Uncovering the conspiracy against UKIP?

What’s a conspiracy? The dictionary defines it as, among other things, ‘an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act’ or ‘a joining or acting together, as if by sinister design’. Let’s take it then as being the joining together by groups and people to accomplish something rather unpleasant. The ‘something rather unpleasant’ is the continued effort to rubbish UKIP. The groups and people who are apparently working together to achieve remains to be considered.

In recent years the attacks on UKIP have come first of all from the Conservative Party. In 2006 David Cameron said..

UKIP is sort of a bunch of … fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.A few years earlier Michael Howard had said that UKIP were cranks and political gadflies, while an internal Conservative Party document had tried to spread the idea that ..

The United Kingdom Independence Party claims to be a home for Eurosceptics but in reality it is full of cranks and political gadflies… Worryingly some UKIP members have even had links with the Far Right. A UKIP vote is not just a wasted vote: it is a dangerous vote for useless representatives who will do next to nothing for their constituents.

So there is a long history of the Conservative Party not bothering to address the arguments that UKIP might present, choosing instead to develop the idea that UKIP members and representatives are just not the sort of people you would want to introduce in polite company or take home to visit your mother. Even in 2012 Cameron was still saying that ‘not all’ UKIP members were racists. Hardly an improvement in his position.

The issue is not whether Cameron and the Conservative Party are wilfully and maliciously conspiring to promote a false description of UKIP. They most certainly have done so and continue to do so. There are almost certainly meetings which take place of senior Conservative politicians and officials in which it is decided that UKIP will be misrepresented. To some extent this is just the unpleasant face of modern British politics. What is much worse is the effect that this misrepresentation has on ordinary people when other agencies are given the permission to treat UKIP members and supporters as if the accusations made by political opponents were the truth.

In 2012 Rotherham Borough Council removed two children from experienced foster parents because it was considered that their support for UKIP made them unsuitable to care for vulnerable children. The council had recieved an ‘anonymous tip-off’. How convenient. Why were the children removed? The social worker who came to take the children away made it clear, ‘Well, Ukip have got racist policies’.

David Cameron has recently tended to row back on the unsubstantiated claims he has made about UKIP, not least because they have overtaken the Liberal Democrats as the third party in most polls, and so many ex-Conservatives are now supporting UKIP and do not take well to being called racists. But this hasn’t silenced other Conservative ministers, and it is reasonable to conclude that the expressions used by Conservative ministers will be planned and co-ordinated. This year he has said that UKIP is made up of fruitcakes, loonies, waifs and strays, continuing the same meme. Indeed he was sure that some of those Conservatives who had told him that they were now going to vote UKIP fitted exactly into those categories.

In criticising UKIP’s stance on the expected numbers of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants in 2014 he added..

The idea that hordes of benefit-claiming Bulgarians are heading to the United Kingdom is the sort of daft issue which Ukip, parties like Ukip, raise, and until we actually get to the stage where people discover that their neighbourhood isn’t suddenly full of Romanians, obviously they will continue to exploit it….But the trouble with Ukip, really, is it’s just a protest party – it’s against the political parties, the political classes; it’s against foreigners, it’s against immigrants, but it doesn’t have any positive policies. They don’t know what they’re for.

There is a deliberate drip, drip of such language from the Conservative Party. UKIP are loonies, clowns and racists, while there concerns are daft, and their attitudes are xenophobic and incoherent. The Guardian describes the recent Conservative response to Ukip as being to ‘brief behind the scenes on the extremist views of some of its 1,700 candidates in the county council elections, but not to give it the oxygen of direct publicity or insult those supporting Nigel Farage’s party’. But Ken Clarke just can’t help himself, or is allowed off the leash to say what the Conservative Party really wants to say but now hesitates to do so.

During the run up to the local elections the Conservative Party machinery and elements of the media seemed to go into overdrive in what appeared to be a co-ordinated response to UKIP. Of course it was reasonable that those UKIP candidates who had especially inappropriate views should be called to account, but there seemed to be no effort to maintain proportionate and even-handed reporting. I can’t recall any unpleasant Labour, Liberal Democrat or Conservative councillors being splashed across the pages of the newspapers.

