From: chris kinder chris_kinder@hotmail.comSubject: The Times Article

Date: 6 February 2019 at 14:02

Warning: Very long but a great insight into the politics that could develop in 2019.

Angry Brexiteers are splitting into factions as UKIP is taken over by

far-right extremists

With Brexit by the end of March increasingly unlikely, Matthew Goodwin, the author of the bestselling book

National Populism, reports on why this perceived betrayal of leave voters is causing a lurch to the far-right

Matthew Goodwin

Separation anxiety: Tommy Robinson leads a Brexit Betrayal march organised by Ukip on January 22

ALAMY

The Sunday Times, February 3 2019, 12:01am

Many “leave” voters fear that Westminster is about to deliver the mother of all betrayals. Seen through their eyes,

Britain’s vote to leave the EU has never been accepted by its ruling elite. They believe that while the prime

minister and parliament appear intent on diluting Brexit to the point of it becoming meaningless, “remain” MPs

are conspiring to block the thing they never wanted in the first place.

You don’t need to look hard to find the anger. Leavers have been voicing their fury for months, ever since Theresa

May unveiled her unpopular vision for Brexit. Two-thirds of leavers felt that the proposed deal was a poor

compromise or a betrayal. Fewer than one in five said it respected the referendum result. But now they fear

something worse: no Brexit at all. When asked how they would feel if — after everything — Britain ended up

remaining in the EU, three-quarters said “betrayed”, “angry” or “disappointed”.

The irony of the 2016 referendum is that rather than finally resolve the Europe question in British politics, it has

poured petrol all over it, polarising the nation. Neil Basu, a Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner, has warned

of a spike in far-right hate crime since 2016 “that’s never really receded”. Skirmishes in Westminster, where angry

leavers heckled a pro-remain MP, added to the febrile atmosphere.

Nigel Farage has quit Ukip and put his support behind the Leave Means Leave group to fight in any second

referendum

GETTY

The question is, what will betrayed leavers do next? A few days before May’s first Brexit deal suffered the largest

defeat for a sitting government in history, I was in Nigel Farage’s office, a short stroll from parliament, watching

the drama unfold. MPs were voting to try to stop the government running down the clock to a “no deal”, forcing

May to present her plans within three days of any defeat. The move infuriated leavers. “Unbelievable!” Farage

boomed. The former Ukip leader had just returned from a holiday in Namibia, his longest break since recovering

from a near-fatal plane crash in 2010. He says he took the break because he can sense 2019 is going to be “a big

one”. He and his entourage are preparing for what they say could be their biggest fight yet.

Their plans started to take shape last summer, when Farage became vice-chairman of a group called Leave Means

Leave. This is different from Ukip; it is a cross-party network and not a formal political party. For much of the past

two years, Leave Means Leave has been staging “Save Brexit” rallies across the country, well away from London. It

can already count on support from 28 MPs, MEPs, peers and senior business people including the Labour donor John

Mills, Sir Rocco Forte and Tim Martin, founder of JD Wetherspoon. Britain’s most prominent leavers, Jacob Rees-

Mogg, Kate Hoey, Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis, have all spoken at events, firing up angry crowds in majority-

leave areas such as Torquay and Gateshead. When May presented her deal to parliament, Leave Means Leave

staged a “Week of OUTrage” outside, protesting against what they branded “the worst deal in history”.

Farage believes that Britain is rapidly approaching a watershed moment, when millions of leavers will realise they

have been betrayed. “Leave Means Leave is a very important vehicle,” he says. “It is the leavers’ backstop

— our backstop, in case we get a second referendum.” He looks and sounds genuinely angry, keenly aware that his

life’s work could go up in smoke. “I want to give people a focus for their anger.”

Between stepping down as the leader of Ukip in September 2016 and then quitting the party altogether in

December, citing its growing obsession with anti-Islam rhetoric, Farage had been spending much of his time

December, citing its growing obsession with anti-Islam rhetoric, Farage had been spending much of his time

shuttling between being an MEP in Brussels, building links with Donald Trump and the US media (he is a frequent

guest on Fox News), and maintaining his media profile at home (he hosts a talk show on LBC). Free from the

stresses and strains of party politics, he has been “enjoying life”. He has even cut back on the infamous Farage

Diet. “I’m not lunching and drinking like I used to,” he says, “which is quite sad.”

Now he is changing gear. The plan is for Leave Means Leave to become what Farage calls a “clearing house” for

leavers across the spectrum, whether true-blue Tories in leafy shires or blue-collar Labour leavers. And it is gaining

momentum. The man running the show behind the scenes is Richard Tice, a longtime member of the Conservative

Party and businessman, who co-founded the group with John Longworth, another businessman and former director-

general of the British Chambers of Commerce. “The moment when Theresa May unveiled her deal at Chequers [in

July 2017] was the moment when the betrayal became obvious,” Tice says. “That was the moment we knew we

had to restart the Brexit campaign.”

