Murnaghan 5.01.14 Interview with Nigel Farage UKIP leader

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Before the break I spoke to Victor Spirescu, the Romanian worker met by much of Britain’s media and indeed by some of its politicians when he landed here last week. He says he’s here working and hasn’t met any hostility. Well the UKIP leader Nigel Farage was listening in and he joins me now. A very good morning to you Mr Farage and you’ll be glad to hear he hasn’t met any hostility and you’d presumably wish him the best of luck.

NIGEL FARAGE: Oh we don’t want hostility and we are not scapegoating Romanians and Bulgarians. We are scapegoating almost the entire political class in Westminster who have allowed open borders since 2004 which have transformed the labour market in this country. The problem we’ve got is we’ve got a massive over supply of unskilled labour, that’s been the case since 2005. I completely understand from the perspective of the big employer it is actually very good for them to employ a gang of people from Lithuania who are prepared to work …

DM: Well that’s what they say isn’t it, the economic performance of 2000s, a great deal of that can be put down to …

NIGEL FARAGE: There is no question, there is no question that it has pushed wage inflation down, it’s helped big companies and big corporations and big landowners to make bigger profits, there is no argument about that. But on the other side is a doubling of youth unemployment since 2004, not just the oversupply of the unskilled labour market but also wage compression. If you speak to people, unskilled people, skilled people, they’ll tell you – take construction for example, they’re earning less than they were ten years ago but of course we have got higher living costs.

DM: So you would like to see wages higher?

NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, the answer is yes. I think we need to be giving people in our own country an opportunity to get work and I think the Prince’s Trust report that came out this week was shocking, that showed a third of those young people with long term unemployment were suffering serious mental issues.

DM: Let me just unravel it though, is it about numbers overall, the idea that Britain is full or is it about the skills they have because as we will discuss perhaps in a moment or two, there are people from other nations within the EU who have perhaps have a greater skillset overall and there are hundreds of thousands of them living here as well.

NIGEL FARAGE: When I worked in the City of London during the Big Bang when we went from being an English gentleman’s club into being an international global marketplace. Men and women, talented men and women from all over the world, were desperate to come to London, 300 banks setting up their HQs. There is nobody more hooked into the fact that we have got to be part of a global economy. I want skilled people.

DM: You know the joke from Boris Johnson don’t you – I’m not sure it is a joke – where the Mayor of London talks about meeting the Mayor of Bordeaux and saying I’m Mayor of more French people than you are because there are 200,000 French people working in our capital. Are they a problem?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well I think the problem is that … there are two problems, firstly we should be selective about …

DM: But the numbers, are they are a problem?

NIGEL FARAGE: The single most important criteria should be that we want people to come to this country who have got a skill to bring and who economically are going to earn more than £27,500 a year which means that they would be net contributors to the UK economy. We want people who haven’t got criminal records, we want people who are going to bring a benefit to the country.

DM: So you would check on what they’re capable of earning?

NIGEL FARAGE: But, but, but, what you do, what you do is you give people work permits because what we’ve done, we’ve mingled everything. If you want to go to America and get a job at a broadcast station there, off you go, you get a two year work permit, you have to have your own medical insurance or perhaps the firm pay for it and after two years you’re expected to leave and what we’ve done, we’ve merged, because of the EU, the right to work with the right to settle.

DM: Okay be we still haven’t got clear whether your objection is to the overall numbers, that there are too many people living here because after all …

NIGEL FARAGE: There are too many people.

DM: So getting people out, whatever their skills, would be a good idea?

NIGEL FARAGE: Having people coming with skills is a good thing but clearly not if …

DM: But someone’s got to go. Or not come.

NIGEL FARAGE: You cannot say to people who come here legally, you must go and I have never advocated that we do that. What I am saying is that it is madness to extend this open border policy, the ability to use the education system and the health system, to get 29 million more people in Romania and Bulgaria.

DM: You mentioned the impact there on social services, public services there and I’ve got a quotation here about the impact of immigration on the existing population: “For reasons which they could not comprehend, the indigenous population found themselves made strangers in their own country, their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition.” You’d agree with that would you?

NIGEL FARAGE: In a lot of England, that’s true.

DM: You know where that’s from don’t you?

NIGEL FARAGE: I don’t.

DM: Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, so-called Rivers of Blood speech.

