The UKIP leader managed to miss a reception on Friday evening, one in which people had paid £25 for the privilege of hearing Nigel speak (insert joke here about limited sympathy for those who would pay that much to hear Farage talk crap). He had an excuse at the ready for why he missed it, however. How many guesses do you need to nail down what it was?
Come on, you say, even Nigel Farage couldn’t blame his own lack of professionalism on immigration. Take it away, Nige:
“It took me six hours and 15 minutes to get here – it should have taken three-and-a-half to four. That is nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a population that is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be.”
That’s so priceless a quote, I feel like having it placed on a poster of Farage and having it hung in my front corridor. Is there nothing the man cannot find to blame on the scourge of foreign types plaguing our land?
It’s particularly galling to hear a libertarian to complain about something that involves a public service being inconvenient. But, sorry I forgot – Farage has given up on libertarianism. He’s now a born again social democrat, saving the NHS singlehandedly, if campaigning leaflets in certain parts of the country are to be believed. Well, as he’s a newbie to the whole world of the “social democratic consensus” (one his old phrases), I’m here to let him know that the problem is not immigration at all, but lack of proper infrastructure. What we need is high speed railways criss-crossing the country, reliving our overworked motorways. Problem is, the Right don’t want to spend the money and the Left, perversely, spend a great deal of energy saying they don’t want big infrastructure projects built. So we live without the railways we require and thus mashups like the one that kept scores of Kippers from enjoy the fruits of Nigel Farage’s boundless wisdom will keep happening into the foreseeable future. Because even if everyone who wasn’t British born left tomorrow, we’d still have traffic queues on the M4. And we wouldn’t have the immigrants, who contribute more in tax revenues per head than the domestic population, to pay for them. Or a functioning NHS to care for those who crashed their vehicles due to the road rage caused by said traffic difficulties, now that all of the foreign doctors and nurses had gone away.
On a final note, Mark Reckless tweeted to remind us that the Tory candidate for Rochester & Strood had complained about immigrants clogging up the roadways herself. Yes, the fact that the Conservative Party can be just as nasty as UKIP when it comes to immigration most of us needed no reminding of, but thanks for your contribution to the debate, Mark.
Government statistics show that road usage in most areas is still from 2 to 20% below the peak levels of 2005 to 2007.
Thus, during much of the time that Farage has been getting louder and louder about immigration increasing, the traffic isn’t as bad as it used to be.
This means his recent outburst in even more nonsensical than it first appears.