Douglas Murray: The smears against Farage and Ukip have reached spectacular depths

[-:Undertaker:-]

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/douglas...acular-depths/

The smears against Nigel Farage and Ukip have reached spectacular depths

Ukip leader Nigel Farage. Image: Getty

Inevitably the lowest attacks have been saved until the week of the election. For months now the neat drip-feeding of anti-UKIP stories from Conservative Campaign Headquarters direct to the UK press has done everything possible to depict UKIP as a racist, xenophobic, bigoted party.

This has been significantly ratcheted up ahead of Thursday’s vote. Today’s pages include the Times repeating a story from last year in the hope of successful guilt-by-association. The story is that Geert Wilders (the ‘Dutch Xenophobe’ as the Times headlines him) would like Nigel Farage to join him and Marine Le Pen in an anti-EU Brussels voting bloc. What neither the Times nor any other newspaper wishes to give Farage any credit for is that he refuses to join that bloc precisely because of the presence in it of a party like the Front Nationale. And yet the press continues to attempt to portray Farage as leading a British National Front.

The depths to which this has sunk are pretty spectacular. For instance it now appears that the British media are perfectly content with vilifying and taunting Farage for having a German wife, because they believe they are doing so in a ‘liberal’ cause. At some point in recent days it seems to have become accepted wisdom that if you are married to a German then you should believe in an utterly unrestricted open door immigration policy. It also appears that to distinguish between different types of immigrant (as Canada and Australia do, to give just two examples) is to be deemed irredeemably ‘racist’.

But the lowest attack of all is now in, and it is of course the story that this was always building towards. And so it has come to pass that the papers are now repeating another story, and finally saying openly what they have wanted to say all these weeks: that Nigel Farage once used the ‘n’-word. Such is the story in today’s Mail. The source is Alan Sked, who fell out with Farage two decades ago. Sked not only claims that Farage used the ‘n’-word but also wanted former National Front members to stand for UKIP.

About which there are many things to say, but let me confine myself to two.

Firstly – if Farage had wanted to run a party which allied itself with the far-right, racist attitudes of the National Front or BNP he could have done so years ago. As it is, former members of the BNP are forbidden from joining UKIP and in his earliest days in the party Farage waged a small war precisely to get rid of those who wanted to form any such alliance. But although they know that this happened, this is just one of the things that the UK media seem almost wholly unwilling to concede. Any party which campaigns for national sovereignty and limited immigration might be expected to attract some undesirable elements around the edges. In the same way that a party which campaigns for Green or left-wing issues might inevitably find itself attracting a certain number of people who take a positive attitude towards far-left wing dictatorships around the world.

But even worse than this is the continental myopia displayed in the British press. In every country across Europe there are parties doing well because they are opposed to the EU project. In the wake of the Euro-crisis, among many other things, it takes a degree of wilful ignorance to imagine this surprising or necessarily extreme. Yet the reaction certainly can take extreme forms. In Greece it manifests itself in the extreme left-wing politics of Syriza and the extreme right-wing politics of Golden Dawn. In Hungary there are the street militant thugs of Jobbik. Inside from them there is the Front Nationale in France, a party whose leader may have reformed some of the party’s views, but whose senior membership remain – as Farage himself has frequently pointed out – people who doubt the historical truth of the Holocaust. And so on and so on.

If the British press could display some independence of mind for even a moment, it might recognise that the success of UKIP is not some terrible stain on British political moderation but rather a triumphant demonstration of it. While the continent is busily throwing up some genuinely unpleasant far-left and far-right anti-EU parties, the only serious political manifestation of this political revolt in Britain is a generally pleasant, decent and broadly libertarian party. But this apparently will not do. Not just because most of the British media has weirdly decided to dance to the tune of UKIP’s political opponents, but because (thankfully for all of us) the media’s need for Nazis and racists in modern Britain vastly exceeds the very limited actual supply.

Fortunately, I suspect the public can see what most of the press cannot. Most people continue to realise that Nigel Farage is not Adolf Hitler, that some idiot council-candidate whose said something rude about gays does not presage some anti-gay pogrom, and that our country has serious challenges of sovereignty and border control to deal with, which the main parties have to date shown themselves utterly incapable of addressing. Every member of UKIP could reveal themselves to be not on-board with gay marriage and support the right to broadcast early recordings of ‘The Sun has got his hat on’ on regional radio, yet still the questions of why Britain is no longer in control of its own border policy or law-making would remain unanswered by the main political parties.

