Yet again I stress – Ukip#s Over Simplification of the Immigration issue is either blatant ignorance or downright dishonest!
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Hi,
endlessly we hear Ukip and their fellow travellers showing their ignorance of the immigration issue.
Yet again let us put the facts forward – Firstly if we Leave_The_EU it will make very little difference to our position as a target for immigrants.
Let us go back one small step and get to grips with a couple of irrefutable facts:
When I was born at the end of WWII the world population was around 2 Billion.
Now in 2014 the world population is over 7 Billion.
The world is no bigger now than in 1946 when I was born.
The rise in populatin in the last 68 years has led to increased desertification and reduced living space.
There is more food now but less well distributed.
OK – let’s stop at those basics for now but let us not overlook just one more basic fact and that is that in a world that strives to avoid war there are numerous worldwide international agreements that deal with refugees, asylum seekers and immigration.
As in almost all other areas The EU does NOT make the laws for Britain or for that matter almost anywhere else!
The EU merely receives laws handed down by such international bodies as The WTO, The WHO, CODEX, The UN, The IMF and a host more such international organisations.
The EU then re presents those internationally binding agreements and rubber stamps them as it puts its impramature on the paper work to pass it off as if it was an EU Law – surely you didn’t think The EU bureaucrats were clever enough to drw up and draft such laws and powerfull enough to impose them on every other Country in the world!
Minded of these facts Ukippers and their racist fellow travellers may find the following article rather easier to understand.
Sunday, 9 November 2014
Leaving the EU won’t solve our immigration problems
Lots of ridiculous articles around about immigration at the moment. On the one hand we have the Ukipist tendency to want to shut up shop and stop engaging with the world, and then you have the equally stupid Marxist view that we can “simply” open our borders to the whole world without any suggestions as to how this might be achieved.
We’re seeing tedious exchanges of migrant numbers and dry economic figures, followed by equally tedious bickering over who’s right. Let’s start with from the position that nobody is right. On the one hand we have a media whose job it is to make money, which means generating hits which means feeding their reader’s own prejudices back to them. So you cobble together a few stats with accompanying pictures of Romanian beggars and then you have a moral panic on your hands which can be marketed and turned into cash money.
Then we get more reasonable studies on the symptoms, and what we find is that these symptoms are eminently solvable. On the one hand you have immigrants who can cut down their expenses by sharing five to a room taking jobs under minimum wage, and on the other a settled community who can’t and shouldn’t have to compete at that level for work, but are then left worse off by leaving the welfare system and taking work – often impossibly so.
We’re seeing a disparity of opportunity here and an unlevel playing field at the bottom of the work ladder. Free market fundamentalists (myself included) would prefer that such an obnoxious and toxic idea never existed, but as a floor price mechanism for addressing the unfair competitive advantage, if properly enforced, can incentivsie work, can generate fair competition and if licensing for houses of multiple occupancy is properly enforced then the economic advantages to coming here to work are significantly reduced. This addresses what is known as the pull factor.
We can also toughen up vagrancy laws so that those who land without having first found accommodation will find that life here is not that pleasant. And let’s face it, vagrancy is a huge problem that does have negative externalities, and a distinction needs to be made between the genuinely homeless and the economic migrants who had some choice in the matter.
There are many small measures we can take that would have an enormous effect on the largely overstated symptoms which would soon collapse the moral panics and take the wind out of Ukip’s sails. So we have to look at why these laws aren’t being enforced. And here’s the kicker… it’s nothing to do with austerity or council cuts.
HMO law has not been properly enforced for a very long time thanks to the, frankly absurd, statutory obligations placed on councils to house people. If you shut down a HMO where there are twenty people living in one house then that places a burden on councils to find the resources to place them, which usually means an expensive B&B because that it the fullest extent of innovation you can expect from councils.
In effect, councils are in a state of paralysis because proper enforcement of the law then magnifies their troubles. Simply building more houses is the simpleton solution in that supply is quite soon taken up and supply can never quite keep pace with demand.
