Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  Once again, we mustered such money as we could from MEPs and from the information budget. We printed a glossy leaflet which was distributed to every household in Ireland. We visited as often as we could.

  Some 53.13 per cent of the electorate turned out for that referendum, and 53.4 per cent of them voted ‘No’. Cowen paid me an enormous compliment by saying that ‘Nigel Farage and a few extremists subverted the democratic process in Ireland’. He did not deign to explain how, by public speaking on behalf of an under-represented majority, I had contrived to ‘subvert the democratic process’.

  OK, it was close, but it was a ‘No’. Had the ‘Yes’ faction won, it would have been an irrevocable sanction.

  But as with Nice, as with the Constitution, the EU demonstrated that it does not understand that word. When someone else looks like winning the game, it simply changes the rules.

  As ever, the serial date-rapist took a deep breath, administered a huge dose of Rohypnol and moved in once more. This, by the way, is a model which we will soon see replicated in our courts.

  The Lisbon Treaty allows for the appointment of a European public prosecutor who will have the power to arrest and charge British subjects. The model for the new European justice will be the French, under which there is no such thing as double jeopardy.

  As I write, Dominique de Villepin, President Sarkozy’s bitterest opponent, has just been acquitted of conspiracy to destroy Sarkozy’s career by linking him to arms dealing – this despite the fact that Sarkozy publicly declared de Villepin ‘guilty’ during the course of the trial.

  The public prosecutor (or, rather, his master Sarkozy) did not like the verdict so, without any new evidence being adduced, he has declared his intention to appeal it. De Villepin, though not guilty, must now face a retrial until they find a jury which agrees with the prosecution.

  As for the Irish vote, the Commission played safe. They resolved that the second referendum would take place after the 2009 European elections. By then, Declan Ganley was wiped out as a political force. Kathy Sinnott had lost her seat. The European Commission ploughed millions into the ‘Yes’ campaign. Furthermore, the Irish Referendum Commission now resolved that its original purpose was not appropriate in this case.

  In 1995, Patricia McKenna had won a Supreme Court case which established that it was unconstitutional for taxpayers’ money to be spent on promoting just one side of the case in a referendum. The Referendum Commission had therefore been set up to ensure that information about both sides should be disseminated equally in the media and elsewhere.

  In this instance, however, the McKenna judgment was set aside on the grounds that there was just so much information about the merits of the treaty to be disseminated whilst the ‘No’ case was, well, just ‘No’.

  Opposition to the treaty was wiped out. When I returned to state the case, I discovered that I had become a villain.

  The Irish government had played the same well-worn, dog-eared cards. I was no longer a passionate volunteer coming to Ireland free of charge and without prospect of personal benefit in order to advocate independence. I was rather a devious foreigner, an absentee landlord imposing his alien will upon the poor, foolish Irish people.

  And yes, of course, I was a fascist as well, or, more precisely and cautiously, according to Europe Minister Dick Roche, I was ‘a modern imperialist … from the same gene-pool as the National Front’ and ‘an extreme nationalist’.

  Once, believe it or not, this calumny – what Vladimir Bukovsky has called ‘the European gulag’ – hurt me. It is the most cowardly because the most unanswerable charge. This is the problem with making a crime of a purported character trait. You can refute a charge of a specific act, but not of a conjectured predisposition or sympathy.

  If you try, even if you have half-German children, work daily with people of all nations and spend your life battling for freedom of speech and the self-determination of all peoples, they’ll only perform a semiotic analysis of your words and conclude that you are a genocidal sexist in your time off.

  At length I recognised it for what it was – a cheap playground jibe for those so devoid of intellect as to be unable to confront you in debate, the equivalent of chiding someone for being fat or ginger-haired, an irrelevant taunt which by implication associates the speaker with an approved majority and casts you into the ideological gulag.

  Over fifteen years, I had learned to shrug it off and get on with the business in hand, in part because that is all that you can do, in part because honest conviction and anger and care for people rather than principles will shine through. I was annoyed only for Ireland, which deserved much better.

  That the people of Britain no longer believed this nonsense was demonstrated by the results of the European election of 2009. Hundreds of parties have come and gone in the past century. None has started with so little and gone on to achieve so much as has UKIP. I remembered that first election at Eastleigh, where I had barely squeezed ahead of Screaming Lord Sutch. Now I was leading the party which had come second in a national election.

  We took 16.5 per cent of the votes cast, Labour 15.7 and the Lib Dems 13.7. The Conservatives came first with 27.7 per cent, which translated as twenty-five seats to our thirteen. The people had started to acknowledge what the fight was really about – their enfranchisement – and had recognised, I think, that we, fallible and sometimes amateur as we were, were not part of the self-serving, self-perpetuating cabal of professional politicians who scorned them.

  The Irish campaign wore on – hopeless now, because the credit crunch had hit and Ireland naturally clung to what had once been the provider of so much wealth. That the inability to set their own interest rates as members of the Eurozone will eventually cripple them was theoretical only. Once, briefly, the streets had seemed paved with gold, the Liffey had brimmed with rather revolting Chardonnay, property prices had made millionaires of smallholders and the Foxrock Fannies had exchanged their gold slingbacks for Jimmy Choos. If they obeyed the Commissioners, maybe they would once more be rewarded with wealth.

