euro elections 3: ukip

Not to be outdone by the BNP's election leaflets using a Spitfire in flight, UKIP's publicity material has a big picture of Churchill.



UKIP, despite the past racist activism of their members, do try to draw the line between themselves and actual racism. They are, they say, just there to stop national power being ceded to Europe. And who says that better than Winston Churchill, a man who spoke so eloquently of a cure for Europe's ills which

would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is to-day.

What is this sovereign remedy? It is to re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe.

Ah. But surely we've gone too far now. I mean, all that Human Rights Act claptrap. Churchill would never have saddled us with that. Which rotter signed us into that European Convention on Human Rights then?

(It was the bloke who was prime minister in the early 50s. Big cigar, you know the one.)

On the back of the UKIP leaflet they declare that

UKIP candidates are real people, not career politicians

And, as if to fit with the wackiness of a party that lists Patrick Moore and Joan Collins among its figureheads, they tell us about their candidates backgrounds.



Now I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with being a licensed hypnotherapist or former England under-21 international chess player who got a degree in mathematics at 19, but why are these things listed as qualifications for office?

Surely they want to demonstrate either political acumen and nouse, or else to show they're 'of the people'. Yet given just two or three points to make about themselves the Ukippers gallop towards the stranger end of their biographies.

Still, when your party has figureheads like Patrick Moore and Roy Wood glaring down, the relative scale of eccentricity must be hard to gauge.

Stare at them for thirty seconds and tell me you don't feel really weird.



UKIP Euro-candidate David Campbell-Bannerman cites Patrick Moore's knowledge as an astronomer (or 'astrologer' as he calls it) to lend credibility to his belief that climate change is not caused by humans. He adds that the polar ice caps may be melting on earth, but they're also melting on Venus. The only problem is that, being a lot closer to the sun, it is hundreds of degrees too hot for there to ever be any ice caps on Venus.

Coming from a party who think Sarah Palin should be the next president of the USA we can't be too surprised. But, as with Palin last year, candidates who are prepared to take a contrarian stance on the most urgent problem facing humanity and are only able to defend it with made-up stuff that can be disproven with a seven year old's scientific knowledge don't inspire confidence.

Dammit though, if I'm going to condemn future generations to the impacts of catastrophic climate change, I want it to be from a position of British profligacy rather than have our carbon be subsumed into some Euro-emissions.

If I'm going to be fucked over by a greedy capitalist elite it's vital that the puppets they install to ease their path round here are born in the same country as me. I'm voting UKIP.