LAST week my predecessor as TSSA president Harriet Yeo announced she was leaving the Labour Party to “lend” her support to Ukip for the next election. Now I do not believe for one minute that the timing of this was just coincidental.

Her announcement came just a day after she was deselected as a Labour councillor and leader of the Ashford group. The reasons the Labour Party cited for her deselection, such as non-attendance at meetings, sound all too familiar. I do believe however that her biggest betrayal to her working-class electorate was to walk straight into the arms of Ukip.

Ukip does not represent the views that I or many within the trade union movement stand for. It is a nasty right-wing party with rich city-based financial backers, which is openly hostile to trade unions.

Its views on migration and its singling out of the most vulnerable are abhorrent. Its supporters are, in the main, a rag-tag bunch of disaffected Tories and far-right extremists with nowhere else to go.

But we underestimate them at our peril. It would be wrong to dismiss them as a single-issue party.

Farage is a populist, with an image as the chirpy man in the pub giving off a jocular persona that people wrongly feel they can trust and identify with. Never has a political party been so dependant on the cult of one person, not even the Thatcherite Conservatives of the 1980s.

Ukip hides some vicious right-wing policies, such as the dismantling of the NHS to be replaced by a US insurance-style system, further liberalisation of the employment laws and attacks on workers’ rights and tax cuts for the rich that would make the most ardent Tory blush, with the reduction to 35 per cent of the highest rate of tax.

It denies climate change and is pro-fracking but perhaps worst of all is the hypocrisy of its policies on Europe and migration within. It condemns the European Parliament and has worst attendance record therein while collecting the considerable wages and expenses that it offers. The European Parliament has also been used by Ukip to form allegiances with some pretty dodgy company too — the racist xenophobic Italian Northern League and Marie Le Pen’s French National Front.

Ukip has made it impossible to have any reasoned debate on either Europe or immigration, shouting down anyone with the temerity to disagree with their hate-filled, prejudicial and narrow-minded viewpoint. Much is wrong with the European treaty and perhaps a referendum is the way to go — but not for the reasons that Ukip is citing.

You only need to scratch the surface of Ukip and the closet xenophobes and racists come out. The language they use includes MEP Godfrey Bloom’s notorious “Bongo Bongo land” quote.

Ukip councillor David Silvester claimed that widespread flooding was caused by gay marriage and now the latest in a long line of shameful individuals is another councillor, Rozanne Duncan, saying she doesn’t like the look of “negroids.”

What’s more, even after losing her council seat over her comments she still “has no regrets.” It’s not like these quotes occur in isolation. Barely a day goes by without a Ukip councillor, MEP or celebrity supporter (See Mike Read’s Calypso song) putting their foot right in it and exposing, bit by bit, exactly what Ukip is.

No wonder Farage does the majority of the media work himself. He can’t trust what his party members are going to say.

None of Ukip’s values are working-class values as I recognise them. And as the far right collapses many are finding in Ukip a party that they feel they can “lend” support too, just as my predecessor has done.

Sadly the party is souring the debate in British politics and shamefully the mainstream parties are allowing themselves to be dragged to the right, trying to defend themselves against losing seats to the new nasty party.

The Labour Party especially should take a long hard look at itself. Quotes about tightening borders and being “soft on immigrants” help no-one. We need a reasoned debate extolling the positive virtues of migration to this country, not the bile being poured out by the right-wing media.

European migrants have paid far more in taxes than the have claimed from the state. They come to this country looking to work, they tend to be young and so in less need of the NHS that Ukip would have you believe they are “clogging up.”

Farage is seeking to blame migration for the financial mess caused by his friends in the city and would have the rest of us pay for it.

The only purpose these defections serve is to offer credibility to a political party that deserves none.

Mick Carney is TSSA president