“My gut feeling is that we’re going to get the Brexit that we fought for, and like your favourite old banger that you drove around and had wonderful picnics in and went to the seaside, it got you to where you wanted to go. But the day comes when you have to say goodbye to it and replace it, with a better model.”
Nathan Gill is not talking about a car, but about his own party.
As the party embarks on its third leadership contest in a year, UKIP’s MEP in Wales thinks that, unless the party can find a big issue to corral around like the Brexit negotiations, it could be curtains for its future.
Paul Nuttall, the party’s last leader, resigned after a dire general election performance which saw the party win no seats and, in Wales, saw UKIP lose all of its deposits in the 32 seats it contested.
Its share of the vote plunged too, from 13.6% in the 2015 general election to just 2%.
It didn’t always look like it was going to be this way.
Image caption Nathan Gill suggests that a UKIP without a cause to rally around may be like an “old banger”
Back in May 2016 UKIP formed a group in the assembly with seven AMs sitting in the Senedd.
The assumption held by many was that their assembly presence would serve as a springboard for the party to continue to build its presence in Wales.
So far, that has not happened.
Since the Senedd election two of their most high-profile members – Mr Gill and Mark Reckless – have gone independent, dwindling their assembly numbers to five.
UKIP also failed to take off at the Welsh council elections a month before the general election result, failing to win any seats.
David Rowlands, the UKIP AM for South Wales East and a long-standing member of the party, argues that the poor performance in June was not down to UKIP but the fact that the poll was like a “presidential” election.
“The reason that it looks so bad for ourselves is that we’ve hit such heights over the last few general elections,” he says.
But there had been internal disagreement over the party’s general election campaign, which focused on banning the burka as a key policy.
The issue fed into the question around what UKIP’s purpose is now, with its core policy – Brexit – being implemented by the UK government.
Mr Gill, who remains a UKIP MEP despite being an independent AM after falling out with Senedd group leader Neil Hamilton, says the reality was that there “was the one issue that united us, and that was leaving the EU”.
“The only way really that UKIP can continue, I think, is if we have that big picture, that big goal of what we need to achieve,” he says.
The MEP claims a “half-baked” Brexit could “reignite UKIP”.
Image caption David Rowlands denied there was an existential threat to the party
The new model Mr Gill refers to in his old banger analogy “may be a political movement, it may be a new party”.
It is important to remember that Mr Gill has had his own difficulties with UKIP in the last 12 months – having been threatened with expulsion by the ruling National Executive Committee over being both MEP and AM.
Meanwhile Mr Rowlands denies there is an existential threat to UKIP and says the party represents something others do not.
“What people don’t understand is, if someone should leave the UK Independence Party at the moment, which party would they go to to reflect their views?
“I’m dyed in the wool UKIP, but could I go somewhere else and feel comfortable that they care about this country in the way I care about the United Kingdom?”
He admits that some members have thought the job was done after the referendum.
“There was a feeling out there, and it was among a number of members of UKIP, that we’ve done the job that we came into being to do, we’ve got ourselves Brexit… therefore what is now the raison d’etre of the party?”
Mr Rowlands, however, says “large numbers” of members who felt that way are returning to UKIP because they fear the Brexit negotiations do not reflect what the British people voted for.
Unlike Mr Gill, Mr Rowlands said he had been comfortable with the burka ban policy.
“I think the burka is an appalling garment… to me its a symbol of oppression of women”, he says.
Image caption Anne Marie Waters is one of the 11 hoping to be candidates for leadership of the party
There are now 11 hopefuls who have registered an interest in taking over the party. They face a vetting process that is currently pegged to end this Friday, with voting due in September.
One of people thought to be a frontrunner is Anne Marie Waters – who has been vocal in her opposition to Islam.
There is talk of UKIP MEPs resigning if she won.
Mr Gill has been reluctant to say very much about the leadership campaign – he is not publicly backing a candidate.
