Nigel Farage on European Disunion
The UKIP leader on withdrawing from the EU, his controversial views about immigration and the failings of the political establishment
By Alexandra Wolfe
Feb. 6, 2015 4:06 p.m. ET
Nigel Farage Photo: Jude Edginton for The Wall Street Journal Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party, a populist movement whose chief aim is to have the U.K. withdraw from the European Union, puts everyone he meets through what he calls “the Farage test.” Most politicians fail it. “They’re all so bloody earnest,” he says. “God help us.”
What does the test entail? “Number one: Would I want to have a drink with them? And number two: Would I employ them?” he explains. “You’ve already been through it,” he tells me with a chuckle. “Provided you get one out of two, you’re OK with me.”
Mr. Farage, 50, is one of the most recognizable faces in a rising wave of antiestablishment politicians across Europe who are winning votes by denouncing the EU’s policies. His party has picked up two seats in the British Parliament in recent months and could get a few more in the general election in May. (Most polls put support for UKIP at 13% to 15% among would-be voters, compared with around 33% each for Labour and the Tories.) He presents himself as a man of the people and is often photographed with a pint and a cigarette at the local pub.
But for the past month, Mr. Farage has sworn off alcohol, an experience he calls both “amazing” and “miserable.” Today, he’s having lunch at an Italian restaurant about two hours southeast of London in Thanet, near his home. A waitress immediately apologizes to Mr. Farage for not serving pints. He says, “Everyone just thinks I spend my whole life drinking beers!”
With his dry month over, he orders a bottle of red wine, sparkling water and a steak. He’s in a good mood: The victory of the left-wing Syriza party in Greece has heartened him; it has refused to meet the EU’s terms for repaying loans. Mr. Farage takes that as a sign of momentum against the EU. He has argued that Greece should go further by rejecting the euro and returning to the drachma.
As the U.K. approaches elections, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris have added to long-standing financial and economic worries, and UKIP has been a beneficiary of the gloomy news. He sees his role as larger than the British arena. “You mustn’t think of me as being a British politician purely but a European politician,” he says. “All of Europe is changing.”
Mr. Farage thinks that these days have brought a new version of the Berlin Wall. “I grew up with the Berlin Wall in Europe, with an East-West split,” he says. “I’m now middle-aged, and Europe’s got another Berlin Wall. It goes down the middle of Europe…and it’s called the euro. Yet the economic system and the series of bailouts that we’ve had have locked the north and south together in a sort of death lock.”
Meanwhile, at the restaurant in Thanet, Mr. Farage’s security staff is starting to get fidgety. They’ve noticed that a woman sitting at the other end of the restaurant is keeping an eye on our table. Mr. Farage’s senior adviser Raheem Kassam, a former editor for the conservative blog Breitbart.com, thinks that she’s part of a protest group that regularly chases him around Thanet.
Mr. Farage dismisses her and her ilk as extremists. The bigger threat, he says, is from the British political establishment at Westminster.
“The establishment is very, very scared of us and is closing ranks against us in the most astonishing way,” he says. Party members have been called “pranks, gadflies, eccentrics, fruitcakes, swivel-eyed loons and closet racists.” In December, a UKIP candidate stepped down after referring to a woman with a Chinese name as a “chinky.” Mr. Farage defended the candidate as a “rough diamond.”
Mr. Farage says he is upset at the British media’s portrayal of himself and UKIP as fringe elements. “In many ways, a lot of what we stand for you would describe as classical liberalism,” he says. The negative narrative about UKIP comes, he says, from a sense of “political correctness that says if you even debate immigration you must by definition be racist.”
Mr. Farage has called for restrictions on immigration, but he doesn’t see his views as radical.
He points to Australia, which has an annual immigration target and uses a points system to selectively recruit highly skilled immigrants. “What we want is an Australian-style points system,” he says. “All we’re arguing for is what America attempts to do and for what most countries in the world attempt to do, and that’s why we’re gaining ground, because we have a logical position.”
“I’m not against foreign people, but there has to be a degree of control over this because at the moment now we discriminate against the whole world in favor of south and Eastern Europe,” he says.
Official statistics show that about 260,000 more people came to Britain than left between June 2013 and June 2014, 43% higher than the previous year. Over half of those were EU citizens.
“It’s absolutely crackers,” he says. He blames issues around immigration for attacks such as the one on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. “You’d have to be away with the fairies to think that it wasn’t in some way related to immigration, but it’s more than that, isn’t it,” he says. “We have taken a multicultural approach in this country, a state-sponsored multiculturalism for 40 years,” he says. “The French in fact didn’t go down this route, but in both cases it hasn’t worked. All you can conclude is that it’s very difficult to assimilate such large numbers of people.”
Born in Kent, near where he now lives, Mr. Farage came of age in the 1970s—a time, he says, when “the country was going to the dogs.” His parents and grandparents talked about politics at most meals. Back then, he says, inflation was over 20%, and income taxes were surging.
Margaret Thatcher ’s pro-business policies, including tax cuts, convinced him to skip college and go to London to join the world of finance. After her election, he says, “suddenly there was the growth of this new phenomenon called the yuppie, and I wanted to be one of them.” He says he would have stayed in business if it weren’t for the creation of the current EU in 1993. “I had to do something about it,” he says. That year, he became one of the founding members of UKIP.
These days, Mr. Farage says that he is focused on helping the U.K. regain its “national self-confidence.” He regrets that the country must yield to the EU on so many issues. He says that Switzerland and Iceland (neither an EU member) have more global trade deals than Britain does, and they are not similarly constrained.
Mr. Farage’s public statements are often laced with humor. He admits to relishing the attention he receives. “I really missed my vocation,” he says. “I should’ve been a pantomime on stage.”
For now, he is focused on the coming elections. Many people don’t think UKIP has much of a chance to bring about a true referendum on leaving the EU. “Forces will tell everybody that the sky will fall if we change anything, but I think actually we can win,” says Mr. Farage.
Lunch is drawing to a close, and as the waitress clears a second bottle of wine from the table, Mr. Farage’s security team motions that it’s time to go. The woman who had been sitting across the restaurant has called in her fellow protesters, and we are told that a group of them is descending.
“We’re fighting on all fronts,” says Mr. Farage as he gets into the car. He says that he’s not afraid of the protesters or the Westminster establishment. “The old British army used to say: ‘Wait for the whites of their eyes before you start firing the rifles,’ ” he says. “We’ve got our bayonets fixed, and we’re charging.”
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario