How did they get here? Let’s take a look at their latest public implosion.
Last month, UKIP leader Henry Bolton was rocked by scandal after
his partner, Jo Marney (who Bolton had recently left his wife for) was
revealed to have made numerous racist comments.
Bolton, who had refused to stand down, was unceremoniously dumped
by the party’s membership at an Extraordinary General Meeting in
Birmingham on Saturday
The meeting was an all-out war between Bolton and the NEC. What the
1,500 attendees witnessed was a mixture of the ugly, comedic and
surreal.
An interim leader was then installed by UKIP’s ruling body – Gerard Batten, a committed Islamophobe and conspiracy crank.
Batten once described Islam as a “death cult, born and steeped in
fourteen hundred years of violence and bloodshed, that propagates itself
by intimidation, violence and conquest”, a comment he backed on Sunday
as being “factually historically true”.
He’s also shared stages with far-right extremists, addressing the
annual dinner of the Traditional Britain Group in 2011, presided by the
racist Gregory Lauder-Frost.
UKIP is now a bad joke, haemorrhaging support and money. However,
the bigger threat lies in Nigel Farage and his Leave.EU backer Arron
Banks who are eagerly waiting in the wings.
Farage and Banks are far more capable figures than anything UKIP
can now do. They are likely to hit hard on anti-immigrant and
anti-Muslim messages when they re-enter the political fray -- most
likely at the helm of a new radical-right political movement.
When they launch, we’ll be ready.
No comments:
Post a Comment