Reverse Corn Law: Prepare for massive price hikes

This evening the FT has flagged up a story that I hope gets the prominance that it deserves, but some how I doubt it.

China will tax grain exporters
China is to introduce taxes on grain exports in the latest attempt to rein in food-driven inflation that reached an 11-year high in November.

Exporters of 57 types of grain, including wheat, rice, corn and soya beans, will have to pay temporary taxes of between 5 and 25 per cent, the country’s Ministry of Finance said on Sunday.
Now I don't want to panic anybody but that is quite an extraordinary act. Think about it for a moment, we in the European Union are currently subsidising the Common Agricultural Policy to the tune of dozens of billions a year, meanwhile China is introducing export taxes on grain... of up to 25%. Now the Chinese don't do things by accident, and I suspect that though they claim this move to be temporary, so was the income tax, in 1799.

With grain prices in the UK doubling in the last 12 months, and their being a global shortage of food, expect that food inflation over the next year to leap. Of course this won't just affect the price of bread and risotto. The largest cost in chicken, pig and cattle is fodder. Beer will go up even more.

As the Telegraph points out today,

This will be a global trend... but higher food costs too. In 2007, wheat prices doubled - with the price of other crops like cocoa and coffee also jumping.

Next year, the growing - and increasingly wealthy populations of the developing world will keep global food demand rising. Global supplies - hit by more droughts, floods and the increased use of land for bio-fuel production - will struggle to keep up.

That's why, in 2008, high food prices will replace expensive oil as the bogeyman of Western consumers and central bankers. Because food accounts for a large portion of disposable incomes, escalating food prices will seriously dent consumer confidence next year, while preventing deep base rate cuts.

What does the the EU do? As Chris Booker states today, many of these problems are either caused or exacerbated by the European Union; a schlorotic conception which has an elderly system designed to deal with the like of Pharoh's dream of seven fat years, but utterly unprepared for his nightmare of seven years of fallow.

People often tell me that the European Union is irrelevant to their lives. If t is in part responsible for a doubling of basic fod prices and the consumer crisis that this will bring about then maybe, just maybe peoiple might begin to notice how big an issue it is.

Imagine a single mother living on an estate on benefits. With just one child she is spending upwards of 30% of her weekly income on food. If that price doubles in the next twelve month what on earth will she do? Is the country at all prepared for the hike in taxes required to deal with this situation. All those on low incomes, pensioners, the unemployed, school leavers, the disbled, imigrants, those living on the minimum wage.

The thought is terrifying. Funily enough Gordo failed to mention this in his New Year message.
Odd that.

Book Review: “The Origins of English Individualism”, Alan MacFarlane

I bought this book, mainly due to seeing it too often referenced by authors I admire (James Bennett being a case in point). And despite its relative antiquity (it was written in 1978) it is still a draft of intellectual cold, still water. Essentially in this book Professor MacFarlane attempted to swim against 150 years of received opinion about the development of the distinctive political and social milieu of England (and yes it is about England rather than the United Kingdom or Britain that he writes).

He had been drawn to this by his previous work on witchcraft in which he noted that in England witches were remarkably different to their continental cousins (In England covens and cannibalism were virtual absent, as was intense sexuality and a hatred of the newly wealthy, instead English witches were individualistic, decorous and essentially targeted their wrath against those who were a drag on society). If witches were so different then it surely suggests that society itself was different?

The traditional view of English history is of the long, slow progress of freedom, from a past of feudalism and an omnipresent peasantry though some strange sublimation by which England created a form of freedom from which derived the industrial revolution, the rule of law and the greatest empire the world had ever seen and then on to a socialist society (Marx). Before the Civil War and the rise of Protestantism (Weber) Britain was analogous to the rest of Europe in that it was a traditional peasant society. By this was meant that all, bar the aristocracy and some in the few small towns, lived in family groups. Land was synonymous with family and was held not by an individual as property but as a group familial holding. Many generations lived in the same homestead and all worked the family property; people neither left, sold nor transferred their land except in extremis. Wage labour was almost unheard of. In this it was much like France and Germany of the 17th/ 18th Century and like Russia and Eastern Europe in the pre Communist period. More importantly it was similar to India, Africa and China of modern days.

This similarity of modern peasant societies makes the study of the England’s development extremely important as policy makers should be able to extrapolate from our experience. This should allow the rapid development of those unhappy parts of the world by following policy short cuts and ironing out the mistakes made in England.