An excellent article by Douglas Murray, rather goes against the quote The Don posted that this is all in the imagination of Ukip and that somehow the media is merely being 'fair'. I don't think so.

I was wondering to myself over the weekend actually just how hysterical the establishment media would get in the final days before the European Elections and I was thinking to myself that it wouldn't surprise me if they really go and make themselves look stupid by trying to link Ukip to Nazism.... well sure enough, about twenty minutes ago I was on the Daily Mail and there's the most ridiculous article up trying to make a vague link between Ukip and the concentration camps of the 1940s.

My hope is, and I think I am right, that the British people will see how ridiculous this is.

Incidently, a YouGov poll just came out which puts Farage as the only leader with a plus rating. No wonder the establishment media and the cartel parties are getting scared, they're cosy 100-year old consensus is crumbling before their eyes.

Thoughts?

[The Don]

Do we really need another thread for this?

[-:Undertaker:-]

Do we really need another thread for this?

Maybe you'd like to respond to the further proof that Tory CCHQ have been feeding the press anti-Ukip smear stories rather than it being, as you posted earlier, some sort of figment of our imagination?

Or maybe you'd just like to take it from the chief Tory spin doctor, Lynton Crosby?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/p...cle3833822.ece

[The Don]

Maybe you'd like to respond to the further proof that Tory CCHQ have been feeding the press anti-Ukip smear stories rather than it being, as you posted earlier, some sort of figment of our imagination?

Or maybe you'd just like to take it from the chief Tory spin doctor, Lynton Crosby?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/p...cle3833822.ece

How does what you've posted prove that the media is targeting Ukip?

[Kardan]

And in the same YouGov survey, we have that 41% of people think UKIP is a racist party, compared to the 40% that said it isn't.

46% of people believe that UKIP are trying to get votes from racist people, compared to the 30% that think they are not.

[-:Undertaker:-]

How does what you've posted prove that the media is targeting Ukip?

Ah well if you don't want to can't see it then you're a hopeless cause.

Clearly you need to do some reading on how the media and politics works, then have a think about it.

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And in the same YouGov survey, we have that 41% of people think UKIP is a racist party, compared to the 40% that said it isn't.

SHOCK as 40% odd of public who don't like a party say X about a party.

That'd be as shocking as the NHS polls on the Tories where it says that X % odd say Tories can't be trusted on NHS.

[Kardan]

Also one poll I found interesting is the 'Who will you vote for in the EU elections?' counting people that are 100% certain to vote in the polls.

Lab: 37%
Con: 34%
UKIP: 13%
Lib Dem: 9%

So UKIP seem to be relying on a lot of people that aren't certain of voting.

[The Don]

Ah well if you don't want to can't see it then you're a hopeless cause.

Clearly you need to do some reading on how the media and politics works, then have a think about it.

- - - Updated - - -



SHOCK as 40% odd of public who don't like a party say X about a party.

That'd be as shocking as the NHS polls on the Tories where it says that X % odd say Tories can't be trusted on NHS.

So a majority think Ukip are racist... The tides are turning! The people are beginning to see through the Ukip facade.

[-:Undertaker:-]

Also one poll I found interesting is the 'Who will you vote for in the EU elections?' counting people that are 100% certain to vote in the polls.

Lab: 37%
Con: 34%
UKIP: 13%
Lib Dem: 9%

So UKIP seem to be relying on a lot of people that aren't certain of voting.

Where is this poll and whom by? Link?

The poll you are showing me sounds to me like a Westminster poll, not a European Election poll.

Ukip are ahead in ComRes and YouGov under 10/10 certainty to vote.

So a majority think Ukip are racist... The tides are turning! The people are beginning to see through the Ukip facade.

Dream on.

[Kardan]

Where is this poll and whom by? Link?

The poll you are showing me sounds to me like a Westminster poll, not a European Election poll.

Ukip are ahead in ComRes and YouGov under 10/10 certainty to vote.



Dream on.

It's on the same PDF document by YouGov that the data for your graph in the original post is from. But it probably is for the general election, it was 'Headline Voting Intention' which I assumed meant the EU elections, but clearly not.