I WANT TO BE A WOLF, NOT A SHEEP:
UKIP’s man of the moment aims to shake up Salmond and save Union
Being an MEP is a bit like being a eunuch at an orgy
TO the political establishment, my election as Scotland’s first UKIP representative came as something of a shock. Well, it wasn’t a surprise to me. I really thought I was going to get elected in the European poll because we were getting a very good reaction on the doorsteps. People were very, very pro-UKIP – in some places, shockingly so. This was shown in the results where we got 14 per cent, which was pretty good; that’s a lot of people.
But there is a really important point about my election, which has perhaps been overlooked.
This is not just about Europe and immigration, although those are very important issues.
What is important about my election is what it says about Scotland: it shows that we Scots really are the same as everyone else.
For years, Alex Salmond has been trying to suggest that Scotland is somehow different from everywhere else; that, as Scots, we are morally superior to everyone else in the world, more caring, more liberal – more Left-wing.
Mr Salmond may think we are somehow morally superior to all other people on Earth. Well, I think that’s a load of hooey. Scots are modest by nature and we should not claim to be morally superior to anyone else.
We are caring and considerate, yes we are – but no more and no less than anyone else.
There are liberal people in Scotland and some Left-wingers, that’s true; but that’s the same as everywhere else.
As much as I love Scotland, and I am a Scot myself, it is now clear that we have as many foibles as anyone else in the world: people are people. Scots have the same problems as everywhere else.
The chap in the semi-detached pebbledash in Rutherglen has the same problems as the bloke in the semi-detached pebbledash in Rotherham – and they think about them the same way.
What my election says is that we have the same issues with Europe and i mmigration as anywhere else in Britain.
It says that we are all in this together and we are better together dealing with Europe and dealing with the world than dealing with it separately.
Also, Mr Salmond was wrong to blame others for my election. He said it was because Nigel Farage was being beamed into Scotland on the TV and that was what won it for us.
But that’s very strange because the Scottish establishment did all they could to make sure we were treated as a minority party in Scotland.
I wasn’t allowed the access to television that the other candidates got, which shows that Mr Salmond’s claim is absolute nonsense.
I am also determined to use my position as UKIP’s first elected representative in Scotland to shake things up a bit. To put it bluntly, I want to ‘re-wild’ the Scottish parliament. They want to reintroduce wolves into Scotland. I want to do the same in Scottish politics – I want be a wolf in their sheep run.
HOWEVER, it is not just the Nationalists who need a kick. We really need to do something about the campaign to save the United Kingdom and now I am an elected politician, I intend to do something about it. I shall be picking up the baton where the Better Together campaign seems to have dropped it.
They haven’t really got much of an idea – they claim to be Better Together, but they are not very much together at all.
UKIP is now going to do its own thing and we will welcome anyone who wants to join us.
I intend to start raising money myself through Scottish businesses and any British businesses willing to put in money.
I will be running poster campaigns and billboards – and we are going to do it better.
The messages need to be much punchier, more hard-hitting. We have to spell out what is actually going to happen in the event of separation.
To be frank, there has been too much fiddle-faddling around, with people saying Scotland can survive if it goes independent.
Yes, of course Scotland can survive – but no one is saying what standard of living we might have afterwards or what the problems would be.
Just look at pensions: we need to spell out what the problems would be with our pensions.
We are so much better off within the United Kingdom because the load is spread evenly across the country.
We need to point out the folly with Mr Salmond’s idea of importing loads of people from abroad. What he doesn’t seem to realise, though, is that immigrants get old too, immigrants need the health service, they need education.
I think we need to adopt a much more direct method of getting our message across.
We have to ask people to consider the real questions. What would happen to Scotland when the pensions aren’t funded? Where are we going to get the money for that?
What happens if we can’t meet the social security bill? What would that mean for the average Scot in Shettleston or Easterhouse?
I’ll tell you what it would mean – it would mean they wouldn’t get any money.
Mr Salmond seems to think that Europe is the big lodestone, the place to go. He thinks they are going to be handing out loads of money. But the EU is bust. A million people marched in Madrid because they are unemployed.
Spanish business has been crippled and destroyed by the euro; so has Italy; so has Greece, where they are chucking Molotov cocktails around.
Is this what we want in Edinburgh and Glasgow? I don’t think so.
UKIP’s objective is to use the EU against itself; to employ whatever resources we legally can using the EU’s own rules to work against it.
I am not going there to have a jolly. In fact, I intend to get on my hind legs as much as possible. But in the European parliament, only group leaders get to speak – and that is the nature of the problem and why being in the European Parliament is a little bit like being a eunuch at an orgy.
MY election has shown that Scots are no different from the rest of the people of these islands. We have the same concerns and worries and fears. We are suspicious of the European Union, we have concerns about immigration and we don’t accept everything Mr Salmond tries to tell us.
He is trying to sell us a vision of an independent Scotland which is wrong and misguided and we have to point that out.
We all know Mr Salmond is a gambler. Now, it is all very well using his own money to back the gee-gees – but it is not right for him to put every other Scottish family’s shirt on his pet hobby horse, too.