Resurrection Tweets

In a truly irresponsible bit of work avoidance I started tweeting imagined conversations following Jesus's return on Easter Sunday. This kind of got out of hand and I ended up tweeting over 50 times following the story. Anyway, some people liked it so I storified it and you can read it HERE.

NTXX

Earlier today, the Glasgow-based theatre maker Vickie Beesley tweeted a sign, spotted outside the National Theatre (on that statue of Olivier as Henry V, I'm guessing). This is what it says:

And quite right too. Rufus Norris has to improve on his predecessor's lamentable record in directing plays by women.

In fact, the National Theatre has a pretty poor track record for programming plays by women. The first show with any kind of textual contribution by a woman to hit the South Bank is probably Candleford which was adapted by Keith Dewhurst in 1979 from the book by Flora Thompson. The first play by a woman to grace any of the three main stages was Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine in the Lyttelton in 1980. The first new play by a woman was Neaptide by Sarah Daniels in 1986, almost a quarter of a century after the National Theatre was founded. The first new play by a woman to make the largest stage at the National, the Olivier, was Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin in 2008, a full 32 years after the Olivier opened. At the National's lavish 50th anniversary gala, there was only one play by a woman represented: London Road by Alecky Blythe (and, let's not forget, the composer Adam Cork). But sadly, they didn't have very much to choose from. The National has been pretty bad at putting women's plays on its stages.

But I was wondering whether it's fair to single our Nick Hytner.  I thought I'd check. How much better did Nick's predecessors do?

The answer is: very badly. In fact, you want to know something shocking? Only once has a sitting artistic director of the National Theatre directed a play by a woman. Hands up if you know the director and the play?

I'll tell you. In 1968, Laurence Olivier co-directed The Advertisement by Natalia Ginzburg at the Old Vic.

And that's it. It was 47 years ago.

Put another way, neither Peter Hall, nor Richard Eyre, nor Trevor Nunn nor Nick Hytner ever directed a play by a woman. Not a single play by a woman has been directed by the artistic director at the National's home on the South Bank since it opened almost 40 years ago. And Ginzburg's play was co-directed. The artistic director of the National Theatre has only ever directed half of a play by a woman.

Let’s just compare this with the record of the National Theatre of Scotland. Since its foundation in 2006, Vicky Featherstone has directed Abi Morgan’s 27, Sam Holcroft’s Cockroach, Cathy Forde's Empty and Zinnie Harris’s The Wheel, while Laurie Samson has directed the three plays that made up Rona Munro’s The James Plays. There may be more but in only 9 years, they are doing twelve-and-a-half times better than the National Theatre in London has done in 51 years. 

Seriously, Rufus, this is an open goal. You could change this horrible record by the end of the year. Do it!

UPDATE: The actor Nick Holder has just pointed out to me that Rufus Norris's first directing job  as AD is Everyman in a new version by Carol Ann Duffy. Which is great and she'll undoubtedly have done a very strong new version. It would still be great to see a play wholly authored by a woman directed by the artistic director though, right?

I ♡ The Frog Chorus

When Paul McCartney dies, as some day sadly he must, some asshat on Twitter is going to bring up The Frog Chorus. That is, the single 'We All Stand Together', credited to Paul McCartney and the Frog Chorus, a song written for a cartoon film of Rupert the Bear, and released as a single in 1984, getting to number 3 in the UK charts, universally referred to as The Frog Chorus.

This asshat is going to point to The Frog Chorus as the centrepiece of their irrelevant and ignorant opinion that Paul McCartney is overrated or even just plain rubbish. This will take one of two forms (there will be asshats queuing up to give both of these opinions): one view is that Paul McCartney was good in The Beatles, but after The Beatles he was rubbish and Exhibit A will be The Frog Chorus. The Frog Chorus, these asshats will declare, is everything that's wrong with Paul McCartney: it's sickly sweet and it's sentimental and it's childish and it doesn't ROCK. The second view, even more fucking moronic, is that Paul McCartney wasn't even all that good in The Beatles and that John Lennon was the real genius and if you want proof of how shit Paul McCartney was when he wasn't able to ride on John Lennon's coat-tails, Exhibit A is The Frog Chorus. These asshats will survey Paul McCartney's contributions to The Beatles and these tin-eared halfwits will bring forward 'Ob-la-di Ob-la-da' and 'When I'm Sixty-Four' and 'All Together Now' and 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' and claim that (a) these are all dreadful songs (which they're not) and (b) they are what all Paul McCartney was ever capable of. When Paul McCartney dies, as sadly one day he must, these asshats should be rounded up placed in a prison ship and forced to listen to 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Maybe I'm Amazed' until they admit that they are asshats.

