English Democrats collapse in London

The England Watch blog has been looking at the English Democrats' efforts in the London elections ... or rather the lack of effort.

The EDP have been desperately trying to find people to put themselves forward as a candidate:

... we need to stand over 374 candidates, so even if you wouldn’t be able to do any more than just put your nomination papers in, and would therefore stand just as a paper candidate, please do let us know if you would be willing to do this to help us to get a Party Election Broadcast across England

This time round the EDP are standing only one candidate in the super constituencies: former BNP member, Mark Twiddy.  Last time they put forward 13 candidates.  In 2008 they put up 24 London-wide candidates, this time they've got 8 - one is a former senior BNP member and another is an EDL supporter.  Last time they sort of had a candidate for mayor in Fathers4Justice leader Matt O'Connor who resigned from the party at the eleventh hour because of their dishonesty and chronic incompetence.  This time they have no mayoral candidate.  Last time they had a party election broadcast.  This time they couldn't even scrape together enough paper candidates to qualify for one.

But rather than try and make the best out of a pretty pathetic showing, their London campaign guru, Steve Uncles, is spending most of his time attacking UKIP on his English Pisspot blog.  He has even claimed that independent mayoral candidate, Siobhan Benita, is supporting the English Democrats complete with fabricated quotes and a dodgy photoshopped picture of her with the EDP candidates - surely a breach of Electoral Commission rules and possibly even a criminal offence under the Representation of the People Act 1983?  We'll soon find out, it's been reported to the Electoral Commission this morning and we've informed Benita's campaign manger.  Benita might not be very complimentary towards UKIP but she's yet another victim of the English Democrats' bungling incompetence and dirty tricks.

Two defections to UKIP in Derby

The defections are coming in thick and fast as people of all political persuasions are becoming more and more disillusioned with the LibLabCon.

UKIP Derby has claimed its second scalp in a week with former leader of the Tory group in Derby City Council, Martin du Sautoy, on Tuesday and former Labour, then independent, Councillor Alan Graves today.

The current leader of the Labour group has declared Graves a traitor for "betraying" his constituents in 2009 when he ditched Labour and went independent.  The leader of the Tories don't seem particularly interested but the Lib Dem leader really deserves an award for her comment:

I'm surprised Alan Graves has gone to UKIP because that is quite right wing and I wouldn't expect that from someone who was a Labour councillor.

UKIP is a centre right party with the emphasis on centre.  There's something for everyone in UKIP, that's why Labour and Tory councillors and members are leaving their old parties and joining UKIP.

Galloway wins Bradford West

A shock result in Bradford West last night has returned the Scottish communist Islamist, George Galloway, to parliament.

I'd like to thank my campaign team, Allah
and the voting public of Kashmir for electing me

This is usually a safe Labour seat thanks to the extremely high immigrant population but Galloway has managed to take it from them for the Respect party with a campaign specifically targeted at the muslim vote.  A letter he had distributed to the mosques in Bradford could easily be an application to be declared a good muslim rather than a begging letter for votes.  The Respect rosette's are even a declaration of their Islamist credentials.

But this is how democracy works of course - the people of Bradford have decided that they want a Scottish communist who laments the loss of the Soviet Union, supports repressive regimes guilty of human rights abuses, doesn't even live in Bradford and who is quite happy to stand in any constituency anywhere in the country to get into power.  George Galloway has surely got to be the first communist Islamic fundamentalist to enter parliament and his election last night is a truly worrying development.

Every party except UKIP and Respect lost vote share in the election.  Respect got a massive 52.83% increase over the last election in Bradford West, UKIP a more modest 1.31%.  But when you consider that Labour and the Tories both lost over 20% of their vote and the Lib Dems over 7%, a 1.31% increase for UKIP is actually a pretty big vote of confidence.

The full results were ...

