UKIP If You Want To

There's a wave of anti-UKIP sentiment seeping Twitter.

Honestly, you can't go ten seconds without somebody tweeting a picture of something European, on the grounds that it will annoy Nigel Farage. And there is an incessant barrage of Farage and his comments about Romanians. But I wonder.

First up - I will not vote UKIP. I think they're a bunch of wild backwoodspeople, I don't trust them and I don't like xenophobia. And some of their candidates and language are xenophobic. Some of them make Colonel Blimp look like Bertrand Russell, frankly.

And I realise that most of the Twitter people who are making jokes about UKIP are preaching to the gallery. They're making jokes to their UKIP-disliking friends. Jokes that display a certain amount of fear and concern, I suspect, but aren't read much by anyone who will vote UKIP.

But if the left-veering, UKIP-disliking Twitterati continue, I wonder. There are people - some of them natural Labour supporters, some Tories. Maybe even, somewhere, a few LibDems. There must be some, somewhere, surely? And they're not xenophobic or racist. But they are wondering about the rate of immigration. They won't be living in the leafy, traditional Tory shires, where Eastern Europeans are a handy addition to the seasonal agricultural workforce. But they're going to be listening to all the abuse of UKIP and thinking, why are they being so villified? Not, mostly, intellectually, but in cartoons, caricatures of their policy based on the views of individual candidates? Could it be, they might wonder, that UKIP really are onto something? Is there no smoke without a fire? Could all these leftier, clever people be scared that their cover has been blown?

All I know is, the day can come when you protest too much. I won't be voting for UKIP. But I sure as anything won't be retweeting too many funnies about them. It might imply I thought they were winning.