MacFarlane’s work however seems to fatally undermine this thesis. By extensive research in legal documents, church records, diaries and so on, he comprehensively rebukes the traditional idea that, “The past is a foreign country, people do things differently there”. Indeed he claims that whereas this might be true for the rest of the world the people of England were remarkably similar to us today in their way of life.

The key drivers of English exceptionalism were he says, the method of inheritance the transferability of property, the large pool of wage labour and the nuclear family. All this is allied to a level of equality before the law and a level of litigation almost American in its scope. Marriage was late, and indeed often not at all with women having all rights to property (a big difference to the Continent). Indeed it seems that instead of the traditional Weberian idea that Protestantism increased individual rights as it concentrated in an individual relationship with God had the counter intuitive results as it strengthened male power.

The book is full of apposite quotations from the documents but I shall include just the one here, about a chap called John Thedrich, described by Professor Zvi Razi as a, “typical wealthy Halesown peasant”,

“He inherited from his father a yardland holding or more yet in fourteen land transactions he purchased and leased at least another yardland. He leased for life a holding of half a yardland or more and another smaller holding for a year. He also leased three meadows for his livestock. In 1314 he acquired from the lord a plot of wasteland to enlarge his barn and in 1320 he bought a parcel of land from his neighbour to extend his courtyard. In 1320 and 1321 he exchanged land with four villagers in order to consolidate his lands into one block. He had sub-tenants and at least two living in servants. During the peak periods he used to employ several extra labourers. He and his wife were amerced forty-three times for selling ale against the assize... He sued villages for various debts...He was amerced eight times for assault and shedding blood. John Thedrich had between 1294 and 1337 at least 196 court appearances and the fines and amercements which he paid during the time amounted to £2-10.3.” (the average annual wage at the time being £5-1.0 approx).
The key point here is that this activity is inconceivable in a traditional peasant society, where land being sacrosanct and virtually inviolable. Not only that, from his court appearances we can see that he is not a million miles away from modern England beyond merely his financial transactions. Another point to make clear is this is all happening decades before the Black Death that is often claimed to have created the circumstances by which the feudal locks of peasants to specific land were forced.

The problem that MacFarlane has however is that before 1200 documentary evidence becomes sparse, thus though he is able to show to his own and this reviewer’s satisfaction that England had an entirely different societal dispensation from the Continent after this time he fails in his stated aim of defining the ‘Origins of English Individualism’. He can neither point to its start, no can he define where those origins came from.

As he himself writes in his postscript ,
“I have my own suspicions as to where those ‘origins’ were in time and space and
they are similar to those of Montesquieu”.
Montesquieu’s thoughts in ‘The Spirit of the Laws’ were these,

In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus On the manners of the Germans we find it is from that nation that the English have borrowed their idea of political governance. This beautiful system was invented first in the woods”. Nor was it merely the political system that was ‘borrowed,’ but also, he suggested, the land law and inheritance system. Crucial here was the fact that, as Montesquieu observed, the Germanic system as described by Tacitus was one of absolute individual property; there was no group which owned the land, and hence no idea that the family and the resources were inextricably linked. In his description of the Salic law he stresses that it ‘had not in view a preference for one sex to the other, much less had it a regard to the perpetuity of a family, a name, or the transmission of land. These things did not enter the heads of the Germans...’ Montesquieu was clearly not in a position to show how the English could have come to take over this or other aspects of this ‘beautiful system.’ It is sufficient for our purposes here that this enormously wideranging mind should have realised that England was different from every Continental country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to have believed this difference had very old roots.
Of course this book has its enemies, after all he was targeting almost the entire historical establishment of the time, but its thesis seems more convincing than the idea that the essential Englishness that created the industrial revolution (and yes I know that that is now a contentious phrase as it was more gradual than previously thought – a conclusion that fits MacFarlane’s ideas rather well) was either some great fluke, or indeed that it popped up fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Or maybe Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London in 1559 was right all along when he said that “God is an Englishman”.

British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, MSK Ghent

How long would it take you to visit almost every provincial art gallery in Britain in order to see the cream of work from our Islands? About a fortnight. That is if you jump onto Eurostar and get yourselves to Ghent to see what must be the most complete and eye opening exhibition in recent years before it closes on the 13th January.

Robert Hoozee, the director of the Museum Voor Schone Kunsten has scoured 63 UK and 14 foreign galleries and museums in putting together what is, in the opinion of your correspondent the most complete and staggering collection of British works assembled in living memory.

