Statement on this weekends protest in Margate:

The events of the past few weeks, and resulting manifestation in Thanet of a Far Right event, run by a party calling for both a ‘Holy War’, and the deportation of 5 million people from the UK, is no surprise to the Thanet Liberal Democrats. 

This mess is the result of mainstream political parties adopting regressive standpoints in order to appease small but highly vocal factions in the UK, factions sponsored by dark power brokers whose end goal is simply the collapse of decent progressive society, and chaos.

Brexit was a key empowerment for those wishing to bring about the end of the UK being a stable nation. At first, the Tory party decided to abandon all of its historical common sense, and take the delusional stance of Brexit being a workable situation. This predictably has led to a downward spiral that made the country a laughing stock. 

Last year, the desperation for this all to end resulted in a Labour landslide. It’s fair to say most decent people were simply relieved that a return to some form of stable centrism was back, but the relief was very short lived. 

Keir Starmer’s government has gone out of its way, to both collude in the ongoing Brexit nightmare, and also to act as a mouthpiece for the very worst of far right narratives, from statements that deliberately mirror Enoch Powell, to even the unthinkable suggestion that the sacred post WW2 European Convention of Human Rights, that was created by leaders like Winston Churchill, can be upended on a whim by governments, despite its whole purpose being to act as a sacred protection from such behaviour.

The net result of Labour’s actions is to legitimise such Far Right narrative as acceptable, inevitable, and moral. This has opened the floodgates to out and out civil division and extremism as a norm. 

The likes of Reform UK, UKIP and its newly defected Councillor Amelia Randall, calling for Holy War are sadly just a predictable result of government not having the moral backbone to call out to the public simple rights and wrongs, and to accept hate speech as freedom of speech, all in the name of political fashion. 

Labour MPs should know better, but are on the one hand, decrying the state of affairs, whilst following silently, with little or no moral objection. 

And the icing on Labour’s cake, is its announcement of digital IDs, which to anyone with even a basic working knowledge of history is a dangerous step, that will hand absolute and devastating power to any belligerent future UK governments. It is a knee jerk, ill thought out panic response the country does not need, at a time when we have millions of people below the poverty line. 

It’s clear by any measure of decency that the Tories, Labour, Reform UK and UKIP are not the answer to the problems the UK faces. 

In Thanet in particular, UKIP has caused such egregious damage to both local democracy and the physical state of the area, that any defection to this party is an insult to the feelings of all residents. 

As a party, we are stunned that the whole squalid affair of a councillor declaring Holy Wars and calling for mass deportations, has not been subject to any higher level of scrutiny.

In 2015 Farage’s UKIP came to Margate, spilling a cacophony of lies and misinformation about Thanet.  As decent people, we peacefully protested against them, as we will do again this Saturday. 

It is something we do with the greatest of sadness, as it should never fall to the hands of decent people to have to protect their community from disgusting bigoted aggression, neither should any government be engaging in such behaviour. 

But we need to be crystal clear; it is not the people coming down to protest that are the main problem here. 

It is those multiple parties and actors who have endlessly misled them over years, through a neatly created set of false narratives, and a broken system that allows such evil division of our humanity to be normalised. 

We ask all locally elected representatives who genuinely feel saddened, scared, and angry at this sad state of division to look upwards in their own parties, and decide whether supporting such a party is truly helping the situation, or just enabling it. 

Thanet Liberal Democrats.