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Summary
A special interview with Nigel Farage, the new leader of the UK Independence Party, on the eve of his party's victory in the European Parliament s vote to leave the European Union, on May 30th, 2017.
Transcript
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Tonight, a special full-length interview with the new leader of UKIP, the UK Independence Party.
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It's May 31st, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
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The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
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If the 2016 U.S. presidential election were an earthquake, well, the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom was a warning tremor.
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In both cases, the forgotten people, the little people, didn't do what they were told by the political, media, and business elites.
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In the U.S., Trump voters were called the deplorables by Hillary Clinton.
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In the U.K., they're just called the working class.
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That was the result in the U.K. of a decades-long campaign by skeptics of the globalist scheme to integrate Great Britain with the European continent.
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I'm sure there were noble reasons for that integration, to avoid a repeat of the horrific wars of the first half of the 20th century.
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For economic prosperity and trade, those are good things, but with it came bad things.
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You can give the EU the benefit of the doubt and call them unintended consequences, but look, it was inevitable.
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The empire building by bureaucrats in Brussels, the corruption, the erosion of British sovereignty and democracy and the British rule of law,
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all of that was predicted by Eurosceptics, and it all came true.
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The European Union and its impenetrable bureaucracy took on a life of its own, and Britons were no longer masters of their own house.
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Add in the terror of radical Islam and Angela Merkel's open borders experiment, and you had a perfect storm.
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And the man of the hour was Nigel Farage, the charismatic, constantly smiling champion, the ultimate Brit, the happy warrior,
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always posing for a photo with a 100-watt smile and a pint of beer at a pub, impossible to dislike, smart as a whip, and a brilliant orator.
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Videos like this from his seat in the European Parliament inspired countless Brits to learn why the EU was a bad deal
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and to find the courage to vote to break free of it.
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Here's a speech from nearly 10 years ago, just great stuff even today, let's run a few minutes of it.
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Good morning, Mr. Van Rompuy. You've been in office for one year, and in that time, the whole edifice is beginning to crumble.
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There's chaos, the money's running out. I should thank you. You should perhaps be the pin-up boy of the Eurosceptic movement.
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But just look around this chamber this morning. Just look at these faces. Look at the fear. Look at the anger.
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Poor old Barroso here. Looks like he's seen a ghost. You know, they're beginning to understand that the game is up.
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And yet, in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system.
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And it's pretty clear that none of you have learned anything.
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You know, when you yourself, Mr. Van Rompuy, say that the Euro has brought us stability,
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I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humour, but isn't this really just the bunker mentality?
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You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation-state could exist in a 21st century globalised world.
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Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium, who haven't had a government for six months.
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But for the rest of us, right across every member state in this union,
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and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces,
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increasingly people are saying, we don't want that flag.
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We want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.
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started rising in the polls, the UK Independence Party.
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The ruling Conservatives thought they'd take the winds out of UKIP's sails
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by preemptively calling a referendum on the matter.
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And to their shock, and that of the rest of the fancy people, Brits voted for Brexit, the British exit.
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His chief goal now accomplished, left the leadership of the party.
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He remains as a member of the European Parliament for UKIP.
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And he now has other endeavours, including a popular radio show in the UK,
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regular TV appearances, and regular visits to America,
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including to visit his pal Donald Trump, who visited the UK on the eve of Brexit to support him.
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Farage is no longer leader, and the UKIP party has had a series of leaders,
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The party has fallen in the polls and had financial difficulties,
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but maybe it has found its feet again with the leadership of Gerard Batten,
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a colleague of Farage, who has been in the UKIP trenches for more than 20 years
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and serves with Farage in the European Parliament as a UKIP MEP.
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He's been in this leadership position since February.
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And I didn't pay attention at first until I saw him consorting with our former reporter,
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Tommy Robinson, in the UK, and publicly standing up for Tommy after his arrest.
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That's more courage than you normally see in a politician, I thought.
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So today we bring you a special show, a feature interview with Gerard Batten,
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Here's how our conversation went earlier today.
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Well, we have a very special guest now, someone who's of great interest to Brits,
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but I think that Canadians and Americans should pay attention too.
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His name is Gerard Batten, and he's the new leader of the UKIP party, the UK Independence Party.
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He joins me now via Skype from his office in London.
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We started to follow Brexit before it even got momentum.
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And the idea that the UK could untangle itself from the EU was so unthinkable back then.
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And in my mind, it was like the idea of Canada removing itself from the United Nations.
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How did it go from impossible to having had happened?
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Well, I think it would be much easier to leave the United Nations than it is to leave the EU.
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Well, it started with people like me a long time ago.
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You know, this whole thing has a very long history.
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We joined the European Union, or the European Economic Community, as it was then back in 1972, 73.