So there’s other aspects we can look at such as the push factor. Many immigrants are escaping war and third world poverty, from places like West Africa, Syria and Huddersfield. In many respects it is our own foreign policy that creates the push of immigration in the first place. In some respects it’s our inexplicable need to drop bombs on things and then even bigger follies such as the EU’s trade policy which has ruined the economy of West Africa by corruptly appropriating fishing rights and sending industrial seabed hoovers to decimate habitats which sustain inshore fishing and exports.
There is also much we can do with foreign aid as a targeted means of international development, but that would mean having a DfD that was fit for purpose and a coherent foreign policy. These matters are not wholly divorced from the EU but not solely EU matters either. But it is a mistake to believe that we can control immigration, or at least mitigate it without engaging in the wider world and even outside of the EU, our own welfare, trade and labour laws have a great deal more of a negative effect than open borders, and that is what creates the perception of problematic immigration.
Then we have the Rochdale and Rotherhams, which again is a good deal more to do with bureaucratic inertia and institutional paralysis, by and large a consequence of not enough subsidiarity, accountability and democracy.
The EU is a problem but it isn’t the whole of the problem, and on balance, EEA zone immigration not only makes us richer but it has also been a huge part of transforming Poland’s economy and in turn will do likewise for Bulgaria and Romania as the remittances start flowing and the cultural and trade advantages thereof.
The fantasy fiction of Marxists is every bit as absurd and toxic as Ukip’s small minded simpleton approach, and seemingly nobody wants to admit the complexity or even attempt to get to grips with the small things that we can do which would be transformational in a very short time. And why is this? It’s simple. Immigration is not at the centre of this debate and it is a proxy for a general disaffection, artificially induced by sensationalist media and opportunistic populist parties.
Our problems are many and multifarious, but I guarantee you the solutions are to be found in very obscure, very dry and distinctly unsexy civic laws. There is no big solution and no single large culprit. To pretend there is as Ukip does is cynical, intellectually dishonest and fatuous. But we’ll get our moronic points based quota system, and I will be completely unsurprised at how little difference it makes – and I will still be repeating myself in twenty years time.
The Overt Racism Seemingly Inciting Racial Hatred of Gerard Batten, in UKIP’s name, displays not only his personal extremism but also his ill educated ignorance which due to lack of education or work experience – having started out as a trained bookbinder and advanced to a shop based sales rep for BT.
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Hi,
the Overt Racism, Seemingly Inciting Racial Hatred, of Gerard Batten, in UKIP’s name, displays not only his personal extremism but also his ill educated ignorance which due to lack of education or work experience – having started out as a trained bookbinder and advanced to a shop based sales rep for BT shows his fear of what to him is the unknown based on his superstition’s antipathy and ignorance not just of Islam but for those of Islam and their Middle East foundations.
Gerard Batten is untrustworthy and has little or no understanding of the basic tennets of British Justice and is all too willing to lie and pervert the course of justice for his personal gain. I understand his association with police officers and others allegedly corrupt and his corrupt abuse of the police and his status as an elected official are a matter brought to the attention of senior police, The Metropolitan Police, Sir Bernard Hogan Hunt, The Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Cameron.
I am perfectly happy to attest to Gerard Batten’s extremism and also his dishonesty, corruption and lack of understanding of duty and responsibility – you need only seek and read the many examples of this unpleasant little man’s behaviour on this blog and his vindictive and dishonest efforts to silence those who expose him.
That Gerard Batten makes a nonsense of the various denials that UKIP makes of their racism, extremist links, anti Islamism and xenophobic hatred – one should remember he has held the highest offices in the party and has stood as one of Nigel Farage’s longest standing colleagues.
Meet Gerard Batten, The UKIP MEP Scare-Mongering About Islam, Immigrants And Bilderberg
Posted: 21/05/2014 12:23 BST
He believes the European Union was conceived by Nazi Germany, suggests the Bilderberg Group is a “shadow world government”, and wants to ban the building of new mosques.
Meet Gerard Batten, senior Ukip MEP and top lieutenant to Nigel Farage.
In recent weeks, Farage has tried to dismiss the string of “unpleasant” and “appalling” remarks – to quote the Prime Minister – made by various Ukip candidates by stressing how minor they are within the party. Batten, thus, poses a particular problem for his party leader.
A founding member of Ukip in 1993, he has been the party’s chief whip in the European Parliament since 2009 after being appointed by Farage to the post. Batten was also Ukip’s mayoral candidate in London in 2008 and came second in the party’s leadership election in 2009.
