Mid-Term Colour Changes: UKIP’s 2014 MEPs Who Left the Fold

When UKIP returned twenty-four MEPs in 2014, the result was treated as a single purple wave. The European Parliament record tells a more granular story. Over the five-year term, a number of those MEPs ceased to sit as UKIP representatives, whether by defection, expulsion or resignation of the whip. Each case left a paper trail in the Parliament’s lists of members, in group affiliations and in the contemporaneous statements of the individuals concerned. Read together, they form an informal register of mid-term colour changes.

The arithmetic of leaving

A defection in the European Parliament is rarely a single event. It has at least three layers: the national party, the political group and the individual member’s office. UKIP’s MEPs sat within the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, a loose formation whose numbers mattered for speaking time, committee places and the broader credibility of the group as a vehicle for eurosceptic argument. When an MEP left UKIP, the party lost a member of its delegation; when that MEP also left EFDD, the group’s arithmetic shifted again.

The individual MEP, however, kept the seat. European Parliament rules protect the mandate of the member, not the party label. Staffing and office allowances attached to the member continued, though the political support and informal networks of the national delegation did not. That gap between the stability of the seat and the instability of the affiliation is the central fact of every case below.

The Bashir precedent

Amjad Bashir, elected for Yorkshire and the Humber, was the first clear departure of the term. In January 2015 he announced that he was joining the Conservative Party. The timing was significant: it came months before the 2015 general election and was presented by his new party as a sign of UKIP’s difficulties. Bashir’s move took him from EFDD to the European Conservatives and Reformists group, where Conservative MEPs sat. For UKIP, the loss was both numerical and symbolic. For the archive, it is the earliest example in the 2014 cohort of a sitting MEP using the European platform to change domestic colours.

Atkinson and the group question

Janice Atkinson, elected for South East England, was expelled from UKIP in March 2015 following allegations concerning expenses. She denied wrongdoing and sat as an independent before later joining the Europe of Nations and Freedom group. Her case is instructive because it distinguishes expulsion from defection. The initiative lay with the party, not the member, but the effect on the parliamentary record was similar: a UKIP MEP became a non-UKIP MEP, and the group arithmetic changed. Atkinson’s subsequent group affiliation also showed that the European Parliament offered alternative homes for members who had lost their national party base.

Woolfe and the independent seat

Steven Woolfe, elected for North West England, resigned the UKIP whip in October 2016 after an altercation in a Strasbourg corridor left him hospitalised. The incident followed the Brexit referendum and coincided with a period of intense leadership turmoil inside UKIP. Woolfe had been a prominent leadership contender and had been seen as one of the party’s more recognisable European voices. His decision to sit as an independent marked a different kind of departure: not a move to another established party, but a withdrawal from the delegation while retaining the seat. In the Parliament’s records, the change is modest—one member listed differently—but in UKIP’s internal story it was a significant rupture.

The 2018 cluster

By 2018, departures had become more frequent. James Carver in the West Midlands and Jonathan Arnott in the North East both left the UKIP whip and sat as independents. Tim Aker in the East of England also moved away from the party. Bill Etheridge, another West Midlands MEP, briefly associated himself with the Libertarian Party. Patrick O’Flynn, elected for the East of England, joined the Social Democratic Party. These cases did not all follow the same pattern: some were resignations, some were expulsions, and some were group switches rather than immediate party memberships. What they shared was the effect on UKIP’s European delegation, which shrank steadily as the term progressed.

What the register shows in 2026

From the distance of 2026, the mid-term departures look less like isolated scandals and more like a structural feature of UKIP’s European period. The party had entered the Parliament with a large cohort and a small group infrastructure. It had not, by 2014, built the kind of delegation discipline that larger transnational groups take for granted. When individual MEPs faced pressure—electoral, financial or personal—the European Parliament offered them a seat that did not depend on party loyalty. That is not a uniquely UKIP problem, but the party’s rapid expansion made it more visible.

For the EFDD group, each departure was a small subtraction. For UKIP’s Brexit-era story, the departures complicate the simple narrative of a united party pressing for withdrawal. The archive’s task is not to adjudicate the merits of each case but to record them accurately: who left, when, to what group, and with what public explanation. The register is incomplete without those details, and it is more useful as a record of process than as a list of villains or martyrs. Mid-term colour changes are rarely clean breaks; they are usually slow, documented and contested.