George Galloway (Respect) 18,341 (55.89%, +52.83%)
Imran Hussain (Lab) 8,201 (24.99%, -20.36%)
Jackie Whiteley (C) 2,746 (8.37%, -22.78%)
Jeanette Sunderland (LD) 1,505 (4.59%, -7.08%)
Sonja McNally (UKIP) 1,085 (3.31%, +1.31%)
Dawud Islam (Green) 481 (1.47%, -0.85%)
Neil Craig (D Nats) 344 (1.05%)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 111 (0.34%)

Garry Bushell and the EU f@#k hotels

Garry Bushell paid a visit to Brussells with Paul Nuttall and a man with a camera to check out the EU's favourite "f**k hotel".  There's no way of linking to the individual article on his blog so I'm sure he won't mind us reproducing it here.  It contains some naughty words and adult themes as they say on the telly but it's a great read.

March 24.While I was in Belgium, I paid a visit to the European Parliament. Now I’m as sceptical about The Project as the next man, as long as the next man is Nigel Farage, but even I was shocked by what I saw inside the belly of the beast. Here is my Brussels diary:

There is a dirty sexy secret lurking alongside the dull and respectable facade of the European Union. Two hotels in easy walking distance of the Brussels Parliament provide short-term rooms to rent for grubby encounters. It costs £21 to hire a room for two hours in Studio Intime in Parnassusstraat – and nobody books one to sleep. Inside the air is heavily perfumed and cupids adorn the walls; outside the canopy is blue with yellow stars mirroring the European Union flag. The two establishments known locally as “fuck hotels” are used largely by EU staff for afternoon delights. Over an hour long period, I watched three couples leave and walk back to work in the lavish Parliamentary building less than fifty yards away. Studio Intime is open about its purposes, advertising its services as providing “rendezvous rooms in Brussels...totally intimate.” Nine different rooms are available from 9am until midnight. The ad promises “complete discretion, impeccable rooms with showers”.

These fuck hotels are an open secret within Parliament. But when you consider the many official perks on offer here you might conclude that tax-payers are the ones getting properly screwed. The children of EU civil servants get free private education, they pay tax at special low rates and they get preferential mortgage rates from banks. The first car they buy is VAT free. Staff can smoke in their offices and bars, where the booze, like the coffee and the high-quality canteen food is subsidised. Half a lager costs you £1 and you can have it for breakfast. The Parliament has a brand new massage parlour, a state of the arts gym, and two saunas.

The masseuse is Melody Fortuna, a beautician whose tasteful promotional picture features her naked bathing in milk she has poured from a stein: http://pokeuroparl.eu/site/estheticienne/melody-fortuna/. Despite the beauty treatment studio being called “POKEuroparl”, there is no suggestion that anything underhand is available here. But has milk ever looked sexier? Talk about Watch out there’s a Hump about...

The Brussels Parliament is bigger than the grandest Las Vegas hotel, but depressingly soulless; the labyrinthine nature of the building perhaps mirroring the baffling complexity of the institution. Inside, the carpets, like the corridor walls, are uniformly as grey as a ghost. The building’s nine bars appear to be thriving though. At 3pm on a Monday I watched a merry group of eight demolish several bottles of champagne. They were interpreters, all on a little under 1,000 Euros a day. In the EU, you get to say “Cheers!” in twenty-three different languages...

The gender imbalance is hard to avoid. Civil service figures reveal that 80 per cent of the younger staff are female, while 70 per cent of the oldest are male. The atmosphere is sexually charged and affairs are rife. “Conversation is how much they get paid and how they get laid,” shrugs a cynical barman. In the EU’s second seat, in Strasbourg, open smoking in the MEPs’ bar is allowed. In Brussels, smokers are supposed to use smoking shelters, which are sited bizarrely inside and are wide open, so that the smoke drifts out anyway. But MEPs who choose to light up at the tables instead go unpunished.