Yet the London MEP, first elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2009, has a wide range of controversial opinions, as colourful as the pink suits he is known to wear.
“Gerard is much more hardline than many of his colleagues in the party,” a party insider says. “He’s got very strong views, with many of them too strong for a lot of people.”
HuffPost UK spoke to a dozen sources, including current and former colleagues of Batten, both on and off the record, to find out more about the controversial top Ukipper.
The MEP also argued that some Muslim texts also required updating, particularly those bits he claimed say “kill Jews wherever you find them”. He said: “If they say they cannot revise their thinking on those issues, then who’s got the problem – us or them?”
Ex-Ukip MEP Nikki Sinclaire, who joined the party in the 1990s, calls her former colleague an “incredibly paranoid person”.
“Gerard talks about the gradual takeover by the Muslims of Great Britain and sharia law. He has been hell-bent on attacking Muslims.”
Sinclaire claims that Batten is “very good friends” with far-right European politicians like Dutch MP Geert Wilders and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, adding: “I often see him in the parliament with those MEPs.”
Although, Farage and Ukip have rejected joining up with far-right parties led by the likes of Wilders (in Holland) and Marine Le Pen (in France) at a Europe-wide level, Batten nonetheless invited Wilders to the European Parliament in December 2008 to screen his controversial film ‘Fitna’ to MEPs, praising him as “a brave man trying to defend western civilisation”.
Gerard Batten with Geert Wilders at a press conference in 2008
The 17-minute film, featuring shocking imagery of the attacks on New York in 2001 and Madrid in 2004 combined with quotes from the Quran, Islam’s holy book, was called ‘offensively anti-Islamic’ by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Wilders has called for a ban on the Quran and claims “there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam'”.
One party insider admits that Batten has very “strong” views about Islam, quipping: “It’s not like he wants to kill all Muslims.”
Simon Cressy, from the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, describes Batten as “on the far right of Ukip”, adding: “He’s very senior. People like him prove the reality about Ukip when they insist they’re not racist and Islamophobic.
“He has got lots of links to various anti-Islamic group over the past few years, he has spoken at meetings where there has been various sorts of dodgy-anti islamic politicians.”
Batten has himself made contact with the English Defence League, admitting to meeting EDL funder Alan Lake in 2011 as he wanted to find out more about the “phenomenon”.
He explained: “Mr Lake gave me his assurances that the EDL were a non-racist, non-violent organisation and that is only concerned with combating the ideology of extremist and fundamentalist Islamism and had no prejudice against Muslims as such.”
For Muslim imam and activist Ajmal Masroor, Batten’s presence in the top tier of Ukip proves it is not “a political party that is fit to serve the 21st century multicultural and multi-faith Europe”. Masroor, a former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate, accuses the Ukip immigration spokesman of “espousing outright discrimination” and “spreading hate”.
Batten’s political opponents agree. “I find his past association with far-right extremism, no matter how much he tries to deny it now, totally reprehensible. It exposes the close relationship between Ukip on the hard-right and extremist parties,” says Labour MEP Richard Howitt, who calls Batten “boorish” and “slightly aggressive”.
The Tory MEP Sajjad Karim, who is a Muslim himself and vice-president of the European Parliament’s anti-racism group, compares Batten’s views on Muslims to the Nazi treatment of the Jews. “The vast majority of Britons find his views on Muslims repugnant and reminiscent of another era where a whole religious community was stigmatised and targeted in this very same way,” he told HuffPost UK.
However, a Ukip insider dismissed Howitt and Karim’s Howitt’s remarks as “hyperbolic nonsense”, adding: “Has Mr Karim never heard of Godwin’s law? Well, you lose.”
The source added that Batten “may come across as obsessive” because he is “single-minded”, but that he “very hard-working, utterly committed to the cause of Britain leaving the EU.”
‘IMMIGRATION? HE IS TO THE RIGHT OF UKIP’
It isn’t just Muslims who have been targeted by the Ukip immigration spokesman. Batten wrote a provocative paper for Ukip in 2010 titled “Immigration – Action Overdue!” which laid out his thoughts at length on the effect of immigrants on Britain.
