A Polish banker who is running for Ukip in the council elections believes the party is the "natural choice" of Croydon's Eastern Europeans.

Przemek Skwirczynski, who will stand in Norbury, said the London Road Polish community could help secure him to victory on May 22.

The 31-year-old, who plans to campaign for the extension of the London Underground to Croydon if elected, joined Nigel Farage's party after quitting the Conservatives last year.

And Mr Skwirczynski, who moved to the UK in 1999 and now lives in Purley, rejects the idea that Ukip's calls for tighter immigration controls were at odds with his migrant status.

He said: "Where Ukip are different from the other parties is they haven't actually pointed the finger at the Poles.

"Admittedly, yes, they have said the flow of people needs to be regulated and have made a reference to eastern Europeans, but they haven't made a specific reference to the Poles as a nation or minority."

He added: "I am in accordance with their more common sense view of migration. There should not be a free flow of people.

"We need to allow people who come in to integration and when you've got too many people coming in you risk people not integrating at all."

Mr Skwirczynski, who chairs the Ukip Friends of Poland after forming a similar group under his former party's name, defected because he believes "Ukip are more conservative than the Conservatives".

And believes his current party are more accepting of his countrymen than any of the mainstream parties, despite controversial election posters claiming 26 million Europeans were "after" British jobs.

He said: "At some point over a year ago I started to become disillusioned with the Conservatives. I started believing they no longer really are conservative.

"As we have seen quite recently, whatever Ukip seems to be saying about immigration doesn't really seem to be very different from what other parties are saying.

"Apart from the Lib Dems, the other parties are all also looking at the possibility of leaving the EU. They all say the British are possibly suffering from the fact they can't get job in the current environment.

"Ed Miliband has pointed the finger the Poles, so has David Cameron and even Boris Johnson as well. They are using the Poles as a scapegoat."

Ukip was accused of hypocrisy this week when it emerged that eastern European distributors were delivering party pamphlets claiming immigrants were a threat to British jobs.

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Ukip's poster has attracted dersion and claims of fearmongering

Employed by the firm Fast Leaflets, the distributors, including several Latvians, delivered the flyers to houses in Croydon

But Peter Staveley, chairman of Ukip's Croydon branch, denied the party was guilty of double standards.

He said: "It is not for us to dictate how people run their businesses. As far as we know the company is fully legitimate and it's not for us to decide who they employ.

"When you go to a hospital, you wouldn't refuse treatment just because the nurse comes from the Philippines. Similarly, if you got on a bus and realised the driver came from the Caribbean, you wouldn't get off the bus.

"I don't really see what the problem is. I realise why our opponents think it is hypocritical but I think they are misreading our immigration policy, which is nothing to do with who the deliverers are.

"We have got an infrastructure problem in this country and in the future we think we should limit it to those who have got the skills and are needed by the economy."