My investigation unearthed a staggering catalogue of waste, privilege, and double standards. More than 1,000 EU officials earn more than David Cameron, who is on £142,000 a year. Civil servants are big earners too. Those in the highest pay grade take home more in a month – £15,482 - than a British nurse earns in a year. Four in every ten are on more than £70K a year – for working a 37 hour week. In Britain, the MPs expenses scandal shocked the nation; but MEPs have it much easier. They don’t need to claim expenses, they all receive a monthly allowance of just over £3,000 – no receipts required. There are 754 MEPs who in addition to their hefty salaries get £237 a day just for signing in; many sign in and disappear. “No-one ever checks,” one tells me. They have chauffeur-driven limousines laid on for them at a cost of £4.25million a year; all drivers sign a confidentiality clause “guaranteeing absolute discretion.” It’s unclear where they are taking them however because, as debates on YouTube show, the chamber is usually empty. The only place you will see it full is in filmed footage inside the recently opened Parliamentarium – a plush visitors’ centre built at a cost of £18million which is devoted to plugging the EU. The centre is as bizarre as it is deserted. One wall, more than 100 yards long, is covered in historical pictures which bafflingly include minor British pop stars Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Another long wall displays head-shots of MEPs. A third room boats an array of furniture and flat film footage of the sea and various citizens. It’s like Armchair Theatre for the lobotomised. But on the plus side, visiting school-kids do get the chance to role-play at being MEPs.

The EU has also given the go-head for a House Of European History at a cost of £137million to “promote an awareness of European identity.” Its history will begin in 1946 so it does not include World War Two – known here as “the European Civil War.” They don’t want to upset the Germans.

The Eurozone crisis may be sparking chaos across southern Europe but in the EU the spending never stops. Arguably the biggest waste is Strasbourg. Each month staff and MEPs pack up and commute to eastern France. This “travelling circus” costs £135million a year. But the arrangement, thought up to symbolise French-German friendship, brings so much money into Strasbourg the French won’t allow it to stop. The third seat in Luxembourg has two debating chambers that have never been used and more than 3,000 permanent staff. Their new HQ, with sports facilities and a swimming pool, cost £716million to build.

While the EU lectures member states about austerity and cutting their budgets, they’re merrily raising theirs. The thought of economising never seems to cross their minds. When van Rompuy and Commission President José Barroso flew to China last year, they went in separate jets. This place is the biggest organised racket since the Kray Twins – and vastly more lucrative. “Life in the Brussels bubble is completely cut off from the reality of life outside,” Scouse UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall tells me. But sensitive to mounting criticism, the EU pays news agency AFB to pump out pro-EU propaganda. In 2008, they also launched a European parliament TV channel which costs £7million a year to run and has 830 viewers a day. The total cost of pro-EU propaganda is £2.02 billion per year, according to research by reform group New Direction. The BBC has benefited from low interest loans from the European Investment Bank. And the EU look after their own. Two British MEPs who lost their seats in 2009 were given jobs working for van Rompuy. The EU also gifts money to professors to undertake ‘research on the EU’; many of these Jean Monnet professors teach European studies at UK universities. Their classes are of course uncritical.

THE European Commission, a short walk from the Parliament, is the real seat of power. 5,000 laws a year are passed but only one in five appears before MEPs, the rest go through as directives and decrees. “The Parliament is democratic facade, a confidence trick,” says Nuttall. “Article 17, paragraph 2 states that the Commission has the sole right of legislative proposal. If MEPs make amendments, the Commission has the power to insist on a unanimous decision.” Yet rules and regulations don’t seem to apply to the EU themselves. Despite passing laws to force down greenhouse gas emissions, they ignore the fact that travelling to Strasbourg creates an extra 18,884 tonnes of CO2 per year. Similarly despite their energy saving policies, the large neon sign on the Paliamentarium building is left on all night, even though there is no-one to see it and no passing traffic. More disturbing is the revelation that Eurocrats are breeding. It is estimated that around one in eight civil servants are second generation, a small but rising number are third generation. They are becoming a hereditary class. Rebel Euro-sceptic MEP Godfrey Bloom says: “Nothing prepares you for the reality, the waste, the remoteness of it all. When I first arrived in 2004, I was saddened and sickened by what I found.” “It’s the death of democracy – at your expense,” says Nuttall. “EU membership costs the British tax-payer £50million per day. If people knew what was going on here, they would be up in arms.” If you support a British referendum on EU membership, sign up here.

