Daily Mail
January 13, 2014
![Unfortunately Nigel Farage does not appear to agree with his members comments. Unfortunately Nigel Farage does not appear to agree with his members comments.](/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Unfortunately-Nigel-Farage-does-not-appear-to-agree-with-his-members-comments._thumb.jpg)
Nigel Farage was last night at the centre of a new racism storm over shocking remarks made by UKIP officials about Nelson Mandela and the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
One mocked Mr Lawrence as ‘Saint Stephen’ and said his grieving mother was ‘boring us all to tears’.
Another, writing just days after Mandela’s death, said that some ‘base-born’ people were ‘intended by nature’ to be ‘slaves’.
Opponents said that the remarks – made on an internal party forum used by senior figures, including party leader Mr Farage – revealed the ‘true face’ of the party.
Some of the most shocking messages concerned Mr Lawrence, who was killed in a racist attack in South London in 1993.
Pamela Preedy, secretary of UKIP’s Redcar branch, wrote: ‘The image of Stephen Lawrence has been promoted to sainthood, with his own memorial site, constant invocation of his name in any discussion of racism; even to close down a discussion about immigration when the issue bore no relevance to his murder’.
Ms Preedy then accused David Cameron of ‘worshipping at the shrine of Saint Stephen’, complaining that ‘we are supposed to publicly mark the anniversaries of his death . . . Please give it a rest!’
![Saint Stephen of Racism. Saint Stephen of Racism.](/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Saint-Stephen-of-Racism._thumb.jpg)
Ms Preedy added in the message, left last year: ‘I’m sure his mother still grieves for him, but it’s time she did it privately without setting him up as some kind of media icon. She risks . . . boring us all to tears.’
Another contributor to the forum, Keith Woods, a UKIP council election candidate, commented as part of the same exchange: ‘As for St Stephen of Racism, I feel sorry for the parents of many white youths that have been murdered . . . no one seems to give a toss . . . your son gets murdered, you become an expert on race relations it seems . . . but only if you are a particular colour’.
The death of former South African President Nelson Mandela last month prompted some UKIP members to discuss whether it was ‘time for a reappraisal’ of the reviled apartheid system.
David William Griffiths, a member of UKIP’s West London branch, used the site to argue that some people were ‘intended by nature’ to be slaves and were ‘marked out for subjection’ from birth.
He went on to quote selectively from Hindu literature to argue that a ‘base-born man’ can ‘never conceal his real nature’.
He concluded with the offensive line: ‘That kingdom in which such b*******, sullying [the purity of] the castes, are born, perishes quickly together with its inhabitants.’
The word b******* has been removed from the quote, on the grounds that it was ‘offensive language’ which had been ‘auto-deleted’.