Flying Free by Farage Nigel

Author:Farage, Nigel [Farage, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781849542869
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2011-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

PROS AND CONS

Yes, we are amateurs and oddballs. We have to be, don’t we, to stand out from the crowd, to reject protection and the assurances afforded by the party system and to demand freedom to run our own lives?

It would have been so easy to accept Tory assurances that they were on the same side and that no further powers or freedoms would be surrendered.

I flatter myself that I might have done pretty well in the Conservative Party if only I had been willing to found my life upon a bedrock of bullshit.

I might have had the chance to prove it too. In early 2005, I was approached by a Tory Knight of the Shires and asked to attend a meeting at a private house. There, with a mutual guarantee of confidentiality, I was told that Michael Howard would look very favourably upon my application for the candidacy in the safe seat of Tunbridge Wells at the forthcoming general election.

Archie Norman was standing down, and this was my sort of seat. It was close to my home. There were lots of business people, lots of fishing people here… As for Euroscepticism – well, why not? The Conservative Party was a broad church. The leader himself was anti-federalist, as I knew…

I knew where this was going. Just what, I wanted to know, did tolerable Euroscepticism mean? If it merely meant impotent expostulation against EU excesses to keep the voters happy, Michael Howard could go hang. Would I be permitted to continue to press for a referendum on membership of the EU, so giving the British people the chance to decide for themselves, for the first time in history, whether they wanted to be ruled by anyone but themselves in the Mother of Parliaments?

Er…

…well…

…obviously actual withdrawal from the EU wasn’t on the agenda and mustn’t be mentioned.

Why not? Were the British people unfit to decide their own destiny?

Well, no. Of course not. Not exactly. But that debate was over, wasn’t it? Withdrawal was not feasible. Negotiation in order to reform the EU, of course, was splendid.

But the debate was never held! The people were led by the nose into subservience and lied to by Tory politicians. As for negotiation, how can you negotiate without sanction, and what sanction did we possess save the threat of withdrawal?

Oh, come now, old boy. That’s all in the past. Can’t turn the clock back, can we? And all this withdrawal stuff is really impractical, but you know, we could really use you, and I think that I can assure you…

The tyranny of the status quo.

I drained the whisky, which was far too good to be wasted in a cliché, and brought the meeting to a mildly uncomfortable close.

Although this was the first attempt to single me out from the herd, it was far from the first time that the Conservatives had offered a deal. In 2000 our media officer, novelist Mark Daniel, arranged a meeting at the East India Club with their member for Teignbridge,

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