08/12/2013
As an indication of the hazards facing Britain's alternative party, the
Mail on Sunday dedicates its front page today to an exposé of UKIP councillor Victoria Ayling saying of immigrants: "I just want to send the lot back".
The comment comes in an aside between "takes" for a self-promotional film, where she has just said: "We must control immigration. We cannot sustain the numbers coming in; the strains on our infrastructure are enormous. Control should be done fairly and the points system like they have in Australia and all those coming here should be encouraged to speak English so they can integrate".
Only then does she add, in a remark clearly not intended for use: "I just want to send the lot back but I can't say that".
Ironically, Ayling made the video in 2008 â five years ago - to promote her bid to become a
Tory MEP. And, according to the
Mail, it was provided to them by her then husband â from whom she has since split. It was he who had been operating the camera.
Ayling has declined to apologise for the comment, saying she was only referring to illegal immigrants. And Nigel Farage has taken a fairly laid-back view, saying: "I had no reason to believe she held views that were extreme or inconsistent with ours. While this comment looks odd and unpleasant there may be a context here that is slightly different to the way it appears".
Irrespective of how this episode is finessed, though, Farage's problem is that Ayling's comment is indeed entirely consistent with the general thrust of UKIP's stance on immigration. No one watching UKIP closely can escape the view that that party's mood music is close to the BNP and there are many in the party who would support wholesale repatriation.
In the absence of any coherent policy, or sensible analysis, the party was already vulnerable to the charge of harbouring a racially-driven policy. And, after the overt support of the oaf Bloom from many members, there can be few doubts that the party is pitching to hoover up BNP refugees after the collapse of their party.
Therein, in my view, lies one of UKIP's more serious problems. It is not so much the unguarded comment of a single ex-Tory councillor that is doing such damage as is there to be done, but the indications that she does indeed represent the bulk of the party membership. Only if UKIP had been a serious player, offering sensible and well-founded analysis and policy, would it be harder for the charge to stick.
On the face of it, UKIP should be benefiting hugely from the immigration issue, and recently that
appeared to be the case, with an
Opinium poll giving the party 19 percent of the vote. But, over the
last three days the
YouGov tracker poll has given it ten, fourteen and then eleven points. It should be doing better.
But the fact that a five-year-old comment by a former Conservative supporter can be resurrected and used to damage UKIP tells its own story. And, if my analysis is anything like correct, the antidote is well-founded and imaginative policy, sensitively crafted so as to slay the racism dragon.
There, the difficulty is that of all the many issues needing to be addressed, immigration is one of the most complex, involving many different areas of public policy. Nothing we have seen in recent times (or at all) gives any sign that UKIP is capable of producing (much less delivering) worthwhile policy in this or related areas.
Unless UKIP decides to deal with policy at a higher level, my guess is that it will always be prone to attacks such as the
Mail has chosen to mount. And, since
this current attack is from a paper that is supposed to be (but isn't) "eurosceptic", the party has a bigger problem than it thinks.