There is another, dearer ‘fuck hotel’ called the Treviso on Place Stephanie which is used by the more well-heeled Eurocrats. This one rents out its rather more glamorous, brothel-style rooms at a hefty £66 an hour. Its promotional material tempts would be adulterers with a promise of "room service and discretion assured." Anne De Schepper, the hotel's manager, said that EU officials prefer to book out rooms over their long lunch breaks. “Eurocrats are 80 per cent of our business,” she revealed. “We are busiest at lunch time, followed by early evening in between the end of office hours and the time people need to get back to their homes.” She added: “Unlike the traditional hotel industry, we have not experienced the economic crisis thanks largely to the Europeans in Brussels.”

Euro Facts: EU security bosses recently issued a memo warning that middle-aged Eurocrat adulterers were being targeted by Mata Hari style interns who were said to be trading sex for EU secrets. They said they were easy prey for the "pretty trainee with the long legs and the blonde hair."

Reports by the Parliament’s internal auditor leaked last year revealed that EU staff are allowed to authorise their own expenses and pay allowances to family members. The auditor, British accountant Robert Galvin, found serious problems with the way “personal entitlements” and perks, worth more than £81 million a year, are being paid to civil servants. His investigation, kept secret from most MEPs, revealed multiple examples of officials being paid twice for the same thing or claiming allowances they were not entitled over a three year period. Cash is paid without proof of “eligibility of costs” or any proper audit checks that the money is spent properly. Rule-breaking is common. The reports also found “critical” irregularities and conflicts of interest concerning procurement contracts worth more than £600 million a year. Marta Andreasen, the former whistle-blowing European Commission chief accountant, said: “The parliament’s bureaucracy operates with a total lack of transparency, which is how it gets away with these irregularities.”

Euro Stats: Total number of staff employed by EU: 6684. Of whom, 5540 are civil servants, 129 are temps and 1015 work for political groups.

As well as Brussels, I visited the beautiful Black Forest with my band, and Bologna, one of the mainstays of the Italian Oi and Punk scenes, as part of my signing tour for the Dance Craze book (both trips reported on the Gonads blog). Here I noticed teenage skinheads with ‘Oi’ tattooed on one arm and the hammer and sickle on the other – a sight to blow the minds of the UK media who, to a sheep, are happy to write off skins and streetpunk as exclusively rightwing phenomena. They were never that in 1980/81 and they aren’t now.

Two opinion polls

Another couple of opinion polls are out today - YouGov are putting UKIP on 6% and ComRes at 3%.

YouGov's results are as follows:

Conservative	35%
Labour	42%
Lib Dem	9%
UKIP	6%
SNP/Plaid	3%
Green	3%
BNP	1%
Other	1%
Respect	0%

And ComRes:

Conservative	23%
Labour	31%
Lib Dem	6%
UKIP	3%
Green	3%
SNP	2%
Plaid	1%
BNP	1%
Other	1%

YouGov's figures are much higher than ComRes because YouGov don't include people who are undecided or say they won't vote and of course YouGov's numbers rarely add up.  While YouGov have a pretty good success rate of predicting LibLabCon results, Survation are generally better at predicting election results for all parties.  Perhaps this is why YouGov only include the LibLabCon in their headlines?

There is a Populus poll out today for the Times as well but it's behind the paywall and Populus aren't publishing it on their website.

UKIP on 8% in Survation/Daily Mail poll

Polling company Survation has UKIP firmly in fourth place on 8%, just 3% behind the Lib Dems.

The poll for the Daily Mail isn't available on the Survation website yet so we don't know whether this is a backlash against the so-called "granny tax", the EU attacks on the city with the GLA elections looming or just a continuation of UKIP's excellent polling performance in the last year or so.  Votes for "other" amount to only 11%.

