UKIP And The Polish Far Right

Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and his fellow saloon bar propper-uppers at UKIP have sought to make light of their European Parliament (EP) alliance with Robert Iwaszkiewicz, who represents the Polish Congress of the New Right (KNP), despite less than total praise from the press, and a distinctly hostile assessment from Jonathan Arkush, vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD).

Squeaky dodgy alliance finger up the bum time

Part of Mr Thirsty’s defence has been to distance Iwaszkiewicz from the leader of the KNP, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who has made a number of less than totally politically correct assertions about race, employment, the Holocaust, and beating women, although he later claimed that the last-mentioned was some kind of joke. Thus Farage no doubt hoped to defuse the situation.

However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, the connections between the Kippers and the KNP do indeed include Korwin-Mikke, so when Farage said there was “nothing in this guy’s background to suggest that he is a political extremist at all”, he was doing little more than asking his inquisitors to “look over there”, as the KNP leader, and one of his own PPCs, has shown.

UKIP PPC and friend

Consider this photo, a “selfie” taken by, and featuring at left, Przemek Skwirczynski, who is UKIP’s PPC for the constituency of Tooting. As he is a PPC, it has to be assumed he has passed the supposedly rigorous party vetting procedure, which weeds out the fruitcakes. The man at the right is Janusz Korwin-Mikke, the leader of the KNP. And his views are on the record.

Korwin-Mikke recently declared that “the minimum wage should be ‘destroyed’ and said that ‘four million n****rs’ lost their jobs in the US as a result of President John F Kennedy signing a bill on the minimum wage in 1961. He went on to claim that 20 million young Europeans were being treated as ‘negroes’ as a result of the minimum wage. He ... was fined 10 days of allowances for his comments”.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke, UKIP fan

Now consider Korwin-Mikke’s own website, where you can filter your search using the tag “UKIP”. Every last move from Mr Thirsty’s team is enthusiastically reported. And the commenters would have made the moderators at the now-defunct bear pit that was Telegraph blogs blush. The impression is given that the KNP is rather closer to the Kippers than Farage has been letting on.

Korwin-Mikke, far from being an inoffensive older bloke, has “called for the vote to be taken away from women, has claimed that the difference between rape and consensual sex is ‘very subtle’ and said that Adolf Hitler was ‘probably not aware that Jews were being exterminated’”. UKIP’s approved and vetted PPC is clearly a fan. And one of the KNP’s MEPs is propping up Farage’s EP grouping.

Perhaps Nige would like to explain himself further. No pressure, Mr Thirsty.