for 73 Seats in the undemocratic EU Mock Parliament
751 Candidates are trying to get
Seats on The Gravy Train
VOTE TODAY:
It is fairly irrelevant who is elected so it is probably best not to spoil your ballot paper by wasting it on either a wannabe politician or even a party as even if all 73 seats were won by one party they could and would achieve nothing of consequence as 73 seats represents less than 10% say in the EU sham parliament & even if every single one turned up and voted unanimously their vote is of no consequence.
IF UKIP were to win with 73 MEPs do not forget that with their past track record 7 would go to Prison and Nigel Farage would fall out with around 30 within a year or two.
Of far greater significance
In The Local Elections on the same day:
VOTE TODAY:
4,216 seats
on 161 councils
in England
are being contested.
The outcome of this election is of far greater significance as it is the Local elections which will influence the General Election in a 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.
Normally this blog takes little interest in the more sordid aspects of the low lifes of Ukip leadership but Nigel Farage’s Boast About The Number Of Women He Got Pregnant has resurfaced in some quarters!
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Posted by:
Greg Lance – Watkins
Greg_L-W
eMail: Greg_L-W@BTconnect.com
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Hi,
as he is a sociopath, in my opinion, with his blind belief if not blinded belief in just how clever and indespensible he is and his absolute lack of understanding of either integrity or ethics I was amused to be reminded of the example from so long ago that typifies his behaviour.
Such hubris and opinion of his own self worth, when he is clearly such an insecure personality that he lashes out at anyone who might be in a position to challenge him or rival him due to their having the leadership skills he so clearly lacks.
Nigel Farage is so very like Oswald Mosely, without the breeding, education or background, that it is quite surprising and interestingly the two men share many traits, including the fact that their political careers peaked at around 50,000 members but neither men were able to command a following in the House of Commons before their fall from grace and eventual departure in ignominy.
Let us not forget the wisdom of Enoch Powell when he said ‘All political careers end in failure’ and we are watching the end of Nigel Farage’s political life if the public have one Iota of sense – that he has destroyed his own future with his untrustworth behaviour, close association with lies, bullying and abuse of people and his public office which has done little to encourage any but the most dependent on him to raise a hand to help him and protect him from his precarious position and inevitable eventual fall, raising only a hand to toast his departure!
Nigel Farage Boasted About The Number Of Women He Got Pregnant
An old interview given by Nigel Farage has resurfaced in which the Ukip leader attacks the “lunacy” of maternity leave and boasted about the number of women he had got pregnant.
Asked if women should play football, Farage replied: “Here’s the bigger question. Do we think, chaps, when we’re there in the front line, when the balloon goes up, with fixed bayonets, when the whistle’s about to blow to go over the top, do we actually want to be there with women beside us? Do we? What an extraordinarily bizarre idea! I certainly don’t think so.
He added: “But maybe it’s because I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view. I find it very difficult to think that we could stand up and run over the top together, into the machine guns or whatever. Men and women are different – thank God!”
The interview, conducted with Belgian magazine Up Front in 2010, was uncovered on Wednesday by Political Scrapbook.
Farage was also reported to have agreed with comments made by then Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom about maternity leave. “Godfrey’s comment that ‘no employer with a brain in the right place would employ a young, single, free woman’ has been proved so right,” Farage said. “With this lunacy, that if you have children you get three months paid leave off work, or six months paid leave off work – he absolutely got it spot on.”
Bloom was kicked out of Ukip by Farage last year when he was recorded telling a room full of women that they were “sluts” and then proceeded to hit a reporter over the head with a book before running away in a taxi.
The Ukip leader has made controversial comments about the role of women in the workplace since that interview took place. In January he claimed there was not “any discrimination against women at all” in the City of London.
Farage has admitted that his party does not do as well among women and men, but said women were “slowly but surely” taking over Ukip. “Nobody has done more in Ukip to promote women than I have,” he said in February.”When you get the results from European elections you’ll be astonished to see as many women as men in the top slots in Ukip, things have changed.”
Laure Ferrari picked up in a Restaurant in Strasbourg by Nigel Farage & Godfrey Bloom & despite no experience put on the UKIP / EFD / EU payroll as UKIP delegation Head of PR!
Now standing, after training by UKIP as an extreme right wing French candidate!
Yet UKIP makes a big fuss about the risk of Romanians taking British jobs – just look at their staff list of foreigners!
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Profile: Laure Ferrari, the protegee of Nigel Farage
21/05/2014 – 07:59
Laure Ferrari [debout-la-france.fr]
Laure Ferrari, EU election candidate for the far-right party Arise the Republic (Debout la République), entered politics after an unexpected encounter with Nigel Farage, the firebrand eurosceptic Britton. She is profiled in the third part of a series looking at the French election candidates, by EurActiv France.
Laure Ferrari decided to enter politics after an unexpected encounter with two famous Eurosceptic MEPs, Britain’s Godfrey Bloom (independent) and Nigel Farage (UKIP).
“At the time in 2007, I was working in a restaurant in Strasbourg. I met these two MEPs and we started talking about politics,” she told EurActiv France.
“The two Brits have no hierarchy and neither of them comes from a political background,” she explained.
There was a clear political affinity between the charismatic UKIP leader and the young woman, and what started as a by-chance meeting quickly turned into collaboration. Laure Ferrari started working with Nigel Farage in the European Parliament, where she was head of public relations for the British delegation to the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group, EFD, which is co-chaired by Farage.
