UKIP, the party that has spent the last several years announcing its imminent revival whilst plunging into a spiral of decline, has had to cancel its Scottish Parliament election launch, and is now trying to shift the blame for this humilaiton onto the police.
The story begins, as so many UKIP stories do, with a shortage of willing participants. When the party announced its Scottish slate on 8 April, it could boast only four who actually live in Scotland.
Clinical death
They included the indefatigable Mackays, Donald and Janice, who possess the kind of zealotry that keeps a party technically alive long after clinical death has occurred.
They managed to recruit two wholly fresh Scottish victims, bringing the total to four, then solved the remaining problem of having fifteen candidates to fill by procuring eleven paper candidates from England, several of whom were simultaneously standing as paper candidates in English council elections.
So the launch event in Glasgow yesterday was always going to be an intimate affair.
Damp squib
Realistically, only three or four of the fifteen candidates were ever going to make an appearance.
The English contingent were not, we are told, at all keen on heading north, wasting time and money on what they knew would be a damp squib of an event.
And so, at 7.49pm on 16 April, with barely sixteen hours to go before the launch, UKIP posted a statement online announcing the cancellation of the event. The statement was dated 15 April and spoke gravely of “only two days remaining.”
Someone, at least, had the presence of mind to backdate the humiliation.
Unspecified threats
The reason given for the cancellation was extraordinary even by the elastic standards of UKIP excuse-making. Police Scotland, the statement declared, had “failed to respond” to requests for assistance.
The threat was Antifa – unspecified Antifa – who had “already” issued threats whose precise nature and intended recipients the press release declined to elaborate upon.
Chairman Ben Walker, warned that this negligence “undermines the democratic process.”
The party announced it had “no choice” but to cancel, called it “a win for wokeness and the establishment,” and signed off with the reminder that UKIP campaigns for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament, a policy position that sits in interesting tension with its decision to stand candidates for it.
No application
There is, however, a problem with this account. Enquirers to Police Scotland yesterday were being told that they had no record of any such event, no application relating to it, and no pending application under any of the names UKIP, UK Independence Party, Donald Mackay, Janice Mackay, Ben Walker, or Nick Tenconi.
The inescapable conclusion is that UKIP’s Scottish launch was not cancelled because of Antifa, or Police Scotland’s indifference to the democratic process, or a failure of civic duty.
Empty room
It was cancelled because the English paper candidates couldn’t be bothered to come to Glasgow, Nick Tenconi and the Mackays would have been left staring at a near-empty room.
A press release blaming the constabulary was, it seems, preferable to the photographs.