Rebel rouser: Richard Tice co-founded Leave Means Leave to “restart” Brexit

AFP

Tice tells me that they already have 100,000 registered supporters and nearly 140,000 on Facebook, while

attracting serious money and experienced campaigners. Like Farage, he also has experience of running campaigns.

In 2015, Tice co-founded Leave.EU with the controversial former Ukip donor Arron Banks, though he says that the

men have not worked together since. Their dream scenario is to exit the EU on World Trade Organisation terms:

“WTO is the way to go,” says the group.

They accept that what happens next will be shaped by events largely beyond their control. But there are three

scenarios under which their plans could turn into action. First, May’s unpopular Brexit deal is passed, perhaps in an

even softer form. Second, MPs and the EU agree to extend Article 50. Third, Brexit is scrapped altogether. “If the

Tory MPs bottle it and May’s deal goes through,” Tice says, “the sense of betrayal among Conservative members

and voters will be such that I do not see the Conservative Party surviving in its current form.”

Farage agrees. “If Article 50 gets kicked down the road and we end up fighting a European parliament election this

year, then I will fight it. No question. And if there is no Brexit then I will absolutely be forced to be involved in a

new political movement.”

There is certainly space. According to a recent survey by YouGov and The Sunday Times, nearly 75% of leavers

would consider supporting a new party on the right that was clearly committed to Brexit. Only a fool would

underestimate the potential for a new populist party in Britain. Last week, other polls found that three-quarters of

all voters feel that politicians are ignoring ordinary people and nearly two-thirds feel the current parties do not

offer an appealing choice.

If Britain does end up holding fresh elections to the European parliament or Westminster, it is likely that Farage

and his followers will throw in their lot with yet another vessel, the Brexit Party, recently set up by a former Ukip

associate. The Brexit Party would fight an election; Leave Means Leave would fight a referendum.

All of them fear that if Article 50 is extended, Westminster and Brussels might conspire to avoid holding European

parliament elections altogether. In Leave land, rumours are rife that the government and the EU might agree to

extend the terms of current MEPs, thereby depriving leavers of a fresh opportunity to register another populist

tremor by performing strongly. “Any attempt by the government and Brussels to prevent that would be another

betrayal and would be resisted,” Tice warns.

What about a second referendum? This still seems unlikely given that the Tories and, crucially, Jeremy Corbyn

opposed the idea. Voters are opposed, too. According to the latest polls, only 36% of us think there should be a

second referendum, while 49% think there shouldn’t (the rest are undecided). Such a move could also be electoral

suicide for the Tories; 79% of their voters oppose a second vote, as do their local associations.

Given the unprecedented volatility, few would predict what will happen next. Farage’s entourage appear to relish

the prospect of a second battle with remainers. “Look,” said one, only hours after the first version of May’s deal

went down in flames, “the only way we get what we want is if we have a second referendum. I’m not happy about

it, but our mood right now is that it might be the only way. To beat them again.”

Farage is reaching the same conclusion. In one breath, he complains of feeling older than his 54 years. Battling

testicular cancer in his youth, a plane crash and a quarter-century in frontline politics have taken a toll. But in the

next he is adamant that, were a second referendum held, he would double down. “I’d give everything to it,

absolutely everything I’ve got — no question.”

Tice is equally bullish. “Oh, we’ll be ready for it. We know we’ll raise the money. We know what the strategy

would be and we’ve got really good people putting their services forward. We’ll win it better than last time. And

this time, remain would have to listen.”

“There are a lot of lessons we can learn from the last one,” Farage adds. What might be different? Insiders who

have Farage’s ear say they would press down much harder on the anti-establishment pedal than they did in 2016,

whipping voters into a populist frenzy to bring down the political class. Some point to the “yellow vests” in

France, who talk not only of protest but wholesale political reform. “We already have the slogan,” said one. “It

will be ‘Tell them again’.”

What is unclear, however, is where all this leaves Ukip, the party that Farage spent three decades of his life

transforming into a mainstream force. Today, it is a shell of its former self. At the 2017 general election, Ukip

crashed to a humiliating 1.8% of the vote. A membership of nearly 50,000 had shrunk to barely 17,000. Ukip was

losing 1,000 recruits a month and looked destined to succumb to an unwritten law about populists: they are like

bees — once they sting, they die.

I wasn’t sure we could save the party, quite frankly,” says Ukip’s latest and fourth leader since the referendum,

Gerard Batten, 64, when I meet him in Essex. “People told me it was too late — it should all be wound up.” He

began by stabilising Ukip’s finances, receiving £300,000 from members to plug holes. The unpopularity of May’s

Brexit deal also helped return membership to 27,000, though it is still way down on its peak.

