UKIP Co-Organises “Freedom Award” For European Far Right

The “European Freedom Awards”, organised in conjunction with the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), indicates a deepening of existing ties between UKIP and the European far right.

Four hundred guests have been invited to the event, including what the SD has called “our friend parties in Europe” and “other parties like us”.

A prize for “increased national autonomy and democracy” will be awarded to former Czech President Vaclav Klaus. Klaus is known for his hostility towards homosexuality and for labelling migration “a method with which to dilute the current European countries.”

Also attending is Mischael Modrikamen, who has been described as Belgium’s Donald Trump, and former Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas, impeached in 2004 for suspected links to Russian organised crime. Nigel Farage will be representing UKIP at the event.

The most worrying group known to be attending are the event co-organisers the Sweden Democrats. The SD was founded by a former member of Hitler’s SS and had to ban members from wearing Nazi uniforms to its meetings in 1996.

Despite their extreme platform, UKIP and the SD have enjoyed a cosy relationship since UKIP invited the SD into the newly-formed European Parliament group “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy” (EFDD) in 2014, alongside an assortment of Holocaust deniers and xenophobes.

Evidence of a social as well as political friendship in Brussels has since surfaced. It has been alleged that UKIP so values its relationship with the SD that it was prepared to abandon an ethnic-minority advisor in Brussels who had filed an official complaint of racial abuse against an SD member.

Further evidence of this troubling relationship was provided when the chairman of the SD’s youth group was guest speaker at the UKIP youth conference in July, receiving a standing ovation for a speech in which he made vile jokes about foreigners.

UKIP has repeatedly denied being a racist party but away from the watching eye of the British public its supposedly principled rejection of the extreme right has proved hollow. UKIP’s continued cooperation helps legitimise far-right movements, extending to them the cover of UKIP’s more mainstream populist image.

UKIP’s role in organising the so called “Freedom Award” in Stockholm tonight also reveals that it is now actively creating opportunities for some of the most alarming reactionaries in Europe to forge ever closer bonds.