Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  Then, on 29 May 2005, came France’s turn. The ‘No’ side was desperately short of cash, so I organised a whip-round amongst the MEPs. Each of us receives some €50,000 per annum from the ‘information budget’, which is intended for the promotion of the MEP and the dissemination of knowledge about the EU. We were disseminating information about the EU, even if it was not the information which they particularly wished disseminated. Between us, we raised €200,000 which we handed to Philippe de Villiers, president of the Vendée and head of the ‘No’ movement.

  Five days before the referendum, I scored a major coup.

  One of the team, the indefatigable and inventive Gawain Towler, had suggested that I submit a written question regarding the hospitality and holidays which Commissioners had received since their nominations.

  We received no official answer. The Commission met, as ever, in strict secrecy, claimed a right of privacy and declared that there had been no impropriety. A public-spirited Commission vice-president, however, leaked the truth to Die Welt. The Commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, had spent a week on the yacht of Greek shipping billionaire Spiro Latsis.

  There is no reason, of course, why the charming Mr Barroso, a former Maoist social democrat, should not cavort on gin-palaces with one of the world’s richest men, but it had surely been more tactful not to have done so just a month before the Commission approved a €10.3 million contract with Latsis’s shipping company.

  It also emerged that the ubiquitous Peter Mandelson had spent New Year’s Eve on Octopus, the yacht of Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, off St Barthélemy.

  Again, it may well have been that their conversations on that festive night were merely about yachts, of which Mandelson has since, though a socialist, shown himself to be an aficionado and of which Octopus is a notable specimen, boasting two helicopters on the top deck (one up front and one at the back), a 63-foot tender (just one of seven aboard), a pool and, er … two submarines.

  It would again have been better, however, had Mandelson not had his dubious record and had Microsoft not at the time been the subject of a major EU investigation. The Commission had the previous year fined Microsoft £355 million for abusing its near monopoly in the software market. The Commission was still battling with the company, of which Allen was a major shareholder, as to how they could verify compliance, and had the power to impose a daily fine of five per cent of Microsoft’s huge global turnover.

  In such circumstances, although no impropriety was or is alleged, it is clearly inappropriate that a Trade Commissioner should be linking arms and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the company’s founder.

  These revelations caused a sensation. For once, MEPs of all political complexions and origins were shocked at their secretly self-appointed masters’ total disregard for the electors. I had to muster the signatures of just 10 per cent of them to compel Barroso to appear before the parliament, there to face examination and a motion of censure.

  Given the number of members who had expressed their disgust, I thought that it would be easy enough to find seventy-five, but, of course, the great machine ground into action. A Maltese socialist who had signed the petition mysteriously withdrew. It was then announced that all Socialists who signed would be expelled.

  The British Tories were also forbidden to sign. To their enormous credit, six of them defied the whip and signed notwithstanding. The gallant Roger Helmer had the whip withdrawn in consequence.

  For all this, I got my signatures. The Commission could not for once bully its way out of at least some accountability. I was still an inept virgin as far as parliamentary procedure was concerned, but our secretary general in the Ind/Dem group, Herman Verheirstraeten, works the parliament’s arcane mechanisms with the same – to me mystifying – skill and ingenuity as an eleven-year-old with his laptop. He somehow worked it so that the debate would be held in Brussels just four days before the French were to vote.

  It was a scene reminiscent of a real democratic debating chamber. There was excitement and bustle – a rare sense that we, the members, might make a difference. As with the election of the Commission, there could be no censure of individual Commissioners but only of the entire body. In a scene which, I fear, will be seen again in far darker days, all twenty-five Commissioners were on parade. I proposed the motion of censure.

  Barroso continued to plead that his holidays were nobody’s business but his own. In a dazzling rhetorical flourish which I last encountered at prep-school, he sullenly informed an awestruck world that ‘Mr Farage would never be found on a luxury yacht because he has no friends!’

  I reeled, I can tell you.

  Roger Helmer had discovered that he was permitted to make interventions. Here was one man to whom we are always delighted to yield the floor. ‘Does Mr Farage agree that the EPP Group has tried to stop us from supporting the motion and that this has been supported by the leader of the British Conservatives, Timothy Kirkhope, and does he not think such action reprehensible?’

  I simply said, ‘Yes.’

  There was much laughter, and Roger was at once booted out of the EPP.

  We lost the debate, of course. That had been a foregone conclusion. British media coverage was minimal. That had been a foregone conclusion too. They just sort of whistled and thrust their hands in their pockets and talked about the weather or something. Throughout continental Europe, however, the whole story was massive. After the Barrot affair, it seems to have established me as the public voice for the millions of Eurosceptics throughout the continent.

  On the Sunday before the referendum, I addressed 7,000 passionate French activists at a rally in Paris. My French is, frankly, épouvantable (or bloody awful – one of the few words which I have somehow picked up), and I can only pray that my accent was a little less shameful than that of arch-supranationalist Heath. I read a text prepared and rehearsed with my staff. When in doubt, I returned to my mantra, ‘Dites-leur NON!’