“Everyone says that I am Nigel Farage’s parliamentary assistant, but this is not true! I was head of public relations,” Ferrari claimed.
Stroke of luck
Laure Ferrari never thought she would have the chance to spend seven years in the European Parliament or run for the 2014 EU elections for the French far-right party, Arise the Republic. “Before 2005, I hadn’t a clue about politics,” she said. “For me, it was carried out by old men who sat around talking.”
Her total disinterest transformed during the 2005 French referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. “I said to myself: the EU is going behind the backs of European citizens here. I was always a bit of a rebel,” she said.
“What I find repelling about the European Union is that it imposes a vision that does not correspond to that of the European citizens!” she continued.
Laure Ferrari, from the northwestern French town of Épinal, studied English at the University of Strasbourg, and then spent two years doing a master’s degree in communications.
After her studies, she opened a cloths shop in Strasbourg called ‘Urban Flavor’. This surprising decision is explained by a longing to be independent. “I couldn’t see myself working for someone else. Therefore I set out on my own and got a bank loan to buy the business,” she said.
Ferrari ran the shop for two years. She soon realised that independence comes at a price. “I launched the business during the economic crisis and realised that working in this sector turned out to be…. quite lonely! “Financial difficulties pushed her to work as a waitress in order to “round off the end of the month.”
Ferrari has no family background that compelled her to join a Eurosceptic party. “I would say my dad was a gaullist and my mother… cannot be categorised, although she always considered herself a bit to the left”, said the young woman, whose family own a commercial road haulage company.
Close Franco-UK ties
Laure Ferrari discovered Arise the Republic whilst working at the European Parliament. “In 2011, I met Nicolas-Dupont Aignan, who I did not know at all! I was instantly won over by his personality and political programme,” said Ferrari.
Hereafter, she organised meetings between both Eurosceptic party leaders. “The ball started rolling. Now, they are like two peas in a pod!” she said. Since then, meetings and cooperation between the two political figures have grown.
“I have also tried to reach out to the German Eurosceptic party, Alternative für Deutschland(AfD). However, relations with them will not be possible until after the elections.”
Uneasy label: ‘extreme’
Despite her negative views of the EU, Laure Ferrari refuses to be classified as far-right or be compared to the National Front, France’s most popular far-right party. This frequent comparison makes her feel uneasy. “We must not forget that there are plenty of left-wing parties that classify themselves as eurosceptic,” she emphasised.
“When I was younger, I took part in protests against the National Front when Marie Le Pen made to it the second round of the French presidential elections in 2002,” she said. “Some of their ideas, like those regarding the death penalty and immigration, disgust me.”
However, their campaign ideas bear striking resemblance. “Even on Europe, the National Front bases many of their ideas on us, not the other way around,” claimed the want-to-be MEP.
Ferrari does not believe in abolishing the EU. Although Arise the Republic advocates an EU exit, the European Council is a positive component of the Union. Exiting the single currency and bringing back the French Franc also features in their political programme, but the Euro would remain as an “international currency”.
Clearly UKIP Couldn’t Organise A Carnival In Croydon so why do people think they have a serious role inpolitics where they can’t deliver either – 21 years and still no Exit & Survival Plan!
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Hi,
as ever UKIP’s desperate efforts to pretend to inclusivity leaves them with Winston McKenzie as a ticking time bomb who as so often happens with UKIP under Nigel Farage’s inept attempts at leadership has yet again ‘blown’!
Just as in almost every election UKIP participates in issues overtake policies and as ever this time the overt racism of Farage’s chosen campaign where we note that the only publicity UKIP has received in the election run up has either been that which they purchased or bad publicity, which to be fair has indeed drawn support but sadly, as can be seen in these photos, amongst the elderly and those who previously supported the BNP and other xenophobes.
You will note how the UKIP racist issue has totally subsumed any reasoned rational promotion of policy to Leave_The_EU. This is hardly surprising in the ligyht of their inept and ill considered damaging campaign that gained so much bad publicity to add to the baggage that UKIP has attracted that has largely lost them the core vote from genuine EUroSceptics and has so damaged the EUroRealist movement such that if they continue to pretend to represent those opposed to membership of The EU that there is a danger that in the next year or two they will manage to lock Britain into membership and vassal status in the EU.
Astonishingly after 21 years UKIP still has absolutely no viable Exit & Survival Atrategy and clearly have very little understanding of just how the EU works, its foundations or its aims. UKIP has failed to explain just how Britain would be better off out of The EU or how it could be achieved – nor of the bigger picture and whilst they have a line of denigratory & childish rhetoric they would seem to have absoluitely no strategy or tactics that encompass the facts – just ya boo rhetoric.
UKIP quite clearly has no understanding of the background of the EU and their actions in placing their impramature on the negotiated edicts of The WHO, CODEX, Davos and other International bodies that oil the wheels of International trade and relations – The EU instigates almost nothing of consequence merely taking our place at the negotiating tables seeking a one size fits all concept making no allowances for the needs, aspirations and values of many of the constituent Nation States.
UKIP has displayed its ineptitude and lack of gravitas on a seriak basis – many may adulate them but few respect them whilst a clear majority despise their cheap style and fundamental lack of any candidates of note in any serious terms.UKIP lacked even the competence to put forward an entry for the BrExit Prize, clearly having no one of competence to research and write such a paper – though I concede that with 20/20 hindsight we now know that the BrExit Prize devolved into farce due to the corrupt management by The IEA and the ineptitude of the judges, which must have been disapointing for the 15 year old, who unlike UKIP, was actually able to present an entry for judgement.
