Steering a Bad Course.

The United Kingdom Independence Party appears to be little more than a bunch of clowns who make a habit of shooting themselves in the foot and campaign on one platform only: Xenophobia. Their sole aim when faced with the spectrum of political issues and complex interrelationships may be summarised as: Take Britain out of Europe and send all the foreigners back to where they came from. And yet they received the highest percentage of British votes in the recent elections to the European Parliament.

So what does that say about the British people? That we’re frightened of being swamped by a barbarous horde of uncouth strangers who will take the food from our mouths, steal our women, and reduce once-proud Albion to a backwater state with an international status roughly equivalent to Bhutan, I suppose. And maybe they have a point of sorts. Mr Farage certainly thinks so. He’s now crowing that UKIP is the third party in British politics, the LibDems being in an apparent tailspin and facing possible oblivion (which danger I predicted they would face if they entered a coalition with the Tories four years ago, which they did.) I doubt that UKIP’s success will be repeated on anything like the same scale in next year’s General Election, but what concerns me is this:

Mr F might be correct in forecasting that UKIP is becoming the third party. If he is, it means that British politics will lurch sharply to the right at a stroke, and I’m not the biggest fan of right wing politics. I would rather go the way of Bhutan than the way of America (with all due respect to certain American friends who I hold in high esteem.) And after four years of misguided rule by a bunch of toffee-nosed and out of touch ex-public schoolboys, I feel we should really be going in the opposite direction. Then again, I suppose we could always invade Poland.