If Nigel Farage is to be believed, the protesters who forced him to abandon his planned press conference at a pub in Edinburgh yesterday, were Scottish nationalists “virulently opposed to the English”. In an interview on the Today programme this morning, he challenged Alex Salmond to “come out and condemn this sort of behaviour”, declaring that “they were all campaigners for independence, they were all people who vote SNP. They were all united by a hatred of the English, the union jack and everything the UK represents.”
But while it’s politically convenient for Farage to dismiss the protesters as nationalist bigots, you will search in vain for any evidence to support his claim. Those who disrupted the press conference shouted “racist”, “scum” and “homophobe”, words which suggest that the protest had more to do with UKIP’s opposition to gay marriage and its anti-immigration policies than it did with Farage’s nationality. For one thing, if SNP supporters are motivated by anti-Englishness, why aren’t Labour, Lib Dem and Tory politicians mobbed whenever they set foot in Scotland?
Rather than naïvely accepting Farage’s characterisation of the protesters, (as some anti-independence Labourites have done), it seems reasonable to let them speak for themselves.
John Martin, the president of the Edinburgh College Students’ Association, said: “We organised yesterday’s protest against Farage out of a belief that UKIP’s policies are fundamentally rotten. Their headline five-year immigration freeze is not only completely disconnected from reality, but is a policy that neither the people of Scotland nor the rest of the United Kingdom would stomach. His regressive and repugnant ideology is not far removed from that of the BNP – just dressed in a better-fitting suit.”
A spokesman for the Radical Independence Campaign said: “This was about challenging someone whose party has been spouting racist, sexist and homophobic bile and gone unchallenged for months. Everyone who opposes the politics of fear and division should unite against UKIP – whether you live in Scotland or England.”
Farage’s insistence, against all evidence to the contrary, that the protesters were united by a hatred of the English (a significant number were English) is amusingly at odds with the line adopted by his own party’s spokesman yesterday: “Was it anti-English? I doubt it.”
In another interview, on Good Morning Scotland, Farage insisted: “The anger, the hatred, the shouting, the snarling, the swearing was all linked in to a desire for the Union Jack to be burnt.” Note the peculiar phrasing: a “desire” for the Union Jack to be burnt. If the protesters loathe the English as much as Farage suggests what was stopping them setting light to the flag there and then?
One protester did invite the UKIP leader to “shove your union jack up your arse”, but this stray quip hardly summed up the spirit of the demonstration (nor was it obviously anti-English).
The protesters may have been foolish to greet Farage as they did (yesterday’s events were a political gift to UKIP), but anti-English they were not.
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