He claimed that “the English will become a minority in their own land”, warning that most Brits “within a few decades” would be “immigrants, or the children and grandchildren of immigrants”.
While Farage squirms about what he meant when linking Romanians with criminality, Batten does not beat around the bush, writing: “Apparently Romanians are cornering the market in hole-in-the-wall-fraud.”
Batten also warns that many parts of Britain are now “more like enclaves of Pakistan, Bengal or India than English cities”, blaming the “phenomenon of ‘White flight'”.
Former Ukip deputy leader Mike Nattrass MEP, who was a member of the party until 2013, said Batten was “to the right of me and other people in the party” on immigration, but added: “He thinks and believes what he says. As an Englishman, he perfectly has the right to say what he thinks.”
Former party leader Dr Alan Sked, who founded Ukip in 1993 alongside Batten, said he was surprised by the latter’s hardline stance on immigration as the Ukip MEP’s wife is from the Philippines.
Sked, an international history professor at the London School of Economics, has previously caused controversy for suggesting he had heard Farage use racial slurs in his presence – but the former party leader has a much rosier verdict of Batten.
“He was always hard working and had a good sense of humour. I never heard him say anything extreme in my time.”
‘THE SHADOW WORLD GOVERNMENT’
Batten has gained particular renown for campaigning about the Bilderberg Group, which hosts an annual conference discussing international issues which is attended by world leaders and business chiefs. For conspiracy theorists, these secretive gatherings have long been used by unnamed ‘elites’ to further their nefarious, global agendas.
As protesters gathered outside 2013’s meeting at the Grove Hotel in Watford, Batten was on hand to give an interview to US radio shock jock and 9/11 ‘truther’ Alex Jones about the Bilderberg “conspiracy”.
Batten told Jones he had regularly been writing to politicians to ask them why they attended the conference and who paid for them, saying: “If you are really here to talk about things in the public interest, who do you think you can do it in secrecy? Why not in public?”
Asked if he thought it was a “conspiracy”, he responded: “What’s the definition of a conspiracy? It’s two or more people meeting in secret to achieve an end which may be illegal or legal. In the strictest use of the word, it is a conspiracy.
“The bigger conspiracy has been the fact that the media hasn’t spoken about this for 59 years and haven’t allowed it to go on without any reporting.”
He also said: “Look who owns the media, it is owned by powerful people and they go to powerful meetings like this.”
Batten’s focus on media ownership draws concern from Jewish groups for its undertones. Mark Gardner, from the Community Security Trust (CST), told HuffPost UK: “Gerard Batten stresses that he does not believe the more extreme conspiracy theories about the Bilderberg Group, but any notions of secret political and media power can risk echoing well-worn anti-Semitic ideas.”
Proving he is no stranger to conspiracy theories, Batten suggested to Jones that the European Union had been originally proposed by the Nazis, pointing to a plan by high-ranking Nazi official Dr Walter Funk in 1942 that sketched out “how are we going to run the economy after we have won the war”.
The Ukip chief whip also claimed that in 1975, when the UK was debating whether to stay in the European Union, the CIA funnelled money into the Yes campaign and the BBC “had meetings to ensure the Yes vote was delivered.”
Batten described the alleged CIA involvement as an “instrument of American foreign policy at the time” and complained that “the No vote was totally outspent and outclassed” by US intelligence.
He told other reporters: “[Bilderberg] has been called a ‘shadow world government’, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but nobody else does either.”
Cressy, from Hope not Hate, says: “People see Gerard as being an anti-Bilderberg campaigner and this anti-establishment guy, when he’s not really. He’s like the embarrassing uncle you don’t want to talk about.”
Former colleagues, such as ex-Ukip deputy leader Nattrass, look at Batten’s obsession with Bilderberg with bemusement. “There’s always someone who turns up at hustings and goes on about Bilderberg – it’s like going after the freemasons.”
Ex-Ukip MEP Sinclaire recalls attending leadership hustings alongside Batten in 2009: “We did several hustings and he would talk about Bilderberg and all these kind of things – and you’d think, ‘Really?'”
A Ukip insider played down Batten’s interest in Bilderberg, saying: “Gerard has his own side-interests as everybody does in politics. They’re not Nigel’s but when it comes to the key issues, they’re as one.”