While avoiding the media (he rarely agrees to interviews), Batten formed alliances with controversial YouTubers

such as the conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, who has 1.5m subscribers, and Carl Benjamin (who goes by the

alias Sargon of Akkad), who has nearly 900,000. Both use the platform to rail against the liberal left, “globalists”,

political correctness, Islam and open borders, with their videos receiving hundreds of thousands of hits. They

describe themselves as classical liberals and distance themselves from the alt-right: “I’m for free speech and

against an ethno-state,” Watson says. “The alt-right is for an ethno-state and against free speech.”

Insiders complain that Batten is pushing Ukip further to the right and holds views that are hardline, if not extreme.

“He was very much on the fringe of the party,” says a fellow MEP. “He was at the limit of what Ukip would

tolerate.” This is especially true when it comes to the issue of Islam, a subject Farage was reluctant to touch and

today warns will alienate most leavers who want to talk about betrayal, not religion.

Sitting under a portrait of Admiral Nelson, Batten says he was not interested in Islam until 2005, when terrorist

attacks in London led him to contribute to a pamphlet, A Proposed Charter of Muslim Understanding. It called on

the leaders of Britain’s Muslim communities to publicly affirm their respect for non-Muslims and democracy, and to

condemn terrorism. He carries a version in his wallet.

Since then, Batten’s views have hardened. He believes that Britain is under threat from Islam, warns that France is

“on the verge of civil war” and points to a political class in Westminster that he argues is not capable of meeting

the threat. “Islamic fundamentalist ideology, if taken literally, is totally irreconcilable with western civilisation,”

he says. “If you believe this rubbish and you implement it in your life, then you end up where we are now, which is

people trying to kill non-believers.” He has also described Islam as a “death cult”, “totalitarian” and an ideology

that “makes sex slaves legitimate”.

Such beliefs have led him to focus attention on the sexual exploitation of girls and women by Muslim men and to

build alliances with confrontational groups that the Ukip of old avoided, such as the Democratic Football Lads

Alliance (DFLA).

An interim Ukip manifesto, overseen by Batten, contains sections on Islam and “paedophile gangs” that call for a

ban on the overseas funding of mosques. Further, it argues for repealing legislation that recognises sharia, holding

a national inquiry into a “historical failure to protect children from rape gangs” and, without saying how, blocking

immigrants who “follow a literalist and extremist interpretation of Islam”.

It is easy to dismiss these views as those of an extremist fringe. But polling by YouGov suggests that the percentage

of British people who think that Islam (not just Islamic fundamentalism) poses a threat to western liberal

democracy jumped from 32% in 2001 to 56% in 2015. More recent work by the think tank Chatham House found

that 55% of people in Europe would support a Trump-style ban on immigration from mainly Muslim states. Batten

thinks the debate about Islam today is where the debate about the EU was in the 1980s: it is fringe, but will soon

go mainstream.

Many former Kippers, including Farage, think Batten has gone too far. “I just think it’s done,” Farage says. “Ukip

now has a ceiling on it of about 750,000 votes — the same ceiling the National Front had back in the 1970s. I think

they’ll destroy themselves.”

It is certainly no secret in Ukip land that Farage and Batten cannot stand each other. “They are just completely

incompatible personalities,” one insider told me. “They are chalk and cheese”.

“Nigel likes people he can either bully or intimidate,” says Batten, “who are ‘yes’ men and women. I don’t fit into

those categories.” He rules out ever working with Farage again.

Farage, meanwhile, has said he “can’t think of anything worse” than leading Ukip again, and argues that Batten’s

views hurt the leave cause. “In the 10 years that I was party leader, I never even made him spokesman. I didn’t

think he would do us any good. He was better off tucked away at the back of his room. Look, I’m a cavalier and

he’s a roundhead. We are just very different people.”

He says Batten has completely failed to grasp a crucial law of British politics: that the British do not tolerate the

types of extremism that flourish elsewhere in Europe. There is certainly evidence of this. When pollsters asked

British people to define “Britishness”, they put their opposition to fascism second only to their love of freedom of

speech. The message was clear: anything that looks or sounds like extremism is a turn-off.

The Ukip leader, Gerard Batten, who Farage says has become obsessed with Islam

AFP/GETTY

Batten, who is married to a Filipina, rejects the charge that he is far-right. He points to Ukip’s slight recovery in

the polls, to about 5% — more than enough to cause the Conservatives problems at a future election. Farage argues

that in the current climate, Ukip should be surging above 20%. “The circumstances have never been more

propitious, ever, than they are right now and it’s just languishing.”