Clearly UKIP is hugely out of its depth – it is not just Nigel Farage ducking out on attending meetings and being unable to cope with hard/combative interview by a well versed interviewer, as shown by James O’Brien on LBC CLICK HERE One need only read through their list of largely low life and nobodies they have fielded as candidate to represent them (for they sure won’t represent me and millions of others like me who seek competence) there really isn’t a single individual of competence, gravitas and integrity amongst their 60 or so candidates.
Then look at their candidates for the 4,000 local Council seats as they lurch from idiocy to irelevance as they are clearly such low grade – I look at my own Council and even in comparison with Labour who I have zero affinity with and the Lib.Dims. I have little but contempt for or even Tory who are so smugly inept UKIP are little more than an embarrassment – as shown by the publicity they have attracted as they follow in the footsteps of general failure of those who went before them.
UKIP may well have polled well for the EU election where we can expect 30% or less participation although it is clear the mask is slipping as the public see through the facade and UKIP has clearly peaked too early and they face every danger of a collapse in their vote, though the low turnout favours minority parties, there is still a chance they will come a close second with around 25 MEP seats but the danger they may only manage to hang onto a close third witha dozen seats only, which becomes ever more likely day on day and were it a further two weeks to the election they might do even worse.
Of the 4,000 local government seats up for election I very much doubt UKIP will top 200 and the number is also falling as the days pass and UKIP’s low grad candidates lurch from bad publicity to offensive behaviour!
Little wonder that Nigel Farage has to lay claim to his crass comments being due to being tired – let us not forget that interogators use sleep deprivation as a means to expose the truth! That Farage is living in 3 different Countries staying either in hotels or The East India Club rarely visiting his alleged home where he has been paying his ‘wife’ some £30K a year of public money – presumably either as hush money or to keep the house aired we know not though we do know for certain that to originally get himself onto the gravy train he promised never to employ family members!
Perhaps he no longer considers Kirsten to be a relation in the light of the clear estrangement of their relationship!
Ukip scraps ‘carnival’ to prove it’s not racist after steel band refuses to play in front of ‘Love Colour’ sign and Farage stays away
Members of the steel band say they are ‘embarrassed‘ to be there – and leave
Ukip planned ‘bold and vibrant’ event in Croydon to dispel racism claims
Steel band told to set up in front of a shop window with ‘Love Colour’ sign
Party members clashed with angry protesters as police looked on
Croydon council candidate Winston McKenzie brands the town ‘a dump’
Nigel Farage pulled out of attending the event amid security concerns
Published: 18:45, 20 May 2014 | Updated: 18:45, 20 May 2014
Nigel Farage was forced to pull the plug on his latest attempt to prove Ukip is not racist, after a steel band refused to play at a bizarre ‘Carnival’ in Croydon.
The Ukip leader hoped it would be a ‘bold and vibrant’ event to defy his critics, but organisers were confronted with protesters likening the party to Nazis.
Mr Farage abandoned plans to attend after opponents clashed with party members, the steel band walked out and a Ukip candidate branded Croydon a ‘dump’.
Ukip supporters clash with opponents in Croydon town centre where their leader Nigel Farage was due to speak, but didn’t turn up
A steel band booked to play at the event instead packed up before Mr Farage had arrived
Band members said they were ’embarrassed’ to be there, and packed up before Ukip leader Nigel Farage arrived
Ukip yesterday paid for a full-page advert in a national newspaper insisting it was not racist.
Today’s event, staged in front of a shop window with the slogan ‘Love Colour’ was a follow-up to a rally Mr Farage held featuring candidates and members from ethnic minorities.
In an apparent admission that the party had to do more to prove it was not racist, the street rally was organised in Croydon.
But Ukip candidates and supporters clashed with protesters and campaigners. Romanians carrying banners about Nazis argued with party members about Nigel Farage’s remarks last week about Romanian neighbours.
Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who sparked controversy with comments about Romanians during an interview on LBC last week, was forced to abandon plans to visit Croydon
The event was supposed to draw a line under recent controversies over comments made by Ukip candidates
Instead the ‘carnival’ descended into a stand-off between protesters and Ukip members, with journalists looking on
Organisers seemed unprepared for the number of protesters accusing Ukip of being Nazis
Ukip strategists cancelled Mr Farage’s visit at the last moment, claiming there was a security threat
Ukip are expected to top the European Parliament elections on Thursday, which Mr Farage says will trigger a political earthquake
See the highlights of Nigel Farage’s car crash interview on LBC
Winston McKenzie, a black Ukip candidate in Thursday’s election, clashed with black teenagers in a debate over whether he was a leader of the community while also being in the party.
He used a megaphone to make a speech urging people to make Britain great again. Mr Farage was due to attend the event, dubbed a carnival or street party, on Croydon High Street.
In his speech, Mr McKenzie said: ‘I want to thank all of the patriotic people in this country who are fed up, let down by the situation.
‘I’m sick to death… of hearing the same rhetoric come from the same stale political parties.
‘It’s time people woke up and realised this country is being disenfranchised.’
