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| "Islam is a degenerate religion" |
Pandya was the utterly useless UKIP candidate for Harrow in the 2010 general election and then an unmitigated disaster in the Leicester South by-election where he called Islam a degenerate religion and called for workshy muslims to be deported. At the time he was committing political suicide in Leicester South (1 in 5 people in the constituency are muslims) he was head of research for UKIP - a position that he was forced to resign shortly afterwards.
After losing his job as head of research for UKIP, he resigned from the party and went back to the Tories where they apparently welcome the kind of intolerance that Pandya spouts and that attracts the attention of Islamophobia Watch. Which leads nicely onto his anti-UKIP rant in the Torygraph.
He says that UKIP is obsessed with "infantile stunts" that do "nothing to curb the powers of the EU". He says that it is "extraordinary" that UKIP hasn't adopted a strategy of amending EU legislation to undermine "European law".
It is because of the "infantile stunts" that UKIP - and Nigel Farage in particular - are so well known. Most people in the UK (wrongly) don't take the EU Parliament and its elections seriously so for UKIP to get enough votes in an election to an establishment that most people know very little about in an election most people don't care about takes some serious publicity and if you're not one of the multi-millionaire, state-funded political parties then you will only get that from headline-grabbing publicity stunts. If Pandya had used some of his time as head of research researching ways to win elections without "infantile stunts" he might have kept his job a bit longer.
It is also because of his beloved Conservative Party that the EU Parliament manages to pass so many damaging, undemocratic laws that undermine our interests. If the Tories stopped splitting the eurosceptic vote, UKIP would be representing the views of the majority as the majority party in the EU Parliament. At the very least, if the Tories came good on the eurosceptic credentials they profess to have at elections and followed UKIP's lead in voting against EU laws that are not in our national interest instead of collaborating with their fellow eurofederalists the flow of bad EU legislation could be stemmed.
Pandya goes on to claim that UKIP MEPs have gone native and suggests that they have a poor record on "expenses". If Pandya had spent his time as head of research researching where MEPs get their money from, he'd know that all MEPs are given the same allowance, paid directly to independent accountants and that there is no system of expenses.
He is uncharacteristically accurate when he says that UKIP is split in the opposite way to the Tories in that they are split on the EU but united on most other issues whereas UKIP is united on the EU and split on most other issues. The split is quite superficial though and UKIP is becoming increasingly centrist as a result of the healthy mixture of left and right in the membership. It hasn't resulted in the kind of defections that the Tories are experiencing every few weeks, for example. If Pandya had spend some of his time as head of research researching the views of the membership he'd have known that.
After that very brief moment of lucidity, Pandya makes the bizarre assertion that UKIP is anti-union because of the recent announcement that the party is changing its policy on devolution from opposition to support.
Thus we have a self-proclaimed "UK" Independence Party that doesn't want a "UK". This is the level of absurdity Ukip operates under. A sharp contrast to Lady Thatcher's handbrake on Scottish devolution in her first term.It may have escaped Pandya's notice but the Conservative and Unionist Party also support devolution, the only difference being that UKIP doesn't discriminate against England as far as devolution is concerned unlike the Tories. If it is absurd that the UK Independence Party should support devolution, which is inherently unionist, because it says "UK" in the party's name then it surely just as absurd that the Conservative and Unionist Party supports it when it says "Unionist" in the party's name? Pandya might have known this if he'd spent some of his time as head of research researching devolution and the Tories.
Pandya says that UKIP is opposed to immigration "in absolute terms" which is of course absolutely wrong. UKIP is opposed to uncontrolled immigration and proposes a 5 year ban on economic immigration after which economic immigration would be reinstated with a points system to ensure we only get immigrants in the quantities we need with the skills we need. The Tories, on the other hand, want a cap on non-EU immigration with no moratorium to allow unemployed people already living here to fill vacancies and maintaining uncontrolled immigration from the EU. If Pandya had spent some of his time as head of research researching his own party's immigration policy he'd have known that.
Pandya moves promptly on to another lie, claiming that the Hamilton's "have been given places on UKIP's National Executive Committee". Nobody is given a place on the NEC, they are elected to it by the membership. Neil Hamilton stood for election to the NEC and he was elected to it by a ballot of the membership. If Pandya had spent some of his time as head of research researching how his own party works he'd have known that.
He finishes off saying that bringing down the Tories would benefit Labour "and another Labour victory is the last thing the country needs". He's partly right - the last thing the country needs is a Labour, Tory or Lib Dem victory. All of them are wedded to the anti-democratic EU and committed to establishing a police state and all of them are economically illiterate and fundamentally dishonest.
Every time Pandya puts pen to paper, he shows the full extent of his ignorance and extremist opinions. Pandya is exactly the sort of person we don't want or need in UKIP and exactly the sort of person who we want to see in the Tories, lost amongst all the other fake eurosceptics and kept out of harm's way.
I'll leave you with a reminder of Abhijit Pandya's description of David Cameron less than 6 months ago:
Simply a lazy, boozy holiday seeking charlatan practising the shallow, intellectually vacant, dark arts of public relations at the tax-payer’s expense to enjoy the emotional Prozac like boost that comes from the self-congratulation of being in office.Don't let the door hit you on the way out Anhijit.
Stuart Parr is a 
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