So, Nigel Farage, whose job is your German wife taking? Ukip leader is confronted over controversial posters by a question that hits close to home

Nigel Farage was accused of hypocrisy yesterday over Ukip’s ‘racist’ EU immigration campaign posters because he employs his German wife as his secretary.
But as senior figures from the three main parties attacked his party’s latest publicity drive, the Ukip leader insisted that no British person could do the taxpayer-funded job taken by his second wife, Kirsten.
The anti-EU party is using a £1.5million donation from a multi-millionaire businessman to launch a poster campaign for next month’s European elections focused on immigration from the Continent.
Scroll down for video

+5

'So, whose job is Kirsten taking?' Ukip leader Nigel Farage is asked by the BBC's Nick Robinson whether his German wife is taking a British worker's job, in light of the eurosceptic party's latest ad campaign

+5

Secretary: Kirsten Farage, pictured last year, works for her husband in an EU-funded role

The most controversial billboard carries a warning that 26million are unemployed across Europe, and asks: ‘Whose job are they after?’ with a large hand pointing at the observer.
Ukip’s opponents have likened the posters to those used in the past by the far-Right British National Party.

Mr Farage yesterday dismissed the criticism as ‘nonsense’, but ran into trouble when he was confronted by the BBC’s Nick Robinson over his employment of his publicity-shy German wife as his secretary using EU allowances.
‘She came here as a highly skilled person earning a high salary paying a very large amount of tax,’ the Ukip leader insisted.
‘I don’t think anybody else would want to be in my house at midnight going through emails and getting me briefed for the next day. 
‘It’s a very different situation to a mass of hundreds of thousands of people coming in and flooding the lower end of the labour market.’ 
Asked whether a British person could take the position as his secretary, Mr Farage said: ‘Nobody else could do that job, not unless they were married to me.’
Mr Farage said his wife earned a ‘very modest’ wage, of up to £30,000 a year, and worked ‘extremely unsociable hours’ for ‘up to’ seven days a week.

+5

'Nobody else could do that job': Mr Farage gave a stout defence of his wife's EU taxpayer-funded role

WOMAN POSING AS VOTER IN UKIP MANIFESTO WORKS FOR FARAGE

Mr Farage faced embarrassment yesterday after it emerged that a woman posing as a voter in Ukip’s manifesto actually works for him.
Lizzy Vaid (right) appears in a full-page photograph as a voter from Devon, with a large quote stating: ‘I’ll be voting Ukip because they’re the only party listening to what people want.’
But Miss Vaid, who is half Indian, works in London and on her Twitter account she describes herself as ‘Ukip Events Manager and Assistant to Nigel Farage, as well as a lover of social occasions’.

He pointed out that one in four MPs at Westminster and more than 70 other British Euro MPs also employ a close family member.
Tory former defence minister Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, became the first senior member of his party to attack the poster campaign, funded by internet and property tycoon Paul Sykes.
His intervention was seen as significant because he chairs a cross-party group on migration which is often critical of government policy.
‘At a time when our country really needs to come together, the Ukip advertising campaign is deeply divisive, offensive and ignorant,’ Mr Soames said.
Labour MP Mike Gapes, former chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, had already said that he hoped the ‘racist posters encourage all decent British Commonwealth and EU citizens’ to vote for another party in the European elections on May 22.

+5

Speech: Ukip leader Nigel Farage launches his party's European election bilboard campaign in Sheffield

POLISH WORKERS FEEL 'AT HOME' IN BRITAIN - WITH SOME JOINING UKIP

Polish workers who arrived in Britain to pick fruit have graduated to better jobs and now feel fully ‘at home’ here – with some even joining Ukip, the country’s ambassador revealed yesterday.
Witold Sobkow (right) said that, initially, his countrymen and women were doing low-skilled jobs when they moved to Britain after Poland joined the EU in 2004.
But they have now learned English, obtained qualifications in UK schools and colleges and won ‘promotion’ to better jobs. Some had become involved in British politics.
In an interview with the Independent, Poland’s ambassador to London said: ‘There are some relatively young people from Poland who are members of Ukip and they have this group, Friends of Poland in Ukip.’

But he insisted he was not condemning those planning to vote for Ukip in the European elections but the party’s poster campaign.
‘I stand by my view that this is a racist, xenophobic campaign designed to win votes by whipping up animosity against foreigners living and working and contributing to this country,’ he said.
Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron said the posters were ‘wrong not just factually but morally’.
Former Labour activist Dan Hodges said Ukip was ‘worse’ than the BNP, which was now ‘finished’ as a political force. ‘The BNP were racist, but at least they had the courage to be open about their racism,’ he added.
Ukip’s deputy leader, Paul Nuttall, said Labour MPs were trying to close down a debate over immigration ‘by shouting racist’.
He said: ‘The fact of the matter is that we’ve got wage compression in this country, we’ve got uncontrolled borders. And the only way we’re going to get control of our borders is by leaving this club [the EU].’

UKIP RACE ROW POSTERS: CLAIM VS REALITY

UKIP yesterday unveiled four posters for next month’s European elections, which immediately sparked allegations of ‘racism’ from the party’s opponents. Here, Home Affairs Editor JAMES SLACK investigates the claims made by the controversial posters.

 

CLAIM: 75 per cent of our laws are now made in Brussels.
REALITY: No simple answer. Ukip’s estimate is based on figures produced by ex-European Parliament president Hans-Gert Pottering.
Viviane Reding, an EU Commissioner, recently put the figure closer to 70 per cent. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg claimed in a TV debate with Nigel Farage that it is only 7 per cent.
The independent House of Commons Library says ‘it is possible to justify any measure between 15 and 50 per cent’. It depends on whether the figures include only primary legislation passed by the UK Parliament, or all laws and regulations influenced by, or related to, Brussels.

 

CLAIM: The United Kingdom pays £55million a day to the European Union and its Eurocrats.
REALITY: Technically accurate. The figure – the equivalent of £20billion a year – is roughly what the British Government paid to EU institutions in 2012.
However, the UK does get around £8billion of this money back in the form of the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher and other payments, such as subsidies to farmers.
This still leaves the UK making a net contribution of around £12billion a year, or £33million a day.

 

CLAIM: British workers are hit hard by EU policy that allows unlimited cheap labour.
REALITY: Last month a Government report concluded that ‘there is evidence for some labour market displacement in recent years when the economy was in recession’, with the low-skilled most likely to lose out.
The Migration Advisory Committee found that for every 100 extra foreign-born working-age migrants in the UK, there was a reduction of 23 in the number of Britons in employment.
Labour and the Tories have made similar comments to the Ukip poster in recent weeks.