The purpose of the exhibition is to show how the exceptionalism/individualism in the English character that created the industrial revolution had an echo in the art produced there. As Hoozee puts is his fine introduction to the lavish catalogue,
“At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Voltaire was already full of praise for the climate of freedom he encountered in England. With respect to religion, he wrote in 1726 that ‘England is properly the country of sectarists...An Englishman, as one to whom Liberty is natural may go to heaven his own way’. Until well into the ninetieth century, artists and critics were fascinated by the specific circumstances under which art in Great Britain was able to thrive. One of these, Théophile Thoré wrote in 1863,
“Self-Government is complete in English Art, just as it is in all the institutions and all the customs of this proud people, where individuality asserts itself. It is this that lacking in French artists, who almost always obey some higher authority, tradition or prejudice”.
He claims, with some justification that in Britain art followed a distinctive path from that on the Continent, charmingly he describes it as ‘marginal’, which has as its mainstay the empirical experience of reality and otherwise wild flights of fancy and the visionary.

As one wanders through the gallery, through the 14 rooms over 300 works in all media, barring conceptual and video (oh what a shame) dating between 17 and 1950 at every stage and around every corner lies the shock of recognition. Work after work that has lodged in the mind over the years lies there to see.

The empirical tradition is exemplified by Joseph Wright of Derby whose magnificent rationalist alterpiece ‘A philosopher lecturing on the Orrery’ takes the high drama of religious work and places it firmly in the world of a questing for scientific knowledge. It was painted in 1766 and has to be seen in the context of works by Fragonard to see what a radical departure had been taken in England.

Add this to Bill Brandt’s photography, Richard Dadd, that photograph of Brunel, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Stanley Spencer, Lowry, Freud, Stubbs, the original Alice in Wonderland, Mad Martin, Ruskin, Epstein... you get the picture.

If you live in Belgium you have no excuse, go now, today. If you live in the UK, well get a move on.

Project Pygmalion

Another day, another Government IT project. This latest one is brewing up in the Cabinet Office and is supposed to be a system by which the online services across government are handled. 18 companies are already signed up to provide the service. This worries me as they claim to have a userbase (read database) of 10 million who have logged onto Government Gateway websites. The key details mentioned by the Government in the tenders is that the firms should be, and here comes the scary part,

"specialists in areas such as security and identity assurance".
You will understand my concern immediately. When I took a look at the bidder briefing for the first time I began to understand why the whole scheme is named "Project Pygmalion" which seems a pretty odd name for it when one considers either the Greek original, Shavian or indeed 'My Fair Lady' version of the tale. Man falls in love with his own creation. Artifice is preferable to reality.

The project is being run by the EDT (E-Delivery Team) which operates out of the Cabinet office and aims to support,

the Transformation Government activities.

Whatever the hell they are.


The key point to this is that another IT project is speeding to fruition, an IT project that is supposed to be able to manage a database with 10 million people and businesses details involved, that is anybody who has tried to get government services online, benefits and so on. The level of personal details required in such transactions is colossal.

Shall we lay a bet that this one snarls up as well?

Bald men and combs

I have just received by a tortuous route a UKIP press release that deserves a little more air,

UKIP and the inheritance squabbleCalm down dears, it's only a policy. Instead of this unseemly tiff over whofirst thought of scrapping Inheritance Tax, just take a deep breath and let ussolve it for you. It wasn't either of you. It was us.

Yes, we admit it. As long ago as October of last year when David Miliband was still in short trousers, we came up with the idea to take millions of people out of the inheritance tax trap. We released it as part of our flat tax policy and we sent it to lots of nice journalists who could tell the nice people all about it.It was such a good idea, that the big boys pinched it.

While we know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we are flattered, it's a little undignified to squabble over who stole it first. If you need any more ideas, please don't hesitate to contact UKIP, available in any decent policy store.

Ends

Note to editors, please feel free to ignore this UKIP policy all over again.


Whilst we in UKIP are delighted that yet again our policies are being taken up, it would be nice once in a while to get the credit where it is due

Candid talk 19 07 10



Pondering the Constitutional Treaty signing in Lisbon last night

What was that Gordon?

Three cheers for Peter Roberts

You will remember Peter Roberts. He was the businessman who set up the Number 10 petition against road pricing. Well according to reports in both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail her has forced a Government U-turn.
However neither paper has seen fit to mention theat Peter is the UKIP PPC for Telford in Shropshire, so just to let you know, here are his comments about today's news.
"At last the Government has seen some sense on road pricing", said Peter Roberts, the man behind the 1.8 million strong petition against the new tax. Mr Roberts, a UK Independence Party PPC in Shropshire, was delighted the Government had changed its policy on the introduction of pay per mile taxation.

