Saturday 10 November 2012

UKIP's David Gale banned from student union hustings

Derby University's students' union (UDSU) has banned UKIP Police & Crime Commissioner candidate, David Gale, from its hustings event saying that it has a "no platform" policy for UKIP.

UDSU says that UKIP is fascist for having the perfectly sensible, non-racist and extremely popular policy of freezing economic immigration for 5 years for the housing and jobs market to recover before reopening the borders with a points-based system to ensure we get the right number of people with the right skills moving here.  There is no mention of race, nationality or ethnicity in the policy because it has nothing to do with any of those - it is simply about maths and economics and they both say there are too many people pursuing too few jobs and houses.  It's not racist or fascist or offensive to say that there aren't enough jobs or houses to go round the people already living here - whatever their race, nationality or ethnicity - and that we need to stop more people from settling here until we've fixed that.
What is offensive and fascist is a taxpayer-funded organisation attempting to unduly influence an election by refusing to allow a candidate a platform because some misinformed, intolerant people disagree with their party's policy on immigration.  If you disagree with UDSU branding 16,000 members of UKIP as fascists and banning David Gale from their hustings you can contact their president, James Beckett, by email at president@udsu.co.uk or by phone on 07792 004 420.  The UDSU website says you can "contact James regarding democracy and your union" so I'm sure he'll be interested in your views on his union's approach to democracy.