UKIP Candidate Accused of Spitting at a Green MP ‘Was Only Pretending to Spit’

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

One of UKIP's Scottish general election candidates has been accused of spitting at a political rival from the Green Party, because that's what you do, isn't it? When you disagree with someone. Just a cheeky glob of spit to say: I respectfully disagree. A bobble of phlegm that says: recycling is bad.

UKIP's Alan Melville, who's standing in Edinburgh North and Leith, was accused by the Green Party's Sarah Beattie-Smith of spitting at her repeatedly over a period of ten days last September when she was manning the Greens' "Yes Tardis" along the city's Leith Walk—but she didn't realize it was the defected Tory candidate until she faced off against him at a recent hustings.

"Interestingly, there was no Lib Dem on the panel tonight but we were joined by the UKIP candidate, Alan Melville," she wrote on her blog. "His presence surprised me, not because I hadn't expected the party to take part in hustings but because I hadn't previously put a face to a name. It was only upon walking in to the room on the night that I realized that Alan Melville is the very same guy who, over ten days in September, swore and spat at me on an almost daily basis as I ran the Green 'Yes Tardis' on Leith Walk."

And at the next hustings, a day later, Melville was questioned about the whole did-he-spit-at-a-Green-Party-representative-while-she-campaigned-out-of-a-police-box thing, and he did the best thing you could possibly do when accused of such, which is stand up and pretend to spit at people.

"I have never spat at anybody in my life," he said. The Herald Scotland reports he then "stood up and attempted to show what he had done, which was a mock spitting gesture," then added: "I never actually spat. I may have sworn." It was just a wee bit of swearing, lads! Can everyone calm down! Just shouting a few obscenities in the streets! It's politics, isn't it!

Thing is, of all the human expectorations to fake, spitting is probably the most difficult. Like: you can fake bleeding, easily, by crushing a blood caplet under your tongue in the middle of a rugby match. If you've ever tried to piss at a urinal and then another person has come and tried to piss at the urinal next to you and you've suddenly forgotten how to piss, you can more or less imitate a wee by sighing and shaking your junk a bit then rapidly washing your hands. Plus, listen: have we not all faked an orgasm? But spitting. Spitting is tough to fake. Because spit actually comes out of your mouth when you spit. Sometimes it gets stuck to your lips or gets blown by the wind back into your face. Sometimes it comes out stringy and sometimes it comes out in a cloud-like bloom. There is no way of misinterpreting that. Plus, surely, if you were trying to make a point about a Green Party representative being wrong about lefty Green ideas like energy preservation and general human empathy, why would you not just spit? When you pretend-spit, you are saying: I disagree with you, Sir or Madam, but not enough to actually spit out of my mouth about it. You are saying: I half-disagree with this, but I've got this new jacket on and I don't want to get spit on it, so I'm just going to make the vague noise of spitting and leave it at that. A shitshow, in other words.

The reaction from the various political parties involved has been incredibly predictable: the Greens firmly condemned the behavior ("We condemn such behavior and would expect other parties to do likewise," they said. "Sadly it's the sort of behavior that seems to fit UKIP's track record of abusive language.") the Kippers were repentant in a fun way ("It seems that a mock spit has created a mock outrage. No, it is not edifying, but nor is the instant run for outrage on the part of the Green candidate."), and the Tories careered in out of fucking nowhere and called for an arrest ("These are serious allegations which should be thoroughly checked out by police. If true, it will be yet another UKIP embarrassment for a party which has no place or standing in Scotland."). Rounds of applause, please, for everyone's individual press teams.

Anyway, the moral of the story is this: UKIP are still an art project being conducted by 130 Central Saint Martins students in old white guy make-up who will reveal themselves as being an eye-opening social experiment on May 8 to coincide with a Channel 4 documentary about what idiots we all were to believe they were real, because they can't be real, can they? They can't actually be real.

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