Dear Member,
The NEC consists of grass roots party activists elected by all the members of
the party from among themselves. Our role is to oversee the party hierarchy on
behalf of the members. We are not “party elites”. We are volunteers, we do not
get paid, we put in our own time which we frequently have to take away from our
paid employment. Our goal is always to try and represent what is right and fair
for our fellow members in accordance with the Party’s Constitution and Party
Rulebook. There are NEC elections every year.
On Tuesday 2 August, a panel was convened to assess the eligibility of the
candidates applying to be leader of the Party. It was clear that in the case of
Steven Woolfe, the eligibility criteria had not been met because his application
had not been received by the Returning Officer by 12 noon on 31 July.
The panel's findings were presented to the whole NEC. The NEC was supplied
with legal advice which made it very clear that the rules of the election were
that "complete applications MUST be received by 12 noon on 31 July" in order to
be accepted. If the NEC made an exception for one person and accepted an
application that did not comply with this requirement, such a decision would not
stand up in court.
Any other candidate, or indeed any member entitled to vote, would have had
the legal standing to sue if Steven Woolfe’s application had been accepted. If
we lost such a challenge, the party would not only have had to pay its own legal
costs, but also the other party's costs. That is money that the party can ill
afford. Alongside this, the legitimacy of the whole leadership election would
have been thrown into chaos.
A clear majority of the NEC voted to approve the panel's recommendations.
Although Steven Woolfe appears to have accepted the situation as a
predictable risk of not lodging his paperwork earlier, others are attacking the
NEC. They are led by the same people who have long wished to abolish the NEC for
reasons wholly unrelated to Steven Woolfe's candidacy, but who have a hostility
to UKIP’s internal democracy.
Things have gone too far. If you were to arrive late at an airport and missed
your flight, would you vilify the airline, call for it to be disbanded, or post
pictures of people wielding rifles on Facebook calling for the airline's
management to be shot? That, in essence, is exactly what members of YI have done
(the chairman and deputy chairman of which are on Steven Woolfe's payroll).
We have had no reason to treat Steven any differently than any other
candidate - nor did we.
The NEC did not take Steven Woolfe off the ballot paper; Steven
Woolfe took himself off the ballot paper.
Yours sincerely,
Piers Wauchope, Adrianne Smyth and Toby
Coke
Members of the UKIP National Executive
Committee |
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