As UKIP's popularity swells– it's polling at 18 per cent right now – there is one girl who will no longer have anything to do with the political party, except to say she's leaving its ranks.
British-Asian Sanya-Jeet Thandi used to be one of those non-white members of UKIP that senior members of the party like to show off to prove that they're not racist. But now she's resigned, after saying that the party is attracting racists. 'UKIP has descended into a form of racist populism I can’t bring myself to vote for,' she said overnight. 'While the party deliberately attracts the racist vote, I refuse to be associated with them.'
Over the past few months, leader of the party Nigel Farage has insisted that his 'no more immigration' line – and major election promise – is not racist. However, Sanya-Jeet, who is just 20, doesn't like the way some UKIP local election candidates were ever allowed into the party to begin with. You know like those who've said Lenny Henry 'should emigrate to a black country', or drawn comparisons between Islam and Nazism, calling the former 'organised crime under religious camouflage' and suggested that Stephen Lawrence's murder (and subsequent cover-up) got too much press attention.
'It is not good enough to say that these individuals just slipped through the net. UKIP is still a relatively young party. That is not an excuse to allow racists to stand for election,' Sanya-Jeet said. 'Immigration is positive. Yet, if I voted UKIP, how many of those voting would privately prefer that my parents and I were not citizens of this country?'
This serves as a big blow to UKIP's propaganda – not only had Sanya-Jeet been the youth wing chair of the party, but she also featured in a UKIP party election broadcast. That's how keen they were to show off that yes, they have a British-Asian in their ranks, so yes, they're not racist.
Okay, so we might wonder why Sanya-Jeet was ever a party member to begin with, but maybe she was just trying to fight them from within? Or, as she puts it, her initial 'reasons for supporting UKIP stemmed from liberal ideas such as lower taxes, a smaller state, freedom of the individual, local referenda, and an immigration policy that offered fair and equal opportunities for everyone'.
But now she's resigned herself to the fact the party, which once appealed to her, is 'straying further and further from the policies that attracted so many of its original supporters, instead cynically pursuing ever more aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric'. All of which tells us that while she might be leaving UKIP, this isn't the last of her we'll see in the political arena.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.