Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  It took us many frustrating years, but, in the 2009 European elections, we suddenly found ourselves afforded the same amount of airtime and media coverage as our rivals. I was party leader by then, and running that campaign.

  At last I had a chance to express to the British people without snide interventions or dismissive sneers from pundits the message which so desperately needed to be expressed and the passions which had moved us and motivated our lives for so long.

  Because the public share so many of those passions and recognise sincerity on the rare occasions that they see it, we came second in that election.

  We were beaten only by the Tories. Their leader, David Cameron, made a stab at sincerity about Europe too. He made two pledges.

  The first was that his party would form a new Eurosceptic group – the European Conservatives and Reformists. So far, the ECR’s record is shameful. Without their support, that most curiously constituted butterfly José Manuel Barroso, who entered the chrysalis of political power a dedicated Maoist and miraculously emerged a ponderously flapping, right-of-centre social democrat, would not have been retained as EU Commission President.

  The second was a ‘cast-iron undertaking’ that the British people would be graciously permitted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

  Here is my Health and Safety warning: Do not let your infirm antecedents sit on a Tory-made bench on a hot day.

  Tory cast iron melts at a slightly lower temperature than ordinary people’s butter.

  Mere months after the election was won, the undertaking was withdrawn. It was replaced by a new one: to, er, reclaim for Britain various sovereign powers. He might just as well have undertaken to give every voter a million pounds and a luxury holiday on Venus, since any such alteration in the provisions of a European treaty requires the unanimous approval of other member-states.

  Needless to say, David Cameron knows full well that this will not be forthcoming.

  But hey, it sounds good, and we’re too stupid to know any better.

  Aren’t we?

  9

  THE COST OF FREEDOM

  The pre-election attack on me in 2009 had nothing to do with drink or doxies. This time, the Observer led the pack with an unimaginative claim that I had ‘boasted’ of taking £2 million in expenses from the EU system.

  The leader of the UK Independence Party, which wants to lead Britain out of the EU, has taken £2m of taxpayers’ money in expenses and allowances as a member of the European Parliament, on top of his £64,000 a year salary.

  Nigel Farage, who is calling on voters to punish ‘greedy Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem MPs’ at the European elections on 4 June, boasted of his personal expenses haul at a meeting with foreign journalists in London last week.

  The admission threatens to flatten a bounce in the polls for UKIP that has seen the party climb to around 17 per cent over the last fortnight as angry voters flock to smaller parties regarded as untainted by the Westminster expenses scandal.

  The story did not fly.

  It did not fly because, as soon became quite apparent to a perceptive reader, I was not boasting about an MEP’s expenses but condemning them.

  I had been asked by former Europe Minister Denis MacShane how much I had received in expenses over and above my salary since my election a decade earlier.

  The paper pretended that it had engineered a brilliant bit of investigative journalism and had caught me out by ingenious subterfuge in the public interest. My statement, it was claimed, had been ‘discreetly taped’. No, it hadn’t. The Foreign Press Association openly tapes all its debates with permission and posts them on its website. I was fully aware that I was on the record.

  Attempting to indicate the enormous cost to the taxpayer of maintaining a useless and unwanted employee, I told the gathering, ‘It is a vast sum. I don’t know what the total amount is but – oh lor – it must be pushing £2 million.’

  ‘Last night,’ the Observer continued, ‘as UKIP circulated new party literature saying Westminster MPs had “ripped off taxpayers”, Farage, who employs his wife to help run his office and pays her from his allowances, faced a backlash as opponents accused him of hypocrisy. MacShane suggested that UKIP’s attempt to pose as more honourable on expenses than other parties had been exposed as shameless and hollow.

  ‘“Far from being the party of the little man in Europe, Nigel Farage’s astounding £2m raid on the taxpayer shows he is up there with any other politician, happy to line his pockets with gold.”’

  And that, mes enfants, is how a dishonest news story is created.

