UKIP Uncovered

UKIP Uncovered
What motivates the leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party?

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Kilroy on UKIP - Time to Censure Farage & Knapman

Richard North on his blog EU Referendum, linked here, has commented on the Robert Kilroy-Silk column in today's Sunday Express. The Kilroy article (quoted in full above this post) concluded as follows:-

As I said in my conference speech, the British people are disenchanted with the old political parties. They are fed up of being lied to, talked down to and not listened to. they want a party that talks straight, tells the truth and will fearlessly stand up for Britain and the British way of life.

This could have been UKIP. It could have seized the opportunity. You could not do it by going missing for a third of a year. The chance will not come again. Take it now and we could change the face of British politics. Do nothing and we shall regret it for the rest of our political lives.

No indication there that Mr Kilroy-Silk is patiently waiting to be unconstitutionally expelled by the party's NEC tomorrow as indicated in yesterday's The Times. It appears that the 'meet the people tour' trailered here last week remains on the agenda.

Like this blog - Kilroy does not yet seem to believe that the possibility of a defining moment in British politics has suddenly passed due to last week's panicky tantrums of Farage and Knapman. Nor that the trampled constitution and organisation of the UK Independence Party is beyond all hope of providing the launching pad for the flight of such a phoenix.

Dr North makes his views after several years close association with the power behind the present UKIP structure very clear in the linked posting. I quote:-

And for Farage – the acknowledged power behind the throne, who manoeuvred Holmes out of the party, bullied Titford unmercifully until he got his way, and then slid Knapman into place as a willing cipher – policy was never an issue. As long as he could climb up on a platform and talk about an "amicable divorce" and a free trade area with Europe, "which was what we thought we had signed up for in the first place", he was content. He did not want to know the detail.

In fact, Farage was and remains the problem. Having left school early to join the city as a trader, he had no further education, did not understand it, and was suspicious of "intellectual" endeavour. People who had ideas were "dangerous" and, if he could not isolate them, he got rid of them.

UKIP's problem as well as that of many others who seek a practical way to pursue the fight against the non-democratic and ever encroaching EU within Britain - is and remains Nigel Farage MEP. Disciplinary steps were rumoured to have been instituted against him last week, those like earlier moves a year ago will likely be ignored. What is required from tomorrow's NEC is a vote of NO CONFIDENCE against both the Leader of UKIP Roger Knapman and the leader of the party's MEPs, Nigel Farage. (My post below this on the Ashford operation is yet another reminder of the leadership abuses that many in the party must now surely recognise, and which most certainly the NEC knows only too well and now has no further excuse to continue to ignore.)

Few can now seriously doubt that these two men today represent the European Union's best chance to finally extinguish peaceful and democratic British resistance to that institutions takeover and subjugation of our nation.

posted by Martin |2:35 PM