Counter Culture

Nikki performed her one woman show on Wednesday August 21 2013 at Fringe Venue 290, the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre

Nikki threw a party and the people came.  She looked a bit surprised that the packed room in the Arthur Conan Doyle centre needed more chairs brought in for her first ever Edinburgh Fringe show about the EU.

This was a light-hearted, satirical and moving look at the European Union.  A view as to its characters, and the effect it has on people’s everyday lives.  Nikki’s take on the EU is that it is NOT funny and neither really are its eccentrics.  We were given a passionate and realistic perspective of the EU by a Member of its own Parliament.  Nikki in the past represented UKIP, but more recently she has started the We Demand a Referendum Now party.

This was a one woman show, and those are not necessarily easy to pull off.  Nikki arrived to greet the crowd, visibly nervous and a bit surprised that so many people were interested in coming to hear her speak about the EU.  But Nikki had a natural rapport with the audience perhaps because she is passionate about her convictions and truly genuine, a rare gem among the run of the mill machine politicians.

She began to loosen up as she  started to describe the odd characters she meets in the Parliament including ‘Colin’ from EastEnders, Nigel Farage and the “village idiot”, Godfrey Bloom. Her spoof on the MEP out of work at the job centre after the next election was quite funny.  By the end we sit around her eagerly waiting to hear what she has to offer next and for me, the show ended much too soon.

A little background on Nicole “Nikki” Sinclaire. She is a politician from the We Demand a Referendum Party and represents the West Midlands as an MEP.  She was elected in June 2009 as a UKIP candidate but later resigned from the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group in which UKIP is part of in the European Parliament, citing the extreme right-wing views of some of the group’s members.

After that she sat as an Independent MEP from January 2010 until September 2012 when she set up the We Demand a Referendum Party. She has campaigned on issues affecting the West Midlands ranging from jobs, to the environment and human rights.  If you follow her blogs and Facebook page, you can see she is extremely hard-working for the people in her community.  I follow her myself with great interest, because to me she is the hardest working and most creative MEP representing the UK.

Nikki Sinclaire, MEP, sits on the Committee for Employment and Social Affairs, Committee on Petitions, Subcommittee on Human Rights, Delegation to the EU-Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee, Delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly and is a substitute member on the Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality.

For more details and a video from Nikki’s show: Visit here.

You can follow Nikki  on twitter at twitter.com/NSinclaireMEP

Reviewed by Michelle Harrington