Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Another Welsh UKIP AM quits
The Western Mail reports that another Welsh Assembly Member has quit UKIP and launched a passionate attack on the party's association with right-wing nationalist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson.
They say that Michelle Brown, a regional AM for north Wales, fired a parting shot by lambasting her party for "handing UKIP’s megaphone to the likes of Tommy Robinson":
She said that instead of fighting for Brexit, the party was "discussing individual politicians’ pet projects such as attacking Islam and abolishing the Welsh Assembly".
She accused the UKIP leadership of trying to "incubate and cultivate a rival fundamentalism". "I still believe in the UKIP that I joined, that spoke for people whose pay was being held down by uncontrolled immigration and whose bills were being sent through the roof because of government and EU policy," she said.
"UKIP won the people of Britain the right to choose whether their destiny lay with the EU or as a self-governing nation. But that isn’t the party I see around me anymore."
As well as attacking UKIP's leader Gerard Batten, she criticised the party's Welsh leader Gareth Bennett AM.
She said: "The group does not function as a group but as a boys’ club – it is not by chance that the group no longer has any female members.
"It does nothing that is in the wider interest of party members or Welsh residents and seems to serve only to further the interests of certain group members."
In the course of just two and a half years, the UKIP group in the Welsh Assembly has shrunk from the original seven to just three. When the history of the 2016 Welsh Assembly election comes to be written, I predict that toothless, ineffective, riven and fractious UKIP will be labelled as the ultimate wasted vote.
They say that Michelle Brown, a regional AM for north Wales, fired a parting shot by lambasting her party for "handing UKIP’s megaphone to the likes of Tommy Robinson":
She said that instead of fighting for Brexit, the party was "discussing individual politicians’ pet projects such as attacking Islam and abolishing the Welsh Assembly".
She accused the UKIP leadership of trying to "incubate and cultivate a rival fundamentalism". "I still believe in the UKIP that I joined, that spoke for people whose pay was being held down by uncontrolled immigration and whose bills were being sent through the roof because of government and EU policy," she said.
"UKIP won the people of Britain the right to choose whether their destiny lay with the EU or as a self-governing nation. But that isn’t the party I see around me anymore."
As well as attacking UKIP's leader Gerard Batten, she criticised the party's Welsh leader Gareth Bennett AM.
She said: "The group does not function as a group but as a boys’ club – it is not by chance that the group no longer has any female members.
"It does nothing that is in the wider interest of party members or Welsh residents and seems to serve only to further the interests of certain group members."
In the course of just two and a half years, the UKIP group in the Welsh Assembly has shrunk from the original seven to just three. When the history of the 2016 Welsh Assembly election comes to be written, I predict that toothless, ineffective, riven and fractious UKIP will be labelled as the ultimate wasted vote.
