UKIP are not a breath of fresh air – but one of Thatcher's stale farts

Nigel Farage is routinely described as a ‘breath of fresh air’ by zealous UKIP converts.

His ‘People’s Army’ acolytes praise him as that rarest of rare things: a ‘straight talking’ politician - in contrast to sneering Westminster careerists who constantly gloss over what they really think.

Furthermore, Faragists say he is an anti-establishment champion of the working man, whom he wants to empower by throwing off the shackles of EU bureaucracy.

The trouble is that all this radical rhetoric is total guff. UKIP are not so much of a breath of fresh air as one of Margaret Thatcher’s stale farts.

Until last year, when he began assiduously courting traditional Labour voters (who consider the former Tory premier a villain), the beer-supping UKIP boss had proudly proclaimed that he was the only politician ‘keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive’.

In fact, Mr Farage (pictured with a Mrs Thatcher mug in 2013) and his party’s elite are such fans of Britain’s most right-wing modern prime minister that they have dared to stand in political territory where even the Iron Lady might have feared to tread.

In its 2010 manifesto, UKIP proposed a 31% flat-rate income tax that would slash taxes for the rich while forcing the poorest to pay more.

Mr Farage, who later described that policy document as ‘drivel’ and tried to distance himself from it until it emerged that he had written the foreword, has more recently suggested keeping the progressive system but reducing the top rate to 40%.

But that still means a 5% cut on the 45% currently paid by top earners and 10% less than the 50% Labour want to levy on incomes above £150 if they are elected.

He remains firm on scrapping National Insurance - and losing the £110billion a year it raises.

Yet his tax plans are pretty tame on the Thatcherite scale compared to his wish to privatise the NHS - a dream so daring that the Iron Lady only spoke of it in secret.
But, following outrage at his suggestion of introducing an American-style insurance system, he was forced to make a U-turn and pledge to leave it in state hands.

Another back-of-the-fag-packet UKIP policy that may or may not still be on offer when the party release their 2015 manifesto is scrapping statutory maternity pay.

This mirrors Mr Farage’s boyhood hero Mrs Thatcher, whose Tory government axed the universal maternity grant in 1987, which ensured that half of all working mothers went unpaid after giving birth.

And, strangely for a party that his built support on the back of contempt for Westminster politics, UKIP advocate raising MPs’ salaries to £100,000 and giving them more say over their expenses.

Furthermore, Mr Farage has advocated more savage public spending cuts than even the back-to-the-1930s Tories have suggested in a bid to close the £86billion deficit.

And UKIP’s planned £22billion annual savings from quitting the EU and axing Britain’s foreign aid budget would not spare hard-working families any pain.

This is because, at current government spending levels, the party’s promised tax cuts could leave a £200billion hole in the budget, according to some estimates.

Bizarrely, Mr Farage’s Thatcherite programme of cuts puts him at odds with his own party’s voters, most of whom crave an expanded state and higher public spending.

Polling by YouGov shows that 78 per cent support the nationalisation of the energy companies and 73 per cent back the renationalisation of the railways.

Another 57 per cent want zero-hours contracts to be banned, rather than the tame ‘code of conduct’ for employers that Mr Farage suggests.

The same number support the reintroduction of the 50p income tax rate, rather than 5% cut for the rich.

A majority of UKIP voters are also believed to support Labour’s plan for a mansion tax.

Yet, rather than discouraging wealthy international investors from parking their money in Britain’s much-needed residential property while paying little tax and causing house prices to rocket far beyond average wage increases, Mr Farage would rather concentrate his vile rage at ordinary, civic-minded Eastern European workers.

And, by the way, these same immigrants would likely be replaced by a similar number of Britons forced to return from Europe if we left the EU – so it would hardly alleviate our housing crisis.

The UKIP leader, who last year claimed to be ‘not on the right or left’ and says he’s ‘anti-establishment’ and a ‘radical’, must either be confused about what these words mean or is lying to boost his popularity.

So let me provide a lesson to Mr Farage that he perhaps didn’t learn at posh Dulwich College, which currently charges £36,325 a year to educate new members of the elite.

Wanting to give tax cuts to millionaires while slashing benefits to ordinary people is rightwing – and very much in the mould of Mrs Thatcher.

And you can’t claim to be anti-establishment when you want to leave all the wealth and real power in the hands of the same people – because, even if Britain did leave the European Union, under UKIP the country’s wallet-stuffing class would still retain their ever-expanding wealth, privilege and the growing inequality that goes with it.

Nor, Mr Farage, can you claim to be anti-establishment when you have more privately-educated candidates than any party except the Tories and include such luminary members of the elite as the Earl of Dartmouth (not to mention super-rich backers like castle-owning tycoon Stuart Wheeler).

And if you really wanted to empower ordinary men and women, you might want to stop attacking trade unionists, who remain by far the most likely working class people to enter that closed world of Westminster politics you like to moan about.

And while privatising the NHS would indeed be radical – radically rightwing – you can’t also claim to be radical if you refuse to challenge the four-decade-old Thatcherite consensus against the state intervening in the market.

After all, Mr Farage, your eagerness to scrap the NHS (even if it is not official policy) speaks volumes about a dogmatic faith in privatisation.

And like your other political convictions, they reside firmly on the Thatcherite right of the spectrum and now belong in the dustbin of history.