Friday, 5th September 2008

"There is a vacuum in politcs," UKIP leader Nigel Farage MEP told the party conference in Bournemouth. "There is no one making the argument for a free and sovereign country once again. Our job is to fill that vacuum."

In his keynote speech, Mr Farage said: "I’m told that the European question has gone away, but we’re all talking about post office closures, about rubbish rules, about windmills littering the country…

"No one seems to be willing to point out that these are all from European laws – as with over 75% of all the new laws imposed upon us."

He said the Liberal Democrats  promised one thing in the UK but their MEPs voted another way in Brussels. As for the Conservatives, "If David Cameron stood up and said that the next Conservative government would have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty then the treaty would be dead in the water. But he won’t do it."

Turning to the ambitions of the EU, Mr Farage said: "The continual expansion of the EU and NATO ever eastwards is perhaps the most dangerous foreign policy I’ve seen in my lifetime. Russia fears us more than we fear it….we must retain an independent British foreign policy."

Britain needed to regain an independent trade policy, too, he added: "Outside the EU we would be free to make trade deals as we wished."

It was not simply a question of being negative about the EU, Mr Farage went on: "We have not been offering good positive alternatives and what I want us to do is to paint a vision of a 21st century relationship between Britain and our European neighbours.''

''I think we have got to change some of the things that we have been saying and some of the things that we have been doing. I think too often it's been easy to characterise UKIP as people who just knock and knock and knock and knock – we say this is wrong, we say that's wrong.

"We are the party that says we want to trade with Europe, we want to be friendly with Europe, but we insist that we should make our own laws in this country."

The European elections of 2009 provided a wonderful opportunity, he said:

"We must turn the elections next year into the referendum that you were promised but that you’ve never had.

''In the European elections of 2009, we are going to be on every single ballot paper in the United Kingdom, and we are the party of opposition."

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