Ukip leadership hopeful gets help with campaign from ex-BNP member

One of the frontrunners for the Ukip leadership is being assisted in her campaign by a far-right former BNP member.

Jack Buckby previously stood for parliament for another extremist group that campaigns openly against Islam. As a former BNP member, he is barred from joining Ukip, but has been helping the campaign of Anne Marie Waters, who is standing for the latter’s leadership on a predominantly anti-Islam platform.

Buckby, a prominent young voice from the British far right, stood in the 2016 Batley and Spen byelection that followed the murder of Jo Cox by a rightwing terrorist. Labour won the seat and all the other main parties stood aside.

He represented Liberty GB, the Facebook feed of which says the UK is becoming “a third-world hellhole”, refers to immigrants as “savages” and calls transgender people “freaks”.

The current lead item on the party’s website, referring to the row over the price of the morning-after pill, is titled: “Should sluts be subsidised?”

Buckby, who used an appearance on Channel 4 News earlier this year to tell a female campaigner to “take in a Syrian refugee – I hope you don’t get raped”, is no longer a member of Liberty GB.

Instead, he appears to be involved in assisting Waters, including promoting the formal launch of her leadership campaign in Rotherham, a provocative choice of location given its association with the scandal of girls abused by men predominantly from Pakistani-British backgrounds.

Hope Not Hate, which researches far-right groups in the UK, said Buckby had left Liberty GB last month. It said the evidence suggested he had been “working closely with Anne-Marie Waters”.

Information embedded in the downloadable copy of Waters’ leadership manifesto lists the author of the document as a “jackb”. Buckby told the Guardian he had “no official role” in her campaign, but declined to answer any other questions.

Waters did not respond to a series of attempts by the Guardian to ask questions.

The involvement of Buckby will alarm more mainstream Ukip members, who have already warned that a victory for Waters, who is the second-favourite behind Peter Whittle, a London assembly member, would see the party fracture.

The Ukip MEP Bill Etheridge dropped out of the race on Wednesday, urging the party’s libertarian candidates to unite against hardliners using Ukip “as a vehicle for the views of the EDL [English Defence League] and the BNP”, who could take it in a “very dark” direction.

He said a victory for either Waters or Whittle – who was behind the party’s so-called integration agenda, including a proposed ban on full-face veils, in the 2017 election campaign – would cause him to resign from the party.

“Some of the comments that I have heard during just two unofficial hustings have frightened me. I find it genuinely scary that a serious political party is on the verge of going down this route,” he said.

Meanwhile, the party’s economics spokesman, Patrick O’Flynn, resigned from his role because of concerns over Ukip’s likely direction under any of the possible leadership candidates.

Saying the party’s activists were more “Thatcherite” and “libertarian” than he had appreciated, he said he had stood down because Ukip was moving away from his preferred position “at the common-sense centre”. O’Flynn also warned against the party “allowing itself to be defined as on the rightwing”.

Waters came to prominence in the party relatively recently. Shortlisted by Labour to stand in Brighton Pavilion in 2013, she stood for Ukip in the Lewisham East constituency two years later, but was prevented from doing so at the June election following concerns about her views on Islam, which she has described as “evil”.

She was the deputy leader of the UK arm of the far-right, anti-Islam group Pegida, and has praised Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s Front National, and Geert Wilders, the head of the Freedom party in the Netherlands.

Waters has described Islam as “an expansionist, political, totalitarian and supremacist faith, commanded to world domination”, and said people are wary of the religion because they fear their children will be abused.

Nominations for the leadership close on Friday, with about a dozen people having expressed interest, potentially leaving the race wide open.

Ukip sources had warned that a rush of new members after Waters said she would stand could sway the contest her way. However, this effect has been countered by the enforcement of a party rule meaning only members who joined before the leadership election was called can vote in it.

Once nominations are finalised, the party will scrutinise whether all candidates can proceed. The evidence that Buckby has been assisting Waters with the campaign could potentially see her excluded, though that would be seen as a controversial option.

Even if Whittle wins, some more moderate senior members could leave what was the UK’s third-biggest party by votes in the 2015 election, with nearly 4 million. In last month’s election, it attracted just 600,000 votes.

Nigel Farage, Ukip’s former leader and best-known public face, who has said he will not stand again, has warned that an anti-Islam agenda will spell the end of the party.

“If Ukip goes down the route of being a party that is anti the religion of Islam, then frankly it’s finished,” he told the BBC earlier this month. “I don’t think there’s any public appetite for that. There’s some, but it’s tiny in this country. The party would be finished.”