For some, the final straw came late last year when Batten appointed Tommy Robinson, former leader of the

English Defence League, as his adviser on “grooming gangs” and prisons. The appointment marked a departure for

a party that had previously tried to put purple water between itself and the far right. Farage promptly announced

that with a “heavy heart” he was following other Ukip MEPs through the exit door.

To find out what is behind Robinson’s appointment, I went to meet him in Bedfordshire. Sitting across a table from

Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), I am struck by how young he looks. Though only 36 years old, he has

been a prominent anti-Islam campaigner for nearly a decade. He was catapulted into British politics in 2009, when

protests against radical Islamists in his home town of Luton spiralled into nationwide rallies against Islam. Between

the rallies — and stints in prison — Robinson became the poster boy of a new generation of angry white working-

class men who are more interested in street clashes than elections.

Many see him as a thug, a hooligan who unleashed something that he could not control. There is no denying that

he has a large following. Though banned from Twitter, Robinson has nearly 1m followers on Facebook. His talk

about his life story at the Oxford Union in 2015 has been watched 1.3m times and he claims that his self-published

book, Enemy of the State, sold about 50,000 copies.

Notoriety has consequences. As we talk in a quiet pub, his phone constantly bleeps. He is exchanging texts with

friends to see if he can stay the night after being told by police that they have received another credible threat to

his life. In between the texts, I ask him about his growing links with Ukip and whether he sees his future in

demonstrations or the ballot box. “It has to go through elections … the only option is political. You can march on

the street all you want, but they [politicians] don’t care.”

Robinson, the son of Irish immigrants, claims never to have voted. He used to avoid Ukip because “Farage is a toff.

Nigel always angered me, the way he blamed things on European migration. My problem is Islam.”

In the past, activists were often careful to draw a distinction between Islamist terrorists and Islam more generally,

but today that distinction is less clear. “The problem is Islam,” says Robinson, “it’s Islam.”

It is this strong belief that Britain is being “Islamified” that unites Batten and Robinson. The latter seems

consumed by it. “Britain now — 5% of the country is Islamic. What will it be like when 20% of the country is

Islamic?” Robinson asks. “As the demographic changes, which it is at an uncontrollable rate, the more extremists,

the more terrorists, the more jihad … I have three children. It’s getting scarier. What the f*** will it be like for

them, and their kids, if we just sit back and let Islam steamroll its way across this country without any f******

challenge?”

The Pew Forum, a non-partisan, non-profit American think tank, estimates that between 9.7% and 17.2% of the UK

population will be Muslim by 2050.

In Ukip land, rumours are rife that Batten is preparing Robinson for leadership or to stand as a candidate. Batten

doesn’t deny the latter and says that, according to Ukip’s constitution, the former EDL leader could be admitted if

the chairman and national executive committee decide to waive the rule, imposed by Farage, that no members of

the EDL can join Ukip.

He clearly views Robinson as central to his strategy of transforming Ukip from a party that relied on ex-Tories into

one that appeals to the working class: “I wouldn’t join the Tory party in a million years,” Batten says. “All they’ve

done is betray this country since the Second World War. Tories, I actually hate and loathe and detest [them]

because they have the word ‘conserve’ in their name and they have never, ever conserved anything in their entire

history.”

Robinson is open to the alliance. “My sense is that, now, I’ve done my political apprenticeship, I’ve done my

learning. It’s time to get serious.” He says that had a parliamentary by-election been called in Peterborough

(where the Labour MP Fiona Onasanya was found guilty of perverting the course of justice but refused to give up

her seat), he would have considered running. “If you bring this movement of people who feel oppressed and

silenced, if you politicise that you will see a political revolution. It’s anti-establishment, it’s not just Islam.”

Many seasoned Kippers, horrified at the change of direction, are not sticking around. MEPs have resigned in

Many seasoned Kippers, horrified at the change of direction, are not sticking around. MEPs have resigned in

protest. “Robinson would never have been allowed into Ukip because we realised he brings a low ceiling,” says

one. Others complain that “skinhead types” have started to attend meetings, which look more BNP than Ukip, and

that open prejudice against Muslims is going unchecked.

“If something negative was said about Jews, it was anti-semitic,” added another insider. “But if something

negative was said about Muslims, it was a bit different. That is the mindset the party is now getting into.”

As Britain approaches its Brexit watershed, therefore, Leave land has broken into two distinct camps: Leave Means

Leave and those who would likely endorse Farage’s efforts for a clean break with Europe; and those like Batten

and Robinson, who remain within the Ukip orbit and hold very different ideas about what the future will bring.

Farage once said that his initial rise had contributed to the fall of a more toxic right wing. Could he once again be

an antidote to rising extremism on the right?

Matthew Goodwin is the author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (Pelican £9.99)

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