Let me tell you something: The Frog Chorus is a fucking magnificent song. First of all, it's a children's song. How is it necessary to say this? It's a children's song. Of course it's childish: it's written for kids. And what's more it's a gorgeous children's song. If you hate The Frog Chorus you must basically hate (a) kids, (b) yourself (because you were once, all too briefly, a kid), and (c) music. Because where the asshats are right is that The Frog Chorus epitomises Paul McCartney - except it shows us everything amazing about Paul McCartney as a composer and nothing bad.

First there's the melody: it does that thing that McCartney has so often managed, writing a song that is so catchy, feels so natural, flows so easily, that you can't quite believe no one ever thought of that tune before (other great examples: 'Yesterday', 'Penny Lane', 'Hey Jude' and, yes, 'Mull of Kintyre'). And listen to the twisting vertical quality of the melody. In the first lines listen to the way we soar from an E up a 4th on 'lose' and 'swim'; then we reach even further to the C for 'one THING...' before we waltz so gracefully down the other side of the melody on '...is certain we'll never give in'. And then we're dipping down on 'side' and 'hand' before the title line lands us the lower C of 'all' bounces and then finally back there on the last syllable of 'together', the whole tune therefore climbing and descending a full octave.

The arrangement is a delight too. Despite its reputation, it's not schmaltzy; it's very spare. George Martin - of course it is - has delivered a characteristically restrained orchestration; listen to the elegant little flute flourish that takes us from the first to the second verse, repeated on the violins between the two iterations of the middle eight. The opening of belching bullfrogs ('Bom... Bom Bom') is witty and rhythmically robust (Paul McCartney being one of the most inventive and melodic bass players in pop creates a typically memorable bass line) and then in the second verse the bass voices are answered by a nicely crunchy alto harmony ('ah-ee-ah') which brings a welcome sourness to the arrangement. The middle eight soars romantically, and, second time round, the grouchy bass frogs bubble up to counterpoint the tune and cut through any sweetness (reminiscent of McCartney's fluent bass playing high on the fretboard for songs like 'Come Together' or 'With a Little Help From My Friends'; so inexhaustible was his thirst for melody in the late 1960s he kept finding new tunes in the bass lines).

And the lyrics. Well, McCartney's not Dylan and never tries to be. Paul McCartney typically feels his way through a melody improvising dummy lyrics and sometimes those lyrics get worked and reworked into something truly elegant and powerful ('Eleanor Rigby', 'For No One') and sometimes they remain the dummy lyrics and they work just fine ('Get Back' or 'the movement you need is on your shoulder' in 'Hey Jude'). And where McCartney's open-hearted improvisations always take him are to love and joy and togetherness. Here they work just fine: 'Win or lose / Sink or swim / One thing is certain: we'll never give in. / Side by side / Hand in hand / We all stand together'. What's not to like about that? You can see it as a vacuous declaration of undying devotion or you might see it as a rather stirring expression of political solidarity. The feeling of the lyrics are underpinned by the sumptuous and loving music, the generosity of the melody and the layered abundance of the arrangement. It's a performance that loves life and loves the world and loves music and loves us.

Of course, none of these asshats will pay attention to this because these asshats never pay attention to anything much. Responding to art with openness and delicacy is hard and makes you vulnerable; much easier to recycle received ideas and scorn lovely things. Paul McCartney has a good claim to be the greatest songwriter Britain has ever produced and The Frog Chorus is a beautiful example of his genius with melody. Bom bom bom bom.

Peer Review

I'm going to come right out and say it: I hate peer review. If you're not an academic, you might not know (or care) what peer review is. Basically, when you write something for a publisher, they will send it out to peer review. That means your book proposal, or a draft of your chapter, or your journal article, or your book manuscript is sent to two or three readers who comment on your work. The convention, generally applied, is that your name is known to the readers, but the readers' names are not known to you. The idea of that is to ensure that the reader can be dispassionate in their assessment of the quality of your work, without worrying that you are criticising someone who may one day be on an interview panel or assessing your own work. This is important of course because academic standards could be seriously compromised if the readers changed their expressed opinions out of a sense of deference, obligation or fear.

