Just a couple of days ago the leaders of the shambolic remains of UKIP announced that they'd hired the services of four of the most grotesque right-wing hatemongers on the Internet.
There's the guy who became famous for teaching his girlfriend's dog to do Nazi salutes at the phrase "gas the Jews" (Mark Meechan), an inexplicably popular white supremacist and Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Youtuber commonly known as "map wanker" (Paul Joseph Watson), a guy who responded to a flood of rape threats against Jess Phillips by saying "I wouldn't rape you" as if he's only interested in raping women he finds attractive, accused the #MeToo movement of being "golddigging whores", and expressed sympathy with the misogynist mass murderer Elliot Roger (Carl Benjamin) and an extreme-right former Brietbart editor who advocated the benefits of sex between adult men and 13 year old boys (Milo Yiannopoulos).
Hiring these foul extreme-right self-publicists is a move straight out of the Donald Trump "no such thing as bad news" approach to publicity.
As far as UKIP are concerned the extremist views and actions of these vile characters are irrelevant, as long as UKIP gains some second-hand publicity through association with them.
The objective here is obvious. UKIP are desperately attempting to drum up support for their spectacularly imploding party by piggybacking on the large social media reach of these disgusting extreme-right Internet celebrities.
In a truly cringeworthy video address the leader of the Welsh UKIP branch Neil Hamilton (yes, he is the guy who was so corrupt and self-serving he even got booted out of the Tory party in the 1990s!) gleefully welcomed these four vile extremists into the party and said how he was looking forward to them producing some "truly dank memes" ...
On the very same day he was announced as a new UKIP recruit the paedophile apologist Milo Yiannopoulos immediately gave Neil Hamilton and the Ukippers one of the "truly dank memes" they were craving when he told an Observer journalist "I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight".
Just two days after his comments about killing journalists a gunman entered the building of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis and gunned down journalists on sight, just as Yiannopoulos wanted, resulting in the death of five, and the grave injury of several more.
Then Yiannopoulos got himself banned from PayPal for sending a $14.88 payment to a Jewish journalist as a coded message to David Lane's 14 word fascist slogan and "Heil Hitler" (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet).
It's undoubtable that openly fantasising about the murder of journalists and sending coded references to "Heil Hilter" to Jewish people is publicity generating behaviour, but whether this kind of publicity ends up being of any benefit to a political party that has always fervently denied being fans of extreme-right terrorism and anti-Semitic abuse is another issue altogether.
The endlessly repeated Ukipper schtick that "we're not extreme-right racists, we just want to leave the EU" doesn't work so well when your party is actively endorsing a man who fantasises about acts of extreme-right terrorism and sends anti-Semitic abuse to Jewish journalists.
Just try to imagine the media outrage if Jeremy Corbyn (or even Theresa May for that matter) had recruited an online celebrity as a political ally, only for them to openly fantasise about extreme-right terrorist attacks against journalists and then send anti-Semitic abuse to a Jewish journalist within hours of their appointment.
But the British mainstream media seem to have little interest in the fact that UKIP have hired the services of some of the most vile people on the Internet in order to sponge publicity from their huge social media reaches, or even that by refusing to discipline their new member they're normalising and endorsing vigilante violence against journalists and anti-Semitic abuse.
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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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So Nigel Farage has resigned as UKIP leader again, and this time it's unlikely he'll be breaking his word by returning one week later.
Washing his hands of the mess he made
In his resignation statement he said "I have decided to stand aside as leader of Ukip. The victory for the leave side in the referendum means that my political ambition has been achieved" before going on to have a sly dig at the politicians who will have to stick around and clear up his mess by calling them "career politicians". Justifying his unwillingness to stick around and see through the monumental change he campaigned so tirelessly for by having a populist dig at those who will be actually be left dealing with the consequences is yet another measure of the despicable character of the man.
Anyone who thinks that Farage's parting rant at the EU wasn't an shameful national embarrassment clearly knows nothing about Britain's proud record of international diplomacy, nor gives a damn about the fact that the people Farage was insulting are the very people who Britain will have to negotiate with over the next few years to work out what the post-Brexit settlement between the UK and the EU is actually going to be.
