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The BBC Learning Zone website poses this age-old question: “Why did the people of Germany support the Nazis?”

And this is what they boil it down to: “Feelings that ­democracy had failed them and that no one except the Nazis would protect them from the Communists.

"A lack of work led many working class people to support the Nazis and they gave them hope - especially through promises to restore Germany to greatness.”

Change communists to ­immigrants, Germany to England and Nazis to UKIP and the ­political earthquake that’s just happened in Clacton is partially explained.

(Image: Getty)

I’m not saying that Nigel Farage is a Hitler clone who plans to invade Europe and build ­concentration camps (although as I’ve pointed out before, one of his teachers noted that he “marched through a quiet Sussex village shouting Hitler Youth songs” and he does like to hang around beer halls).

But he and his ­self-styled “People’s Army” have cleverly positioned ­themselves in the same electoral gap that the Nazis did in Depression Germany. Offering hope to frustrated people who feel exploited by forces outside their control and sick of the perceived apathy towards their plight from the detached establishment.

So, as in 1930s Germany, they vote for the anti-establishment party with a charismatic leader who tells them whatever they want to hear.

UKIP triumphed in Clacton, and will do so ­elsewhere next May, because, like snake-oil salesmen, they promise fake cures to all ills.

For the middle classes (we’ll lower your taxes), for the patriots (we’ll give you your country back),

for the working class (we’ll give all jobs and houses to theindigenous population).

They tell people who feel marginalised they haven’t forgotten about them, exploit xenophobic fears, peddle false hope.

(Image: Getty)

They warn them ­Westminster and Brussels are the enemies. You’re the outsider, we’re the party of the outsider, so we’re your only choice. Come with us and stick two fingers up to the people who aren’t making your life better.

They prey on confused, ­disillusioned minds in the hope they’ll be given the benefit of the doubt by people with nothing to lose. Two specific moans among UKIP voters in Clacton were that their resort has been reduced to a ghost town because Brits now take holidays abroad, and what jobs are left are taken by people coming in from abroad.

So where do you go with that contradictory grudge? UKIP of course. The Scapegoat Party.

I heard a former Labour voter there say his life went downhill with Thatcher and no party has given him hope that they can turn it round until UKIP. Even though they are more Thatcherite than the Tories.

Farage is an ex-public school stockbroker who wants to shrink the state and let the markets rip for the benefit of his own class. MP Douglas Carswell wants to ­privatise the NHS, slash welfare and cut taxes for the rich.

But somehow they are perceived to be speaking the language of the bloke down the Dog and Duck.

Maybe because the leaders of the three main parties speak like aliens from Planet Soundbite.

Before his victory, Farage admitted UKIP look “a bit like a rugby club on a day out”.

(Image: PA)

Which they do: a shower of mostly ugly, posh, right-wing white men getting drunk, spouting gibberish, dropping their trousers and baring their backsides.

Which was OK before yesterday. But now they’re in Westminster they’ve got to pull up those ­trousers and help run a country.

Farage says the time has come to take his party seriously. For once I agree. It’s time to seriously expose them as the dangerous charlatans they are.