Ukip councillor Donna Edmunds has said that shop-owners should be free to refuse to serve women or gays: "I'm a libertarian so I don't think the state should have a role in who business owners serve."

As an expression of ultra-libertarianism this might just about be defensible in itself. But it runs into a problem. If you think people should be free to choose whom they sell to, shouldn't they also be free to choose to sell their labour to whichever willing buyer wants it?

But Ukip wants to deny them this right. It wants tough immigration controls. Not only are these curbs on the rights of sellers, but they also infringe the rights of business owners which Ms Edmunds is so keen to assert: if businesses should be free to refuse to serve gays, shouldn't they also be free to hire whomever they want? We have a very selective form of libertarianism here.

In itself, of course, this is no biggie. Most of us believe that some liberties should be restricted. But it's difficult to see the grounds for selection in Ms Edmunds' case. It's hard to believe they are consequentialist ones. We know that immigration has economic benefits, so you have to impute large cultural costs to it to want it restricted. This is a tenable position in itself - albeit not one I share. But there are surely also cultural costs in permitting business owners to refuse to serve gays; doing so fosters a homophobic atmosphere. It's hard to see a reason for liberty in the one case but not the other.

It would be easy to dismiss Ms Edmunds as the kind of fruitloop we could find in all parties.

But there's something else. Nigel Farage has defended the right of a "comedian" to tell racist "jokes." Again, in itself such a view is tenable. But again, we run into the problem: why be so libertarian in defending racists and so anti-libertarian about immigration?

What we're seeing in both cases is what I've called asymmetric libertarianism. It's libertarianism for bigots but not for foreigners. There's a word for this. It begins with R.

On this, I'm with Peter Risdon: fuck Ukip.