Sunday, December 21, 2014
Nigel Farage crosses a line
There is some speculation on-line as to whether UKIP's recent slump in the polls is the result of the cumulative impact of a series of gaffes by high profile candidates leading up to Farage's own defence of the terms 'chinky' and 'poofter' or just the voters finally waking up to the reality of the sheer-awfulness of this party of reactionaries and bigots.
Fortunately, the Independent has provided a useful on-line guide to UKIP's top excuses for a series of blunders that has peeled back the veneer of respectability that they have painted themselves with over the last 18 months.
These include Farage's bizarre claim that he missed a meeting in South Wales due to immigrants clogging up the motorway, the candidate who claimed that the Nazi salute he was pictured giving was just him 'imitating a pot plant', and this:
Christopher Monckton, Ukip’s former head of policy for Scotland and he of “gay men have ‘20,000 sexual partners’ in their ‘miserable lives’” fame, called on the far-right British Freedom Party (BFP) to “come back and join Ukip” in 2012.
The short-lived BFP was formed by disgruntled BNP members and was shortly afterwards to get into cahoots with the EDL. A Ukip spokeperson pointed out that members and former members of the BFP were banned from joining the party and Monckton was probably unaware of this because he had been on a tour of the US for most of the last year.
As the Liberal Conspiracy blog points out: “One of their key spokesman doesn’t know about a change in policy, and thinks far-right parties (the BFP always had far-right origins) was fine to reach out to?”
There is also this:
One to rank with the “some of my best friends are black” mantra, former Ukip candidate Anna-Marie Crampton crafted a string of excuses after an anti-Semitic Facebook post was made on her account.
The post said the Second World War, in which six million Jewish people died as a result of the Holocaust, was started by “the Zionist Jews” and that it had been financed by Jewish “banksters to make the world feel guilty”.
Following calls for her resignation and her suspension by the party, Crampton said she had “clearly been trolled” and told the party’s leadership that her account had been hacked. She then added on Twitter that she was not anti-Semitic and that her “great grandmother was Jewish on my mother’s side”.
Never has a party been so damned by the sheer number of awful candidates and officials it places in senior positions and by the crassness of its own leader. It is little wonder that UKIP are seeking to stop its candidates using social media, though we should be clear that the main reason for that is not a lack of training but the fact that they don't want voters knowing what their people really think.
Fortunately, the Independent has provided a useful on-line guide to UKIP's top excuses for a series of blunders that has peeled back the veneer of respectability that they have painted themselves with over the last 18 months.
These include Farage's bizarre claim that he missed a meeting in South Wales due to immigrants clogging up the motorway, the candidate who claimed that the Nazi salute he was pictured giving was just him 'imitating a pot plant', and this:
Christopher Monckton, Ukip’s former head of policy for Scotland and he of “gay men have ‘20,000 sexual partners’ in their ‘miserable lives’” fame, called on the far-right British Freedom Party (BFP) to “come back and join Ukip” in 2012.
The short-lived BFP was formed by disgruntled BNP members and was shortly afterwards to get into cahoots with the EDL. A Ukip spokeperson pointed out that members and former members of the BFP were banned from joining the party and Monckton was probably unaware of this because he had been on a tour of the US for most of the last year.
As the Liberal Conspiracy blog points out: “One of their key spokesman doesn’t know about a change in policy, and thinks far-right parties (the BFP always had far-right origins) was fine to reach out to?”
There is also this:
One to rank with the “some of my best friends are black” mantra, former Ukip candidate Anna-Marie Crampton crafted a string of excuses after an anti-Semitic Facebook post was made on her account.
The post said the Second World War, in which six million Jewish people died as a result of the Holocaust, was started by “the Zionist Jews” and that it had been financed by Jewish “banksters to make the world feel guilty”.
Following calls for her resignation and her suspension by the party, Crampton said she had “clearly been trolled” and told the party’s leadership that her account had been hacked. She then added on Twitter that she was not anti-Semitic and that her “great grandmother was Jewish on my mother’s side”.
Never has a party been so damned by the sheer number of awful candidates and officials it places in senior positions and by the crassness of its own leader. It is little wonder that UKIP are seeking to stop its candidates using social media, though we should be clear that the main reason for that is not a lack of training but the fact that they don't want voters knowing what their people really think.
