I’ve had a bit of feedback to my blog on UKIP. So I have revisited the questions I raised, i.e. whether UKIP is a fascist party, and the question of legal status.

It’s often too easy, if we’re lazy, to label the political right as fascist. It was often said that the Thatcher government was fascist but, in one meeting I attended back then, someone rightly pointed out that if that were true we wouldn’t be holding the meeting! So maybe I’ve fallen into the lazy trap. But as I say that, I am still uneasy.

What can’t be denied is that UKIP is a party of the hard right which campaigns not just against the EU but also against LGBT equality, for harsher immigration controls, deeper spending cuts and a quicker break-up of the NHS. In the European Parliament it is in a grouping which includes the far-right, anti-gay United Poland party and the right-wing Northern League of Italy.

The aim of fascism is to smash all working class organisation and ultimately all forms of democracy. Its aim is to use parliamentary democracy in order to destroy it. And fascism means violence, and fascists today encourage and engage in violent street attacks on blacks and Asians (especially Muslims), asylum seekers, LGBT people, trade unionists, the left and so on. This description doesn’t fit UKIP as a party, and its party organisation doesn’t have the disciplined combat form characteristic of fascist parties.

And yet … The history of some of its core members is fascist: HOPE not Hate has highlighted the case of Robert Ray, an Essex councillor, once National Front (NF) organiser for Newham, who canvassed with Nigel Farage during the recent Thurrock council by-election; Nigel Farage himself seems to have such a history, with teachers at his school worried about him being appointed a prefect. One alleged that he was among pupils who marched late at night through a Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs.

The words and actions of other prominent UKIP members give rise to similar worries about the core beliefs and attitudes of UKIP. Much of this is documented by HOPE not Hate. Alexandra Phillips, UKIP’s Head of Media, has a particularly bad record when using – well, yes – the media. On Facebook, she frequently mocks the disabled, often referring to herself or others as “spaz” or “spasticated”, both words, says HOPE not Hate, “that have thankfully dropped out of common usage as the majority of British society regard them as offensive.” She also refers to an online friend as an “autistic wanker”. She says she is “hungrier than a Biafran”, a mocking reference to those who starved during the 1960s Nigerian-Biafran war. She said she was “bored of being Anne Frank”, referring to the iconic Dutch victim of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Farage, like Enoch Powell before him, likes to raise impossible spectres so that voters, fearful of the future, will turn to him. Powell’s spectre was of a kind of bloodbath that would take place as a result of immigration: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Compared to that, Farage’s effort at this year’s conference, like much of what he does, is laughable. And yet it isn’t. For the aim is the same. So he says that from 1 January next year,

nearly 30 million of the good people of Bulgaria and Romania have open access to our country, our welfare system our jobs market. How many will take advantage of that no one knows. The Home Office don’t have any idea at all. The previous estimate was 13,000 in total. Migration Watch thinks 50,000 a year. It could be many times that.

Then he gets to crime, and the threat becomes more sinister, more dangerous:

There is an even darker side to the opening of the door in January. London is already experiencing a Romanian crime wave. There have been an astounding 27,500 arrests in the Metropolitan Police area in the last five years. 92 per cent of ATM crime is committed by Romanians. This gets to the heart of the immigration policy that UKIP wants, we should not welcome foreign criminal gangs and we must deport those who have committed offences.

The statistics here are used in an extremely doubtful way, and HOPE not Hate explains this better than I can – go to the following link and scroll down a bit:

FactCheck: Nigel Farage’s Ukip conference speech

All this is worrying. Of course, some of the scandals associated with UKIP are about the usual jealousies and infighting that go on in any political party. But we should take their racism and xenophobia seriously. When Powell talked of blood, ethnic minorities were attacked and people died. There are similar consequences when Farage does his anti-Romanian rant. HOPE not Hate tells how, in the Eastleigh by-election, the UKIP candidate linked Romanians with “a natural propensity to crime”. Shortly after, two young Romanian workers were attacked in Brighton because their language sounded “East European”. It is partly the rhetoric used, and the images conjured up, by Farage and UKIP as well as the fascists of the BNP and the EDL, that has led to the spate of recent racist attacks on my Afghan-British neighbours as they drive their taxis in the small hours.

And I suppose the question is: Do we want UKIP to get its hands on the levers of power? Because I suspect that, if they do, hostilities will cease between UKIP, the BNP and the EDL. And then we’ll find out whether UKIP is fascist or not.

I think that fascist parties should be banned. And UKIP?