"This was always going to be an additional tax on the motorist and I am pleased it is being dropped", he continued. "However, we must not be complacent: The EU's Galileo satellite system was one of the reasons the government wanted to introduce a national road pricing system. This expensive and controversial copy of the American GPS system was at the heart of the tracking technology required for Road Pricing and the intention was to make the motorist to pay. Now the EU has decided to raid the Agricultural budget to pay for it instead, rather than reimburse the taxpayer. Whatever happens now the taxpayer still picks up the bill".

The campaigner has already set his sights on another objective, to support what is left of Britain's once proud automobile manufacturers, "We have some of the best and most respected car manufacturers in the world producing in the UK. Land Rover, Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls Royce and Aston Martin operate in a market of luxury vehicles which will always be at the high end of C02 emissions. They are fairly low volume in global terms and the environmental impact of their products is negligible. The anti –car environmental policies of both the Government and opposition seem deliberately designed to destroy these companies with their punitive taxation of British made products. You could stop making cars in the UK and it would have absolutely no effect on global CO2 emissions".

"It is about time British policy makers concentrated on British interests rather than following fashionable fads" he said.

The Bumper Book of Government Waste

The latest book to come out the excellent Taxpayers Alliance is The Bumper Book of Government Waste. Published only last week, it is the perfect book if you want to understand why it would be possible to cut taxes by upwards of £4,000 per household and still not cut services. (Now whether services could or indeed should be cut is another story, and one I will go into in future).
Currently it is only in hardback so it is ideal for throwing at any passing politician or bureaucrat. It estimates that £101 billion is wasted per annum by the British Government. This is a scandal and one that should be addressed immediately.

I do have to declare an interest as I am one of the sources for the authors Lee Rotherham and Matthew Elliot.

Next year it will be even worse.

Watch the EU Spinning Fraud

This email has landed in my intray today - by circuitous ways naturally,
Subject: Press kit Discharge 2006
Importance: High

Dear Members, dear advisors,

DG INFO, which I represent, would like to submit an idea for the forthcoming discharge procedure.

On November 13 in Strasbourg, the Court of Auditors will present its 2006 annual report. It is widely predicted that for the 14th time in a row, there will be no positive DAS.

In order to be "on par" with the Court & the Commission, which will both come up with carefully-crafted press packs, I would like to compile a 2006 discharge press kit of our own & need your help in that sense.

The idea is simple: based on your experience of business at Cocobu, you are invited in this press kit to present your views on the discharge and all its related aspects, including thus themes such as national declarations, methodology, the sampling method, etc.

The philosophy of this press kit is equally simple: one text per MEP, maximum 1 page A4, preferrably in English. Language should not be too technical and clearly present your main strategic ideas. It should be as short as possible, too: the more
creative ideas are often the simplest & shortest ones. Do not worry about the fact that we do not know the contents of the Annual report: it is the Court's & the Commission's niche, we should be more forward-looking.

Once completed, the press kit will be displayed in the Nov 13 Cocobu room and sent to the press.

So, I would kindly ask you:

1. if you're interested to participate
2. if you could provide me with your contribution by Thursday am of next week (ie it leaves you a full week to draft it)
3. if you're interested, if I can use photos (send them to me if you have some preferred one)

I am at your disposal for any question / query. A reminder will be sent on Monday.

With kind regards,
JY Loog

Jean-Yves LOOG
European
Parliament
Press ServicePhone: +32.2.284 46 52
Visit http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
So yet again it appears that the European Court of Auditors will refuse to sign off the Commission's accounts. What is interesting is the institutional response. Here we have a Parliament press officer asking MEPs to get their rebuttals in early, indeed written a whole month before this news becomes official because they know that the annual spectacle of the Court of Auditor's Report is a running and embarrassing sore.

However we can see from the suggestions the official line to take (which will be worked on together with the Commission and the Court), "national declarations, methodology, the sampling method, etc".

The basic line is this; The Court of Auditors cannot sign off the accounts because it does not have access to the national spending of EU funds. Therefore in order to show how squeaky clean the EU is, what is required is that the CoA be granted audit oversight of national spending. Of course this would only be national spending which involves EU funds, not discreet national budgets. This is the Monnet method in miniature. There is no guarantee that they would indeed not gain oversight of in the UK's case, the National Audit Office. Given the breadth of current EU fiscal interests and spending in the individual nations then even with strict compliance with a rule barring CoA from looking into other spending the scope would be massive anyhow.

