UKIP Government would cause riots, documentary claims

Channel 4 docudrama UKIP: The First 100 Days as a UKIP government would lead to riots in the streets and the loss of millions of jobs

A Ukip government would lead to riots in the streets and the loss of millions of jobs after the UK leaves the EU, according to Channel 4 docudrama screening tomorrow.

Her character, elected for Romford in an imagined landslide that puts Nigel Farage in Number 10, is left grappling with her conscience as the new government brings in tough anti-immigration raids and withdraws from Brussels.

The show predicts riots in the streets between protesters for and against the raids and features a factory closing after EU withdrawal.

Burford, who said she is not a Ukip supporter, said her own politics were “irrelevant”.

She said: “I didn’t meet anyone from Ukip but I watched most of the conference speeches from the conference in Doncaster or generally I watched a lot of politicians speaking and a lot of politicians get in sticky situations.”

Channel 4’s head of documentaries Nick Mirsky said “a lot of research” went into the film and Mr Farage had been invited to watch it before broadcast.

He said: “We did invite Farage to come and do an interview after the programme in which case he would have seen it before it went out but he declined.

“We do reflect that they say they’re going to put more money in the NHS, we do reflect that they’ve got thoughtful, considered MPs, we do reflect various things about them but we suggest the ride over those first 100 days might be quite bumpy”.

Richard Bond from RAW productions, which made the film, said the party’s policies were a “bit of an unknown” so the show concentrated on its most widely-publicised wishes which he said were “leaving the EU and having a robust immigration policy”.

He said: “When we conceived of it Ukip were the big political story and had a quite extraordinary result in the European elections and I guess for us at that point we just thought ‘What if?’ What if that kind of trajectory was projected into the future.

“One of the toughest things at the script stage was trying to write something plausible whilst what was happening in the real world was sometimes implausible. The day Mike Read released the Ukip calypso we all looked at each other and thought we certainly wouldn’t have written that and had we people would have said this is completely mad and insane.”

Ukip: The First 100 Days is on tomorrow on Channel 4 at 9pm.