  Since it is a subject which has been painfully central to the last decade of my existence, tells us a lot about the EU and is seldom truthfully discussed, I thought that I should tell the next section of the story as viewed through the prism of filthy lucre.

  *

  The common perception is that MEPs are on easy street – underworked, oversexed, overpaid and over there. And so they can be. So most of them are. It all depends how well (for which read poorly) you do your job.

  If you do your job for your employers (your constituents) really, really badly, you can live like a movie star. If you do it well, you can damned near go bust.

  An MEP’s basic salary is the same as that of an MP – some £65,000 per annum (of late enhanced a fair bit since we are now paid in euros and the pound is weak). Considering that I had had to employ a new man in my office at a cost of £40,000 to fill in for me in my absence, I was not exactly crowing when first I arrived in Brussels.

  But no matter. All I had to do was play the system.

  I at once learned about the travel expenses racket. We were awarded £600 for every return journey to Britain, no matter whether we flew club class, by economy airline, by train or in a shared car. We could have hitchhiked. As long as we submitted a boarding-pass or ‘proof of travel’, £600 was paid into our accounts without further question.

  I bought advance Ryanair tickets from Stansted for a fraction of that sum. Given that, as I have said, I had indefinite free parking at BAA airports and that a free limousine picked me up on arrival in Belgium or at Baden-Baden, I could easily have pocketed an extra £15,000 a year just for travel home for the weekends.

  So soon as this institutionalised corruption was explained to us, Jeffrey Titford and I broadcast it. Since there was no mechanism for returning the money, we agreed that we would not ‘pocket’ it but put it to good use in funding the victims of the EU.

  One such use became almost immediately apparent when, in July, 2000 some sad little undercover officer for Sunderland City Council entered one of Steve Thoburn’s three shops in the city and made a ‘test purchase’ of bananas, criminally advertised as selling at 25p per pound. They were selling at 25p per pound. They were, by all accounts, first-rate bananas. The price was a fair one. The crime lay in the fact that they were sold in pounds.

  Napoleon and his bureaucrats could not count without using their fingers. The EU wanted to homogenise the whole of Europe, whether the people of Europe wished to be homogenised or not. The infinitely superior Imperial weights and measures system which had evolved for purpose over centuries was thus a tiny tussock in the level playing-field. The EU brought out a fleet of steam-rollers and dreary little people with theodolites and spirit-levels.

  Steve Thoburn’s customers could count without using their fingers. They actually preferred to use pounds and ounces. So he let them.

  Soon afterwards, two further sad little trading standards officers (OK. They were ‘only obeying orders’, but they must have been sad for all that) arrived to impound Steve’s wicked scales. Since these were the tools of his trade, Steve not unreasonably objected. At that, the police were called.

  The scales were removed. Steve was compelled to buy dual-purpose scales at considerable expense and went right on selling in pounds and ounces because that was what his customers preferred. If they wanted to buy in kilograms, he was quite willing to let them do that too. He was liberal about the
se things.

  Despite understandable furore at this quite extraordinary, pointless exhibition of what can be achieved by a combination of weak brain and enormous power, Sunderland City Council decided to prosecute.

  Now we had the perfect use for our unwarranted travel expenses. We – well, the EU via us – also contributed to the defence fund of a publican charged with selling T-bone steaks on the bone and to fishermen’s organisations at a time when thousands were being put out of business. We then told the world what we were doing.

  The EU accepted that MEPs routinely pocketed their travel expenses for foie gras and floozies. That they should put the money to good use in their own communities was quite intolerable.

  Michael Charmier, director of finance for the European Parliament, summoned me to his office and presented me with a bill for £10,500 for excess expenses – the sum which I had publicly declared that I had thus far donated to causes which I deemed good. I protested that, had I retained the money for my own use, there would have been no problem, that the money was therefore mine and that how I elected to spend it was my business.