But the Observer ran stories using leaked emails, and the Sunday Mirror tried to suggest that Nigel Farage had a great problem with racists in UKIP. A UKIP party spokesman said..

We have evidence that Conservative Campaign Head Quarters has been scrutinising each and every one of our 1,732 candidates, monitoring every social media output over the last few years.

What has been happening most recently? Well the Mirror has tried to suggest that UKIP are the laziest party in Europe. No-one who knows the incredible workload that Nigel Farage puts himself through could present his voting record as an indication of lack of effort. Clearly the Mirror is not a newspaper, it doesn’t report the news, rather it is an agent of a particular political and social agenda.

And at just the same time the extremist left-wing organisation, Unite Against Fascists, has decided that UKIP are just such a fascist party which they should oppose and disrupt. At a public meeting in Hove members of UAF attempted to disrupt the event and prevent Nigel Farage from presenting UKIP’s policy programme. The incident led to Farage noting that in the course of 1000 public meetings he had never experienced such an attempt to silence the expression of free speech.

But we should expect more of such anti-democratic efforts. This is only the beginning for anti-UKIP activities. At the annual conference of the extremist UAF, Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott spoke about racism and those promoting anti-immigration policies in the UK. Diane Abbott spoke of her concerns about the rise in support for UKIP. She said..

I am very fearful that mainstream parties will take the wrong lessons from the rise of Ukip. I am worried for my own party, the Labour party, will take the wrong lessons. For every party that considers itself progressive, moving to the right on immigration, at the current time is just a spiral downwards.

One of the UAF’s leaders, Glyn Ford, said..

Ukip are not a fascist party, but they are xenophobic, ultra-nationalistic, many of their members are racists, and they act, in my view as a recruiting ground for people who may later on veer even further to the right.

And the Socialist Worker’s leader of the UAF, Weyman Bennett said that Ukip leaflets he had seen during the recent Eastleigh by-election had often been “worse than the BNP”. Let’s remember that David Cameron is a signatory of the UAF founding statement together with many extremist Labour MPs and Union leaders.

There seem to be three things going on here. In the first place the Conservative Party is continuing to attempt to present UKIP in one way or another as nutcases and racists. If it says it enough times it is expected that people will believe it. There is a determined programme of trawling through the social media of candiates and councillors over many years to try and present every personal opinion as party policy.

Secondly there is an increasing media determination to place UKIP at a disadvantage compared to the other main parties in the UK on TV and in print and web media. There will be more stories such as that run in the Mirror about the laziness of UKIP, and there will be an increasing co-ordination between various political misrepresentations of UKIP, and campaigns in the media.

And finally we will see an increased activity of extremist left-wing organisations such as the UAF and Hope Not Hate, who have decided that with the collapse of the left-wing BNP it is now necessary to target UKIP for various violent and disruptive actions.

There certainly seem to be three conspiracies at work. Somewhere in Conservative Central there are groups conspiring to prevent UKIP from presenting its policies and agenda in accordance with the tradition of political free speech in the UK. In various national media offices there are similar decisions being made. The Mirror knows that UKIP is not lazy. The decision to present Farage and his colleagues in such a way is a conspiracy, in the sense of a joining together by people to accomplish something rather unpleasant. And what the media is doing is certainly unpleasant and undermines democracy.

But the greatest threat to UKIPs ordinary activities lies in the increasing interest of extremist left-wing groups in silencing the voice of what is now the third most popular party in the UK. If it becomes more difficult for UKIP to organise public meetings, and if they are targetted by the UAF and other Socialist Worker Party front organisations then the polite, elderly, family members and supporters of UKIP will find themselves physically threatened and democracy on the ground will suffer.

There is a conspiracy against UKIP, but it is a conspiracy against democracy itself. A conspiracy to prevent the truth being reported. A conspiracy to misrepresent what others are proposing. A conspiracy to offer violence towards the representatives and supporters of mainstream political parties. As with all consipracies we must bring those who conspire into the glare of public notice. Only then will we be able to demand of our politicians that they do not insult us, of our media that it does not lie to us, and of the police that they protect our freedoms to speak and to hear the proposals of any legal political party.