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One does not wish to comment on the gullibility of a UKIP MEP who is cheated out of £3,000 after a member of staff complains she has not been paid her wages by the European Parliament.
Suffice to say that, of the “services” in the EP, the payroll department is usually pretty slick, and it would have taken only a telephone call or an e-mail to check whether a payment had been made.
The report, however, disclosed that Mr Gerard Batten MEP had been hiring Jasna Badzak, 42, a Yugoslavian immigrant, as a researcher, on the knock-down rate of £10,000 per annum, considerably less than half a recently qualified English-born researcher might accept for this type of work.
This is the party, of course, which objects to immigrants coming to the UK and under-cutting local wage rates. One is thus reminded of party leader Roger Knapman, who in May 2006 was outed for hiring cheap Polish builders to do up his country mansion, keeping them in his attic and paying them half the rate of British workers.
Mr Farage is, of course, extremely voluble about such practices and Mr Batten, acting as chief whip for his boss, has also been quick to complain about the immigrant problem.
Mr Knapman’s excuse for hiring cheap immigrant labour, though, was that his Polish workers were far better than their British equivalents. When it comes to research, though, it is tempting to suggest that you get what you pay for.
Nevertheless, that may not be the issue here. The indications are that something far more tawdry is involved, and not all aspects of the Telegraph report hang together. There were, it seems, “issues” between the pair, and relations were far from cordial.
All the same, we may be seeing here a glimpse of why the UKIP research effort is so poor and, even though a jury found Batten to be an innocent party in this case, neither he nor his researcher emerges with any great credit. Doubtless, this is not what UKIP voters expected when they cast their votes.