UKIP Lose Another Court Case

From the Northern Echo, again!

A TEACHER has won a legal battle with the UK Independence Party (UKIP) over an attempt to use his former membership of the British National Party to expel him.

Judge Peter Fox ruled that UKIP and the party’s Stockton branch chairman Gordon Parkin acted unlawfully when they tried to throw out member Alan Hardy.

The High Court in Middlesbrough heard how Mr Hardy, the branch’s former press officer, was initially expelled after falling out with Mr Parkin, who stood for UKIP in the Stockton North constituency at the last general election.

In his ruling, which declared Mr Hardy’s expulsion as null and void, Judge Fox summed up the relationship between the two men.

He said Mr Hardy, from Stockton, accused Mr Parkin of being “incompetent, dishonest and self-seeking”, while Mr Parkin accused Mr Hardy of being dishonest and so disruptive that it was impossible for the branch to function.

The row came to a head when Mr Hardy asked Mr Parkin to resign as branch chairman.

An argument between the two men resulted in UKIP Stockton branch being temporarily banned from the venue it used for meetings.

In September last year, Mr Parkin wrote to Mr Hardy saying he should no longer attend branch meetings.

In January, when Mr Hardy tried to renew his membership, Judge Fox found that UKIP general secretary Jonathan Arnott contrived to exclude him from the party on the grounds that he was a former BNP member, despite party leaders being aware of his past when he joined.

Mr Hardy, from Stockton, who is teaching English as a foreign language in Saudi Arabia, last night welcomed the ruling.

He said: “This has been about accountability. Gordon Parkin, aided by the UKIP hierarchy, now knows he cannot treat those who may disagree with him like dirt.

“Indeed, in light of the outcome of this case, I think he should do the decent thing and resign his membership.”

UKIP executive chairman Steve Crowther told The Northern Echo that the party was very unhappy with the judgement and would be reviewing its position.

He said: “UKIP is a tolerant, inclusive and non-sectarian organisation and it is important to our members that those values are maintained.”

The most interesting paragraph in the article is:

In January, when Mr Hardy tried to renew his membership, Judge Fox found that UKIP general secretary Jonathan Arnott contrived to exclude him from the party on the grounds that he was a former BNP member, despite party leaders being aware of his past when he joined.

So they were happy for a former BNP member to join them. Then used his previous allegiance against him when they wanted to oust him as branch chairman. Such nice people.

UKIP-More Stupidity

One of UKIP's major problems is the membership. They are not very bright you see. What normal people think is supidity, UKIP members think is a smart political stunt. From the Northern Echo:

THE North-East branch of euro-sceptic party UKIP has been investigated by trading standards officials after making a bogus application for cash from an EU quango.

Members of UKIP North- East created the fake Hartlepool and East Durham European Language and Culture Club to apply for a £50 grant towards a fictitious event to celebrate the European Day of Languages.

Once the scam was exposed, trading standards officials in Durham were alerted and looked into the case.

Europe Direct, an arm of the the EU’s European Commission based in Durham, which promotes European culture across the North-East, initially agreed to pay the grant in an email sent to the fictitious club in July.

UKIP claimed they had set up the bogus club to expose Europe Direct for not making the necessary checks before it agreed to hand out EU cash, and said UKIP would never have cashed the cheque had it arrived.

The UKIP sympathiser behind the stunt, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “This all started to wind up the EU – when I created a totally fictitious organisation.

“I was surprised to learn that Europe Direct North-East fell for it and decided to give us a grant.”

Europe Direct approved the grant by email, and even offered free bunting, booklets and prizes – but the ruse was exposed before it sent any money out.

The organisation had agreed to hand out 20 of the £50 grants to schools, colleges, youth and community groups to fund a European Day event next week.

Dave Pascoe, of UKIP North- East, said: “Through this hoax we have gained a modest victory over the EU machine and managed to kick the malevolent EU monster in the ankles.”

However, Dorothy Gibson, manager of Europe Direct North-East, said: “The checking and vetting procedures we have in place raised concerns about this application and guidance was sought from Durham County Council’s trading standards service.

“It is now the intention of the county council to inform the National Anti-Fraud Framework, which alerts all local authorities to incidents of this nature.”

It is understood that Durham County Council’s trading standards officials ruled there was no further action they could take because they would have difficulty proving UKIP intended to defraud Europe Direct – especially as the party claimed it would not have cashed any cheque received.

Ms Gibson said: “From a very early stage we had serious concerns about this application.”