But there are risks to anonymous peer review as well. In 2007, I finished a first draft of my short book Theatre & Globalization and sent it off to the publisher who dispatched it to readers for commentary. Three reviews came back. One was complimentary; the second had some serious criticisms; the third was horrible. And by horrible, I mean the reviewer didn't just criticise the book or the argument, he criticised me. He suggested that my opinions were deplorable and the book arrogant; he made clear that he thought a discussion of globalization that drew on Marxist views was disgraceful and, conversely, refused to accept that Kant had any place in the argument. He felt that my tendency not to cite a huge amount of North American theatre was parochial (he was himself North American). The comments were kind of bitchy. Basically, he made it very clear that he didn't like me.

I can take criticism. I mean, I don't like it: who does? But I can take criticism. When you have a play on, you have to learn how to take the swift little rabbit punch of a bad review. Running an academic department, as I have been for the last three-and-a-half years, you learn to expect a drip-feed of disgruntlement from colleagues and students and how not to take it personally. But there's something peculiarly upsetting about anonymous criticism. It was clear from the tone that the person knew me and had, probably prior to reading the manuscript of my book, taken a dislike to me. But I didn't know who. So I was left with this strong sense that someone somewhere, who I'd probably met, really didn't like me. It could be anyone.

I'll be honest; it really upset me. It hit my confidence in my work, my sense of how I come across, my faith in my ability to communicate. It took me over a year to feel I could write something again. And I'm pretty robust: I'd been in academia for almost 15 years, had already made professor. Imagine what a more junior academic might have felt? And it was definitely the anonymity that did it: at one point, a distant colleague who had heard that I'd been very upset by one of the reports on my book, very kindly outed herself as one of the readers. Immediately, I felt relief, although we soon worked out that she'd written the second report (with the reasonable criticisms). The relief when I thought she had written the harshest report is that I could now understand where those criticisms were coming from. But instead, academic publishing seems to be organised through these one-way mirrors that breed paranoia, hurt and ill-feeling.

It's like internet trolls. I don't mind people criticising me when they say who they are. It's when you get some nasty little vomit of spite from someone called BritTheatreFan or PoliticalPony that you feel like someone's stuck you in a blindfold and is spanking you. And that may sound sexy but as any submissive will tell you, it's when the dom(me) actually wants to do you harm that you need to worry.

In part, it's about ego. If your critic can be anyone, then it could be everyone; maybe everyone hates you. But also if your critic can be anyone, they might be the most brilliant and saintly person in your field, someone by whom it would be crushing to be disliked. If you know who is criticising you, it makes it easier to deal with: just as if you get a bad review from Quentin Letts, no one with the slightest brain is going to give a shit, you can always deal with the initial disappointment of a bad book report from Professor XYZ by reminding yourself that Professor XYZ is a complete fool that you've always hated anyway and, if anything, you'd be more worried if he'd liked it.

But more seriously, knowing who is expressing the criticisms is intellectually much more sound. Knowing that Professor XYZ thinks you shouldn't be using Marx makes more sense when one knows that Professor XYZ offered a critique of the Marxian influence in theatre studies in his 2008 book. It allows you to place the criticism in a structure rather than simply having to bare your chest to the lightning bolt from Olympus.

It's hard to know what the way out of this problem is. You can't easily make the writer of the manuscript anonymous; in a field like Theatre and Performance, you usually have a good idea of who it is working in your field, so when an article shows up you will, if you've been to a few conferences recently, have a fairly good idea who wrote it. The problems of deference are, I suppose, important, though I wonder if they are quite as serious as they are made out to be. (I guess I'll find out: one of the consequences of getting that nasty report is that I've decided always to de-anonymise myself, even if I'm writing a very critical report. Maybe this will one day come back to haunt me, but I suspect not.) 

