ABSTRACT
In the period leading to the 2015 UK General Election, the mainstream political parties felt compelled to operate a ‘common sense’ discourse that ‘UKIP are right but don’t vote for them’ (John Harris, Guardian, 11.11.14). The success of UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage, in comparison to his British National Party counterpart, Nick Grifn, is political ‘zero-myth’ par excellence. Whereas Grifn, now resigned, was widely understood to have ended his career with a controversial but disastrous appearance on the BBC’s Question Time, the rise and rise – and mainstream acceptance – of the sanitised Farage signier must be taken seriously as a further manifestation of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Zombie Multiculturalism’ (2012).
