Nigel Farage. Image: Flickr/ European Parliament
We have been hearing a great deal about UKIP over the last few months, although their level of support appears to be fading as next week’s election draws closer. Nonetheless, I have endeavoured to inform myself as to this relatively new political phenomenon; and I recently spent a couple of hours perusing the party’s general election manifesto.
And here I discovered something of an anomaly. For here is a party which claims to stand for the ‘independence’ of the United Kingdom, and which makes great play with the notion of reclaiming Britain’s ‘sovereignty’, so that this country may once again take its true place among the nations. But when we come down to specifics, we find these two concepts strangely narrowed, wrenched from the meanings in which I, for one, had grown accustomed to seeing them.
