so to do until the whole thing eventually fizzles out. They have not yet cottoned on to the fact that by far the biggest threat to human existence is that of overpopulation.

What is more disturbing, however, is the ease with which they have been recruited into behaving as they do – with no regard to everybody else’s opinions and wishes.

Whether by disrupting a Snooker Tournament, the Grand National, obstructing motorways or whatever else, it is clear that there is a core group of these ‘eco’ fanatics who can be directed to any place or event that somebody decides should be attacked, whenever and wherever they choose.

For this to happen, there has to be a hierarchy at large, as opposed to and directing the cannon fodder who actually make the mischief.

As we have seen on various other occasions, it is those ‘useful idiots’ who do the dirty work while the organisers stay safely away and laugh at those gullible enough to take it all in, regardless of the veracity of their ‘cause’ or the consequences of their mindless actions. This is not new by any means. The Nazis in pre-war Germany used similar tactics involving some sort of brainwashing and intimidation, which resulted in the emergence of Hitler Youth and we all know what a misguided bunch they eventually turned out to be.

Of more concern these days is the potential for the organisers of these events to bring together at short notice a substantial gang of activists who can be easily manipulated into carrying out acts of serious civil disobedience against any stratum of society they decide needs their form of correction or treatment.

This is a form of grooming, however you look at it.

Of course, there will be a percentage who will duck out of any really serious civil disorder, but that would still leave a substantial number of organised troublemakers who will relish the thought of seizing some sort of power to affect political thought or action.

This is generally accompanied by those seeking to maximise damage to public and private property.

It is regrettable that the Courts have so far failed to acknowledge this current spate of ochlocracy. Meanwhile, we all have to put up with that troublesome element intent on testing the boundaries of a decent democratic society.

Ivor Jones
UKIP Bath & Somerset Branch
Representative for Bridgwater & West Somerset

According to BBC News, holiday park owners won’t be able to cope with the rising numbers of electric cars.

One Somerset park near Brean Sands, just south of Weston-Super-Mare holds a thousand static caravans, but has only three electric charging points. The owner has been told the National Grid can only support a few more, leaving most electric car drivers unable to recharge on site.

Every caravan needs electricity for lights, heating, and the gadgets of modern life but electric cars are much hungrier. To install hundreds of charging points would be a massive job. The whole park would have to be dug up, big new cables laid. The supply to the site from the Grid would need to be quadrupled, if not more. The grid couldn’t cope with it.

For years Somerset was left out of high speed broadband networks, because the resident population was small. In the same way, there are fewer high speed electric charging points in these remote areas.

UKIP opposes electric vehicles. We will repeal the ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars set for 2030 and end tax exemptions and free electricity for electric vehicles. Electric Car Batteries cost £7,000 and have a life of just 5 years if you are lucky. With a limited battery life, electric vehicles will not have a worthwhile second-hand value.  Electric car batteries use lithium-ion technology, which is potentially dangerous and car fires in electric vehicles is already more frequent than for petrol and diesel vehicles.

The RAC has joined other electric motoring campaigners calling for action from the government.

If this issue concerns you, please consider becoming a UKIP member. You can join UKIP at ukip.org/join.

According to Somerset Live, a huge solar farm could be built on farmland on green belt land on the fringes of North Somerset. PS Renewables has announced plans to build a five megawatt solar farm on a 22 acres site on land south of Haberfield Park Farm at Abbots Leigh.

The land is currently used to grow crops, but the scheme could see rows of PV panels installed in lines up to 3.5 metres from the ground. Access to the site would be from the A369 – a busy commuter route into Bristol – down an existing track.

The site, from which energy would be fed into the regional grid, would be controlled remotely and CCTV would also be installed. The solar farm would take four months to build and have a lifespan of 40 years.

UKIP would oppose this unwanted development. We oppose building solar farms on agricultural land and we will remove subsidies for wind and solar farms. Land suitable for agriculture or grazing must be returned to farming.

Save our green fields …

If this concerns you please consider becoming a UKIP member. You can Join UKIP at ukip.org/join

They tell us we’ve left the EU. They want us to think that we have left the EU. We are supposed to believe that we have left the EU.

