In a year, Ukip has been transformed into an increasingly hard-right populist force. How did it happen?

In a small flat on the edge of Glasgow, the future trajectory of Ukip is taking shape. From here, a fast-growing viral news site pumps out a daily stream of clickbait and conspiracy theory in support of the party’s hardline agenda.

The site, Unity News Network, is run by Ukip’s Scottish youth leader, Carl Pearson, and the activist David Clews. It is one of three suddenly popular outlets pushing the party’s message to a receptive new audience: the young, angry and the digitally savvy.

While Ukip’s lurch to the right has prompted an exodus of party stalwarts, it has more than made up for this with thousands of new members drawn in by the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, far-right YouTubers, and Ukip’s newfound dominance of the rightwing web thanks to the likes of Pearson and Clews.

Along with Kipper Central and Politicalite.com, Unity News is heavily supportive of the hardline agenda of Gerard Batten, Ukip’s leader for the past year, who in that time has transformed the party into what analysts say is an openly far-right force.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Clews, the founder of Unity News Network. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Insiders say Batten’s repeated anti-Islam rhetoric and the appointment of Robinson has prompted the departure of numerous senior officials and party organisers, threatening its ability to fight elections less than four years after Ukip gained almost 4m votes in the 2015 general election.

This void is being filled, sources say, by a growing influx of often younger activists, drawn in by Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as well as controversial YouTube personalities and the likes of Unity News Network. Overall membership has risen 50% in a year.

Last month, Unity News racked up almost 2m views for its videos of France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests. In one week in January, it amassed 55,892 interactions on Facebook, with Politicalite attracting 47,979 and Kipper Central 28,187, according to an analysis for the Guardian by the metrics company NewsWhip.

Surrounded by his 19-month-old son’s toys, Clews denies Unity is a Ukip propaganda site, but says many readers support the party. “What we do is not hyper-partisan – it’s populist,” he says. Having launched in April last year, the site attracts more than 120,000 users a month.

Among the headlines decrying “the BIASED MEDIA” are stories attacking public figures such as Gary Lineker, Diane Abbott, Owen Jones and Anna Soubry, along with Brexit-themed memes such as one showing the US financier George Soros as a puppet-master controlling the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Such images of Soros, who is Jewish, are widely criticised as antisemitic in tone.

Clews rejects the idea that his site seeks to stir up anger, or that its content could trigger real-world incidents. “If I was a taxi driver and someone got in and went and murdered someone after I dropped them off,” he says, “is the taxi driver responsible for that person being murdered?”

Two hundred miles further south in Hartlepool, the other side of Ukip’s transformation is obvious. This was once the centre of its surge in the north-east. But these days the shutters are down on what was its most visible presence in the region – the office of the MEP Jonathan Arnott, who quit the party last year – and the distinctive purple front has been changed to white, with the only surviving relics some purple dustbins.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Hartlepool office of the former Ukip MEP Jonathan Arnott, now sitting as an independent. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Nigel Farage, the party’s former leader, once predicted Ukip would be the biggest party in the region by the end of this decade. But the 2015 election, in which the Ukip candidate fell 3,000 votes short of unseating Labour, was a high-water mark.

Fast-forward four years and Ukip has vanished from Hartlepool, while the party itself, having seen its founding political goal realised in the result of the Brexit referendum, is becoming defined by anti-Islam policies, street protests and ties to the far right.

Its demise in the town has been swift. Five of its six councillors quit the party a year ago, on the same day as Arnott. Others followed, among them Phillip Broughton, the party’s parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool in both 2015 and 2017, who has called the party “a complete and utter mess”.

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Across the entire Brexit-supporting north-east of England, Ukip has imploded. “It is sad really,” said the former Ukip council group leader John Tennant. The only route to a comeback, Tennant says, would be to row back on the hard-right agenda of Batten, who prompted Farage and others to flee the party late last year by appointing Robinson. “But I fear it’s too far down the line now,” he says. “It’s not my problem any more.”