I try to make every effort to NOT infringe copyrights in any commercial way & make all corrections of fact brought to my attention by an identifiable individual
yet again Ukip makes the perfect error – it would be hard to find a more stupid and badly led organisation – little wonder their support, after their crass failures in the BreXit Campaign, they compound their problems by encouraging their racist lunatic fringe, mostly due to the utter incompetence of their leadership over the years! Not just their individual leaders but the callibre of those placed on their NEC and put in place as staff and in the chain of command.
Ukip under fire for choosing candidate who called Islam evil
Selection of Anne Marie Waters, ex-depty leader of far-right group Pegida, reveals ‘grubby, true face’ of party, says Tim Farron
Anne Marie Waters attends an ‘Islam kills women’ rally and protest in Westminster last year. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Thursday 27 April 2017 14.02 BST Last modified on Thursday 27 April 2017 16.54 BST
Ukip has been accused of “grubbing around in the gutter” for votes after the party selected a parliamentary candidate who has described Islam as evil.
Anne Marie Waters, an activist from the anti-Islam Pegida movement, has also praised the far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders.
It follows Ukip’s decision to campaign on banning the full-face veil and sharia courts. The move by Ukip’s leader, Paul Nuttall, to focus his party on an “integration agenda” – which also calls for mandatory medical checks on schoolgirls at risk of female genital mutilation – has prompted some disquiet among senior figures.
The decision was also condemned by the leaders of the Liberal Democrats and Greens, who said Waters’ selection showed Ukip was embracing hard-right politics in an attempt to gather votes in the wake of the EU referendum.
Waters, who will stand in Lewisham East in south London, takes a robust attitude towards not just radical Islamism, but the religion as a whole, which she described in a tweet last year as “evil”.
She was deputy leader of the UK arm of Pegida, the German-formed far-right and anti-Islam group partly set up by Stephen Lennon, who, under the name Tommy Robinson, founded the English Defence League street organisation.
“Whether it is politically correct or not to say it, people are concerned about Muslim immigration,” she says. “They are concerned because Islamic culture does not fit with ours, and it is our culture that is being sacrificed. They are concerned that their children are at risk of rape and sexual abuse.”
Waters regularly tweets similar views, and has written articles for the hard-right website Breitbart praising Wilders and linking Muslim immigration to rapes and sexual assaults.
A Ukip spokesman said: “Anne Marie Waters has been selected as a candidate for Lewisham East, where she will work hard to promote the party and gender equality.”
However, a party source said Waters’ candidacy still had to be approved by the national executive committee, which would meet on Friday.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, said: “Once again the mask is slipping from Ukip and revealing the nasty, grubby, true face of the party. This is why they are constantly rejected by voters, because what they stand for is genuinely un-British.
“This party seems desperate to grub around in the gutter for every single vote, and shame on them for it.”
Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, said after the Brexit vote Nuttall’s party was “desperately scrabbling around for relevance and seem to have settled upon attacks on Muslims and promoting fringe far-right politics as their new home.
“By selecting candidates from the extreme right, they expose themselves as the bigots they really are and utterly undermine any claim they have to stand up for ordinary people. Ukip are no patriots – they are reactionaries wrapped in the Union Jack.”
Waters is not alone within Ukip in expressing such views. After the Westminster terrorist attack last month, one of the party’s MEPs, Gerard Batten, who is Nuttall’s spokesman on Brexit, blamed the attack on Islam, which he called “Mohammedanism”.
Batten wrote: “It is a death cult, born and steeped in fourteen hundred years of violence and bloodshed, that propagates itself by intimidation, violence and conquest.”
At the same time, Victoria Ayling, who finished second for Ukip in last year’s Sleaford and North Hykeham byelection and is believed to be seeking selection for the Boston seat, retweeted a false claim that Muslims had been seen celebrating in Birmingham, Bradford, London and other cities after the attack. When challenged, she refused to disown the tweet.
I try to make every effort to NOT infringe copyrights in any commercial way & make all corrections of fact brought to my attention by an identifiable individual
Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
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