Nikki Sinclaire MEP

When somebody upsets UKIP's leading spiv, Nigel Farage, he gets his cronies to smear them. Nikki Sinclaire, by standing up to the extremists in UKIP who sit with homophobes, racists and extreme right wing fruitcakes in the European Parliament, has upset them. So, as they have done with just about everybody with a profile who leaves UKIP, they have tried to smear her.

One of their favourite smears against MEPs is to claim that a complaint has been made about their financial probity to OLAF, the EU anti-fraud unit. Anybody can complain to OLAF, it doesn't mean the complaint is being taken seriously. For some weeks now the far-right extremists in UKIP have claimed that Nikki Sinclaire is under investigation. The following email proves those claims to be baseless. More nasty, tasteless and immoral smears by UKIP's far-right leadership.

Dear Ms. Sinclaire,

I apologize for not having contacted you earlier.

I understand from your telephonic message to OLAF Free Phone, that you wanted to be informed whether OLAF has opened an investigation into possible irregularites you may have committed as alleged by a former assistant of yours.

I can confirm to you that OLAF has not opened an internal administrative investigation into this matter.

Yours sincerely.
Danny De Raedt
Investigator
European Commission
Europe Anti-Fraud Office OLAF Unit A 1 - EU Institutions.
Office 05/58 - Phone : + 32.2.***.**.**

Action Against UKIP

Nikki Sinclaire is taking action against UKIP for discrimination. Perhaps the EFD Group is their natural home:

The UK Independence Party (Ukip) is to be taken to the High Court by the West Midlands MEP claiming it discriminated against her because she is gay.

Nikki Sinclaire is taking action over Ukip withdrawing the whip from her in the European Parliament and preventing her standing for the Commons as a candidate for the party.

She claimed that her treatment had been in breach of Ukip's constitution and was motivated by sexual orientation discrimination.

A directions hearing is to be held by the High Court. The MEP is also taking the party to an employment tribunal, with a preliminary hearing on December 28.

Ms Sinclaire was kicked out of the party after she refused to sit with the eurosceptic group Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) which Ukip joined in the European Parliament last year.

She said she quit the EFD because it contained "extreme elements", including people with "openly homophobic opinions".

"I think that is homophobic in itself, the fact that they expected me to sit next to such people and engage with such people in the Parliament, while taking a holier-than-thou attitude to parties like the BNP (British National Party) in the UK," she said.

As well as withdrawing the whip from the MEP, Ukip's national executive committee also ended her position as the party's candidate for Meriden at the general election.

She said she still believed in the aims of Ukip, whose principal goal is to take the UK from the European Union


, and would be prepared to be one of its MEPs again if it was "more tolerant".

"It is unacceptable in the 21st century for people to be marginalised and treated in an offensive and derogatory way on the grounds of their sexuality," the MEP said.



Read More http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories//tm_headline=ukip-were-homophobic-towards-me-claims-west-midlands-mep-nikki-sinclaire%26method=full%26objectid=27607957%26siteid=65233-name_page.html#ixzz153a0YrTb

UKIP Vote Back Bertie Wooster aka Nigel Farage

The man is so obviously a spiv and a conman that we can only assume 60% of UKIP members are intellectually and politically challenged. Yes Nigel "Bertie Wooster" Farage has become leader of UKIP for the second time. No tasteless jokes about the second coming please, not with his reputation.

But don't take our word for it. The following article appeared on Friday 5th November:

No doubt, in picking the Fifth of November as announcement day for yet another of its leadership elections, UKIP was once again displaying the arch “sense of humour” which it, though not the rest of us, seems unable to resist. But the Tory Right needs to understand that UKIP’s set to become an even unfunnier joke, and that this will weaken still further Euroscepticism in the UK.

It’s apt – fitting would not be the right word – that UKIP’s joker-in-chief, Nigel Farage, looks set to be declared its leader, resuming a post which, in another “only with UKIP” quirk, he meekly surrendered just a year ago, conveniently before the general election. It could also only be with UKIP that we could witness a leadership contest during which the frontrunner has proceeded with apparent inevitability to the prize and yet, at the same time, has suffered grievous, even fatal blows to his reputation. This concerns all of us who would like to see UKIP mature into at least a voice of conscience on the Right, a prospect which frankly receded in the course of Mr Farage’s last stint in the job. Sadly, however, neither “maturity” nor “conscience” serve as les mots juste when we contemplate Nigel Farage. The party’s prospects of serving as such, let alone anything more, is likely to recede still further, should the once-and-future leader return, given what we have seen and heard in recent weeks.

