01/04/2014
Nick Clegg must be thinking Christmas has come early as Nigel Farage continues with his destructive spree, determined to leave nothing behind him of his party but smouldering wreckage.
His latest gift comes via the
Telegraph which reports Farage speaking at Chatham House, where he declared his pride at having "taken a third of the BNP's support". Farage is thus quoted as saying that his party actively targeted BNP voters who were "frustrated" and "upset" by their changing communities.
That Farage was after the BNP vote has been evident for some time, and he has admitted it before. But when I remarked on it recently, suggesting that UKIP had been refashioned as
BNP-lite, I was accused of "a disingenuous attempt at a smear" of the sort normally the province of the legacy media.
The behaviour of the UKIP leader, however, has been subject to further analysis, discussed by Peter on
his blog, where he suggests that Farage has become a tool of the establishment, playing with "safety valve politics" in order to undermine BNP.
The conclusions are more than a little disturbing, suggesting that Farage has nearly completed his appointed task. Once he departs, as he inevitably will, he will leave a hollowed out shell of a party, in a bloody civil war, with no foundation to steer its recovery - and it will be lucky to survive the skeletons that fall from the Farage closet.
Having cleared out any natural successors, Peter concludes, the party will be left with talentless yes-men and it is difficult to see how it can survive at all.
With Farage's scorched earth policy â the only policy in evidence from UKIP â it is very hard to disagree with this conclusion. Twenty years of UKIP have brought us nowhere near exiting the EU, and Farage does seem intent on making that a distant and unrealisable dream.
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