Now try telling our fishermen how our fishing grounds are being protected from apparently unlimited incursions by vessels from France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands, including large factory ships using the ‘pulse’ method of fishing, i.e. the indiscriminate large scale electrocution method, right up to our puny 6-mile limit.

We are entitled by international convention to establish a 200-mile zone, yet that outfit known as Defra stands meekly by and watches as our precious fish stocks are plundered to unprecedented and dangerously low levels. Unbelievably, our fishermen are still subject to quotas which are strictly enforced by Defra and which are for specific species of our own fish only.

As a result, not only do our crews now find themselves using very expensive fuel for which, shockingly, this government has specifically disallowed from receiving any concessions, they are obliged to sail through areas of good fishing of the ‘wrong’ species to those areas where their ‘quotas’ of fish can be found. They also face heavy penalties from our own Government for netting ‘wrong’ fish, or for being forced to discard them over the side, as per wasteful polluting EU regulations.

By now, we should have been well on the way to re-establishing our once-thriving fishing industry as befits our island status and needs. But instead, the Destroy Every Fishing Rig Afloat arm of this Government excels itself at applying overzealous myopic nit-picking all around our coasts.

Recently, our crews in Devon and Cornwall that have been hounded by officialdom to comply with nonsensical over-regulation have fortunately, but at considerable personal expense, been able to fight back through our curious legal system. This should never have been necessary if we had unequivocally left the EU as claimed by this government.

We can expect nothing better from a Labour administration, and as for the LibDems, just forget it.

So much for the Conservative version of our ‘independence’.

The UK Independence Party, however, has warned for a long time that our fishing interests were being sacrificed to curry favour with our ‘friends’ in the EU, but with friends like these, etc.

Sadly, our fisher folk are not alone. Notably our farmers and hauliers are also severely hindered in their own particular ways by having to comply with overburdening Government bureaucracy (designed to placate mainly the French), rather than fair and decisive action in our own interest.

The next general election should not be yet another two-horse race. Despite whatever contrary impression is being spread around by the usual suspects, the UK Independence Party is steadily gaining ground nationwide. The new Manifesto contains many practical and sensible ideas. It deserves a good read before the sneering starts.

Ivor Jones
Branch Representative
Bridgwater & West Somerset

The Conservative Party won the 2019 general election, with a huge mandate to level-up outside London and reap the benefits of leaving the EU, but they have miserably failed. They have given us Brexit in Name Only (BRINO), a grim cost-of-living crisis, a growing tax burden, outrageous energy bills, rising inflation, expensive food and mortgage cost hikes. Not only that; this sleazy Conservative government wasted money on Covid contracts, held parties during lock-down, kept changing its leaders and policies, became obsessed with the climate change psychosis, and sold-out our fishermen and Northern Ireland to Brussels. Moreover, this year alone, a record 40,000 illegal immigrants have made their way into the UK mainly using small boats across the English Channel from France. Continue reading Migrants Being Forced On Somerset’s Tourist Destinations →

The emperor has a new set of clothes – actually, a whole wardrobe of them, all in green and probably made in China.

Or do those vestments really belong to the hierarchy of that new religion called ‘Climate Change’?

For their information, the Earth’s climate has changed ever since the beginning of its existence and will continue so to do until the day it eventually splutters to its end. By the same token, a large degree of atmospheric pollution has also occurred, caused by the very geophysical structure of the planet itself. There are currently twenty to thirty large volcanoes and numerous smaller sites active at any one time spewing out toxic gases by the megaton and molten rock by the cubic MILE.

They did not stop after Vesuvius, or Krakatoa. They are still reminding us of their global presence and power, as did Mount St Helens in the USA in 1980, and not too long ago that unpronounceable Icelandic one which caused global problems. Within the past few months or so, Guatemala, Mount Kilauea on Hawaii, the Cumbre Vieja on La Palma in the Canary Islands and the Taal on the Philippines have hit the headlines….and don’t forget Stromboli. Those are only some of the easily accessible and noticeable ones. We can only hope that the Yellowstone system remains benign for at least a few more thousand years, but who knows?

Then factor in the small matter of sunspots, El Nino, the Jetstream and other normal natural phenomena and things start to look a bit more realistic.

