OUTSIDERS coming here and taking our jobs. No, this isn't racist bigotry but the irony of UKIP parachuting a candidate from London into the Dean only months before a General Election is too rich to miss.

Who does this big city businessman think he is, coming to our Forest and seeking to represent us in the Houses of Parliament when he doesn't even live here?

Had he ever been to the Forest before the hustings where he was elected? What does he know about HOOF, our community hospitals and the shameful number of deaths on our roads? Nothing.

If only there was an angry party that has made its reputation stopping outsiders coming in and stealing our jobs. Like UKIP. Brilliant.

Only UKIP does contradiction of that magnitude. In its eyes immigration equals bad and outsiders to run our Forest equals good. But Foresters aren't so gullible.

And yet UKIP deny that he's been parachuted in even though he won't even have residence here until the end of the month.

Then again, Tory 'don't mention the illegal immigrant cleaner' Mark Harper's got a good track record when it comes to massive contradiction too.

He'd love us to all forgive and forget his role in selling off our Forest. Then there's his 'helping out' at a local Food Bank, while his government presided over the massive increase in dependency on them.

I hear he even voted against an investigation into the causes in the increasing reliance on Food Banks. No, we won't forget how Harper betrayed the Forest.

At least Labour's Steve Parry-Hearn sends his children to a Forest school and has lived here for years. He's also done his time in the local Labour Party before being nominated as its candidate.

And – for the record – as a director in business myself I don't see immigration as this country's most important problem. Especially in the Forest of Dean.

The best candidate deserves any job, irrespective of their skin, culture or country of origin. A willingness to work is nothing to be afraid of. But the politics of race and immigration is the politics of fear, and nothing more.

Of greater concern to me is youth unemployment, the NHS and peace in the Middle East.

I don't believe in everything Labour stands for but I know it stands for values which most of us recognise as fair and decent.

Locally, we need less of the Tory/UKIP hypocrisy – and more representation of issues that really affect Foresters.

Yours in disbelief at the incredulity of UKIP.

– C. Spiby, St Briavels.