by Nigel Farage
He came back. I held my breath…
He said yes.
It may seem that my being so well-known in the party made re-election straightforward. It doesn’t work that way. My years at the front also meant that I had the most enemies. I produced a video. I made my own campaign website.
I was to appear on Question Time in my capacity as an MEP, but Bannerman’s office telephoned to object, so the BBC had to find a replacement. Since this was widely perceived as placing Bannerman’s interests above those of the party, it probably made his already low vote still lower. In the end, he polled just 14 per cent, Tim 21 per cent and I was returned with 61 per cent.
The result was announced on 5 November 2010, the same day that the Election Court declared Phil Woolas’s election as Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth null and void on the grounds that he had made false election statements. We were back in action, with my colleague Paul Nuttall standing in the resulting by-election and winning 5.8 per cent of the vote.
Soon afterwards, an aggrieved Bannerman, who was distinctly uncertain that he would be reselected by UKIP, handed his seat – entrusted to UKIP by UKIP voters – and his services to the Tories.
*
Maybe UKIP supporters are naturally sporting and are accustomed to outsiders beating the odds (though keeping an eye on the bottom line) whilst those who stick to the established parties prefer to stick with favourites. One way or another, however, we have enjoyed a great deal of precious support from bookies.
It has been said – quite wrongly, of course – that there is something of the rails bookie in me, a certain bonhomie, perhaps, a taste for flash suits and a willingness to take a punt.
The loyal, practical but ever adventurous Alan Bown is of that traditional variety – an independent businessman, ready to take his own risks and to accept the hard knocks without complaint.
Stuart Wheeler, although similarly resilient and sporting, is of another kind. An old Etonian barrister and investment banker with a keen mind and a passion for games of chance, he transformed the betting industry as one of the most successful pioneers of spread-betting, which enables punters to take positions on the fluctuations of stocks, shares, gold, currencies, oil or the number of times a sportsman will spit or fall over during a game. His sort of betting is regulated by the Financial Services Authority rather than the Gambling Commission.
For us in the City, already betting daily on fluctuating markets, spread-betting offered a chance to back our judgement on our own account with tax-free profits. Stuart’s IG Index was one of the giants. It made him a very rich man and enabled him to buy the truly stunning Jacobean Chilham Castle in Kent.
It was here that I was invited to lunch with Alan and Stuart, two very different, very sensible men linked by a love of speculation, of independence and of play.
Stuart had already given us £100,000 after David Cameron broke his cast-iron pledge on Lisbon. He had been expelled from the Conservative Party for his pains.
Now I wanted to ask him to give us something more precious still – his time, energy, financial acumen and contacts as our party treasurer.
There was a distinctly suspicious look in his eye at first. I think he thought that I was trying to lock him in as a donor. I wasn’t. These two men were rich because they were imaginative, brilliant at appraising odds, at marketing and at coordinating disparate elements to one end.
It was a great moment for me when Stuart accepted. Again, the leader’s job became easier. I could run the group in Europe and act as representative and spokesperson in the UK, knowing that the admin and the finances were in far more expert hands than mine.
Alan, meanwhile, had been subject to the most extraordinary, prolonged persecution. Since first he sent a £1,000 cheque to us in 2003, he had given us well over £1m and a wealth of good advice. Between December 2004 and February 2006, his donations totalled £349,216. During that period, he had as ever been resident in the UK but had not been on the electoral register.
Why, he could not say. Maybe, by his own admission, he had simply omitted to fill in the form or, having filled it in, to post it. Maybe he had posted it and Royal Mail had contrived to lose it. It did not really matter – or should not have mattered.
The 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act was intended to stop expat, foreign and anonymous donors from having undue influence. Alan, with his loud check suits, leather elbow-pads and bluff manner is very plainly British, has never been an expat and is anything but anonymous. A retired businessman making openly declared donations in good faith should not have earned more than a gentle slap on the wrist from the Electoral Commission.
Instead, they came down on him – and us – like a precisely targeted ton of bricks.
It had been an error. Alan accepted it. So did we. We had checked that he was on the register when he made his first donations in 2003. It had never occurred to any of us to check whether he was still on the register the following year. He had been a UK resident all his life. His was a British business. We offered to repay £14,481 – the amount that we had received after we had become aware of the oversight.
Elcom wanted blood. They demanded that the whole sum be declared forfeit. We offered to pay it back to Alan. No. It must be confiscated like a drug-dealer’s profits. We fought all the way through the courts over years. Alan was placed under enormous strain and generously underwrote legal fees which, by the time the High Court ruled against us, topped £250,000. Stuart was also resolute and committed to the case.
We went to the Supreme Court…
And what remains of British justice showed the common sense and fairness that had always been its hallmark it was usurped by bureaucratic rules and regulations. On 29 July 2010, their Lordships resolved by a 4–3 majority that the spirit of the law outweighed its letter.
