Nigel Farage is planning on standing against the Speaker, John Bercow, in his Buckingham Constituency at the coming General Election (BBC). This is unusual in that – by convention – the Speaker seeking reelection is unopposed (certainly by the mainstream parties; I believe the SNP fielded a candidate against Michael Martin in 2005). However, I rather welcome Mr Farage’s candidacy.

Nigel Farage is a decent and principled man. He may have all the subtlety of a bull in a proverbial china shop, but the haemorrhage of our national sovereignty is something of a red Torero’s cloth in his case. In 2008, for example, he refused to rise for Prince Charles’s standing ovation, on the grounds that the latter had given a speech favouring an further shift of power to Brussels.

He has not decided to stand against Mr Bercow because it would be easy – at the last election, Jonnyboy romped home with a majority of 18,000. Rather, Nige objects to both the Speaker’s participation in the expenses imbroglio (he is, supposedly, a ‘flipper’); and perhaps more significantly, the fact that Parliament has surrendered more and more power to Brussels – and as the symbolic leader of this Parliament, Mr Farage holds the Speaker responsible for this (which vaguely makes a little bit of sense in a superficial way).

“Everything from what light bulbs we can put in our living room to how we regulate hedge funds is decided in Brussels and the Speaker does not intend to reverse that.  I want the election in Buckingham to be a debate about how we are governed in this country.”

Perhaps more interestingly, this offers the Conservative Party to rid themselves of an unwanted speaker without wielding the knife themselves. It was widely held that if Labour couldn’t elect one of their own as speaker, they’d elect the next best thing – John Bercow was once rumoured to be considering defection to the Labour Party; he then cooperated with the ill-fated “Government Of All Talents” that Brown instituted in a vain attempt to look original. There are those in the Party (both grassroots and parliamentary) that would very much like to see Bercow dismissed and an old grandee like Sir George Young enthroned on the speakers’ chair. By standing against Bercow – unopposed by the official Tory party, Labour and the Lib-Dims – Mr Farage might have a reasonable chance of picking up lots and lots of support from disillusioned Conservatives (although his track record on expenses isn’t entirely spotless).

I’d personally would be very tempted to vote UKIP in a Bercow/Farage contest. John Bercow has desecrated the office of speaker by ridding himself of all the ceremonial gladrags (some had hopes of a resurrection of the wig). He’s just a bit slimy. Nigel Farage, conversely, is an interesting man who would bring the “conviction politician”‘s spark of excitement back to a lacklustre Parliament. Obviously one UKIP MP wouldn’t make a difference, but after all: all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Tags: EU, Parliament, sovereignty, UKIP

This entry was posted by Callum Wood on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 8:46 am and is filed under General, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.