ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now over the past few years we’ve watched the rise and rise of the UK Independence Party but 2015 is of course the moment of truth.  The party is fighting in every constituency in May’s general election, by all accounts the most unpredictable for many decades, so is the party now a permanent presence in our politics or could 2015 be the year the UKIP bubble bursts?  Well the UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, joins me now.  I know what you think and a happy new year to you Mr Farage and the first revelation is that Nigel Farage has given up his pint for January, your New Year’s resolution.

NIGEL FARAGE: I have, yes, I started before the New Year.  I am not being particularly virtuous about this, I need a break and it does us all good to have a break every now and again.

DM: So a total break from alcohol?

NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, absolutely.  

DM: What about the cigarettes?

NIGEL FARAGE: Oh no, I’ll think about that later on in the year.

DM: Okay, one thing at a time.  So how do you read the political weather ahead, how do you read the runes?  We’ve got very clear already haven’t we the offerings from the two biggest parties, it’s the economy of course from the Conservatives, don’t give the keys back they say to the party that crashed the car and it seems that Labour are running initially anyway on the NHS, we’ve got to save that.  How does UKIP get its hearing, are you still just going to bang on about immigration?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well I think there are three big issues which concern the public and will dominate the general election and yes, the economy is one of them and yes, the NHS is another but there’s a third one that isn’t being talked about this morning and that’s immigration and in many opinion polls immigration is now the number one issue because of the impact it’s having on people’s wages, because of the impact it’s having on local healthcare services so I think on the immigration issue I suspect Labour and the Conservatives would rather not debate it at all but they’re going to have to and in a sense that’s what UKIP did to British politics in 2014, we forced this issue onto the agenda.  I’m struck though, looking at what’s being said this morning and given that we’ve got fixed term elections, that our politics is becoming very American.  It’s no great surprise, the Conservatives have got a guy called Jim Messina, Miliband has got a guy called Axelrod, these are Washington big political players and American politics is dominated by negative campaigning, you tell the public how ghastly the other person is and that makes them vote for you.  We saw a bit of this in the by-election in Rochester where all sorts of things were said about Mark Reckless but I’m just not sure that in the context of British politics that style of campaigning actually works and I sense that the public – if we’re going to have four months of this I think the public are going to get very bored and be looking for something a bit more positive.

DM: Quite a lot flows from that, I mean because if it becomes more Washington like, more like the United States, of course in the end the smaller parties get squeezed out and it’s about one guy against the other. Do you fear that can happen to you?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well I think British politics in a sense has become more presidential over the last four or five general elections, that we vote far less for whether the man or woman locally is good and for who we think should or should not be the Prime Minister.  In America it is a binary choice, you’re absolutely right, but British politics has changed, we’ve gone beyond that.  We’ve seen the massive rise of the SNP in Scotland, we’ve seen Northern Irish politics turned on its head in the last 20 years and we’ve seen the rise of UKIP in England and Wales particularly so no, actually I think if people get bored with this binary choice you may actually see the number of people that vote for the two so-called main parties at its lowest level ever.  

DM: So what’s your tactical thinking then as we head in, we are now already in the election campaign as we’ve just been discussing, we hear you’re turning the party a bit to the left, you sniff an opportunity amongst those Labour voters particularly in the north?

NIGEL FARAGE: This left/right thing is a load of nonsense, it’s out of the window, forget it, it’s gone, that was yesterday’s politics.  I mean yes, we are campaigning for no tax on minimum wage, yes we’re campaigning for ordinary folk to have a fair break in society, we do that because we are a patriotic party and part of that is to believe you’ve got to help your own people.  It’s not about left or right, it’s about common sense.

DM: But the big offering from Labour as we just discussed is the NHS, your position on the NHS, you’ve junked the idea that you’d like to see some kind of private health insurance bought in for those who can afford it, that’s gone, so the NHS budget it, let’s hear it from you, is totally protected.  Will you increase spending as Labour are promising to do?

NIGEL FARAGE: I think all this nonsense about ring fencing or whatever it is, the Conservatives are going to ring fence and Labour appear to be wholly uncritical of all aspects of the NHS and when you look at the Welsh controlled, Labour controlled health services and see they are the worst health provision in the whole of the UK, what we’ve got to say is look, we believe in the NHS but it can be run better, it can be more efficient …

DM: Is there money to be saved from the NHS budget?

NIGEL FARAGE: Without any shadow of a doubt there is although …

DM: How much?  