THE GREAT SURVIVOR
Having worked as a salesman at British Telecom for 28 years, Batten helped found Ukip and then rose up the ranks, eventually standing for the party leadership in 2009 and coming second to Lord Pearson.
Today, he is one of the most senior and high-profile members of Ukip – which has its downsides. Earlier this month, Batten reported that a brick was thrown through his living room window in the middle of the night.
His party leader was quick to offer his support and blamed the attack on “the media campaign against UK”.
Relations, however, are said to be pretty poor between the two men. A well-placed Ukip insider said the pair “are not socially close and never have been”, adding: “they’re not drinking buddies”.
HuffPost UK repeatedly contacted Farage and Batten for comment, but at the time of publishing, they have yet to respond.
Ex-Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom says Batten is not “clubbable”, but adds: “I’ve always found that what you see is what you get.” Bloom declines to endorse Batten’s more “out there” views on Islam and Muslims.
Sinclaire describes Batten as the “official controlled opposition” within Ukip to Farage, explaining: “Anyone who has ever questioned or stood up to Farage has basically been destroyed. Gerard Batten challenges Nigel and always survives. My belief is that he’s the one who Nigel puts up [with] and controls.
“I know him and Farage don’t get on. I question how he can survive in Ukip. They’re not good friends. My only conclusion is that he controls him.”
Gerard Batten and Nigel Farage
Nattrass says that Nigel “does not like” Batten and “has said some disgusting things about him before”.
“Nigel tried to sideline him in the 2009 European elections and stop him being top of the candidates’ list in London. Gerard is where he is because Nigel can control him. Anyone he can’t control, he shoves out of the party.”
Sked recalls Batten and Farage have been at odds for much longer, claiming that the London MEP even backed a vote to kick Farage out of Ukip back in 1997, but quit the party’s national executive when “threatened with having to share the subsequent legal bills.”
Batten left the party in 1998 in protest at Ukip’s decision to change its position on sending its MEPs to Brussels, after previously having adopted a position of refusing to attend the European Parliament once they were elected to it.
“Nigel was one of the prime movers of the change at the party policy,” a party insider recalls. “Gerard was dead set against the policy and wanting it to keep to its core values.”
Batten’s own core values are controversial, to say the least. His political opponents call him a supporter of the far right, and see him as an anti-Islam, anti-immigrant extremist. The fact that he is a believer in CIA and Nazi conspiracies don’t help his credibility, either.
UKIP’s vote in the Hastings election was not far ahead of the new British Democratic Party. Throughout the country, however, UKIP is now usually far ahead of the vote for nationalist groups and it sometimes wins local elections.
Why does UKIP get these large votes? The reasons are simple. Opposition to immigration and massive publicity for it. That is now UKIP’s greatest appeal. Opposition to the EU is only a good second in explaining its draw. UKIP is coy of admitting the obvious since, not long ago, it was pouring ordure on nationalist opposition to immigration. The reason it took up seriously the immigration issue is that it saw nationalists getting big votes and decided it was safe to come out of the closet. That’s politics!
UKIP has received more support from the media by a mile than any non-establishment party since the 1930s when newspapers like the Mail and the Mirror favourably publicised Mosley’s party. You can’t count the SDP since it was essentially an establishment internal tiff. Even the BBC has made Farage a regular feature in major programmes. Some think that suspicious.
Most of the country is now convinced that UKIP wants to stop immigration. Maybe it does but let’s look at what the party actually says on the subject in the policy section of its web site.
The first thing one notices is that immigration policy is ‘under review’. Does anyone know how long for? I seem to recall the same story a year ago. We don’t actually have any firm policy on which to judge UKIP at the moment.
Now call me cynical but ‘under review’ is one of the oldest politician’s tricks in the book. Whatever the complaint it can be said that it might be met when the review has finished. Perhaps in UKIP’s case it never will. Or maybe wait and see which way the wind is blowing and never mind supporters who may later feel misled.
All we have to go on at present is what are suggested to be the principles on which UKIP’s firm immigration policy is to be based – if it ever emerges.