  Charmier now showed me how the rest of the parliament justified its expenses, at least to itself. ‘There shouldn’t be any excess!’ he objected. ‘After all, there are cups of coffee and newspapers to be paid for on your journey!’And, he might have added, excess baggage fees and hospital bills if MEPs insisted on spending £500 on newspapers and coffee on every Eurostar journey.

  Jeffrey was presented with a still larger bill.

  These were just the preliminary blows intended to soften us up. Now the parliament went in for the kill. We were called in by a quaestor.

  Richard Balfe had been a devout servant of the Labour Party but he became a still more devout servant of the EU. He had been so anxious to stand for the position of quaestor (financial overseer or senior prefect) in the parliament that, when his party forbade it, he defected to the Tories.

  He was a very shrewd political operator, one of those men who, even in so unwieldy and massive an organisation as the EU, can make things happen.

  His first words to Jeffrey and me were, ‘All right. Do you both want to be martyred?’

  ‘Martyrdom’ in this context meant that we would have to pay the outstanding bills and be under scrutiny day and night thereafter.

  ‘Or,’ Balfe continued, ‘the documents could be “misfiled”…’

  If we accepted a little creative misfiling, we could continue to accept the expenses and to contribute them to whatever cause we would, provided that we did not mention how we had spent the money.

  The stinking Golden Delicious cart must not be upset, because beneath that shiny pale-green top layer, the worms are feasting.

  It was a very difficult dilemma for us. They had known that it would be.

  If we were compelled to repay the money, we would attract a great deal of publicity and cause the EU a deal of embarrassment for a while, but we would be all but spent forces, monitored wherever we went and whatever we did. We would be compelled to withdraw our support for cases which depended on us and which were affording valuable and enduring intelligence to the general public about the practical consequences of European rule.

  We conceded.

  So now, officially, we drink our excess travel expenses – or rather, we spend them on coffee and newspapers – like every other law-abiding MEP.

  The biggest single expenses pot for MEPs is that for the General Expenditure Allowance, which works out at an average £3,500 per month per member. This is intended for running an office in the constituency, ‘relevant’ entertaining and travelling within the home member-state.

  I have been receiving the General Expenditure Allowance for ten years and have never yet had to prove that I have actually spent a penny of it. As it happens, I do not think that even my bitterest political foe will deny that I have been the hardest-working of all British MEPs, continually travelling around Britain (my battered Volvo records a punishing 30,000 miles a year in Britain alone), entertaining constituents and journalists and garnering constituents’ tales of injustice and woe.

  I spend considerably more than my General Expenditure Allowance, but then, I am known to my constituents, which I believe to be my principal duty since I purport to represent them. Can you name your MEPs or put faces to them? No? And yet they contrive to spend over £100 a day in your very area.

  I am afraid that I know plenty of British MEPs who live full-time in Brussels. They keep a single room office in their British constituencies, but it does not cost £42,000 a year.

  But they have much more important things to do. If they are working in their constituencies, they cannot claim the all-important Attendance Allowance.

  Yes. For clocking in at the EU Parliament, whether they do anything there or no, they receive £270 per day.

  Stay in Brussels, then, claiming the General Expenditure Allowance and remembering to drop in on the parliament daily, so proving that it is a working, democratic institution, and you are on easy street.

  No matter that your constituents never see you. You were appointed by your party anyhow, not returned by popular acclaim. You cannot lose your seat for abusing your constituents or ignoring them altogether and deciding that, although elected as a Lib Dem, you now represent the Charles Manson Memorial Trotskyite Mass-Murderers’ Party. This is not a representative parliament. It exists for show.

  By living like that, you can easily double your income as an MEP. Oh, and if you buy a stylish little apartment in Brussels on a mortgage, expenses will leave you with a nice capital nest-egg when at last you retire.

  Of course, there are other living expenses which must be taken into account. A man or woman must eat. Don’t worry. That too is taken care of. Over half of your voluminous correspondence consists of invitations. Every night of the year, you will be bidden to receptions and dinners. So long as you are prepared to accept fifth-rate company in exchange for the Krug and foie gras, you need want nothing more for the rest of your days.

