Toby on Tuesday

'Project Fear *Cancelled*' 

 

They called it Project Fear, but with hindsight it was really Project Farce - the threats, the bullying, the duplicity, the use of the whole Whitehall machine to spread their lies, the trashing of our country by a pack of spivs known as the Cameroons or the Heirs to Blair.   But the nightmare is over and they have been found out.   David Cameron with his absurd threat of World War 3 has gone, his chums the ludicrous Lords Feldman and Hill have resigned and the egregious George Osborne with his threatened Punishment Budget was rightly sacked by Theresa May after just a 2-minute interview.  And the Brexit bonus is only beginning.   The stock market has soared, the more competitive pound is supporting our exports and the “back of the queue” is now front of the queue in planned trade deals with China, India, the US and the old Commonwealth.   With the psychological boost of regaining control of our country, Britain is fast on its way to regaining its place in the world as the most innovative, most enterprising and most stable economy of all.   

 

But I think that the reason why Theresa May has embraced Brexit, as she has finally done, is that her 6 years at the Home Office will have convinced her of the vital need to secure our borders against the existential threat from Islamic State-inspired terrorism throughout Europe.   The near impossibility of keeping the likes of the terrorist-linked Salafi cleric Abu Qatada al-Filistini out of our country in the face of EU legislation must have finally convinced her that UKIP had indeed been right all along.   And although we were told that with Brexit the French would scrap the Le Touquet Agreement and the Calais border camp would move to Kent, only last week President Hollande confirmed that it would remain intact.   The instigators of Project Farce must never again be allowed anywhere near the running of our country.

 

But one of the difficulties that we have in UKIP is that, whenever, we point out the great political truths, the old mantra of racism is thrown at us.   By way of example, Alison Pearson is a fair-minded, completely objective and gifted columnist for the Daily Telegraph.   And the other day she wrote, “A friend who grew up in Provence tells me that the population of his home town is now around 40 per cent north African origin, many of whom are unemployed.   The National Front enjoys huge support.   My friend lives in London because he thinks that civil war in France is brewing, and the political class is totally in denial...Anyone can put an army up against an army, but how do you fight an army you can’t see, whose soldiers wear no uniform, who are legal citizens of your own country yet who hate your way of life, and who may not even know each other?”  Alison Pearson can say this but, if a member of UKIP had written those words, he or she would immediately be accused of making racist comments and even risk prosecution.   And after 6 years at the Home Office, Theresa May will be all too clear of the need to regain control of our borders and, if the condition of a trade agreement with the EU is continuing free movement of people, I believe that there will be no such agreement.   The world is full of free trade agreements between neighbouring countries that do not involve free movement of people and the UK’s agreement with the EU should follow the example of these.   Otherwise, the security risk from EU-originated terror is just too great.   And there is nothing racist in saying this.

 

Yet as the terrorist threat grows, as Europol rightly predicts, we do need finally to nail the lie that UKIP is in any way a racist party.   Otherwise our message will always go unheeded.   And there is a solution close at hand, for among the candidates for the leadership of our party, all of whom are in different ways truly excellent, one stands out.   That is the charismatic Steven Woolfe, the 48-year old North-West MEP.   Of mixed race background himself, he is just the one to see off hostile journalists from the BBC, Channel 4, the Guardian, the Independent and the rest, when they start to accuse our party of bias, prejudice and racism.   With his legal career, formidable intelligence, great fluency and good Northern sense, he is the one to see off the cynics and the doubters.   It was David Cameron who charged UKIP with being a party of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” – well, the fruitcakes and loonies have won the referendum and seen off some of the most unpleasant and mendacious public figures of the past generation, and the racists may well be about to find themselves with the kind of multi-ethinc leader of whom those home counties manipulators, like all those behind Project Farce, could only dream!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'All Change' 

 

 

Secretary of State for Exiting the EU – David Davis

Secretary of State for International Trade – Liam Fox

Foreign Secretary – Boris Johnson

Environment Secretary (DEFRA) – Andrea Leadsom

 

