- Location
- Teignmouth, Devon
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Kipper Sinks But Doesn't Burn
29 September 2017
Anne Marie Waters: 24.6%
David Kurten: 23.3%
John Rees-Evans: 19.9%
Jane Collins: 15.2%
Peter Whittle: 15.1%
Aiden Powlesland: 0.8%
Anne Marie Waters was elected leader on a very narrow margin on a platform that mainly boiled down to being anti-Islam. Immediately a wave of resignations began, with UKIP losing six MEPs before it was stabilised by rumours that the NEC would be lodging a vote of no confidence.
28 December 2017 - EGM - To support the motion to remove Anne Marie Waters as leader of UKIP for conduct against the values of the party.
Yes: 88 No: 177
To verify the no confidence motion, the NEC had to call an Emergency General Meeting within 28 days. And to the shock and horror of many members they opted to do so between Christmas and New Years, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Few registered members could make it and the hope was this would bias the decision towards the NEC, who would have advance notice and more willingness to travel. The meeting was small and badly attended, but the ex-pat Irish UKIP vote and the Northern Ireland vote swung towards Waters.
Immediately the party was hit by another wave of resignations, including Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall. By the end of the year the party was reduced to 4 MEPs, Gareth Bennett in the Senedd and David Kurten in the London Assembly.
Waters began to reorganise the party around herself - where-ever possible the NEC was cut out of decision making and more and more power found it's way to For Britain - her attempt to establish a Momentum style party-within-a-party.
The next year was a desperate fight for the soul of the party as Farage established the new Brexit Party as a rival. Things came to a head in the NEC elections, when it became clear that the NEC would block For Britain's slate in its entirety. Waters resigned as leader, announcing that she would use the leadership election as a referendum on the NEC's conduct.
24 November 2018
Anne Marie Waters (For Britain): 60.2%
Ben Walker: 39.8%
Anne Marie Waters was opposed by only one candidate, who had the backing of the NEC and for a long while looked as though he might win by default as Waters was under threat of being suspended from the contest. Walker promised the same anti-Islam policies as Waters, and all the same limitations to the power of the NEC. In fact he promised to go further, with AV for leadership elections and regular referendums on party policies. In the end, none of this was trusted.Waters went into 2019 riding high - many NEC members resigned and she was able to replace them with her own people, and as Brexit trundled on the party regularly polled well. All this collapsed in the EU elections, where her candidates such as Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin caused media storms and the party's vote collapsed to the new Brexit Party. Following the election, Waters was forced to resign.
21 September 2019
Helena Windsor: 34.6%
Stuart Agnew (For Britain): 31.9%
David Kurten: 26.8
Piers Wauchope: 12.1%
Freddy Vachha: 4.6%
Windsor won a tough election and bought the party back towards what could be considered a moderate direction but was far to the right of UKIP in its prime. The far right was allowed to continue in the party, and anti-Islam measures were considered an important and permanent fixture. The party was largely moribund having lost most of its donors, and representatives, and its position as foremost right of the Tories party. Then, Brexit declared they would pull out of many seats in the 2019 December election. UKIP, hollowed out and defeated, could manage only 302 candidates, but that was more than Farage had put forward. They got good press from being denied a place on some of the debates, but when they were included, Windsor performed terribly. The party received just 1.4% of the vote and Windsor tendered her resignation.
23 February 2020
Carl Benjamin (For Britain): 50.1%
Jo Marney (One Britain): 32.1%
Gerard Batten: 17.8%
Carl Benjamin, former UKIP candidate and alt-right YouTuber, took over as leader of UKIP and pushed the party back to the right in an election where Gerard Batten represented a middle ground and model Jo Marney "The Bad Girl of Brexit" represented a move back to what in the party now constituted the left. For the first time, Marney was at the head of her own slate, and an attempt to form a new party-within-a-party to compete with For Britain.The party set out to refocus on culture war issues - race, gender ideology, and Islam were to be the key areas. Then COVID hit.
Benjamin's mental health had never been great - but the media interest in his "I wouldn't even rape" Jess Phillips comments, along with his apology and statement that in fact he would, and the ensuing police investigation, all left him in a fragile state. The pandemic worsened this considerably. He found himself getting increasingly tied up in arguments over minutia of political philosophy and less and less interested in actually leading the party, which was in financial turmoil and suffering from widespread embezzlement. This, added to highly memeable Zoom gaffes, caused him to be seen as an utter joke, even in the party.
Black Lives Matter and the anti-mask protests of the summer helped give him a bit of interest in the world again, but it was too little, too late. In early August he announced that the country was irreparably broken and that he would be writing a book called the Two-Hundred Year Plan to describe how the right could survive and take back society.
26 September 2020
Laura Ward (Free The Children Alliance): 26.5%
Steven Morrissey (For Britain): 26.4%
Tommy Robinson: 26.3%
Elizabeth Jones (One Britain): 24.8%
Laura Ward was a strange figure - a relative unknown in the party who went on to beat two big names and the annointed candidate of the remaining party infrastructure. She would have definitely lost, had Robinson stood down for Morrissey, or vice versa. But egos got in the way and the relationship between the two giants of the party's new centre proved too much to overcome.
Ward represents a new faction within the party - one that believes wholeheartedly in QAnon, Coronavirus denial, and that vaccinations, facemasks, and 5G are government conspiracies. These views are mainstream in the party's membership, but many people in the mid-level leadership consider them to be too extreme and unelectable. But, they said that about Anne Marie Waters and... wait. Shit.
