So Nigel Farage went to Edinburgh yesterday and was barracked by fifty or so middle class types who disrupted his press conference. The police were called and he had to leave in the back of a police van, before telling anyone who would listen that the demonstrators were "fascist scum," and the matter is still rumbling. My guess is that our Nige will emerge the victor in all this in the eyes of ordinary people who tend to regard students as a privileged rabble who should really keep their gobs shut around normal people.
Now, clearly the rabble may have been scum, but they were not fascist by any stretch of the imagination. They are just the children of privilege who think that their puerile views are of interest to the rest of us. Once they graduate they will go off and earn a fortune in the City, but in the meantime they are letting off steam. What they have managed to do over the past couple of decades is to define certain terms and concepts themselves and then judge other people by the yardsticks that they have created. So they accused Farage of being xenophobic on the grounds that they said he was xenophobic. The fact that he is married to a German and speaks German fluently is neither here nor there: these people set the terms, remember?
The question is why do we allow them to set the terms of debate? The sensible thing to do would be to ignore them and let the voting figures do the talking. It would also help if Farage took a leaf out of the others parties' books and held his meetings in secure venues, guarded by party stewards.
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