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UKIP – Are they still a thing?

On Saturday, 8th November, United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) intends to march through Sheffield. The most common response to this news has been “Didn’t they pack up years ago?” The answer, unfortunately, is no.


UKIP's recent (hastily abandoned) rebrand more accurately reflects their political shift

Once upon a time, UKIP was a Farage vehicle, but the wheels have truly come off. No longer interested in waving plastic Union Jacks in the face of a bewildered European parliament, the name’s been sold to the (not very) highest bidder, namely one Nick Tenconi.

Nick started out as a serial student botherer with Turning Point UK, an offshoot of the better-funded and better-looking, Trump-adjacent Turning Point USA. His schtick was to be a thirty-year-old man wandering around campuses trying to trick students into being woke while furiously mugging for the camera.

Once this stopped paying the mortgage, Tenconi started making a fuss with an imported U.S culture war issue, Drag Queen story hour. Several face-offs with London antifascists saw gleeful coverage on billionaire-funded GB News. However, ultimately, what was a burning issue on the other side of the Atlantic fizzled out in the British weather.

Casting around and spying the hollowed-out carcass of UKIP, Tenconi saw the chance to launch a “Christian” nationalist movement. By this point, UKIP had had 11 leaders since Farage moved onto bigger and worse things, and barely scraped 0.02% of the vote in the 2024 General Election – it was firmly in the small ads for “spares or repair”.

Since Tenconi took over the former blue rinse voters’ choice has morphed into a blatantly fascist outfit. Claiming to be “Christian nationalists,” they march for the mass deportation of all “non indigenous,” i.e. black or brown people. They also have the Left in their sights, aiming venom at anyone in favour of wealth taxes or trade unions.


Sheffield is just the latest (maybe the last?) in Tenconi’s hateful “Mass Deportations” tour, which has taken in cities around the country and been fiercely resisted.

Time for a Steel City welcome.

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