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We had a referendum in 1975 on continued membership.
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And, of course, nothing happened for a long time.
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And then I joined a small political party in 93 called the Anti-Federalist League.
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18 months later, we changed our name to the UK Independence Party.
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And it took us 23 years to get to the point where we had the referendum and achieved the referendum.
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And it was done through taking votes at the ballot box.
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We have fought hundreds of elections, you know, by-elections, parliamentary elections, local council elections, all kinds of elections, in order to become an electoral threat.
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And it was becoming that electoral threat which forced David Cameron to promise the referendum.
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And I think he seriously miscalculated because he thought they were going to win, that the Remain side would win.
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And now, for the last two years, our political establishment has done everything it possibly can not to fulfill the obligation of the referendum, which is to take us out of the European Union.
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It's incredible, the attempts to thwart democracy.
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It's reminiscent of the excuses thrown up against Donald Trump to try to delegitimize his vote.
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Except for in the UK, it actually seems to be working.
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Do the decision makers in her cabinet on this file, do they believe in Brexit?
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The problem that we have, Ezra, is that our political establishment, our big majority, doesn't want to leave the European Union.
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Theresa May was a Remainer in the referendum campaign, as were most of her cabinet.
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You have a few genuine leavers, like David Davis, that she put into the job of negotiating our withdrawal agreement, who has suffered endless frustration and has threatened to walk away, I believe, at some point.
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And you've got a House of Lords, which are completely unelected, but appointed by the political parties, who are doing everything they can to actually delay the process.
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So it is, I think, if this doesn't go through, if we don't leave the European Union, I think this will be the end of any real belief in democratic politics in the UK.
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Because, you know, 17.4 million people voted to leave.
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I think that it would have been a bigger majority if we'd have had a fair referendum campaign.
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It was a very slanted campaign, but we still won.
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And if this isn't carried through, I think you will see complete, permanent cynicism about politics and the political system.
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So I think it's vital that it succeeds for a number of reasons.
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First of all, to return democratic sovereignty to the UK, but also to restore any kind of faith in politics going forward.
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Yeah. Well, in the United States, the analogy I gave, and it's not perfect to discredit Donald Trump's win, but at least Donald Trump is the decider now.
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The slow walking of the Brexit is an inside job.
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The government that held the referendum clearly didn't want it, as you say, they miscalculated.
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In the United States, and I know we're getting into the realms of hypothetical here, but if there was some way that the will of the last U.S. presidential election were thwarted,
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nominally in a democratic way, but let's say if Donald Trump were impeached in a proceeding that seemed quite unfair,
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I think Americans wouldn't be docile or passive.
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There's still a revolutionary spirit in America, and not to be too dramatic, but at the end of the day, they have their Second Amendment and their firearms.
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And I'm not saying anything like that would be on the horizon, but I'm saying it's the reason the framers of the U.S. Constitution put it there at the end of the day,
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against the tyrannical government that ignored them.
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My fear, and I'm hoping you can disabuse me of this, my fear is that the United Kingdom in 2018 has some courageous, brave people,
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and from what I know about you, I would put you in that category, but it also has people who are passive, who don't know what they can do,
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who are disarmed, not just in terms of firearms, but disarmed in terms of the media, disarmed in terms of the police,
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the press, the politicians, the professors, they don't have anything left, and all they have left is cynicism.
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They're submissive. Am I wrong about the character of the U.K. today?
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I think that what we've had, well, you must remember, you may have experienced something similar in the U.S. and Canada.
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We've had 40 to 50 years of people being told that they shouldn't be proud of their history,
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they shouldn't be proud of their institutions, they should be ashamed.
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We have to be part of this supranational political organization called the EU,
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and we are governed by an elite across not just politics, but our police, our education system,
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who are basically being infiltrated and taken over by left-wing, culturally Marxist, politically correct views.
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The ordinary people at the bottom quite often don't agree and rebel,
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but they're very limited in how they can rebel against that because now if you say the wrong thing
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or if you tweet the wrong thing, you can find yourself out of a job or you won't be offered a job
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if people look at your history, because don't forget, everything now is, you know, on the Internet.
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Very easy to see what people say, what their opinions are.
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And we have people arrested now for ludicrous, ludicrous reasons.
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We have had a man arrested on the street for reading the words of Winston Churchill out of a book published in 1898,
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I think it was, on Winston Churchill's views on Islam.
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We had a lady arrested the other day for wishing somebody a gay day.
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Well, she was an old lady, probably using it in the old-fashioned means of, you know,
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But the police came around and knocked her door down and arrested her.
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We have all kinds of crazy things going on now because everything has now been infiltrated
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by these politically correct cultural Marxist views.
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Now, I don't believe in a, you know, I would never advocate any kind of violent reaction to what's going on.