  I knew that Tom Wise, one of the new intake of UKIP MEPs in 2004, was a wrong ’un when, two weeks after the election, I told him that there was to be a Gadflies dinner. (In that year, Conservative leader Michael Howard had dubbed UKIP ‘cranks and gadflies’. In the great British tradition of adopting an insult as a badge of honour which gave rise to the Old Contemptibles and the Tories’ own Vermin Club, I had founded a Gadflies dining-club, which meets once a month in Strasbourg.)

  Wise apologised. He had a prior dinner engagement, so he said, with the Sicilian League of Federalists.

  I was standing above him as he sat at his desk. Sooner than look at him as I ingested this outrageous intelligence, I looked at his computer. He had stuck a label at the top of his screen. It read, ‘HAVE YOU SIGNED IN YET?’

  Wise had always been fat and greedy. Now Billy Bunter was let loose in a confectionery factory carpeted with postal orders. We had lost him. I knew then that whatever tenuous loyalty he might have had to the party was gone.

  I stated as much, but it was not until the following year that we had it confirmed that Wise had built up ‘a surplus of funds’. I instantly raised the matter at the NEC and threatened to resign unless there were an investigation. The results of this investigation were alas suppressed by an excessively loyal leader.

  In the end, it was shown that Wise had used £36,000 of his permitted secretarial allowance of £125,000 to pay off credit cards and to buy a car, wines and other luxuries.

  Oh, he was far from the only MEP to abuse the system and his predations were small-change compared to some, but a lazy man can live a life of luxury without breaking any of the parliament’s rules. In UKIP, which exists not to exploit the system but to drag Britain out of it, such personal enrichment was mortal sin. Wise was in the end sentenced to two years imprisonment for fraud and money-laundering.

  For myself, I have no desire to drink tepid champagne with people with whom I have nothing in common. My colleagues and I drink at O�
��Farrells, the nearest proper pub to the parliament. We have to buy our own drinks, and it is by certain standards a dive, but it is a congenial dive, we can smoke there and anyhow, Farage’s First Law states that the quality of a drinking establishment is inversely correlated to the refinement of its décor.

  I regard my mission as telling the British people how they are being abused and their freedoms eroded. This involves driving thousands of miles and missing out on lots and lots of attendance allowances. Yes, I pay my wife a small income to handle my correspondence and diary, but she did the same work efficiently for several years unpaid, and would it somehow be preferable that I pay some mini-skirted intern instead?

  I stayed in hotels and pensions in Brussels and Strasbourg for my first seven years as an MEP. It was only when I was leader of the group and compelled to spend six or seven nights a month in Brussels that it plainly became at once more agreeable and economical to have a reliable base with a change of clothes in situ. I very deliberately did not buy, but now rent a flat which I share with my colleague Godfrey Bloom.

  When we took the flat, Bloom’s theory was that we would at last be able to get early nights. It hasn’t worked yet, but it sounds great.

  In 2002, I realised that I could no longer responsibly run Farage Futures and fulfil my responsibilities as an MEP. I closed down the company in good health. I ensured that every employee found a job. I thus lost my personal income and missed out on the biggest commodities boom of all time.

  I have spent my savings from the metals-trading days. I am now wholly dependent on my income as an MEP. My former colleagues in the City earn more in a month than I in a year.

  I think that I can claim, Mr MacShane, that my eccentric passion for freedom, so far from ‘lining my pockets with gold’, has cost me millions.

  I am not out to score political points, but would gently point out in the interests of justice that the Europhile Mr MacShane claimed £125,000 over the period 2001–2008 for the scruffy garage attached to his home which served, so he said, as his constituency office, a further £135,000 in second-home allowances and over £400,000 for staff salaries, as well as some £20,000 or so per annum in Incidental Expenses provision.