NIGEL FARAGE: Is it? Well, what he was warning about is that if you have a large influx of people into an area that changes an area beyond recognition, there is tension, that basic principle is right.

DM: So we saw it coming back in 1968, Enoch Powell saw it coming?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well no … for different reasons, for different reasons and on a completely different scale. I mean when immigration was being discussed in the 60s and 70s and 80s we were talking about an annual net inflow to the country of between 30 and 50,000 people. What we have had in the last 13 years is net four million extra migrants who have come to Britain so we are dealing with something now on a scale that hitherto we couldn’t even have conceived.

DM: But it’s about perceptions and realities as well isn’t it because Enoch Powell made that speech back in the 60s and predicted, and I’ve just read through it again, by 1985 a quarter of the population would be born outside the United Kingdom. That didn’t come to pass but people believe that …

NIGEL FARAGE: Well actually … well actually if you look at the figures in London …

DM: No, no, no, what’s the overall UK figure for people born outside the UK?

NIGEL FARAGE: It’s about 11 to 12%.

DM: Yes but people …

NIGEL FARAGE: Well all right, it’s splitting hairs.

DM: But what do people think it is?

NIGEL FARAGE: Oh people probably think it’s higher and I can think of parts of the East End of London for example where we find wildly different figures but the point is that ….

DM: No, no, no, it’s about perceptions and reality. People actually think, in an IPSOS MORI poll last week it was 31%, that’s what people think overall is the population born outside the UK which is wrong.

NIGEL FARAGE: The key to the immigration debate … the key to the immigration debate is do our politicians have control of it or not and the answer is no. Because we’re members of the European Union we cannot decide as a nation who comes to live, work and settle in our country.

DM: Okay, so you’ve got to get us outside of the EU, it’s the only answer from your point of view?

NIGEL FARAGE: If you want to control immigration policy you cannot do that and stay a full member of the European Union.

DM: Okay and what then happens to those, presume your policy goes through and we have left the EU, those EU nationals that haven’t lived here for seven years, they have to go, they’re not allowed work permits are they?

NIGEL FARAGE: As I said earlier, you cannot say to people who came legally, you should not be here, that would be an unconscionable thing for any political party to do. What we’re going to have to do is work out benefit entitlement and I think this needs redefinition. Mr Cameron is saying that EU migrants should not get benefits for five years … sorry, for three months, I would have thought five years.

DM: But it is just this policy about seven years residence then you could apply for a work permit if you were a former EU national. So say we have the referendum in 2017, the country votes to take us out, the Romanians and Bulgarians who have come now will not have been here for seven years. Would they have to go?

NIGEL FARAGE: We would not force anybody to go back anywhere, that is not what we are about in our party.

DM: So they would be allowed work permits?

NIGEL FARAGE: Of course they would because they have come here legally and we’ve got to treat … You cannot say to people who have come here legally, you should not be here, that would be the wrong thing to do. What we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to get a grip on who is here legally, who is here illegally and completely redefine what our immigration policy is.

DM: The last question on this, and it’s not a small point, I was discussing it with some of our production team beforehand saying perhaps it’s not relevant but it is. The last census said there is something over 400,000 Irish citizens, people born in the Republic of Ireland living in UK, there is free movement of people between those borders, no passport required, they can vote, don’t have any problems whatsoever. Would that change once we leave the EU?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well no, the answer is that Ireland was part of this country …

DM: [Laughs] Hold on a minute …

NIGEL FARAGE: Well until 1921 Ireland was a part of this country and that’s why we have the free movement and no restriction and it’s been there for the best part of a hundred years. The difficulty …

DM: Okay, so that would apply to Indians then who were part of this country until 1947?

NIGEL FARAGE: One of the difficulties that we have here is that if you have free movement with Ireland and Ireland has stayed part of the European Union and we haven’t, then we have got to rethink that. It is a very difficult problem.

DM: Would it apply to the Scots then if they vote for independence?

NIGEL FARAGE: I don’t think they will but yes, it would. I mean, when you think about it, who is in charge of British immigration policy? At the moment Romania is dishing out hundreds of passports every week to Moldovans so in effect it is the Romanian parliament who can decide who can come to Britain, we could face that problem with Ireland.

DM: I want to ask you a little bit about your own party and this charge that you are very much a one man band. We talk about the polling and if we ask people who’s in charge of UKIP, they know you but they don’t know anyone else at all do they?

NIGEL FARAGE: I’m not sure about that.