UKIP calls for an end to mass uncontrolled immigration. It says Britain can’t stand any more of immigration rates which add a million to the population every four or five years. But that DOES NOT MEAN STOPPING IMMIGRATION. It means that – best case – the number of new immigrants would simply equal those going out. Since large numbers of British people are leaving in disquiet at the way the country is going, it amounts in itself to a continuation of the process of population replacement.
Future immigration must be controlled and limited so that it can be shown to ‘benefit the British people as a whole’. Well that’s exactly what the big parties say is already the case! So no change there. And no numbers.
But we are told that meanwhile there will be a five year freeze on immigration for permanent settlement with ‘exceptions’. So it seems the aim is not merely to stabilise the population but to go further and slow the growth of the foreign entrant population.
But how many ‘exceptions’? We are not told and it gets worse when UKIP says that people will be allowed in on work permits not allowing permanent settlement to fill gaps in the jobs market which cannot be filled from the existing workforce. What sort of figure do they have in mind and what sort of jobs? We are not told. We have around 2.5 million unemployed on the official basis and, if there really are ’skills shortages’, why are we not training our own people? Are they not clever enough? Touch of real hidden racism here?.
The above is, of course, the same story the big parties have used for years with their ‘highly-skilled migrants’ legend – many of whom end up working in shops.
Putting it all together, UKIP’s policies could be fully implemented during the five year freeze while the following occurred.
50,000 maybe 100,000 a year new permanent immigrants as ‘exceptions’? The world and his wife will make a case to be exceptions. Say 200,000 work permits to fill all those jobs we are too stupid to do.
But, you say, at least the 200,000 would not be here permanently. But that is not the whole picture. Part of the work permit game is the revolving door. Those who have entered and reach the end of their terms may simply be replaced by others. To all intents you have permanent immigration even if the faces change. And if the economy makes some degree of recovery ye olde ‘skills shortages’ may make it ‘essential’ to increase the number of work permits. Especially if the permanent population started falling, as it possibly would under the scheme, since the outflow of skilled emigrants will doubtless continue.
We could easily find ourselves with the numbers living here being swelled by well over 100,000 a year – and far far more – but with many misleadingly being now dubbed temporary residents and UKIP’s stated policies being achieved.
As soon as parties start talking about work permits to fill ‘skills shortages’ – except in minute numbers and rare circumstances – the bulldetector goes off the dial. Do we really need a Canadian to run the Bank of England?
The stated Tory policy is to limit population growth to less than 100,000 a year. That, if they actually intended to achieve it, could be better than what UKIP is offering.
If anyone thinks the above unfair to UKIP then the remedy lies in their hands.
Give us some numbers to go on! On the basis of what UKIP currently claims we are looking at a proverbial Swiss cheese.
I came across this having listened to Nigel Farage on CLICK HERE on 23-Oct-2013 in the EU Parliament pleniary session in Strasbourg for the upcoming EUCouncil meeting of the 24/25-Oct-2013where he spoke briefly only to meet with rebuttal at 10:21 with the brief intercession of:
“This agenda is about distracting attention from the real causes of unemployment and lack of growth.”
They include:
– restrictionist budgetary policies;
– cheap foreign imports from emergent economies;
– domestic earned income being invested abroad; and
– outsourcing of jobs.
“However, the cause that is the real taboo is immigration – especially from the Third World. Their migrants are assisted by anti-discrimination laws but what we really need are native-population preference laws so that each country’s nationals go to the top of the employment list.
“In the UK, we have an Establishment Safety Valve Party* that would pretend to be opposed to mass immigration but on 4th May 2010 its leader, Mr Farage, said that the UK should issue a quarter of a million work permits each year.”
Marta Andreasen ex UKIP MEP Repeats Her Expose!
Although she is a serial liar there is much truth in her exposure of her erstwhile sponsor Nigel Farage & HIS UKIP!
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Ex-MEP Marta Andreasen claims Ukip peddles ‘lies’ as high-profile Tory MP Priti Patel‘s father announces he is standing for election
Former MEP claims Nigel Farage is to blame for failing to vet candidates with far-right links
The UK Independence Party tells “lies” to stir up fear of immigrants and Nigel Farage is personally to blame for failing to vet candidates with far right links, one of its former leading MEPs has claimed.
Marta Andreasen’s comments came as the Ukip leader spoke of his pride that the party was managing to reduce the BNP’s vote share by winning the support of people who had previously voted for Nick Griffin’s party.
