Misty Thackeray, Racism and Sectarianism in Scottish UKIP

Yesterday and Thursday I blogged on the resignation of the Scottish-based surgeon, Mr Jonathan Stanley, from UKIP. Among his reasons for leaving were displeasure at the party’s refusal to publish material he’d written about the deaths of eleven children and a mother at the Morecombe Bay NHS Trust. He also found Furhage’s plans to exclude migrant children from state education and medicine unconscionable.

He also complained of the Scots party using the language of English nationalism, and a poisonous culture of sectarianism and bullying within the party. The blog Angry Meditation’s piece, Your definitive guide to UKIP’s racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, paedophiles, animal abusers, and violent bullies. provides further light on this accusation by citing some of the bigoted and extremely sectarian remarks uttered by Misty Thackeray, UKIP’s Scottish chair. According to the site, Thackeray

•Liked Facebook group which thinks “paedophilia is part of Islamic tradition”
•Posted “real Catholicism and Real Islamism are far from antagonists with both having an outwardly benign image but inwardly sharing a fascist ideology of extreme submissive conservatism and imperialism”
•Described Glasgow council as a place for “gays, Catholics and Communists”
•Appeared on a leaked list of English Defence League activists.

It’s clear from this that the Scots party’s culture of Islamophobia and sectarian anti-Roman Catholicism, along with homophobia, come from and is endorsed by the leadership itself.

With this poisonous culture, Mr Stanley was right to leave.

The Guardian Adds a Few More Details on Jonathan Stanley’s UKIP Resignation

I posted an article yesterday about the resignation from UKIP of Jonathan Stanley, a Scotland-based surgeon. Mr Stanley was their candidate for Westmoreland and Lonsdale. He resigned citing racism and sectarianism in the Scottish party as his reasons for leaving, along with the party’s failure to publish documents he had written about the deaths of eleven babies and a mother in the University Hospitals of the Morecambe Bay NHS Trust.

The Guardian today published an article reporting Mr Stanley’s resignation as one of three blows and scandals to hit the party. The other two were the investigation of Janice Atkinson for fiddling her expenses from the EU, and the suspension of Stephen Howd, a barrister, and their candidate for Scunthorpe, over allegations of harassment at his workplace.

The Guardian’s report says little about this. Most of the article is about Stanley’s resignation and Atkinson’s fraud, adding a few more details about why he resigned. In addition to the sectarianism and culture of bullying, he also strongly objected to the party’s use of ‘the language of English nationalism’. He felt it was damaging and corrosive to the Eurosceptic and Unionist cause.

He also took issue with part of Farage’s plan to exclude migrants from state support for five years after they came here. Along with his other reasons, he stated he could not support the exclusion of migrant children from state education and medical care.

Stanley’s absolutely right. It is totally unacceptable that migrant children, in particular, should be punished and left vulnerable because their parents came here in search of a better life. It’s also a move that is absolutely certain to do immense harm. If you exclude children from state education, and they cannot afford the immense fees of private tuition, then automatically you create an unskilled underclass, who will have no other recourse but crime. Especially if they cannot claim dole or other benefits.

I’ve similarly reblogged material from Vox Political, where Mike has produced the opinions of doctors and social workers that if migrants are excluded from the NHS, then it could lead to more infectious disease going untreated. You think of the chaos and suffering that could arise, if someone contracted Ebola, because they came from or visited West Africa, and were excluded from state medical treatment and couldn’t afford to go privately.

Or more prosaic problems and deaths that could arise from more ordinary problems going untreated, like meningitis or appendicitis. And does anyone really want to see women left to give birth without proper medical care, especially after the rave reviews of the Beeb’s Call The Midwife? That programme showed exactly the problems women faced bearing children in the East End slums in 1950s austerity Britain. No-one should want that privation and poverty to come back.

Except, it seems, Farage, and the rest of the Kipper, Tory and Lib Dem goons, who crave to see the NHS carved up and sold off.

The Guardian’s article is at: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/20/ukip-faces-crisis-two-parliamentary-candidates-suspended-one-resigns