What do Farage and his party have to say?
On Austerity: In an interview with London Loves Business (May 22nd), former banker and now UKIP MEP and economic spokesperson, Godfrey Bloom, said: ‘I’m advocating a 25% flat tax…. I spent 35 years in the City showing people how to invest money in trust funds and offshore funds in order to diminish – quite legitimately and legally – their tax’. On public spending, he is even blunter: he would cut Government spending on things like quangos from around £60B to no more than £10B and remains nonchalant about the mass redundanucies such cuts would create. ‘I hope hundreds, thousands of jobs will be lost’ he says.
On Homophobia: In December 2012 The Guardian reported Farage’s links with anti-gay, far-right European politicians amid claims he backed a populist Polish priest who describes homosexual men as “sodomites”. More recently, The Pink News reported Farage as saying he would not expel UKIP members for voicing “old-fashioned” views about homosexuality, including those who describe it as “disgusting”.
On Disability: UKIP’s 2010 manifesto included a call to move away from independent living and inclusive education, and for out-of-work disability benefits to be paid at the same rate as jobseeker’s allowance. UKIP initially backed (though later suspended) Geoffrey Clark, would be Kent counsellor who suggested that mothers carrying foetuses with Downs syndrome or spina bifida should be forced to have abortions to avoid the child being “a burden on the state as well as on the family” (The Guardian, 18 December, 2012). UKIP has recently appointed a disability spokesperson but has yet to reveal any policy changes.
On Women: In 2010 a trade union blog for Red Pepper magazine reported Farage tweeting “… Pregnant Workers Directive is bad news. Can we stop it? Unlikely.” and Bloom (see above) telling a female trade union leader who had written to him about the directive to “stick to giving advice on nappies and breastfeeding”. On 22nd May the Huffington Post carried the headline: UKIP Donor Demetri Marchessini: Bible says women wearing trousers is ‘an abomination’.
On Xenophobia and racism: According the Daily Mirror (18th May) Ukip’s leader on Lincolnshire Council and East Midlands Chair, wrote: “Have you noticed that if you rearrange the letters in ‘illegal immigrants’, and add just a few more letters, it spells, ‘Go home you free-loading, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, baby-making, non-English-speaking ********* and take those other hairy-faced, sandal-wearing, bomb-making, camel-riding, goat-********, raghead ******** with you.’” He also objected to foreign doctors working in the NHS writing: “We don’t want them taking all the jobs in the local community and we certainly don’t want them working in our hospitals!” The Mirror story also reported UKIP’s party Chair in Bury writing of Barack Obama: “I bet he’s a closet ‘Imam’ as well! “If I ever see him on a Greyhound bus wearing a rucksack, I’m getting off!!” During the council elections last month a Ukip candidate in East Sussex was suspended after reportedly posting anti-Semitic comments on a conspiracy theory website including a claim that the second world war was “engineered by the Zionist” (The Guardian 26th April). A UKIP candidate in Kent, referred to risk of tuberculosis after barriers to Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants are lifted next year on his blog “I would suggest not going to London after January 2014 unless you absolutely have to and if you do, adopt the Japanese practice of wearing a face mask,” (Daily Telegraph 26th April) and there are reports of BNP and EDL members joining UKIP. The chair of the Hillingdon UKIP branch boasted on his blog that he “joined my friends from March for England to tag along on the EDL Tower Hamlets demonstration”.
Let Farage and UKIP know where you stand – join the Stand Up to UKIP Protest at Hove Town Hall from 6pm Monday June 3rd
Supported by: Brighton, Hove & District Trades Union Council, Sussex Labour Representation Committee, PCS South East Region, PCS DWP East Sussex Branch, Brighton University UCU, Brighton Defend the NHS, Brighton Queers Against the Cuts, Brighton Love Music Hate Racism, Varndean College Against the Cuts, Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Brighton International Socialism Network, Brighton Socialist Resistance, Brighton SWP, Brighton UAF, West Sussex Coast UAF.
IF YOU WISH TO SUPPORT THIS PEACEFUL PROTEST PLEASE EMAIL brighton@uaf.org.uk
Brighton & Hove UAF 