Ukip, which is riding high in the polls ahead of Thursday’s local elections, has come under pressure over the backgrounds of several of its candidates. Today it suspended the membership of an activist who was photographed apparently making a Nazi salute.
Mr Farage has always insisted the party is colour blind and bans former supporters of the BNP and other far-right groups from membership.
But Ms Andreasen, who defected to the Conservatives three months ago, said she had become concerned that Ukip, which is fielding more than 1,700 candidates, was increasingly stirring up hatred against immigrants in its campaigning.
And she claimed she was still receiving calls from party members alarmed at its strategy and choice of candidates.
Ms Andreasen told The Independent: “Even if they say they have changed the constitution to have less BNP [members], they actually are taking the ground of the BNP and they have many members who are coming from the BNP and the National Front.”
The MEP, who represents the south-east of England, said Ukip had “generated a lot of anxiety” by playing on anti-immigration sentiment in the recent by-election in Eastleigh, where the party came second ahead of the Tories and Labour.
She said: “If you saw the campaign in Eastleigh it was all about immigration and they lie, they produce data which is ridiculous, they say the whole population of Bulgaria and Romania is going to come to the UK.”
Mr Farage admitted that the party faced “one or two teething problems” in selecting its representatives and admitted that it “does not look very pretty” to have a candidate pictured making the Nazi salute. He said: “We don’t have the resources to trawl through absolutely everybody’s social media sites and that has led to one or two embarrassments.”
But Ms Andreasen, a former chief accountant for the European Commission, said it was Mr Farage’s jealousy of potential competitors inside the “one-man band” party that had prevented candidates from having their records checked.
She said Mr Farage changed the party’s constitution last year “giving him full power on everything, including the establishment of strategy, policies and selection processes for candidates for elections”.
She added: “He has come out saying ‘we cannot vet everybody’ – well he cannot vet everybody because he wants the control himself. He should have been able to establish an administration with the means to vet, even if it’s 1,700 candidates. He’s the one who put candidates all over the place in as many seats as possible… He’s very attractive to the media because he’s a showman but he doesn’t have the patience or the interest in dealing with data.”
There is no love lost between the pair, with Mr Farage responding to Ms Andreasen’s defection by saying the Conservatives “deserve what is coming to them”, adding: “The woman is impossible.”
Ukip is aiming to capture around 14 per cent of the vote in tomorrow’s elections. While that is unlikely to win the party many seats it could deprive other parties – notably the Tories – of victory in close-fought contests.
It is also expected to finish second in the parliamentary by-election in the safe Labour seat of South Shields.
During a campaign visit to the constituency, Mr Farage insisted he was doing more than any political leader to counter the BNP.
He said Ukip was managing to reach out to voters concerned about immigration while refusing to pander to racial prejudice. “By adopting that strategy we have actually taken away one-third of the BNP vote. Nobody has done more [than me] to damage the BNP in British politics.”
Ukip received a pre-elections fillip with the disclosure that a candidate is the father of the high-profile Tory MP Priti Patel. Sushil Patel is standing in the Hertfordshire County Council elections.
Tory sources initially claimed he would stand down to avoid embarrassing her, but last night he insisted he was standing. He said: “My views are my own and I am astonished there has been quite so much interest in my candidacy.”
Marta Andreasen: Ex-MEP who is no stranger to controversy
A Spanish national, born in Argentina, Marta Andreasen, 58, was once chief accountant for the European Commission.
She was suspended after raising concerns about its financial records, first via a letter to its then president, Romano Prodi, before publicly accusing the organisation of having worse accounts than Enron.
She entered the European Parliament for Ukip in 1999 and was re-elected twice, becoming party treasurer in 2007.
This February, she became the third MEP to quit Ukip in two years amid rows about policies, personalities and far-right allegiances.
This article commenting on UKIP was of passing interest:
Home › News › Central political strategy for UKIP: Xenophobia?
Central political strategy for UKIP: Xenophobia?
The UK Independence Party is preparing to exploit ‘fears’ over mass immigration from Romania and Bulgaria by putting the issue at the centre of its campaign strategy. UKIP, which has seen a surge in the polls, claims that 350,000-400,000 immigrants from the two countries will come into the UK. They also claim that a rise will ‘impact’ crime rates.
