UKIP launches manifesto

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Britain should be "out of the EU but back in the world", according to the UK Independence Party.

Launching their election manifesto this morning in London, party leader Lord Pearson said that it was a "fundamental misunderstanding" that the economy would suffer if Britain left the EU.

He said that the UK's membership of the European political union should be replaced with a free-trade agreement similar to that which exists between Switzerland and the EU.

And he said he was putting "country before party" by actively campaigning for parliamentary candidates from other parties that shared UKIP's desire to withdraw from the union.

Former leader Nigel Farage MEP said that the campaign so far had been a "piddling irrelevancy".

Farage said it was "irrelevant" to British business whether the Conservatives or Labour won the election as all new financial regulations would come from Brussels rather than Westminster.

"The fact is that 75 per cent of our laws are made by someone else," he said.

Farage is seeking to unseat Commons Speaker John Bercow in the normally safe Conservative seat of Buckingham.

And he dismissed suggestions that he was breaking some "great convention" by standing against a sitting Speaker, arguing it had happened as recently as the 1980s.

The party has also announced that it will not field candidates where it feels the existing MP is sufficiently Eurosceptic, such as the seats held by Tory MPs Philip Davies, Douglas Carswell, and Philip Hollobone and Labour MP David Drew.

Outlining the party's other policies, deputy leader David Campbell Bannerman MEP insisted UKIP was no longer a "single issue party".

He said the party would lift the income tax threshold to £11,500 and introduce a flat tax of 31 per cent for anything above that, as well as getting rid of National Insurance.

On immigration he said they wanted to see a five year freeze on "permanent settlement" and would introduce work permits for all immigrants including EU citizens.

Directly elected police, education and health boards would be brought in to devolve power to people, but he said the party did not want to see directly elected police chiefs.

New grammar schools would be built, but the "stigma of failure" attached to 11 plus tests would be removed by including non academic exams as well as academic exams, he said.

As part of the party's desire to see increased local democracy, referendums would be permitted on local issues such as planning, in what he dubbed "Tesco referenda".

The Human Rights Act, which he said was a "criminal's charter" would also be scrapped.

UKIP would get rid of the national parliaments in Wales and Scotland and replace them with monthly meetings of Westminster MPs that represented each nation.

And on defence policy Campbell Bannerman said the party wanted to increase defence spending by 40 per cent, leading to an increase in the size of the army by one quarter and rebuilding the Royal Navy to "2001 levels".

But central to achieving these goals, he said, was the withdrawal of Britain from the EU.

Campbell Bannerman said the party wanted to leave the union immediately and negotiate a free-trade agreement in its place.

He said that the party would then negotiate a free-trade agreement with Britain's "kith and kin" in the Commonwealth, estimated to be worth $1.8 trillion.

"UKIP wants to be out of the EU but back in the world," he said.

The party won thirteen seats in the European Parliament at the last European elections, and is hoping to secure its first Westminster seat.

Insisting that his party was on course for a good result on May 6, Nigel Farage said they were doing "very much better" in this general election than they had ever done before.

"Don’t completely write us off," he said.

View the UKIP manifesto in full:
www.dodsmonitoring.com\downloads\Election_2010/UKIPManifesto2010.pdf

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