With Brexit underway, anti-EU UKIP struggles to redefine self

LONDON, April 25, (AFP): With just weeks to go before Britain’s general election, the anti-EU UK Independence Party is still battling to redefine its identity after the country voted for Brexit.

Since last June when Britain voted to leave the European Union — UKIP’s raison d’etre since its 1993 inception — the party, hindered by a leadership crisis, has failed to successfully redefine itself. And on Monday it was thrown into fresh turmoil as embattled leader Paul Nuttall refused to say whether he would even stand for parliament.

UKIP is now credited with just five percent of voting intentions according to a YouGov/Sunday Times poll released on Sunday, its lowest score since March 2012.

Elected party leader in November, Nuttall has already suffered an electoral defeat.

In February, he failed to beat the main opposition Labour candidate in a by-election in Stoke-on-Trent in central England, despite 69 percent of locals having voted for Brexit.

Following the defeat, Arron Banks, UKIP’s main donor, threatened to quit the party if it didn’t “clean up its act”.

And in March, UKIP’s sole member of parliament, Douglas Carswell, quit the party arguing that it should disband now that the Brexit mission has been achieved.

UKIP is now left to campaign with no elected MPs and without its firebrand former leader Nigel Farage, who opted out of running after doing so seven times and failing to secure a seat.

With Brexit under way, UKIP’s main challenge is to show it can come up with a coherent manifesto.

But according to Brian Klaas, a politics fellow at the London School of Economics, “the party is in disarray”.

Their platform, he says, has little to offer beyond “holding (Prime Minister) Theresa May’s feet to the fire” when it comes to a hard Brexit, which entails the country exiting the European single market.

For Peter Harris, UKIP’s candidate in Dagenham-Rainham in southeast England, the party is working on making sure that “Brexit means Brexit” and concentrating on the upcoming two-year negotiations between Britain and the EU.

UKIP will ensure that Britain will have “complete control of our borders,” Harris said, as well as regaining control over “law-making” and “fishing waters”.

But Harris was less expansive on domestic issues, instead sending back to the party’s 2015 manifesto and adding that UKIP cares about “local issues”.