More anti-Muslim comments by UKIP candidates uncovered

Hot on the heels of news reports last week of a UKIP member posting racist and anti-Muslim comments on his Twitter account comes further reports of other UKIP candidates and members accused of doing much the same.

The Guardian on Saturday reported on the remarks posted by a UKIP candidate for the London Borough elections in Enfield, William Henwood, who alongside racist comments about British comedian Lenny Henry, posted tweets saying “Islam reminds me of the 3rd Reich, strength through violence against the citizens”.

He also said Muslims “like us to fawn to them” and “young Muslim men remind me of young Afrikaners. They are taught at an early age they have the right to abuse”.

Another UKIP candidate,  Magnus Nielsen, who is standing in the London Borough elections for Camden council, posted this comment on his Facebook page: “70% of mosques in the UK have been taken over by Wahabbi fundamentalists. Islam is organised crime under religious camouflage. Any Muslim who is not involved in organised crime is not a ‘true believer’, practising Islam as Muhammad commanded”.

According to the Daily Mail, UKIP candidate for local council elections in Tamworth, Staffordshire, Robert Bilcliff, posted anti-Muslim comments on his Facebook page in July 2012 although the paper does not print the comments he is alleged to have made.

And Sky News reports on an advert taken out in the local paper, Exeter Express and Echo, by UKIP party activist, David Challice, in which he attacked the ‘lunacy of multiculturalism’ and advised “cash-strapped Moslems” to take multiple wives in order to claim welfare benefit.

With the European Parliament elections less than a month away, the proliferation of anti-Muslim and racist sentiments expressed by UKIP candidates, members and supporters is certainly cause for alarm given the party’s popularity in opinion polls and by elections to date. A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times put UKIP in the lead for the first time on 31% ahead of Labour and Tories at 28% and 19% respectively.

Nigel Farage has boasted that UKIP has done more than any other party to ‘destroy the racist BNP’ by listening to the policy concerns of disenfranchised voters ‘who vote for them out of frustration but don’t agree with their racist agenda’. Disclosures of recent months, following UKIP’s strong showing in local and by elections, would suggest that the party is much closer to the BNP’s ‘racist agenda’ than it is willing to concede.