From an integrationist perspective this all makes perfect sense. Whether, as a supposedly sovereign nation we are happy to have the Court poking its nose into our business is a different matter.

For information this email was sent to members of the European Parliament's Budgetary Control Committee, COCOBU. The Committee that infamously refused to meet a whistleblower because they were told by the Commission he was sick. The Commission works on a Catch 22 rule. All officials are happy to work here, the wages are good, the job is secure. You would have to be mad to be unhappy. Thus if you are unhappy and point out fraud (See Marta Andreasen, Robert McCoy, etc) then you must be sick. And of course sick people can make other people sick by their very presence). After all honesty is contagious.


Cross posted on England Expects

Candid writing

Candid writing, like Candid talk will be a irregular column of articles published eleswhere. The first is an article on the website of Politea, a Dutch political website focusing on matters European Union. This quarter they are discussing the growing phenomenom of Euroscepticism in Europe and I was asked to write about the Independence/Democracy Group in the European Parliament. This is a political alliance that includes UKIP, that is joined by a common belief that the sheer scale of European Union ambitions are anti democratic in conception.
"So what are you for? - Independence/Democracy Group in the European Parliament
As the media officer for the Independence/Democracy Group in the European Parliament I was delighted to be invited to provide a discourse on precisely that question. OK, so you are in the European Parliament the most avowedly federalist of the European institutions and you, as a group set your face against further integration. Aren't you barking up the wrong tree?

The point is that the Ind/Dem Group is a coalition of varying degrees of Euroscepticism united around a belief that only the nation state holds sufficient emotional loyalty for its citizens that the workings of a participatory democracy are effective.

Therefore you will find in the Group sub delegations such as the UK Independence Party that verges on the libertarian, to the Danish June Movement which has its roots in the hard left. Between them range the French MPF, traditionalist catholic, the Swedish Junelist, a centrist social democratic party, Polish Catholics, Dutch Calvinists, Greek orthodox nationalists, an Irish independent (Kathy Sinnett) who majors as a disability rights campaigner, and a free trader from the Czech Republic. Associated with the group, but without electoral representation as of yet (the elections are in November) are the Romanian National Initiative Party an anti-corruption movement and others, Atlanticist free traders in Portugal and Germany, neutrality campaigners in Austria and so on.

Thus must now be very obvious the Group is very much a mixed bag. But they are utterly united on three core issues. Firstly they are opposed to any further integration. Next they vigorously oppose the constitutionalisation of the European Union, and finally they are committed to transparency and rooting out corruption. With these three issues they are as one.

Back in 2004 they were the only Group in the European Parliament to have successfully campaigned for ‘No’ votes on the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands. Today they are the only group that has consistently demanded that those voices, the clear voices from the people of those countries that they did not want the planned Constitution, are respected by the Euro elite.

The Ind/Dem Group has been at the forefront of the campaign to force the Commission to reveal the names of those who draft and those who advise on the drafting of legislation. It was the Ind/Dem co-President Jens-Peter Bonde who finally forced the Commission to disgorge the names of thousands of secretive ‘expert committees’ who are so powerful, yet unknown. Now we know what the committees are we are demanding to know who sits on them.

The Ind/Dem Group is at the forefront of the campaign to ‘Make every vote count’. Currently in the Parliament over 80% of votes take place by show of hands. Not only is this prone to error, (in one recent case after Ind/Dem MEP Graham Booth queried a result an electronic check was carried out. What had been called ‘Rejected’ had in fact been passed by over 500 votes to 48), but it is also utterly undemocratic. The only power a citizen has over their politicians is the power to sack. If you do not know how they have voted, then there is no accountability.

Overall the Ind/Dem Group, though small, punches significantly above its weight on matters that are its common interest. Questioning the European status quo was impossible only a few years ago, but is, partly thanks to the activities of Ind/Dem members growing across the continent. Even the European Commission’s Eurobarometer polling confirms this trend. It will not stop until it has forced the elite to listen.

Gawain Towler

Nigel Farage on UKIP's National Conference

This posting has been purloined from Devil's Kitchen via 18 Doughty Street,

Is it cos I is ignorant?

