FROM UKIP’S DEPUTY LEADER EU-lovin’ Tories just can’t deliver

STRAIGHT TALKING

EITHER the Conservative Party is inept and stupid beyond belief or its leaders are wilfully lying to the British public.

That’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from a series of Tory announcements last week about immigration and human rights.

Now I know a good number of Tories and I know that they’re not stupid, so my guess is that they’re attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the British people in a desperate effort to out-UKIP UKIP.

Take the issue of immigration. David Cameron stood up at the Conservative Party conference and announced that he will renegotiate freedom of movement within the Eeropean Union to reduce immigration.

The party faithful cheered him to rafters, unsurprisingly, as did the majority of the British media, which really should’ve known better because it’s obvious that the Prime Minister can’t deliver on this promise.

Whilst Mr Cameron was on the podium in Birmingham saying that he’d renegotiate freedom of movement I was having a very interesting meeting in Brussels with the European Commissioner responsible for labour mobility across the EU – the person we would have to renegotiate with.

I asked her directly whether the UK could renegotiate freedom of movement within the EU and her answer was that the right of free movement of workers was an essential element of the internal market and that she wasn’t prepared to shake on that principle.

So in other words, there will be NO renegotiation, regardless of what Cameron tells his Tory chums.

And besides, it would take the agreement of the other 27 EU member states for Britain to successfully renegotiate freedom of movement rules – and there’s more chance of Elvis turning up in the European Parliament than that ever happening.

Then, later in the week, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told another whopper by announcing that if the Tories won next year’s general election they will seek to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights ( ECHR) and create a British Bill of Rights instead.

I like this idea so much it’s actually official UKIP policy.

However, what Mr Grayling forgets to tell the British people is that if you are a member of the EU then you have to be signed up to the ECHR.

The two go hand in hand and have done since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty by Gordon Brown in 2008.

You know, that same Lisbon Treaty about which Mr Cameron gave us a “cast iron guarantee” of a referendum, only to drop it at the first opportunity.

Both of these Tory proposals are sensible but inevitably undeliverable simply because of their total commitment to remaining in the EU.

If we left – like UKIP want to – then we could at last reduce immigration by controlling our own borders and pull out of the ECHR and produce our own Bill of Rights.

However, as long as the Conservatives are wedded to the EU, which they are, then they’re talking tosh when it comes to immigration and human rights.