A familiar conflict, then, between overzealous jobsworths at Elcom (our own punchy Party Secretary, Michael Zuckerman, took one look at the Elcom representatives and announced, ‘This lot are so bad they were rejected by DEFRA’) and judges committed to fairness? So you might think, but the BBC’s Michael Crick raised another, more disturbing angle:
Spot the difference(s):
Case A: Alan Bown gave a political party £363,697
1) It was his money
2) He had a business trading in this country, making him eligible to donate money
3) He was not on the electoral register when he donated although he was the year before, and also the year afterwards.
Case B: Michael Brown gave a political party £2.4m
1) It was not his money, he had defrauded it
2) His business was not trading in the UK, so therefore he was ineligible to donate money
3) He was not on the electoral register; neither was he the year afterwards, nor the year before.
Do you see the difference(s)?
Well the main difference is that the Electoral Commission has doggedly pursued the Alan Bown donation, and won an appeal forcing the party to give up the money, despite a judge previously ruling that the political party that received it had acted in good faith.
In the Michael Brown case the Electoral Commission has always maintained the political party acted in good faith and need not repay money. Although following the criminal proceedings against Mr Brown they have re-opened an investigation, it has not yet had any result and they have not managed to say when, if ever, it will.
Oh yes there is one other difference: this year the Political Parties and Elections Act went through Parliament, and among other things it restructured the Electoral Commission and gave it new funding and powers. The political party in Case A, UKIP, has no MPs and only three representatives in the House of Lords (where the government has no majority and is particularly vulnerable to amendments). The political party in Case B, the Liberal Democrats, has 63 MPs and 71 members of the House of Lords (where the government has no majority and is particularly vulnerable to amendments).
At least those ar
e the difference that I can see. Perhaps you can suggest others?
In 2005, Brown, a convicted fraudster, gave £2.4m to the Lib Dems. As Crick says, not a penny of that money was his. He had stolen at least £36m from investors. He lived in Majorca. The shell company through which he made his donations, Fifth Avenue Partners Ltd, was not, so far as anyone knows, trading in the UK.
And, in October 2006, the Electoral Commission – that same Electoral Commission pursuing us relentlessly through the courts for an administrative error – declared:
The Electoral Commission has previously made clear its view that it was reasonable for the Liberal Democrats – based on the information available to them at the time – to regard the donations they received from 5th Avenue Partners Ltd in 2005, totalling just over £2.4m, as permissible. It remains the Commission[’]s view that the Liberal Democrats acted in good faith at that time, and the Commission is not re-opening the question of whether the party or its officers failed to carry out sufficient checks into the permissibility of the donations. Nevertheless, we have always said that if any additional information that has a bearing on the permissibility of the donations comes to light, we would consider the matter further. It is not clear to the Commission that 5th Avenue Partners Ltd was carrying on business in the UK at the time the donations were made.
Brown remains a fugitive. The Liberal Democrats retain his victims’ stolen money. Level playing-ground, anyone?
18
SURVEYING THE WRECKAGE
‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,’ Wellington is supposed to have said.
I may not be quite so gloomy but, certainly, I find little joy today in seeing my predictions fulfilled.
Over the past few years, the EU has been crumbling about our ears. As ever, hubris – that overweaning arrogance and ambition which believes that it can dispense with eternal laws – shudders to hear the footfalls of Nemesis approaching.
Democracy and nationhood were hard won in the blood and suffering of millions. Every one of the EU’s founders and those who have plotted its ascendancy have been given the power to do so only by means of that democracy, trusted by their people to work for the good of their people. Every one of them has betrayed that trust and has worked, behind his or her employers’ backs, to give away the very basis of their power.
It is strangely fitting, then, that Nemesis should first make her presence felt in Greece, her own home and that of democracy.
I am on record as having predicted for more than twelve years that Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and maybe Italy could not, should not, be shoe-horned into a fictitious economic union with their northern brethren.
I have stated over and over that the euro was a weapon in a political project, not an economic one, and that in consequence economic realities were being ignored in the cause of the political class and at the expense of their people.
I warned that, unless we faced up to the truth and allowed nations to respond to their own particular needs and to survive on their own terms, the consequences would be dire and the people forced, in the absence of any other potency, to resort to civil unrest and, if resisted, violence.
It gives me no pleasure to see the unholy alliance of bankers and professional politicians now passing the vast cost of their imperialist dreams onto the people of Europe.
Neither class can afford to be proved wrong, so they keep buying their own debts with our money in order to keep the EU and the banks afloat and force us to pay the price.
It sickens me to see the people of Greece and Spain on the streets, demanding relief from terms imposed upon them by their masters’ undemocratic aspirations.
Stability in the economies of Europe came from voluntary, non-contractual linkage to the Deutschmark, allowing fluctuations and trade. Unification and compulsory standardisation have conferred no benefits but have destroyed such stability and hobbled economies already under stress.
It is as though a body’s limbs and reflexes had surrendered their power to react autonomously and must now refer to a distant, conscious brain for prior permission to flinch from a flame.
