You can almost hear the screams from Westminster, can’t you? Every time Nigel Farage opens his mouth, the combined political classes of Primrose Hill and Holland Park react like a chorus of flashed spinsters, exposed to the hairy buttocks of a drunken navvy. Oh my word, he’s done it again! Someone stop him! Help!

But it’s a funny thing, this metropolitan fainting fit induced by anything connected to Ukip. To me it seems overdone; to me it suggests there are deeper psychological forces at work. After all, Ukip have yet to win a single MP at Westminster. So why do they invoke all these bladder-bursting conniptions in the chatterati?

Opinion formers would have it that Ukip’s opinions are the problem; i.e. the party is a bunch of crypto-fascists, the BNP with polished brogues, a bus-load of “loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists” (according to the PM). Therefore these barely concealed bigotries need to be exposed, by the scandalised elite, so the proles can react with proper aversion, and go back to dutifully voting Lib, Lab and Con.

But what are these appalling Kipper opinions, polices and personalities which so affront the Top Ten Thousand?

First, the people. There’s no doubt that Ukip does attract a few crazies and extremists. But then, all political parties do that, indeed I’d suggest that, for most citizens, the mere act of joining a political party – any party – is the act of a dubious nerd with narcissism issues, so Ukip are hardly unique. Furthermore, Ukip – as Farage ably put it – do not have a monopoly on oddballs. Or extremists.

Here, for instance, is a list of Labour Party notables who used to be communists or Marxist fellow-travellers: Alistair Darling. Jim Murphy, Jack Straw, Peter Hain, John Reid, Peter Mandelson. Now, whatever you think of Nigel Farage or Paul Nuttall, as far as I know they have not called for the overthrow of bourgeois democracy, so let’s toss out that canard about Ukip being uniquely “full of extremists”.

How about their policies then? One Kipper position that Ukipphobes love to cite is their apparent desire to reintroduce the death penalty. And on the face of it that does seem quite “out there”. No EU nation uses the death penalty (it is forbidden by quasi-EU law), virtually no western nations use the death penalty. So this policy is indeed a fringe position, right? Wrong. On the latest polls about 50 per cent of Britons support the death penalty. Half the country. And until Ukip came along, the views of half the country, on this issue, were entirely unrepresented in mainstream politics.

Then what about Europe? You probably know what I’m going to say here but it’s worth saying anyway. All three mainstream parties are intent on remaining within the EU (after some pantomime renegotiation if you are a Tory). That means that the 30-50 per cent of the country that expressly wants to leave the EU has been wholly unrepresented in politics. Until the rise of Ukip.

Then what about immigration? Ukip’s policy is to severely restrict immigration. Again this seems pretty radical, until you look at the polls. Sixty-nine per cent of people actually want zero net immigration. In other words, most Brits, when it comes to immigration, are even further to the right than Ukip.

And so on, and so forth. Ukip are against HS2 (the only party with that position). So are 48 per cent of the British people. Ukip have considered a policy to ban the burqa (the only party to consider that position) – this is a policy supported by 61 per cent  of British voters. Ukip want to cut foreign aid (the only party with that position) – this is a policy supported by 55 per cent of the British people.

Now personally, I’m not a Ukip supporter, but I can damn well read Ukip’s polling numbers. And what they tell me is that virtually all of these “cranky”, “fruitcake”, “loonytoon” positions adopted by Ukip turn out to be opinions shared by large minorities, or outright majorities, of the British electorate. They are also opinions that have, until recently, been ignored and repressed by the liberal elite.

This then, is why the political classes are horrified by Ukip. It’s not because they believe Ukip are really crazy. It’s because they are worried Ukip might be really popular.

The European Parliament is to spend almost £2 million on press monitoring and trawling Eurosceptic debates on the internet for “trolls” with whom to debate in the run-up and during euro-elections next year amid fears that hostility to the EU is growing.

The Daily Telegraph has seen confidential spending proposals and internal documents planning an unprecedented propaganda blitz ahead of and during European elections in June 2014.

Key to a new strategy will be “public opinion monitoring tools” to “identify at an early stage whether debates of political nature among followers in social media and blogs have the potential to attract media and citizens’ interest”.

Spending on “qualitative media analysis” is to be increased by £1.7 million and while most of the money is to be found in existing budgets an additional £787,000 will be need to be raised next year despite calls for EU spending to reflect national austerity.

“Particular attention needs to be paid to the countries that have experienced a surge in Euroscepticism,” said a confidential document agreed last year.

“Parliament’s institutional communicators must have the ability to monitor public conversation and sentiment on the ground and in real time, to understand ‘trending topics’ and have the capacity to react quickly, in a targeted and relevant manner, to join in and influence the conversation, for example, by providing facts and figures to deconstructing myths.”

Training for parliament officials begins later this month.

Paul Nuttall, UKIP’s deputy leader, has attacked the proposals, which he said, violate the neutrality of the EU civil service by turning officials into a “troll patrol”, stalking the internet to make unwanted and provocative political contributions in social media debates.

“Spending over a million pounds for EU public servants to become Twitter trolls in office hours is wasteful and truly ridiculous,” he said.

“It strikes me as bizarre that the EU administration is playing such an explicitly political role with a brief to target Eurosceptics – that’s code for parties like Ukip, and this is hardly neutral.”

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Eastern European inmates in British jails are costing taxpayers just under £73million a year, official figures show.

Romanian and Polish prisoners have swollen their ranks by 60 per cent since 2010, bringing the total to 2,430 from 10 countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain.

Three years ago there were just 1,490 inmates from those nations in our jails, where it costs £30,000 to hold a prisoner each year.

The Ministry of Justice figures reveal Poles now form the biggest ­foreign contingent in British jails, with Romanians at Number five on the list, up from 400 in 2010 to 532.

In women’s jails, with 46 prisoners, they are the second biggest group, behind Nigerians on 47.

Romanians are most frequently jailed for theft, pick-pocketing and shoplifting, as well as burglary, robbery, fraud and sex offences.

Ukip Deputy Leader Paul Nuttall said: “It was madness that in 2004 we opened our doors to much of Eastern Europe.

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