Raheem Kassam and David Kurten pull out of leadership race

Raheem Kassam has pulled out of the leadership race today after failing to secure adequate funding from supporters to pay for anything other than an online campaign.

David Kurten also pulled out of the leadership race yesterday, saying that he would be happy to work with any of the candidates still in the running.

This leaves just four candidates: Suzanne Evans, Paul Nuttall MEP, John Rees-Evans and Peter Whittle AM.

What is interesting is how different these final four candidates are. Two of the four are full time politicians, one is a woman, one is Welsh, one is from a working class council estate and another is gay. Both BME candidates pulled out over the last 48 hours but the diversity of the 7 candidates who officially declared their intention to stand torpedoes the media lie that UKIP is a party of racist, sexist, homophobic old Tories in cheap blazers. There has been more diversity in UKIP's leadership contest than all the other mainstream parties combined.

Raheem Kassam's promise to change his ways isn't enough

Leadership candidate, Raheem Kassam, has apologised and promised to change his ways after being called out for verbally abusing leadership rival Suzanne Evans.

Kassam called Evans a "wrinkly old ginger bird" and has reportedly been "incredibly sexist" toward her. He says that he apologised to her at a patron's dinner this week but Evans says that he did no such thing.

Raheem Kassam fancies himself as the heir to Farage which is something of an insult to the man who turned UK politics upside down and secured our independence from the EU. Nigel Farage is straight talking and brutally honest, Kassam is just rude and offensive. When the Independent wants Kassam to win to destroy the party it's a pretty clear indication that there is something seriously wrong with him.

I normally try to avoid taking sides in internal elections but if this man somehow ends up winning the leadership election I will return my membership card and I know I'm not alone.

Paul Nuttall and Suzanne Evans join leadership contest

Paul Nuttall and Suzanne Evans have thrown their hats into the ring for the re-run of the leadership election following Diane Evans' resignation after just 18 days.

Evans was barred from the previous leadership election as she was serving a suspension following her conduct in the London Assembly election campaign. It is very much to her credit that she stuck with UKIP despite what she and others (rightly or wrongly) felt was unfair treatment.

Nuttall pulled out of the previous leadership election and the decision was in no small part because of threats and abuse from far left activists. As a working class, old Labour northerner Nutall is seen as a huge threat to Labour and the Corbynists in particular.

London Assembly member Peter Whittle was an unexpected addition to the leadership race when he announced his candidacy a little under a fortnight ago. Whittle is one of the most senior openly gay politicians in the country (UKIP MEP for Scotland, David Coburn, is another) and was the only gay candidate for London Mayor.

West Midlands MEP, Bill Etheridge, is the only candidate from the previous contest to put himself forward again. He came third behind Diane James and Lisa Duffy and ahead of Phillip Broughton and Liz Jones.

The final declared candidate so far is the London editor of the hard right American political website, Breitbart, Raheem Kassam. Kassam was ineligible under the rules of the previous contest as he hadn't been a member for long enough but qualifies now the criteria have been relaxed.

Bernard Jenkin MP is right to suggest an alternative to the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty

The editor of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, is claiming that a letter from Bernard Jenkin MP reveals that Vote Leave wants to keep us in the EU for at least a decade but the letter doesn't actually mention Vote Leave and Kassam appears not to have read the letter properly.

Whilst there are undoubtedly some in Vote Leave who want to use a Leave vote as a negotiation tool to get reformed membership, the campaign itself is officially in favour of a Leave vote meaning we leave the EU. As Vote Leave's Chief Executive, Matthew Elliott, told us earlier in the year:

I'm not quite sure what else to say, other than the fact that if we are to win this referendum, we have to convince voters who have previously taken a "reformist" stance to come out for Leave - sadly Leave is not yet at over 50% in the polls! I am campaigning for a Leave vote, and there is no way I will campaign for or recommend a Remain vote. 

What Bernard Jenkin MP has said in his letter to a constituent is that he (not Vote Leave) thinks that there are other options available to the UK in the event of a Leave vote than immediately invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty as David Cameron has said he will do. His preference is to instead negotiate a new treaty with the EU that would do away with the need to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

In his eagerness to "prove" that Vote Leave is a trojan horse for the establishment Kassam has ignored the fact that Jenkin hasn't even mentioned Vote Leave and failed to consider whether what he says is a viable option.

Under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty the only legal way to leave the EU is by giving notice to quit under Article 50 of the treaty. If the other member states agree to let us leave (no, this is not a joke) then a two year process is triggered in which we negotiate the terms of our exit and our future relationship with the EU. At the end of the two years we are out.

The is no other provision in the Lisbon Treaty for leaving the EU but under international treaty law a new treaty can supercede the Lisbon Treaty just like a piece of domestic legislation can implicitly or explicitly supercede another piece of domestic legislation. Bernard Jenkin's suggestion that we could conclude another treaty with the EU that would result in our exit from the EU and not require giving notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is absolutely valid and in fact the deal that we would negotiate with the EU if we leave by way of the Lisbon Treaty would quite likely result in a new treaty or at the very least a new annexe to the Lisbon Treaty. If it did result in a new treaty then that treaty would of course contain the repudiation of the Lisbon Treaty.

