Ukip

Paul Nuttall doesn’t want to be a hangman after all. There was some doubt over the weekend when the Ukip leader said he’d bring back the death penalty and would even pull the lever himself.   This left Andrew Neil somewhat curious and so he used his election interview to enquire if Nuttall had been signalling a career move. But it turns out he wasn’t. He’d be up for stringing up nonces to make a point but wasn’t seeking new opportunities in that sector. ‘I don’t want to be Albert Pierrepoint,’ he told Neil. ‘That’s not what I want to go into after politics.’ The leader interviews have been revealing, showing up

If Ukip’s vote really does hit the floor come June 8th, the party’s leader won’t be granted a coveted prime-time slot on BBC One to make their mark. Thanks to Ukip’s past success, Paul Nuttall did get that opportunity tonight. But the Ukip leader’s plan did not fare well for coming under the scrutiny of Andrew Neil. On Brexit, it’s a point widely made that Ukip is a victim of the referendum result. In his interview tonight, Nuttall made it clear that the best the party can offer for the time being is an insurance policy that he hopes won’t be needed. The Ukip leader told Andrew Neil that he wants

Ukip has vowed to ban the burka if it ever comes to power and in its manifesto – which it launched today – the party calls on people to show ‘your face in a public place’. But there’s a problem: in the same document in which the party unveiled its policy, there was one person who could well fall foul of the new plans – a beekeeper.   The image of the hardworking beekeeper appears just pages away from Ukip’s announcement that ‘face coverings…are barriers to integration’. Thankfully, Ukip’s deputy leader Peter Whittle has said the question of whether apiarists would be affected by the ban was ‘ridiculous’. Mr S hopes the

Once upon a time the Welsh didn’t much care for the Kippers. In successive European elections (1999, 2004 and 2009), Scotland always produced Ukip’s worst result and Wales was the second or third worst. It was a similar story in Welsh Assembly elections: in 2003, 2007 and 2011, Ukip talked up their chances of winning seats on the regional list, only to fall well short in the end. Wales seemed barren territory for what looked like a very English party. Then things started to change. In the 2014 European election, Ukip came within a whisker of actually topping the poll in Wales. This was followed in the 2015 general election by the

Ukip is a party dwelling on its past glories rather than its future this afternoon. The party’s leader Paul Nuttall has very few crumbs of comfort from the results so far: Ukip has lost every single one of the seats it had previously held. It has, just moments ago, snatched a single seat from Labour in Lancashire. Yet even the most optimistic Kipper would struggle to put a spin on the performance so far. The line that there are still results to come through is rapidly wearing very thin. Instead, when Nuttall broke his silence earlier he talked of the party’s ‘electoral success over recent years’ and how the party had forced the

Ukip is a party searching for a purpose. In recent weeks, its focus has been on Islam. Now, it has hit on a new ruse to try and win over voters: going after Britain’s foreign aid budget. The party has said it will scrap the 0.7 per cent spending commitment put into law by David Cameron. Like it or not, it’s a popular move – with the millions spent on unwise projects, such as those in North Korea, doing little to endear a sceptical public to the cause of foreign aid. Hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition last year calling for cuts to the aid budget. Polls paint a

Poor old Paul Nuttall. Today was supposed to be a fresh start for Ukip as the party launched its election campaign event in the run-up to June 8. Instead, it’s descended into chaos. A group of protesters from ‘Stand up to racism’ have gatecrashed the launch event, waving banners and shouting and screaming moments before Nuttall was due to take to the his feet. The demonstrators were booted out of the room in which the event was taking place. But they refused to leave the building: meaning that a group of journalists were left trapped outside. The show has gone on anyway, with Nuttall doing his best to spell out the

Paul Nuttall has just confirmed he will be standing in the upcoming election. The Ukip leader promised to be ‘leading the party into battle’ on June 8th. Where he stands, we’ll have to wait and see. Nuttall said that he would announce in the next 48 hours which seat he planned to target. In a statement, Nuttall said: ‘As the leader of the party I will be, obviously, leading the party into battle as I have done many times in the past’ Nuttall might now be saying his decision was obvious, but it hasn’t always looked that way. Earlier this week, when journalists tried to pin him down on the question

The launch of Ukip’s new ‘integration agenda’ today was notable for two reasons. Firstly, Paul Nuttall refused to say whether he would seek a parliamentary seat in the snap election — eventually barricading himself in a locked room away from pesky hacks. The second thing to note was Ukip’s focus on the burqa. Overall, the new agenda had a distinctly anti-Islam focus. Nuttall — along with deputy leader Peter Whittle — said a Ukip government would pass a law against th­e wearing of face cov­erings in public plac­es, enforce an immediate closure of ­schools where there i­s evidence of Islamis­t ideology being taug­ht, and bring in annual school-base­d medical checks on g­irls at risk of suffering­

On this week’s episode, we discuss the two European nations that are are heading for the polls in the next couple of months. First, we look at Theresa May’s shock decision to hold a snap election, and then we cross the channel to consider the French election as they get set to whittle the field down to just two. With British news set to be dominated until June 8th by election fever (yet again), there was no place to start this week but with the fallout from the Prime Minister’s stunning U-turn on an early election. It’s a gamble, James Forsyth says in his cover piece this week, but with a portentially enormous pay

Mark Reckless infuriated many Tories when he defected to Ukip. Now, he’s defected again – and made few people happy in the process. The Ukip AM has announced that he is joining the Conservative Group in the Welsh Assembly, where he sits as a regional representative. Not for the first time, he is following in the footsteps of Douglas Carswell – this time by leaving Ukip behind. And his reasons for doing so are similar to Carswell’s: Brexit means that it’s mission accomplished. In his statement, he says: ‘I am joining the Conservative Group in the Welsh Assembly. I leave Ukip positively, having achieved our joint aim, a successful referendum