I know that the current education system is failing, but this attack on UKIP by a Lib/Dem on Youtube has got to take the biscuit,

"If you want a government that will keep the UK to Europe for a better future as we done in the first place...Vote Liberal Democrats".

Lord help us

Update,

I recieved this splendid email from the chap before he deleted my comment on his video post,
"well my dear sir, say what you like about my hand writen, but at least I don't support the UKIP that will never win an election as they are simerler to the BNP.
It is that simple, if you have nothing good to say, don,t say anything my dear sir".


Like my correspondent, words fail me.

Candid Talk 07 10 07



First attempt at what will become a regular round up of thoughts on what is happening in Dorset, the UK, Europe and elsewhere.

Farage Speech

We are here because we are not happy with the staus quo
We are hee because we do not trust the political establishment.

We want the United Kingdom to be part of the 21st Century global economy, not a small backwater in the European Union.

We must give people the opportunity, through direct democracy, that the voice of the people can be heard through the application of local referendums.

We the people of Britain should be masters of our own destiny

Live blogging the Conference

Here at the Troxy in Limehouse

Farage speaking now

Thanks for Marta Andreason for becoming Treasurer,

Launch of a immigration policy that calls for a moritorium on immigration for a period of five years.

Good joke about work permits,
If Goldman Sachs needs a banker...they can get a work permit
If a Kentish fruit farm needs some short term fruit pickers...they can get a work permit,
If a political Party needs to employ a Spanish citizen...then she can get awork permit.

Government keeps wriggling

They must think it is a soporific term. Yet again the Government is hoping that by endlessly repeatingthe mantra from the Council mandate people will end up believing, "The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called 'Constitution', is abandoned".Thus, flying in the face of what we all know to be true we have junior Foriegn Minister Lord Malloch Brown respondingto UKIP peer Lord Pearson this week,
"Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP) Hansard'>http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/71001w0019.htm#07091813000112">Hansard sourceasked Her Majesty's Government:
Further to the Written Answer by Lord Malloch-Brown on 18 July (WA 26), whether, when they signed the European Union Constitutional Treaty in 2004, they agreed that the United Kingdom's existing labour and social legislation, common law system, police and judicial processes, independent foreign and defence policy and tax and social security system could have been changed by the resulting constitution, had it come into force.
Lord Malloch-Brown (Minister of State (Africa, Asia and the UN), Foreign & Commonwealth Office)
The constitutional treaty contained many sensible changes, which the Government supported, and which would have helped an enlarged EU deliver more effectively. But as the mandate for a reform treaty states clearly: "The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them by a single text called 'Constitution', is abandoned".
The reform treaty not only amends the existing treaties but also better safeguards our national control in key areas such as labour and social legislation, police and judicial processes, foreign and defence policy, and social security policy.


Astonishing in the light of this sort of response, Brown thinks that his government will be regardred somehow as more honest, as something that will restore trust

Gawain Towler selected as PPC

Or at least that is what the press release says

Last night (4th October) at a packed meeting in Charlton Marshall’s Charlton Inn, the North Dorset Constituency association selected local man, Gawain Towler, as the party’s new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC).
John Baxter, the association Chairman said he was delighted, “Gawain is an excellent candidate and will do North Dorset proud”, he said. “Whenever Mr. Brown calls an election, UKIP here will be ready for him”.
Mr. Towler said, “From the age of 14, when at school in Iwerne Minster, I have dreamt of fighting this seat, I am honoured that the membership chose me last night”.


“We need to make it clear that the UK Independence Party is the party of freedom, not just from the eurocrats of Brussels, though certainly that, but also from the impositions of our own control freak government, the idiocies of the South West Regional Assembly and of course the pettifogging attentions of our local councils”. He continued, “It’s about time they learnt to trust people with their own lives rather than assuming that they always know best
”.
Graham Booth, South Western Counties Euro MP said, “I am delighted that Gawain has been selected, I have known him for a long time now I know that he will be a doughty fighter for Dorset and freedom”.

Notes
Gawain Towler currently works for the UK Independence Party in the European Parliament as their press officer and Chief of Staff. He grew up and still has a base in Wimborne. He is married with two small children. Before working for UKIP he was a journalist and founder of the Brussels based satirical and investigative magazine, ‘The Sprout’. He has previously stood as a Parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party in Scotland.

Well the qustioning was pretty harsh, but agreement was there, we are ready, we will do the work and well if Brown does call the election we will put up a good show.

John Baxter, Constituency Chairman congratulates new PPC Gawain Towler