  A kindly commentator named Michelle Draye recorded that I had made my speech in ‘un français parfait’. I worry for her hearing, but love her for her optimism.

  I returned to France on the night when the results were announced. I smiled weakly at Barrot who was also there. I refrained from asking him just how it felt to have misappropriated just less than the Great Train Robbers and to have been rewarded not with a life sentence but with a huge income, pension and mastery over a continent. I was too busy praying.

  God bless the bolshy, determined, truculent, independent French. We may on occasion curse them because we have so often been the victims of that truculence, but, unlike so many of our countrymen and women, they know how to stand up for their own. They had suffered for centuries under an autocratic monarchy and oligarchy. They did not want to accept the domination of a far less elegant but equally impervious version.

  Sixty-two per cent of them had turned out, and 55 per cent of them had said ‘No’. I was that night kissed by a vast number of French women – and men, there were lots of delightful and this time voluntary European unions and we did wonderful things for the French balance of payments, particularly that of the Epernay region.

  Three days later, the results of the Dutch referendum were announced. The Brussels parliament was in session, but we organised a small informal party in the Press Bar. The result was better than even we had hoped. Some 62 per cent of the Dutch people – who, like the French, have memories of obedience to force majeure and do not like it – had voted. An overwhelming 61 per cent of these had delivered a resounding ‘No’.

  Again, the champagne corks popped and the cheers rang through the building. Our small, informal gathering rapidly became a large and chaotic piss-up.

  We had done it!

  No fewer than 64.3 million French citizens and 16.4 million Dutch had been asked if they wished to cede self-determination and had democratically stated that they did not. In a sane and decent world which played by the rules, that was the end of the Constitution.

  I wa
s brimming over with champagne, gratitude and goodwill, but I swear that I was not crowing – or not outwardly at least – when I saw German arch-federalist and socialist Jo Leinen on the corridor, walked out to him and offered him a glass of champagne. I was simply being gracious in victory.

  ‘Bad luck, Jo,’ I said. ‘Come and have a drink with us anyway.’

  He fixed me with a glare and made a noise as though they were moving a piano on bare boards down in his gut. ‘You may have your little victory tonight,’ he said softly and very precisely, spitting out the words in soft chunks, ‘but we have fifty different ways to win…’

  He stalked on.

  The blood drained from my face and neck as I watched him go.

  I knew that I was no longer living in a Europe which respected the will of the people, but I had never realised that its leaders could so explicitly reject their employers’ clearly stated desires.

  Leinen the socialist and lover of the people had just declared that he despised the people. He and his friends belonged to an autonomous, totalitarian ruling class. The people were wholly irrelevant.

  The rules stated that all member-states must ratify the Constitution if it were to proceed, so why, after so unequivocal a rejection, did the Luxembourg referendum proceed? Lord knows. Perhaps the Commission wished to claim that the score was 2-2, for all that Luxembourg’s total population is a trifle smaller than that of Croydon.

  In Luxembourg, as in Spain, we thought that we had no hope. Fifteen per cent of the entire duchy’s GDP comes from the EU institutions on its soil. Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to resign should the people vote ‘No’. The media were unanimously in favour. The parliament had already voted ‘Yes’.

  Jens-Peter Bonde and I paid a visit to see if we could lend a hand. We discovered the ‘No’ faction to have no funding and no infrastructure. At the meeting which we addressed, there seemed to be just a motley but charming collection of libertarians with widely different and sometimes very odd agendas.

  We underestimated Luxembourg and the sturdy independence which had kept her autonomous and fighting for freedom for so long, even when invaded. The ‘Yes’ faction won, but only by 56 per cent. Considering that 40 per cent of the population consists of first-generation EU and eastern European immigrants, this is a remarkable and far from unequivocal result.

  At this point, the EU appeared to concede. The Czech and Irish referendums were cancelled and those declared in Portugal, Poland, Denmark and the UK indefinitely postponed.

  And now they started playing dirty.

  14

  LIARS, CHEATS AND FRAUDS

  In December 2005, Britain’s six months’ tenure of the EU’s rotating presidency came to an end and Blair came to the parliament.

  I confess that, when he had come six months earlier, I had been impressed. The parliament did not like Blair. He had stuck with America in his (not demonstrably Britain’s) venture in Iraq without first asking the permission of the EU. Britain still remained outside the Eurozone. Blair was a heretic. Some day soon, he could be branded a criminal for such disgraceful autonomous behaviour. At present, he was just an unpopular dissenter.

  He was brilliant. He sold himself as an ardent pro-European. We must encourage the people of Europe, he said. We must speak their language and not become entirely alienated from them. Under Britain’s presidency, the EU would get rid of unnecessary regulations and reform the Common Agricultural Policy…

  Much to Blair’s surprise, no doubt, I did not subject him to the habitual Farage barrage. If, I said, he was successful in deregulating the economy and in translating its words and actions to the people, I for one would support him.

