A UKIP Councillor blamed recent flooding across the country on divine retribution for Equal Marriage laws. freefoto.com under a Creative Commons Licence

UKIP Leader Nigel Farage’s headaches this week did not stop at being whacked over the head with a placard by protesters in Kent. A UKIP Councillor blaming recent flooding across the country on divine retribution for Equal Marriage laws transformed the party from a concern, to a laughing stock – and now a Facebook campaign is under way to make ‘Its Raining Men’ number 1 to celebrate.

Henley on Thames Councillor David Sylvester wrote to his local paper to argue the nation was 'beset by storms' because of David Cameron’s decision to act 'arrogantly against the Gospel' in changing marriage laws. UKIP stood behind the comments until Sylvester went on to BBC Radio to defend them, at which point the party used emergency measures to suspend him.  Sylvester told listeners:

'I don’t have a problem with gay people.  I believe as a Christian I should love gay people and, indeed, I do. My prayer for them is they will be healed.  I believe that is what the Apostle Paul said in the New Testament, he said some of you are gay but you have been healed. There is healing for the gay condition and I believe a Christian should long for gay people to be healed and to have normal heterosexual lives.

'It is nonsense to say it is homophobic. If you love a person enough to want them to be healed and to have a proper family, that is hardly homophobic.  It is a spiritual disease… it’s not what I say, it’s what the Bible says.'

Since the show, UKIP and David Sylvester have been the butt of a million jokes, which show no sign of abating anytime soon.  A twitter account @UKIPWeather has been set up, and now has over 100,000 followers.

Then some bright spark made a UKIP version of Radio 4’s The Shipping Forecast which promptly went viral.

The Shipping Forecast spoof expands the mockery of UKIP to take in UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom’s ‘Bongo-Bongo Land’ comments, and referring to female party activists as ‘sluts.'

But joking aside for a moment, UKIP are proving themselves a party of hysterics and bigots.

It would be futile to highlight UKIP as homophobic, transphobic or xenophobic – they are omniphobic.  They are appalled and terrified about pretty much everything which doesn’t look and sound like them.  They appeal to the darker angels of our nature which seek out and magnify superficial differences, whilst overlooking the vastness of our common humanity.

In 2010, the party suspended its Chairman for London, Paul Wiffen, after he made the following racist rant on an internet forum.

'You Left-wing scum are all the same, wanting to hand our birth right to Romanian gypsies who beat their wives and children into begging and stealing money they can gamble with, Muslim nutters who want to kill us and put us all under medieval Sharia law, the same Africans who sold their Afro-Caribbean brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish.'

More recently UKIP candidates were found to be posting pictures of themselves making Nazi salutes, and one candidate created the above picture of himself as one of Hitler’s henchmen using photoshop.

There is also significant crossover in both candidates and supporters, from the British National Party (BNP) to UKIP. UKIP are the polite face of the same old ‘loathe thy neighbour’ politics of hate and envy.  Recent discussions on the UKIP online member’s forum on homosexuality and gay marriage were particularly enlightening.  Former parliamentary candidate and branch chairman for Oxford, Dr Julia Gasper claimed

'As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the ­subject.'

UKIP member Jan Zolyniak posted: 'The evidence is quite clear that the percentage of homosexuals who molest children is very high and cannot be dismissed.'

Douglas Denny from the Bognor Regis branch in West Sussex wrote: 'What irritates me is they (sic) way they and their leftie, neo-Commie followers seem to want to force the rest of us to consider them as normal.'

Perhaps the best way to deal with UKIP to diffuse their efforts to be taken seriously as some rebel faction.  Let’s make them unelectably ridiculous. The plan is to get the 80’s dance track and token LGBT theme tune to number 1 in the pop charts in honour of Sylvester’s eminent bigotry. The Facebook campaign already has over 5,000 followers, and depending on how many stupid things UKIP politicians manage to cough up in the coming weeks, we might be looking at a comeback for The Weather Girls.

Join the Facebook Campaign.

And have a little listen to the original to entertain yourself in the meantime.