UKIP ‘immature’, ‘unaccountable’ and ‘Neanderthal’

By Martin Banks

Date: 22/07/04

THE UK Independence Party (UKIP), which scored a spectacular success in last month's European elections, came under fire on three fronts when it made its debut in the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week.

First, the 11 UKIP members, who pledged to "wreck the Parliament", were accused of "schoolboy tactics" when they tore up their ballot papers during Tuesday's (20 July) vote for the assembly's president.

UK Socialist MEP Peter Skinner said: "Their behaviour was yet another display of their lack of political maturity."

The party's most high-profile deputy, former UK TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, was then criticized for failing to commit that he would declare his financial interests. "If I feel I don't want to, I won't," he said.

This prompted Jonathan Evans, leader of the UK Conservative delegation, to say: "UKIP rightly complain that the EU is not sufficiently transparent and accountable yet Kilroy himself apparently sees no need to be accountable and transparent to his own electorate."

UKIP was criticized on a third front when the man named as its candidate for the Parliament's women's committee made an extraordinary attack on women's rights.

Godfrey Bloom, newly elected MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, said: "I would represent Yorkshire women who always have dinner on the table when you come home. No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age."

UK Socialist MEP Glenys Kinnock hit back, saying: "We know UKIP are Neanderthal but it is absolutely terrifying that Bloom can fly in the face of what we have worked and fought for." On the eve of their first visit to Strasbourg, the party suspended its twelfth MEP, Ashley Mote, who had campaigned to clean up sleaze in Brussels, because he faces a court appearance over alleged housing benefit fraud.

Reaction by other MEPs to the first appearance of UKIP MEPs at an European Parliament plenary session following their success in the EP elections, June 2004.

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