The entire raison d'être of UKIP is the EU and its many treaties that have transformed the body over the years. David Cameron -many have suspected in fearful response- has 'promised' a referendum on EU membership to extinguish the fires of political rebellion emanating from within his own party. True, Britain hasn't seen a referendum of this kind since Harold Wilson's referendum of 1975. Since then, treaties such as Maastricht (1992) and Lisbon (2007) have enshrined new powers of the EU and its members, the number of which has also grown since the initiation of our membership in 1973. Maastricht, for example, unified the European Economic Community and rallied their support for a single currency (the Euro) in addition to unifying us politically, in order to allow cross-state foreign policy decision-making and inter-continental policing; the union was both economic and monetary. Lisbon later formed, what is now called officially the European Union, replacing the European Community and striving for greater cohesion, such as that stated in Article 3, Point 2: "...free movement of persons... ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime."
This of course may seem dubious to some, who -like UKIP- believe that we no longer have control of our borders, yet another article can be referred to (Article 4 Point 2,) which stresses "...respect for members states... national identities, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional, inclusive of regional and local self-government." The point further states that self-government on these key issues is their concern when matters of national security and law and order are at stake, which of course refutes the notion that we cannot extradite terrorists on the grounds of Human Right laws (as Richard Littlejohn believes.)
But of course UKIP is not just the single-issue party of EU membership, but rather a party of multiple policies. Recently, a Green Councillor by the name of Michael Abberton posted a leaflet onto his Twitter account, using UKIP logos and colour schemes listing "10 Reasons to Vote for UKIP."
This list (which has seen an updated versions with sources since published,) was investigated by the Cambridgeshire Police on the grounds of it violating the Representation of the People Act, specifically the article concerning the slanderous use of falsehoods to deliberately affect the outcome of an upcoming election; the UKIP affiliate in question who filed the original police complaint is still unknown. But for a party who claim to be pro-freedom to go to the police to solve this issue without first consulting the man who posted it, speaks volumes of their hypocrisy. And without further delay, let's look into this supposed Green propaganda.
1) Scrapping Paid Maternity Leave
This policy was posted onto the affiliate website of a man named Amjad Bashir, the small and medium business spokesperson and was essentially advertised under a list of EU regulations, followed by the tagline "Government is the problem, not the solution." Interestingly enough, the website has since had this deleted for obvious PR reasons. But thankfully, there is a YT video (I definitely recommend that you watch him,) featuring a screenshot of this website between the 5th and 6th of May, and you can clearly see that this was Bashir's policy until very recently. The images are below:
1) Scrapping Paid Maternity Leave
This policy was posted onto the affiliate website of a man named Amjad Bashir, the small and medium business spokesperson and was essentially advertised under a list of EU regulations, followed by the tagline "Government is the problem, not the solution." Interestingly enough, the website has since had this deleted for obvious PR reasons. But thankfully, there is a YT video (I definitely recommend that you watch him,) featuring a screenshot of this website between the 5th and 6th of May, and you can clearly see that this was Bashir's policy until very recently. The images are below:
As the Website Stands Today
Until Recently
When perusing the web, I've seen some people defending UKIP and Bashir by saying that it wasn't in their manifesto (because no party really has one at present for the 2015 general election,) or alternatively, I've been hearing the argument advanced that this man is only an affiliate/not representative of UKIP. Really? Well please tell me then, why would a SME spokesman for UKIP (the man who would probably be Business Secretary if they ever got into power,) put something like this onto his website that runs as a UKIP promoter if it is not "part of UKIP policy"? If Ed Davey as Energy Secretary put onto his personal, Lib-Dem blog, that he wanted to scrap climate change policy (another UKIP policy by the way,) then that becomes not just a preference of a man in charge, but official policy of the body he is representing i.e. the Lib-Dems and the Coalition government, making it Tory policy too at that point.
