Farage racism row grows as he insists: Romanians ARE more likely to commit crime
NIGEL FARAGE yesterday stoked the row over his ‘racist’ attack on Romanians by insisting that they were likely to commit crime than other immigrants.
The UKIP leader said it was ‘perfectly legitimate’ to point out ‘where there are differential crime rates between nationalities’. The defiance came 24 hours after an interview in which Mr Farage, whose wife is German, claimed people would rather live next door to Germans than Romanians. When asked what the difference was, in an interview considered so disastrous that his senior media aide, Patrick O’Flynn, interrupted to try to stop it, Mr Farage said: ‘You know what the difference is.’
Yesterday, rather than apologise, the UKIP leader declared: ‘Where there are differential crime rates between nationalities, it is perfectly legitimate to point this out and to discuss it in the public sphere.’
He added: ‘Police figures are quite clear that there is a high level of criminality within the Romanian community in Britain.
‘This is not to say for a moment that all or even most Romanian people living in the UK are criminals.
‘But it is to say that any normal and fair-minded person would have a perfect right to be concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.’
Mr Farage emphatically denied UKIP was racist and said his comments about Romanians moving in were being criticised by media commentators who lived in ‘million-pound houses and for whom the prospect of such a turn of events is not a real one’.
Meanwhile, the LBC presenter who conducted the original interview has branded Mr Farage ‘one of the
‘Any normal person would be concerned’
slickest, nastiest, most dissembling political leaders in living memory’.
James O’Brien said the interview confirmed his ‘worst fears’ about the UKIP leader, saying that his ‘cultivated pint and a fag facade’ had slipped.
He says: ‘I firmly believe that there is something deeply questionable about the man who leads the party and I hope the all-too-brief slip of his mask last Friday will prove it to others.’
Mr O’Brien described Mr Farage as a ‘particularly putrid Pied Piper’ leading blindly dancing followers.
To make matters worse for Mr Farage, the multi-millionaire funding his party issued a veiled warning that he could walk away unless UKIP won this week’s European elections.
Paul Sykes, who is financing UKIP’s £1.5million poster campaign, revealed that he has made no commitments to the party beyond this Thursday.
He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I have told them – I am doing nothing until I see the European results.
‘When I know the vast majority of people are voting UKIP, have voted to leave the EU, then I’m going to roll my sleeves up. But we need that first.’
The frank remarks will send a shiver down the spine of Mr Farage, who will recall how Mr Sykes spectacularly abandoned the party shortly after the European election campaign of 2004.
The former member of the Conservative Party, who is worth an estimated £650million, dumped UKIP after it announced it was out to ‘kill’ the Tories.
However, Mr Sykes also stressed yesterday that the UKIP of 2014 was a far more impressive operation and made clear he is now a ‘lot more’ committed to the party.
Despite all of Mr Farage’s problems, a ComRes opinion poll last night forecast that UKIP was still on course to win the European elections. It put UKIP on 35 points – with Labour on 24 and the Tories on just 20. The Lib Dems were languishing in fifth place on six points – one behind the Greens.