Protesters waved placards branding Ukip the ‘modern Nazi party’ as they disrupted the street event
Ukip officials struggled to maintain control and eventually cancelled Mr Farage’s vist
Ukip council candidate Winston McKenzie tried to shout down opponents on Croydon High Street
Mr McKenzie said Mr Farage would not be attending because as a family man and party leader ‘certain situations you have to avoid’
Mr McKenzie said there was no choice but to cancel the event, adding: ‘Croydon is unsafe and a dump’
Police officers watched over the peaceful but heated clashes outside the Whitgift Shopping Centre.
The Endurance Steel band, which included black members, told reporters they were ’embarrassed’ to be there because they did not think that people should vote for Ukip.
Winston McKenzie, a Ukip council candidate in Croydon, tried to silence critics using a megaphone. Standing in front of a Ukip battlebus he addressed a small group of party members.
But as he was shouted down by opponents, it emerged that Mr Farage had cancelled a visit to the town. Mr McKenzie confirmed Mr Farage would not be attending, citing security concerns.
He told reporters: ‘He’s a responsible family man and political party leader. Certain situations you have to avoid.’
Mr McKenzie added: ‘Croydon is unsafe and a dump.’
Protesters told Ukip to ‘f*** off’ and challenged them over remarks by one council candidate who said comedian and actor Lenny Henry should emigrate to a ‘black country’.
At an event on May 7 Mr Farage posed with black and Asian supporters to insist: ‘Don’t call us racist’
Amjad Bashir, the party’s small and medium size business spokesman, is pictured shaking Mr Farage’s hand after telling the rally: ‘Take a look at all the faces and skin colours represented on this stage and tell me Ukip is a racist party’
It came after Mr Farage was condemned by politicians from the three main parties after declaring in a radio interview last week that everyone knows ‘the difference’ between Romanians and Germans. Mr Farage’s second wife Kirsten is German.
The Ukip leader yesterday attempted to backtrack, saying the vast majority of Romanians were ‘good people’.
‘If I gave the impression… that I was discriminating against Romanians then I apologise certainly for that,’ the Ukip leader said on a campaign visit to Ramsgate. He said people would – rather than should – be concerned about Romanian neighbours.
He added: ‘Can we just have an honest appraisal of what has happened to post-communist Romania? Across the whole of the European Union, amongst all 28 member states, 7 per cent of all crime is committed by 240 Romanian gangs.’
UKIP Sells Seats, Candidacies & Office for Cash (It has also been claimed that publicly funded jobs have been the reward of sexual favours!), Often Undeclared – which may well explain the astonishingly low calliber and lack of gravitas of its MEPs and candidates, now and in the past.
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Hi,
that UKIP attracts front page news like this can not be passed off, even to the most gullible, as some sort of smear tactics – this is clearly and undeniably reliable journalism and carrying out their duty to inform the public. Were this the action of any other party responsible UKIPpers would be only too pleased to see such blatant corruption exposed.
I have never heard a spokesman for UKIP speak out in support of Labour for rewarding their donors with Peerages, nor for that matter has anyone officially spoken out against Peerages for services to the Tories as in the case of the liar and racist scoundrel Malcolm Pearson!
Ukip faces scandal over ‘cash for Euro seats’
Jane Collins made an interest-free loan of £10,000 to the regional party branch weeks after her selection Adam Gerrard/SWNS
Billy Kenber and Alexi Mostrous Last updated at 12:01AM, May 14 2014
Ukip faces a “cash-for-Euro-seats” scandal after forcing MEPs to donate large sums and threatening to bar those who refused from standing again, its former deputy leader says. Ex-Ukip insiders have also raised concerns that the party favoured wealthy MEP candidates before this month’s European elections.
Two leading candidates for the May 22 poll, and the partner of a third, donated or lent the party tens of thousands of pounds about the time they were selected for safe seats, according to an analysis of Electoral Commission records.
No new MEP candidates from the Labour or Conservative party have made declarable donations in the past four years. Three Liberal Democrat candidates who have donated large amounts have not been given winnable seats.
The revelations come amid further controversy for Ukip. Yesterday a British Asian former chairman of its youth wing resigned from the party, claiming that it “deliberately attracts the racist vote”, while Janice Atkinson, a prospective MEP, provoked derision by asking police to arrest protesters who called Ukip members “fascists”.
David Campbell-Bannerman, Ukip’s former deputy leader, left the party in 2011 after repeatedly warning Nigel Farage and other top officials about its “overt [link] between financial contributions and selection to a public elected office”. He said that it was “potentially very dangerous” and could be seen as being “cash for Euroseats”.
In his resignation letter, leaked to The Times by a former Ukip branch chairman, Mr Campbell-Bannerman raised concerns including that “Ukip MEPs will only be there in future to keep the party solvent or to pay lip service to the leader”.
Mr Campbell-Bannerman, now a Conservative MEP, accused Ukip of drawing up plans to field four MEP candidates simply so they could “pay all their salary to the party” without carrying out any work.
He wrote that his “urgent calls” for legal advice had gone unheeded and warned that “any future Ukip MEPs beyond 2014 will either be very rich or just sycophantic placemen/women of the leader”. Mr Campbell-Bannerman said yesterday that he stood by his comments.
All Ukip MEPs elected this month will have signed a “code of conduct” forcing them to donate 10 per cent of their salary, equivalent to about €10,000 (£8,000) a year, to the party. Any MEP not fulfilling this promise risks being “blackballed”, according to emails sent by Alan Bown, one of Ukip’s biggest donors.
Mr Campbell-Bannerman was primarily concerned with pressure applied to sitting MEPs. However, a number of new candidates likely to win seats at the European Parliament on May 22 have also given generously to the party.
