More than one Farage sycophant has tried to claim that Paul 'Benito' Nuttall has not threatened to close down the UKIP Members Forum. See: LINK
Apparently, Junius and GLW were lying and were just trying to discredit "our hardworking chairman".
So how do they explain this?
From the UKIP Members Forum:
When I became Chairman of UKIP, I believed that the members did not have a platform to share ideas and experiences. Therefore, when I appointed Jonathan Arnott as General Secretary, the first job I asked him to do was to set up a 'member's forum'. To begin with, it was a revelation. Members communicated, downloaded leaflets and offered constructive proposals as to how to improve the party.
Unfortunately, once the leadership election began, this was no longer the case. Since then, it has been used as a vehicle to criticise the party, undermine the leadership and drive new members away. In the North West, we have lost two candidates in the past two weeks and both have cited the junk they have read on this forum as one of the principle reasons for their resignation.
I pushed for this forum against the advice of the leadership at the time, and I feel that that I am being let down at the moment. They are being proved right and I am being proved wrong.
I will not allow this to continue much longer.
This is not a form of censorship, but I am not prepared to provide a platform for new or active members to be driven away by a bunch of keyboard warriors.
Paul
And here is Douglas Denny's response:
Paul,
I am amazed you have made this suggestion.
For a start, - now it is up and running - you would be wrong to unilaterally close this forum down without discussion by the communications manager; Damian the website manager, and the NEC. It is not your personal fiefdom, and now could rightly be said to have 'stakeholders' in the rest of the membership who use it.
Having set it up primarily to promote communication within the party - something which has been a dire problem in the past - and to provide an alternative to the 'UKIP' section of the British Democracy Forum, it would be a grave mistake to consider closing it just because a few members use it as a platform to 'sound-off'. This really is an admission and case of shooting the messenger because you don't like the message.
Consider:
1) Sounding-off here rather than the BDF every now and then is a good thing as it allows steam to be let off here within the confines of a more private members area, without external steam being let off in a more public place like the BDF.
2) I doubt if you have done an audit of the numbers of 'negative' posts, Vs. 'positive' but I have no doubt the numbers of negatives are small.
3) If you do not have somewhere to observe the negatives from members - then where are you going to get feedback to know what those negatives are? It has been a severe problem in the past that the leadership never knew what was seriously concerning the membership across the country, and things got out of hand - Ashford is a good example of that. This is an excellent platform for feedback within the party and for the 'leadership' to observe that feedback.
4) It does allow some interaction and liason between people who enjoy being as you put it 'keyboard warriors'.
You are utterly failing to understand there are a lot of people who are our members, who actually enjoy the cameraderie of belonging to a group on the internet and exchanging views.
Sometimes those exchanges get a little heated, but provided they don't get out of hand completely (and that is what a moderator is for - to deal with that) then it is all to the good of social interaction within "our" UKIP group here within the confines of the members area.
And - why not have keyboard warriors? they can be an asset when they direct their attacks to serious issues. Censorship is never productive to obtaining the truth.
If there are one or two who are clearly totally disruptive, then they can be identified, advised to moderate their output or be removed from the members forum. Closing it down entirely because of one or two recalcitrants is just silly.
Further, if one or two members, as you suggest, wished to leave the party because of this forum, then I simply don't believe they were committed enough to the primary cause of what UKIP is all about in the first instance! The obvious answer to that suggestion is if they did not like tone of this forum then all they had to do was leave the forum - NOT the party. Perhaps more like - they used that as an excuse to leave the party because they intended to leave anyway for other reasons.
Frankly your suggestion of closing this forum down is Luddite, totally negative and reactionary; I am against it and say so publicly. If you persist, I shall insist it be brought forward as an agenda item at the NEC.
DED.
So there you have it. So now even the rats are turning on themselves.
UKIP is in SERIOUS trouble. Members are resigning, branches are closing and the OLAF investigations are hotting up.
You ain't seen nothing yet!
Why not contact Nuttall and tell him what you think of his attempts to turn UKIP into a dictatorship? Or why not ask him about his fascist friends in the EFD or his pathetic attempts to bully UKIPPERS into submission?
Here is his email: ukipbootle@yahoo.co.uk
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