UKIP Uncovered
What motivates the leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party?


Thursday, September 04, 2003 

UKIP's MEPs in action

One reaction we received to the article that we reprinted yesterday from The Sprout was surprise regarding Farage and Titford having abstained on the question of reform for the grossly abused system of MEP's allowances

This is only part of the exremely patchy record of these two men's performance in the European Parliament. The following are extracts of a summary prepared by Christopher Beazley MEP at the time of the last General Election. Expect an update well ahead of next June.

The quote below is taken from this link: UKIP INVISIBLE AND IRRELEVANT

UKIP MEPs turn up for just a fraction of European Parliament committee meetings, where many key decisions are taken.
They claim that the fisheries policy is crucial to the UK national interest, yet Nigel Farage, a member of the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee, did not attend any of its first 15 meetings following the June 1999 European Elections.
Jeffrey Titford is a member of the Budgets Committee, which decides how a significant proportion of the EU's £60 billion budget is spent, yet between September 1999 and December 2000, he attended only four of its 31 meetings - and is not recorded as speaking at any of them.
Mr Titford is a substitute member of the Agriculture Committee, which scrutinises the CAP: he does not attend.
In the Parliament's plenary session, neither UKIP MEP voted on: the draft EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the proposed creation of a European Public Prosecutor, a single asylum procedure, unauthorised entry of aliens, the proposed creation of a European Fund for Refugees, a new energy chapter to the treaty, the use of Depleted Uranium. One or other UKIP MEPs was absent on votes for a European Constitution and extended use of QMV.
Former UKIP leader, Alan Sked, described UKIP MEPs as “Sceptics who betray Britain” in The Spectator (10.2.01). He sees it as a “political embarrassment” that their activities in the European Parliament have been “most bizarre”.
He notes "The official voting records of the European Parliament in fact provide much amusing reading - for example, the UKIP decision to abstain on the vote to reduce the notoriously abused allowances system, when all other UK parties voted for reform."
Sked also insists that, before becoming an MEP, Nigel Farage had met representatives of the British National Party and was photographed doing so. Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist and UKIP supporter, denied this in a Spectator letter the following week, but in the 17 February edition of The Spectator, Sked repeated the allegation, first carried in The Times and apparently uncontested by Farage.


Any believing things might have improved with the arrival of Graham Booth following the apparently enforced retirement of Michael Holmes with ill health are referred to his maiden speech, which unbelievably opened with this paragraph:-

"Maister Preziden: If I axed my mates back ‘ome where they come from, they’d zay “Deb’m”. Not Cornwall, cross the River Tamar, which is furrin parts, nor Zomerset, where awl they toffs live. That’s too close to Lunnon for their liking. As for Lunnon, well that used to be dree days on the vast stagecoach and there’s many of uz volks who never did get used to they new-vangled things like ‘orseless carriages and they motorway things what brings awl they furriners to our neck of the woods."

Even more unbelievably, Booth then continued in the same incomprehensible manner for a further six paragraphs winding down with this quite extraordinarily crass remark:-

"With wun of they Regions, we’ll be off like a long dog and then uz citizins can awl “take a fuller part in the integration of Europe”.
“What’s a Luxemburger?” zays my mate."


Any readers not believing this can possibly be true, can read Graham Booth's European Parliamentary Maiden Speech from the link.

This same man who as reported earlier in the week is now lead candidate for the UKIP in the South West in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections and will be attending a Rally on 25th October. An excellent opportunity for the ordinary people of Devon, the county of my birth, to go along to their capital City of Exeter and make it plain to UKIP's increasingly shady-looking party leader Roger Knapman, his deputy Graham Booth and their disgraced American strategist Dick Morris, that Westcountrymen and women do not like being made to look both ignorant and foolish!

posted by Martin |7:38 AM
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