  Even members of the group later accused me of treason, but I not only meant every word – had Blair indeed succeeded, I would have shaken his hand – but I knew that he was destined to fail and to fail ignominiously. Every least alteration to parliamentary protocols requires unanimity, and the prospect of unanimity was nil.

  I was still impressed by Blair at a lunch later in his presidency. Here was a man who could think on his feet. He nursed a single glass of wine throughout, though the carafe remained in front of him. In the end, I became fed up with such ‘bogarting’ and had to ask, ‘Pass the wine, please, Prime Minister.’

  He looked mildly surprised, but he passed it.

  At the end of the presidency in December, Blair returned to the parliament to report. For once, seating was ad hoc rather than hierarchical. The UKIP members behaved like stereotypical Germans with beach-towels. We rushed into the chamber so soon as the doors opened and occupied all of the second row. Godfrey Bloom wore a deerstalker and carried a meerschaum. When asked why, he explained that he was looking for the French concession.

  None of Blair’s declared intentions had been fulfilled. He was haggard and ashen. The sparkle in his eye had faded and sunk back like a lately brilliant fish thrown back dead into the ocean in accordance with Common Fisheries Policy. He had been up for most of the night, arguing with Chirac, attempting to salvage something – anything – from the presidency. He was no longer impressive.

  Now I let him have it. I pointed out that, so far from reducing regulation, he had overseen the passing of a further 3,350 legislative acts, that there had been no sign of economic reform, that he had pledged that there would be no surrender of the British rebate but that he had signed away £7 billion of it and that, so far from reforming the CAP, he had extracted a tentative commitment that the EU would review spending on agriculture in three years’ time.

  ‘Why should British taxpayers pay for new sewers in Budapest and a new underground system in Warsaw,’ I demanded, ‘when our own public services are crumbling in London? …Your budget deal is game, set and match to President Chirac. No cheese-eating surrender-monkey he. Unlike you, he stands up for French national interests not some bizarre notion of Europe, and he has outclassed you and outplayed you at every turn…’

  Everything which happens in the hemicycle is filmed, but for some mysterious reason, the official film of Blair’s response has vanished. Those who saw it, however, will testify that the man simply lost it. He turned crimson. He screamed. He pointed at the Union Jacks which stood on the desks before us and yelled, ‘You – you sit behind your country’s flags but you don’t represent your country’s interests. We’re in 2005, not 1945! We’re not at war with these people!’

  This last reflects Blair’s greatest folly. He believes his own rhetoric about modernity. Maybe he reads history, but, if so, it is as many a tourist wanders an historic site, sincerely believing that those who built its buildings and lived amongst them were perforce savages, moved by emotions which we have somehow miraculously outgrown. When asked what his food strategy was, he merely blinked and said that ‘Britain has no food strategy’ because, of course, plagues and wars and fuel blockades and the like are things of the past.

  In the modern era, there will always be beans from Kenya and prepacked grated Reggiano Parmesan from Italy. If Britain should run short of wheat, she can always get it from Canada or Poland. Time has stopped. We have reached a Brave New World where everyone believes in peace, justice and equality.

  He does not realise that 1914 and 1939 were really quite modern in their time, and that the less educated people thought then too that they had attained the highest development of humankind. He does not realise that every man-made building, alliance and empire must crumble into its constituent parts and that preparedness, now as always, is all that we can offer in the way of guarantees of safety.

  I pray with all my heart that all nations will be mutually supportive friends. I believe it slightly less than I believe in Father Christmas.

  And there, I think, lies the greatest difference between us. The EU is built on wholly unwarranted faith. Architects tell us that even in the great Gothic cathedrals whose components have been carefully selected and fashioned for their functions, ‘the arch never sleeps’ – that there are constant strains pulling this wa
y and that – and even these must one day fall.

  So too an alliance such as the United States, built with the consent of all its people, can exist for centuries but will still one day founder. The European Union is a Lego construct, forced together by an impatient child regardless of the shapes and colours of the pieces. Its components strain against one another before it has even been completed.

  Blair, Barroso and the rest of them, like the child builder, see the magnificent palace in their minds’ eyes but forget that the arch never sleeps and that ill-assorted pieces will not adhere for long.

  But then Blair’s contribution to modernity, his Ozymandias-style memorial and, by his own admission, the symbol of his government was a gigantic, £789 million glass-fibre fabric blister on the banks of the Thames.

  The Dome’s life expectancy is sixty years. I’ll bet it outlives the European Union.

  I have since flayed Gordon Brown, who sat stolidly chewing the cud and looked like an impatient preacher attempting to ignore a resonant fart in the middle of his sermon, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, who schmoozed all the usual Europhile suspects (Cohn-Bendit, Watson, Schulz, Daul etc.) and had them wriggling in their seats like excited puppies, but came back at me fiercely again and again and plainly enjoyed the debate because later, at the Elysée, he preferred to enjoy cigars and talk with the man who had given him hell – now there’s a politician for you – than with the more deferential. Sarkozy likes a cigar and respects an enemy.

  None of them ever lost his or her cool like Blair.