It’s been a busy week for Ukip. Once credited with a leading role in driving Brexit, it now appears to be hurtling to the far right under their Muslim-obsessed leader, Gerard Batten. Their latest leader has formed a close alliance with the convicted criminal and Islamophobic extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson). Together they’re set to go on yet another expensive outing on London’s streets this weekend, this time branded as part of a “Brexit betrayal” rally.

Batten has cosied up to a range of overtly extreme groups and figures. These include Yaxley-Lennon, whose material was listed as an influence on Finsbury Park attacker Darren Osborne, as well as the near-bankrupt far-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos, and several other extreme online figures. Members of the hooligan-led street movement, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), are now allied with Ukip too.

Batten has brought the worst tendencies within his party to the fore. It has always had an overt anti-immigrant prejudice, notably under the leadership of Nigel Farage. Numerous elected officials and candidates have been caught out making extreme comments over the years. Those might now seem mild compared to the rantings of its current leader about Muslims and “rape gangs” at a time of rising anti-Muslim hate crimes, but Ukip has always flirted with such bigotry.

Batten and Yaxley-Lennon are seeking to take Ukip even further to the right. Professional agitating about “betrayal” is now big business, of course. There is a real danger of the far right – which now includes Ukip – attempting to weaponise Brexit to bring in new support to this racist agenda. It’s unlikely Batten will advertise the serious political and financial backing that has come to support his new “special personal adviser on rape gangs and prison conditions and prison reform”. Yaxley-Lennon is estimated to have made over £2m in donations this summer, and stood to rake in another £1m during an aborted US tour.

Yaxley-Lennon now links through to a network that includes Steve Bannon (who is struggling to get his anti-EU “movement” off the ground), the seven Republican members of congress who invited him to his US speaking tour last month, and the dollars that have been flowing in from the former English Defence League leader’s legal backers, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum in the US and far-right alternative media outfit Rebel Media, run by Ezra Levant, in Canada.

In the run-up to this demonstration, Farage quit the party that he, with Batten, helped to found – ironically over the extreme path he himself set them on. He said: “The very idea of Tommy Robinson being at the centre of the Brexit debate is too awful to contemplate.” Well, quite. But the gall of the man in walking away from the beast he helped create is staggering. After all, it was Farage who fronted the hugely offensive “Breaking Point” poster campaignduring the EU referendum; who backed the anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany (AfD) party; and who showed open support for Front National leader Marine le Pen in the French presidential elections. Not to mention he employed then-Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam as his close adviser.

Given the violence that erupted at Free Tommy demonstrations this summer, it’s hard to rule out the possibility of anger erupting again among Yaxley-Lennon’s supporters. After all, he spent four years dragging his English Defence League thugs around our towns and cities, costing UK taxpayers in excess of £10m in policing costs.

At an earlier Day for Freedom demo in May – involving Yaxley-Lennon, Kassam, Batten, the DFLA and others – speaker after speaker decried their apparent lack of free speech, while preaching from a stage equipped with video screens and marching through the political heart of the UK: bizarre, but another example of how the far right weaponises such debates. That event also descended into violence. Despite all this, Yaxley-Lennon’s well-funded backers in the US later flew in Arizona congressman Paul Gosar to speak at a Free Tommy event in July, while Donald Trump’s ambassador for religious freedom lobbied the UK ambassador in Washington over Yaxley-Lennon’s imprisonment on contempt of court charges.

Suzanne Evans, the party’s former deputy chair, called Yaxley-Lennon’s appointment by Batten, “a ludicrous and crazy thing to do … and yet he [Batten] doesn’t seem to care; he has no mandate from the members to do this. I think it is very dangerous” She added that there were now many reports of hardline Tommy Robinson supporters turning up at Ukip meetings, obsessed primarily with Islam.

Batten may have saved Ukip from impending bankruptcy, after its disastrous merry-go-round of leaders post-Farage, but polling puts the party down at around 4-6% support at the moment. But with the influx of hard-right supporters and money, you have a febrile mix which the Brexit tinderboxmakes ripe for exploitation.

Nick Ryan

Click here to subscribe to our weekly newsletters in English and or French. You will receive one email every Monday containing links to all articles published in the last 7 days.