Ukip partners with a Polish MEP from a Holocaust-denying party to rescue its EU funding

Ukip, whose EU political group recently collapsed, does a deal with a far-right Polish politician to keep its funding.

(Photo By Nigel Farage's EU political bloc has done a deal with a far-right Polish MEP. Photo: Getty)

Last week, Ukip’s political group in the European Parliament collapsed because its membership fell below the required number of seven member countries.

This would have led to a loss of status in the institution, and also a huge loss of official funding, as outlined by our guest blogger, Catherine Bearder MEP.

But the party has managed to rescue its funding by doing a deal with the Polish MEP, Robert Iwaszkiewicz. Iwaszkiewicz is a member of the Congress of the New Right, a far-right party in Poland. According to the Guardian, its leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, has permitted this partnership to take place.

Korwin-Mikke’s outspoken and racist views meant that even Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National in France, ruled out forming an alliance with his party following her success in this year’s European elections, calling his political views “contrary to our values”.

Korwin-Mikke is notorious for racist slurs and for questioning the events of the Holocaust, saying Adolf Hitler was “probably not aware that Jews were being exterminated”.

The Labour party’s Michael Dugher has condemned Nigel Farage for his decision to do a deal with a representative of such a party. He commented:

As we approach Remembrance in the UK, we rightly honour all those people in Britain who stood up to Hitler and fought against the Nazis and fascism in Europe. Yet here are Ukip forming an alliance with a far-right party in Europe that denies the fact that millions were murdered in the Holocaust, in order to keep receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds from the European Parliament. This shows once again that Ukip do not share the values of decent working people in Britain.

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Glenis Willmott MEP, Labour’s leader in Europe, said:

Nigel Farage’s desperate attempt to resurrect his group has seen him sink to an all time low. The views expressed by his new allies are sickening even by UKIP standards.

For all the facade of the rosy cheeked, jovial pinstripe, these developments highlight once again the dark heart of UKIP and the cynicism of Nigel Farage.