February 14 letters: Farage’s dog-whistle politics give succour to extremists

IN January 2015, we witnessed the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, in which we saw the world come together to remember the genocide of millions of Jews as well as the hundreds of thousands of disabled people, Roma 
gipsies and dissenters of all persuasions in the industrial killing fields of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Yet this remembrance is tempered with a growing sense of unease; unease at the way in which Europe, once again, is on the cusp of repeating a history that we had fought so valiantly to defeat during the Second World War.

Nigel Farage continues to play his dog whistle populism without any sense of history and responsibility for the times we are living in; blaming immigration for the strain on 
our vital public services when 
the simple truth is that since 2010 we have seen local authorities and government departments having their funding cut by up to 30 per cent in some cases.

Farage, this new messiah of the rightwing with his choice of language cloaked in racist vulgarity, is dragging us further along a road towards a destination that I doubt he himself would wish to go to.

But the story does not end here. Over the past couple of years my son and I have visited the resilient and beautiful country of Poland where we experienced Gdansk, home to the one-time inspirational Solidarity movement, but we also experienced the tears and heartache of visiting Auschwitz/Birkenau and the lesser-known Stutthof death camps.

Every regrettable remark by Farage and some of his extreme supporters that aims to divide people based on their race, poverty, ethnicity, sexuality, religion etc continues to give both succour and encouragement to the nasty, far-right elements, alas, still present in our communities.

From: Terry Palmer, South Lea Avenue, Hoyland, Barnsley.

READING Andrew Vine’s excellent column regarding anti-Semitism (The Yorkshire Post, February 10) and media statements regarding the rise in such attacks, no one seems able to give any meaningful reasons. Some, like George Galloway, say much of it has to do with Israeli attacks on Gaza, but if this is true in this millennium, what reason did the German people give in the 1930s?