Ukip’s on the verge of a spectacular comeback – and it’s all thanks to Theresa May, by James Delingpole.
Paul Joseph Watson, Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad have joined Ukip. Let that sink in. …
None of them is remotely ‘alt-right’, but this hasn’t stopped their enemies on the left trying to tar them with that brush. It’s how they were billed in a Mirror story headlined: ‘Meet the new face of Ukip: the free speech extremists who could make Ukip dangerous again.’ And also in a New Statesman article by ex-BBC journalist Paul Mason, which accused Ukip of ‘pandering to right-wing nationalism and xenophobia’.
This is because ‘alt-right’ (in fact, a tiny, minority movement with no relevance except as a bugbear) has become the left’s preferred euphemism for ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’, ‘people we can safely dismiss without taking the trouble to listen to what they are saying’.
In fact, what Watson, Meechan, Benjamin and their ilk are saying is eminently reasonable, well thought through, logical and compelling. Their main beef is that free speech — the bedrock of any advanced, liberal democracy — is under threat. And that none of the three biggest parties is doing the damnedest thing to preserve it. …
What I love about Watson is that he tells it exactly as he sees it. There’s none of that mealy-mouthedness you find among that older generation of journalists who’ve spent years having to temper their polemic in order not to sound too extreme. Watson, like many of his peers, has never had to do a proper job, so he is untainted and untrammelled and takes no prisoners. …
Like Sargon, like Dankula, like Milo Yiannopoulos — who also joined Ukip — he is the voice of a smart, sassy, meme-literate generation who are sick to death of the double dealings and manoeuvring and evasiveness that brought us to our current Brexit impasse. They want action not words; Trump (or something akin), not Theresa May.
By welcoming these new voices, Ukip has suddenly — if, probably, inadvertently — transformed itself from a deeply embarrassing party of irrelevant, funny old men in terrible purple ties into a potent force of revolution. Like Germany’s AfD or its populist equivalents from Italy to Sweden, Ukip could now become the party of rebels too intelligent to vote socialist, too jaded and betrayed to vote for the mainstream again.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
