UKIP and Front National Are The Same

In a controversial interview broadcast this morning on The Andy Marr Show (tm), leader of the French Front National (FN) Marine le Pen was quizzed on her party’s stance on a variety of issues. In the wake of Combover Crybaby Donald Trump winning the US Presidential Election, there is genuine concern that Ms le Pen might win next year’s French presidential contest, and thus destabilise the EU and even NATO.

Squeaky French finger up the bum time

Ms le Pen was candid in her admission that the FN had been financed, at least partly, by Russian banks. She also claimed that the destabilising influences on Europe came not from Moscow or any of the other Usual Suspects, but were in fact the USA and the EU itself. How the EU, which is a by-word for stability, can be a destabilising influence is an illustration of how the FN has tapped in to “Post-truth politics”.

But it was her worrying support for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his effectively totalitarian régime in Moscow that should have alarm bells ringing both in France and elsewhere in the world. This matches the attitude of Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and many of those in UKIP - as well as The Donald. Farage and Trump have been meeting in Trump’s grotesquely tacky headquarters in New York City.

The Kippers, though, are not like the FN, surely? Farage and his pals have been scrupulous in distancing themselves from Ms le Pen, and she would no doubt confirm this. Or not. Describing Farage’s excuses as “ridiculous”, she told Marr “Sorry, but objectively there is - on the topic of immigration and the European Union - not a hair’s breadth of difference between what Ukip thinks and what the National Front thinks, let’s be truthful”.

There was more. “Maybe Ukip is trying to counter the demonisation they are victim of by saying, ‘We are the good guys and the National Front are the bad guys’ - they can do so, but I don’t feel obliged to follow this strategy because, frankly, I feel it’s a little bit ridiculous”. UKIP and the FN, the latter with a history of racist and anti-Semitic bigotry, more than a whiff of Islamophobia, and recent Holocaust denial, on the same page.

Think about that, and the FN’s anti-German rhetoric as enunciated by Ms le Pen: “What doesn’t work is when you impose the same drugs on everyone, when clearly, if you will, the different countries are not suffering from the same disease; or that you want everyone to wear the same suit, but the suit will be too small and too big for everyone, except possibly for Germany, as they tailored it”. Don’t look at Russia, look at Germany!

And her excusing of Putin: his kind of politics was “one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his country, defending his identity”. Threatening the Baltic States and Poland, helping to reduce Syria to rubble, invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea, all the cyber-attacks and campaigns of misinformation, this is “reasoned protectionism”. This is a party that has “not a hair’s breadth of difference” from UKIP.

Think about that the next time Nigel Farage say’s he’s a patriot. Because he is not.