Is the United Kingdom Independence Party racist?



Leftist Dan Hodges says below that it is.  Hodges is an unusually rational Leftist but his nuances fail him when dealing with a dynamic new British conservative political party.  Because its prime focus is getting the UK out of the European union, people suspect that UKIP has broader nationalist beliefs, beliefs of a Fascist sort.  In fact it is the opposite.  It wants to REDUCE government, not increase it.  It has a largely libertarian inspiration.

It does however attract a number of supporters for non-libertarian reasons -- in particular its opposition to Britain's flood of immigrants  of various stripes.   And in Britain, being anti-immigrant gets you called "racist" by Leftists every time.  In the USA, it is perfectly mainstream politics for conservatives to be outspokenly critical of illegal immigration.  Not so in Britain.  So Hodges is right that by  Leftist standards UKIP is racist.  But the objective truth is that UKIP has NO racist policies and rejects racism. 

References below to the BNP refer to a now largely defunct party that was solely anti-immigration but which was always portrayed by the Left as Fascist.

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.

The British National Party are finished. They are kaput. Or, as I’m sure their followers would prefer, “Kaputt”.

Griffin’s remaining tenure as an MEP can now be counted in weeks. There will be no tearful celebrations from burly men in black bomber jackets when the Euro election results are read out in Manchester town hall. On 22 May the BNP will cease to exist politically.

At which point Ukip will become de facto standard bearers for the extreme Right. Indeed, Farage has openly expressed his pride that the BNP’s former supporters are making Ukip their new home. In his now notorious interview with GQ magazine, Ukip’s leader took a break from expressing his admiration for Vladimir Putin to explain

“What we did is starting with Oldham by-election in the North of England is for the first time ever try and deal with the BNP question by going out and saying to the BNP voters: ‘if you are voting BNP because you are frustrated, upset, with the change in your community, but you are holding your nose because you don’t agree with their racist agenda, then come and vote for us. And I would think that we have taken a third of the BNP vote from them, and I don’t think that anyone has done more to damage the BNP than Ukip and I am quite proud of that”.

SOURCE

The fact is that many Labour party voters are dissatisfied with the disruption to their communities caused by massive immigration and UKIP has taken a lot of voters off the Labour party for that reason.