I intend to fill Labour’s working-class vacuum

In Stoke-on-Trent and elsewhere, Ukip is seeking to represent communities forgotten by a political elite

When I was elected Ukip leader, I set out a bold ambition: that our party should become the party of choice in patriotic workingclass communities up and down the land. I knew when I did so that it would be seen as throwing down the gauntlet to the Labour Party, which for decades has taken such communities for granted, even as it abandoned their values and became more and more dominated by the doctrinaire socialism of middle-class pseudo-intellectuals.

The Labour message, taken to its apogee by Jeremy Corbyn, is underpinned by a notion of global citizenship that seeks to abandon the nation state as the bedrock of collective sentiment and action. This lack of belief in our country, and lack of recognition that we have higher obligations to our compatriots than we do to other citizens of the world, is reflected in almost everything that senior Labour figures say and do. So we see a Labour leader who won’t sing the national anthem, a shadow home secretary who won’t countenance any reduction in immigration, a shadow foreign secretary who appears to loathe the Cross of St George and a shadow chancellor who has had kinder things to say about the IRA than the British Army. I know, from my own upbringing, that these are not the values of working-class communities. They are not my values either.

The chance for me to set out my stall and to offer just such a community a new political path came much earlier than I expected: when Tristram Hunt announced he was abandoning his electors in Stoke-on-Trent Central for a posh job in a London museum. This presented me with a dilemma. Should I seize the day and stand in Stoke-onTrent – a city I know and admire greatly – or should I take more time to hone the Ukip message before road-testing it against the worst that the Labour machine could throw at it? I reflected that I would always regret not offering people in Stoke-on-Trent the chance for change, so I decided to go for it.

I knew when I did that there was a big risk Labour would fight dirty. I even knew that a smear against me, based around the Hillsborough disaster, was in the offing after a conversation involving a Labour MP was relayed back to me in the very early days of my leadership. To be frank, I could have handled that smear better and I have acknowledged I should have been more on the ball and stopped a piece of incorrect information going out in my name some years ago. I was so offended by the implication that I was not even at the Hillsborough disaster and angry at the hurt that was being caused to family members back in Liverpool that for a short while I let it divert me from my campaign.

But it did not take me long to realise that this was the intention all along. And I am right back at it for the run-in to polling day. At our conference on Friday, I set out my political priorities, explaining how Britain can take advantage of the new freedom that Brexit will bring. For a start, we can cut the cost of living for people, because we will have finally won back control over VAT coverage. So I am proposing that VAT should be removed from domestic energy bills, saving households an average of around £60 every year.

And leaving the EU will allow us to reduce our foreign aid bill in a humane and sensible way – by signing our own trade deals with developing nations, creating a transition to trade can free up very substantial funds for tackling our domestic priorities. Chief among them will be solving the crises in the NHS and in social care by putting in more resources.

Outside the EU we can also develop an immigration system of which our country can be proud. I want to see an Australian-style points system operating within a distinctly British mandate to sharply reduce the overall level of immigration. There should be both an aptitude assessment and an attitude assessment of applicants. That is to say, we need to make sure that people who wish to make a new life in our country share its core values, such as a commitment to gender equality and free speech.

We will propose other policies to encourage integration among people already in our country who have not assimilated as well as they might have done. These will include only publishing official documents in English (or, where appropriate, Welsh and Gaelic) and encouraging public authorities to implement requirements for people to show their face when in public buildings.

I will also ensure that the next Ukip manifesto contains provision for a major programme to build a new generation of council houses. And I mean council houses, rather than housing association ones, as the latter sector has a reputation of being run by cliques and favouring newcomers over longstanding residents.

We will develop a policy that gives major priority to those able to demonstrate local links. And Forces veterans will be right at the front of the queue. I know that these new approaches will have wide appeal among patriotic, common-sense voters, far away from metropolitan political salons. Win or lose in Stoke-on-Trent – and I expect to win – a decrepit Labour Party should know that Ukip is not going away.