Race for Votes

“It all started during the last council elections – this guy came knocking on the door, claiming that he was standing for UKIP and started going on about Eastern European immigrants and how they were all rapists and murderers! When me and the wife told him that was just racist, he said ‘How would you like it if you had Romanians as next door neighbours? You’d soon change your tune!’ Next thing we knew, this family from Bucharest were moving next door!” explained fifty eight year old Bracknell resident Derek Thring to the Bracknell Weekly Advertiser earlier this week. “It turned out the UKIP guy was the landlord of the place next door! After a few weeks, he came back and started ranting about how liberal bastards like us deserved all they got from these Romanian criminals we were so eager to let live here! But we just told him that our new neighbours were really nice people and we’d had no problems with them at all. He just went mental and started ranting and raving – we had to call the police to get rid of him!” Thring claims that the landlord-cum-UKIP candidate subsequently attempted to provoke his Romanian tenants into anti social behaviour. “They reckoned he’d threatened to reprt them to immigration if they didn’t break into our house and shit on the beds – but they refused, telling him they were here legally,” the painter and decorator told the local paper. “Next thing, he tried offering them fifty quid if they’d smash our windows and set fire to our shed! When that didn’t work, he just shouted racist abuse at them until they threw him out!”

Disgusted by the behaviour of their landlord, the Romanians subsequently moved out, but Thring remains mystified by the prospective local councillor’s actions. “I thought Nigel Farage and his UKIP lot were against immigration? Yet this bloke was encouraging them, letting houses to Eastern Europeans, then trying to get them to commit crimes,” he told the newspaper. “His tenants told us that he’d specified to the agency they’d let the house through that he specifically wanted Romanians!” However, Thring’s experience doesn’t seem to be an isolated case of ostensibly anti-immigration right wingers being involved in apparently recruiting workers and tenants from Eastern Europe. “This Englishman, he came to Sofia, to the roughest, poorest areas, promising new opportunities in Britain, but he insisted only those Bulgarians with serious criminal records would be considered,” twenty eight year old Bulgarian immigrant Grigor Wakov recently told the Sunday Bystander broadsheet. “He was especially keen on rapists, muggers and arsonists. Unfortunately, I had no record, so I used my brother’s identity – he is a big time sex offender – to join this man’s scheme. In UK, he put us all in houses in nice areas – of course, all the criminals soon started offending again and the local people started campaigning against us!” Wakov was surprised to see his mystery benefactor on TV during a local election campaign. “There he was campaigning for one of your loony parties – I forget which – one, saying how foreigners were bad,” he told the broadsheet. “He was telling everyone how Bulgarians were all criminals and should be sent home! People were cheering him!”

Sunday Bystander journalist Jerome Frook, who interviewed Wakov as part of an investigation into the activities of far right fringe political parties in the UK isn’t surprised at such developments. “The reality is that, in the present political climate, the only beneficiaries of mass immigration are the far right,” he contends. “The more foreign criminals they can import and settle into nice middle class areas, the easier it is for them to ‘prove’ their arguments that all immigrants are evil bastards destroying the fabric of British society! Not only that, but they get rents paid on their properties for a few months until these criminal tenants get arrested or deported.” Sending crime rates through the roof in the communities in which they settle their criminal immigrants is considered by these right wingers to be a small price to pay for electoral success, he argues. “As they see it, the rise will only be temporary, as soon as they are elected they’ll have them evicted, arrested or deported,” Frook explains. “And if they aren’t elected – why should they care what happens to the bastards – as they see it – who wouldn’t vote for them? They deserve all they get, is their logic.”

Securing electoral success isn’t the sole motivation for these right-wing supporters bringing large numbers of immigrants into the country, Frook believes. “Only a few months ago a wealthy British businessman, Hector Shigleton, was convicted for human trafficking – he’d been running an operation to bring thousands of illegal workers into the UK, mainly from the Far East – to work in his businesses,” the journalist claims. “He was able to slash his wage bills, thereby undercutting his competitors and putting them out of business. The interesting thing is that, before his conviction, Shigleton was a major contributor to UKIP and several other anti-immigration parties.” Unscrupulous businessmen like Shigleton have everything to gain from restricting legal immigration t the UK, Frook points out. “Whilst Eastern European immigrants might be cheaper than indigenous labour, they still have to be paid at least the minimum wage and employment rights, not to mention the fact that health and safety legislation also applies to them,” he says. “But illegal immigrants have no such rights – due to their illegal status they can’t invoke health and safety, join a trade union or compain to an employment tribunal. They are entirely at the mercy of their ’employer’, who can exploit them mercilessly in order to drive down their costs and maximise their profits!”

For their part, the various extreme right-wing parties involved in the current local and European Parliament elections have been quick to deny Frook’s allegations, with UKIP distancing itself from Shigleton, despite his monetary contributions to the party. The party has also been keen to point out that the local election candidate who had intimidated Derek Thring and his wife had been dropped by them and was no longer a UKIP candidate. “We’re a legitimate political party firmly committed to the democratic way,” a spokesperson declared. “There is no way that we would condone any attempt to gain electoral advantage through seeking to characterise the activities of a criminal minority as being representative of an entire ethnic group.” Frook remains sceptical. “By the same token, I wouldn’t use these examples to brand UKIP as a racist party,” he muses. “But they certainly do seem to attract a lot of that type – if you know what I mean.”