2-4) Raising income Tax for the Poorest 88% of Britons; Scrapping Holiday Entitlements & Speeding Up Privatisation of The NHS
These policies were quoted on the website of UKIP Birmingham spokesperson Keith Rowe, but unfortunately for us, the policies hyperlink no longer takes you anywhere. This naturally presents some problems for us but, given that Amjad was quick to remove the contentious issues from his site, it seems only natural for Keith to do so as well. UKIP have spoken often of County Health Boards, designed to increase competition within the NHS because, and I quote from memory Paul Nuttal's Question Time appearance "I believe that competition improves service [within the NHS]." For those of you wishing to see a more concrete example of this, I was lucky enough to find a screenshot from Nuttal's UKIP website.
UKIP Pro-Privatisation Letter
Scrapping Holiday Entitlements feed into the policies surrounding the EU Directives on work conditions, which is EU policy under what is known as the EU Working Time Directive. This states that individuals employed on a full-time basis are entitled to "4 weeks of paid annual leave." Given that UKIP wish to get rid of this policy, it seems only logical that they will do so via resigning from the EU Employment Law, which is laid side-by-side with the current UK employment law by the London Chamber of Commerce, here.
5) Cancelling All Planned House-Building
This originated from the copy of the 2010 Election Manifesto, the only link to which I found here. Although there is debate as to whether or not this is still official policy, there are some points in this manifesto that ring true with this kind of policy, such as "encouraging demand, not just supply" or "incentivise the use of 800,000 empty homes," which does insinuate a policy driven by current housing stock rather than building more homes, which, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is a priority if we wish to see people continuing to own rather than rent.
6) Abandoning All Action on Climate Change
This point is elucidated by a gentleman who no longer works for UKIP but used to be their official Science Advisor; a man called Lord Christopher Monckton. He claimed constantly that he was the SA to Margaret Thatcher, despite the fact that she didn't credit him with the position in her own autobiography. A YouTube user and climate scientist who runs the Potholer54 channel has rebuked many of Monckton's claims and misrepresentations of climate change and has even sent correspondence to him, so definitely check out those videos. The specific playlist linked has 5 videos titled "Monckton Bunkum Part 1-5." Essentially, Monckton constantly claimed that ice yield has reduced between -generally- a few years worth of time and has concluded from this microscopic datum that climate change is a myth. The Daily Mail (that bastion of integrity!) has made similar claims such as the infamous "Global Warming Stopped in 1997," based on a small MET Office update that said no such thing. If however you look into a longer graph -such as this one from the NCDC- it shows a very different trend indeed. Also, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Centre the ice yield for the years 1978-2010, showed a linear decrease in ice yield of 3.3% per decade.
National Climatic Data Centre (a US Organisation)
National Snow & Ice Data Centre
7) Cancelling Regulation to Make Banks Safer
This is backed up thanks to Coughlan's earlier video to which I linked in point 1. The Independent published this "Open Letter to Alex Jones" from Farage himself, in which he attacks Gordon Brown for handing over regulations to "Canary Wharf" but wishes to remove more regulations -such as those imposed by the EU- on banking, which of course fits in rather well with their "free market solves all" mentality. Please note however that the only source for their deregulation claims as it stands is in the student-run, political-neutrality-claiming magazine: The Yorker.
8) Abolishing Your EU Human Rights
This is of course a long-standing UKIP policy, though here it could be argued that many of these principles in the EU Human Rights Act are already upheld in Common Law and Habeas Corpus. But considering what we already know about UKIP and their tendencies surrounding limiting worker freedoms, it does beg the question as to the motivation for abolishing this legislation. But the key point here is that -firstly- the European Court is not a body of the EU, but rather the Council of Europe and -secondly- the administration of these laws by the European Court in Strasbourg, is only possible once all other court options within the member state concerned have been exhausted. Often these cases are resolved in the UK, as seen our earlier example of terror suspect Abu Qatarda who was finally extradited to Jordan last year. His lengthy stay in this country however was perpetuated not thanks to the European Court, but rather a UK Court after having won his immigration appeal in the first place.
