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It is with great regret and sadness that I have resigned my membership of the UK Independence Party with effect from today. This was a very difficult decision for me, but one made inevitable by the clique now in control of the Party.

Since announcing my resignation, I have received many messages of support and good wishes. Many UKIP members have said that they are also resigning. I have not, and will not, try and influence members one way or another. It is up to individuals to decide if they wish to Leave or Remain. But I would like to explain how I came to my decision.

Earlier today I received a letter from the Interim National Party Chairman, Ben Walker, informing me that my membership had been suspended for eleven months. Mine is just the latest in a long line of such arbitrary and unjust suspensions. The reasons Mr Walker gives are customary of the misrepresentations, falsehoods and dishonesties that we have come to expect. I am not going to counter them here as they are unworthy of my response. I will however, give a brief account of how the Party came to be in its current position.

Through the turmoil of the last six months I have stayed with the Party in the hope that it could overcome its difficulties. After the disastrous result of the European elections on 23rd May, I kept my word and resigned as Leader at the end of my appointed term on 2nd June. At that point I had no intention of seeking re-election to the leadership. However, much to my surprise, many members asked me to run again to save the party from extinction for a second time. Against my natural inclination, I decided to do as they asked. I then put my name forward for nomination in the leadership election.

No sooner I had done this than the Chairman and NEC declared me to be ‘not in good standing’. I was never officially informed of this decision or the reasons why. It was totally without any justification. It meant that my nomination papers were rejected and my deposit returned. In order for a reform programme to be implemented, and the right policies to be pursued by the Party in the future, I backed Richard Braine in the leadership election. Richard duly won by over 50% of the vote in August; which, with all due modesty, was largely due to my endorsement.

Richard had run on a platform which included making me Deputy Leader and Liz Phillips Chairman. He had a clear mandate from the members to implement those proposals. However, he was prevented from doing so by Chairman and NEC. They refused to rescind my unjust designation of ‘not in good standing’ so that Richard could appoint me, and they rejected his choice of Liz as Chairman, which has to be approved by the NEC.

To enable Richard to regain control of the Party by democratic means I mobilised nine candidates to run as the ‘Batten Brigade’ in the NEC elections of November. The then Chairman and NEC responded by making purely arbitrary and unfounded decisions to suspend the membership of, or designate as ‘not in good standing’, six of these candidates so that they could not run. Nevertheless, the three that were allowed to run did win seats.

Prior to the NEC election results being announced things had rapidly gone from bad to worse. The Chairman and NEC effectively hijacked the Party and prevented Richard from leading or carrying out his mandate from the members. The situation became farcical when Richard was prevented from communicating with his own members without the approval of the Chairman.

In order to fulfil his mandate and lead the Party, Richard tried to enter UKIP HQ in Newton Abbot with a Party member who is an IT specialist so that he could send an email to all members advising them of the situation. The HQ Manager refused him entry on the orders of the Chairman. Richard could no longer put up with this ludicrous situation and was forced to resign the leadership on 30th October.

The then Party Chairman and the NEC instigated a legal action against Richard Braine and three other members. This was an entirely spurious action, which nevertheless was heard on 6th December in the Royal Courts of Justice. The Judge, Mr Justice Warby, found against UKIP and warded costs of £29,000 to the Defendants: Richard Braine, Tony Sharpe, Geoff Armstrong and Mark Dent. This sum does not include the thousands of pounds incurred by the NEC for their own legal costs.

I have supplied an electronic copy of Mr Justice Warby’s Judgement to Kipper Central separately so that they can publish it on their website. It shows that the case was entirely without foundation. Nevertheless, the Interim Leader has misrepresented the findings of the Judge and his decision to the members. What she will not be able to hide is the massive hole in UKIP’s diminishing finances when the legal costs have to be paid.

Before Richard resigned as Leader, and as a last-ditch attempt to return the Party to the members, I called for an Extraordinary General Meeting, as laid out in the Party Constitution. The intention was to put motions to the membership for the removal of the NEC, to restore the membership and status of those suspended or not in good standing, to hold fresh NEC elections under free and fair terms, and to call for structural and constitutional reform of the Party.

An enormous amount of work has been done by stalwart UKIP members to organise the necessary Branch EGMs necessary to call for the national EGM. However, the Interim National Party Chairman has recently written that the National EGM will not be allowed to take place on the basis it is being called. It is obvious that the NEC is not going to allow an EGM to hold them to account for their conduct over the last six months.

At the NEC meeting last Saturday 14th December, the NEC took decisions that are staggering in their blatant undemocratic nature. They called for each branch to contribute £500 for the EGM (which will be beyond the means of many branches at this time), and for a £10,000 deposit in the leadership contest. This enormous sum is obviously to deter candidates from standing and to allow the NEC’s ‘designated’ candidate to stand unopposed.

I understand that at that NEC meeting the current Party Treasurer, Neil Hamilton, declined to give the NEC members a written statement of the Party Finances. In all my time as an NEC member throughout the years I have never known the Treasurer not to make a financial report to the NEC. As Directors of UKIP Ltd it is their legal duty to understand the Party’s financial position in order to discharge those duties responsibly.

The former Party Treasurer, Mark Harland, who I appointed when I was Leader, had been hounded out of office prior to that meeting. Mark told me that Neil Hamilton (who is not an elected NEC member) ‘demanded’ his resignation, and that he no longer felt able to continue in such a hostile environment. Mark is a real gentleman who plays with a straight bat and who did a sterling job of managing the finances during my term as leader.

In short, the Party has been hijacked by a bunch of undemocratic and incompetent buffoons. They are either totally incompetent or they are deliberately intent on destroying the Party. They now try and blame me for their current difficulties. However, during my time as Leader I rescued the Party from insolvency, and doubled the membership and annual income. I wrote a Party Manifesto in September 2018 which was widely acclaimed, and some of its policies subsequently appear to have been adopted by Boris Johnson – at least for the purposes of winning popular support. Whether he ever acts on them is another matter.

I took full responsible for the Party’s defeat in the European Elections last May, which were a profound disappointment; but most members realised this was due to the engineered creation of the Brexit Party, its promotion by the MSM, and the all-out attack on UKIP and myself by the MSM. As I said at the time, the BP was not a real political party, but an alternative Tory Party for those who could not bring themselves to actually vote Tory. It is unlikely to survive for long, and it will not take populist policies forward.

Today I came to the decision that there was no point in being a ‘suspended’ member of a Party led by an NEC who are intent on only one thing – maintaining their own positions. I no longer feel it is possible for our ordinary decent members and hardworking branch officers to influence the outcome of events.

The NEC has prevented the elected Leader from leading, they have prevented free and fair NEC elections, and they now intend to gerrymander the next leadership election. Meanwhile their total incompetence has halved the membership figure since I left office, and income is rapidly declining while they squander money on unnecessary legal actions.

It is therefore with a very heavy heart that I made the decision to resign from UKIP almost twenty-eight years after helping to set it up. I will not advise other members what to do, that is up to them, but I will say this: UKIP was a grass roots party that belonged to its members – it does not belong to the NEC. If UKIP disappears it will be entirely due to the actions of its National Executive Committee.

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