The matter of who UKIP selects as its Assembly candidates has always been a bit of an academic exercise. In every previous election, the party has never come close to even winning a regional seat, let alone a first past the post one. But this will all change in this May’s Assembly election when – at minimum – it can be expected to pick up one regional list seat in each of the five top up regions.
This will give UKIP the status of the fourth biggest group in the Assembly and, if the Liberal Democrats fall back further from their 5 seats out of 60, then they are likely to have an official party group status and could well be key to the balance of power in the chamber.
Predictions for a UKIP advance are well founded. In the 2014 European election they polled over 200,000 votes and almost beat Labour to first place in Wales. Then in last year’s General Election they took over 200,000 votes again and came third behind Labour and the Conservatives in the popular share of the vote, comfortably beating both Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats. Added to this, UKIP held its deposit in every single Welsh constituency, which demonstrates how evenly spread its support is across Wales.
As you normally only need about 15,000 votes to pick up an Assembly regional seat, this depth and breadth of support can be taken as an augury of significant change in May. UKIP knows it has the best chance here of making a breakthrough than in any part of the UK and it has thus approached the question of selecting candidates with a sense of significant importance. The decision was taken some months ago to centralise the selection process through an UK panel rather than a Welsh one, hoping to ensure the highest quality candidates emerge, but things have not quite gone to plan…
The news emerged some weeks ago that the likely lead candidates in some of the regions were certainly well known – former MP and celebrity Neil Hamilton for Mid and West Wales and former MP Mark Reckless in South Wales East amongst them – but this produced a massive backlash with Kavin Mahoney, one of UKIP’s few councillors in Wales, threatening to leave the party if the “outsiders” were adopted. All of which has resulted in a ten day stand off while the different factions try and resolve a situation which has become increasingly fractious and bad tempered.
Thankfully for UKIP the matter has now been resolved with the selection process being handed to members via a ballot – all very democratic for the grassroots party but also all very time consuming and costly. With just three months to go, the party therefore does not have a single candidate in place for some highly winnable Assembly seats. Presumably they are simply hoping that the name UKIP will be enough to carry them into the Assembly, regardless of how well known the names they choose to associate with are.