Survation and Angus Reid recognise UKIP's place in mainstream politics and its consistent polling results and put the party on a par with the LibLabCon, leaving only YouGov in the major polling companies that persist in maintaining the myth of the three party state.

More on this when the data tables are available.

Another Tory defects to UKIP

South Oxfordshire District Councillor, Christopher Quinton, has defected from the Tories to UKIP in protest at their stance on same sex marriage and the wearing of crucifixes in the workplace.

Councillor Quinton owns technology investment company Quincom and represents the Woodcote ward in the Chilterns.

Two more Tories defect to UKIP

Councillors Tom and Catherine Bursnall defected from the Tories to UKIP on Wednesday.

Catherine is a former Mayor of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.

Although UKIP's policy of leaving the EU was important to them, they both said "The Conservative party is no longer the party for the aspirational 'go getter'; no longer the moral crusader for a lower taxed nation; and no longer the party that trumps meritocracy over political gesture".

People are increasingly turning to UKIP because they see the party as the true opposition to the LibLabCon circus.  They're attracted to all the party's policies, not just the one for getting us out of the EU.

UKIP Scotland Spring Gathering

UKIP Scotland holds its Spring Gathering tomorrow at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange.

The Spring Gathering is open to members of the public as well as UKIP members so if you're not a member but you're interested to hear what UKIP has to say, why not pop along for a listen?

UKIP Leader, Nigel Farage and Deputy Leader, Paul Nuttall, are both speaking at the Spring Gathering, as is Young Independence Chairman, Harry Aldridge.

A live feed of the Spring Gathering will be on the UKIP website.

British government proposing PFI on English roads

David Cameron's announcement today that the British government is planning to lease English roads to foreign companies as part of a new PFI scheme.

£11 down, £71,799,989 to go

The idea is that strategic roads will be leased to companies on a long term leases and in exchange they will get a share of road tax to pay for repairs and improvements.  New roads will probably be toll roads but he's given us a Cast Iron Guarantee™ that tolls won't be applied to existing roads.

The average interest rate on PFI deals is 8.5% but the British government can borrow money at an average of only 4%.  PFI is poor value for the taxpayer so why would they choose PFI over a "cheap" loan?  Because PFI is an off-book loan.  It doesn't appear on the balance sheet so it covers up the extent of their unsustainable, unfunded borrowing.

Instead of borrowing money to pay someone to maintain our roads, how about getting some of the 2.67m people who are capable of work but don't have a job to work on road crews?  They're being paid for doing nothing at the moment, it's not unreasonable to expect them to give something back to society in exchange for their benefits.

This will no doubt be denounced by left wingers who see being paid not to work as a right rather than a privilege but it's a win-win suggestion.  People who are out of work long term start to lose their work ethic and self-esteem and their skills quickly get out of date.  Get them working, give them on-the-job training, teach them practical skills and help them to get a job and start supporting themselves.

Meanwhile, all this work that needs doing that we apparently can't afford to pay for can be done.  You won't need a 4x4 to drive to the supermarket, grass verges won't look like meadows and the ground won't be carpeted in bottles, cans and food wrappers.

The British government is always talking about responsibility so how about some responsible management of the economy from them and some individual responsibility from the population?

As for the idea of toll roads: just look at the M6 toll road as an example of how people feel about the idea of paying to build a road, paying to maintain it and then paying for the privilege of driving on it.

Argentina threans legal action against Falklands companies

Argentina is stepping up its (currently) non-violent attacks on the Falkland Islands with a threat of legal sanctions against oil exploration companies operating in Falklands waters.

Argentina signed up to the 4th Geneva Convention in 1956 which bans collective punishment in times of war, where war has not yet been declared and during occupation. In blocking Falklands flagged ships from ports in South America, harassing Falklands flagged boats and now threatening spurious legal actions against the lawful activities of companies in the Falklands' sovereign territory, Argentina is conducting war against the Falklands and by extension, the UK. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is considered an illegal collective punishment, the Argentine blockade of the Falklands is surely equally so?

