Is UKIP a racist party? These 15 comments would suggest so

Left Foot Forward

Nigel Farage insists that UKIP is not a racist party. So why does it attract so many racists?

 

After one of his councillors was filmed saying she had a ‘problem with people with negroid features’, UKIP leader Nigel Farage stated today that:

 “I haven’t seen the film but she is alleged, and she confirmed to us, that she had made a series of racist comments that is at odds with what we stand for.”

Rozanne Duncan may have been expelled from the UKIP, but scandals like this are no longer an exception to the party rule. Here are 15 other times that ‘racist comments’ have come from the heart of UKIP:

1. Last May UKIP member Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected to Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, wrote the following post:

 “islam is a cancer that needs eradicating multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camals that’s their way of life.”

2. UKIP was forced to sack newly elected councillor Dave Small after just six days, when Facebook posts from 2012 surfaced, including this:

 “I visiting the city of Birmingham recently and felt like a foreigner in the city of my birth, all around me I could hear the sound of jabbering in an alien voice … we also have the Pakistani’ and the Somali’s. Tell me Mr Cameron Why? the men wear their Pyjamas.”

3. In 2013 UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom famously said that the UK should stop providing aid to ‘bongo bongo Land’, and that the aid was being used to buy designer sunglasses and Parisian apartments. He may have toned down the language, but this Tweet from 15 February shows that Bloom hasn’t changed:

4. Last year UKIP was forced to distance itself from local council candidate James Elgar after the discovery of tweets like this:

#ThingsAsianBoysDo groom and rape underage white girls, stab and rob innocent old white people, bomb innocent white people #EctEctEct [sic]” 

Elgar’s father insisted that his son ‘came home at 10.30 pm with a curry’ the day the story broke.

5. Last April UKIP suspended Andre Lampitt, the star of its European Election TV campaign, after he tweeted:

“Most Nigerians are generally bad people… I  grew up in Africa and dare anyone to prove me wrong.”

6. After comedian Lenny Henry said there should be more black and ethnic minority people in creative industries, candidate William Henwood said that Henry should move to a ‘black country’.

7. Joseph Quirk, former UKIP candidate for Boldon Colliery Ward on South Tyneside Council has shared anti-Semitic material claiming that Jewish Bankers financed Hitler, Soviet Communism and 9/11. There’s also this from November:

“Well, I reckon dogs are more intelligent, better company and certainly better behaved than most Muslims.”

8. Gerard Batten, UKIP’s chief whip and immigration spokesman, believes that all UK Muslims should sign up to a special code of conduct, and wants mosque building to be banned.

9. Camden UKIP chairman Magnus Nielsen made headlines after describing Islam as ‘organised crime’. Now standing for Hampstead and Kilburn, Nielsen says that his ‘great aim’ is to licence mosques. Asked if he would prescribe the same for Jewish and Christian places of worship, he said that this would not be necessary.

10. Former Offerton councillor Harry Perry’s Twitter feed is astonishing. As well as prolific sharing of material about the ‘sin of feminism’ and the ‘disease’ of homosexuality, Perry is obsessed with the idea of ‘white genocide’:

and has a rabid hatred of Islam:

11. Plymouth UKIP candidate Ron Northcott believes that premier league football teams should be limited to two foreign players. His Twitter account is a treasure trove of bizzare anti-Scottish (‘jock’) bile and calls to reclaim the country.

12. After the death of Nelson Mandela, West London UKIP member David William Griffiths wrote in the members-only forum that some people were ‘intended by nature’ to be slaves. Meanwhile Pamela Preedy, secretary of UKIP’s Redcar branch, questioned why Mandela’s death had received so much coverage since he ‘had nothing to do with Britain’.

13. Newport East candidate Donald Grewar was forced to resign last month after he apparently backed a post by the EDL, calling for ‘no surrender to militant Islam or political correctness’.

14. Diane James is UKIP MEP for the South East of England and has said that Romanians are naturally associated with crime:

“On 1 January 2014 the floodgates will open for Bulgarian and Romanian citizens [to come to Britain].

“We are not just talking about pressure on services from immigration but also, and I have to say it, the crime associated with Romanians.”

15. In 2013, the then Stourport-on-Severn councillor Eric Kitson was questioned by police after he shared anti-Muslim cartoons on Facebook. In one particularly memorable post he said of Muslim women: ‘Hang um all first then ask questions later.’

Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter

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293 Responses to “Is UKIP a racist party? These 15 comments would suggest so”

  1. Anthony

    That’s a distinction without a difference.

  2. Kel

    That would be nationalist not racist, if you’re not sure read a dictionary to clarify the terms

  3. Kel

    How so?

  4. Beth

    Well, for some, faith (religion) is as an important part of their identity as race.
    You do not clarify what faith you refer to when you say “If a faith encourages the death of its opponents”, but I will take a wild guess that it’s Islam. And if you think that Islam somehow validates death of opponents then I implore you to do some research and not the kind you can find in the newspapers, far right forums or from the mouths of ignorant xenophobes.
    It’s impossible for me to ever understand how one can ever generalise a population of over 1.6 billion people by the actions of a handful (comparatively speaking).
    Having said that, hatreds manifesting on race and/or religion make perfect sense. It is born out of ignorance, fear and a need to simplify the complexities of the individuals, cultures and history. We are lazy, we are self serving and it takes very little energy to hate then to try to understand one another.

  5. Anthony

    It is as immoral to judge people negatively and treat them badly based on their race as it is based on their religion.

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