UKIP Leader Nick Tenconi is becoming increasingly deranged. The man with the megaphone, making a nuisance of himself in town centres around Britain every weekend, is clearly rattled that under his new, dynamic leadership, UKIP is falling flat on its face and needs picking up before his political suitor ‘Tommy Robinson’ gets out of jail and decides that UKIP may not, after all, be the political partner for him.
Most striking of all has been the accelerating attrition of UKIP’s branch network. The party which brought you the Brexit referendum and once boasted over 500 local branches is now reduced to only 13. Yes, that’s right, 13. This has serious implications for Tenconi and his project to link UKIP up with Robinson who, before he went to jail, said that UKIP could be the political party partner to his ‘cultural movement’.
The party which brought you the Brexit referendum and once boasted over 500 local branches is now reduced to only 13.
Tenconi has made it known he harbours ambitions of running Robinson as a UKIP parliamentary candidate and Robinson has said that he has been impressed with Tenconi’s leadership.
That was then…
Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) may now be having second thoughts. If a party structure is what he wants UKIP to bring to the table, he must now realise that he is going to be sadly disappointed. And it raises the question – without a party network, what is the point of hooking up with UKIP at all, especially as Tenconi and Chairman Ben Walker are plainly set on milking Robinson’s fund raising (or should we say, grifting) abilities to the full.
It is also plain that on its own, UKIP simply cannot turn out the numbers to allow it to pose as a serious street movement. A recent march in Portsmouth attracted only 100-150, and even that was an increase on previous turnouts in Manchester and Southampton. It was also significantly smaller than the counter-demonstration by anti-fascists who are regularly outnumbering them. UKIP has been pulling in new members lately but they are largely from the Tommy Robinson flock, so would hardly count as a gain for Robinson in any merger.
Tenconi’s claims to have ‘taken’ back Manchester and Portsmouth from the left is so much risible nonsense will be seen as such by the Robinson acolytes who have been brought in to pack the UKIP NEC. Neither Richard Inman nor Rikki Doolan nor Stan Robinson have been spotted at the recent marches and another two – Simon Bean and Dean Neil – have, albeit for differing reasons, vanished from the UKIP NEC list without trace.
In response to all this, Tenconi has been throwing out increasingly deranged policy statements. If announcing that all ‘communists’ would be deported to North Korea was not imbecilic enough, he topped it with a declaration that UKIP would “deport all migrants and their offspring (even if they were born in the Britain) who have not integrated into our society.”
Under threat
Who would decide if people were sufficiently integrated, and how this might be judged, is conveniently left unanswered. On the face of it, though, it would seem to capture not just the Muslim communities which UKIP clearly has in its sights but also, for instance, the orthodox Jewish communities of North London and Manchester.
So, the UKIP / Tommy Robinson project is plainly under threat. Its future will now depend on how Robinson himself views its prospects of advancing his own personal position when he gets out of jail. That, for him, will be the only thing that matters. What seems clear, however, is that its future is now completely out of the hands of Tenconi and UKIP.