UKIP ‘gay cure’ candidate Alan Craig demands expulsion of Suzanne Evans for calling him a homophobe
UKIP’s ‘gay cure’ candidate Alan Craig has urged party execs to expel Parliamentary spokesperson Suzanne Evans for criticising him.
Ms Evans, the former Deputy Chairman of the UK Independence Party, had been one of a few pro-LGBT voices within UKIP, and was briefly its interim leader for a period of three days last year during which Nigel Farage resigned and un-resigned.
She was served with a suspension for ‘disloyalty’ earlier this year, after telling PinkNews that ‘gay cure’ UKIP candidate Alan Craig should be removed after the party leadership defended him.
PinkNews last year broke the news that Mr Craig would be speaking at a ‘gay cure’ event after his selection as a UKIP Parliamentary candidate. He has also compared gay equality advocates to the invading forces of Nazi Germany, and claimed that same-sex adoption is ‘child trafficking’.
In a letter to the party’s NEC seen by PinkNews, Mr Craig, who remains a UKIP member, says: “As you will know, her two allegations against me are (a) that I have compared gays to ‘Nazis’ or similar and (b) that I have participated in ‘gay cure’ conferences.
“On the basis of these she claims that I am homophobic – yet both these allegations are simply untrue: I have not called or compared gays to ‘Nazis’, ‘Gaystapo’ or anything similar, and I have never attended or spoken at ‘gay cure’ conferences.”
“I have asked her via her Team Suzanne followers to provide the evidence for these allegations, but of course they cannot and have not.
“On the basis that Suzanne has continued shamelessly to repeat publicly the false accusations against me that contributed to her suspension in March, I request that her party membership be terminated.”
Mr Craig’s claim that he has never “compared gays to ‘Nazis’, ‘Gaystapo’ or anything similar” is particularly astounding, given his website still features the article “Confronting The Gaystapo”.
It states: “Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands(…) but it’s only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated.”
In 2015, PinkNews broke the news that Mr Craig was set to speak at the “Transformation Potential” event for people trying to cure “unwanted same-sex attraction”, hosted by the Core Issues Trust. Mr Craig, a UKIP PPC for Brent North at the time, dropped out of the event following the PinkNews report.
Records of both are below. (Click to enlarge)
