Winston McKenzie has been dumped out of his role as UKIP’s Commonwealth spokesman following a litany of gaffes culminating in the former professional boxer announcing he was ‘disillusioned’ and ‘dismayed’ about former boxing promoter Frank Maloney’s gender reassignment to become Kellie Maloney.
The deluded ‘politician’, who once raised eyebrows by making a comparison between Nigel Farage and Jesus Christ, insulted residents of London’s largest borough by population last year when he organised a so-called ‘UKIP Carnival of Colour’ in his north Croydon constituency, subsequently calling the borough ‘unsafe’ and ‘a dump’ when the UKIP leader pulled out of attending.
Mr McKenzie, who has apparently been busying himself persuading Black voters to vote and even join UKIP, was evidently so enamoured with his concocted, nebulous and frankly patronising role that he has failed to recognise UKIP as, if not a racist party; then the party where racists seek refuge. UKIP members have been exposed with alarming regularity to, at the moderate end of the scale, have racist leanings while a few at the extreme end have been unapologetically outspoken about their abject xenophobia. In the forthcoming General Election, it will be alongside the UKIP candidate’s name that many supporters of the suspiciously quiet National Front and British National Party put their mark, seeing Mr Farage’s party as a more pragmatic route to Aryan purity.
UKIP makes a big show of dismissing members whose racial intolerance becomes exposed to the public gaze, but occasions where the mind and means exist to record the outrageous politically incorrect outbursts that land these people in trouble are extremely rare. The reality is that the conversations from which these indiscretions emanate are going on all the time behind closed doors in UKIP’s corridors of power and, in all probability, back at home after a hard day’s campaigning.
It is undeniable that Britain’s established migrant population is affected by the positives and negatives of a liberal immigration policy in just the same way as those who would style themselves ‘truly British’. White Britons have no greater need for jobs, housing, healthcare and school places than anyone else, but too many migrants and children of migrants are being hoodwinked into believing that the likes of Nigel Farage have accepted them as part of the fabric of Britain. To many UKIP sympathisers, the difference between me, a London-born Black man, and an economic migrant from East Africa is one of semantics. Pest control begins with preventing ingress, but then it becomes necessary to deal with the pests that have already taken up residence.
Nobody is talking about genocide here, but it would not take Machiavellian levels of duplicitousness and scheming to make Britain a very uncomfortable place to live for certain ethnic groups. Even apparently colour-blind policies, when they disadvantage those that occupy the lower socio-economic margins, have a sharper impact on migrant groups because it is they that languish in those margins disproportionately.
Rozanne Duncan, a former UKIP candidate for a Kent constituency was recently expelled after she confessed she has a “problem” with “negroes”. She was unable to articulate why; perhaps it is their features, she mused. She is certain, however, that she is not a racist. After all, she has “many Asian shopkeeper and local business friends”.
Well, Mrs Duncan, since your problem with negroes renders you unlikely to ever offer one a job; or give a thirsty one a glass of water; or welcome one as a son or daughter-in-law; or cradle a baby one; or even stand voluntarily in close proximity to one on a bus, you are interchangeable with every racist I have ever met.
Mrs Duncan is one of the most dangerous kinds of racist – one who doesn’t even realise she is one. How could she be racist? She is not intolerant of every other race . . . just the one! Returning briefly to the aforementioned Mr McKenzie, he has described gay adoption as ‘tantamount to child abuse’ and ‘unhealthy’, but would without doubt vehemently resist accusations that he is a homophobe.
I strongly suspect – in fact, I know that many of the people UKIP, NF, BNP et al. want to see the back of feel exactly the same way about Britain. I met and befriended an Irish gentleman many years ago who despised the British. Bob’s contention was that the Irish and the Blacks rebuilt Britain, economically and physically, after WWII and he planned to ultimately return to Ireland, but not before he had taken back what he felt he had contributed and some of what Britain had taken from his homeland. Bob’s actual words were more akin to a war declaration thinly veiled in a riddle, but I knew exactly what he meant.
It is often casually mooted by the kind of certifiable idiot that is dug up at suburban shopping centres for TV voxpops from time to time that the Government should pay for every migrant in Britain to go ‘home’. Well, I have lost count of the number of people I am acquainted with who would jump at the chance – but why should they go back empty-handed? Yes, Britain has become a magnet for refugees from the world’s ills and for economic migrants, but what this relatively tiny island race has to give has largely been amassed through historical plunder, entrapment and double-dealing. Throughout modern history, Britain has denuded or taken possession of, often using nefarious tactics, vast swathes of the very nations whose people they now seek to deny.
Several of the abolitionists famed for campaigning to end the Slave Trade in the 19th century achieved their lofty positions, wealth and, therefore, influence from the very system they later sought to repeal. Perhaps these altruists were actually more interested in limiting opportunities for others to attain similar riches. It’s much less fun being fabulously wealthy when everyone else in town is similarly endowed.
An English work colleague once inferred to me that it was British people that transformed the Jamaica he had recently visited on holiday from the wasteland it was pre-colonisation. I retorted that Britons went to America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia to get rich, not to invest their riches. After all, when one tills the soil, it is not the soil that ultimately benefits but he who reaps the crop. Sugar planters in the Caribbean and South America built just enough of an infrastructure to ultimately facilitate the building and maintenance of their massive estates back in Britain. My own family name was imposed on my ancestors by the head of a dynasty that would eventually own a large proportion of Monmouthshire and Shropshire!
Given their own opportunity to dictate who should not be allowed in, I’d wager that the indigenes of Britain’s former colonies might have chosen to limit those intruders carrying the European diseases, weapons and instruments of torture that ultimately killed them off. Just a thought!
Britain makes no secret of its intent to continue its legacy by allowing virtually unrestricted access only to ‘exceptionally talented’ individuals and large investors, thereby denying the nations from which they come that same exceptional talent and investment. This is like hiring a builder, then insisting he uses bricks recycled from his own home.
If Britain is indeed ‘going to the dogs’ as Mr Average on the street claims, he should be grateful to the migrants who built the roads; who staffed the transport system; who cared for the ill and infirm and who opened the convenience stores for allowing this once great nation to stave off this fate for so long.
Who knows how UKIP will fare in two months. The party’s showing in the General Election will certainly be an interesting indicator of which way the wind blows as far as the nation’s tolerance of migrants goes.
If UKIP continue to make inroads at the rate the Party has over the past 3 or 4 years, the main parties will almost certainly move further to the Right. Labour’s steady shuffle in that direction is surely proof, if it was ever needed, that no political party is above selling its soul to the devil in the pursuit of votes. UKIP is bullish about immigration being a bad thing – a stance that appears to have gained them substantial support, so Labour is direct mailing leaflets with a section on “Labour’s tough new approach to immigration”. What’s that all about?
So Labour will not have my vote; nobody will. I’ve already been told that not being part of the solution makes me part of the problem. Well, so be it.
A much greater problem, in my view, is the likes of Winston McKenzie who, in his megalomanic fug has succumbed to the UKIP lie and, more depressingly, is busy feeding it to people who, if they don’t know better now, most certainly will.
One can only hope that enough skeletons fall out of UKIP cupboards to totally discredit them before they get an opportunity to become UK politics’ kingmakers or worse.
