UKIP - It’s A Death Cult

Another day in the General Election campaign, another challenge for UKIP’s comedy turn leader Paul Nuttall. The “Bad Bootle Meff” has been dodging questions about the subject that, now the EU referendum has been held and the exit process started, has come to define his party - its attitude to all those Scary Muslims (tm). Nuttall has already failed to convince commentators that his party’s manifesto is not bigoted in any way.

I keep pulling the f***in' trigger but it still won't extinguish me burning keks

Now, he’s got a full-scale hate speech row on his patch and appears unable to thus far do anything about it. The problem? “Ukip has been accused of ‘grubbing around in the gutter’ for votes after the party selected a parliamentary candidate who has described Islam as evil … Anne Marie Waters, an activist from the anti-Islam Pegida movement, has also praised the far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders”.

Ms Waters has described Islam as “evil”, and just for good measure has characterised followers of The Prophet of being paedophiles: “Whether it is politically correct or not to say it, people are concerned about Muslim immigration … They are concerned because Islamic culture does not fit with ours, and it is our culture that is being sacrificed. They are concerned that their children are at risk of rape and sexual abuse”.

Once again, the purity of “our culture” is at the forefront of the Kipper agenda, which is not a substitute term for “White British culture” at all, honestly. And Ms Waters is not the only problem for Nuttall: one of his MEPs is making similar noises.

Gerard Batten said that Islam should be referred to as “Mohammedanism - the cult of Mohammed - because that is what it is … It is a death cult, born and steeped in 1,400 years of violence and bloodshed, that propagates itself by intimidation, violence and conquest”. I think my Muslim near-neighbours just bought the freehold, but hey ho.

This thought does not detain Batten: “The terrorists are the vanguard of Mohammedanism. They set out to cow the non-Mohammedan population, so that the ‘moderate Muslims’ can get on establishing sharia courts, forcing halal food in school and works canteens, and making the authorities look the other way regarding criminal activities for fear of being called racist and Islamophobic … A normal non-Mohammedan should have a perfectly rational fear of ‘Islam’”. The Scary Muslims (tm) are clearly coming to get him!

Nuttall has a clear course of action, and there is a recent precedent. Stephen Latham, who fought West Bromwich East for UKIP in 2015, and who said “So the Muslims have infiltrated the Labour party. What a surprise. Who would have guessed such a thing was possible? The Labour Party of Diane Abbott and Harriet Harman infiltrated by the evil cult of Islam. Wow” was later prevented from standing for them again.

Latham claimed he couldn’t remember making those comments, then didn’t remember how a cut and paste job from a far-right blog claiming “European integration amounts to genocide” had got onto his Facebook page. But ultimately he didn’t convince his local party and will not be allowed to stand for them again.

So Paul Nuttall has a precedent to work from. Will he have Anne Marie Waters removed, or won’t he? Or is UKIP on the inevitable downward spiral of the death cult?