The right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock is one of the most duplicitous wreckers in the entire party. Whenever there's an opportunity to attack Jeremy Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members who support him, Woodcock is always at the forefront slinging as much political abuse as possible.
Now it turns out that Woodcock has been going around threatening to quit the Labour Party in order to inflict as much damage on the party as possible before the local elections.
The reasons he gives are the usual stuff. The Corbyn's a "Russian stooge" smears (despite the Tories taking £800,000 in donations from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies and Labour taking £0 since Corbyn took over) and the anti-Semitism smears (despite the fact that Jeremy Corbyn can point to a track record of opposing all forms of racism and bigotry all the way back to before he became an MP in the 1980s).
Woodcock is also whining that the Labour MP Dan Jarvis is being asked to stand down as an MP if he wants to become the mayor of the Sheffield region, because of the Labour Party policy of no double-jobbing.
Jarvis is trying to claim he should be allowed to do both jobs, but the precedent is absolutely clear. Sadiq Khan stood down as an MP in 2016 to become London Mayor, Andy Burnham stood down as an MP in 2017 to become Mayor of Greater Manchester, and Steve Rotherham also stood down in 2017 to become the mayor of the Liverpool City Region.
Why Jarvis thinks he shouldn't follow this precedent is anyone's guess, and why Woodcock has decided that this particular argument is the one he wants to have a final ruinous tantrum over is anyone's guess too.
If Woodcock does go ahead with his threat to quit the Labour Party and see out the parliament as an independent MP he won't just be betraying his constituents in Barrow who voted for him to serve as a Labour MP, he'll also be demonstrating that he's got significantly less integrity than Ukippers.
When Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless quit the Tory party in 2014 to defect to UKIP, they at least had the decency to call by-elections to give their local constituents the right to choose whether they were still wanted. By-elections they both won by the way.
Woodcock has no intention of doing that because he'd almost certainly lose his seat to the replacement Labour candidate, so he's planning on squatting in the seat for as long as possible in order to attack the Labour Party at every move, which is hardly what his constituents voted for.
If Woodcock does go ahead with this threat to quit the Labour Party and then squat in the seat for as long as possible, it'd be proof that he's got less integrity, less regard for his constituents, and less commitment to democracy than the Ukipper fruitcakes on the extreme-right fringe of UK politics!
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Nigel Farage is having a huge hissy fit because he wants a seat in the unelected House of Lords or a Knighthood and Douglas Carswell (UKIP's only actual MP) lightly mocked him over it.
The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Britain's self-proclaimed saviour from the terrible anti-democratic EU technocrats scuttling around in search of peerage to sit in the unelected House of Lords is so brazen that perhaps even a few 'Kippers might actually be capable of thinking "hang on a minute".
When asked by UKIP insiders to intervene in order to help secure anti-democratic gongs for Farage, Carswell responded in an internal party email that maybe Farage could be nominated as an OBE for "services to headline writers". Carswell's email has now been leaked and Farage is having a total meltdown over it.
Farage's furious reaction to Carswell's jibe is an illustration of just how enormously over-inflated his ego has now become. Farage has claimed that Carswell's slightly mocking words were motivated by "jealousy" and then demanded that the comically inept new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall expel Carswell from the party for daring to criticise him.
Imagine the size of the ego that imagines a bit of light personal ribbing against the dear ex-leader is more damaging to the party than a witch hunt to expel the party's only MP!
Carswell is also clearly despised by Arron Banks, the obnoxious millionaire UKIP donor who is busy blackmailing the party into making him party chairman by threatening to stop pumping cash into the party if they don't.
I'm no big fan of Douglas Carswell because (like Farage, Nuttall and Banks) he's an ex-Tory, and he consistently votes in favour of pretty much every appalling scam the Tories come up with. However, being called "a terrible individual" by a slimeball like Arron Banks is clearly a feather in his cap that he can be well and truly proud of. And winding up Farage so much that he's has a pathetic dictatorial foot-stamping fit ... well that's provided everyone with a little bit of light political amusement, which we can all be thankful for in these dark and dangerous days.
