Nazi bully row threatens £5.6m funding for Ukip
WHEN Ukip MP Douglas Carswell said his party needed an ‘optimistic message’ to stop its imminent implosion, a racist bullying scandal was perhaps not what he had in mind.
In a fresh blow for under-fire leader Nigel Farage, the party David Cameron once dubbed a bunch of ‘fruitcakes’ and ‘loonies’, is battling to suppress allegations of racist remarks towards one of its British Asian members, because the outcry could hit Ukip’s shaky finances.
I’m told that Hermann Kelly, Ukip’s European press spokesman, put pressure on party member Joshua Duroch to withdraw his complaint about being insulted with a Nazi epithet by a member of the far-Right Sweden Democrats party.
The extremist movement, whose founders included a former member of Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS, are Ukip’s fellow members of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group, led by Farage. According to my man in Brussels, the Sweden Democrats are threatening to pull out of the EFDD if Duroch pursues his claim, which could put the future of the group in jeopardy — and lead to a potential 7.7 million euro (£5.6 million) cut in funding for cash-strapped Ukip, which receives the money because it is part of a wider grouping in the European Parliament.
I can reveal that the alleged altercation took place in a pub in Brussels, when Joel Ankar, an assistant to Sweden Democrats MEP Kristina Winberg, is understood to have called Duroch ‘untermensch’, the Nazi term for those deemed racially inferior.
Duroch, a Roman Catholic who supports Glasgow’s Celtic football team, complained to both Ukip and the European Parliament, and an investigation is ongoing. Duroch is unable to comment for legal reasons and Ankar told me he is ‘not interested’ in having a conversation about Duroch.
The Sweden Democrats have made efforts in recent years to distance themselves from their white supremacist origins, when members dressed in Nazi uniforms.
When the party was admitted to the EFDD group last June — despite Farage’s previous reservations — Winberg and fellow Sweden Democrats MEP Peter Lundgren were forced to put out a statement refuting the party’s past.
Unfortunately, it seems to have caught up with them.