The head has made sure that it is exceptionally comfortable. It regards flinching as rebellion. It wants the limbs bound.
The euro meant that credit was still available in countries with galloping inflation. They were unable to raise interest rates or to devalue. They were led by the nose into bankruptcy.
Political fantasy cannot cancel out economic truth.
In 2008, Iceland went bust. It devalued the krona by two thirds. It raised interest rates to 18 per cent. It let the established banks go under and started afresh. In 2010, the United Nations named Iceland the seventeenth most developed country in the world and the fourth most productive per capita. Iceland took its medicine and is now well on the road to recovery.
So I derive no pleasure from being proved right, particularly since the EU politicians’ response to the proof of their own folly was simply to bind the people tighter into their scheme, though there was no reason to suppose that a second or third bailout would prove any more effective than the first.
Now, in sustaining the ECB and their pet banks as they pour good money after bad in the fanatical belief that their vision of union must survive at any cost – save to them, of course – the politicians are condemning the people and, still worse, their children and grandchildren to work and suffer as galley-slaves on the doomed ship EU, even though she is holed and listing.
I can see a future for the euro. It may be that Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and maybe even France might share a currency, but this, whatever it may be called, will be an extended Deutschmark economy which will cause its own problems.
Even in the face of, to me, self-evident truth, I am a democrat. If the people of Europe had wanted all this, I must concede.
But the people of Europe never wanted the euro.
Only two countries were ever even offered a choice about joining the single currency. Both rejected the option out of hand. And the market’s lessons are seeping through to the streets. The evidence is continually mounting that the peoples of Europe want control of their own affairs.
Take the Finns. The redoubtable Timo Soini joined us in the European Parliament in 2009. Formerly Secretary General of the Finnish Rural Party and decidedly rustic in appearance though rarely without his Millwall FC supporters’ scarf, Timo founded the anti-EU True Finns party and won Finland’s highest personal vote share in the European elections.
He and his assistant Jukka Jusula were a breath of fresh Finnish air in stuffy Brussels and Strasbourg. They gazed about them in horror, just as we had done, as we showed them about the vast, lavish palaces to bureaucracy and explained their workings. They joined our group and regularly attend Gadfly dinners, where Timo eats and quaffs heartily and Jukka smokes his cigars.
For all the noise and the joviality, Timo is seriously bright. He has a rare gift for filleting complex data and serving it up in a form palatable to the man or woman in the street. As he famously wrote of the bail-outs in the Wall Street Journal,
It is not the little guy who benefits. He is being milked and lied to in order to keep the insolvent system running. He is paid less and taxed more to provide the money needed to keep this Ponzi scheme going. Meanwhile, a symbiosis has developed between politicians and banks: our political leaders borrow ever more money to pay off the banks, which return the favor by lending ever more money back to our governments.
In a true market economy, bad choices get penalized. Instead of accepting losses on unsound investments – which would have led to the probable collapse of some banks – it was decided to transfer the losses to taxpayers via loans, guarantees and opaque constructs such as the European Financial Stability Fund.
The money did not go to help indebted economies. It flowed through the European Central Bank and recipient states to the coffers of big banks and investment funds.
Further contrary to the offi
cial wisdom, the recipient states did not want such ‘help’, not this way. The natural option for them was to admit insolvency and let failed private lenders, wherever they were based, eat their losses.
That was not to be. Ireland was forced to take the money. The same happened to Portugal…
Alas, Timo was not to remain long with us. I visited Finland as his guest in order to address an impassioned audience. In the 2011 Finnish parliamentary election, the True Finns won a staggering 19.1 per cent of the votes – just 1.5 per cent short of absolute victory. Timo himself scored the highest vote of all candidates in the entire election.
The Finns love Timo. More to the point, the Finns do not wish to sacrifice their own autonomy and prosperity on the EU pyre.
The Danish People’s Party, with 13.8 per cent at national elections, 15.3 per cent at the European elections and ever growing support from the young, have been essential to recent governing coalitions. They have radically changed the EU and immigration debate in Denmark and have seen border-controls reintroduced in defiance of the Schengen ‘Agreement’.
Norway continues to reject EU membership and to prosper. Eurobarometer, the official EU gauge of support for their project, shows that the majority of Swedes and Britons have no confidence in the purported Union and recognise few benefits from membership.
Even the people of Germany – with France the biggest beneficiaries of European integration – are only tenuously committed to the project.
In September 2010, I was in Berlin at the invitation of the Four Professors, economists who were posing a legal challenge to the Greek bailout. They pointed out – quite correctly – that there was no provision for any such thing in the treaties and that it threatened the very stability to which all other members of the Eurozone had signed up.
It was all very John le Carré. The meeting was held at a disused factory in the old East Berlin. The walls were decorated with extensive multicoloured graffiti of the sort that will never find its way to Tate Modern. One hundred violent demonstrators were gathered outside. Security men with walkie-talkies bustled us across a bomb-site to a back door.