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For years people pointed out that UKIP is a savagely right-wing political party that was led by a former Tory party activist, bankrolled by ex-Tory millionaire donors and stuffed full of failed, disgraced and defected Tory politicians.
The classic response from working-class UKIP supporters was that the extreme-Thatcherite tendencies of the party were secondary to the main objective of getting the UK out of the European Union.
Well now that 37% of the public have managed to drag the UK out of the European Union, what is the point of UKIP continuing to exist? And what is the justification for working class people continuing to support a party that promotes the hard-right Thatcherite economic dogma that has ruined their communities, repressed their wages and trashed their local infrastructure and services?
UKIP
UKIP has functioned brilliantly as a Tory Trojan Horse party. Over the years they have soaked up the votes of millions of people from communities that have been left behind as a result of the Thatcherite economic ideology of the last four decades.
It's actually quite a brilliant ploy for the right-wing media to present an even more right-wing, even more rabidly Thathcerite party than the Tories as a "protest vote".
Not only does this ploy divert people away from supporting parties that actually offer a genuine alternative to the toxic Thatcherite consensus of the Westminster establishment, it also serves to drag the whole political spectrum even further rightwards as the Tories attempt to imitate UKIP, and the Blairite faction of the Labour Party attempts to imitate the Tories.
Whether UKIP continues in this role as a Thatcherite Trojan Horse party, or eventually folds itself back into the Tory party seems to depend a lot on whether Andrea Leadsom becomes the Tory party leader. Leadsom is from the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party, so under her leadership the Tories would become almost indistinguishable from UKIP. Leadsom's leadership bid happens to be supported by Arron Banks (the UKIP donor who wants to see the NHS abolished), so a merger between UKIP and the Tories could happen, with the few remaining liberally minded Tories likely splitting off in disgust.
In my view this kind of formal merger between UKIP and the Tories is quite unlikely because UKIP will surely serve a much more useful purpose to the merchants of hard-right economic ideology if they continue soaking up the anti-establishment votes in working class communities and then using this support to drag the Westminster establishment ever further to the right.
If UKIP formally merged with the Tories they'd soon lose a lot of the anti-establishment votes to other parties that do actually offer much better alternatives than UKIP's prescription of "more of the same Thatcherite dogma, but even harder"
Working class UKIP voters
If you are a UKIP suporter from a traditional working class background you need to accept that the vote for Brexit means that your main excuse for voting for a hard-right Thatcherite party is gone.
You've got what you wanted now, but just look at the kind of savagely right-wing opportunists that your support has helped into the political limelight.
- Arron Banks: An intensely smug NHS-hating Thatcherite who went from bankrolling the Tories, to bankrolling UKIP, to bankrolling the Leave campaign and back to supporting the Tories with his backing for Andrea Leadsom to become Tory leader and unelected Prime Minister of the UK.
- Roger Helmer: Another Tory defector. When Helmer was UKIPs business spokesman he voted in favour of the TTIP corporate power grab in the European Parliament demonstrating two things. UKIP don't actually give a damn about sovereignty as long as the over-ruling institutions are multinational corporations, and all their bluster about UKIP always voting "no" to EU legislation is bullshit. because Helmer clearly voted in favour of the TTIP corporate power grab.
If you're a working class 'Kipper it's time for you to either step off the UKIP bandwagon, or to admit to yourself, and everyone else, that you're now the kind of person who supports an extreme version of the Rupert Murdoch approved hard-right economic ideology that has destroyed working class jobs and communities up and down the country for the last four decades.
If you refuse to quit the 'Kipper snake oil after Brexit, it's absolutely clear that you actually approve of the social and economic damage done to the UK by the Westminster establishment's fixation with hard-right economics. In fact you approve of it so much that you're supporting an even more virulent strain of this toxic hard-right ideology than that promoted by Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and whoever succeeds him.
Conclusion
Only the future will tell whether UKIP continues to exist as a Tory Trojan Horse party to soak up the protest votes of the chronically under-informed, or folds back into the Tory party where so many of their financiers and politicians came from.
My view is that they would be far more useful to the hard-right if they stay as a Torjan Horse protest party, fuelling the ever rightwards shift in the UK political spectrum with voters who are dissatisfied with the consequences of Thatcherite ideology, but too chronically under-informed to realise that they're supporting an even more radical form of hard-right Thatcherite economic ideology.
The interesting thing will be to see what the new excuse working class 'Kippers come up with for defying their own economic interests by voting for an even more rabid version of the hard-right Thatcherite ideology that has wrecked working class communities up and down the country, destroyed our industries, distributed our common wealth to private interests and repressed our wages.
They can't use opposition to the EU any more because they already won that battle, so what is it to be?
Talk of patriotism?
Ludicrous appeals to "common sense"?
Who knows?
The only thing that does seem certain is that whatever the reason they come out with, it will involve studious evasion of the fact that UKIP represents an extreme-right version of the Thatcherite economic dogma that is the root cause of most of the things that 'Kippers are generally so pissed off about.
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I first published a version of this article back in September 2014, but I've updated it to include more information about what some of these twelve Tory-UKIP defectors have been up to since then.
Nigel Farage
The UKIP party leader Nigel Farage clearly assumes the majority of people are stupid enough to fall for his jovial pint-swilling "man of the people" act. I mean how gullible would you have to be to believe that a privately educated former Tory party activist and commodities trader in the City of London is the kind of guy to stand up against the wealthy establishment in order to defend the interests of ordinary people?
perhaps it is a little unfair to judge Farage only by his establishment background, because the left-wing firebrand Tony Benn also came from an establishment background and nobody could ever accuse him of being a Tory. Of all the many many things that Farage has said and done to actually prove that he's still a Tory at heart is the way he lionises Margaret Thatcher and declares himself and UKIP to be the heirs to Thatcherism. A man can hardly declare that he is the only politician "keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive" without looking like a Tory in a purple tie.
UPDATE: In 2015 Farage decided to make an all-or-nothing gamble to try and win the Westminster seat he's always been craving. In order to try to boost his chances of success he promised to resign as UKIP leader if he failed to win the South Thanet seat he was contesting. He duly failed to win the seat and resigned, but then hastily un-resigned and in so doing proved beyond doubt that not only is he a reckless gambler, but also a man who is utterly incapable of sticking to his word too.
Stuart Wheeler
Many might imagine that Nigel Farage is the driving force behind UKIP, but he's just the charismatic front-man. The guy who is really running the show is the Eton educated UKIP party treasurer Stuart Wheeler. Wheeler made his fortune setting up the spread betting firm IG Index in the 1970s. Until 2011 he was a Tory party supporter, so much so that the £5 million donation he made to the Tories in 2001 to bankroll their General Election campaign is still the single largest political donation in British political history.
Wheeler has gone from bankrolling the Tory party to bankrolling UKIP, and he's brought a large network of other former Tory party donors with him. UKIP is bankrolled by former Tory party donors to such an extent that 90% of their donations now come from the people who used to bankroll the Tory party!
Neil Hamilton
The Tory MP for Tatton Neil Hamilton became a political joke after he was caught up in the cash for questions scandal in 1994. Despite having the fourth strongest Tory majority in the whole country Hamilton was easily defeated by the anti-corruption campaigner Martin Bell at the 1997 General Election. Subsequently Neil and his wife Christine were given numerous opportunities to keep themselves in the limelight on shows like Have I got News for You and The Weakest Link.
In 2011 Nigel Farage handed Neil Hamilton his ticket back into politics by supporting his bid to join the UKIP National Executive Committee. By 2014 Hamilton had worked his way up to deputy Chairman of the party and campaign director for the 2014 European Elections.
Back in the 1990s I found it infuriating that several TV shows allowed this guy to blatantly cash in on the corruption allegations against him, but it's even more infuriating that UKIP have welcomed him back into the world of politics with open arms.
UPDATE: After spending almost two decades seeking a route back into politics the people of Mid and West Wales handed Neil Hamilton a route back into politics by voting UKIP which gave them one seat on the regional list, top of that list was Neil Hamilton. I wonder how many of the people who voted UKIP in this region actually understood that they were endorsing Neil Hamilton?