This all comes back to more familiar times. During the Second World War, enormous quantities of smoke and toxic gases were produced by millions of tonnes of high explosives and raging fires worldwide over a prolonged period. The question of ‘climate change’ was not then an issue. In fact, the winter of 1947 was one of the coldest on record, and then came freezing 1963 with similar conditions. There have been others since and will be again. Then came the hots of 1976, but no amount of futile gestures by our eco-fanatics will have the slightest effect, and certainly not in this country with a virtually imperceptible output of carbon dioxide (if that is their prime consideration).

Will they demonstrate in China for more effective action, and if so, will they go by bike? Will they stop buying clothes, shoes, electronics, furniture, etc. to help reduce China’s CO2 production? Mind you, some of them seem to have stopped buying clothes a while ago, but that’s simply an observation. Also, using superglue to stick hands or whatever to roads or buildings is most inappropriate since cyanoacrylate type glues are ecologically very unfriendly. As a matter of principle, surely flour and water should be their adhesive of choice.

With regard to our national power generation, this will never be physically achieved within the context of some wonderful net zero illusion. Despite political wishful thinking, this cannot be done solely by mirrors (smoke is no longer a permitted option).

Do those eco-fanatics not realise that those windmills and solar panels require considerable amounts of energy to construct? The additional raw materials still have to be mined, transported, refined, etc. Then once manufactured into the component bits, they have to be surveyed, sited whether on land or offshore, installed, connected and maintained – all of which requires a considerable amount of energy, only to materialise as unsightly, inefficient, grossly expensive vanity projects which rely absolutely on amounts of wind and sunshine for which this country is geographically and meteorologically wholly unsuitable.

Regarding battery power, they require vast amounts of precious metals, mainly lithium, cadmium and nickel, to be mined and refined. By all accounts these miners are usually young children in DRC and China working in atrocious conditions for very little personal reward – effectively slave labour. The subsequent refining of this material is giving rise to colossal amounts of toxic heavy pollution of land and rivers. This is not ‘green’ energy by any means

Then come the massive costs in time and resources when these things need replacing. Because of all the plastics and precious metals contained within them, they are virtually indestructible so therefore non-recyclable. So much for the green credentials!!

For largely self-interest reasons, most of our politicians refuse to accept that the biggest threat currently confronting Mankind is that of overpopulation. Our seas are being grossly overfished, the world’s rainforests are being destroyed in favour of biofuels and expensive cash crops, and vast swathes of good arable land are being occupied by solar panels. All the while the demands of a rapidly increasing population are becoming less and less achievable. Various medical, political, tribal and unhelpful religious doctrinal considerations also have to be taken into account. These annoying little details are totally and conveniently ignored by the new believers.

The utterly disproportionate interpretation of the eco situation is already proving to be unnecessarily damaging to our economic existence and viability. It can only get substantially worse, especially if our politicians continue to curry favour with the self-styled eco experts. How many of these people are seeking to benefit substantially from deeply flawed government schemes?

They seem to be totally in thrall to other countries who are only too keen to debase our international standing and destroy our economy.

Our reliance on Chinese, French, Russian, Middle Eastern and other foreign involvement in our vital power requirements and independence is at best scandalous, and at worst blatantly corrupt.

This new religion plays directly into their hands.

Ivor Jones
UKIP Representative for Bridgwater and West Somerset

Our Annual Party Conference was held in Skegness on 10th October. It was a highly successful and well-attended conference with a wide range of speakers.

Here is a video of the speakers and delegates at the conference being interviewed by The Voice of Wales: https://gettr.com/streaming/p1ty9jkdaa4

Here is a video of Lembit Opik’s https://gettr.com/streaming/p1u1y5bcab0 and Calvin Robinson’s conference speeches https://gettr.com/streaming/p1u1o899346

Our updated Manifesto was released at the Conference, and this can be downloaded here:  https://www.ukip.org/party-policies

A new pocket manifesto will be available shortly.  If members and supporters who live or work within the Bath and Somerset catchment area would like to receive a copy, please contact us at: office@bathandsomersetukip.org.uk giving your name and address details.