But there should be some ground rules that publishers need to ensure the reviewers follow: it's not about you (yes, we know you'd have written it differently, so what?); play the ball not the player (never get personal, don't let your own frustrations and disappointment and annoyance show); try to be helpful (never just be negative, offer practical constructive criticism); kill your bugbears (remember that academia is about debate; if you don't agree with it, that's exciting; if you have a chip on your shoulder, get rid of it); be real specific (if there's a mistake, that's helpful to know; if you just didn't like the second half of the essay for some reason you can't put your finger on, either put your finger on it or keep it to yourself). And the final rule is make nice: publishers, if the report hasn't stuck to these rules, rewrite or paraphrase its contents to the author. 

You'll notice that I've referred to my anonymous reviewer as 'he' and mentioned that he's a North American. That's because I cunningly managed to work out who it was.  (And I'm pretty sure that, if he'd known I'd find out who he was, he'd have tempered his comments and made them more constructive, which is kind of my point.) He's a distinguished North American academic in the twilight of his career; this means that, even if I wanted to, I couldn't wreak any kind of revenge. But it has given me the satisfaction of realising that he's a complete fool that I've always hated anyway and, if anything, I'd be more worried if he'd liked it.

Good Old-Fashioned Racism

Ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses. We have something to celebrate. Racism, that scourge of centuries past, is gone and gone for good. This is great news! Cheers! Well done everybody!

Jeremy Clarkson knows what I'm talking about. It's been widely reported that the Top Gear presenter has been suspended by the BBC after punching his producer and calling him a 'lazy Irish cunt'. Apparently Clarkson was drunk and annoyed by his food options. In darker times, this might have been seen as a violent racist assault. But, as I write, 925,796 people have signed a petition calling for his reinstatement. Charlie Houghton from Chelmsford remarked 'Jeremy is a bastion of light in a dark PC world' and 1,666 people have 'liked' this remark. Which is fine because, in our new enlightened times, this isn't racist at all; it's a blow against political correctness.

This has been swiftly followed by the BBC Trust, wisely observing that when the Top Gear team used the word 'Pikey' they weren't being racist. Nor were they being racist in 2008 or 2009 or 2012, when they used the term as an insult. This used to be a racist term to refer to Gypsies and Travellers, but that was when there was such a thing as racism. Now it harmlessly refers to something that's nasty and poor and working class, so no one can possibly be offended by it.

This comes hard on the heels of the team having made the word 'slope' (to refer to an Asian man) non-racist by transforming it magically into 'typically ebullient, rather wonderful tribute to a beautiful, hidden country'; their triumphant reclaiming of the formerly-racist idea that a typical Mexican is a 'lazy, feckless, flatulent oaf' into something that's funny and definitely not racist; Clarkson also cleverly magicked the racism out of the word 'nigger' by insisting he didn't say it and then, when footage emerged of him saying it, explaining that he didn't say it, he merely didn't try hard enough not to say it, which is a difference that definitely makes sense and means he isn't racist.* Anyway, how could he be a racist? According to his friend A A Gill, 'Jeremy does not just present, he comes up with the ideas, he also writes the scripts. All those jokes and that banter are not off-the-cuff wit'. See? He wrote these supposed racial slurs beforehand. Ergo, not racist.

I guess the problem is some people seem to be stuck in the seventies, when there used to be racism. But to those people I say, come into the twenty-first century! Scrap your Ford Cortinas! Leave your Gentle Giant LPs behind! You'll like it here! The water's lovely! No one is a racist!

Nigel Farage knows what I'm talking about. He has recently declared that racism was a problem 40 years ago but it isn't any more and that is why we don't need race discrimination legislation. UKIP as a party is 'colour-blind', he said. That basically means that, like Clarkson and everyone else nowadays, they're not racist. Now, of course, some people might start saying that UKIP are colour-blind in the sense that 'you don't see many people of colour at a UKIP conference' but you know who those people are?

Racists.

Yes, the only people who still cling to racism, are a few sad, sad people who long for the olden days of racism and so they try to find it everywhere, even when it doesn't exist. A good example of this is journalist Michael Crick, who asked the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom why, of the 270 people on the cover of the UKIP conference brochure (titled 'Changing the face of politics'), there were no black faces. Godfrey Bloom immediate spotted that he was talking to a racist, called him out on it, and, for good measure, wisely attacked him with a pamphlet. Don't believe me? Take a look:

Racists are people who notice racism, the big silly racists.