Slinging a load of insults at the people you are going to have to negotiate with looks like a spectacularly counter-productive strategy, unless of course you're planning to wash your hands of the whole affair and leave others with the awkward task of negotiating with the people you just pissed off .
This is the beginning, not the end of it
The idea that the referendum vote for Brexit is the "be all and end all" of the whole thing rather then the beginning of a very complicated process is an utterly bizarre, yet widespread delusion.
Just witness the way so many Brexit voters leave furious "sore loser" and "get over it already" type comments when people are trying to discuss the likely future consequences of Britain's haphazard departure from the EU, as if the vote for Brexit was the end of the affair rather than the beginning of it!
Before the referendum people like me argued that Brexit would be a viable proposition for consideration if the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson had actually bothered to come up with any kind of coherent plan for how the post-Brexit UK economy should be restructured, but without such a plan, a vote for Brexit would be a vote for unpredictable chaos.
"Fearmongerer" shrieked the Brexiters every time we tried to point out that the Leave campaign was based on anti-immigration hysteria, uncosted and hopelessly unrealistic spending pledges, naive wishful thinking and outright lies, and that above all, that they had no real plan for what comes next.
Now it's becoming increasingly clear to everyone that there was no great plan after all.
The post-Brexit chaos
In the aftermath of Brexit the reality is beginning to sink in. David Cameron resigned because he didn't want to be the one to press the economic self-destruct button by submitting the Article 50 notification. He damned well should have done because he was the one who decided to gamble the entire future of the UK in return for a bit of short-term party political advantage at the 2015 General Election, but he didn't.
The majority of Labour MPs then decided to wash their hands of responsibility for clearing up the Brexit mess by focusing their attention on a ridiculously ill-timed coup attempt against their own leader instead of concentrating on the infinitely more important task of explaining what the Labour Party policy would be for reducing the social and economic insecurities caused by Brexit might be.
Boris Johnson was the next to wash his hands of the whole Brexit thing by refusing to stand in the Tory leadership election, leaving a field of five staggeringly unappealing candidates (is Jeremy Corbyn really that much more inherently "unelectable" than that disgusting bunch?).
Now Nigel Farage has washed his hands of the whole affair too.
A hard-right Tory future
Given the way the majority of Labour MPs decided to commit collective suicide rather than attempt to outline any sensible policies for dealing with Brexit (something that Corbyn and McDonnell have admirably tried to do despite the pre-planned anti-democratic internal rebellion going on behind their backs), it's pretty much clear that whoever wins the Tory leadership election is going to be the one to determine what form Brexit actually takes.
Whether it's the terrifyingly right-wing authoritarian Theresa May (who wants to scrap your human rights and replace them with a set of Tory allowances), the uber-Thatcherite anti-intellectual Michael Gove (the man who handed £billions worth of publicly owned schools over, for free, to unaccountable private sector interests) or an outsider like the dark horse Andrea Leadsom (who seems the most likely winner to me because she's far less smeared in shit than the other four candidates), Farage's legacy is going to be the Toryfication of Britain.
Nigel Farage's legacy
Enabling the Tory party to set about restructuring the UK far more comprehensively than Margaret Thatcher could ever have dreamed of is quite some achievement for a Thatcher-worshipping ex-Tory activist like Nigel Farage. I always maintained that UKIP was a Tory Trojan Horse political party designed to hoover up the votes of the dissatisfied and under-informed in order to deliver even more of the Thatcherite economic madness that is the actual cause of most of the social and economic problems faced by deprived communities across the UK.
Aside from giving a disgusting bunch of right-wingers who were too corrupt, incompetent or downright bigoted even for the Tory party (Neil Hamilton, Janice Atkinson, Bill Etheridge, David Silvester ...) a way back into mainstream politics, Farage's other main political legacy looks set to be the restructuring of the UK economy, constitution, legal system, foreign relations and society in general in line with the hard-right ideology of whichever of the five universally unappealing candidates ends up winning the Tory party leadership.
As for the party Farage fronted for so many years, whoever succeeds him as the leader of UKIP will have a hard task on their hands holding the party together when the actual reason for their existence has disappeared. However, whatever remains of UKIP looks certain to be an utterly toxic force in British politics which will continue to soak up the dissent of the communities most badly hit by hard-right Tory economics in order to drag the Tory party ever further rightwards.
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The Vote Leave campaign have been making all kinds of completely uncosted pledges about what a vote for Brexit could deliver:
Increased NHS funding and reduced waiting times (Boris Johnson) lower house prices for first time buyers (Chris Grayling), lower food prices (the Vote Leave campaign document), lower energy bills (Michael Gove, Boris Johnson), increased landowner subsidies (Boris Johnson), reduced business rates (John Longworth) increased wages (Michael Gove, Boris Johnson), increased primary school places (Priti Patel) better digital connectivity (John Longworth) an end to welfare cuts (Louise Mensch) saving the UK steel industry (Nigel Farage), increased science funding (the Vote Leave campaign document) full access to the single market (Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan, Owen Paterson, the Vote Leave campaign) and even an end to Tory austerity (John Redwood).
If you're inclined to believe all of these pledges it might seem like Britian is about to immediately become the land of milk and honey as soon as we just take the simple step of quitting the EU. There is of course a major snag in this utopian scenario: All of these pledges add up to vastly more than the projected saving from the UK contribution to the EU.
When Brexit campaigners are confronted with the fact that they're making all kinds of impossible uncosted projections about what a post-EU British economy would be like, they openly admit that their speculations are just hot air, or "options" as Chris Grayling calls them.
The Brexit campaigners' excuse for coming up with absolutely nothing resembling an economic restructuring plan is the same as their excuse for making loads of completely uncosted statements about how much better everything would be outside of the EU. Their line to justify peddling ridiculous fantasy economics is that "we're not an alternative government, so we're not in a position to make any promises" as if that gives them carte blanche to make up whatever rosy scenarios they like in order to con people into voting for Brexit.
Even if we ignore the warnings that the uncertainty of a haphazard Brexit with no economic restructuring plan is highly likely to trigger financial market shocks and a serious recession; if we allow the Brexiter assumption that everything will be perfectly rosy and the projected savings from leaving the EU won't even be slightly offset by the economic chaos, they still clearly can't fund anything like all of their hot air speculations.
A key point is that the net UK contribution to the EU is around £8.5 billion per year, which seems like an awful lot until you consider it in perspective. The GDP of the UK economy was £1,809 billion in 2015. This means that the saving from quitting the EU would amount to just 0.47% of GDP. Even if this amount isn't immediately consumed by a likely post-Brexit economic crisis, does anyone honestly believe that it would be enough to pay for all of the Brexiter pledges detailed above?
Given their abject lack of a strategic plan for Brexit, their inability to pay for all of their pledges and their tendency to immediately backtrack when challenged, the 'kippers and the hard-right fringe of the Tory party look increasingly like the Simpsons character Montgomery Burns offering the public a "mystery box" in order to convince them to vote for Brexit. What's in the box, nobody knows for sure. But the Brexit campaign seem intent on promising everyone that it's going to be exactly what they want it to be, even if that's a multitude of different things to different people.
Perhaps one of the most important considerations when being offered a "mystery box" is who is doing the offering, and how much you trust them. How much do you trust a bunch of hard-right Thatcherites to keep their word that they're going to invest in socialist spending like funding the NHS or saving the steel industry for example?
In my view, given the people who are offering it, the Brexit "mystery box" is actually highly likely to contain even more of the toxic hard-right economic dogma that successive UK governments have been pushing ever since 1979.
There is an awful lot of dissatisfaction in the UK, and a lot of it actually stems from the consequences of the hard-right neoliberal dogma we've been enduring since 1979. But the UKIP Tory Trojan Horse party and the extreme right-wing fringe of the Tory party are trying to convince the public that the main problem is the EU, not the consequences of their own beloved hard-right ideology. They're hoping to fool people into quitting the EU, which would then enable them to push their right-wing economic dogma even harder than they already have, create a gigantic bonfire with our rights and liberties, and turn the UK into the vast tax-haven economy that the likes of John Redwood have openly fantasised about in the past.
If the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, Chris Grayling, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Priti Patel, Neil "cash for questions" Hamilton or Michael Gove are offering you a "mystery box", you shouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find that it contains a very nasty surprise indeed.
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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.
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.
