Protester adds welcome mats to Ukip immigration poster in Nigel Farage's target constituency South Thanet, gets called a 'hero'

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An unnamed protester has defaced a Ukip immigration poster in Nigel Farage’s target constituency of South Thanet – by adding three welcome mats.

The design shows three giant escalators leading up to the top of the white cliffs of Dover, and was unveiled at an event on the beach in Kent by Nigel Farage himself at the end of March.

But one version of the poster on a billboard in Ramsgate, Kent, has been made altogether less imposing by an apparently anti-Ukip vandal.

Karina Barker, a Ramsgate resident who posted an image of the modified poster online, said: “I don’t know who has bolted Welcome mats to the Ukip poster down my road, but you are a genius and I salute you.”

It’s fair to say that the change has been met with majority approval among other social media users.

Though some disagreed – describing it as likely to be the work of “scrounging students”.

A couple of people have suggested that the mats could be taken to “affirm the point of the poster, ie Ukip would say that we have an open door immigration policy”.

Ms Barker responded that: “It could, true, but there are plenty more prominent ones in town if that was the point they wanted to make.”

Ahead of his appearance in the BBC’s election debate on Thursday night, Mr Farage wrote in this paper that he’d had enough of people calling Ukip “racist”.

And he revealed that one Ukip councillor in Ramsgate has had his garage defaced three times in the past three weeks.

He wrote: “Now whether or not you believe that mass immigration has placed a strain on our NHS, housing, school places and more in the past decade, you surely cannot think, for a second that Ukip members should sit down quietly twiddling their thumbs while they’re being sneered at and smeared.”

A spokesperson for Ukip in South Thanet declined to comment on the defacing of its poster.