Just Hookem

At first I thought UKIP and the National Front were the shame of Britain. Soon they were dislodged from their position by Brexit. Now we have this – right wing UKIP thugs throwing punches in the European Parliament. Try not to swear.

There’s a time and a place for expletives, but now is not that time. Don’t get me wrong; there are more than a few choice words sitting impatiently on the tongue. All the same, when what I have to say concerns the pure affront of British parliamentarians – at a time like this – brawling like schoolboys at the Strasbourg parliament, it’s best to “use my words.”

What UKIP achieved by Britain’s referendum decision to leave the European Union was anything but the independence of the UK from Europe. It was the casting on the memory of Europe of the now indelible impression of Britain as an island of small-minded, xenophobic, and racist knuckle draggers, and now we can add thugs to that list.

Your average European – much the same as ourselves about their realities – doesn’t care much for the subtleties of what is actually going on inside the United Kingdom. Like us, they make do with the headlines – and the media they are consuming is particularly interested in painting us in a certain light at the present moment.

So when Mike Hookem and Steven Woolfe went mano a mano all they did was show us what we always knew about them and hand Europe the rope it’s looking for to hang us. Inarticulate people have a tendency to communicate with their fists, and this is pretty much all we can expect from the likes of UKIP. Part of me wants to say, well, what can you expect from an ass but a kick? But then this pathetic show of bear-belly machismo further disgraces a Britain – which right now still includes Scotland – that is already hanging its head in shame.

These are the people that the Conservatives have followed in their ditch to the right to scrape back a few votes from a lowest common denominator of the English electorate, and this is where it has brought us. God knows that my greatest political sympathies are with the interests of the working class, but these guys from Hull aren’t working class. There is no class about them.

We rise with our class, but what UKIP does is instigate the undereducated and the angry of the Tories’ Prometheus “aspirationless class” to rage, and all that can ever come from this is violence. For decades this ballast of society has been stoked up and primed for the amusement of the comfortable on the Jeremy Kyle Show, and now they are running the country.