The Resistible Rise of Nigel Farage

Elections to the European Parliament will be held on 22 May, and if you watch TV you may have noticed that, it being election time, the parties are given slots to make election broadcasts. Most people switch over or switch off at that point, but if you are interested in the way we are governed, some interesting conclusions can be drawn.

The Plaid Cymru broadcast featured shots of Jill Evans MEP among others, mentioned some of the party's policies including an ambitious apprenticeship scheme which could be part-funded by the EU, and drove home the message that Plaid is the only one of the parties to put Wales and Welsh interests at the heart of its campaign.

UKIP's latest broadcast featured a 30-something year old man called Andre Lampitt. No sooner had the broadcast been aired than it turned out that Lampitt, who was born in Zimbabwe, has political views which would have gone down a storm at party rallies in Nuremberg in the 1930s.

Africa should be left to the Africans so that they can kill themselves off. Ed Milliband is, Lampitt believes, not British but Polish. Muslims are animals. And much more of the same, all posted by Mr Lampitt in semi-literate English on social media websites.

An embarrassed Nigel Farage later suspended him from the party, but there are plenty more Lampitts in UKIP, and the party has been busy stoking the fires of xenophobia with a series of billboard posters with messages such as, "26 million people in Europe are looking for work. And whose jobs are they after?" (a finger points out at you - yes, you).

The latest UKIP fiasco is another billboard poster depicting what purports to be an out of work "British" builder. "EU policy at work. British workers are hard hit by unlimited cheap labour". It turns out that the man in the picture is not a builder but an Irish actor.

For the record, Ed Milliband's father was born in Belgium in 1924 to parents originally from Poland. He came to Britain in 1940. A few million people in Britain would fail the UKIP poster boy's citizenship test on that score.

The Tories' broadcast, on the other hand, had an air of desperation about it as it tried to sell David Cameron's half-baked and doomed attempt to negotiate new terms of membership and a promise to hold a referendum.

A mad dog and a rabit caught in the headlights, perhaps, but at least both parties talked about Europe, what with these being European elections.

The Labour Party managed to pull off the trick of producing a broadcast which not once mentioned Europe, Brussels or UKIP. Instead it spent the first half talking about the cost of living, fuel prices and the cost of childcare before moving on to attack first the Tories and then the Liberal Democrats. Not one of the issues raised has anything to do with the EU.

Attacking the LibDems really is like flogging the proverbial dead horse, and they really need not have bothered.

UKIP, on the other hand, is the antithesis of everything Labour is supposed to stand for and the most dangerous development in British politics in living memory. And yet it is the elephant in Labour's room.

UKIP is likely to pick up more votes from disaffected Tories than anywhere else, but the latest poster campaign is clearly pitched at white working class voters, a group Labour has neglected before in parts of London and the north-west of England with the result that extreme right wing groups like the BNP picked up council seats.

The calculation that Labour's election strategists appear to be making is that their enemy's enemy should be allowed to get on with it. It's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui being played out for real.