  And indeed, Barroso visited Ireland on 19 September 2009 and announced a €14.8 million grant for former workers at Limerick’s Dell plant. I rummaged in my wallet and could find no more than the price of a few drinks with which to win over the voters of Ireland. The fact that Dell had moved the plant to Poland at a cost of 1,900 jobs to Limerick was only tenuously linked to EU membership. The EU was still Father Christmas.

  Add this to the brazen lies circling – EU law would not supersede Irish law, vote ‘Yes’ for jobs, the treaty had no constitutional significance etc – and the sudden silence of many who had vociferously advocated a ‘No’, and it was a hopeless cause.

  There were some entertaining moments. At the Reuters debate in Dublin, I managed to skewer Dick Roche, the man who had uttered that weary slander, and to expose a shill in the audience. For those who have led lives untainted by such things, a shill is a player at an open game of poker or chemmy who is covertly playing for the house, so substantially altering the odds. The EU has many thousands of shills scattered amongst the population, particularly where there are young, impressionable minds to be moulded.

  An unkempt, earnest, bespectacled questioner with a distinct resemblance to Worzel Gummidge arose from the audience and announced herself to be a professor at University College, Dublin. She started her question – or, rather, her speech, for I could detect not a single interrogatory in the entire thing – and I sat back and relaxed. It was like listening to a gruesome bedtime story for the hundredth time.

  It went on and on…

  …and on…

  I knew at once what she was. Every one of the sentiments and phrases used was familiar to me. I suppose I should have interrupted her, but she was giving me a breather from a torrid debate, and it is really quite instructive to see an expert tying a slipknot at her own throat.

  When I was given to understand that she had finished, I simply said, ‘I assume that you are a Monnet pr
ofessor?’

  There was no reply. The good professor looked over her shoulder, then seemed to have noticed something interesting on her rump, then demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected concern for her coiffure and ran her fingers though it. Then she was ready for the inevitable. She gulped. She said, ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “I assume that you are a Monnet professor?”’

  ‘I have that honour—’ she started.

  I just laughed.

  Amidst her ramblings, this woman had advocated frankness and honesty. Yet she, purporting to be ‘a citizen and a voter’ had not deigned to tell the audience that she was handsomely paid by the EU to disseminate EU propaganda in the guise of learning, or, in the official version, ‘to stimulate universities throughout the world to explain the European Union model for peaceful coexistence and integration as well as European Union policies and external action.’

  Just how great seats of learning – by definition impartial – can bring themselves to endorse such propaganda (just try substituting ‘USSR’ – or even ‘British government’ for ‘EU’ in the above mission statement and see how it reads), I fail to understand, but there are over 400 such professors in British universities, all paid by you to teach the party line.

  I will search my wallet again, but I am pretty sure that I cannot manage anything similar for the alternative view.

  I suggest that all Monnet professors should henceforth be compelled to preface lectures and publications with the words ‘The following cannot, alas, attain the high, dispassionate standards of academe because I must serve my paymasters, advocate the cause of European integration and side with all EU policies and external action. I apologise, but I have a mortgage to pay.’

  Should they fail to do so, their lectures should be boycotted by all students who value honesty, freedom and the integrity of academe.

  Having nodded to all the very familiar faces in the rent-a-mob crowd outside, I wandered through the corridors of Dublin Castle on the day that the results came through. I looked at the portraits of the past British governors of Ireland and saw in my mind’s eye the smiling face of José Manuel Barroso at the end of the line. The Irish had fought so gallantly for freedom and autonomy. Today they gave it away again.

  The Czechs now had no excuse not to ratify the Constitution – sorry, the treaty.

  The Battle of Lisbon was over.

  We had won many battles but we had lost the war.

  Or had we? In the course of that campaign, we had demonstrated to millions their irrelevance to those advancing the EU project. We had exposed dishonesty and downright disregard for democracy. We had forced supposed leaders of member-states to show their true colours, and they were not those which the peoples of Europe wore on their shields. In defeat, our army had grown a thousandfold.

  The war goes on. The people are now aware of its nature. It is not a war between left wing and right nor between nationalists and internationalists. It is far more fundamental than that. It is the struggle between a formerly sovereign people and a coterie of professional politicians who have claimed sovereignty for themselves and wrested it from them by deceit and bribery.

  At the last, it goes still further. It is about the individual’s freedom no less than the individual nation’s to define and govern him or herself without intervention from a self-proclaimed and self-perpetuating mediocracy whose only excellence appears to lie in the prodigious ability to remember acronyms and whose only loyalty is to tidiness, homogeneity – and power.

  Thanks to Lisbon, we are entering a second protectorate in which neighbour spies upon neighbour and nothing is immune from regulation. Political correctness and conformity in accordance with safety regulations and an apocryphal ecological gospel are the new puritanism. It is no less killjoy and intrusive than the original version.

