Steve Flannery

I grew up watching flag-waving little Englanders parading their nationality around Rochester like Dickensian caricatures, puffing their chests out in pride over an imperial history carefully reimagined to paint over barbaric cruelty with Constable landscapes and Churchillian swagger… As if the accident of where they were born had been an achievement… These folk were everywhere… with their arrogant smiles and entitled condescension. They were the National Front-supporting parents of school friends, avoiding eye contact if I dared visit their house via their sons, asking me transparent questions about my ethnicity and explaining how mixed race marriages never work, in case I propositioned one of their vulnerable teenage daughters… I was taught to consider myself both lucky to be here and self-evidently inferior by virtue of my heritage. So when I see those same superior, colluding, patronising smiles on the over-rehearsed faces of attention-seeking rabble-rousers like Farage and Tice, I have to remember… We can’t change the past but we can make damn sure those who belong in the past don’t destroy our future… Farage is a disease, a malicious vessel of hate… A gleeful provocateur. Everything he touches becomes a toxic wasteland of hopeless misery. He is a cancer waiting to destroy the same host over and over again. I said this about him in a Channel 4 News interview back in 2014. I’m saying it again now.