It's UKIP time

FEELING DIRTY - FOLLOWING THE SMELL OF KIPPERS

Anyone who's read some of my earlier posts will be aware that my political views would be described as left of centre. Certainly well to the left of New Labour. So it's no surprise that many of the people I follow on Twitter have similar opinions. We all want to hear things which reinforce our world view. But sometimes it's good to get to see the opposite side too, if only just to try and understand what motivates the people you often find yourself disagreeing with.

A few months ago, not long after the Sandy Hook murders, I spent several weeks following supporters of the NRA, who also tended to people on the side of the Tea Party Republican movement. And, so they seemed to think, on the side of their god. It was certainly an interesting experience, but there was never likely to be any meeting of minds. Their view of humanity was so disparate from mine as to be irreconcilable. And now I've spent some time 'with' their equivalents on this side of the pond. For the past three weeks I've been following about a dozen UKIP supporters, beginning the experiment just a few days before the recent local government elections. And now I'm here to report on what I found.

I have to give them credit for being very good at one thing. Very, very good. Hatred. They excel when it comes to hating things. And people. But mostly things, institutions, vague concepts. Being openly hateful towards actual people can look too much like actual bigotry. And UKIP doesn't do bigotry. Or racism. And all of us know this because they keep saying they don't. That's clear enough, isn't it?

We can start with the EU. Apparently it has never, never ever, done anything worthwhile and is to blame for, oh, about 90% of any set of problems you care to name. Day after day I've read tweets telling me that withdrawing from the EU is a cure for almost any ailment (albeit not the common cold, well not yet). Just one glance at my timeline as I type this shows me that Britain is either being destroyed by Europe (It does seem that most of us are mistaken and the British Isles are actually a separate continent. Well, apart from Paddyland of course.) Or we will come "to resemble an Eastern European Soviet Block". Did I hear you say you'd like some evidence to back up these assertions? You must be some kind of commie.

In less than three weeks one woman has thrice tweeted that there have already been two referendums on the EU - in 1914 and 1939. I sincerely hope she's a troll, or it's a sad indictment of our educational system. Maybe she could take night classes in history? The First World War was a conflict between the ruling imperial oligarchies of the major European powers, with little to choose between any of them for the way in which they chose to use their own peoples as cannon fodder. What happened in 1939 was a very different war, justifiably fought against an evil ideology which sought to wipe out, or subjugate, Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, and so on and on, indeed anyone not considered to be part of the 'Aryan' myth. Any self aware UKIP supporters reading this might find that list strikes a familiar chord.

Did you know that the EU is a Marxist conspiracy? And that it is "our hereditary foe"? (Honestly, I'm not making this up.) I've learned that too. Along with the fact that UKIP supporters don't have access to dictionaries and aren't aware that capitalism is enshrined into the EU constitution, even featuring in the list of basic human rights. These night classes could be kept busy.

What else comes into the UKIPers firing line? Immigration tends to be their second favourite topic, followed closely by Islam.  Not immigrants or Moslems of course, because that might not.... look good. Except there were plenty of tweets implying that paedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse was in some way linked to immigrants or Moslems, not as individuals but as groups. Not that UKIP supporters are in any way racist. Well maybe the odd one. Maybe some very odd ones. There couldn't be any truth to this article, could there?

Farage is constantly pointing out that his is the only party to explicitly ban previous members of the BNP and other extremist organisations.  Ah, the laddie doth protest too much, methinks. Maybe, just maybe, none of the UKIPers I've been following are racists themselves, but they do keep some interesting company. I have had several retweets into my timeline from people who are ardent EDL supporters including one suggesting that "Welfare is funding Islamic conquest of Europe".  Another was advocating all "white British males" to join the BNP, National Front, anything really because they had to "fight back". And then there was the charming young man who hankered for better days gone by and suggested that "benign imperialism" was best for the "backwards" countries. Oh, hang on, he actually is a UKIP supporter. They do get the loveliest people.

Then there's gay marriage. And the gay agenda (which sounds like a more fun meeting than most of the ones I used to have to go to). And gays. Homosexuals. And other terms. I saw one tweet describing somebody, possibly some Tory MPs, as "bending over backwards submissively like poofs". For the first time in decades I found the phrase 'shirt lifters' appearing before me, not just once, but three or four times. Reading this stuff I kept expecting a sniggering Reg Varney to stick his head round the door. (Younger readers might need to read this to understand that reference!) Of course UKIP isn't at all homophobic. No, of course not, it just happens to attract anti-gay bigots. Coincidence really.

The BBC. Full of lefties. Marxist agenda. Unpatriotic. Funny, feels to me like Farage and co have never been off our airwaves in the past few days, whilst that other smaller party in England never gets much of a mention, despite having almost as many councillors as UKIP and a Westminster MP. Plus two MSPs at Holyrood, something Farage can't even dream about. Yes the Greens don't seem to get much of a look in, do they? Leftie BBC? LOL.

Meanwhile Question Time seems to love it's frothing-at-the-mouth right wingers, inviting the likes of Starkey and Hitchins back again and again. Oh, and Farage. Even Griffin. Whilst I hardly ever see my views represented at all with only Owen Jones and Ken Loach making the odd appearance. Meanwhile the selling off of the most important institution in Britain, the NHS, has received scant coverage on the BBC who have pandered shamefully to this right wing government.

I get annoyed at the BBC for being so right wing, so 'establishment' at times. Meanwhile the extreme right regard it as a left wing hot bed. Which probably means that, on balance, they are doing a difficult job fairly well. I one would hate to lose them. Just try imagining a British version of Fox News (*shudder*).

One final special place is reserved on the hate list for a man I mentioned above, Owen Jones.  My UKIP 'friends' really do seem to want a place set aside in their vision of hell for him. So he must be doing something right. There's even a parody account in his name, which displays all the deft sense of humour and wit that Thatcher was so rightly famed for....

Oh, one more. The Scots. But only since last Thursday.  I felt so proud of my home city.

To be fair there are also things that they all seem to love. And that's where I really found myself entering into some kind of parallel existence. Let's call it Kipperland. It certainly smells fishy.

In Kipperland you can refer to Richard Littlejohn columns as 'evidence', presumably whilst managing to keep a straight face. 'Mad Mel' Phillips is taken seriously and an endorsement from that crumbling Neanderthal, Norman Tebbit, is not seen as embarrassing. Those well known symbols of liberalism and journalistic integrity, the Daily Fail and the Express, feature prominently as reliable sources for stories on their favourite topics. And there was some serious courting of well known 'celebrity' MP, Nadine Dorries, because she's such a heavyweight political figure. (Mind you, they already have the infamously corrupt liar Neil Hamilton on their list of parliamentary candidates, so they aren't too choosy.) Truly another world.

And yet. Once I look beyond the bigotry and rampant paranoia what I see is something very familiar. UKIP and their supporters make much of how different they are from the three main English parties that they disparagingly refer to as the LibLabCons. But what came through was that behind the extremist rhetoric, and some of the loonier policies they propose, they look depressingly similar.

But that's for my next post.