Tuesday, 12th May 2009

UKIP Leader Nigel Farage argued the UKIP case in a great op-ed piece in the Daily Express. Here is the article in full.

There's a European election on June 4, but none of the established political
parties seem all that keen on telling you about it.

Just as the clapped-out old Westminster parties did not want you to know
about the expenses claims of their MPs, so they do not want you to know what
they're actually standing for in this election. The Lib Dems want to
continue turning the Westminster Parliament into a parish council, Labour is
for more Gordon Brown no matter what and the Tories have been sitting on the
fence for so long they're in danger of getting impaled.

We in UKIP do want to tell you what we're standing for, because we can't go
on like this: locked into an undemocratic club that costs hard-pressed
British taxpayers £40 million a day and dictates huge areas of our national
life.

The most important thing any government does is to defend the borders, yet
Parliament has given away almost all of our powers to do so away. For
example, as this newspaper recently revealed, a million Moldovans are about
to get the right to come here.

Yes, a million people from the poorest country in Europe will be able to
come to Britain and there's nothing we can do about it. The President of
Romania gave them Romanian passports: so they become EU citizens and they
can come and live here. Remember how well that worked out when we did the
same for the Poles and the other East Europeans? Millions arrived and it
doesn't take too many to swamp the ship of state. The President of Romania
might be a very nice chap but neither you nor I voted for him nor voted to
give him the power to decide who can live here. More importantly, there's no
way we can vote against him and no way we can even influence his decision.

Westminster has also given away the power to decide who can claim asylum. Of
course we should aid and shelter those who would be killed or persecuted in
their home countries. But the rules are that those seeking asylum should do
so in the first safe country they get to: if that's France then France has
to, yes, has to, offer them help. Not encourage them to migrate to the coast
to make it easier for them to sneak into Britain. Looking out over Calais
it's as if the place is twinned with the UK Benefits Office. Even that isn't
enough for Brussels. Soon they’ll be a new EU-wide system. When a boatload
lands on the shores of Malta, or a raft reaches Spain, Britain will have to
take 13 per cent of them. We won't even be able to decide who, they'll just
be allocated to us. Aren't you looking forward to that?

What this means to us here is obvious. Immigrants of these various types
make up 40 per cent of new households. That's a new one every 6 minutes.
Gordon Brown keeps boasting about jobs created, but they were jobs for
immigrants: 500,000 in all. Jobs for British workers are actually down
140,000. We'd like to do something about all of this but can't while we are
locked into the prison of nations that is the European Union. It's actually
illegal under their rules for us to favour our own. The only way we can
change this is if we leave the EU and have British laws for British people.

This is the heart of what we in the UK Independence Party are arguing and
fighting for: that British citizens should be the people who decide what
happens in Britain. That's why we were the only British political party in
the European Parliament to vote against allowing Bulgaria and Romania to
join, creating more millions who can come here. It's why we will vote
against any further expansion, like to Turkey, which will extend the right
to live here to 80 million more poor people.

Once we leave the EU we can start doing what we must: having a proper system
to choose who we allow into our country: people who have the skills and
qualities to benefit our nation and not those who don't. We could keep out
foreign criminals, something that at the moment we can't. We might like to
let in the brave Gurkhas who have already demonstrated that they are willing
to fight and, if necessary, die for this nation. The reason the Government
is backsliding over this is simple: they know that we're all concerned about
immigration and that they've given away almost all of their powers to do
anything about it. We can't do anything about asylum seekers, we can't do
anything about millions from Eastern Europe, we can't do anything about
British jobs for British workers, so let's stamp down hard on the Gurkhas,
just to show that we're doing something.

Contemptible isn't it?

Just for the cherry on top, there's a man in Brussels who decides these
rules for us. In November 2004 I revealed that a French court found he had
redirected public funds into the coffers of his party. We've got a man like
that deciding which criminals can come to our country. The other parties are
happy for this mess to continue.

This is what this election can mean: you can tell the political classes what
you really think, how you want this country to be run. If you want it to be
run by us Brits and for us Brits then you should vote for UKIP. The other
parties are happy for this mess to continue. And also consider this: the
best way to give Gordon Brown a damn good kicking would be to make sure
Labour comes fourth by voting for UKIP.

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