The racist vote
How sad it is that the racist vote continues to rear it’s ugly head. Canvassing has become a pretty full time occupation lately, but for the most part I am enjoying it. But every now and then (and twice on Saturday):
ME: ‘Hello, I’m Steve Guy, one of your Liberal Democrat cand…’
VOTER: ‘…and you can f*** off, because your lot won’t send the f***ing immigrants back!’
ME: ‘Err, no - thank you’. Walks off slightly depressed and ticks ‘ANTI’ column on canvass card.
One of the most commented upon threads in this blog is this one criticising the BNP. Most of the comments are full of spelling mistakes and look like they should have been written in green crayon - but just how many of these nutters are there?
Of course, we don’t expect anything else from the BNP. Despite the attempts to disguise themselves as a bona fide party concerned with Britishness and patriotism, most of us here know the kind of nasty people at the heart of the organisation and their true agenda. But something else I saw recently worried me more. A voter handed me a UKIP leaflet, with a banner headline which screamed ‘500,000 Immigrants’. The leaflet then went on at great pains to point out that UKIP were ‘not a racist party’. But the headline is clearly designed to appeal to the green crayon wielding brigade.
My message to UKIP is simply this, to claim not to be a racist party whilst clearly courting the racist vote in such an obvious way is just rank hypocrisy.
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May 1st, 2007 at 6:12 pm
I think that there’s a small number of BNP supporters who trawl the internet looking for comments on the BNP. I’ve even had someone trying to claim that the BNP are liberal after a post on my blog (most bizarre…)
As for UKIP. They’re odd. They’re liberal/libertarian in some ways, but then pull out reactionary rubbish like their xenophobia. Its a bit like Thatcher really (looking back on her reign, I wasn’t aware of much around then) some sound liberal thinking with nationalism and jingoism attached.