Rozanne Duncan knows what I'm talking about. UKIP Councillor for Thanet District Council (sorry, former UKIP Councillor), she was filmed for the BBC documentary, Meet the Ukippers, declaring that 'there is absolutely no way I am a racist' - and illustrating this by referring to a couple she knows and gets on with 'I don't if they're Indian or Pakistani - it doesn't matter to me'. You see? Colour blind! She wisely knows that the difference between India and Pakistan is completely insignificant and not worth her attention (India and Pakistan, you should follow her excellent example). She also went on to explain:

the only people I do have problems with are negroes - and I don't know why. I don't know whether there's something in my psyche or whether it's karma from a previous life or whether something happened to me as a very very young person and I have drawn a veil over it because that sometimes happens, doesn’t it?'.

Basically, she's not a racist, she just has an irrational fear and hatred of black people. See? Makes perfect sense. In fact, she's typical of UKIP voters, 49% of whom say they are racially prejudiced, but 64% of whom are 'not racists', which is definitely statistically possible in this non-racist world.

Malky Mackay knows what I'm talking about. The former Cardiff City manager sent text messages referring to people like South Korean footballer Kim Bo-Kyung as 'Fkn chinkys' and said of a Jewish football agent 'Go on, fat Phil. Nothing like a Jew that sees money slipping through his fingers' and lamented of a selection of transfer targets 'Not many white faces amongst that lot but worth considering'. While he was forced by the racists of this world to apologise, fortunately he also explained to rest of us that this was not racism. How could it be? Racism doesn't exist. It was, in fact - as if he had to point this out! - 'friendly text-message banter'.

The brilliant thing about banter is that it immediately neutralises offensiveness. Once upon a time in the bad old days, if you called someone a poof or a nigger or a paki or a bitch or a yid, they'd be really offended, but now you follow this up by explaining it was banter and they'll laugh along and probably go for a pint with you. If only people had known of the awesome power of banter back in the olden days of yore! When the police were accused by the Macpherson report of institutionalised racism, they could have just explained that it was institutionalised banter and then everyone could have gone for a pint. Those landlords who put 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs' or the MP Peter Griffiths who gained the seat of Smethwick with the slogan 'If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour' or when Thatcher on World in Action grabbed the National Front vote by talking about British people being 'swamped by people with a different culture', they should all have just pointed out that this was banter, just pulling your leg, and you should lighten up and get a sense of humour and then everyone would have gone for a pint.

David Coburn knows what I'm talking about. The UKIP MEP referred to Scottish Government's External Affairs Minister as 'Humza Yousaf, or as I call him, Abu Hamza'. And in case you think he was basically saying 'all Muslims are the same and they're all terrorism-supporting fundamentalists', you couldn't be more wrong because it was just a 'stupid joke'. Banter, see?

In fact a lot of UKIP candidates know what I'm talking about. Joe Quirk bantered on Facebook that 'dogs are more intelligent, better company and certainly better behaved than most Muslims' Andre Lampitt, star of an UKIP election broadcast, banteringly tweeted that 'Muslims are animals their faith is disgusting their prophet is pedophile' and that 'Most Nigerians are generally bad people I grew up in Africa and dare anyone to prove me wrong'. Ron Northcott, a UKIP candidate in Plymouth, suggested on Twitter that 'Asian Muslims groom our white girls, now they rape our boys. Jordanian Paralympians commit sex offences. We need to reclaim our country' a priceless bit of banter echoed by James Elgar, UKIP local election candidate in Egham, who proposed: '#ThingsAsianBoysDo groom and rape underage white girls, stab and rob innocent old white people, bomb innocent white people #EctEctEct', which his father patiently explained to the PC killjoys was just 'banter'. And then there's Magnus Nielsen, a Camden Council UKIP candidate, who banteringly bantered that Islam was 'organised crime under religious camouflage [...] created by a man called Muhammad who was a gang leader of criminals'. 