William Legge
Eton educated William Legge (or "The 10th Earl of Dartmouth" to use his establishment title) was a Tory member of the unelected House of Lords from 1999 to 2007. In 2009 he was elected as a UKIP MEP for the South West region, which I suppose is actually better than simply being appointed to the bloated anti-democratic shambles that is the House of Lords. The point still stands that he's one of the many former Tories now wearing the purple and yellow of UKIP.
Roger Helmer
Roger Helmer is another Tory MEP to have defected to UKIP. He was originally elected a Conservative MEP in 1999, but defected to UKIP in 2012. Many people have taken offence at Helmer's bigotry (claiming that rape victims "share a part of the responsibility", comparing gay equality with bigotry and incest, claiming that homophobia is a meaningless word ...) and his climate change denialism, however I'm much more concerned about his links to a foreign right-wing corporate pressure group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC is a profoundly disturbing organisation that writes corporate friendly "model legislation" which is then turned into state law by ALEC friendly legislators. Laws written by, or heavily influenced by ALEC include the classification of environmental protest activities as "terrorism", further privatisation of the US education system, deregulation of the US energy and telecommunications markets, support for the private prison-industrial complex and the appalling "stand your ground" murderers' charter.
Helmer was appointed as an Adam Smith Scholar by ALEC in 2005 and served on the ALEC International Relations Task Force. It seems extremely odd that someone with such strong links with an organisation intent on rewriting the law in the US and abroad in order to suit corporate interests, would want to join a party that endlessly harps on about protecting British sovereignty. The only way it makes any sense is if the endlessly repeated UKIP concerns about British sovereignty are just a smokescreen to obscure an extremely right-wing pro-corporate agenda.
Janice Atkinson
Janice Atkinson sprung into the public consciousness when she decided to verbally abuse some Green Party activists and was photographed making obscene gestures at them during the 2014 European election campaign. Despite this loutish behaviour she was still elected as a UKIP MEP for the South East.
Before Janice Atkinson defected to UKIP in 2011 she was a failed Tory. She was a press officer for the Tory party during their disastrous 2005 General Election campaign and in 2010 she was a failed Tory parliamentary candidate in the West Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen. It was the failure of politicians like Janice Atkinson to win back seats that were lost to Labour in 1997 that prevented the Tories from forming a majority government in 2010.
Even though she is clearly an obnoxious individual, it is difficult not to admire her opportunism. She was clearly failing to get anywhere within the Tory party, so she made the decision to jump ship and get herself on the gravy train of European parliamentary expenses with UKIP instead.
UPDATE: Atkinson was turfed out of UKIP in 2015 after being caught trying to inflate her European Parliament expenses. She now sits in the European Parliament as an independent MEP.
Bill Etheridge
Bill Etheridge is another of the crop of Tory party failures to have joined UKIP before the 2014 European elections. Prospective Tory party councilors Bill and his wife Star resigned from the party after having been suspended for posting pictures of themselves holding golliwog dolls on social media.
Nigel Farage was given reason to regret welcoming Etheridge into the UKIP fold when he decided to advise a UKIP youth conference that they should try to imitate the speaking style of Adolf Hitler!
Bill Etheridge is clearly a man with an appalling lack of self-awareness. After the Daily Telegraph reported his Hitler comments, he had the cheek to criticise their coverage as "tasteless" and "disgusting" as if advising the UKIP youth to strut around like a bunch of little Hitlers is perfectly acceptable.
Another indicator of his appalling lack of self-awareness is a sneering Facebook attack on the Tory party for their feeble "vote UKIP get Labour" propaganda campaign. His riposte is that "if you vote UKIP, you get UKIP". It seems that he has completely forgotten his political past, otherwise he might have said "Vote UKIP, get Tory rejects like me".