Under European electoral rules, parties register a list of candidates in ranked order in each of the UK’s 12 regions.Voters choose a political party rather than an individual candidate and each party’s share of the vote then determines how many of their ranked candidates are elected in each region.
Jill Seymour, 56, a parish councillor in Shropshire, is ranked first on Ukip’s regional list for the West Midlands, making her almost certain to become an MEP. She and her husband Brian, 77, a manufacturing tycoon, paid the price of a “car” to host what was then Ukip’s biggest public meeting, a 900-person gathering, in Telford last September.
Ms Seymour was the highest-ranked candidate in the region in a preliminary list endorsed by Ukip’s selection committee and was voted in by the party membership as the top candidate two weeks after the Telford event. Ukip has not registered the donation, which it would have been required to do if it exceeded £7,500.
Jane Collins and Amjad Bashir, who are ranked first and second in Yorkshire and the Humber, made interest-free loans of £10,000 each to the regional party branch in November and December 2013, weeks after their selection. Mr Bashir also financed a Ukip event attended by more than 1,200 people in Gateshead last month. Staff said hiring the venue with sound and lighting equipment and crew for an evening event would cost £10,200.
Mr Bashir declined to say how much the event had cost but that he was “democratically elected on merit and am working hard as a part of a team to secure the best possible result for Ukip in the European elections”. Ms Collins did not comment.
Ms Seymour has not campaigned as fervently as some of her fellow prospective MEPs. She has only spoken at three Ukip-organised events in the West Midlands this year, while the second- and third-ranked candidates have each spoken at least a dozen times, according to the party’s website.
In seven local hustings organised between the West Midlands MEP candidates since April, Ukip was the only party not to field their top-ranked candidate on a single occasion.
Ms Seymour said she was unable to attend every hustings because she had been “inundated” with requests, adding that she was “all over the place, we’re out all the time”. “I can’t fit myself into every hustings,” she added.
A Ukip spokesman said the party believed there was “no point” in responding to detailed questions from this newspaper because “past experience has taught us that you will not fully or fairly record our responses”.
Three new Lib Dem candidates have donated to the party since mid-2010, although none of the donations came within a year either side of the party’s regional lists being announced in December 2012.
Rob Speht, a former councillor, gave donations valued at £3,300 in mid-2011 while Jo Hayes, a councillor in Colchester, gave £10,000 last December. Both are number two on their regional lists in areas where the Lib Dems may well miss out on winning a single seat.
A Lib Dem spokesman said the party does not “require either MEPs or candidates to donate to the party” and that donations “do not play a role in the selection or ranking of Liberal Democrat European election candidates”.
That UKIP’s selection processes for office in both elected office and employment was corrupt has long been known to those informed in the matter of dishonesty withing UKIP and its unarguably corrupt leadership. The problem has always been the willingness of the leadership clique and much of its claque to brazenly lie to the media, the legal authorities and others in a manner most redolent of sociopathy – in that it seems probable that they believed their lies were justified in their belief of the cause they claimed to represent.
To understand the style and extent of corruption one need only read of the lies and dishonesty of Douglas Denny in his capacity as a party returning officer yet willing to utterly corrupt any concepts of democracy to ensure his benefactor Nigel Farage was elected see CLICK HERE
That this was an institutionalised process is shown by the report of another returning officer for the party who enumerated corruption and outlined its extent CLICK HERE.
The indubitable and undeniable corruption that put UKIP MEPs and other officers in position is most clearly displayed by the intellectual pygmies and the institutionalised lack of gravitas of those holding office in the party; clear failings that are glibly passed off as some sort of merit in their not being competent politicians as they are not career politicians and be it the serial failure in The City, fired from his main job for his habitual drunkenness, or the shop sales assistant for BT, or even the Tory serial failure at elections David Bannerman, or even the inherited wealth and status of Stuart Agnew or William Legge, or the good fortune of making money from building society buy outs of estate agencies UKIP has not attracted and kept a single solitary MEP of any realistic competence or calliber.
The serial failures and indisputable self serving rascals and nere do wells who have ridden MEP tickets in UKIP are most plausibly understood to have gained office by bribery in one form or another, be that even pure sychophancy than was ever displayed in merit or democratic due process within the party.
That UKIP is unfit for office is hard to deny be that in its inability to either represent or even understand the processes required either to win a referendum to Leave-The-EU or to promote the benefits of Leaving where after 21 years they have achieved virtually nothing and have even failed plausibly to represent the huge upswing in opposition to membership of The EU amongst the public, diluting the message with their racist stance in supporting racism across The EU, as the undeniably do in offering support and encouragement and even direct financial succour to their CHOSEN colleagues in their Pan EU Political EFD Group, whilst having closely associated via their tawdry MEPs with such organisations as The Front National of France, The Lega Nord of Italy, The EDL and even the BNP.
That UKIP’s line is to lie to claim they are not racist, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary and the odious display of those of ‘different’ ethnicity as a clear display of tokenism has been as risible as the individual who in pretence of lack of overt prejudice states ‘some of my friends are black’ or ‘I have several gay friends’ when they base their association with black friends or homosexual chums on very febrile linkage – just as where Nigel Farage ensures a photo shoot is organised that can be captioned ‘We are not racist we have several non white candidates’!!
