HOPE not hate has recently offered to help UKIP vet its Parliamentary candidates, bringing a few troublesome representatives to its attention in a recent blog.
UKIP has (reluctantly) taken our advice, withdrawing support for North Wiltshire candidate Paddy Singh after we exposed a series of extremely racist and antisemitic comments on his social media accounts. The party also deselected leading anti-Muslim activist Anne Marie Waters following pressure from HOPE not hate and other media sources earlier this month.
While we have the ball rolling, HOPE not hate would like to take this opportunity to draw UKIP’s attention to several other candidates implicated in discriminatory statements and behaviour.
HOPE not hate revealed Chapman describing Islam as “despicable”, and Muslims as “fucked up,” in 2015. At the time Chapman was standing for UKIP in the Stretford and Urmston constituency, Greater Manchester, which is roughly 10% Muslim. Despite this he has somehow slipped through UKIP’s net and onto the ballot paper this time.
In 2016 HOPE not hate exposed a deluge of anti-Islamic hatred on Baksa’s personal Facebook page, including him endorsing posts saying: “F*** YOU Muslims go back to your own filthy country”. Baksa, who has previously represented UKIP in the Calderdale local election, has somehow been selected to represent UKIP again, only now as a Parliamentary representative.
At the launch of its manifesto last week, UKIP claimed that immigrants into the UK would have to take a “social attitudes” test. “If they do not agree that women and gay people are equal and not second class, they will not get in” said Suzanne Evans.
It is perplexing, then, that UKIP’s current Energy spokesman Roger Helmer has made it back onto the ballot. Helmer suggested on his “Straight Talking” blog that gay marriages would lead to incestuous and polygamous unions. Of Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s comments that gay marriage was a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right,” Helmer stated: “I wish I’d thought of the phrase. Perhaps he ought to be a politician”.
In 2009 Helmer has denied the very existence of homophobia, stating that the word was “merely a propaganda device” used to “denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions”.
He later defended himself, stating that despite the violence and prejudice suffered by gay people, the word homophobia was created by the “militant gay rights lobby” and has “no meaning” because he had “never met anyone with an irrational fear of homosexuals.”
Helmer also used his blog to discuss the delicate subject of rape. “While in the first case, the blame is squarely on the perpetrator and does not attach to the victim, in the second case the victim surely shares a part of the responsibility, if only for establishing reasonable expectations in her boyfriend’s mind.”
Helmer also caused a storm when he suggested that 15-year-old girls could consent to sex with pop stars.
Batten, a UKIP co-founder, recently attracted widespread condemnation for labelling Islam a “death cult, born and steeped in 14,000 years of violence and bloodshed”, and arguing that it should be referred to as “Mohammedianism – the cult of Mohammed – because that is what it is”.
With tensions high in the wake of the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester last week, Batten took to his blog to reiterate his belief that “Mohammedanism is a barbaric, regressive ideology that was primitive and backward when it was first concocted in 6th century Arabia”.
Batten is a veteran anti-Muslim activist with links across European ‘counter-jihad’ networks. Batten called for British Muslims to sign a “charter of Muslim understanding” to reject violence in 2006, reiterating the claim in 2014.
Batten also addressed the 2011 dinner of the far-right Traditional Britain Group (TBG), an event run by former BNP member and convicted fraudster Gregory Lauder-Frost. The TBG hosts annual far-right gatherings attended by both Tory fringe members and extreme-right elements. HOPE not hate has previously exposed UKIP’s links to the TBG.
Batten was recently defended by UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, who also has a long and sorry history of making flatly demagogic statements in relation to immigration and Islam.
Nuttall has labelled the EU’s response to the refugee crisis as “freedom of movement of Jihad” and called on the British government to reveal the location of refugees legally living within the UK to prevent “British Cologne” sexual attacks. He opposes same-sex marriage and would restrict the rights to roam of Roma people to protect the rights of “indigenous, taxpaying, hardworking” people.
Consider this revealing statement made by Nuttall in ladmag the Midweek Sport in 2015, during which he wrote of a Muslim plot to “conquer” Europe:
This would constitute a meaningful rejection of bigotry. As opposed to the tactic of Great Yarmouth candidate Catherine Blaiklock, who resorted to taking a photo of her black husband to hustings in order to prove that the party is not racist.
