Farage excellent on AM show today but what next?

To coin a phrase you could not put a cigarette paper between my views on the EU and Nigel Farage's. I think he has to develop and back up a lot of his gut instincts with facts and links to serious writers and further action. To do this he needs a good team which he has not got. The players are there but he just is not picking them. He is a poor manager in that respect.

The Farage troll SDP gives a fair summary of his main interview points thus:

1/ None of the the leaders of the 3 major political parties have ever had a proper job.

2/ UKIP will say job done when Britian is a self governing nation.

3/ The question is does Britain want to be just a province of a country called Europe.

4/ 40% of Britain's overseas trade is with the EU but this percentage is falling.

5/ Britain runs a £46 billion pounds a year trade deficit with the EU

6/ Laws from the EU are damaging British business

7/ No co-operation or coalitions with David Cameron because he is not to be trusted.

8/ UKIP is not racist and is the only party that has a ban on former BNP members

All good stuff but against a better interviewer than Jeremy Vine a few of these assertions, particulary point 8, might have come under closer scrutiny.

EUKIPs pressing need is to quickly assemble a team of business people to rebut the baseless allegations of Branson, Sorrel and ram home the message that leaving EU control does not mean being excluded from the single market.

Simon Wolfson, CEO of Next, does this in his brilliant piece in today's Sunday Telegraph entitled, "I back the singlemarket - but not at any cost". Click on link to read it. He comes from a long line of savvy Jewish busnessmen who have also been great philanthropists in the UK.

I cannot improve on his writing so please read it for yourself but I give a few quotes plus some expansion and explanation but it is all very good

"But, although leaving would be difficult, I reject the argument that says the benefits of a single market require us to stay in at any cost. Particularly if that cost is an ever more powerful EU.

What business wants is very simple: a single market, not a federal Europe. Britain joined the EU to participate in a common market and help shape its rules. We did not sign up to the inexorable march to a federal Europe."

"These scare tactics are all too familiar to me. They were the same threats used by the same people when they urged us to join the euro. I remember their warnings of economic isolation and ruin.

Yet Britain's trade with Europe grew despite remaining outside the euro, while many that joined the single currency find themselves saddled with hyper-unemployment and permanent recession. The scaremongers were wrong then, they are wrong today. Their concerns are a poor excuse for stifling debate."

Yes indeed Lord Wolfson, they were also the same scare tactics used in Wislon's fixed 1975 refererendum that kept us in this disastrous project. He quotes exports to the EU as £200 bn annually. That makes our imports from the EU £250 bn! The philes can huff and puff but EU are not going to throw that amount of exports to us away. It would increase EU unemployment even further. That is the sort of thing that brings governments down.

On the CAP bribe for French farmers Wolfson writes, " The Common Agricultural policy is downright protectionist. It hinders the economies of countries we should help in Africa, while pushing up food prices for Europeans."

Abolishing the CAP would do far more for development of the poor parts of the world than all the foreign aid put together and multiplied by 10! Jack Kennedy knew that but Barroso and his ilk ignore to keep their useless project in being. They want to rival the US. Can they not see that US success stems from its democratic political and econom,ic system and gold standard Supreme Court justice.

"If other "core" countries want to forge a new federal state then let us wish them well. Let them build one, with all the regulation, loss of democracy and expense that involves.

But we do not have to join in, certainly not for the sake of our continued participation in making the rules that govern the single market."

and most tellingly on the EU integration argument,

"They have unwittingly exposed the truth of the matter. They know that deeper integration will make them less competitive. They tacitly admit that more Europe means more damaging rules and regulations. 

That should be a concern to all Europeans, whether Britain stays or not.

Many continental European businessmen quietly agree. Germans who are unhappy that their taxes are being used to prop up countries they regard as profligate; Spaniards who wonder if the euro will condemn their economy to never-ending recession and hyper-unemployment."

Had I still been on UKIP's NEC I would go tomorrow to sit outside Simon Wolfson's office to try and get him and like minded busness men to speak out in TV forums on these views. I am sure Jeff Randall on Sky would facilitate such a show.

Simon Wolfson's grandfather whose generosity funded my grant to study at Oxford would rightly have been very proud of him!