SCOTLAND’s only Ukip MEP was last night at the centre of another foot-in-mouth row after likening the Conservative position on the EU to “appeasement” of the Nazis.
David Coburn compared David Cameron to former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who infamously declared he had been assured of peace by Adolf Hitler in 1938.
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said, a year before World War Two.
Addressing the Ukip conference in Doncaster yesterday, Coburn attacked Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson for saying she would accept whatever EU reform deal Cameron strikes with Brussels ahead of an in-out referendum on European membership.
Coburn said: “Cameron, like Chamberlain before him, returning from Munich waving a worthless piece of paper - where have we seen that before?”
Earlier this year, Coburn was forced to apologise for a “joke” in which he compared SNP international development Humza Yousaf to the convicted terrorist Abu Hamza.
“Humza Yousaf, or as I call him, Abu Hamza,” Coburn said in a newspaper interview.
Asked about his reference to Chamberlain, Coburn told the Sunday Herald: “You know, like anything he [Cameron] brings back, she [Davidson] will sign up to, like Chamberlain at Munich. I bring back a piece of paper. Appeasement to Brussels, I think. Appeasement to Brussels.”
He added: “The Tory leader seems to have gone over to the dark side.”
The policy of the British and French governments in the 1930s, in practice appeasement meant giving Hitler what he wanted to avoid conflict, including parts of Czechoslovakia under the Munich agreement of 1938 which prompted Chamberlain’s misplaced optimism.
Elsewhere in his speech, Coburn claimed Ukip were the only unionist party left in Scotland in light of Kezia Dugdale allowing Labour MSPs to support independence, and said the SNP were not true nationalists, as they would accept rule from Brussels and Frankfurt in the EU.
“What kind of Nationalist is that, who wants to give away his country to a foreign power? They [the SNP] are international socialists who want to use Scotland as a battering ram to destroy the UK because it does not fit their historical socialist paradigm.”
A spokeswoman for the Scottish Conservatives said: "This is another silly intervention from Mr Coburn. We stand with the majority of Scots who want a reformed European Union which helps Scottish employers get their product to market."
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