Labour won the Oldham West and Royton by-election yesterday, with UKIP coming in a distant second. Nigel Farage, who had been claiming their candidate was going to win easily, has gone straight to blaming immigrants

In multiple interviews, he insisted that mass immigration and the increase of ethnic minorities meant democracy had “died” in parts of Britain.

He repeatedly cited a report he claimed to have read in the Guardian last Saturday.

“The northern correspondent of the Guardian wrote last Saturday that she knocked on the doors of a street in Oldham where nobody spoke English, nobody had ever heard of Jeremy Corbyn, but they were all voting Labour,” he told the BBC.

“So there is a very large ethnic vote in this country in our inner cities. They vote Labour indeed and in one of the boxes last night it was 99% Labour and almost the electoral process is now dead in those areas.”

He went on:

“What I’m saying is that mass immigration, the change to our demographics in Britain… is fundamentally changing politics. The system is widely open to fraud and there is an ethnic element to British elections which we’ve never seen before.”

It goes without saying that the Guardian report doesn’t mention streets full of immigrants, or masses of people who don’t know who Corbyn is, but will vote for him anyway.

The race baiting and immigrant blaming started before last night, though. I follow the RSS feed of a Salford UKIP activist’s website. It’s an incoherent and often painful read, which feels like you’re being fed snippets of his stream of thought after a couple of lunch time beers. He posted a variation of Farage’s lament this morning, but, on Monday, he posted this-

Something to think about
11/30/2015
10:10 pm
Swinton South UKIP
mole45

According to the 2011 census more than 50,000 of the 220,000 population in Oldham are from an ethnic minority. There have been some reports that some Asian voters have lived in the area for more than a decade and do not speak English – but will vote Labour.

It’s worrying to me in a sense that parties could bow to the minority sector to maintain it’s power base no matter what the view of that minority was. The figures are from 2011 i would not be surprised if those figures are inflated dramatically today.

I’ve posted a screen shot from my Netvibes feed, because the original post isn’t there any more. Perhaps he had a think, or maybe someone suggested he remove it. Either way, a UKIP activist on Monday was making the same sort of claim that Farage is today.

I hope the defeat in Oldham is a sign of the great UKIP deflation that’s long overdue.