UKIP must be getting desperate. Word is that their leader Paul Nuttall is getting short shrift from most of the Stoke people he talks to – and what little reputation he had has been shredded by the #addressgate scandal, investigations of huge EU expense fraud, of false claims of being at the Hillsborough disaster and even allegations that his campaign funds of £10,000 come from another EU con. His candidacy in the Stoke Central by-election may well be not just the end of his personal political ambitions but of his party itself.

Desperate times, desperate measures – and desperately poorly executed, as it turns out.

Jeremy Corbyn was pictured recently campaigning in Stoke alongside Labour’s candidate, Gareth Snell. It was a bog-standard campaign photo, not very exciting or memorable. Here it is – note particularly the red rectangle highlighting the house in the background:

UKIP must have banked on nobody remembering this picture, because they decided that, to attempt to portray Corbyn as offensive to the people of Stoke, they decided it would be a good idea to tamper with it, via some not very high-quality photoshopping:

Amateurish and, given the existence of the internet and search engines, pretty stupid.

But that’s not the end of their stupidity. You see, the party that (having no sense of irony) loves to style itself the party of ‘patriotic’ Englishmen managed to screw up even further.

They got the flag wrong.

In fact, they not only got it wrong – they insulted it and all it stands for.

The English flag portrays the Cross of St George. It’s not the only flag that does – it also features on the flags of Georgia, Sardinia, Barcelona, Aragon and various Italian regions and cities.

The English flag has the cross of St George – a red cross portrayed centrally on a white background, like this:

On occasions where the cross is not central, it is always portrayed with the horizontal bar nearer to the top of the image than the bottom:

The photoshopped flag in UKIP’s fake image clearly has the crossbar closer to the bottom of the flag:

So UKIP’s fake England flag is upside down. This is not only wrong but considered a gross insult. Here’s what a flagmakers’ site says about it:

The sinfulness of flying our noble national flag upside down – unforgivable.

Ironically, the same page refers to a formal complaint made to the EU in 2012 about the flying of the UK’s national flag (which incorporates the English flag of St George) upside down – by (then Tory, now) UKIP MEP Roger Helmer:

Arriving at the parliament this morning at around 7am, I noticed that, in the line of national flags, the flag of my country, the Union Jack, was flying upside down (as it was when I first arrived at the Strasbourg parliament in 1999). May I ask if this is merely an oversight, or a deliberate snub?

So, not only are UKIP so desperate to do well in Stoke that they will lie (again) to the people of the city by faking flags in photographs in attempted propaganda – but they know or care so little for the honour of the English flag they attempt to exploit that they grossly insult it.

You honestly couldn’t make it up. But, clearly, UKIP could – and did.

I hope that the owner of the house will sue UKIP for using his/her house in this pathetic way without permission.

And I trust the people of Stoke will send Paul Nuttall out of their fine city in a couple of weeks with a flea in his ear and a humiliatingly meagre vote count – they owe it to him and to themselves to do so.

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