It's time the British government grew a pair and told Argentina to make a move and reap the consequences or stop trying to bully the Falkland Islanders.

UKIP polling 3rd in London - LibDems joint 4th.

UKIPers should be jubilant and LibDems extremely jittery in equal measures tonight - this YouGov poll shows UKIP in third place in London with 7%, while Nick Clegg's party are duking it out with the Green Party for fourth.

The trio of Livingston/Johnson/Paddick all over again was not ever going to inspire. In addition there are two huge differences between now and 2008: a) we're in the era of Coalition whereby the LibDems are now viewed as establishment poodles rather than a viable third party choice and b) that UKIP have seriously got wind behind their sails and are a Party that is in a more professional state than ever before.

Could the LibDems come 5th? Possibly. But one thing I'm more sure of - UKIP will have representation on the Greater London Assembly after May. Whoever the Mayor is, having UKIP GLAs could spice things up a bit. Just like Farage and Co. have done in the European Parliament.

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Cameron insults the wider Anglosphere with yet more 'Special Relationship' guff

According to a report in the Metro on David Cameron's ongoing visit to the United States:

"The prime minister was treated to a 19-gun salute, a review of the troops and marching fifers in colonial-era uniforms as 7,000 guests gathered to hear Mr Cameron describe the two countries as the 'united states of liberty and enterprise'."

Ah! That well-known 'Special Relationship'. 

British Prime Minister's come cheap, obviously. Just throw on a few syrupy, meaningless words, a trip on Air force One and you can take what you please. 

Uneven extradition treaties? Certainly Sir!

Whip up xenophobic hatred against a non-existent company called 'British Petroleum'? We understand!

Pressure the UK over the sovereignty of 'Las Malvinas'? No problem!

The myth of the Special Relationship is a very English Upper Class construct. Like all the best English Gentlemen's clubs, membership is designed not just to admit like minded chaps but also to specifically exclude those who aspire to join but just can't quite make the grade.

Having had to grudgingly admit the reality of American supremacy, but deeply infected with 'Top Table Syndrome', British politicians turned their backs on the reality of Anglosphere common culture in favour of a quite artificial  exclusive relationship. 

The 'Special Relationship' is the other side of the coin to our membership of the European Union. The paradox of both is  that  they bolstered feelings of political superiority at the same time as  substantially weakening our position internationally. We have become enslaved to both, whereas if we had kept our independence and nurtured our Commonwealth links we would now be a proud, free maritime trading nation. Not a nation politically at the top table, perhaps, but one with more freedom, more wealth and  a much, much  surer sense of our own identity.

There is, alas, no end in sight to this embarassing pantomine, or to the gratuitous insults we throw at those Anglosphere cousins we have 'blackballed' from our silly club. Presumably Cameron would have us believe they don't value liberty or enterprise the way the United States and Britain do.

It amazes me they still want to deal with us at all. Perhaps they do so out of pity.

Cameroon tokenism is busting his Party open.

When Tory MPs are blasting their own Party Chairman as the "worse ever", then you have a problem.

Of course the Cameroon virus is about promoting women and non-white faces not on merit, but in the name of 'diversity' for the sake of it.

That has led the the rapid promotion of Baroness Warsi, who recently got hammered by Tory MPs after her treatment of Roger Helmer, who of course defected to UKIP at the Party's Spring Conference.

This is what happens when a 'Notting Hill' cartel takes over your Party with a focus on political correctness and metropolitan feel-goodness, instead of focusing on the promotion of quality, principle and true conservatism.

With the A-list, all-women shortlists and other patronising measures now becoming common practise within the Tory Party, expect annoyance to grow on their backbenches. After decades as a Tory, Roger Helmer finally turned his back and became a UKIPer. It looks increasingly as if he will be followed by many, many more.