9) Making it Legal for a Man to Rape or Assault His Wife
The law only changed on marital rape in 1991 despite critiques as far back as the 19th century. Nevertheless, a UKIP backer recently said that "there is no such thing as marital rape," a comment that has obviously provoked outcry. This falls into line with a reported rebellion against the EU in 2006, on a motion titled "Combating Violence Against Women." Of the 14 MEPs who rebelled and voted against the movement, 8 were UKIP members.
10) Cutting Education Spending & Buying 3 Aircraft Carriers Instead
Now, this issue with UKIP can be traced back to their 2010 Manifesto, in which restoration processes for the military were on the table, including the specific purchase of light jets and aircraft carriers. The education policy is one advocating a return to the Grammar School system and the implementation of County Education Boards, akin to the ones that they wish to set up for the NHS; a franchised system, where charities and parent-run initiatives (such as current 'free schools' championed by Blair and continued by Gove,) would become the norm, alongside the perhaps more alarming "...not-for-profit and profit-making private companies..." This seems to suggest a similar libertarian approach to the schooling system and if indeed schools are franchised off to companies and charities, and combined with their low tax approach, it seems fairly logical that they will match the low taxes with a much lower spend, despite their desire to see increased military spending. This is followed by a policy of denationalising Further- and Higher-Education Institutions, instead replacing the loan/grant payment system with "Student Vouchers" and "Training Vouchers." These would be issued to everyone over the age of 18. The denationalised education establishments will be "...only accountable to their students" and "...run by charitable bodies."
And Finally . . . Number 11)
Phew! That took quite a while so if you've made it this far then I applaud you. But we aren't done yet, because there is a single point that I would like to address, a point reiterated continually by Farage that is just not true. The point is so crucial to the fear-mongering that they even went to the trouble of making a poster out of it:
Get Your Tin-Foil Hats on People, the Bureaucrats Are Coming!
Yes, that's right! Apparently 75% of our laws are made by the EU (and we all know the EU is a bunch of unelected, unrepresentative, crypto-fascist, do-gooding, PC-brigade, liberal-lefty, BBC wishy-washy bunch of commie wankers from Brussels right?) But sadly Farage has got it wrong again, because -firstly- to say that X amount of our laws are made the EU is a daft way to measure the impact as to our lives, because each individual law has a different impact than another might, which makes this so-called 'impact measurement' a fallacious one. But more importantly is the fact that the EU Parliament in which Farage sits (when he bothers to attend) is the body to which he is referring. Why else to we vote in European elections? To vote for our MEPs of course. According to the HoC Library (cited via FullFact) the claim of law % could be justified from anywhere between 15%-50%. This is because the laws are passed in different variations vis-a-vis EU/UK Parliament influence, the three categories being "Acts put in place by UK Parliament with EU Influence"; "Regulations Influenced by or Related to the EU" and finally "EU Regulations & Regulations Influenced by or Related to the EU." These different categories will of course contain different types/severities of laws, with the European Parliament voting for 70% of all laws passed (according to Vivianne Reding,) which is where UKIP distorted the claim, even after she said that she made a mistake in saying simply that the EU in general passes all these laws. Put simply, 70% of all laws passed within the EU are made by the elected MEPs of each member state. The other 30% are made by the European Council, made up by the Heads of State or Government of the member countries, meaning that David Cameron, as PM, is our current Council Representative. Of course this would challenge the idea of our Councillors etc. being unelected, but then again, Cameron wasn't really elected as PM was he, given the lack of a "Coalition" option on the ballot paper in 2010.
Thanks for reading! I'm glad that you took the time to read this and click on the links, and if you were thinking about voting for UKIP purely because of the EU, then I hope that this post made you think twice before voting for them. I could go into their more light-hearted controversies (Godfrey Bloom for example,) or perhaps show another weaselly excuse from Paul Nuttal about his attendance record being the worst; but I've realised that these things only serve to highlight the craziness, stupidity and -indeed- disingenuous nature of UKIP, and I didn't even have to resort to racism claims! And if you believe that this so-called "non-racist libertarian party" is a genuine one to vote for in order to show dissatisfaction with a body that, granted, isn't perfect, but far from unelected, then you might be better emigrating to Bongo-Bongo Land. But then again, you'd be an immigrant there wouldn't you?
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