Yet it was Nigel Farage, UKIP’s founder Prof. Alan Skedd assures us to this day, stated Nigel Farage said:
“We will never get the nigger vote”
which of course has been frequently denied, yet seems all too likely to be true as this most litigious of politicians has never visibly taken action to gain redress on the statement and whose subsequent support for racism has been transparent.
I do not for a moment claim that all members of UKIP are racist but it is undeniable that its leadership and senior members aid and support racism and as shown by Sanya-Jeet Thandi racism is rife a’s leadership and the party policies incline to encourage racism see: CLICK HERE
I reiterate that I do not for a moment claim UKIP membership is largely racist but it is clear that racism is a very marked part of the makeup of UKIP as a party or ALL of its members would have spoken out in disgust at the support for xenophobes,over racism, Holocaust Denial, anti homosexuality and the like amongst their CHOSEN partners in the EU EFD Group and even closer to home the propensity to incite racial hatred of Gerard Batten based upon his superstitious beliefs in association with known racists and with his vile attack on honest decent followers of Islam, which inclines and is likely to incite racial hatred and animosity – little wonder he recently obtained notoriety with allegations of a brick being thrown at his house and braking a window!
Despite Gerard Batten’s undeniable lack of understanding of the basic tenets of justice and his willingness to abuse his position to seek to pervert the course of justice I would not put it past him to have invented the story of a brick being thrown at his house for personal publicity – he was after all only too willing to ‘use’ the police to make patently false allegations against me – which fortunately the South Wales Police dismissed despite the efforts of the less diligent and untrustworthy Metropolitan Police.
Am I saying that all of UKIP members are corrupt and racist, clearly not but just as with The Metropolitan Police there is a very clear sector who are corrupt and lack due diligence.
UKIP Discovers: When You Depend On Stunts Await A Falling Star! As their conference star Sanya-Jeet Thandi has proved.
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Hi,
as one Asian woman said when she quit UKIP:
“Ukip is exploiting the stupidity of ignorant anti-immigrant voters for electoral gain, While the party deliberately attracts the racist vote I refuse to be associated with them.”
Ukip’s ‘rising star’ is rising no more; she’s quit in disgust
Ukip ‘rising star’ says party is ‘exploiting the stupidity of ignorant anti-immigrant voters’
Back in November 2011, Ukip posted a video on YouTube in which Nigel Farage tried to knock on the head the notion that Ukip was a “whites only” party – propagated, he said, by The Independent and The Guardian – which was peopled by “very angry old men.” As evidence, he produced an 18-year-old named Sanya-Jeet Thandi, who had taken that autumn’s Ukip conference by storm. “A rising star of the party,” he called her.
As such, she was on Channel 4 only this month defending Ukip’s immigration policies, on the grounds that Ukip would give equal treatment to all would-be immigrants while the EU favours EU citizens.
But Sanya-Jeet Thandi is a rising star of Ukip no more. She has quit in disgust at the anti-immigrant campaign Ukip is now running. “Ukip is exploiting the stupidity of ignorant anti-immigrant voters for electoral gain,” she wrote. “While the party deliberately attracts the racist vote I refuse to be associated with them.”
Ukip’s garagistes
The events of the past couple of days have also raised questions about how much certain members of Ukip value free speech. Janice Atkinson, who chairs the party in the South-east, thinks protesters who shout “fascist” at Ukip members should be arrested. And an unidentified councillor:
sent for the police because he objected to a tweet posted by a Green blogger, Michael Abberton, lampooning Ukip policy.
Finally, the Camden New Journal recorded a Ukip candidate in West Hampstead, Magnus Neilsen:
reflecting that the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1888, which extended the vote to working-class men, may have been a mistake.
But there is a group of Ukip activists who value free expression – their own, if no one else’s. Protesting against the treatment of “hard-working, right-thinking, garage-owning Brits”, they have been busy in Cambridge decorating the doors of a row of garages with large black vinyl letters spelling out the words “Farage garage” – which they presumably pronounce so that the two words rhyme, though some of us make Farage rhyme with barrage and garage with carriage.
The letters were easily removed without damage to the doors, but when Cambridge News asked Ukip’s Cambridge branch chairman, Peter Burkinshaw, what he thought of this stunt, he replied: “I hate graffiti of all kinds. I think these messages should be illegal.” Spoken like a true Ukipper.
Ukip Abusing the Police & Justice system As Part Of Enforcement for their own gain, to suppress facts about Ukip, as a part of their Modus Operandi.
Published to web site 19-Jan-2015.
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Hi,
Yet another case of Ukip using the police in an effort to intimidate and threaten a member of the public for daring to publicise facts about Ukip.
I appreciate this article is somewhat dated but there is no statute of limitations on abuse of the police process for gain that I know of and this is far from an isolated incident!
Such abuse of the police and Justice by Ukip is in fact all too common, whether through the Courts as with Jasna Badzak and also Nikki Sinclaire, both harassed by the police and charged, based on questionable complaints made by Ukip.
Just as I was lied about by Mark Croucher, Clive page and Paul Nuttall, as shown when their efforts to abuse the Court procedures and Justice to extort over £100,000 from me, their case was dismissed and I was discharged with costs awarded in my favour – costs, that I might add, Ukip have been too dishonest and devious to honour, in a display of contempt for The British Courts and British Justice.
Gerard Batten also lied to the police in an effort to bankrupt me and after being questioned under caution for almost 3 hours, there again the case was thrown out, this time by the police who realised he was telling lies and trying to invent a case against me, having boasted to associates in Brussels that he was going to bankrupt me and silence me once and for all.
