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Westminster Corner

Wednesday, 17th March 2010

In his fourth newsletter, UKIP Leader Lord Pearson looks forward to the Spring Conference.

This Friday sees the formal launch of UKIP’s campaign in Milton Keynes. Many of our PPCs and candidates for local councils are already working hard but may I repeat that it really is important that all the rules set out by the Electoral Commission are obeyed to the letter and are seen to be obeyed.

We hope that as many or our members as possible will come to Milton Keynes to discuss what will be a vitally important election campaign and that all our PPCs and local election candidates will attend. We do need more candidates for local council elections – we need to have UKIP’s presence across the whole country, to make people realize that we are a major political party with much to say that other parties ignore. I am well aware that the financial side of fighting elections deters many people from putting their names down. But there are no deposits in local elections and canvassing a ward is an easier and cheaper exercise than campaigning across a whole constituency.

The word “change” seems to be appearing in all the main parties’ election slogans. This is dishonest, to put it mildly, as the one thing we can all be sure of is that with eighty per cent of our national legislation coming from Brussels there will be no change, whatever the outcome of the election as long as we stay in the European Union. If we can do well enough to force a hung Parliament then real change will emerge from that.

UKIP will be concentrating on telling the truth – a radical idea in politics. Our slogan, to be used as often as possible will be: Straight Talking. That is what UKIP promises to do during the campaign and afterwards.

There was an important event in the House of Lords on 5^th March. Together with the redoubtable Baroness Cox I had invited the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, to present his film Fitna, to explain it and to answer questions in a private session and then at a press conference.

We can take some pride in the fact that Mr Wilders was allowed to do that in this country - a victory for freedom of speech and the rule of law. Jacqui Smith, then Home Secretary, gave orders last year to turn him away from this country, because the Islamists threatened to become violent. She was over-ruled by an immigration tribunal, whose chairman proclaimed the importance of freedom of speech.

Mr Wilders’s party has done extremely well in the recent local elections (perhaps something UKIP can emulate?), coming first in Almere and second in The Hague. They have high hopes of becoming the largest party in the Netherlands after the June 9 election. If that comes about Mr Wilders will try to form a government though, as he explained, the Dutch political system makes it almost impossible to have anything but a coalition. Mr Wilders is sanguine and pragmatic: if he cannot form a government he will make his party the leading voice of opposition.

Despite his electoral success Mr Wilders cannot walk about freely and has a 24 hour guard because of serious death threats. It is preposterous that Mr Wilders should face the possibility of a 16 month prison sentence and be threatened with assassination for expressing views that are shared by millions of his countrymen. Even in Britain he has to be heavily guarded. He is being charged with incitement of hatred and has not been allowed to produce adequate defence. He had put forward the names of eighteen well known Islamic experts but fifteen were rejected by the court and the remaining three will have to give evidence behind closed doors. So this is, as Mr Wilders has said, a political trial. As I pointed out to the massed journalists who did not seem to know what to say in response, he could not be stirring up hatred if it were not there already; the hatred comes from the Islamists and it is directed at our societies and our culture.

I am sure UKIP will take forward the ideas of freedom and truth in politics in our election campaign.

With good wishes

Malcolm Pearson

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