Johann Hari

There are only two weeks to let the British people know the United Kingdom Independence Party is not a harmless repository for their protest votes. UKIP is now set to come third in the European elections - yet they have been almost entirely unscrutinised by the British press, waved away as a band of harmless single-issue amateurs. In fact, in many parts of Britain, a vote for UKIP is a vote to be represented by paranoid far right wingers - but who knows it?

Let's look at some of the people you'll be voting for if you put a cross for UKIP. The party is running on a manifesto co-authored by a man called Aidan Rankin. He writes articles and letters for Third Way, a breakaway faction of the National Front, and believes that races should not mix. To this end, members of Third Way have made contact with black separatists and Orthodox Jews who believe the world should be divided into segregated racial groups.

At the last general election, UKIP's list of candidates included - in the words of Searchlight, the magazine which monitors and exposes the far right - "former racists, anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers". The magazine claimed that UKIP's parliamentary candidate for Dunfermline West just three years ago, Alastair Harper, had been a leading figure in the neo-fascist Northern League founded by eugenicist Roger Pearson. It also said that the party's candidate in Beaconsfield, Andrew Moffat, was championed by the Holocaust denier David Irving after he was discharged from the Coldstream Guards without explanation.

Searchlight even alleges that UKIP's current national chairman and one of its leading candidates, Mike Nattrass, has been a member of the extreme right, pro-Apartheid, pro-Rhodesia New Britain Party.

UKIP boasts that it now requires all candidates to declare they are not racists. Yet they don't seem to try very hard to make sure these anti-racist declarations are accurate: Private Eye recently provided a summary of the public racism of UKIP's new star recruit, Robert Kilroy-Silk. "Pakistanis want to generate hate ... but then what else can we expect from Pakistan?" he asks. Iraqis are "not worth the life of one British soldier, not one. All they seem to do is moan, incessantly, about their lack of amenities". He raves against "pushy blacks" and "talentless Asians", and suggests that asylum- seekers should be "herded together" by the paras and "dumped on a secure slow boat to ... wherever".

Kilroy-Silk was very publicly sacked by the BBC for these views. UKIP seems not to have noticed. Other forms of bigotry are equally welcomed: boxing promoter Frank Maloney, their candidate for London mayor, has said he will not be campaigning in Camden because there are "too many gays" there.

Similarly, UKIP's claim to reject xenophobia and seek friendly relations with our European neighbours does not seem to match the evidence. Their website links to a guide called "European Union myths and follies", which cites Winston Churchill, speaking in 1918. "Once the apparatus of power is in the hands of The Brotherhood, all opposition, all contrary opinion must be extinguished by death ... You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." Churchill was talking about the Bolsheviks (and supported the idea of European Union) - but what's a few gulags when you're panic-mongering?

The site then leaps directly from mis-describing the EU to the second verse of our national anthem, which, they complain, has been suppressed by fiendish political correctness. "Oh Lord God arise/ Scatter her enemies/ And make them fall/ Confound their politics ... Oh, save us all!" It seems fair to point out that there is some contradiction between UKIP's public desire to seek a friendly relationship with our trading partners, and this plea for God Almighty to smite them.

UKIP's links section - the people they choose to identify as political allies and friends - is an interesting guide to the party's world view. A typical site belongs to Credence Publications, whose top book is Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day. It details "the coming takeover of Britain by the axis powers of France and Germany ... [and] the raw and terrible facts of what treason carried out in British politics has cost our once great nation". Their other links are just as appealing. They point their members towards Northern Ireland's UK Unionist Party (a fringe group not to be confused with the Ulster Unionist Party), which denounces the peace process as "a disgrace".

Many of the symptoms of far right politics are on display among UKIP and its friends: a paranoid hatred of metropolitan political classes, a belief in dark conspiracies operating in the shadows, and the characterisation of anybody who disagrees with their extreme position as "treacherous" and "disloyal".

Indeed, UKIP routinely denounces Edward Heath, John Major and Tony Blair - who, whatever you think of them, have dedicated their lives to serving Britain - as "traitors". It seems strangely appropriate that Joan Collins has joined the Party. Their view of the EU and of our political leaders is like something from a Dynasty plot-line: cartoonish motivations, evil scheming and dastardly foreigners. If Romano Prodi as described by UKIP had bigger shoulder-pads and classier ball-gowns, he could easily be a partner in ColbyCo.

But beneath the layers of bigotry and silliness, it is important to note the appeal of UKIP's arguments. Large numbers of British people - more than 40 per cent in some polls - want to withdraw from the EU. Many are decent people tempted by the UKIP argument that after withdrawing from the EU, we could still engage in full trade with our European partners. It seems like we could cherry-pick the best of the EU - access to European markets - without the political entanglements of belonging to the Union itself. The Withdrawal Brigade points to Switzerland and Norway as models of a post-EU future. These two countries trade with the EU without having to adhere to its rules, UKIP boasts.

There's only one problem with this neat vision: it isn't true. Many of my relatives live in Switzerland, and it is a simple fact that Swiss people have to follow the vast majority of EU regulations. If almost all your products are sold within the EU, then you have to meet EU rules at almost every step of the production and distribution of goods.

After withdrawal, Britain would still, in practice, be bound by EU regulations. The only difference would be we would have absolutely no say in formulating those regulations. They would be made without us. Britain wouldn't even be shouting from the sidelines, as we so often are today. Our government would be outside the stadium, yelling in an empty street. They could more accurately be named the UK Isolation Party.

Nobody has an excuse to vote UKIP in the European elections. If your priority is to kick Europe in the teeth, vote Tory: they are extremely hostile to the EU and have obsessive Europhobes like Bill Cash on their front bench. If you want to kick Tony Blair and the political class in the teeth over Iraq, vote Liberal Democrat or Green. If you insist on voting UKIP, you won't be striking a blow against Europe or Blair. You'll be casting a vote for paranoid bigotry.

Aidan Rankin has requested that the following rider be added to this article:

'Aidan Rankin has had no contact with Third Way since 1998 or the UK Independence Party since 2001. He assures me that he has never at any stage
supported racial separatism. He is committed to individual freedom, equal rights for all and the multi-racial society, and has abandoned any
support for right-wing politics. He regards UKIP, in particular, as institutionally homophobic.'

There's a discussion of this piece at http://united-kingdom-independence-party.wikiverse.org/