Murnaghan 22.09.13 Interview with Alan Sked, founder of UKIP

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, back in 1991 Alan Sked formed a party called the Anti-Federalist League. You have probably never heard of it but a few years later he changed the name to one you will have heard of, the United Kingdom Independence Party or UKIP. Now he left the party after the 1997 general election saying it was doomed to remain on the political fringes. So is he right and what does make of their conference farce this week? Professor Sked joins me now and a very good morning to you. Do you recognise the seeds of what you founded still within the current UK Independence Party?

ALAN SKED: Well I mean there are decent people in the party and decent people who vote for it because up until I founded my new party, New Deal, there has been no other party that has said it’ll take Britain out of the European Union. However, quite clearly UKIP nowadays is led by morons who have no policies, are fascistic and the chickens are coming home to roost.

DM: You said led by, does that apply to the leader?

AS: Oh yes indeed. Michael Crick has revealed in the last week that even his school teachers when he was at school thought he was fascist and racist. He is the only party leader who has ever been photographed with leading members of the British National Party, one of whom in the photograph was actually in prison to trying to murder a Jew. He has also admitted on Channel 4 News that as leader he tried to get ex-National Front candidates as UKIP candidates. He once asked me if I would do that when I was leader and I said over my dead body. He leads a party whose policies seem to be obsessed by race, Islam, immigration …

DM: So veered away from the core message of federalism and Europe?

AS: Oh most certainly. They don’t mention Europe very much, it’s all immigration and at the last general election when we were facing the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s, the fractured policy of UKIP was Ban the Burka which was completely irrelevant.

DM: Is it irredeemable in your book now or what would your recipe be for making UKIP more credible or credible at all?

AS: No, I think it’s doomed, absolutely doomed. I think there are enough investigations going on into Farage’s past, into the party but the real thing is they have nothing to say. Before the last local elections we were shown all this debate that took part in the party but we’ve got no policies, what are we going to do? Perhaps we could buy some, they said, perhaps we could buy some from a right wing think tank. My view is suppose you bought one, how would you be able to tell whether it was good or bad? You don’t have the mental facilities of doing so.

DM: But on that core issue that you were concerned about when you set up the party or what became the party in 1991, do the Conservatives, the current Conservatives, address that issue by offering a referendum after a renegotiation in 2017, is that enough for those aspirations?

AS: No, no, the Conservative policy is a farce. Nobody believes that David Cameron will be able to get anything positive in renegotiations, he is doing what Harold Wilson did in 1975 where you have a very cosmetic renegotiation which will get you no real concessions regarding British independence, after which you’ll come back from Brussels and say he has had a wonderful renegotiation, that Britain should buy this, should stay in the European Union. He is trying to pull the wool over both his own party, which won’t work because it will split and I think he’ll lose the leadership, and he is trying to pull the wool also over the eyes of the British public.

DM: People hear that who support what you say about the European Union and say okay, I hear what you say about the make-up and some of the members of UKIP but the flagship issue is that in our estimation, that will keep the pressure up on the Conservatives if we vote for them.

AS: I’m glad there is pressure on the Conservatives, I’m glad the Conservatives are moving in a eurosceptic direction but I think what’s happened is that UKIP has gone so far towards the extreme right that the only votes they are taking away are from the Conservatives in the shires. The result of this will not be to squeeze the political system towards getting us out of Europe, it will mean that the Tory party will lose some seats, a Labour party which is pro-Europe will get in and that will actually cut the throats of what UKIP is supposed to stand for.

DM: Okay, Professor Sked, thank you very much indeed for your analysis, Alan Sked there.