They used to say that a week was a long time in politics.   Just now a minute seems like an age.   The Tony Blair era finally ended last week when the Chilcot Report passed judgment on the Iraq War and the “heirs to Blair”, Messrs Cameron and Osborne, passed into history.   And if anyone had forecast last Tuesday that we would actually have a Secretary of State for Exiting the EU and a Secretary of State for International Trade, the wise old heads would have declared “Dream On!”   Even our own Nigel Farage was moved to say, “The appointment of David Davis and Liam Fox to Brexit and International Trade roles are inspired choices.   I feel more optimistic now.”   But there they are and no one should doubt both men’s determination to achieve their goals.   David Davis is the very best sort of Yorkshire MP, highly intelligent, independent-minded and full of courage in pursuing his causes.   And no one should underestimate the scale of the challenge that he now faces.   Nearly 45 years of legislation, much of it damaging, will need to be reversed and there will be 27 other EU countries to create pitfalls and problems at every step.

 

So David Davis will have the complete support of UKIP Thirsk & Malton as he sets about his task.   The kind of issue he will face, and one in which both Andrea Leadsom’s and Boris Johnson’s departments will inevitably become involved, concerns the fishing industry.   Over the coming weeks I will write about some of the difficulties that will challenge the new Government and a major one will be the reclamation of our nation’s fisheries.   Now in a classic combination of aggressive EU legislation and weak British negotiation, French boats are allowed to fish up to six nautical miles from the British coast but EU laws prevent British vessels from fishing within 12 miles of the French coast.   As we take back our own 12 mile coastal waters and our 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone in the North Sea, it’s easy to see trouble ahead.   So our new Ministers will be able to depend on UKIP Thirsk and Malton as they seek to recover so much that has been squandered.

 

Paradoxically, these Ministers will probably receive far more support from UKIP Thirsk & Malton than from the sitting Conservative MP here.   As a Remain voting Cameron supporter, he may well not have the stomach for a fight when difficulties arise.   Among voters in Scarborough District Council, the support for Leave was 62% in the Referendum against 38% for Remain, so the imperative to reclaim our fisheries should be clear.   Yet there’ll be trouble ahead as we set out on the task.    It was the German philosopher Jean-Paul Richter who wrote that, “the French had the dominion of the land, the English of the sea and the Germans of the air,” by which he meant that Germany was the land of thinkers and philosophers.   The EU allowed France to keep its lands and Germany its ideologies (currently the EU), but our seas were taken from us and their return is vital if we are to become a maritime, open, trading nation once more.   Our own MP here may well not wish to fight for our fisheries, but UKIP Thirsk & Malton definitely does.   So our role in the years ahead will be to support David Davis, Liam Fox, Boris Johnson and Andrea Leadsom as we withdraw from the EU, to ensure that Remain-supporting MP’s like our own do not thwart them and, under our own new UKIP leader, to replace a moribund and irrelevant Labour Party in its old heartlands, particularly in the North of England.  That should be enough to keep us busy in the years ahead!

 

Until next Tuesday!

 

Toby

 Toby on Tuesday

'Weighed, Measured, And Found Wanting'

In January 2000, Council Directive 80/181/EEC passed into English law by statutory instrument without a debate in Parliament.   This made it a criminal offence to use the old Imperial system of weights and measures, imposing instead the immediate use of the Continental metric system.    The Brussels’ Commission’s argument was that the use of the Imperial system gave British exporters an unfair advantage in trading with the United States where the traditional system was also used.   Instantly, a great part of Britain’s economy was criminalised and faced prosecution.   One of the first to be brought to trial was Steve Thoburn, a market trader in Sunderland.   In February 2000, Trading Standards officers caught him selling bananas by the pound, his scales were seized, he was prosecuted for a criminal offence and found guilty of being in breach of Council Directive 80/181/EEC.   He and Neil Herron, a veteran campaigner against heavy-handed and incompetent bureaucracy, appealed, taking the case as far as the European Court of Human Rights, where the appeal was inevitably rejected.   The strain proved too much for Steve Thoburn and in March 2004, at the age of 39, he died of a heart attack with a criminal record.   At the time, Neil Herron declared, “This man had the courage to stand up and be counted and it was a pleasure to know him.   He was an ordinary person’s hero – an extraordinary ordinary person.”   While Steve Thoburn’s prosecution was underway, Tony Blair was busy taking Britain into the Iraq War but, despite Sir John Chilcot’s report, he can be confident that there will be no criminal record for him.   If you need an allegory for the sheer awfulness of the way our country has been run over the past generation, you need look no further than the contrasting fates of Tony Blair and Steve Thoburn. 

In 2003, Theresa May was Shadow Transport Secretary.  She had just achieved fame of a sort when she described the Conservative grassroots as “The Nasty Party”, which was an unusual way to make friends and influence people.   And this was the only time when I have had the doubtful pleasure of meeting her.   She would not remember the occasion at a Northern business conference in York, but I could never forget.  I asked her why it had been necessary to criminalise the use of pounds and ounces, and if it was necessary wouldn’t a civil rather than a criminal prosecution be more appropriate?   In her peremptory and charmless way, she turned to me and declared, “You (i.e. the business community) asked for it and anyway it’s a condition of our membership of the European Union!”   No doubt she thought the question an irritant and Steve Thoburn’s criminal record to be entirely deserved.   Here was Ted Heath in a dress, I thought, and nothing has happened since then to make me question that view.   And as she is now our next Prime Minister, anyone who thinks that she can be relied on to enact last month’s Referendum decision will definitely be disappointed.

The cases of the Metric Martyrs, as Steve Thoburn and others like him are known, continue to stain our legal system.   There have been so many breaches that prosecutions are rarely brought now, but when we ask for a pound of apples we are still inciting the shopkeeper or market trader to commit a criminal offence.   The brave Neil Herron continues with his campaign, saying that the Brexit vote finally gives us the opportunity to “strike down the repugnant piece of EU legislation.”   And here we come back to the immunity from prosecution that Tony Blair has always enjoyed.   In May 2000, three months after Steve Thoburn was criminally charged, Cherie Blair gave birth to young Leo Blair.   At the time, Downing Street announced that the baby’s weight was 6lb and 12 oz.   Insodoing Downing Street and the Blairs were likewise committing a criminal offence, as under the EU Directive the baby’s weight should have been given as 3.06kg.   But as we have all learned, there’s one law for the Blairs and one for the rest of us.   And as for Theresa May, she would probably say, “Don’t be so silly, if I decide something is a criminal offence or not, that should be quite good enough for you – and all those nasty people like you!”

Until next Tuesday!
Toby

Toby on Tuesday

'Trust the People'

The old Working men’s Clubs scarcely exist now, but for many years they were a vital part of Britain’s political life.   And it was in Birmingham at one of the earliest of these that on 16th April, 1884 Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, first coined the immortal phrase, “Trust the People.”   What he was saying was that the innate good sense of ordinary men and women in Britain contained far more political wisdom and insight than the advice of countless sophisticated so-called “experts”.   It was true then and it was true on 23rd June, when the majority of voters in the United Kingdom ignored Project Fear and chose finally to leave the wasteful and dysfunctional construct known as the EU.

And we have already had three specific gains from that vote.   Three major policy initiatives in Brussels had been held back until the week after our Referendum and all would have had an adverse effect on our country.   Thanks to Brexit, we have avoided the worst of their impact.   Signorina Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, did indeed launch her report calling for a European Army, but without the possibility of British participation it fell completely flat.   Signor Monti, Chairman of the EU’s High Level Group on Own Resources, pressed on with his campaign for EU-wide direct taxation and the issue to every one of us of a “European Tax Identification Number”, but again without the prospect of compliant UK taxpayers this again became irrelevant.   And Frau Merkel pursued her campaign for Turkish EU membership and visa-free travel to the Schengen Zone, but again the UK can now avoid the direct risk that this policy entails.   So the gains from Britain’s vote are building steadily and the prospect of a safe-haven Britain, protected from many of the EU’s self-inflicted troubles, is now a realistic aim.

UKIP’s task in the coming years will be to ensure that the integrity of last month’s vote is secured and that the Remainers are not allowed to undermine our democracy.   Here in Thirsk and Malton, our pro-Remain Member of Parliament has pledged his support in the Conservative leadership election to the pro-Remain Theresa May.   The Thirsk & Malton constituency is spread over three District Councils, Hambleton, Ryedale and Scarborough.   Together they returned 84,724 votes for Leave (57.42%) and 62,819 votes for Remain (42.58%).   Our role here will be to uphold the result for which over 57% of our electors voted and to offer a home to constituents from all parties and none who, unlike their Member of Parliament, supported Leave last month.   On this strong base our Association can grow, for in Thirsk & Malton UKIP is the only party to have learned, in the words of Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, to Trust the People!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby