Nigel Farage at the UKIP conference 2009 (Image - Wikipedia Creative Commons)
The UKIP membership application form states:
"I am not and have never been a member of the British National Party, National Front, British Freedom Party, British People's Party, English Defence League, Britain First or the UK First Party.
"UKIP reserves the right to reject applications or terminate memberships if these criteria are not met."UKIP began as the Anti-Federalist League, a Eurosceptic political party established in 1991 by the historian Dr. Alan Sked who was a lecturer on International History at the London School of Economics. On 3 September 1993, the group was renamed the UK Independence Party.
It was Alan Sked who first banned former members of far-right parties from joining UKIP, not Nigel Farage as is often assumed.
An article on Kipper Central refers to a recent tweet by Alan Sked which says that Farage pressured him in 1997 to remove the ban on National Front members, but apparently Sked resisted the pressure and the ban remained in place.
After UKIP's poor results in the 1997 General Election, Sked was pressured to resign by a party faction led by Farage, David Lott and Michael Holmes. In 1998 Sked left the party and Michael Holmes took over as party leader but the driving force behind the party was still Nigel Farage. Until 1997, under the leadership of Dr Sked, UKIP's membership form included a clause stressing that former members of racist parties were not allowed to join. Soon after Sked's departure, however, Farage got his own way and the clause disappeared.
In an article dated 21 October 2015 for The National Interest, Sked wrote:
"After I stepped down to return to academic life, the party came under control of a preposterous mountebank named Nigel Farage, who reoriented it to the far right. The clause about a lack of prejudices was abolished and all sorts of nasty statements were made against Blacks, Muslims and Gays. Former members of the National Front were allowed to work for the party or become candidates."Farage seems to have had a fixation on the National Front. A report in the Independent says that when Farage attended Dulwich College in South London in the late seventies and early eighties, he would boast that his initials NF also stood for National Front.
The National Front was founded in the 1960s by A.K. Chesterton who was a prominent member of Mosley's British Union of Fascists before the war. Farage must have known this but wasn't afraid of the bad publicity former NF members might bring to UKIP.
In 2006 Farage became leader of UKIP and remained leader until 2009 when he stood down. During this period the BNP was at the height of its success. By 2008/2009 the BNP had about 60 district councillors, half a dozen county councillors, a seat on the Greater London Authority and two MEPs. It also had 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham Council making it the official opposition to Labour who had 38 seats.
In most council elections the right-wing vote was being split between UKIP and the BNP. In some council elections the combined UKIP and BNP vote was enough to get either party a councillor elected.
To avoid splitting the vote the BNP wanted to do a deal with UKIP. The plan was for the BNP to stand in the inner cities, in working class areas and target Labour voters, while UKIP would stand in the shires, in middle-class areas and target Tory voters. There was an attempt, over many months, by BNP members to infiltrate UKIP, to try and sell the idea to UKIP members, and to convince them that there was no future for either party unless a deal was made. The BNP even sent former tennis star Buster Mottram, who was a BNP member, to sell the deal to UKIP.
As a result of the infiltration of UKIP by BNP members, and the unrest it was causing, Farage re-introduced the ban on far-right membership. To reiterate: the ban was re-introduced not because BNP members were considered too extreme, but because infiltration of UKIP by the BNP in pursuit of an election pact was causing dissent among the UKIP rank and file.
So why didn't UKIP make an election pact with the BNP? At the time this was going on, the BNP were being constantly vilified by the mainstream media while UKIP was being given an easy ride. Farage must have thought it best to put as much distance between UKIP and the BNP as possible. What he didn't foresee was that once the BNP was no longer a threat, all the accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia would be directed at UKIP instead.
To counter accusations of racism from the mainstream media, Farage has always claimed the ban was introduced to keep racists out of UKIP because of their ideology. The real reason the ban was introduced has now been largely forgotten.
