Flying Free (33 page)

If the journey from unknown, eccentric little party to second in a national election seems an implausible one, that of Nigel Farage from restless City trader to spokesman for a popular movement across Europe seems still more incredible.   

I won’t pretend that I have not fought long and hard for the party’s triumphs. I have given every waking hour and a fair proportion of the sleeping ones to the cause.

I can honestly state, however, that no part of the journey was planned at the outset. My every movement along the way has been reactive. It all started with anger and frustration at politicians’ lies, and there has always been another outrage to address, another election to fight, another smirking prat to be corrected. One new challenge simply led to another.

He who rides a tiger cannot dismount. Am I glad that I took up tiger-riding?

The disadvantages have been many. Had I stayed on in the City, I suspect I would now be looking forward to prosperous retirement. Instead, I have an aged Volvo, I have just remortgaged my home and will be lucky to retire to a dinky villa in Worthing.

I have sorely neglected my family. I have also neglected my hobbies. I have not played golf in seven years. I have worked seven days a week for fifteen years. On the rare occasions when I am at home, I am usually in my office at the bottom of the garden.

I may appear blithe and dismissive, but the treachery of Mote, Wise and a few others whom I worked hard to advance only to see them turn rogue caused me acute pain. On the other hand…

I would have disgraced myself in the modern City. The compliance culture has taken all the fun out of trading. Everyone must behave and conform.

When I visit nowadays, I find orderly people sitting quietly at computers, sending emails to colleagues sitting just ten feet away. They no longer hurl jokes and abuse at one another like civilised people. With three new regulatory authorities imposed by the EU, I fear for the future of the City itself.

I might have survived it for a decade, I suppose – making a great deal of money, growing daily more frustrated and drearily drunk. As it is, I may be poor and occasionally hobbling, but my waistline is precisely the same as when first I joined UKIP.

In politics, people can still talk and flirt and argue. In twelve years as an MEP, not a single day has been the same as any other. I have enjoyed discourse with some of the best – and worst – opponents of our age. I have never had to take up crosswords to keep my mind limber.

I did not enter politics out of philanthropy but rather as an extension of my own resentment at having inherited freedoms infringed by
power-crazed
idiots spouting gibberish.

It gives me particular pleasure to know that we have empowered many others and caused them to doubt the authority whereby such people presume to grant us rights where we can manage perfectly well with innate freedoms, thanks. If you grant rights, you assume the right to take them away.

The disgraceful Lisbon Treaty process has demonstrated that democracy faces a huge threat. Opposition to EU growth has become mainstream, awareness that we can resist widespread. I am proud of that.

I allowed my passion to run away with me.

Sometimes I have huddled in the saddle, clinging on for dear life. Sometimes, I have urged it on, whooping at the speed and the feeling of the wind in my hair. It has taken me to many fascinating places and presented me with many daunting obstacles. Sometimes I have flown over them, sometimes barely scrambled through. Thus far, I have just about managed to stay in the saddle and enjoy the scenery.

It is expected of me that I should preach that, if only all readers vote UKIP, we will leave the accursed Union and all will miraculously be well.

I would thus show myself to be a true politician and a damned liar.

There are lies, damn lies, statistics and the Great Lie that one day, if we just get the formula right, time will stop.

It is the lie at the heart of modern mythology – the ‘happy ever after’. As Cinderella walks up the aisle, she sinks into molten amber and is fixed forever in love, beauty and happiness. Most marriages are based on this lie. Most marriages fail.

Without the New Jerusalem and eternal bliss for the virtuous, the Day of Resurrection, the Worker State and similar nonsenses, many of the great religious texts would be excellent collections of stories and books of etiquette.

And the world would be a far, far better place.

So I do not have immutable visions of the future, because humans are humans and nature is nature, and death, war, famine and pestilence show no signs of hanging up their boots.

‘We’ll muddle through and adapt’ is about as good as it gets.

So when I am asked for my vision of the future, I shy from specifics. I
know
that this expensive, irresponsible EU fantasy will founder and that Europe’s nations and their smaller subdivisions will once more determine their own futures.

Why am I so sure?

First, because of the lessons of history. There have been similar empires and federations. All (save those whose survival has depended on them and whose people were therefore party to their creation) have fallen apart and returned to their constituent parts. That is what must happen to ill-assorted, natural forms crammed together without the mortar of popular consent.

Second, because sacrificing self-determination to a distant, unwieldy, unrepresentative bureaucracy is such a laughably old-fashioned – such a post-Second World War – idea. It runs counter to everything that is happening today.

There is a parallel in the effects of the last great technological revolution in the early nineteenth century. Mass migration, vastly improved transport, more rapid communication, the wealth of a new middle-class and the growth of markets, all demanded that the democratic base be extended.

Respect for rulers who had hitherto been seen only in grand portraits dwindled. This became instead the golden age of caricature.

And what was the ruling class’s response? To assert their God-given right to govern, to take government further away from the people.

The consequences were a terrible revolution in France and very nearly one in Britain, averted only by Reform.

The Duke of Wellington famously objected to the railways because ‘they would encourage the lower classes to move about’. Today’s political class is every bit as anxious to deny the inevitable.

Thanks to the last decade’s innovations, news can spread worldwide in seconds. We know what is being done in our name. We know of our rulers’ every peccadillo.

No man is a hero to his valet. We have all become valets to our rulers. .

If democracy has any meaning at all, the people must now be heeded more than ever before, not less.

