Some Reasons Why I Won't be Voting UKIP

These days I don't talk about politics much on my blog, or religion, or even mention much about my personal life. It's nearly all books, books and more books. However, in less than one week, the European Elections are taking place, an event that usually slips past the awareness of most people (including myself) like a Teflon-hoofed centaur on a very steep slide made slick with extra virgin olive oil. These European Elections aren't going to be like others. They are a test to see how xenophobic our country has become.

Anyway... Some reasons why I won't be voting UKIP:

(1) Disengaging from the EU will ruin our economy,
(2) Their environmental policy is wrong,
(3) They have no experience and are not a real party,
(4) They are in close alliance with numerous distasteful extremist parties in other European countries. I'm not saying you can always judge a person or set of people by the company they keep... but it's a fair guide,
(5) It has been infiltrated by BNP members and other nutters,
(6) UKIP councillors and spokespeople seem bizarrely thin-skinned, almost to the point of pansy-ism and this doesn't augur well for the future,
(7) Some of my best friends are foreign, so I certainly have little time for a party that wants to remove these people from my life. In fact the mere suggestion makes me very aggressively defensive and I don't like feeling that way,
(8) The very very very very very very annoying dismal hack Tony Parsons intends to vote UKIP. Does he regard Farage as a replacement for his lost love, the helium-voiced designer-lesbian Julie Burchill? What Parsons does, I can't possibly consider doing. All his opinions about everything have always been erroneous.

All these reasons are important to me, but #7 is the main one because it's personal.