I'm saying they're not a far-right nationalist group, which was your original unsupported assertion. The term nationalist is vague.
The hell it is vague. Nationalist is someone who prefers his or her nation, national identity, customs and so on, over anyone's else and will do anything to keep the area he or she is in as "pure" as possible and free from outside influence.
So? The Tories are supposedly as well. Only to the hyperpartisan is rightwing the same as the far-right like the BNP.
The Tories are conservatives. You can not just make up a new name for the same people, because some or part of the political sphere are suddenly unpopular. I know the US conservatives have done so with their libertarian bs, but this party is a conservative party. Their problem is they cant call themselves "conservative" since they would not be seen as "different" or an alternative to the Conservative party. And yet with the "libertarian" sticker they still dont get any support outside these elections because no one knows what the hell they stand for. And by the way almost every country has such a party, some more successful than others. National Front in France (Le Pen) is the French version. Does not change the fact that it is a conservative party with highly xenophobic borderline racist policies on many issues.
Is this supposed to prove your previous hyperpartisan slur? It doesn't even attempt to deal with it.
If one looks at UKIP they are not far-right at all. They are simply very similar to quite mainstream conservative or libertarian-conservative currents in England with an extra appeal to anyone Eurosceptic. To attempt tarnish them by linking them with the far-right and BNP, particularly when there is no attempt to even back it up, is simply hyperpartisan hackery.
Give me a break. UKIP is a nationalist party, there is no doubt about that. Just look at what they call themselves. And you can not be a nationalist party without having certain "racist" and xenophobic aspects. And you can not deny that UKIP is not xenophobic.. they want to ban all immigration
for 5 years for god sake!
You have 2 types of nationalist parties.
You have the xenophobic nationalist parties. These parties are the PC versions of the out right racist parties. The difference is in how they promote their views but in principle there aint that big a difference. These parties advocate the national identity over everything. They dont want anyone telling them what to do, and are sceptical of almost every single international agreement that puts some sort of "burden" on the nation.. real or not. In principle they could be against things like the Postal treaties or telecommunications treaties that give out country codes.. why dont we have the country code 1? These parties also advocate next to none or zero immigration, especially from "certain countries". These certain countries change over time. During the 50s and 60s it was the Spanish and Portuguese, now it is the Polish and people outside Europe. But it is always targeted against people with different traditions, who look different and speak different languages. These parties are often also highly fascist.
Finally you have the out right racist parties like the BNP. They dont care how they are viewed and use inflammatory rhetoric to spread their views. Out with Muslims and so on. These are the neo nazi parties across Europe.
Now members of both groups often overlap, and have so between the BNP and UKIP.
No matter how you look at it, the similarities between the BNP and UKIP are striking. Both are xenophobic, blame foreigners for all the problems, and want to get rid of "non British" people.