Weekly Poll Lowdown

So it's time for the first weekly poll lowdown in a while having finally fixed the voting problems. I asked what you thought is the best way for the PM, our good friend Dave, to counter the spread of UKIP. And you believe brining forward the EU referendum is the best way to stop the pressure of UKIP and to make our party overall more in touch with the population. 20 of you voted, so we got a very decent spread of ideas.

Bring forward the referendum on the EU	50% (10)
Introduce better immigration control	5%(1)
Carry out more spending cuts	0% (0)
Introduce more tax cuts	10% (2)
Spend more on the economy	5%  (1)
Do nothing, UKIP will go away one day	30% (6)

Before I move on to what I think I want to say why 30% of you are wrong for thinking UKIP will go away. Within a decade or so I agree that UKIP probably won't be here. It's a party made around one man and some rather populist policies that in time will be seen to be as realistic as Nick Clegg's pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees. In the meantime however they will do bad damage to Conservatism. A loss of activists and splitting our vote is just the start. In safe Tory seats in the East UKIP now have a large proportion of council wards, will the constituencies go purple in 2015 too? Possibly not, but a well organised local UKIP could cause huge problems.

One other thing I'd like to say is that virtually all of UKIP's vote is based on immigration, as Lord Ashcroft's polling has shown. Its fairly visible when canvassing as well and this leads people who don't like the immigrants for one reason or another, even if they have never voted in their lives, to come out and vote for UKIP and it's populist policy.

So what should we do. I actually agree we should bring forward the referendum date, but the solution is to get the economy going with tax cuts mostly. Why do people care about immigration as a nation at the moment? Some of it is generalisation and hate for the rapid change, which is not acceptable and should be tackled. But the main bug bear is economic strain. Whether this exists or not the solution to this problem is to create more jobs and have a growing economy. If we do so people will be much happier and more opportunities. Give people a positive reason to vote Conservative.

Let's make sure the economy is on the up

The reason why I choose to tackle the economy rather than the of route problem of UKIP vote is because we are more likely, more practically and more quickly going to be able to grow our economy than leave the EU and its open borders policy. I do not believe that Dave would support a referendum on the EU before 2017, but to rub salt in the wounds the Lib Dems and Labour will also block the proposed vote in the House of Commons later this week.