Moving mountains

This weeks kind of a digest begins with the continuing fall out from Thursdays by-elections in England where the emergent United Kingdom Independence Party (UKip) caused a major set upsets.
Take the area of Essex centred on Clacton on Sea, where the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament changed his allegiances to UKip and decided he'd resign but stand for his new party instead.  Well he won it for UKip with over 12,500 majority, more than he had in 2010 at the general election.
Then the area of "proper" Lancashire of Middleton and Haywood near Rochdale where the death of a popular and much respected local MP, an area where it's unheard of for the centre-left Labour Party not to win convincingly, only got their candidate back with just 670 votes on a partial recount with UKip coming second.
And in months time also in Essex there's yet another by-election due.
Most political commentators are agreed there's more than just dissatisfaction with the governing Tory and Liberal Democrat opposition going on, indeed you'd think the Labour opposition would be doing well but they're sure not.
Most agree with me and what I've been saying on here for a while, people feel the candidates and leaders especially are in a different world altogether to them going from education at 4+, leaving formal education at 18 for studying Politics,Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at university and getting there first job as political researcher or working for a MP before becoming one themselves.
They've had little experience of the lives of ordinary people, the workplace discovering what works, what doesn't and the very real limitations of ideas and philosophies as applied to the "real world". They live in an abstract bubble talking to each other about what interests them that they present in their party's programs and election addresses ignoring what many electors are talking about on the streets.
Whatever peoples personal points of view on UKip may be, they're talking with people on the street, making connections and that's what many people who voted for them liked.
One worrying aspect politicians being off the ball has been with the Ebola virus, the need for a global program to help tackle it at source and what measure for screening UK airports need to take to minimize the exposure to UK residents to it from those travelling from effected areas. Where there's a vacuum, something comes to fill it and sadly in part of Stockport we saw hysteria fill the void where a child and parent, cleared on return to the UK barred from returning to education by well meaning but ignorant parents creating conditions that meant a head teacher and governing body had little option other to request they didn't return.
In such sad situations, politicians need to give real leadership and direction to events that leads to cooler heads on the streets of our towns and cities. They failed.