Thoroughly Modern Mosley?

As part of my gentle exercise routine, I am doing a lot of walking at the moment. It is not a particularly interesting walk, so fear not, I shall not be describing the route in any detail, but I am seeing some very worrying posters: Ukip posters.

We need to be very clear about what Ukip is. Yes, it’s an anti-immigration part and yes, it’s an anti-European Union party but it’s much more than that. It’s this year’s party of the far right. How else could you describe a party that has the explicit support of Britain First, an openly far right group born from the ruins of the 57 varieties of British fascism? And why, apart from the car crash leadership of Nick Griffin, is the BNP such an electoral irrelevance at the moment? Simple: their place on the right of British politics has been filled by Nigel Farage.

Farage himself paints the illusory picture that he is there for everyman, standing up for the little man (never the woman, you may have noticed!) against the high and mighty establishment. But wait a minute. Our Nigel is the privately educated former merchant banker – hardly the voice of the man down the pub he purports to be. Like all parties of the right, Ukip trades on fear, fear of the foreigner, fear of the immigrant. Ukip pretends that the EU has taken away all our powers but never says which ones, whilst its MEPs trouser the generous expenses they get for not turning up to meetings in the European parliament. Farage calls for “controlled immigration” which is another way of saying no immigration. These foreigners are coming here, taking all our jobs, shagging all our women and claiming all our benefits. Pull up the bridge now.

I grew up during a time when Enoch Powell was speaking about “Rivers of blood” and the National Front was making huge inroads into our society. Whether Farage likes it or not, the National Front used exactly the same language as Ukip. Stop immigration, get out of Europe, spend more on the armed forces and, in case I forget, stop immigration.

Ukip doesn’t give us hope: it promises hopelessness. It promotes hate and distrust, it lies about immigrants and immigration, it is there to scare us.

It was David Cameron who once told us that Ukip was full of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. He retracted that remark some years later, realising perhaps that he was describing some of the electorate who should really be voting for him, but he was right. That’s exactly what they are, except that many of them do not require the preface “closet” before racists.

The political leader to whom I most liken Farage is Oswald Mosley who led the British Union of Fascists before World War Two. Farage likes to downplay the worst elements of his odious party but if you ask the man and woman in the street what Ukip stands for, you can bet the top answers will not be the the NHS and schools.

I have had the misfortune to meet some of these “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, including Ukippers and some of them are not the sort of people you would like to meet down a dark alleyway on the way back from a Ska gig. Farage is cute enough to sound almost reasonable to some people’s ears (not mine) but his fellow travellers are not so smart and time and time again they have been caught out and found out.

Ukip isn’t the BNP yet but I feel exactly the same about them now when I see their election posters as I did when the National Front marched in the 1970s and the dangers for our society are much the same, especially as so many of their senior figures and supporters are integral parts of the establishment they pretend to despise.