NIGEL FARAGE: Although overall, and this is what no one is talking about, health spending is going to go up over the next few years because our population is rising so rapidly so there is no way around that.  This is going to be costing us more money in a few years’ time than it is now, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be more efficient.  What I want to do, and I agree with you, there has been some confusion, perhaps deliberate in some cases – people know where UKIP stands on the European question, we don’t want to be part of the Brussels empire …

DM: Absolutely they know that but what about the NHS, that is one of the big questions?

NIGEL FARAGE: What they don’t know, what they don’t really know, is where we stand on the NHS, education, defence and what I’m going to do  for the first time ever, in conjunction with our spokesmen and spokeswomen, I am going to give a series of speeches over the next couple of months where we lay out exactly what the UKIP policy is.

DM: I can’t let you off the hook about the NHS.  You said there that you think there is scope for some savings in the NHS budget as it currently exists, what percentage?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well savings are clear aren’t they in the sense that the growth of middle management staff in the NHS since 1997, it’s gone up by 48%.  Don’t tell me there aren’t efficiencies that can’t be made, there are and it’s up to us in one of these big speeches to lay out the numbers.

DM: What we do know about your plans for the NHS, relating to one of your core messages, interestingly you are going to winnow out aren’t you those that can’t speak English properly?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well of course, don’t we want to live in a country where we speak the same language and isn’t it scandalous, isn’t it scandalous that we’re not training enough nurses and doctors in our own country?  I don't know about you, whether you’ve ever been to a GP …

DM: Well of course I have.

NIGEL FARAGE: … that didn’t speak very good English and it is something that people out there are talking about.  The whole point about immigration, whether it impacts on the health service or elsewhere, is that we have to have proper integration.      

DM: But do you know what proportion the estimate is of NHS staff who are not British born?

NIGEL FARAGE: But it’s getting higher every year.

DM: Do you know what the proportion is?  I’ll tell you, the estimate is about 11%.

NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, there was a recently false figure put out of about four-fifths of nurses which was wrong.

DM: No, it’s around 11% so you’ve got 1.3 million, the estimate is, working in the NHS so you are talking about 130,000 people who you have to check as to whether they can speak English or not.  

NIGEL FARAGE: I would have thought it was fairly obvious, wouldn’t you?  We have seen medical …

DM: And if they can’t you’ll sack them?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well if people don’t speak English and they are dealing with English speaking patients, surely they shouldn’t be employed in the first place?

DM: Okay, so they will go.

NIGEL FARAGE: They shouldn’t be employed in the first place.  I just want to get back to the real issue, why are we not training enough nurses and doctors in our own country?

DM: Okay, fair point.  Another point just on the NHS and this is from what we do know about your plans for it, we will ensure that visitors to the UK have private health insurance as a condition of entry.  So you hop on the train in Paris for a last minute business meeting, you come here, you’re not born in the UK, you don’t have private health insurance, you turn them back at St Pancras?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well there are about 200 countries in the world where if you or I went to work there we would not automatically be entitled to free healthcare on their state, we would go with a work permit to work in the country, we would prove we had an address to live at when we got there and prove that we had private medical provision.  This is what the whole of the world does and yet we have allowed the National Health Service to become the international health service and that doesn’t make sense.

DM: Of course we don’t have to do that as things are currently configured when we go to Paris or Brussels do we, that’s in the European Union.  You’d have us pulled out of it so you’d be checking all those Europeans who still come here to work every day?

NIGEL FARAGE: We could quite happily have reciprocal deals with countries with whom it was appropriate but is it appropriate to have that deal with countries where a trickle of people go and work in those countries and a huge number from their countries come here?  It’s about being sensible with this, of course we can have a reciprocal deal with France or with Spain if that suits us to do it.

DM: Let’s ask you about coalitions or whatever it may be, given however the cards fall after the general election, are you categorical that you couldn’t do a deal with any Conservative party still led by David Cameron?

NIGEL FARAGE: I     think we’re jumping the gun a bit here, I mean look, you know, I don't think anybody knows what’s going to happen in this general election, it’s the most open general election in decades so we are running a bit ahead of ourselves here.

DM: But you could do a deal with a Cameron led Conservative party?

NIGEL FARAGE: I’m pretty clear, I want my country back, I want us to be a self-governing nation.  The big elephant in the room still is the fact that most of our legislation is not made in this country, it’s made somewhere else, I want our democracy back, I want control of our borders back, I want us to be able to negotiate our own deals on the world stage.   To do all of that I need a referendum, we need a referendum …

DM: Well you  need some MPs who hold the balance of power don’t you?  How many do you think you’re going to get?

NIGEL FARAGE: My worry is about us getting enough MPs, not what happens after May 7th.