William Henwood, UKIP council candidate in Enfield, was similarly bantery when he suggested Lenny Henry should go and live in a 'black country'. I mean, it's so obviously a stupid comment, it can only be a joke, unless you think he's a thick racist, which he can't be because racism doesn't exist any more. The same is true of Stourport-on-Severn councillor Eric Kitson's obviously hilarious Facebook comment about Muslim women that we should 'Hang um all first then ask questions later'. Look, he even spelled a word wrong as a clue to how funny he was being. The PC brigade missed another spelling clue when they condemned Ken Chapman, hoping to be elected for UKIP on Amber Valley Borough Council in Derbyshire, simply for saying 'islam is a cancer that needs eradicating ­multiculturism does not work in this country clear them all off to the desert with their camals that’s their way of life'. I mean: 'camels'. Come on, it's obviously brilliantly witty.

There are many more such humorists in the UKIP, clearly the funniest party in Britain. If we could only get a sense of humour, we'd realise that we are living in the best of all possible non-racist worlds.

* If we are to understand the disappearance of racism, it's important to understand how this works. Nobody is a racist, but sometimes, for various reasons, they say things which may be perceptually indistinguishable from racism for quite other reasons, as when Kerry Smith, UKIP Councillor in Essex, referred to 'poofters' and to a Chinese woman as a 'chinky bird', not because he's a racist, but because he was on 'a strong morphine based prescription medication for a back injury'. When Nigel Farage said he would be very concerned if a Romanian family moved in next door, he wasn't racist, he was tired. Morphine and sleep-deprivation have a notorious tendency to make people say racist-style things that are not actually racist. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

There were things you could criticise about 'political correctness'. There may have been overzealous and naive instructions that went out (though no one has ever found any evidence of being genuinely being told not to sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' or the banning of black bin liners). It may be that the kinds of debates that 'political correctness' generated in the 1980s encouraged a kind of 'victim culture' that meant that 'being offended' was considered a more significant hurt than it is.

For me, the most unfortunate legacy of 'political correctness' was the emphasis placed on banning certain words and replacing them with others. Don't get me wrong: it's obviously a good thing when we are all made aware that language can be an instrument of oppression and a key component of systematic abuse. But sometimes it can feel as if the battles against racism or in favour of sexual equality or disabled rights has just been reduced to a matter of word choices that don't offend people. And that's not politics, that's etiquette. Or, more properly, that's part of politics, but without anything else, it's just etiquette.

And it's the prim, humourless aspect of etiquette that has been seized upon by the racists and homophobes and misogynists and body fascists as the stick to beat the left with; by 'the left' I mean something generous - anyone who genuinely cares about these inequalities, who thinks it is a matter of injustice when a group's human rights are compromised. Now, my memory of those times is that I first heard the phrase 'political correctness' being used as a joke by people on the left as a way of drawing attention to and correcting any excess of rigidity, humourlessness, or simplification. But it's been turned against us to characterise the left as lacking humour.

As the examples above show, it's not the left that lacks humour, but it's the right - the far right - that seems to mistake hatred for hilarity. None of the comments above is funny. They are all, in both sense, witless. 

But here's the strange thing. That failing of political correctness - occasional, not systematic - of turning complex political issues into mere word-swapping is now the stock-in-trade of the far right. They exchange 'anti-racism' for 'political correctness'; they swap out 'racism' and they swap in 'banter'.

There's a strange parallel between UKIP and the Conservative Party: both seem to be in the business of denying their central beliefs. The Tories will consistently tell you they are friends of the NHS, that they love the public sector, that they want it to flourish, when the key figures in the Government (certainly the Tory side, but some in the Lib Dem side too) have grown up with an ideological belief in reducing the state to the bare minimum and turning its functions over to the private sector.

Similarly, while UKIP constantly deny being racist in any way, its appeal is to the racist instincts in this country; no one in the country gives the slightest shit about their economic policy or what they'd do with defence. UKIP and its supporters just care about stopping immigrants coming in, for wholly racist reasons (there are no good economic or cultural reasons to care about that). And so many of its supporters and candidates and spokespeople reveal themselves, on a weekly basis, to be racists, to have racist views, to have racist pasts (a letter written by one of Nigel Farage's schoolteachers in 1981 showed concerns that as a boy he was, a fascist, a racist, given to singing 'Hitler-Youth songs').

Perhaps the most successful piece of political correctness in modern politics has been to swap the words 'British National Party' for 'UK Independence Party'. Let's see things for what they are. UKIP is one of those aberrant atavistic upsurges of bigotry and hatred that seems to accompany periods of economic hardship every forty years (1930s, 1970s, 2010s). UKIP are a good old-fashioned racist party.