Gerard Batten’s actions against me would seem to be all too similar to his claims made regarding Jasna Badzak!
Just imagine what these United Kingdoms would be like were these corrupt charlatans to get any kind of power or authority at the upcoming General Election – it looks like the first casualty would be freedom of speech and the second casualty would be the indipendence of the police as a part of controlling the judicial process.
There are many other cases like the one below – as examples of Ukip’s modus operandi!
Green Party activist visited by police over Ukip tweet
Free speech under threat as comments were ordered to be removed
OUTRAGED Green Party peer Jenny Jones condemned yesterday a police visit to the home of an activist who used Twitter to expose Ukip’s racist policies as “bully boy tactics.”
Ms Jones is writing to Home Secretary Theresa May after police were sent to doorstep Green Party member Michael Abberton at his Cambridge home on behalf of a thin-skinned Ukip councillor.
Mr Abberton revealed that officers visited on Saturday in connection with a tongue-in-cheek graphic he had tweeted last week titled “10 reasons to vote for Ukip.”
The “reasons” — ranging from their pledges to scrap maternity leave and holidays to raising income tax for 88 per cent of the population — were supplemented with links to Ukip materials.
Officers asked Mr Abberton to remove the tweet and ordered him not to tweet about their visit.
The activist removed the tweet as a gesture of goodwill but unmasked the intimidation attempts on his blog, writing: “A complaint had been made but with no legal basis. Not a police matter. So why did they come to my home in the middle of a Saturday afternoon?
“Why would a political party, so close to an election, seek to stop people finding out what its policies are or its past voting record?
A Cambridgeshire police spokesman confirmed that a Ukip councillor had taken “exception” to the tweet and filed a complaint on Friday.
“Inquiries were made as to whether any offences had been committed under the Representation of the People Act but none were revealed and no further action was taken,” he said.
The spokesman said it was “certainly not the advice” of police not to tweet about such visits.
“This is not 1930s Germany,” he said.
But the Green’s peer Ms Jones was far from satisfied, telling the Morning Star that she intended to raise the matter with the Home Secretary.
Ms Jones said the officers’ decision to go doorknocking was “absolutely astonishing.
“It sounds horrific,” she said.
“It’s all about freedom of speech. As a politician I know there are terrible things people say about me and you just have to live with it.
“The police need to understand that there’s no role for this unless there’s actual abuse.”
And Green Party leader Natalie Bennett added: “This is a very disturbing occurrence.
“Just the sheer fact of the visit is deeply damaging to free speech and is going to intimidate a lot of people thinking about whether they really are free to speak their mind.”
Ukip Cambridgeshire group council leader Paul Bullen — a magistrate in Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire’s Family Proceedings Court — denied all knowledge of the affair, adding that he “could not see” his fellow Ukip councillors making such a complaint.
He repeatedly declined to say whether he would ask them whether they had been involved, stressing instead that he knew “absolutely nothing.”
“If I looked at every bit of mud-slinging against Ukip in the last three months, I’d spend my whole life on the internet,” he said.
Earlier this month the right-wing party’s would-be Stockport councillor Harry Perry was suspended over a series of tweets asserting that “Islam is evil” and Muslim children were the “devil’s kids,” that Pakistan should be “nuked” and that gay, lesbian and bisexual people were an “abomination before God.”
Ukip Enfield candidate William Henwood told British comedian Lenny Henry via Twitter in March to “emigrate to a black country” and compared Islam with “the Third Reich, strength through violence against the citizens.”
Ukip support placards in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire. Photograph: Julian Eales/Alamy
Police have asked a blogger to remove a tweet that fact-checked Ukip policies but did not break any laws after receiving a complaint from a Ukip councillor, prompting concern over attempts to stifle debate.
Michael Abberton was visited by two Cambridgeshire police officers on Saturday. He was told he had not committed any crimes and no action was taken against him, but he was asked to delete some of his tweets, particularly a tongue-in-cheek one on 10 reasons to vote for Ukip, such as scrapping paid maternity leave and raising income tax for the poorest 88% of Britons.
“The police explained that I hadn’t broken any law – there was no charge to answer and it really wasn’t a police matter.
“They asked me to ‘take it down’ but I said I couldn’t do that as it had already been retweeted and appropriated, copied, many times and I no longer had any control of it (I had to explain to one of the officers what Twitter was and how it worked). They said that they couldn’t force me to take it down anyway.”
However, to show goodwill Abberton removed all instances of the offending tweet.
A Cambridgeshire police spokesman said: “A Ukip councillor came across a tweet which he took exception to. The name of the person on the tweet was identified and that individual was spoken to. We looked at this for offences and there was nothing we could actually identify that required police intervention. Clearly, the councillor was unhappy about the tweets. If every political person was unhappy about what somebody else said about their views, we would have no politics.”
As for being told not to tweet about the visit, the spokesman added: “I don’t know if he’d have been told that. It’s certainly not the advice I would have given him. A gentleman has a right to free speech – absolute total right to free speech – we can’t tell people what they can and can’t say on the internet, as long as it’s within the law. We certainly don’t go to people’s houses and say: ‘You can’t tweet about this’. This is not 1930s Germany.”
On his blog, Abberton made it clear that the two police officers were extremely professional and polite, but he did wonder why they had visited him at all.
