Did Ukip’s Steven Woolfe forget he’s not white?

The African-American Civil Rights activist Al Sharpton once told me, when discussing the Black Supreme Judge Clarence Thomas, that: “All our skin folk are not our kin folk”.

"Just because Thomas is Black", Sharpton added, “doesn’t mean he has our interest at heart”

The same could be said of Steven Woolfe, who was until the beginning of this week the favourite to succeed Nigel Farage and win the leadership for Ukip. Up and till last week, few, including myself outside the Ukip bubble had heard of Wolfe. But when I saw his picture plastered around the newspapers, my first question was, ‘He’s got Black features, he must be mixed heritage with African decent’.

And a quick Wikipedia confirms that not only does Woolfe have African American heritage from his grandfather, but also Jewish heritage from his grandmother.

As a child Woolfe remembers coming home after school having constantly been called 'n.....r'.

For the last two years Woolfe has been at the heart of Ukip, heading up its immigration policy. No doubt, therefore sanctioning some of the most racially offensive election posters ever seen in the UK. Given his Jewish ancestry, did he have no moral conscience about the ‘Breaking point poster’ that mirrors a Nazi propaganda poster of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany? Or the leaflets that arrived in all UK homes which blatantly lied about 77 million Turkish citizens on their way to the UK? The same vilified citizens who have the same colour skin as he does? Has Woolfe no conscious that his party is plagued with Xenophobes, and as an element of Far Right extremist involved with the party? It seems not.

But it also seems those ‘chickens came home to roost’; once the leadership realised that Woolfe would have easily won the leadership battle.

Even for a Machiavellian party that will almost do and say anything to win the popular vote, Ukip’s leadership, could not stand the fact that their potential leader was, using the ‘one drop and you’re Black definition’ , Black, and even worse for some, part Jewish too. After all, politically it would have been a brilliant move.

This can be the only reasonable conclusion one could accept given that Woolfe’s application arrived 17 minutes past the allotted deadline. I know some may say the 'rules are rules' and all that, but remember the pledge Farage made, that he would stand down as leader if he didn’t win his General Election seat. After losing he and he hierarchy just changed the rules and ignored that particular promise.

No doubt though, as the Conservative Lord John Taylor did back in the 80's when he was ousted by his own racist Tory members, Woolfe will say ‘ this exclusion has nothing to do with my mixed heritage’.

But it is of course, and it is in part why I and many will have no sympathy for the plight of Steven Woolfe. The other part is for his complicity in the Xenophobic debate that his party raged against immigration, causing an unprecedented spike in racism and anti-Semitism. It’s not sympathy Woolfe deserves, but pity and shame for being part of a thoroughly nasty political party

Simon Woolley