UPDATE: The double-sided A4 leaflet, fold into three like a menu, slightly tidied up from the text below. These need to go everywhere between now and the local elections on May 2… Do your bit if you can – they can be colour or B&W, doesn’t matter!… DOWNLOAD HERE (PDF)!
Draft leaflet… let us know what you think
VOTE UKIP…
AND OPEN THE DOOR TO AN EXTREME RIGHT-WING NIGHTMARE
UKIP’s manifesto for the local government elections blames immigrants for “crippling local services”. THIS IS A LIE. Government cuts and all round “austerity” are crippling local services. But the Tories and their more extreme stalking horse, UKIP, would prefer you blamed foreigners.
As sure as night follows day, when a society is in the midst of an economic crisis, those that helped cause it try to get off the hook by finding an easy scapegoat. The super-rich, using the media they control, create a tide of exaggerated half-truths that demonize a minority, creating divisions among the population. Meanwhile, the rich get richer – the richest 150 people’s incomes are rising at the fastest rate ever – as they wage war on the poor with increasing austerity, cuts in essential public services and rising food costs.
A similar scenario happened in the 1930s when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists launched attacks on Jews, in parallel with Hitler in Germany – with the Daily Mail cheering him on. It happened in the late 1960s, when Tory politician Enoch Powell’s racist “rivers of blood” speech spurred the rise of the National Front.
The main difference between these two prior occasions and now is that this time a much greater proportion of people in Britain are sleepwalking into the realm of fascism – wrapped up in a cloak of respectability, given front-page coverage by the Sun, Mail, and most of the mainstream media – like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Across Europe, blatant fascism is on the march. The universal scapegoat this time is people from Eastern Europe. In Greece, the rightwing haters, the Golden Dawn, are openly fascist; in Britain, UKIP shies away from white supremacism – in public anyway, though you can find this doctrine around its fringes. It officially calls itself “a patriotic party that believes in putting Britain first”, that “believes in civic nationalism”, “opposes multiculturalism and political correctness and promotes uniculturalism”, and recognises “the numerous threats to British identity and culture”.
UKIP is fighting the 2013 local elections mostly on a wholly unfounded claim that Britain is about to be invaded by millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE. UKIP IS SCAREMONGERING.
Just as it is in the interests of “free trade” to kill off most of Britain’s manufacturing industry and import goods from abroad because they are produced cheaper, so it is in employers’ interest to exploit immigrants as cheap labour, working for long hours in substandard working conditions. After years of British people unsurprisingly refusing to do the exploitative jobs given to immigrants, now youth unemployment is sky-high, immigrants are accused of taking British workers’ jobs – although they weren’t British workers’ jobs in the first place. The arse-about-tit logic of UKIP would be laughable if it wasn’t so hateful and being believed by so many…
Many would agree, it’s not a good idea to be part of the EU, although our membership costs a fraction of the amount (£95bn) estimated to be lost from corporate tax-dodging every year. But despite its name, UKIP doesn’t really want an independent UK: UKIP wants Britain to instead be a poodle to the US in terms of defence via Nato, and trade agreements.
A closer look at UKIP’s policies (see UKIP’s website) reveals the immigration issue is only one element of UKIP’s far-right, opportunist agenda. Many people perhaps aren’t aware of the danger UKIP poses to education, public services, the NHS, our civil freedoms and human rights – as none of it appears in the 2013 election campaign.
Read the small print before you consider casting your vote for UKIP. And bear in mind that UKIP is a member of a far-right group which contains openly fascist and neo-Nazi parties in the European Parliament, is openly admired by the French National Front, and some UKIP candidates have been revealed as having links with fascist and Nazi groups in Britain; other candidates have called for the euthanasia of disabled babies, and for every British town to have prison cells available for “rounded up” immigrants.
It is UKIP official policy to:
- Oppose clean, renewable energy such as wind and solar and invest in shale gas fracking, coal-fired power stations and a massive nuclear programme
- Double the amount of prison places
- Double the size of the territorial army
- Increase defence spending by 40%, buy nuclear weapons from the US and buy more arms.
- Bring back fox-hunting
- Encourage the destruction of the NHS by introducing vouchers for private health insurance.
- Large cuts to public spending, and cutting two million public sector jobs.
- Deny climate change is manmade
- Scrap British and European human rights laws
- Deport all illegal immigrants with no amnesty whatever their circumstances
- Lock up all asylum seekers while their applications are being decided, and limit appeals
- Scrap the Crown Prosecution Service and give more power to police to bring cases to court
- “End the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism”
- “Strengthen our commitment to NATO, while withdrawing from all EU operations”
- Encourage the privatization of key NHS services and GP surgeries
- Privatise state schools and colleges
- Opposition to same-sex marriage
- Scrap workers’ rights such as maximum working hours, holiday entitlement, redundancy, sick pay and parental leave
- UKIP is wary of “works committees of employees being set up” and Trade Unions. “UKIP would need to be convinced that workable, strict procedures could be introduced to prevent mischievous individuals trying to gain control”.
UKIP claims to be “democratic” and “libertarian”, it claims to put local and national interests before anything else… UKIP now says it is against the Bedroom Tax. UKIP will say anything and jump on any populist bandwagon to win votes. It is riddled with contradictions, but lurking not far below its surface is a cold-hearted dystopian vision that makes the Con-Dem Coalition’s war on the poor seem like a picnic!
VOTE UKIP…
AND SAY GOODBYE TO HUMAN RIGHTS, COMPASSION, THE ENVIRONMENT AND THAT FAMOUS BRITISH QUALITY OF TOLERANCE
ARE YOU WITH THE 1% (LAB-CON-DEM-UKIP, CORPORATE MASTERS AND BANKERS) OR THE 99% (THE CITIZENS OF BRITAIN AND THE WORLD)?
TIME TO CHOOSE SIDES. WE, THE PEOPLE, ARE THE ALTERNATIVE TO THE POLITICIANS.
BEWARE THE FASCIST TROJAN HORSE OF UKIP! UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL! DON’T LET UKIP DIVIDE OUR COMMUNITIES!
Sources: UKIP, Hope Not Hate, Owen Jones
Forest of Dean Anarchists 