“It wasn’t until after they left that I questioned why they had visited me in the first place. A complaint had been made but with no legal basis. Not a police matter. So why did they come to my home in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? Also, seeing as my profile doesn’t have my location – how did they know my address, or even the town I live in? … Why would a political party, so close to an election, seek to stop people finding out what their policies are or their past voting record? And is it not a matter for concern that a political party would seek to silence dissent and debate in such a manner?”
Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, who was contacted by Abberton, said he was awaiting a detailed response from the police.
“It seems astonishing for the police to get involved, there was nothing abusive or threatening in the tweets so I do want to know why they acted, and I want to know why the police told Abberton not to tweet about the visit.”
Huppert said he was pleased that Ukip’s policies were coming under scrutiny.
Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green party, said: “This police action is both disturbing and surprising. That an apparently general complaint from a political party about not liking what was said about them could have led to a police visit that many would find intimidating is an extremely serious incident that demands immediate investigation. Free speech is a precious right that we must defend.”
Bennett said the party’s only member in the House of Lords, Jenny Jones, would write to Theresa May, the home secretary, to ask her to investigate.
“What a waste of police time, energy and resources,” Jones said. “Their job is to investigate crime and catch criminals, not restrict free speech.”
I’ve written about different things and different people, but surprisingly for a blog (which, let’s face it, is pretty much the archetype of vanity publishing) I’ve never written anything about me.
Until now.
Yesterday afternoon as I was debating whether to continue watching some lame James Caan movie about midget submarines, I was disturbed by a police officer peering through my lounge window. I do live on the ground floor, so not as surprising as you may have imagined. I went to the door and there were two constables there. The first thing they said was that there was nothing to be worried about, they just wanted to come in for a chat. Not something that has ever happened to me before, but I showed them in and sat them on the sofa.
They wondered if I was the Michael Abberton on Twitter and I said yes. Then they said this was in relation to a complaint that had been made by a certain political party in relation to tweets I had published about them and one tweet in particular which talked about ten reasons to vote for them. The PC wanted to know if I had made that poster. I explained that I hadn’t but it had been doing the rounds on Twitter for a while, and so I had decided to see if these claims could be verified.
In doing this I set myself strict rules – nothing second hand, nothing from a newspaper, everything from an official party source as much as possible. Some I could find no basis for, and I highlighted these in bold. The only thing I quoted which did not come from an official party source was the parliamentary voting record. I explained all this to the police in some detail – also that on several occasions I had simply sent people the link to the official party manifesto.
The police explained that I hadn’t broken any law – there was no charge to answer and it really wasn’t a police matter.
They asked me to ‘take it down’ but I said I couldn’t do that as it had already been retweeted and appropriated, copied, many times and I no longer had any control of it (I had to explain to one of the officers what Twitter was and how it worked). They said that they couldn’t force me to take it down anyway.
I asked if I could tweet about the visit. The straight answer was ‘no’, as this might appear prejudicial in light of the upcoming election and the police must appear to remain neutral. But they couldn’t stop me from doing so, as I had Freedom of Speech. Incredulously, I said, “…but you must realise how this looks!” One shrugged, the other looked embarrassed.
As they were getting up to leave I asked for clarification – was this in relation to possible copyright infringement – and they were very clear on that point. It wasn’t, and they didn’t see how it could be. And even if it were, again it would not be a police but a civil matter.
I’d like to be absolutely clear – the police officers were extremely professional and polite and I couldn’t fault their behaviour in any way. But it wasn’t until after they left that I questioned why they had visited me in the first place. A complaint had been made but with no legal basis. Not a police matter. So why did they come to my home in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? Also, seeing as my profile doesn’t have my location – how did they know my address, or even the town I live in?
About fifteen minutes after they left I received a threatening tweet from a party member I had had an exchange with earlier in the day. Though appearing to be no more than a party supporter, he seemed to know that the police had been involved. I copied the tweet and sent it to the police.
I contacted some people I’d had exchanges with involving this party. One of them put me in touch with a solicitor and a journalist and advised that I contact my MP, which I’ve done. And whilst acknowledging the fact that the police had no right to censure my posts, in order to show goodwill I removed all instances of the poster where I’d sent it @someone, and have not tweeted about the visit or about that political party since.
Nevertheless, the story has gotten out and it seems people do feel (rightly) outraged by it.
If I had been abusive in any way, if I had been dishonest in any respect or if any of the sources had been fake rather than official party links, I could in some way understand it. But all I had done is promote the party policy using links to their own sources – no editorialising, no commenting. And in fairness highlighted those allegations I could find no evidence for. One of the sources was their current manifesto!
Why would a political party, so close to an election, seek to stop people finding out what their policies are or their past voting record? And is it not a matter for concern that a political party would seek to silence dissent and debate in such a manner?
You will note that a simple search on Twitter brings one to the following posting:
FOR THE RECORD – Kirsten’s affair with Nigel Farage – Daily Mail
Clarifications and corrections
PUBLISHED: 00:00, 12 May 2014 | UPDATED: 00:00, 12 May 2014
An article about Nigel Farage on 14 March and 22 April said he and his wife Kirsten began an affair before the UKIP leader’s first marriage ended. We are happy to clarify that they met only after the divorce was finalised and apologise for any distress caused. We have agreed to pay damages and costs to Kirsten Farage.”
If you wish to report an inaccuracy, please write to the Readers’ Editor, Daily Mail, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email corrections@ dailymail.co.uk
Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
Michael Abberton 
Ukip-vs-EUkip 
Posted: 21/05/2014 12:23 BST