Marta calls for Farage to resign

Marta Andreasen has published a letter on her website explaining why she is calling for Nigel Farage to step down as leader of UKIP.

It's a very well written letter and she makes some very good arguments but her answer to UKIP's problems is - in my opinion - wrong.

Marta says that UKIP is bankrupt.  Quite possibly it is at the moment.  Bankruptcy is insolvency and insolvency is when your liabilities exceed your income and assets.  The Labour Party is over £20m in debt and the Tories are about £10m in debt and running a budget deficit of over £7m per year (membership fees are worth £1m to the Tories).  So how does UKIP's debt and budget deficit stack up against the LibLabCon?  Or the Greens for the that matter?  They've spent some serious money on elections this last couple of years and one MP's salary won't pay the bills.  Perhaps Marta will tell us?

Marta also criticises the amount of money spent defending the latest legal action brought against the party by its loyal servant in Solihull.  Fair comment: they should have let her back in as a member and then created a new class of membership for MEPs costing £1k per month which would have not only tested the loyalty of the sainted one but it would have forced the other MEPs (Marta included) to hand over a bit more of their eurogeld.

Marta then goes on to criticise the amount of money spent on by-elections that we couldn't win.  What I want to know is how many members we recruited as a result of the party's professional by-election campaigns in Barnsley and Oldham.  Coming second in Barnsley and third in Oldham gave UKIP a credibility that has been lacking thus far in by-elections.  You have to speculate to accumulate.  I agree those by-elections were unwinnable but they were great results for UKIP although I agree that the reported £20k+ cost of contesting the Leicester South by-election with our community cohesion "expert" was a criminal waste, as was the money pumped into the Scottish and Welsh elections that we could never win with our current anti-devolution policy.

I suspect Marta's main problem is the lack of control around spending of EFD group funds which are controlled by Nigel who has a tendency to spend money on things that are good ideas rather than good sense.  But that doesn't make him a bad leader, it just makes him the wrong person to be controlling the purse strings.  Nigel was only recently re-elected leader with over half the vote of the membership, head and shoulders above the other three candidates.  The only person who comes close to filling Nigel's shoes is Paul Nuttall and he's made it clear he's not up for leading the party just yet.

By all means change the rules to reign in Nigel's spending but as a leader, he's doing a good job - he raises the party's profile, he is enthusiastic and inspiring and the media love him.  Without a motivated membership and the oxygen of publicity the party would be dead and Nigel brings both of those to UKIP.