Mr Farage’s eagerness to treat everything as a sort of silly jape – think Boy’s Own meets The Beano, his many declarations, prior to his previous election and, tellingly, again now, that he intends to “professionalise” his party notwithstanding – has long been to UKIP’s detriment, beyond the eyes of those in the media, usually sharing no actual affinity with the party, who consider him “good value”. Now, though, light has now been shed on the bumptious ‘Nigel Farage’ figure the press likes to exploit for its own, hardly Eurosceptic, purposes. Dismally this Nigel is some distance removed from the Woosterish image he likes to cultivate.

Farage has always brushed aside as sour grapes from the disaffected claims, or revelations, about an unpleasant quality to his political leadership. Yet in this latest UKIP leadership campaign something unexpected has happened, with at least two major attacks upon Farage coming from senior UKIP figures previously regarded as essentially sympathetic to him. The first of them, Douglas Denny, is on the party’s NEC, from where he has been one of Farage’s principal apologists. No longer. Two weeks ago, he wrote on a public forum that Farage, ‘stabbed the party in the back by abrogating his responsibility to the party as Leader – by not taking the party into the general election.’ The next day, Mr Denny went even further – much further – by stating that Farage is ‘prone to temper tantrums, bullying tactics and condescension to try to belittle those who oppose him’ and that he ‘has repeatedly ignored the NEC or attempted to by-pass what he does not like’; ‘has shown he does not have a future vision for UKIP’ and ‘is much too tied-up with Brussels and his fiefdom over there’. For the icing on the cake, Denny revealed that he had made these criticisms out of the public gaze on the party’s members-only forum, but that, even though he was on the NEC, the comments had been censored there.

A week later, Farage took another barrage, this time from within that Brussels fiefdom. His second critic, Mike Nattrass, is not only a fellow UKIP MEP; he is also a former Deputy Leader of the party. In a widely circulated email, Mr Nattrass made observations about Farage that were even more damning than those of Mr Denny.

Increasingly, I am hearing the word “Spiv” used to describe him … [He’s a] control freak. He grabs all UKIP publicity to the detriment of any other UKIP spokesperson or MEP. He employs assistants with the MEP’s budgets without allowing those MEPs any say … he does not like truth or competition.

That was only the start of Nattrass’ devastating attack. Farage, he said, has ‘the morals of an alley cat’; he has been ‘caught out with both hands in the till’ after breaking a UKIP MEPs’ agreement not to employ spouses and ‘secretly’ paying his wife out of his budget; he ‘has derailed every leader since the very first’, bar one; ‘the whole Parliamentary Group in the EU is run for Nigel’s financial and public image’; he has contributed ‘next to nothing’ financially to the party (a very interesting allegation, given that Farage once famously explained away his brag that he had received over £2million in non-salary expenses and allowances by saying he had used it ‘to help promote UKIP’s message’). For good measure, Nattrass also took aim at Farage’s ‘close friend Godfrey Bloom MEP’, who, he claimed, does ‘all the hiring’ and ‘is said to be banned by four hotels for urinating in the corridors’. Such is the volume of ‘professionalization’.

Despite all this – or perhaps because of it – Nattrass concluded that he expected ‘Nigel will be elected leader as no one else is effectively allowed to stand without a spin campaign against them.’ As disturbing evidence of this, he added that he ‘found allegations of fraud were brought against me when I stood for Leadership. They melted away afterwards and had no foundation in truth, but they did the job intended’. Then, breathtakingly, Nattrass stated that, in contrast to the fake charges against himself, ‘Nigel has had a number of very real cases against him.’ Whatever the substance of these charges, in a normal, even, professional party, the would-be leader might have been expected to keep the lid of the petrol can, but as if to prove that, at the centre of any UKIP firestorm, one will find Nigel Farage, he promptly proved at least two of Nattrass’ accusations. First, in an astonishing act of petulance, by publicly falling out with fellow leadership candidate and MEP, David Campbell Bannerman, over the latter’s quite legitimate complaints about Farage’s planned appearance on Question Time in the middle of the campaign. Indeed, Mr Farage went as far as to roar at the BBC microphone helpfully put in front of him:

Mr Bannerman clearly thinks that his own ambition and his own ego matter more than the interests of the party. Frankly, I am appalled by that. I think that the act of getting hold of Question Time and saying it was all wrong and against party rules was just an act of envy.

If irony survived Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize, this charge, from this source, will undoubtedly have finished it off.

