UKIP Uncovered

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

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Alan Bown is writing UKIP’s Election Manifesto - and here’s the proof

EXCLUSIVE!

One of the great mysteries of recent months - the UKIP Manifesto for the next General Election - is slowly being revealed to UKIP activists.

Readers of this blog will recall that UKIP has never in its 11 years had a Policy Committee, despite a unanimous resolution at its 2001 Conference mandating the leadership to set one up that would meet at least two-monthly.

The same Conference resolution unanimously mandated the leadership to appoint party spokesmen on every subject - but once again has never done so. So much for claims that UKIP is a ‘democratic’ party.

Alone among major and minor British parties, UKIP does not have a Policy Committee and does not have Party spokesmen.

The last time UKIP revised its policies was in early 2001, ahead of the 2001 General Election. Since then it has gathered dust. Nearly 200 weeks have gone by without a single policy being updated.

Members have been in suspension for months, waiting with bated breath for the announcement about what’s in the Manifesto. They were told it would be September, then October. Then: ‘definitely at the UKIP N.E.C. Meeting on 22 November’. The latest is: ‘definitely at the N.E.C on 6 December’. But we heard that even then, nothing will be finalised. Grumbling N.E.C. members have been saying: “If they won’t show it us until the day of the meeting, how can we approve it then?”

In recent weeks the Party Chairman, Petrina Holdsworth, has openly conceded that the Manifesto is being decided by ‘Holdsworth’s holy huddle’ of herself, Roger Knapman , Nigel Farage and David Lott, and that the details are not being disclosed to the Party’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, because ‘they might leak out’. It is indeed a wonder that any UKIP member anywhere takes the leadership seriously when they treat their own N.E.C. colleagues with such appalling disdain.

But, ‘UKIP Uncovered’ can now put 28,000 UKIP members out of their misery and exclusively reveal not only what’s in the Manifesto but who wrote it! And it’s not even being written by Holdsworth, Knapman, Farage and Lott.

The main planks of UKIP’s appeal to the electorate are set out in a glossy A5 card leaflet promoted and, we understand, paid for, by Alan Bown. More of that in a moment.

The first clue as to who wrote the Manifesto came when UKIP activists - and others -spotted an advert for UKIP in national newspapers, one of a series that was run before the European Election. It made the claim that UKIP would find the money for tens of thousands of extra police officers, teachers and nurses, a host of other spending commitments, and still have change left over to increase state pensions by £34 a week per person.

These adverts were spotted by non-UKIP members. Some of them challenged UKIP activists in the South-West and elsewhere, along these lines: “Hey, _______, is this true? Can we really pay every single pensioner an extra £34 a week if we leave the E.U. - plus all those other things?”. UKIP activists gave replies along the lines of “Yes, that’s how much being in the E.U. costs us. If it’s in the advert, then someone in the Party must have done their sums”.

One activist wasn’t so sure and gave Alan Bown a ring a few weeks ago. The conversation went roughly as follows:

‘Alan’

‘Yes’

‘About the advert in the papers’

‘Yes’

‘About that bit that said that UKIP could increase pensions by £34 a week for each pensioner’

‘Yes, good, isn’t it? Are you getting a good response?’

‘Well, yes. But it’s about this extra £34 a week on the state pension. People are asking us if we can really do that. Do the sums add up?’

‘Yes. My people have worked it out. £34 a week, they tell me - plus all those other things we put in the advert, like extra police, nurses and teachers’

‘It seems a bit high. Me and some others have worked out a few figures and it seems rather high to us’

‘Well, I’m just about to go to press with one of our leaflets. I was going to put a promise of £34 a week in, perhaps we’d better put it down to £25 a week, then. What do you think?’

‘Well, do the sums add up?’

‘I think I’d better put £25 a week in. I’ll tell the printers to make it £25 a week. Thanks. Bye’.

Lo and behold! A week later, out comes Alan Bown’s new leaflet which began: “UKIP says stop paying the £30 million a day to Brussels and instead, immediately increase state pensions by £25 a week”.

This sounds fine in theory, but there are a couple of serious questions posed by the issue of the Bown leaflet, of which hundreds of thousands have already been printed and are being distributed.