Only seven of 24 Ukip MEPs elected in 2014 are still with the party. In several other Ukip heartlands such as Boston in Lincolnshire and Thanet in Kent, MEPs were followed out of the door by local organisers.

“These are the real campaigners, not the ones who just write crap on social media,” says one Ukip insider. “These are the ones who went door-knocking in the pouring rain, who ordered leaflets. And now they’re gone.”

One source in Thanet, the scene of Farage’s 2015 bid for election that narrowly failed, says the party’s organisation is “something of a shadow of what it used to be”. “The office is hardly ever open, and the main people who kept things running have gone,” he says. “Ukip is finished here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage, a former Ukip leader, has launched his own pro-Brexit party. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

In interviews with those close to Batten, they say he has made it his personal mission to drag the party to the right, sidelining its ruling body on key decisions including making Robinson his adviser on grooming gangs and prisons last year.

Robinson has more than a million Facebook followers, and has powerful friends around the world. Batten, 64, began courting those close to the English Defence League founder months before becoming Ukip leader in February last year, the Guardian has learned. In October 2017, Batten held a private two-hour lunch with the then leader of the Football Lads Alliance, John Meighan, and the anti-Islam figurehead Richard Inman, both of whom have large online followings.

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Batten has also courted younger supporters through his embrace of three YouTube agitators, who joined the party last year. One of these was Paul Joseph Watson, a senior editor at the US conspiracy theory website Infowars, which has argued that events such as 9/11 and the Sandy Hook primary school shooting were faked.

Some of those who have stayed in Ukip support Batten’s change of stance and focus on Islam. Stuart Agnew, one of the party’s remaining MEPs, told the Guardian he believed the influence of Islam on society meant the life chances of women in the UK were “going into reverse”.

“Either females are born into radical Islamic families where their education is neglected and they are forced to wear burqas, making employment very difficult and reliance on benefits highly likely, followed by a forced marriage,” he says. “Or young white girls from dysfunctional families find themselves victims of Asian grooming gangs and a reluctance by the authorities to act.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuart Agnew, one of the party’s MEPs, has remained with Ukip. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

But Agnew appears in a minority among long-standing Ukip members. One former senior figure says many people had initially clung on hoping Batten would change course or be ousted. “But now it’s so obvious that even people who’ve been trying to pretend nothing has changed can’t do so.”

While the new model Ukip might gain attention and clicks, the departure of so many stalwarts will make fighting elections very difficult, with the local elections in May seen as a major test.

“These days, if I had to organise a campaign I’d struggle to know who to phone. It used to be really straightforward,” one source says.

Efforts at the ballot box will be all the more difficult now that Farage has launched his own pro-Brexit party. According to one source, Farage’s office receives regular emails from local Ukip activists asking how they can join, while some of the party’s seven remaining MEPs are also considering jumping ship.

One of the many paradoxes of the party’s rapid transformation is how it has been instigated by a man initially appointed as an interim leader with a brief only to steady the ship, and whose opinions were long seen as fringe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gerard Batten outside the Houses of Parliament in January. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

“Gerard has been around Ukip forever, and he’s always had these odd views on Islam,” says one former party colleague. “A couple of times there was even talk about whether he should be reselected as an MEP, as his views were at the extreme of what could be tolerated. In the end it was decided it would be too disruptive to act.”

One former senior party member draws a parallel with another political figure who was once on the fringes of his party. “He’s our version of Jeremy Corbyn – out on a limb for years until his moment comes. And when it does he’s brought in what you could call a hard-right Momentum to back him up. He’s completely changed the party.”

Young, digital, street-smart and hardline: the new Ukip looks very different from the old version. And even if the new direction does not immediately win seats in parliament, it has won new fans. The party is polling at about 7% nationally. That’s more than three times the support it attracted in the 2017 election.

• This article was amended on 4 March 2019. An earlier version described the Hartlepool office of MEP Jonathan Arnott as formerly Ukip’s headquarters in the north-east of of England. The story now describes the office as once Ukip’s most visible presence in the region, as distinct from a headquarters.