Two men were thrown out of a Ukip event in Gateshead on Wednesday evening after loudly telling Nigel Farage to "fuck off back to Toad Hall".
Farage was in town at the start of Ukip's European election campaign. After booing Farage's arrival, attendees Michael Holt and Josh Wright chanted: "Fuckk off back to Toad Hall, Fuckk off back to Toad Hall, na na na na, hey!" One of them can be heard to add succinctly: "Fuck off."
The video, posted on Facebook, helpfully sets the scene. "At this point Farage is at the front of the stage trying to get us to stop chanting about Toad Hall," it explains. The pair were ejected from the meeting.
Holt told The Huffington Post he and Wright decided to launch the protest because they do not like "the way that political culture in the UK is totally fixated with race and immigration" and that "Nigel Farage is a big part of the reason that that has been allowed to happen".
"This is England and I don’t want people like him giving our country a bad name around the world by going around spreading his bigotry, stirring up tension and making people wrongly think that the weak and vulnerable are responsible for our nation’s problems," he said.
Holt added: "We were originally planning to chant something a bit cleverer, about Ukip supporting TTIP (which is a far bigger assault on UK sovereignty than the EU) or the fact Ukip don’t even have a manifesto (that way they get to be an empty vessel for people’s fears and prejudice).
"In the end we just thought: the man’s a horrible toad-faced git and he doesn’t deserve the credit of being taken seriously. So we chanted about him f**king off back to Toad Hall instead."