Thursday 2 February 2017

The hypocrisy of the UKIP complaint about Seb Dance's stunt


The Labour MEP Seb Dance held up a piece of paper saying "he's lying to you" behind Nigel Farage as he was busy spouting his usual brand of xenophobic, fearmongering anti-European rhetoric in the European Parliament.

The action was a breech of parliamentary etiquette for sure, and Dance will inevitably end up getting punished for it, but the hypocrisy of the official UKIP complaint really is something else.

The UKIP MEP who submitted the complaint is a guy called Bill Etheridge who said that it was "disgusting behaviour".

If anyone is a qualified expert on "disgusting behaviour" it's surely Bill Etheridge, who is one of the very many failed, defected or (in his case) disgraced Tories to have ended up in UKIP.

Etheridge was a Tory Party local council candidate until 2011 when he was forced to resign in disgrace after he decided to indulge in a spot of social media race-baiting. It's not often that someone's bigoted behaviour is so overt and extreme that they end up getting shoved out of the Tory party, but Bill is one of the rare examples.

Since joining UKIP and becoming an MEP for the West Midlands region Etheridge has continued to court controversy, famously telling a gathering of young Ukippers that Adolf Hitler "achieved great things" and advising them that they should study and imitate Hitler's speaking style!


This kind of hypocrisy would be utterly astounding, but by now we're well used to revolting displays of self-pitying faux outrage from Ukippers with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, and the self-awareness of inanimate objects. 

If anything is actually "disgusting" it's clearly a political party that is ever willing to provide a home to failed and disgraced Tories like Bill Etheridge, cuddle up to extreme-right hatemongers like the EDL and Britain First, and has continually shamed Britain by using the European Parliament to scam vast amounts in expenses despite hardly ever turning up other than to use the parliamentary debating floor as a platform to spread their  xenophobia, fearmongering rhetoric and anti-European bile.

We are living in interesting times indeed, where wealthy white western males like Nigel Farage can play the perma-victim and millions of people actually take them seriously, and light-hearted objections to Farage's shameful victim-complex grandstanding can actually be self-righteously described as "disgusting" by a Hitler-praising social media race-baiter and failed Tory like Bill Etheridge!


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