Ukip if you want to.....

Boy, when Ken Clarke gets it wrong, he gets it wrong with clogs on. Ukip is not full of fruit-cakes. In any case, being normal has never been a qualification for a politician. The political parties all have their fair share of eccentrics like, well, Ken Clarke. These people bring a new dimension to political thinking and sometimes offer news ways of looking at the world.

No, Ukip is dangerous. I'll allow you to ask me why.

Name 5 Ukip policies.

They want to get the UK out of the EU - to be 'independent' - not realising apparently that no country in the world is really independent, in the sense that we all have to trade with each other if we want to survive. According to Ukip, everything that's wrong in the UK is the fault of the EU: from the recession to the Euro to straight cucumbers to most of the population of Bulgaria apparently planning to settle here in 2014.

Independence doesn't, of course, extend to Scotland, according to Ukip, since they want to abolish the Scottish Parliament.

So that's two - admittedly contradictory - policies: out of Europe and no parliament for Scotland. Any more? It seems Ukip want to cut corporation taxes and abolish inheritance taxes, though we're a bit short on the detail of how they're going to afford to do that. Even with those ideas they're still some way short of a manifesto. Their policy review doesn't seem to be moving forward very fast.

So, in a way, there's a kind of poetic beauty to what's happened. Since the last general election, the Tories have seized on a whole range of far-right ideas: mass immigration, the NHS being exploited by foreigners, benefit scroungers from abroad and so on. And they've presented these ideas in the most dishonest way possible. They claimed about 12 million people came to work in the UK from the EU between 2000 and 2010. Yes, but 12 million Brits also took up the right to work overseas. They claimed almost a million Poles came to work here. Yes, but most of them have gone home now and some Brits have gone to live in Poland. They claimed most of the UK budget went to  the unemployed including people from the EU. In fact, only about 13.6% of GDP goes to the unemployed - and only about 14% of Polish people who came here to work have ever claimed unemployment benefits. They claimed a huge amount of income support, housing benefit and the rest went to 'illegal immigrants' and asylum seekers, when we know that only 0.7% of the total budget is 'fiddled' and most of that by UK citizens.

And now the Tories' right-wing ravings have come back to bite them on the bum: Ukip has been so good at taking the Tories's own ideas they've made themselves appear to be the only political party that cares that people in England are actually worrying about these things.

So who's got the plan? I mean, of course, the plan to seize back the political agenda from Ukip. Myself, as a Yes voter in the Scottish independence referendum, I'm a bit complacent: I reckon the prospect of Ukip rule down south will bring in a few hundred thousand new Yes votes in Scotland. The prospect of a UK dominated by these people can only be good for the Yes campaign.