A leading UKIP official has said the NHS is a wasteful socialist programme and compared it to Nazi Germany.
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Matthew Richardson, who sits on UKIP's top decision-making board, described the health service as a "racket" that sits the heart of the "Reichstag bunker of socialism".
The party official, who was partly appointed to keep negative stories about UKIP out of the media, said the health service is the "sacred cow of British politics", and called for swathes of it be privatised.
In the video, recorded at a right-wing conference in the US in 2010, Richardson attacks the NHS as one of a series of "wasteful socialist programmes" that are pushing up the national debt.
A number I couldn't possible imagine when I was younger is now the amount of money that is owed by my country, and soon more than that by your country, to other countries, paying for wasteful socialist programmes. And of course at the heart of this, the Reichstag bunker of socialism is the National Health Service. …
And that is [why] socialised health care is a racket: Once it is in place, it is very, very hard to get rid of.
In a separate recording, Richardson told right-wing activists that he hoped to see further privatisation of NHS services:
Question: Now we have a Conservative government in charge, when can we start to see some privatisation of the NHS? We've heard the horror stories, is there hope on the horizon?"
Matthew Richardson: Well I'd like to think there is. But I think there's probably not. The problem with the NHS is as I've described is the sacred cow of British politics. …
We have to work very hard to convince them [people working for the NHS] that their jobs won't be lost, in fact that their pay scales will be increased, that their working conditions will be better, that their treatments will be more effective. And that people as a result of privatisation, or part privatisation or full privatisation of the NHS will do better. And that's a battle that we have to win the hearts and minds of people for, and it's a battle that you guys have to win because you are going down a slippery slope.
The footage, originally recorded by US politics network C-Span, was released by Labour as part of a fightback against Nigel Farage's party. Labour has also launched a website entitled Meet Nigel Farage in an attempt to highlight the UKIP leader's statements on the NHS.
Meanwhile, in separate comments leaked to the Sunday Times, Richardson declared that UKIP would stand up for bigots.
I've said before, people talk about UKIP being bigots. There are hundreds of thousands of bigots in the United Kingdom and they too deserve representation.
Richardson told the newspaper that the comments were "light-hearted banter".