UKIP leader says our forefathers were wrong

On 3 February 2012 Nigel Farage MEP, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, was the guest speaker at a Making Politics Matter event in Christ Chruch University in Canterbury.

In the course of the meeting he expressed some surprising views on Scottish independence and the Irish nationalist demand for home rule.

Asked if UK independence should include Scottish independence, the once staunchly unionist politician said that though he used to be of the opinion that all of the United Kingdom should be ruled from London, now he realised just how ridiculous he was in believing this.

'I've now come to the view that if we listened to old man Gladstone in 1886, and we had given the Irish Home Rule, we wouldn't have had the IRA, we wouldn't have had thousands of deaths and all of the misery.'

This is a bizarre statement from the leader of UKIP, especially in the year that marks the centenary of the Ulster Covenant.  Our forefathers fought against home rule for Ireland because they would not accept domination by a Dublin parliament.  Now Nigel Farage says that Ulster should have been put under the control of a Dublin parliament! 

That was what Gladstone proposed in 1886 and that is what Ulster opposed.  Now Farage says that Gladstone was right and Ulster was wrong!  According to Farage, Thomas Sinclair, Sir Edward Carson, James Craig, Fred Crawford and every other unionist was wrong!

This is of course just the latest in a long series of bizarre statements by Nigel Farage and I am sure it will not be the last.