Dr David Abbott speaks out

On Monday 12th January Dr David Abbott was ‘allowed’ to present a rebuttal of the various allegations made against him by Ms Oxley and the rest of the nodding donkeys on the NEC.

As you would expect it made little difference as Farage and Nuttall’s kangaroo court had already decided to exclude him. It is now only a matter of time before he is thrown out of UKIP.

To Farage and Nuttall freedom of speech and democracy count for nothing. You either obey the leader and his little sidekick or face expulsion. Hitler and Mussolini pursued a similar course.

I should add that only Del Young voted to allow Mr Abbott back onto the NEC.

Here is Mr Abbott’s statement:

The following is the statement I read to the UKIP NEC at its January meeting. I was rebutting as illegitimate in terms of Natural Justice, Moral Behaviour and Decent Action my expulsion for urging that UKIPs own rules should be followed.

The central point is that expelling a long-standing and twice - elected member of the NEC for whistle-blowing is the wrong thing to do. My views are well known and I take seriously my responsibility to represent a strand of our membership.

Miss Oxley has complained that I wrote an article which advocates keeping to the rules. This was not an attack on UKIP. It was an attack on the way UKIP is run. It was a plea to keep to our own constitution, our own rules and the fair, normal British way of doing things. Calling for the party rules to be adhered to can hardly be an attack on the party.The question is not whether you wiil throw me off the NEC, and suppress a voice of concern for our party.

The question is whether you want to build a successful party.

Successful businesses follow their own fair rules and protocols. Successful doctors do too.

But in UKIP we often don’t, and recently we haven’t been successful. The one has led to the other.

I put it to you that it is the breaking and bending of fair rules and ignoring protocols and conventions that leads to low morale, a low level of trust and declining contributions. These, in turn, lead to very bad election results.

My letter was addressed primarily to NEC members. It was a plea to do what is right.

We arrive at these NEC meetings intending to do the right thing. We don’t intend to break the fair rules that have been established. But it is hard, without accountability and transparency, to resist the temptation of what seems, at the time, to be the expedient and easy way.

Let me give you an example. Paul Nuttal is a decent man who will make a capable chairman, but his appointment to this position was announced at conference before some of us even knew who he was. At the subsequent NEC meeting Nigel told us that he had done a phone poll that confirmed his decision to name Paul as chairman. But I didn’t receive a call and nor did Eric Edmond, nor Del Young. When Eric asked who had received a call, Nigel replied ‘obviously not you’, and everyone else stared at the table in embarrassment. Eric, Del and I should have been asked. You can’t poll only those you think agree with you.

We attack the EU for not keeping to its own rules. Nigel made a great speech recently pointing out the fascist tendencies of Danny Cohn-Bendit.

We have to set a good example in our own party. We have to stand up for democracy both outside and inside the party as well. We need lively discussion an acceptance of divergent views. A good team is not based on yes men or silence.

Belittling, mocking, ignoring NEC members who ask questions or demand answers is not the British way of doing things. Five NEC members have left since I joined the NEC and they have also left the party.

Expelling an NEC member elected by the party members is even more damaging. Two (one sixth) of the elected members of this committee have been expelled in the last couple of months. We cannot go on like this, losing and alienating our energetic activists.

And don’t think the rest of you are immune. It may be your turn sooner than you think if you allow this nonsense to go on.

I co-edit a website called BRITS AT THEIR BEST (britsattheirbest.com). It has a blog attached to it. Our readership varies, but has occasionally been as high as 10,000 a day. If I wanted to publicly attack the party, or the leader, I could very easily use the blog, but I've never done so. I have only posted positive things about the party, including a couple of Nigel’s speeches.

I originally planned that the Keeping to the Rules piece that Miss Oxley objects to would go just to NEC members. It was intended to encourage the NEC to keep to its own rules. Thus it was supportive of the NEC. Then I thought I would send it to people whom I suspected could influence members of the NEC in one way or another, to encourage them to encourage you.

When a patient is ill, dying perhaps, not responding to the treatment, the doctors have to re-evaluate. One of the ways that happens in medicine is to review the chart and make sure all the proper protocols were followed.

Our dear party is in a serious trouble. Perhaps we should re-evaluate our position as far as keeping to agreed protocols and fair rules.

This is what prompted me to write the letter.

Let me give you some more examples:

By refunding the fees paid by two of the MEP candidates, the party has already admitted that rules were broken in the MEP selection process. The returning officer’s report states that rules were changed in mid-game, which is one of the observations that I had made in the letter. He seems to recommend re-running the whole election process in London because of the rule breaches.

Our party rules do not permit a foreigner living abroad to be a member of the party, let alone become a MEP candidate. The preferment of an Argentinian Dane who lives in Barcelona and who has told this committee she does not share UKIP's core goals is an outrage. This candidate did not have a CRB check, is not a registered elector and has apparently made an illegal donation to the party when she paid her £250 deposit. She had the same proposer as another candidate, which is against the rules. And she stood in two regions without pointing this out as required. Furthermore she withheld material information about her pending court case with the EU authorities. All this is disturbing activists in the SE. I suspect fewer leaflets will be delivered as a result.

Our press officer lost a computer with confidential data on it and somehow someone in Morocco put up a video of John West on U tube. And the party didn’t even apologize. In fact in a newspaper article our leader sympathized with this woman rather than with the wronged candidate. The candidate is now suing. More trouble because we haven’t kept normal standards of decency.

And talking of press officers our party apparently has no protocol for hiring press officers or anyone else. Most new hires seem to come from the pub with no references checked.

We had Mark Croucher who works closely with Searchlight, a communist organization headed by convicted criminals.

Then there was Adrian Lithgow who was already guilty of racially aggravated assault at the time he was hired. Steven Sobey, a plant from the Tories, masqueraded as The Hon Steven Sobey Neville; Clive Page is guilty of benefit fraud.

Our leader issued an edict that MEP’s wives must not be on the MEP’s payroll. Then he is caught paying his own wife. And his fellow MEPs and this committee support him.

Del, the founder and energetic leader of Young Independence, was ambushed without notice, and replaced by the partner of a Regional Organiser. The state of Young Independence now looks parlous as judged from its website. Most files haven’t been updated for six months or a year.

Eric is similarly pounced on without the notice required by common decency.

The man who was our treasurer at the time I joined the NEC knowingly accepted illegal donations, landing our party in trouble with Elcom. Alan is bravely picking up the tab, but these vast sums of money could have been spent on the cause if we had just kept to the rules in the first place.

The Ramsgate call centre opened without the knowledge of the NEC and subsequently closed.

The treasurer isn’t even aware that it had existed and its activities are not shown in the accounts she signed off.

Farage said he deliberately failed to invite me to a meeting of the SE committee when I was a member. When I pointed out that the meeting was not therefore valid he replied “See if I care”.

This attitude to fair rules and conventions seems to start at the top. I put it to you that one of the jobs of this committee, steered in this by our secretary, is to keep the party on an ethical course and compliant with our own rules; even if this means disagreeing with the leader. This, I believe, is the way to success.

If our party is to survive, let alone succeed in its noble goals, we must change the way we conduct ourselves. We must stop disregarding rules and conventions.And that is the reason I wrote the letter.

Marcus Abbott!
12th. Jan. 2009