Yet again, we've got evidence as to why so many have walked away from UKIP.
I live in a town where there has been an influx of Eastern Europeans. 99.9% of them are upstanding citizens - in fact, there's been more attacks on Eastern Europeans than by Eastern Europeans on "us Brits", locally. Both Polish and Portugese shops have been attacked by local yobs. No Poles or Portugese have been implicated in attacks on local shops.
Despite the rhetoric, the fact that 6 out of every 7 criminals "banged up" are still British suggests that this is typical around the UK. Despite this influx distorting a local council ward's demographic this year, the ward's voters chose overwhelmingly to vote other than BNP, suggesting that the migrants were not seen as a major problem.
Economic migrants (not immigrants, by and large) have been a part of British culture for hundreds of years. Most are here to earn an income to send back to their families. They are no more likely to commit crime than the average UKIP branch member and statistically less likely to than the average UKIP MEP. Most of them go home after a couple of years, bitter at the way they have been treated by the British. Some stay and endure decades of abuse because they've been daft enough to choose to live here.
The impotence of our immigration policies is not the fault of European immigrants. It's the fault of the EU's policies. We lessen ourselves by attacking people rather than changing the system. Generalities such as those mentioned in the opening posts will not win UKIP votes from the intelligent swing voter. They will not garner votes from the the intelligent non-voter. They will encourage the media to tell everybody that UKIP is no better than the BNP.
The issue with the prison overcrowding is as much due to the knee-jerk political reactions after 9/11 and 7/7 as anything else. There are certain procedures (designed for short-term emergency overcrowding) still in place after 18 months, due to the political need to keep certain classes of charged individuals in remand rather than on bail. That's exacerbating decades of political hokey-cokeying made worse by the Labour government's inability to reconcile necessity with reality since 1997. Where are UKIP's real plans for law and order? Or is this it?