Comments made by the membership officer of the Caerphilly branch of UKIP on Facebook have been described as “extraordinary and appalling” by Labour’s Assembly candidate for Caerphilly.
UKIP has hit back and said the comments, which were part of a discussion on terrorism, have been taken out of context.
In a conversation dating from November 14 last year, UKIP Caerphilly’s membership officer Jason Lock posted: “The trouble is the PC brigade and all the f***ing do gooders should be shot as traitors they have put our nation and families in danger, these Muslims will not give up until they own the world so action not words are needed!”
Labour’s Caerphilly candidate Hefin David described the comments as “extraordinary and appalling”.
He said: “They were publicly available on an open Facebook page. It Is really worrying is that UKIP’s membership officer’s role includes recruiting like minded people to his party. I would hope that UKIP will remove him but it’s a sad reflection of their party organisation in Caerphilly.”
A UKIP spokesperson said: “UKIP are sick and tired of the Labour Party using underhand and extreme tactics of rifling through our volunteers’ private social media to pull out deliberately de-contextualised lines from private threads to try to demonise the party.
“Having read the entire Facebook conversation it is clear to any sane person that the Labour Party edit and interpretation of the thread is deliberately malicious and untrue.
“What they are doing is essentially slandering ordinary people simply because of the job that they choose to do, potentially harming their future job prospects by publicising deliberately distorted and misleading representations of them to try to reduce UKIP’s electability.
“These are real people with real lives and it’s spiteful, it’s malicious and it shows a major moral deficit in the Labour party’s operations. They should be disgusted by their own actions, not ours.”
Last year, UKIP found itself at the centre of a social media row after a candidate in the Bedwas, Trethomas, Machen by-election for Caerphilly County Borough posted on Facebook that immigrants should be “gassed”.
Bobby Douglas made the comments after posting about how UKIP leader Nigel Farage would refuse to give benefits for immigrants until they have lived in Britain for five years.
He resigned from the party and UKIP, which also suspended him, were quick to distance itself from the comments, which Mr Douglas had claimed were a “joke”.
Just the sort of comment one comes to expect from kippers. They really are the scum of the earth.
I expect you hate me too, and describe me as scum despite knowing nothing about me. There are plenty of irrational, inarticulate, ignorant, spiteful and anonymous people running the EU. I can see where you get your attributes.
Richard, maybe you should look at certain people in your party and condemn their actions.
This seems to me what Ukip are about and they try bullying people.
Maybe you are in the wrong party.
Oh come on Lisa this is clearly labour doing what they usually do and scraping the bottom of the barrel. This man may have been a little crass or overly impassioned or an idiot but this is a non story if ever I had heard one. This is far tamer than your going to hear down the pub or in the break room at work.