A UKIP member of the European parliament was unrepentant Wednesday after complaining about British aid being sent to “bongo bongo land” where it was spent on luxuries.
Footage leaked to the Guardian showed MEP Godfrey Bloom saying: “How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month when we’re in this sort of debt to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me.
“To buy Ray-Ban sunglasses, apartments in Paris, Ferraris and all the rest of it that goes with most of the foreign aid,” he is shown saying at a July meeting of UK Independence Party (UKIP) supporters in Wordsley in the West Midlands.
Steve Crowther, chairman of the eurosceptic, anti-immigration party, said on Wednesday: “We are asking Godfrey not to use this phrase again, as it might be considered disparaging by members from other countries.
“However, foreign aid is an extremely important debate that needs wider discussion.”
Bloom, who represents Yorkshire and the Humber, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday: “If I’ve offended anybody in bongo bongo land I shall write to the ambassador at the Court of St James’s and apologise to him personally.
“Look, my job is to upset The Guardian and the BBC — I love it, I love it.”
The shadow minister for international development, Rushanara Ali, said his comments were “offensive” and sprang from a “very narrow-minded, very objectionable set of views”.
Laura Pidcock, of the campaign group Show Racism the Red Card, condemned “crude stereotypes that see Britain as a civilised place and overseas as tribal”.
Bloom told the BBC: “What I am suggesting is when a country has £1 trillion of debt and we’re cutting our hospitals, our police force and we are destroying our defence services, that the money should stay at home.”
The coalition government has pledged to provide 0.7 percent of Britain’s national income for international aid. In 2012 it spent £9 billion on the aid, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Bloom also came under fire earlier this year after suggesting that no “self-respecting small businessman” would employ a “woman of child-bearing age”.
A local council candidate was suspended from UKIP this year after she was reported to have posted anti-Semitic comments online.
In May, a photo emerged of another candidate performing an apparent Nazi salute but party leader Nigel Farage insisted he was merely imitating a pot plant.
UKIP has surged in the polls this year and recorded its best-ever results in May’s local elections.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives have announced fresh anti-immigration measures and promised a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
UKIP MEP wants debate on aid to 'bongo bongo land'
