UKIP MEP addressed racist group that defended Apartheid

Earlier this month Stuart Agnew, one of UKIP’s four remaining MEPs, addressed the Springbok Club, a far-right group founded in 1996 which serves as a pro-apartheid outlet for South African expatriates and their supporters, and has been supported by Thomas Mair, killer of Labour MP Jo Cox.

The Springbok Club website – which displays the apartheid-era South African flag as its banner – claims that Agnew, at a meeting at The Antelope Pub in London, spoke about “his time spent living and working in Rhodesia”, and that he “gave a report-back on his recent trip to South Africa when, as part of an official European Parliamentary delegation, he investigated the facts concerning the current farm murder campaign currently taking place in the country”.

The Springbok Club is run by Alan Harvey, a former National Front member. According to Harvey, the policy of the Springbok Club

“can be summed up in one sentence: we want our countries back, and believe this can now only come about by the re-establishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent”.

Following Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, Harvey wrote on social media:

“That Mandela creature was an evil terrorist. May his soul rot in hell”.

The Independent has previously revealed that Neil Hamilton, UKIP’s candidate in the recent Newport West by-election, addressed the group in 1998, and was pictured posing in front of the South African apartheid-era flag.

In 2016 a Mail on Sunday investigation linked the Springbok Club to Thomas Mair, the far-right extremist who assassinated Labour MP Jo Cox; the group had once described Mair as one of its “earliest subscribers and supporters”. The Springbok Club told the Mail that Mair had not been in contact with the organisation since the 1980s, and that “We have never met Mr Mair”.

Agnew is currently a prospective UKIP candidate in the Eastern region in the potential European Parliament elections. The fact that he would feel able to address such a group represents UKIP’s increasingly open embrace of far-right politics.