Comments by "" (@Bungle-UK) on "Is farage xenophobic and is he a racist?" video.

It’s the usual lazy tropes that people throw at Farage - calling him racist or xenophobic is as simplistic as Steve Coogan calling monarchists ‘idiots’. Farage loves his country and believes the best traditions of it should be upheld….what’s wrong with that?
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@kevrussell5972 I’ve never heard his make either of those statements. He feels immigration levels are too high (which they patently are) but has never advocated zero immigration. His first wife was Irish and his current wife is German - marrying foreigners would be an odd thing to do if you couldn’t stand them.
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@adeko8578 As Nigel has shown.
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On what basis is Farage racist?
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@badbones777 Perhaps the issue is that neither his supporters nor his detractors fully listen to the detail of what he says. He has never said he dislikes foreign people, and has never advocated zero immigration or sending legal immigrants ‘home’. Indeed he has worked internationally almost his whole life and has married two foreign nationals, with his kids holding dual UK/German nationality. Perhaps people see his nationalism as, by default, disliking ‘foreigners’ in the same was as Sturgeon was portrayed as hating the English by loving Scotland.
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@badbones777 We may have to respectfully agree to disagree as I feel a lot of the nuance of what is actually said gets lost in translation. To pick the HIV comment, as an example, I remember him making it at a tv debate (2015 general election debate I believe) and he was actually making a point about ‘medical tourism’ and the cost to the NHS by pointing out that we don’t screen people that are moving here for illnesses, and he was asking the question of whether it was right for a HIV-positive foreign national to move here and receive free treatment. Note, he wasn’t saying they shouldn’t come here, he was questioning their immediate access to free healthcare for a pre-existing condition and whether they should contribute to the cost. Now, we could argue that he picked that example, despite such cases really bring a drop in the ocean for the NHS budget, because it plays into the ‘blame foreigners’ narrative. Or, we could say it’s a legitimate example of NHS waste. I see parallels with Corbyn….you may not agree here. Corbyn was portrayed as a terrorist sympathetic that hates Jews and this country, none of which is really true I’d like to think. However, his action fed that narrative and threw red meat to some rather unsavoury characters on the left. Indeed, Corbyn talked about a’kindler, gentler politics’ but turned a blind eye to very aggressive and hateful behaviour by some of his supporters both online and in real life - I’ve seen the bile coming from my local Labour Party and it isn’t pretty. So, both Corbyn and Farage present a certain persona while both attracting and not distancing themselves from some rather unpleasant fringe elements. As they say, all politicians are chameleons.
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