Two extremes tapping into voter despair

They are two of the most controversial candidates in the British election and, by chance, they both tipped up in a run-down corner of Kent to canvass yesterday.

Ukip’s anti-immigration firebrand Nigel Farage and the Happy Mondays self-styled freaky dancer, Mark ‘Bez’ Berry, did not actually cross paths, but their campaigns did criss-cross in very different ways in their bids to try and tap into the voter despair and disillusionment that has marked this election out like no other.

The dilapidated seaside town of Ramsgate was meant to be the launch pad for Ukip’s lunge into Westminster, but plunging poll ratings have made it Nigel’s last stand as he struggles for election, which may be why he was on the backfoot, while Bez, with very little to lose, could not have been more in the media’s face.

When the Irish Examiner contacts Ukip to see when we could follow Farage on the campaign trail, the chap on the other end of the line — they like to call themselves Kippers — is brutally frank: “It’s proving counter-productive enough when the British press tags along. I don’t think we’d be too keen on the foreign press as well.”

Foreigners, eh? Who needs ‘em!

Bez, on the other hand, proves unstoppable in the Evolution cafe, as he holds forth on why he he got into politics with the We Are Reality Party.

“I started fighting the revolution four years ago, and I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, so I took it to the next level, which is forming a political party — even though it’s not a revolutionary act in itself.

“You can’t be a revolutionary if you are engaging with the system, but we are engaging with the system in a revolutionary way, if you know what I mean,” he says.

The refreshing opposite of Farage’s crude, myopic nationalism, Bez is an avowed internationalist who links the emergence of Ireland’s hated water tax to the Battle of Waterloo.

“What we are seeing now is a thing called TTIP — the Trans-Atlantic Trade Investment Partnership — it’s happening in Ireland all the time, that’s why you’ve got to pay for water — everything is being sold off to private companies.

“What we are seeing is this TTIP and privatisation of everything, its the transfer of power between Masonic houses, so what’s happening is that power is shifting from the Hanovarien mother lodge to the Stuarts and the Knights Templars, which are the Americans, the French, the Germans, they are all part of that lodge.

“The privatisation, everything we see today, is the result of this deal what was done 200 years ago at the Battle of Waterloo.”

Bez is not actually standing against Farrage in Kent, but battling for parliament in Salford, the place fittingly immortalised in the song ‘Dirty Old Town’, given his green, anti-fracking agenda.

On the face of it affably eccentric, there is a darker side to Bez, and when pressed on his 2010 conviction for assault against a former girlfriend, and how can he aspire to be a lawmaker when he does not accept the rule of law in his own case, he provides the strangest comments yet.

“Yeah, but I’ve never fiddled with the kids,” he says. “That’s the main thing, I’ve no convictions for kiddy fiddling — paedophilia — I’ve not been involved in paedophilia cover-ups. I’m a victim of the system.”

Farage is feeling the heat after a campaign that failed to catch fire, despite his shameful efforts to try and link immigrants to HIV and pressure on the NHS.

The only other seat Ukip has a shot at is just up the coast at another run-down, shabby resort — Clacton. Both constituencies cling on to England, much like Ukip clings on to an image of England in the 1950s that never really existed then, and could never be achieved now.

But, like Bez, Farage aspires to the balance of power, and a knife-edge election tips on the most unlikely of axis, while the Tories are hoping the royal birth will give them a boost as it unleashes a nationalistic feelgood factor.

Even the dress sense of Kate and Wills was fed into the political zeitgeist as they left the hospital with the little princess. It did not go without comment that William was in Tory blue and Kate in Lib Dem yellow, with some insisting this was a colour branding to signal support for the status quo.

Conspiracy theorists noted that Cameron is the Queen’s fifth cousin after all.

When told the royal baby came in at 8lb, 3oz, Farrage saw another Euro-bashing chance and declared: “Imperial measurements! Proper measurements!”

Though he often comes across as character who has escaped from a ropey 1970s sit-com, Farrage has made much of the political weather in England, topping the share of the vote at the Euro elections, so is finding the slide in the opinion poll ratings hard to take.

Ramsgate should be ideal territory for his xenophobic brand of nationalism, an elderly and working poor population in a run-down corner of Kent that is overwhelmingly white.

Indeed, virtually the only non-white person I encountered was the British-Asian taxi driver who ferried me from the railway station — and he’s toying with voting Ukip because he claims the influx of east European immigrants are work-shy compared to their Indian-Pakistani predecessors.

This is a fascinatingly weird election.