The first problem is the mathematics. The UKIP leaflet says: “Stop paying the £30 million a day to Brussels and instead, immediately increase state pensions by £25 a week”. Well, £30 million a day is £10,950 million a year, as anyone with a pocket calculator can work out in less than a second.

There are an estimated 11 million pensioners in the U.K. If we gave each of them another £25 a week, that would be £1,300 a year each. The resulting expenditure would total £14,300 million a year.

In truth, £30 million a day would only allow each pensioner to get an increase of £19.14 a week.

The second problem with the Bown leaflet is: what about all the other (eleven) promises UKIP made in 2001 for spending the so-called ‘Independence Dividend’? In that Manifesto, the following clear promises were made of how UKIP would spend the ‘Independence Dividend’:

1) Pay nurses higher salaries (£500 million a year budgeted)
2) Employ 25,000 extra police £800 million a year budgeted)
3) Employ 30,000 more teachers (£1.2 billion a year budgeted)
4) Take one million low-paid workers out of tax (£1.4 billion a year budgeted)
5) Exempt the family home from Inheritance Tax (£500,000 a year budgeted)
6) Restore married person’s tax allowances (£800,000 a year budgeted)
7) Index-link ex-pats’ pensions (£300 million a year budgeted)
8) Agricultural subsidies of £2 billion a year to help farmers when we come out of the Common Agricultural Policy) (£2 billion a year budgeted)
9) Regional funds of £1 billion a year to replace E.U. Structural Funding (£1 billion a year budgeted)
10) Extra spent on care of the frail elderly (£500,000 a year budgeted)
11) Extra spent on the N.H.S. - £2 billion a year budgeted.

If, as the Bown leaflets strongly suggests, UKIP is going to put all its eggs into one basket and use up 100% of the money saved by leaving the E.U. on what amounts to an electoral bribe to pensioners, what will become of all these other - some would say well-thought-out - policies?

The news is - they have been binned, trashed, abandoned. It doesn’t take an Einstein to work out that the Bown philosophy of ‘bribe the pensioner’ means that all the other financial commitments made in the 2001 Manifesto must go.

But perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this whole affair is that the National Executive Committee, which is supposed to run the Party:

a) is being told by Petrina Holdsworth that they are too untrustworthy to be told what will be in the Manifesto
b) has no say whatsoever in the content of the Manifesto
c) did not sanction or even know about the Alan Bown leaflets
d) has abandoned control of UKIP policy to Alan Bown.

So, given that Alan Bown has now decided how the ‘Independence Dividend’ will be spent (though presumably reducing the extravagant £25 a week to £19.14 a week in time for the election), what of the rest of UKIP’s Manifesto? Here is a list of the new UKIP policies announced on Bown’s undated leaflet. Look out for vague slogans without accompanying practical policies:

· Take back control of our borders
· Enforce our immigration rules
· Scrap political correctness so people can speak their mind (this from the party which threatened Robert Kilroy-Silk with expulsion for having the nerve to say that he thought he could lead the Party better than Roger Knapman!)
· Stop planting GM crops in Britain
· Cut crime with zero tolerance, effective deterrents and ‘more disciplined prisons’ (what can that mean? - 24 hours without exercise instead of 23½?)
· Give matrons full authority for hospital hygiene
· Let the people decide on moral issues like capital punishment and genetics through binding referendums.

The leaflet, incidentally, is fronted by a cartoon which features cartoon characters from Hungary, Greece and Spain caricatured as rushing to the E.U. with begging bowls. Not likely to appeal to those British citizens wholly or partly of Spanish, Greek or Hungarian origin.

So! UKIP policies are kept secret from the N.E.C. but are announced to the world by an Alan Bown leaflet without the N.E.C. knowing about it. Alan Bown is not on the N.E.C. and holds no office within UKIP. There is no N.E.C. minute authorising the involvement of Alan Bown in writing the Manifesto. Several reasons why, perhaps, if there is a resolution of no confidence in the N.E.C at the coming Extraordinary Conference, it is likely to be carried overwhelmingly.

Remember, the content of the 2005 UKIP Manifesto was revealed to you first on ‘UKIP Uncovered’.

posted by Martin |9:10 AM