Within the next few months, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) members will be asked to elect a leader to replace Paul Nuttall, the Catholic conservative, mildly pro-Zionist Member of European Parliament for North West England, who resigned after leading the party off a cliff at the last General Election.
It’s fair to say that Nuttall was neither intellectually equipped, nor politically astute enough to lead a defanged UKIP into the Brexit negotiation period, as evidenced by his inability to achieve the slightest electoral success in 2017.
UKIP’s share of the vote, which reached a staggering 4 million when I stood as a prospective Member of Parliament for West Lancashire in 2015, collapsed at this year’s General Election — with both the Labour Party, from whom UKIP had previously siphoned off hundreds of thousands of voters from disenfranchised White working class communities in the north, and fiercely patriotic English Conservatives, whom UKIP had targeted down south, hacking large swathes of support back from Nuttall’s party.
In fact, Nuttall’s inability to put his personal stamp on the populist party resulted in UKIP losing over 80% of its vote (from 12.6% in 2015 to 2% in 2017), its membership rumored to have dropped by more than half, and the party Farage had built from scratch all but relegated to a footnote in the annals of British history and dustbin of British politics. ...
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