Nathan Gill
Yet another embarrassing addition to the UKIP fold as a result of the 2014 European elections is the former Tory party activist Nathan Gill. Shortly after he was elected as the UKIP MEP for Wales it was revealed that until 2008 he had run a home care company in Hull that had mainly employed Polish and Phillipino immigrants on poverty wages, many of them living in bunkhouse accommodation. Gill didn't close his immigrant reliant business because of any new found opposition to immigration, the business went bankrupt with debts of £116,000.
The appalling hypocrisy of going from an employer who pays such low wages that they are forced to rely upon dozens and dozens of immigrant workers living in bunkhouse accomodation, to standing as a candidate for an anti-immigration party is undeniable.
Aside from the fact that he seems to be a perfectly inappropriate candidate for an anti-immigration party, another question must surely be why UKIP couldn't find any better candidates in the whole of Wales than a man with no real business experience apart from driving his company into bankruptcy, despite cutting costs by exploiting cheap foreign labour?
UPDATE: In 2016 Welsh voters handed Nathan Gill a seat in the Welsh Assembly on the North Wales regional list, so now he gets to claim two salaries as a UKIP politician despite having a track record of exploiting migrant workers until his company went bankrupt!
Amjad Bashir
Amjad Bashir was yet another long-term Tory party activist turned UKIP MEP. He explained that his main reasons for joining UKIP were to remove the UK from the EU, his opposition to gay equality and his desire to dramatically cut down on immigration.
The hypocrisy and self-interest of a Pakistani born immigrant joining UKIP and making statements like "we now have to seriously restrict immigration" is appalling. He's one of the beneficiaries of immigration into the UK from the former colonies, now he wants to kick away the ladder to stop others coming and benefiting in the same way that he has.
UPDATE: Amjad Bashir was elected as a UKIP member of the European Parliament in 2014 but swiftly defected back to the Tory party in January 2015! This defection left the Yorkshire and Humber region with two MEPs each from UKIP, Labour and the Tories, which is grotesquely unrepresentative of the actual results which were UKIP 403,630, Labour 380,189, Tory 248,945.
Douglas Carswell
Despite his propensity for expenses scamming (flipping his second home, getting the taxpayer to pay for all manner of expensive furniture and subsidise his food bills) and his climate change denialism, Charterhouse educated Douglas Carswell was a darling of the Tory party, attracting glowing praise from the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Tory blogger Guido Fawkes. Despite all of the praise, Carswell's main political achievement within the Tory party seems to have been the ridiculous campaign to politicise the police by introducing elected PCCs, a policy which resulted in the lowest electoral turnouts since universal suffrage!
In August 2014 Carswell defected to UKIP claiming that David Cameron was not doing enough to deliver change.
UPDATE: Carswell managed to keep his seat in the 2015 General Election but has flown under the radar ever since, only popping up on the odd occasion to make himself the only non-Tory MP to vote in favour of brutal Tory policies like Tax Credit cuts for the working poor and welfare cuts for disabled people.
Mark Reckless
Of all of the new crop of Tory MPs in 2010 Mark Reckless was one of the least notable. In fact, hardly anyone had even heard of him until he decided to follow Douglas Carswell's lead and defect to UKIP. His decision to announce his defection at the UKIP conference, and just a couple of days before the Tory party conference seemed premeditated to create the maximum possible publicity.
Before he defected to UKIP a few of the only notable things he did were joining five other Tories to vote against the tripling of "aspiration taxes" for university students, excusing the fact that he missed a parliamentary vote by claiming that he was too drunk and ..err ... publicly lambasting Douglas Carswell for defecting to UKIP!
UPDATE: Reckless was deposed at the 2015 General Election but quickly bounced back by sneaking onto the regional list for the South Wales East region in the 2016 Welsh Assembly election.
David Silvester
The eleven other people mentioned in this article have all defected from the Tory party and achieved important positions within UKIP (party leader, deputy chairman, MEP, party treasurer, candidate MPs ...) however it is important not to forget the dozens and dozens of Tory party councillors to have defected to UKIP too.
Until 2013 David Silvester was a Tory councillor in Henley-on-Thames, but then he decided to defect to UKIP. He hit the headlines in 2014 when he decided to blame the Somerset Floods on the introduction of gay equality legislation (in my view one of the very few decent things the Tory led government has actually done).
