Scottish Catholic Observer

A former senior member of UKIP Scotland has accused the party of running an ‘extremely cynical’ election campaign intended to appeal to anti-Catholic bigots.

Dr Jonathan Stanley (top), former treasurer of the party who resigned last year over what he then called ‘sectarian racist filth,’ has told the SCO that he believes that the party—which has no MSPs at present—was making a cynical attempt to appeal to residual anti-Catholic sentiment in Scotland. UKIP Scotland Party Leader David Coburn (above) has denied the allegations saying his party is ‘open to all,’ but one of UKIP’s candidates for May’s Scottish election has posted online calling Catholicism ‘filthy mysticism.’

“I think they’ve chosen to go down this route because they believe it will get them to 6 or 7 per cent,” Dr Stanley said, referring to the usual threshold for wining seats in the Scottish Parliament elections.

“If they were genuinely anti-Catholic, that would be one thing, but if this is just an attempt to dig up the bones of sectarianism, I don’t think it will work.

Dr Stanley said his criticism only applied to the Scottish branch of UKIP and not the party as a whole.

A recent Survation poll suggested UKIP could win as many as six seats in the Scottish Parliament on May 5.

Dr Stanley, an Edinburgh-based surgeon, said that he had personally experienced senior members of UKIP Scotland making anti-Catholic remarks.

The party’s former chairman Arthur ‘Misty’ Thackeray, Mr Coburn’s chief of staff, had previously made disparaging remarks about Catholicism, saying it was based on a ‘fascist ideology’ and complained of a ‘suffocating culture of anti-loyalism’ in Scotland. He stepped down from his UKIP role earlier this year over accusations he’d made indecent phone calls to a number of women.

Caroline Santos, one of UKIP’s candidates in May’s Scottish Parliamentary elections, has used the social networking site Twitter to make a number of controversial remarks about Catholics. In December of last year, the UKIP candidate for the regional South of Scotland list said she was against Catholic schools because ‘I don’t want my taxes subsidising gobbledygook, simple’ and suggested the existence of such schools meant Scotland ‘was still stuck in the religious dark ages.’

The year before she proclaimed she didn’t hate the Pope but was ‘just not a follow [sic] of filthy mysticism.’

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland has expressed concern over Ms Santos’ statements saying ‘we really don’t want to go back to the language of the 16th century in political debate.’

Mr Coburn, a MEP who is standing in the Highland and Islands region in the Scottish Parliament elections, declined to condemn Ms Santos’ comments but he claimed that UKIP Scotland is not an anti-Catholic party. “The parties acting chairman and our lead candidate in the North East, Calum Walker, is a Catholic,” he said. There are Roman Catholic members throughout the party.”

He also said he personally believed that Catholic schools in Scotland were ‘doing a good job.’

“UKIP are a party for all,” he said. “If I’m elected I stand for everyone, be they Hindu, Muslim, Catholic whatever. But if we were starting from scratch, I’d prefer the French secular system, without religious schools. Because we do have to be concerned about people of other faiths coming to this country and starting schools.”

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—This story ran in full in the April 15 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.