UKIP assertion that 350,000-400,000 Romanians and Bulgarians, will come into the UK, has been challenged by migrant experts. Migrant specialist say that Romanians are more likely to go to Italy, Spain and France, than to the UK, as they share cultural and linguistic links with these countries.
They also pointed out that the restrictions on immigrants are being lifted at the same time for other Western European countries. Bulgaria and Romania joined the European Union in 2007, however caps on their movement with the European Union were placed. The caps are due to be lifted in January 2014.
UKIP believes that the issue will play a ‘major’ role in local elections in May, as well as, European parliament elections in 2014. UKIP seek to link the issue with leaving the EU, which is a ‘major’ concern for voters. Private polling suggested that any party that successfully ties the two issues, would appeal to 80% of the electorate. A UKIP spokesperson told the Independent:
We will be able, quite legitimately, to tie the Government’s inaction vis a vis the European Union and a local impact on people’s towns and villages”.
He went on to say:
The free movement between Britain, Romania and Bulgaria is going to have an impact on schools, housing, roads, facilities, health care and I hate to say it- crime”. The rhetoric from UKIP, has caused alarm in the Conservative party, as they fear that the new strategy will take away traditional Tory voters.
Conservative MPs have called on the Government to impose new restrictions on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria. On Wednesday, Tory MP Stewart Jackson, will present a commons Bill calling on fresh limits on Bulgarian and Romanians coming to the UK. He said:
We don’t want to make the same mistake as we did in 2004 which was to import a very large number of low-wage, low-skill workers and embed welfare dependency in our indigenous workforce”.
Comparisons with 2004 are misguided, migration expert warn. In 2004, Britain was the only major economy to adopted an ‘open doors’ policy towards Poland and other EU member states. Up to one Million Polish migrants came to the UK, however half of them left the UK after a few years. Scott Blinder, acting director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University said:
If you compare what is going to happen next year with what happened in 2004, most of what we know suggests it will be a smaller impact, smaller scale event”.
The electoral campaign from UKIP is based on misinformation and a distortion of the facts, the implication that voters are worried about ‘immigration’, because of supposed links to crime and disintegration is a cause for concern. What is even more concerning is how the ‘dangerous’ rhetoric has caught on in the other parties. The net benefit of immigrants for the UK is quiet high, Immigrants play a huge role in the UK economy and they tend to play a pivotal role in the health service.
The strategy of UKIP is regrettable, seen by many as xenophobic and wrong, however this surge did not happen in a vacuum. They have merely played into a wider climate of xenophobia created in part by media’s depiction of ‘immigrants, crime and the economy’.
This image is juxtaposed with the idea that ‘Britain is full up’ and being ‘overrun’ by ‘foreigners’, despite the fact that 95% of people in this country are citizens and 81% of this country is uninhabited. Whilst, tough scrutiny of UKIP is needed, it should also be applied to the Media that feeds us these stereotypes.
it is fairly clear to the informed that opposition to excess immigration is not in any way racist.
Immigration comes from many Countries and almost no aspect of inward immigration is beneficial to the host Country where housing, education, culture, health, jobs and so much more are put under pressure.
One of the greatest damages is in relation to the health service, where there is an influx of people making demands on an already over stretched health service – this gives rise to an influx of medically qualified aliens when our own Government should be forced to train sufficient medical staff for our own services.
Sadly the Government tends to redirect its resources from training to treatment. This results in a vacuum sucking in trained people from third world countries – the great resource of the poor countries!
Who and in what way are there winners from the overall effect of excessive immigration?
Racism on the other hand is pernicious and unfortunately all too close to the values of all too many in UKIP.
You will have noted the inclination to incite racial hatred engendered by the anti Islamic pamphlets of UKIP’s NEC Gerard Batten and the Zionist extremism of Malcolm Lord Pearson and his gross exaggerations of the reproduction of Muslims and people of colour.
You will have also noted the support from UKIP of their extremist anti homosexual, racist Pan EU EFD Group which Nigel Farage leads!
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Regards,
Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
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UKIP’s immigration policy
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Posted: 21/05/2014 12:23 BST