(Title Image: BBC Wales)
Caroline Jones AM has left the UKIP Assembly group, criticising what she describes as a shift by the UK party towards the far-right.
In recent months the party has courted “alt-right” internet celebrities and supporters of prominent anti-Islamist and former football hooligan, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson), while their new leader in Wales re-adopted the party’s previous policy of direct-rule from London.
Caroline Jones lost a leadership election in August 2018 and was a Conservative candidate for Police & Crime Commissioner in 2012 before defecting to UKIP. She will now sit as an Independent and becomes the fourth AM to either leave the party or be excluded after Mark Reckless, Nathan Gill, and Mandy Jones.
She told BBC Wales, “I never joined the party to be part of a far-right organisation. I joined the party because I wanted to come out of the European Union. I still do.”
