UKIP: Thanks For Nothing

We've noted before on this blog UKIP's increasingly toxic tendency to blame "everything on immigrants". Previously it was Farage's assertion that he was held up on the M4 motorway due to the fact that "open door immigration has meant that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be'".

That he was traveling by car early evening on a Friday around a notorious bottleneck on the M4 wasn't taken into consideration. Thus "bloody immigrants" was dog whistle politics writ large.

With this in mind it therefore comes as no surprise to see that Farage believes that immigrants are to blame for children not playing in the streets:

Britons are so ill at ease with levels of immigration in their towns that their children do not play football with their neighbours in the streets, Nigel Farage has said.

The UK Independence Party leader said people in eastern England felt a “deep level of discomfort” about the millions of immigrants who have settled in the UK in the past decade.

He said: “I want to live in a community where our kids play football in the streets of an evening and live in a society that is at ease with itself.

And I sense over the last decade or more we are not at ease"

It's not unfair in our view to believe that Nick Griffin would have been proud of these sentiments. That children may not, or cannot, play in the streets is often down to a myriad of factors, not least its illegal, it's unsafe and that many roads simply have too many cars - ironically Farage's children couldn't play outside his own house, in the street, for this reason alone.

In trying to remove ourselves from the EU however Farage's language is toxic. With what began as a eurosceptic party, has been hijacked by a man who has turned it into a self-promotional vehicle and is prepared as a consequence to condemn the eurosceptic movement in terms which hinder significantly the argument of getting out. So much so that we are set to lose before we even start.

With such language and thus with effectively a self-imposed glass ceiling on support, no wonder the media have begun to catch up with bloggers by noticing belatedly that UKIP's trend is on a downward trajectory.

With so-called 'UKIP strategy' we get a measure of the man when we see this:

“If we went to every town up eastern England and spoke to people about how they felt, their town, their city had changed in the last 15 years, there is a deep level of discomfort, because if you have immigration at these sorts of levels integration doesn’t happen.” 

Note the words "eastern England". It's an odd statement to make for a leader of a party named the United Kingdom Independence Party. What about Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales where immigration is not necessarily such a vote winner - immigration has an uneven effect across the country.

But within "eastern England" is the constituency of Thanet South; where Farage is standing to be elected as an MP. It's also next door to where UKIP held its Spring Conference in Margate which had no mobile signal nor internet access.

A professional party with workable facilities at its conference less important than Farage's own campaign it seems. So no policies, no strategy, no exit plan just dog-whistle soundbites to get Farage elected.

Perhaps in this sense it will work and this will please the cult, but in getting us out of the EU no chance.

What a waste of 20 odd years...