4/21/2005 09:12:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||Today UKIP MEP Derek Clark came into school. You might be aware I'm not his biggest fan. He came into school earlier in the school year to have a bit of a rant about anything and everything that's good in the world- me and Matt attempted to "pwn" him by challenging what he had to say. The trouble was that there wasn't a designated time for any questions, so we had to interrupt him and try and make a point based upon what he was ranting about- as you might have guessed, he wasn't talking about the more favourable points of the European Union, so it was very difficult to try and make a point. Everyone at school claims that I got pwned.
Today was my chance for a rematch.
Dezza, as he is "affectionately" known, started off like he knows best- a torrent of rhetoric about the "corruption" and how everyone is lying and how the news programmes are unbalanced as they don't feature a lunatic fringe party who have somewhere around the region of zero current seats in (Westminster) Parliament.
During his tirade, he went on about the job losses at Rover and how the government should have bailed out a failing company in order to protect British jobs. He also ranted about how jobs in the coal industry should have been protected. Minor problem there Dezza, there's no coal left! I seized the opportunity and scrapped my original question for instead, "how many jobs would be lost if Britain pulled out the EU?", "Think of all the beaurocrats!" I cried. He claimed that they'd be "zero" job losses. I can't remember how he justified this. I don't think he did actually justify it.
The problem was, despite having prepared questions that would knock him to the ground, and give him a good kick in whilst he screamed for his mother and volunteered his lunch money, he just kept talking . Dundas asked him the question "What's your policy on terrorism?", the theory being he'd simply answer "it's bad", and then he'd go on to tell Derek how UKIP issued a press release saying that letter bombing MPs was somewhat justified (seriously). If there's one thing I admire about Derek Clark is his amazing ability to dodge questions. Ask him about terrorism, and he'll turn his answer in to a 15 minute jeremiad of the Greek justice system, and how wonderful Britain is and how awful Johnnie Foreigner is.
Unsurprisingly, we ran out of time as the bell went for lunch. As the proletariat dashed out of the hall indoctrinated and hungry, we (that is to say, myself, Dundas and Matt) stayed to ask more. This is where I think for a few minutes at least, I became a slightly politer version of Jeremy Paxman. I asked Dezza if UKIP will ever be taken seriously as a credible party if you consider that in an interview with BBC Four's The Late Edition last month, the presenter, Marcus Brigstocke spoke to BNP leader Nick Griffin, and Griffin called UKIP "hair curlingly racist". I also cited UKIP's alliance in the European Parliament with the League of Polish Families- a nazi Catholic group who hate homosexuality, and have been linked with skin head groups who have attacked gay rights activists. He seemed to avoid the Nick Griffin connection, but went on to explain how the Poles were "devout Catholics", and thus it was okay for them to be really right wing. I questioned if UKIP could morally be allied with these people, and he seemed to say "yeah, basically". "Is this a case of my enemy's enemy is my friend?" I asked, "Not quite" he said, but he "sees my point". Pwned.
On the way out of the hall, we followed him and pressed him on the environment. This is probably where the most unbelievable part of the interrogation happend. He reckons that renewable energy doesn't work, and that in bad (well, good) weather, wind farms won't work, and we'll have no electricity. He seemed to think there wasn't any redundancy measures and that we'd have to run fossil fueled power plants anyway, "just in case". He was completely incapable of grasping the idea of multiple sources of power (wind, hydro, wave, solar, etc) placed all around the country.
Frighteningly, this former science teacher tried to defend fellow UKIPper Steve Reed who said "[‘Renewable resources’] are not renewable… Taking energy from winds and tides irreversibly enervates the weather system and slows the rotation of the Earth". He claimed that wind power slows down the wind, and basically put, was very, very wrong. Dundas explained this to him. At least it wasn't as bad as the first time he came in to school, when he cited chaos theory. Pwned, I think.
At this point, the deputy head of Sixth Form intervened, presumably to save Dezza from any further embarassment. When I saw him a few minutes later, after Dezza had left in his (proudly British built) Toyota, he said "well done", to us, which was nice.
In summary, I think we came off better in this rematch than first time around, it's just a shame we didn't have more time.|||111411645415028773|||Euroskeptastic