For Paul Nuttall, the UK Independence Party’a (UKIP) latest leader, the strategy is clear: Brexit needs to be clean, decisive — and rapid. However, what that means for the party itself is another matter.
Of all the paradoxes about the British insurgent party, the biggest is this: UKIP was made by Europe, bankrolled by Europe. The European Parliament gave the party its springboard and its voice. If UKIP was a political start-up, the EU provided the venture capital. Without the parliamentary seats, and the money that went with them, UKIP would never had have the platform. Europe made former party leader Nigel Farage a star.
“It gave him a platform he couldn’t get at home,” one former EU official says, adding that the European Parliament was “absolutely indispensable” for Farage and his party.
Robert Ford, a politics professor at Manchester University, said: “Essentially it was the European Parliament that gave UKIP the springboard to become a force in domestic politics” by providing money, staff and legitimacy.
With the letters MEP [member of the European Parliament] after their names, UKIP leaders such as Farage and Nuttall, who won his seat in 2009, were invited onto the BBC’s Question Time and other primetime programs.
“Some junior councilor from Clacton probably wouldn’t be able to get a national platform that way,” Ford says.
UKIP was not the first to tread the path of EU success to national prominence. In 1984, France’s far-right Front National made a breakthrough in European elections, winning 10 seats, which helped propel it to national attention.
The party’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, but in 2002 its then-leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, beat the Socialists to become a contender for the French presidency. Now his daughter Marine looks likely to make the final two in next year’s elections.
Britain’s smaller parties initially struggled to make an impact in Europe. The UK was wedded to the first-past-the-post system that punished small parties. That changed in 1999 when then-British prime minister Tony Blair introduced proportional representation (PR) for European elections, a consolation prize for the Liberal Democrats, who had expected more sweeping electoral reform after Labour’s 1997 landslide.
PR had an immediate effect: In the 1999 European elections, Labour and the Conservatives lost votes, while Farage and two UKIP allies were on their way to Brussels.
Elected office was the gateway to EU funds. By 2005, UKIP and their allies were getting 2.2 million euros (US$2.33 million at current exchange rates) per year to run their operations in Brussels and Strasbourg.
In the same year, UKIP raised ￡677,000 (US$865,300) in donations and membership fees, according to Electoral Commission records.
Few questions were asked about how this money was spent, according to the former official.
“It is all very murky,” he said, with relatively little control on any political groups, including the center-right, socialists and liberals. “It is difficult to see what the money was spent on in all cases.”
Wealthy donors and party members are important to UKIP’s balance sheet, but the party gained 3 million euros in EU funding last year, although it has recently been ordered to pay back 173,000 euros as the parliament tightens controls.
Simon Usherwood, politics researcher at Surrey University, says EU funds are more reliable than the whims of the party’s best-known donors: “It is not an Arron Banks [UKIP donor] ‘how do I feel today’ kind of proposition.”
And UKIP proved to be highly effective in using the money and platform to attack the EU. The party’s MEPs shunned the day-to-day lawmaking of the parliament and its committees. No serving UKIP MEP has ever been responsible for amending an EU law, a position known as a rapporteur in EU jargon.
UKIP has more MEPs than any other British political party — and the second-worst attendance. According to VoteWatch data shared with the Guardian, UKIP MEPs have attended 75 percent of rollcall votes in the current parliament, compared with Labour’s 91 percent attendance record, the Conservatives’ 81 percent and the Scottish National Party on 71 percent.
Farage lowers his party’s average: He has attended only four in 10 votes.
For UKIP MEPs, this is the best way to represent the constituents: “I do not want to be involved in this rapporteur thing, it is important to attend the plenary and vote no,” UKIP MEP John Stuart Agnew, one of the party’s longest serving MEPs, once told researchers.
“UKIP MEPs tend to have relatively low attendance. They ask a lot of questions and they use the time they have in the plenaries to make speeches, which are not really aimed at the plenaries, but are there for external consumption,” Usherwood said.
The parliament’s Web streaming service, which started in 2008, has been a gift to UKIP, allowing the party and Eurosceptics to create countless YouTube clips, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers the EU’s official channels can only dream of.
A subset of YouTube, mainly Eurosceptic and Russian propaganda TV, is devoted to the UKIP leader: Farage insulting the then-European Council president Herman Van Rompuy as “a low-grade bank clerk”; or attacking the EU hierarchy as “very very dangerous people.”
Soon the stunts and the rants will come to an end. If the UK leaves the EU in 2019, the unofficial deadline in Westminster and Brussels, UKIP will lose its best platform, most reliable banker, and its big idea.
“Once we get to Brexit they haven’t got an answer to what is the party for,” Usherwood says.
Ford thinks that UKIP can survive, even without the crutches provided by the European Parliament.
“The structural divisions that opened up the space for the party in the first place aren’t going away. Brexit may even intensify them,” he said.
UKIP is also now firmly lodged in the public mind.
“Whenever there are arguments about immigration or Brexit betrayal, or possibly national identity, which might be where it goes next, UKIP are going to strike voters as an obvious place to go,” Ford said.
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