Ah, So That's How Much You Respect Our Country...

When the historians look back at the 2009 European Elections, I suspect they will marvel at the extent to which the field was already full of "You know they're corrupt, vote for me because you don't know I am" candidates before the Torygraph brought the roof of the House of Commons crashing down around MPs ears. It's a shame that it will have to be the historians who do the marvelling, because they deserve a lot more scrutiny (read: pointing and laughing) than they're getting.

UKIP do get coverage (if not especially scrutiny), but they don't count since their message is more "We are corrupt, but not as much as they are". Jury Team had their little blaze of launch-related glory, but once it became absolutely clear that they were just a massively multiplayer experiment to determine whether Paul Judge's ego was bigger than his wallet, the whole thing disappeared faster than Cristiano in Rome...

And then there's No2EU, or as they might more accurately be described, UKIP For Communists. They are of course their own ego trip, this time for Bob Crow, the man who thinks he's Robespierre. Still, you have to take an organisation seriously when it constitutes an alliance of the RMT, the Alliance For Green Socialism and the Liberal Party and when its most experienced candidates are Tommy Sheridan and Dave Nellist...

Still, if by a man's actions you shall know him, my encounter with one of their number this evening was instructive. Walking home from work I found a man flyposting for No2EU on the billboards at the junction of Callaghan Square and Tyndall Street. Now, I didn't mind him doing the one on the left (which currently bears the UKIP poster from blogs passim) but when I caught him, he'd just started on the one on the right.

Which is advertising the British Army.

I tried to take a picture of him, but my phone decided to have a funny turn and switch to video mode, so I had to make do with making him scarper for fear of being caught with the vandal's brush in his hand. Still, it's nice to know that the eurosceptics of the world know how to behave with respect to our fighting men and women...