Who is Running the UK – London or Brussels?

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and its leader Nigel Farage have got themselves in a spot of bother over the past few days over some WAYCIST campaign posters.

You see, UKIP is fielding candidates in next month’s elections for the European Parliament. Based on the latest polling results, Mr. Farage and his party can expect to do extremely well in those elections. The Powers That Be are alarmed at that possibility, and have reacted accordingly: Nigel Farage is a “racist”! I mean, anyone who thinks the job of Her Majesty’s government is to act in the interests of the British people must be a racist, mustn’t he?

The following “interview” of Nigel Farage from Sky News gives the flavor of the arguments being used against UKIP. In the background behind Mr. Farage you can see a billboard of the poster at the top of this post, which an army general has attacked as “disrespectful” of the flag.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Below is another UKIP campaign poster, which in my opinion isn’t racist enough:

To paint an accurate picture of Modern Multicultural Britain, the young woman on the bus should have been surrounded by Jamaicans and Bengalis and Pakistanis and women in hijab, not white people. The last time I was in London (two years ago) white people were well under 50% of the people I saw on the Tube. The buses were somewhat more white, but they were still very culturally enriched. I assume that most white people either take taxis or drive their own cars.

Our British correspondent JP — who sent the posters and the links for the articles excerpted below — includes this background note:

Paul Sykes is the businessman who funded UKIP’s poster campaign. According to comments left at Mr. Sykes’ Telegraph article, even posts at the Guardian denouncing the posters as racist have been met with disapproval by Guardian readers — some of whom appear to be coming over to the UKIP side.

It is all very encouraging and seems to catch a mood also taking root at Bundy Ranch as articulated by Mike Vanderboegh.

Excerpts from the article by Paul Sykes:

No More Surrendering to EU Bureaucrats

by Paul Sykes

An outright victory for Nigel Farage will be nothing less than a political earthquake

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks of a tide in the affairs of men that, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Miss the tide and only shallows and miseries lie in wait.

Next month’s European elections represent such a moment in the life of our nation. Overwhelming public support for Ukip — the only political party advocating immediate withdrawal from the European Union — could mean we catch a tide that will restore our proud tradition of national independence. But if we miss our chance, we will be swept ever further into the shoals and sandbanks of a Federal Europe.

[…]

I have spent a great deal of my own money trying to raise awareness of the ways in which the EU has eroded our national sovereignty, and attempting to win the British people a democratic vote on what has stealthily been done in their name these past two decades.

Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the area of immigration. The Single European Act, signed into UK law in 1986, guarantees the free movement of capital and labour across the borders of the 28 countries that now make up the EU. Disgracefully, this measure was adopted without a referendum of the British people.

 

It was a cruel and heartless act because competition from people from much poorer countries has forced down the wages of British workers — to the shame of Labour MPs and the trade union movement. It also means 485 million people have the right to move to Britain at any time they please. We may have a UK Border Force. But when it comes to the 27 other countries in the EU, we have no borders, and no force.

Many think that Britain’s boundaries start at the white cliffs of Dover. They do not. They start in places such as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria; they start wherever impoverished EU governments (Malta being the latest) offer to sell passports to the highest bidder, thereby granting people from all over the world the right to come and settle here.

David Cameron talks of reducing immigration to tens of thousands of people a year. But it is a pipe dream. The latest figures show gross immigration is running at 500,000 a year and net migration (deducting those leaving the country from those arriving) at more than 200,000 a year. This is an unsustainable state of affairs.

Which is why I have promised to do whatever it takes to help Ukip emerge as the winner in the European polls next month. I want to help Nigel Farage deliver what he calls a “political earthquake” on May 22. These European elections offer the chance to support a party — Ukip — that represents a complete break with the past, while the other parties, whatever their merits, remain content to work within the existing Brussels straitjacket.

The other parties cannot do anything about immigration or British workers being undercut by cheap foreign labour; they are vassals of the European Court of Justice and the closely related European Court of Human Rights, which stops us deporting foreign criminals and terrorists. The other parties are about to embrace new European controls over our policing and justice systems, they allow interference in our tax system, and they subcontract more and more of our foreign and defence policies to unelected EU bureaucrats.

True, Mr Cameron has promised an in/out referendum in 2017 if the Conservatives win the 2015 general election outright. But he renders that promise meaningless by insisting that he will recommend staying in irrespective of the outcome of his attempts to renegotiate the terms of membership.

In all but name, May 22 is a referendum on our membership of the EU, with a vote for Ukip being a vote for out. An overwhelming victory for the party will break the political mould in the UK, forcing Labour and the Lib Dems to back a full-scale referendum and intensifying the popular pressure for that to be staged much earlier than 2017. Such a result — combined with massive pressure from backbench MPs — would leave Cameron, Clegg and Miliband no choice but to pass a law setting a date for a referendum within a year.

Which is why I view Ukip’s new advertising campaign — which I am funding to the tune of £1.5 million — as more of an essential public awareness campaign. Yes, it is hard-hitting, in order to capture attention. But its real purpose is to show the British people just how many of their democratic rights and powers successive governments have quietly smuggled away to Brussels.

The time has come to take back control of our country and the right to govern ourselves. May 22 is our chance to catch a tide that can restore our freedoms and carry us forward to a glorious new chapter in our nation’s history.

For a sense of the arguments used by the other side — you WAYCIST! — consider this snip from a blog entry by Dan Hodges, also from The Telegraph:

UKIP is worse than the BNP: at least Nick Griffin has the courage of his racist convictions

As the row continues to swirl this morning around Ukip’s racist election posters it’s important to keep a few things in perspective. Nigel Farage is not Nick Griffin. Ukip are not the fascist foot soldiers of the BNP.

They’re worse…

And from Keighley, a culturally enriched town in West Yorkshire, comes this by-election news:

UKIP Candidate Voted Onto Keighley Town Council

A UK Independence Party candidate has won a by-election seat on Keighley Town Council. George Firth, 48, won the poll for the vacancy on Fell Lane and Westburn ward by a big margin, picking up 366 votes.

The sole rival candidate, Mohammed Ansar Ali, 35, gained 104 votes. The turnout in yesterday’s by-election was 14.6 per cent. The poll was held to fill a seat left vacant by the death of town councillor Brian Hudson, in January.

Mr Firth, of Whin Knoll Avenue, said: “I’m humbled by all the votes cast for me — I didn’t expect that amount of support. I’d like to offer my condolences to the family of Councillor Hudson. He did a lot of work for the area and I hope to be able to step into his shoes.”…

So the political situation in Britain is becoming very interesting indeed. Stay tuned: the EP elections on May 22 will be worth watching.