DM: Perhaps Godfrey Bloom.

NIGEL FARAGE: Well Godfrey has certainly made himself very well-known over the course of the summer, not all for good reasons.

DM: But what about your top team, who would you like to see out there more then? Who are your top team?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well, for example, our candidate from Eastleigh, Diane James, has been seen on national media a lot over the course of the last few months. My deputy Paul Nuttall appears on more and more and more media, Tim Aker, who is a guy in his late 20s. Again, you are seeing a lot more UKIP faces than you ever saw before.

DM: Are you sure you’re not trying to dominate … we mentioned Godfrey Bloom there, you’ll have read the interview he gave to the Guardian before Christmas. Nigel is not interested, he said, in the running of the party, he is UKIP’s chief salesman, he is not a team player.

NIGEL FARAGE: That’s absolute rubbish. I don’t accept that. He also went on to say that I’d done a deal, I was going to go to the House of Lords and frankly a lot of that was just preposterous. I am very happy for other people to come and show the British voters that UKIP is a team and it is not just me.

DM: I wanted to ask you about doing deals. Okay, you have shot that one down but we had Toby Young out this morning, he was on Sky News earlier, what about that idea, that you trade votes to keep Mr Miliband out because you won’t get a referendum then will you?

NIGEL FARAGE: There are two problems with it. I am absolutely certain that Miliband will offer a referendum before the next general election so if he does that then Toby’s argument dies. The other problem is that Toby is of a mind-set, much of the press are of a mind-set that every UKIP voter is a retired ageing half colonel living in Salisbury Plain and all of our votes come from the Conservative party. Actually two-thirds of our voters do not come from the Conservative party, a fifth of our voters are people who haven’t voted for anybody for twenty years and actually there are now seats, marginal seats, in which the only candidate which can beat the incumbent Lib Dem or Labour MP is a UKIP candidate. So we’ve really got to … Paddy Ashdown is the one politician who has really got this and Paddy said about three days ago that actually UKIP are doing well in the areas where the Lib Dems used to.

DM: So do you think you can win parliamentary seats? Is that your ambition for 2015?

NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, yes, I do. I think what we showed …

DM: One for yourself, selected yet?

NIGEL FARAGE: Not yet, no. I mean everyone’s talking about the election, nobody is talking about the fact that we have a European election and so I’m focused on that.

DM: Well I was going to move on to that, you want to finish first in that in terms of voting share?

NIGEL FARAGE: I’ve said for years that I think we have got the ability to top the poll in the European elections and I still believe that, yes.

DM: Okay, we’re looking forward to what’s going to happen in 2014. Just one last question on this issue, perhaps you followed the debate, I know you will have done, about World War One because you are a keen historian. To polarise the debate, we’re going to have it a bit later on in the programme, has it been hijacked by the left and portrayed in that old phrase as lions led by donkeys?

NIGEL FARAGE: It’s very interesting that Michael Gove said it was left wing historians that changed the narrative in the 1960s on how we viewed the First World War. Actually probably the single most important work as part of that revisionism was actually published by the late Alan Clarke MP who wrote a book called The Donkeys and Alan Clarke was not left-wing, that’s for certain, that’s absolutely for certain! No, Douglas Haig who is seen to be this terrible butcher and portrayed in Blackadder brilliantly by Geoffrey Palmer, Blackadder is a satire. Haig in the 1920s was a hero, the poppy appeal was set up as the Douglas Haig Fund so we’d been through this period of knocking our generals, of saying we were awful, of saying the whole thing was pointless slaughter but do you know what, compared to the other armies actually what we learned from World War One was the British generals were the innovators. We were the guys that invented the tank and started to use it, we developed a form of warfare in 1918 which Hitler used in 1940, we pioneered blitzkrieg and actually what I want school kids to learn is ghastly as all wars are and especially ghastly for soldiers the First World War was, but 1918 probably represents the biggest most significant military achievement in the history of …

DM: But we’ve opened a whole new frontier to stay with that metaphor, which is why people say the EU was set up to maintain …

NIGEL FARAGE: They do and they made a mistake on that because Yugoslavia was set up after the First World War to maintain peace in the Balkans and look what happened to that. You cannot take different countries and force them into one state unless people actually want to become part of it.

DM: Fascinating stuff and we’ll discuss that further I hope one day. Mr Farage, good to see you, Nigel Farage there, the UKIP leader.