Could anything else go wrong for Mr Farage during this fortnight from hell? Amazingly, yes. The next leaked email came from the keyboard of one Sharon Bonici, who it transpires is a Maltese socialist with strong links to Farage (try to keep up: this is UKIP), whom he has entrusted with the setting up of his latest Brussels project, a lavishly taxpayer-funded pan-EU party. The email confirms this ambition of Farage, executed in the face of an overwhelmingly supported motion at the recent UKIP conference not to establish any such thing without the explicit approval of UKIP’s membership.

While Farage defying his members is standard-issue behaviour, what’s truly toxic for any British Eurosceptic who thinks that UKIP under Farage is worth even a protest vote is whom he has already signed up to this latest costly project. Top of the list is his alleged fixer, Godfrey Bloom. No surprise there perhaps, but go further down the list and one finds representatives from the Sweden Democrats, a party born out of the Swedish neo-nazi movement, and the extreme-right Flemish party, the Vlaams Belang, with proposed additions from Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands and Italy’s notorious far-right Lega Nord, with the latter of whom Farage has already closely embroiled UKIP in the group he leads (jointly with the Lega Nord itself) in the European Parliament. That group, the ludicrously styled Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD), has been the subject of much controversy within and outside UKIP over the past year, not just because of the membership of the Lega Nord, which has countless allegations of racism and paramilitary violence stacked up against it, but of various other far-right parties as well, including the Danish People’s Party, the Slovak National Party and Greece’s Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS). The leaders of the last-named claim 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy and were properly condemned by the US State Department in 2005 as an ‘extreme right-wing party (which) supports virulent nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia’. They’re also into their seventh year propping up Nigel Farage’s Brussels fiefdom. For understand this, Farage’s hegemony within UKIP stems directly from the powerbase afforded to him by this EP group. In other words, if you think that Nigel Farage is wrecking British Euroscepticism, it’s the EP’s money that lets him do so. Funny that.

Disgust over the EFD’s composition caused one UKIP MEP, Nikki Sinclaire, to leave it, closely followed by Mike Nattrass, but while Farage subsequently withdrew the UKIP whip from Sinclaire in Brussels and has tried to hound her out of the party altogether, he has thus far left Nattrass’ status intact, fearful of the latter’s clout within the party, not least in terms of his generous funding.

Despite all this controversy, and despite always rubbishing the suggestion that the EFD has far-right elements, Farage now seems not to care as he desperately tries to move into open electoral alliance at pan-EU level with partners whose extremist credentials are in no doubt at all. It will be interesting indeed to see who else now slithers out from under the EU’s rock garden to join Farage’s grand project. The Bonici email suggested that one of the pan-EU party’s first campaigns would be ‘to generate 1 million signatures to be able to instigate a pan wide European referendum [sic] on Turkey. The idea is to use the million signature clause according to the Lisbon Treaty.’ By a strange coincidence, three days before this email was sent, Austria’s far-right Freedom Party organised a two-day conference in Vienna, to organise an EU-wide referendum on Turkish EU entry, using the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty regarding a million signatures.

Attending the Freedom Party’s conference were parties remarkably similar to those on the Bonici email – far-right politicians from Vlaams Belang, the Sweden Democrats, the Lega Nord, the Slovak National Party and the Danish People’s Party, the latter represented by one of the EFD’s leading MEPs, the appropriately named Morten Messerschmidt, who, amongst many controversial moments in his delightful career, said in 2006

I think we need three sets of rules of immigration. One for Europeans, who will be regulated by EU-law. One for people from the rest of the Western World, including parts of East Asia, South America, etc. And then a third set of rules for the third world, who in general do not really offer anything we can benefit from, speaking of education, labour craft and knowledge.

This is the coalition which Nigel Farage has been carefully and quietly cultivating across the Channel for many years, whilst an indifferent British press have looked the other way. One school of thought holds that Farage has been indulged deliberately, to some extent, to thwart the BNP, but with friends like these, what exactly has been the point?

UKIP can perform a valuable service to Britain: they can keep the Tory Party, if not honest on Europe, then at least rather more honest than leaders like David Cameron and John Major would prefer to have it. With Nigel Farage leading them, whatever threat UKIP poses, it won’t be an honest one.

The article appeared in Critical Reaction .

UKIP Leadership Election Result and Annabelle Fuller

If UKIP members want their party to be taken seriously then they will have voted for Tim Congdon as new party leader.

Sadly, Nigel "Bertie Wooster" Farage is likely to win the election, he usually makes sure he wins internal elections if you get my drift. And, if he does win, the word is that his 'friend' Annabelle " Madeleine Bassett" Fuller will be given a nice cushy position.

So that will be Mrs F and Ms F both on their master's payroll. How cosy.




The result will be announced via the UKIP website at 4-00pm today GMT.