The Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, has launched a withering attack on the integrity of the MEP who defected to the Conservatives on Sunday and defended the party against fresh allegations of extremism.
Farage told BBC1’s Andrew Marr show on Sunday that Ukip had become “increasingly alarmed” by Amjad Bashir’s behaviour and that other MEPs in the party had been “begging” him to get rid of Bashir in October and November last year.
He said Bashir “didn’t tell us the truth about the employment of illegal immigrants in his business”. Farage also alleged that there were “some big open questions in Brussels about money” involving the MEP and that Bashir had associated with political extremists from Pakistan.
Farage said the final straw came on Friday, when there was a hustings meeting in West Yorkshire “where gerrymandering appears to have taken place”.
Bashir has said there is “not a shred of truth” in the claims being made about him by Ukip, and on Sunday the Tories dismissed Farage’s claims as “absurd, desperate stuff”, saying they had checked Bashir’s integrity before accepting him as a member.
The defection of Bashir, who was elected as a Ukip MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber in 2014, is the latest in a series of negative events and revelations to hit Ukip this weekend.
Farage used his set-piece appearance on the Marr show to announce that Ukip wanted to use the money saved from leaving the EU to put an extra £3bn into the NHS. But his interview was to a large extent taken up with having to respond to the damaging revelations.
Farage dismissed the news about Bashir’s defection by attacking his integrity and saying the Conservatives would regret taking him on. “My only surprise – and my genuine surprise – is that the Conservative party have accepted him. Caveat emptor [buyer beware],” he said.
Farage was also asked about two revelations involving Matthew Richardson, Ukip’s party secretary and a member of its national executive council.
The Sunday Mirror published quotes from two speeches Richardson gave in the US in 2010 to conservative audiences, where he described the NHS as “the biggest waste of money … in the UK” and said it was at the heart of “the Reichstag bunker of socialism”.
And the Sunday Times revealed that Richardson told a meeting last month: “I’ve said before, people talk about Ukip being bigots. There are hundreds of thousands of bigots in the United Kingdom and they deserve representation.”
On the bigot comment, Farage said Richardson and colleagues had been having a drink after a long meeting and that Richardson was just using a joke that the late Conservative MP Eric Forth used to tell.
And, on the NHS comments, Farage said Richardson was a member of the Conservative party when he made them.
Farage, who in the past has called for the NHS to be replaced with an insurance-based system, said Ukip had had an extensive debate about health policy and that it was committed to a free NHS, funded by taxation.
Ukip would put an extra £3bn a year into the NHS by using the money saved from not having to pay for EU membership, he said. He also claimed that Ukip could save £2bn a year by tackling health tourism and said the party would not charge tuition fees for students doing medical degrees.
Farage said it was very unlikely that Ukip would join a formal coalition with the Conservatives after the election, but he offered new details of the conditions he would demand in return for Ukip supporting the Conservatives in a less formal arrangement.
He would insist that only British citizens could vote in the in/out referendum, he said. “Because at the moment there are four million or so EU citizens living in Britain who I do not think should be allowed to vote in that referendum,” he said.
He also said he would call for an immediate referendum and demand equal spending limits for both sides.
Farage also said he would regard Ukip getting three or four seats at the election as a good result, and dismissed claims that he was angling for a seat in the House of Lords. “I have never heard such rot in my life,” he said.
He was not asked about a separate revelation in the Sunday Times, which reported that Patrick O’Flynn, the MEP and Ukip economics spokesman, had said that those in the party who favoured a flat tax, with higher earners paying the same income tax proportionally as low earners, were “politically completely away with the fairies”. At the same event, O’Flynn reportedly said those at the top of the party had “egos slightly out of control”.
In an article in the Mail on Sunday, Bashir said the Ukip claims about him were completely unfounded. “Ukip’s reaction on finding out that I was going to join the Conservatives sums up what is wrong with them,” he wrote.
“They made a crude attempt to smear me with false allegations of irregularities in the recruitment of Asian members in Bradford. There is not a shred of truth in any of the claims but it has made me more convinced than ever that I made the right decision.”
After hearing Farage’s claims about Bashir, Grant Shapps, the Conservative chairman, told Sky News this was “absolutely desperate stuff”. He said the Conservatives had conducted “due diligence” to ensure that Bashir was a person of integrity before accepting him.