There is no reason – in theory – why we could not now be governed by
X Factor
-style voting on every motion currently before Parliament. If it were not for the frequently irresponsibly wielded power of the media to rabble-rouse, we would make a better job of it than the political class.

Of course direct democracy needs checks and balances, but it should at least be the ultimate check on the whims of elected leaders.

But the political class has taken representation away from the people who gave it power. It passes laws and even makes wars without reference to the will of those people.

And, in an age of instant communication, it is horrendously slow and unresponsive. Whilst the EU fiddles with procedure, we burn.

We saw just one example in the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001.  

We in Britain knew how to handle FMD. After the 1967 outbreak, veterinary advice was clear and unequivocal. Speed was of the essence. Infected animals should be slaughtered at once and buried in situ in
quicklime. Had this advice been followed, over £8bn might have been saved and enormous distress averted.

But we were not permitted to follow this advice in our own land. In 1980, the British government had handed all control of such matters to the EU, whose ridiculous ‘models’ required ‘protection and surveillance zones’ and the confirmation of every diagnosis by laboratory testing.

The EU had also passed a directive on the protection of groundwater which forbade farm burials and the use of quicklime.

It took weeks to get qualified majority approval from the Standing Veterinary Committee for any action to be taken. Thanks to further EU regulations, there were next to no abattoirs left in the country, which had already caused enormous suffering in normal circumstances and now seriously compromised bio-security.

The farmers of Britain just had to wait for the bureaucrats of Brussels to make up their minds. When at last they received permission to act, they were ordered to slaughter all animals within two miles of the centre of infection (the bureaucrats failed to make it clear which animals they meant), then to transport the carcasses often hundreds of miles to an approved rendering plant, so further spreading infection.

At a time when most Europhiles believe that Tibetans should rule Tibet and that Scots should rule Scotland, how can they maintain that Lithuanians are better able to handle crises in Cornwall than the Cornish?

Another example of our impotence in the face of the EU lies in the shameful business of prisoners’ right to vote. It is a long-established tenet of British justice that a convicted criminal should play no part in the formation of the legislature until the price of his or her crimes be paid. In 2005, however, the European Court of Human Rights decreed that the ban was unlawful.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the House of Commons debated the issue and, by a majority of 234 to 22, voted to uphold the ban on prisoners’ enfranchisement. The Prime Minister declared that the idea of prisoners voting made him ‘physically ill’.

Justice Secretary, Lord Chancellor and Euro-toady Kenneth Clarke, however, sneered at the vote. ‘I think the government, like everyone else, accepts that government should comply with its legal obligations.’

Get that?

The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, whose principal duty is the maintenance of our courts’ independence, ordains that the principal legislative body of the United Kingdom – Parliament – must obey an alien institution.

The bloodiest war in our history at last established that the British sovereign does not have the power to overrule Parliament, yet the unelected Council of Europe, at least nine of whose members come from nations internationally deemed ‘not free’ or only ‘partly free’ (including Russia and Azerbaijan) can steamroller our Parliament.

This is colonialism.

So yes, my first aim is to help Britain to reclaim her own self-government as soon as possible so that we can handle our many problems as our habitat requires and as our people desire.

The deeper we sink into the European state, the more dependent we become and the greater the vacuum which will be created when at last we leave.

It happened in the Soviet Union, whose downfall was foreseeable a full twenty years before it happened. Too many people depended on it for their income. Too many children grew up with Soviet propaganda as their fairy-tales.

Taking government away from people turns them into dependent children and so delays the moment when they dare to reclaim their own lives. Every welfare payment, grant, regulation, intervention of government in health, parenting and other individual responsibility increases dependence and makes change harder.

And the worst of it is that government is bloody lousy at managing health, parenting, education and other individual responsibilities.

Nurses, parents, teachers and local communities are surprisingly good at it.

But today there are no structured communities, no institutions with discretionary authority and few local pubs or other forums to foster them.
There are no local leaders, youth leaders, councils or unions with clout who speak for their members rather than for some distant, theoretical party interest. There is little prospect of advancement for committed public servants outside the party structure.

‘
Liberta e partecipazione
’, sang a great Italian performer called Giorgio Gaber: ‘Liberty is participation.’

Participation in our society is profitless. The young have no cause beyond materialism. They have not even the connection with their tribes and their past afforded by education or religion. This last is only in part a consequence of EU regulations. It is symptomatic of prolonged gurdledummery, craven ‘multi-culturalism’ and resignation of responsibility to the incompetent.

So I have to admit that my vision of the future – even when we have taken the first essential step of leaving the EU – is far from rosy. There is a huge amount of readjustment to be done. We have to undo decades of destructive work by the professional politicians.

But one thing is certain. It cannot be done from inside the EU.

I once thought that renewal of the old institutions was the way, but it will no longer serve.

The old order is crumbling. The church is a busted flush. The upper house has been dismantled like a complex clock by a clumsy child who now can’t work out what goes where. The established political parties are losing their grip. Contempt for career politicians has never been greater. There are no recognisable personalities – let alone stars – in the Commons.  

The euro is all but bust, the US running enormous deficits. The maintenance of huge, top-heavy bureaucratic states is no longer sustainable in the modern world. Social mobility has rarely been less. Skills are no longer nurtured in the young because success is defined not by achievement or status within a community but by material possessions.  

Aspiration and originality are not encouraged in education. Even those pupils who aim for excellence are reined in because exams are all about replicating standard views and demonstrating that you correspond
to a specific, very low and so universally attainable government-ordained standard – not that you have thought.