Tim Congdon's latest email and Farage's failings

The above arrived in my inbox recently. Tim stands out in Farage's EUKIP. He is intelligent, a good economist and honest. I cannot say the same of EUKIP's ruling Cabal of which Tim is a semi-detached member at worst.

Tim makes 3 main points:

He wants a balanced budget, that UKIP will not fight elections as part of a pan-European party and Nigel Farage will be included in any televised national debates on the 2014 and 2015 elections.

Taking his points one by one its quite a long time since the UK last had a balanced budget roughly the 2 years either side of 2000 but Tim's points that saving our £8bn net contribution to the EU plus his contentious estimate that getting rid of unnecesssary EU regulation would save about £20bn annually.

To that I would add the politically difficult but financially uncontentious action that axing the whole foreign aid budget and the ODA department would save £11bn annually. Its not so hard if you have the political will to balance the books.

These are simple figures but Farage failed to get similar figures across in his recent Radio 5 interview with Victoria Derbyshire. Click on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ccbm9 to hear the shambles. He chose to bat on NHS and welfare both difficult wickets. Incidentally Mr F it was Bismark who first brought in old age pensions. Farage's problem is he does not do detail. This failing will be increasingly targetted by the media. La Derbyshire is not a premier league financial journalist! He certainly needs Tim Congdon but Tim is not good at communicating to Joe Public so UKIP has a big problem still.

His second has already brought him into conflict with Farage at Torquay three years ago when Tim and Trevor got a motion passed barring Farage fro joining such a PEP. This produced the usual petulant display from Farage claiming Tim and Trevor had just cost him a million pounds. For this reason, EU money for NF, Farage's EUKIP will fight sooner or later as a PEP in the UK.

The last point is the easiest to reply to. There won't be any TV leader's debates in 2014 and 2015. Last time it was a one off by GB to scupper call me Dave. It worked and saddled Dave with Cleggy. Remember GB's frequent repetition of the phrase I agree with Nick! Dave has learned his lesson and if he has not Tory high command has!