Where Kassam gets the decade in the EU thing from is Jenkin's clumsy wording about negotiating the new treaty where he says that we would have to negotiate with all 27 remaining EU members. 

It would be for the UK and the EU to agree the basis of a new relationship in the aftermath of a vote to leave. This would involve negotiation with all the other 27 member states at government-to-government level. This could take the form of a new treaty, which would mean the UK would not need to resort to Article 50. We will have many options open to us after a vote to Leave, unlike if we vote Remain and I am grateful to you for offering me your thoughts on the matter.

Conducting 27 separate negotiations would indeed take many years but there wouldn't be 27 trade deals with 27 EU members. One of the fundamental arguments for leaving put forward by Leave campaigners is that as EU members we can't negotiate our own trade deals because they have to be done collectively by the EU. Reading the whole paragraph, Jenkin is clearly referring to lobbying of the individual EU governments as Cameron did to get his "deal" to ensure that the agreement reached with the EU goes the right way.

If it was practical I would like to leave tomorrow but the whole machinery of the state needs to move from its current model where large chunks of government are outsourced to the EU to one where they actually do their own thinking. The biggest challenge will be DEFRA which has been little more than an outpost of the EU in the UK, the British government having handed control of fisheries and agriculture to the EU many years ago. In the case of DEFRA they will effectively be building a brand new government department. Government moves at a sedentary pace, it is unlikely that they could even decide what the department should do let alone resource it and get it working effectively. If there was an opportunity to delay the insourcing of at least some aspects of government beyond the two years allowed by the Lisbon Treaty then as long as fully leaving the EU is the end game and it doesn't delay that objective unduly, it isn't something that should be dismissed.

David Cameron has predicted pretty much everything short of an alien invasion (from outer space, not the middle east) when we leave the EU and when we do vote to leave he will want the record to show that he was right. Government departments have been instructed to make no plans for leaving and he has said that he will give notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty as soon as we vote to leave so government departments and the civil service will be starting from scratch with a fixed two year deadline to bring everything that has been outsourced to the EU back in-house and negotiate a new relationship with the EU. It's been set up to fail to secure Cameron's legacy but what Jenkin suggests is a way to make it work.

With an agreement that we cap our relationship with the EU as it is now, sign up to no new treaties and hand over no new powers we can chip away at what competencies the EU has (with a corresponding reduction in the membership fee of course) whilst negotiating a new treaty in parallel which will take us out but maintain a relationship with the EU on terms that work for us. As long as there is an agreed deadline for getting out completely - perhaps 5 years - and it's not used as a stalling technique there's no reason why we should choose to limit ourselves to two years to leave and equally no reason why we should have to use the Lisbon Treaty to leave if our best interests are served by leaving in a different way.

Vote Leave is clearly the establishment campaign - it's the one the politicians and other establishment figures flocked to - but is it a trojan horse? I don't think so. Our preference was for Grassroots Out to be designated the official Leave campaign but the Electoral Commission chose Vote Leave. Their decision was made transparently and whilst the decision wasn't the one we wanted there is no point trying to undermine the campaign that has all the money and resources and the mandate from the Electoral Commission to lead leave campaigners. Kassam's misleading analysis of Bernard Jenkin's letter and incorrect attribution of that misleading analysis of the MP's comments to Vote Leave are not helpful. Now is the time to work together, not play silly games.

Breitbart declares war on UKIP

Raheem Kassam, one of the casualties of last week's tussles at the top of the party, has rejoined Breitbart London as Editor in Chief and declared war on what he describes as "the left wing of UKIP".

Patrick O'Flynn led a rebellion last week against Kassam and Matt Richardson, two of Nigel Farage's advisers who he claimed were responsible for making Farage "snarling, thick skinned and aggressive" which saw both of them resign from the party.

Breitbart is well known for its hard right conservative stance and it appears that Kassam's aim was to move UKIP from the centre-right and make it part of the American tea party movement. Whilst this brand of bible belt politics and the confrontational manner of the Republicans might be popular in some parts of the US, it's a turn off to voters here and has increased Nigel Farage's "Marmite factor".

UKIP's core policy of fighting for withdrawal from the EU has brought in members and support from both ends of the political spectrum and accommodating the disparate views of the membership has resulted in a set of policies unique to UKIP that embrace both the left and the right of the party and appeal to everyone from the leafy suburbs of the south east to the northern mining villages. Lurching to the right is going to alienate not only our members and supporters but a big chunk of what is now UKIP's core vote. They might not be the type of people that the tea party approve of but UKIP is perfectly placed to take on both the left and the right.

If Kassam and Richardson were wormtongues trying to hijack UKIP to extend the tea party movement to the UK - and it would appear that that is the case - then we're better off without them, even if it means adding Breitbart to the long list of media publications that are at war with the party. UKIP has a winning formula, we need to hold a steady course and not allow outside influences to steer the party too far to the left or the right.