Sunday 22 February 2015

Meet the UKIPpers on BBC 2 tonight

The BBC documentary, Meet the UKIPpers, is airing on BBC 2 at 10pm.

Although this is unlikely to be a hatchet job on the scale of the EU-funded Channel 4 mockumentary it's the BBC so it will of course focus on the negatives and the main thing it will be concentrating on is the comments made by former UKIP councillor, Rozanne Duncan, who said she has a problem with "negroes".
The only people I do have problems with are negroes. And I don't know why.

I don't know whether there is something in my psyche or whether it's karma from a previous life or whether something happened to me as a very, very young person and I've drawn a veil over it - because that sometimes happens, doesn't it?

But I really do have a problem with people with negroid features.
Duncan says she wasn't being racist when she made the comments and actually she's right. Racism is the belief in superior or inferior qualities based on a person's race or prejudice or discrimination against somebody because you believe that your own race is superior which is clearly not the reason she has "a problem" with black people. But she used language that has been considered offensive for decades and can't be trusted to represent everyone equally so it was right to expel her from the party and I would hope that she would do the right thing and resign as a councillor to make way for someone who doesn't have "a problem" with 1 in 50 of the population.

Anti-UKIP campaigners will ignore the fact that Duncan was immediately expelled from the party and use the footage to attack the other 42,000 UKIP members and the thousands of UKIP councillors who don't share her views. Election candidates are now vetted by the party for anything above town and parish council level but what questions would you have to ask to identify that kind of irrational phobia? There is nothing that could realistically have been done to identify Duncan's unsuitability for public office in advance but the important thing is that she was removed from the party as soon as it became apparent.