Cancelled its Welsh Conference in Swansea because of lack of
support, membership has declined by 25%, donors running away and is having to
wade in the murky waters of East European politics to retain its Brussels £1m a
year funding.
Recently I posted on my blog that a party that has had
to cancel its Welsh Conference was not a serious enough party to play a part in
the forthcoming May 2016 Welsh Assembly election. The event was shelved due to
‘POOR advanced ticket sales’. At the time I was sent a good line from someone
that I think bears repeating - ‘they are no longer UKIP but ENGIP
(littlenglanders)’.
I also suggested in the post that Welsh voters should
give serious consideration as to what possible benefits is it for them to vote
for a party whose roots are entirely based in England. It has no Welsh
tradition, heritage or background whatsoever it is in fact English to the
core.
One month on The Sunday Mail has
revealed that the party is in a much worse state than what happened in Wales. The
paper reported that UKIP seems to have lost around 25% of its 50,000 members with
a consequential loss of £300,000 income. The situation was described by a
senior party source as a "total car crash".
The Mail also quotes another party
source claiming Mr Farage's infamous and highly publicised U-turn after the
election, when he resigned as leader only to quickly return, had alienated many
supporters.
The party's financial problems
have apparently been exacerbated because its main donor Arron Banks is now
channelling his money into the Leave EU campaign, rather than UKIP.
Prior to the May General Election it is
believed that UKIP received a sum of around £3m in donations and public money,
but that fell to less than £200,000 in the three months after the election.
As if all that wasn’t enough
over at the European Parliament UKIP’s pan-EU grouping called the Europe of
Freedom and Direct Democracy collapsed because a Latvian member of the group
resigned and so the group fell just below the number required to qualify for
official group status. The result was going to be that UKIP was in danger of
losing about a £1m per year of funding from the Parliament.
I find it quite ironic that
the party which loudly vilifies even the existence of Brussels and the European
Parliament is to a great extent reliant on EU funding for its very survival.
Fearful of this pending
disaster Farage went on the hunt for a new recruit to save his ’booty’ and he
found one in a far right racist holocaust denier. An MEP member of the Congress
of the New Right seems to have done a convenience transfer to Farage’s group
merely so that UKIP’s £1m per year could be saved. The Polish MEP’s name is Robert Iwaszkiewicz
and he made the transfer with the blessing of his leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke who is quite a controversial figure himself.
So there we have it,
principle counts for absolutely nothing to Farage and his party. UKIP goes
round the country fooling voters that it is not like other parties in the UK
and that its aim is to bring fresh air into our politics. Yet all the while it plays
in some of the murky waters of Brussels and east European politics.