UKIP initially tried to defend Silvester's absurd comments by saying they were just his own personal opinion, however Nigel Farage went on to say that it was "incredibly damaging" when "defectors" from the Conservative Party join UKIP and say "appalling and outrageous things". If Farage is really so concerned about defectors from the Tory party damaging the reputation of his party, one has to wonder why he continues to allow extremists from the far-right fringe of the Tory party to flood into his party through the door that he is holding open for them?
UPDATE: After a few weeks of wrangling Silvester was eventually thrown out of UKIP February 2014. He clung on as an independent councillor until 2015 when he lost his seat.
Conclusion
It's remarkable that so many UKIP voters fail to realise that they are just a Tory Trojan Horse party that are led by a former Tory party activist, massively bankrolled by former Tory donors and stuffed full of failed, defected and disgraced former Tory politicians.
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So what can I say about Nigel Farage's un-resignation?
I can't say that I'm surprised about it. It's not difficult to see that, despite his own admission that "it's frankly just not credible for me to continue to lead the party without a Westminster seat", he's pretty much irreplaceable to them, given that the rest of the party is made up of a collection of failed Tories, bitter angry old men, outright bigots, teabagger style neoliberals, embarrassingly under-qualified amateurs and even a smattering of hopelessly confused left-wingers.
I had hoped that UKIP might be able to move on from Nigel Farage's deceitful attempts to be everything to everybody and establish themselves a position as a genuine right-wing libertarian party because, even though I strongly disagree with the right-wing libertarian stance, I don't see why right-wing libertarians should be so completely unrepresented on the political compass as they are at present.
Another reason I would have liked to see UKIP attempt to take a more genuine right-libertarian stance is because I see right-wing libertarians as slightly less dangerous than the kind of extremist right-wing authoritarians who dominate the current Tory government. As a left-libertarian I imagine that I would have been able to find much more common ground with a UKIP taken in a right-libertarian direction (stuff like standing up for personal freedoms, and opposing the ever encroaching surveillance state), than a party doggedly sticking to the fundamentally dishonest ultra-Thatcherite in Tory constituencies / more-Labour-than-Labour in Labour constituences shtick.
I would obviously have preferred them to move toward adopting a genuine political stance, but there's probably a hell of a lot more votes for them by maintaining their deceitful efforts to appeal to the uninformed and undereducated by telling them whatever it is that they think they want to hear.
The really big problem for UKIP, and the reason they couldn't let Farage go, is that his own admission that it is "frankly not credible" for the UKIP leader to not be holding a Westminster seat obviously applies equally to every other UKIP politician bar their sole MP Douglas Carswell, who although an interesting character, is hardly what anyone would call a charismatic bloke with mass appeal and leadership potential.
Aside from being a bit of an unappealing oddball, another obvious problem with Carswell is that he's still clearly tainted by the fact that until 2014 he was a Tory MP, and by his appalling voting record during his time as a Tory MP. It's was always going to be difficult for UKIP to pull off the "plucky anti-establishment outsiders" look while being led by a guy who was a member of the ruling government party less than a year ago, especially since ever more of the UKIP rank and file are realising where UKIP's money is actually coming from (90% of it from Tory party donors).
Even though Farage's undignified climbdown makes him look like an unprincipled snake who won't stick by his word when he makes an all or nothing "elect me or I resign" gamble and then loses it, I don't suppose it matters to to most 'kippers that he's displayed such an appalling lack of dignity.
If 'kippers had any standards they should be seriously unhappy about the fact that their leader make a ridiculous "elect me or I resign" gamble, then lost it, then made himself appear embarrassingly unprincipled when he un-resigned within half a week, making himself (by his own admission) an uncredible leader.
Most of them won't be bothered at all by it though. They'll be so busy celebrating the return of their uncredible hero, and so confidently immune to cognitive dissonance, that they'll be able to reimagine the whole thing as a heroic triumph over adversity by their straight-talking, never deceptive or dishonest, fag smoking, beer swilling everyman of a privately educated former Tory party activist and commodities trader turned "people's champion".
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
