Richard Berry

Ukip needs to reduce its defection rate to be taken seriously

Party-switching has been relatively common among British MEPs in recent years.  In the past ten years, 13 MEPs have ended their term of office in a different party to the one they started it in, 9 per cent of all those elected. That is equivalent to almost 60 MPs changing allegiances in the House of Commons between elections, which is unheard of.

When we look closer at the figures we see that this phenomenon is largely down to one party in particular: Ukip. Ukip has been very successful in recent European Parliament elections, winning 12 seats in 2004 and 13 in 2009. But following both elections, the party struggled to keep hold of its MEPs. In total, eight UKIP MEPs have left the party while still in office since 2004.

This means that in the past decade an MEP elected for UKIP has had a 1 in 3 chance of leaving the party, through defection or sacking, before the next election. In contrast, only 6 per cent of Conservative MEPs have changed parties, while no Labour or Liberal Democrats have done so. Out of all party changes among British MEPs since 2004, 62% have been MEPs leaving Ukip.

Two Ukip MEPs – Marta Andreasen and David Campbell Bannerman – have defected to the Conservative Party. Others, most notably Robert Kilroy-Silk but also Nikki Sinclaire and Mike Nattrass, have formed their own parties after falling foul of the Ukip party leadership in one way or another. Various forms of impropriety did for Ashley Mote and Tom Wise. Godfrey Bloom, meanwhile, has been on a one-man mission to discredit both himself and his party in the most spectacular of fashions, a crusade which saw him eventually resign his membership. Ukip have, however, gained one new member in the European Parliament via the defection from the Conservative Party of the noted climate sceptic Roger Helmer.

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