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The Real Bigots Are Those Who Label UKIP “Far Right”

As a young Jewish man, and a passionate believer in the virtues of a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society, I am abhorred by the claims made by Mathew Goodwin in the course of his defence of his decision to include UKIP members as a control group in his study on attitudes to violence and the far right. 

First, Goodwin defends his inclusion of UKIP by explaining that the authors of the report wanted a control group to the right of Cameron’s conservatives. Ed West, writing for the Telegraph, has already made the suggestion that surely a better control group would have been just an ordinary cross-section of British society. Nevertheless, it is my own submission that if Goodwin had wanted a control group “right of Cameron’s Conservatives”, I see no reason why he shouldn’t have just interviewed ordinary members of the Conservative party most of whom are much more right wing than Cameron who is frequently criticized by Tories as being a moderate, centrist, “heir to Blair” figure. 

Nevertheless, Goodwin makes the fair point that he never claimed UKIP is a party associated with violence and he points out that the assertion of UKIP’s leadership that it is opposed to extremism and violence is “backed up by our own data”. 

So how does Goodwin justify his suggestion that UKIP shares more with the far right than it admits? Given by his own admission UKIP members do not lust after violence, he does so by claiming that the party has “considerable policy overlaps with the extreme right”. Here is where Goodwin’s argument becomes disingenuous, warped and extremely offensive to members of UKIP such as myself who are members of minority communities.

The BNP are self-evidently right wing nutters: the leadership meets the KKK, have denied the holocaust and, until stopped by the courts, left membership of the party only to indigenous white Brits. Many of the BNP’s supporters are neo-Nazi skinheads and this is all a million miles away from UKIP. 

Yet Goodwin argues that UKIP’s sensible policy on immigration which is designed to promote liberal values overlaps with the BNP’s white supremacist policies. 

Goodwin quotes the UKIP policy of ending uncontrolled immigration as being overlapping with the extreme right. But surely wanting controlled immigration is not an unusual view at all after the unprecedentedhigh levels of immigration seen under New Labour? I myself, for example, believe immigration should be controlled with regards to the brain drain which many academics claim has led to the NHS stealing doctors and nurses from poor African countries where they were trained. Furthermore, Goodwin also claims that there is overlap in terms of the policy of wanting the “expulsion of illegal immigrants”. I cannot possibly see how this view is extreme.   

Yet there is one policy which Goodwin claims does not just overlap with the far right but is in fact a “radical right pitch to voters” and that is: ending multiculturalism. Here we spot the fundamental flaw in Goodwin’s paper and that is that “far right” is never properly defined. Being far right is innately a bad thing as far as Goodwin is concerned. This is evident in his description as UKIP as being “alongside the more toxic extreme right” implying that there is a less toxic, but albeit toxic category UKIP falls into. 

While I too would of course agree that far right politics is detestable, my own definition of “fair right” must be different, and in my view, more sensible, and I can demonstrate this in my support for UKIP’s allegedly extreme right policy on multiculturalism. Incidentally, I would argue that the Prime Minister agrees with UKIP on this given that he has said state multiculturalism has failed. 

UKIP is a libertarian party and British classical liberalism emphasises not trying to promote diversity but rather favours a policy of merely tolerating minority groups. That we don’t believe in throwing money at quangos or encouraging positive discrimination in order to achieve the successful integration of minority groups into British society is all that this policy is about. UKIP has long ago scrapped a silly French-style ban the burqa policy.

Indeed, UKIP is a liberal nationalist party in the British libertarian tradition. It is about preserving a nation-state which is tolerant towards minority groups and will not allow society to fragment. After all, a lack of social cohesion hurts minority groups the most. The narrative Goodwin paints is a clear smear against UKIP and it does not stand up to scrutiny. The real victims of this affair will be my Asian, black, and other friends in UKIP who are from minority backgrounds, and who will be looked down upon because others have deeply misunderstood their political beliefs.

Julien Conway is Director of UKIP Friends of Israel and a student of Law at Southampton University. Tweet: @JulienConway