Readers may recall that last year Nigel Farage was principled enough back in April to refuse to form a group in the European Parliament with Marine le Pen, French Front National leader, because of “prejudice and antisemitism” in her party – although he also said Le Pen had “got some good qualities” and was “achieving remarkable things“. Forming a group that has at least 25 members from at least 7 countries brings the group large sums of Euro cash — the sort of thing you might expect a principled Europhobe to turn down anyway — but both Farage and Le Pen were determined to form separate ones.
Remarkably, Nigel Farage has now done a deal with a Polish far-right party that Marine Le Pen though too anti-semitic for her group (she called him a holocaust denier), as well as too misogynist (for opposing women’s right to vote).
The deal agreed with Janusz Korwin-Mikke, leader of the Congress of the New Right which got 7.5% of the vote in May, is enough to get Farage over the threshold which will bring UKIP over £1m a year. Only one of the party’s MEPs is to join but one Polish replacement for the Latvian who resigned last week is enough to keep the money rolling in. But Janusz Korwin-Mikke has some very, very nasty views:
- women shouldn’t have the vote – most women were not interested in politics anyway, “evolution has ensured that women are not too intelligent”, and women would more often vote for a welfare state;
- democracy is the “stupidest form of government ever conceived“ where “two bums from under the beer booth, have twice more to say than the university professor” (he is a monarchist);
- the European commission building could be put to better use by “turning it into a brothel“;
- there is no written proof Adolf Hitler was aware of the Holocaust;
- the difference between rape and consensual sex is very subtle;
- the general public should “not see the disabled on television“.
And of course, let’s be clear that Farage didn’t want a pact with the Front National because of their name, not their policies. If they weren’t called something so similar to the National Front he’d have been happy to align with them.