  As with the protectorate, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, the Yugoslav union and many others, it will not survive without the wholehearted consent of its constituents. It has not that consent. It cannot hold.

  I only pray that we can break it up intelligently and calmly now rather than wait until our children must once more fight for freedom at terrible cost.

  The battle goes on, and we all have our parts to play.

  15

  BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY

  In November 2009, I resigned the leadership of the party to fight the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, for his Buckingham seat in the 2010 general election.

  That, at least, is the official version. It’s true in part.

  I was persuaded that Bercow’s seat was there for the taking. Although he was nominally a Conservative, the huge majority of Conservative activists disliked him. After his prolonged flirtation with New-but-shop-soiled-Labour, they thought him a turncoat.

  Following his weevilling for the Speaker’s job over many years, it is generally thought that only three Tories actually voted for him. The rest of his support came from Labour.

  Between 2002 and 2007, he claimed more expenses than any other MP (save for a brief lapse in 2003, when he only struggled in third). In 2008–2009, after an Information Tribunal granted permission for MPs’ expenses to be published, he suffered an inexplicable loss of form and came in 631st out of 645.

  But class will out. Within weeks of his election to office, he was up to his old tricks and troubling – or rather, not – the stewards, because touts reported a triumphant return to mid-season form, with £45,581 claimed for new televisions, DVD players and the like at his flat in the Palace of Westminster.

  He was a home-flipper. He had once been a hang-’em-high, send-’em-back-where-they-came-from member of the Monday Club. Norman Tebbit thought him too right wing.

  A man for all seasons then, but not, I thought, the unimpeachable, inspiring, model – well, anything – that Buckingham deserved.

  It is the supposed convention that the Speaker, in that he is a de facto Independent, is not opposed at elections. Bercow, however, had played one party off against the other and had lobbied and intrigued for his appointment like a Big Brother contestant (like his delightful, lofty, Labour wife who was subjected to real democracy on the show and therefore kicked out at the first opportunity). He had, to my mind, forfeited his immunity.

  He was unopposed by the three principal parties. Given, then, that his Conservative bona fides were generally considered dubious, it was not just anti-federalists but also true conservatives who were to be left without a voice in this poll.

  I could certainly not fight such a campaign whilst running the entire party in Britain and the party and group in Brussels, so it was with a sigh of relief that I resigned the leadership.

  This was not a straightforward procedure. I intended to make the announcement at Conference in Southport and told only a few trusted people of my intention. Nonetheless, the papers got hold of it. By the time I announced it on the Conference stage it was already well-known. Lord Pearson made it still harder by declaring it a disaster and demanding a show of hands from those who wanted me to stay on.

  All very flattering but I was, for once in my life, exhausted. No other party leader has had to perform such a dual role. There just were not enough hours in a day to deal with the media, admin and relations with the membership in Britain and with meetings, speeches, discipline, protocol and strategy in the Parliament.

  I also wanted, for once, to get out at the top.

  When I had taken on the leadership, polls showed us at less than 1 per cent in general election voting intentions. Now we had just come second in a national election. All those who loved me had doubted my ability to play the sober, responsible leader, but, like a natural stroke-player settling down to construct an innings, I had contained my natural impatience and done the job. I was proud of that.

  As a trader it is all too rare that you have the chance to get out of a commitment before it starts to decline. Here was my chance.

  There was a leadership election. My colleagues in the EU Parliament – UKIP veterans all: Mik
e Nattrass, Nikki Sinclaire and Gerard Batten – stood. So did Malcolm, Lord Pearson of Rannoch.

  And I, of course, found it impossible to remain neutral.

  On the BBC’s Daily Politics show I gave my honest view, to whit:

  If Lord Pearson gets that job and I’m leading the party in the European Parliament, then I would argue that UKIP is stronger and will be for several years to come. If it’s not Lord Pearson, things will be tricky. But I think it will be Lord Pearson. He is head and shoulders above the others.

  Not tactful perhaps, but yes, I was concerned for the growing party’s future as I passed it into new hands, and I was deeply concerned lest it should be tainted by special interests.

  Any political party attracts all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. Labour has loads of chippy, snarling members who harbour resentments and just want to do down the privileged, loads of arrested-development student Marxians who got laid in their gurdledum days and have never moved on, a vast number of pesto-and-Prosecco ‘working-class’ Islingtonians and their ilk who claim to be spiritually working-class and many who vote as they go to Church at Christmas, because their parents did and it’s sort of consoling.

  The Tories have their religious and tribal adherents too, together with estate-agents, racists, social aspirants, Archers fans and the many Mail readers who know where they stand about absolutely everything unconventional.

  And the Lib Dems? God knows. Chapel, of course, and nice people who cannot bear to be seen in the staff common room to vote for either of the other two, just as they don’t quite like to wear suits or strip off, espouse their own generation’s music, or their children’s, and wouldn’t like to be thought to have firm opinions on anything much except cardigans, Birkenstocks with socks and all-embracing niceness.