DM: How many do you think will do it?  How many do you think you need and what are your aspirations?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well it’s tough to tell.  We read a lot about the SNP but of course the SNP will be taking seats directly from Labour so perhaps the arithmetic of that doesn’t overall change the game very much.  For UKIP to succeed we have to win seats that are currently held by Labour, seats that are currently held by the Conservatives and perhaps some that are held by the Liberal Democrats.  If we do that in sufficient numbers we will change the electoral arithmetic.

DM: Let me put that together because the SNP have already indicated that they might support a minority Labour government if it falls like that, you’ve indicated in the past that you’ll do a deal with the devil including Ed Miliband if you get what you want, could you see UKIP under certain circumstances supporting that kind of coalition, SNP, Labour and UKIP joined together?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well I don’t see UKIP being joined together with Labour and the SNP at all, I really don’t.  In fact I would regard it, even if we were in that position, as unlikely that UKIP would want to be in coalition with anybody but what you can do is give support to minority governments in return for what you want.

DM: But a lot of UKIP supporters must be saying look, we’re not going to have Prime Minister Farage, we accept that and as much as we can have a copper bottomed guarantee from the Conservative party that they will have a referendum in 2017, why would you support Labour?  To try and force them to give you a referendum or do you think that will come out in the course of the election campaign?

NIGEL FARAGE: Don’t forget just two and a bit years ago, Cameron was implacably opposed to having a referendum.   UKIP started to do well in one or two by-elections and he changed his tune.  Between now and May it is quite probable that the Labour party will change its position on a referendum and the Cameron offering frankly isn’t good enough in the sense that it’s all been kicked into the long grass into 2017 following a renegotiation that looks highly improbable at any level.  Whenever he talks about changing freedom of movement of people or of unpicking the treaties, I can promise you as a veteran of Brussels, that’s the last thing anybody over there wants.  We would not even be discussing a European referendum if UKIP hadn’t done well, if you really want a referendum make sure there are enough UKIP MPs in Westminster to hold the balance of power.

DM: But you clearly think David Cameron is damaged goods, would you rather a Conservative party, would you find it easier as UKIP leader to talk to Boris Johnson or to Theresa May?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well look, David Cameron doesn’t like UKIP and doesn’t like me and he has been incredibly rude about us over a very long period of time, not just about us personally but about our policies, saying how appalling they are and yet now in interviews he tries to sound a little bit like us.

DM: But would it be easier if there was a new broom there, a Boris or a Theresa?

NIGEL FARAGE: I doubt Mr Cameron’s sincerity, I don’t think he really wants change, I think he is an agent for the status quo as indeed I think is Ed Miliband.  What we in UKIP want is real change.  

DM: Okay, last question about Ebola and the terribly sad case of Pauline Cafferkey and the question about the checks that were carried out at Heathrow and some of the countries, some of the states in the United States with their health workers check them more carefully and give them de facto quarantine when they come back from those Ebola affected countries.  Do you think our checks need looking at?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well I’d say two things.  Firstly we’ve just had the New Year’s Honours, long lists of people with MBEs and OBEs and knighthoods and peerages and I would think that people who genuinely risk their own lives to go and do some good in the world are the people who should get some kind of recognition.  From the medical perspective I am just not qualified to comment.  I understand that this lady had seven checks or seven temperature checks that took place at Heathrow Airport, short of putting people in quarantine for a week it is very difficult to see, for me, what more could have been done.

DM: And what about when it comes to international aid, we know you are going to slash the international aid budget but would things like that survive, the considerable help that the UK is giving to those countries affected in West Africa, that would be ring fenced?

NIGEL FARAGE: We are spending about a billion pounds a month on foreign aid, about £12 billion a year nearly we’re spending on foreign aid.  Of that, about two billion is spent on inoculations, on clean water, on things that we would really consider to be genuine humanitarian missions.  We’d wish to keep that of course.

DM: But do you think the Ebola effort in West Africa funded by the UK is money well spent?

NIGEL FARAGE: Yes, when there’s a crisis, when there’s a disaster, that’s exactly where we should – with also private giving as well – we should get involved and we should help but foreign aid being used as an extension of foreign policy, propping up dubious regimes all over the world, no thank you.

DM: But we should also be sending our medical professionals over there, a tiny proportion of them may come back and may be affected with Ebola?

NIGEL FARAGE: Well that’s up to the medical professionals but it is clear that we still live in a world where people are prepared to go to Syria to do humanitarian work or to go to Sierra Leone and do it and the world is a better place because of people like that.

DM: Mr Farage, thank you very much indeed, very good to see you.  Nigel Farage there, the UKIP leader.