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And I've offered people over the last 25 years that I've been in politics the option of putting a cross on a piece of paper.
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Because if you elect representatives and you elect enough of them, they can change the law
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and they can change the direction of a country.
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And, of course, the problem with our political system is that we have what's called a first-past-the-post system.
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I think certainly they have the same thing in America.
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So, a representative can get elected on as little as 30, 35% of the vote.
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On the continent, they have proportional representation systems,
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which means that if you're a party like mine, you can actually win seats.
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You can actually start to change things, as we're seeing in Italy,
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where these so-called populist parties have been elected.
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Well, UKIP was very popular going back a little while.
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In 2015, when we got 13% vote, we got more votes than the Scottish National Party,
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And yet we got one seat, and I think they got about 62, 64 seats in Parliament
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because of the way that the first-past-the-post system works.
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So, it's very difficult to change things in our country, but we're not giving up.
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I think people realise that they're being betrayed over the withdrawal of the European Union.
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And my job, I have a very difficult, I've probably got the most difficult job in British politics,
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which is to rebuild UKIP's effectiveness and credibility as a fighting force and an electoral threat.
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And that's what I'm going to be trying to do over the next 12 months.
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Excellent. I want to talk to you a little bit more about UKIP,
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and then I want to talk to you about Tommy Robinson, because that's on the mind of our viewers.
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I just want to say I agree with everything you've just said.
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My point about the American Second Amendment is that there's a spirit that the centre of power
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By no way, by no means would I ever suggest a violent uprising,
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They call it Independence Day on their July 4th.
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They, and I think there's also something, getting to know Tommy Robinson over the last year when I would visit him,
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I also became aware of the class strata in the UK.
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In Canada and the United States, we just don't have that.
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And let me ask you a question about that, and then I want to talk a bit about UKIP and a bit about Tommy.
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And I respect, you're a very busy man, so thank you for this time.
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It seems to me that there's a lot of, I would call them forgotten people,
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And I think a lot of them, and this is just my one year's study, so you correct me if I'm wrong,
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a lot of them historically have voted labor, and might be laborites on economic matters,
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but when it comes to British sovereignty, borders, Islam, and the political correctness,
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these traditionally working class labor supporters are looking for someone to stand up for them,
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And that's what's so interesting to me about Tommy Robinson.
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He's a working class football type, but I think people say shut up, shut up, shut up for 20 years.
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They wanted to go to UKIP, they go to Tommy, they're desperate for someone to listen to them,
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I mean, I come from a similar background to Tommy Robinson, I'm quite a bit older than him, I'm 64, he's 35.
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But I grew up in a working class area, I come from that background.
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I had a long career earning a living before I got elected to anything at the age of 50.
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And I identify with those people, they're at the bottom of the, very often the bottom of the economic scale.
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They're very often the people who work the hardest, pay the most tax,
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But they are the people who bear the brunt of the policies that our political elite visit on them.
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Now, you can't vote for Tommy Robinson because he doesn't have a political party.
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And when you do vote for something different, it's very difficult for that to make a difference,
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But UKIP did make a fantastic difference in bringing about the referendum.
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That was an enormous political, sorry, you know, a historic achievement to do that
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And the difficult job now we have is following it through and making sure that it happens.
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You have elites now, not just in politics, but in education and law and all the professions.
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But it isn't even true to say that all of those are in favour of the European Union
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or the direction that we're heading in with political correctness
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and the failure to address the threat from literalist Islam.
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I was on, there's a series of three-hour programmes I'm in last week, this week and next week.
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And when I came out, I was in the street the other day after one of these programmes
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had been broadcast and the lady came up to me and congratulated me on it
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and said, you know, we've got to show everybody how awful the European Union is
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There's enormous undercurrent there that actually does cut across these political classes as well.
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It wouldn't be fair to say that, you know, that there is a, it's a completely two different stratas.
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But then a lot of people are afraid to voice their opinions in modern Britain
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For example, I had an example, if I can quick tell you a very quick story.
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We had a freedom demonstration and rally outside of Downing Street in Whitehall about a month ago,
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which Tommy Robinson spoke, I spoke, a number of other people spoke on the subject of free speech.
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A few days after that, I got a call from somebody.
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A man had taken his children to this rally and then they'd gone to school on the Monday morning.
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A five-year-old child had told the teacher that they'd been to this rally where, you know,
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And then the teacher said that she had informed the police because the child was in danger of radicalisation
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and the father was called to the school to meet a police officer to discuss this.
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They, you know, the advice was don't go to, don't turn up, get legal advice
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and demand this in writing before you do anything.
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But the problem is the family are reluctant to have their names in the newspapers
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So I think they're probably just glad that the thing has gone away
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because the school and the police officer didn't want to put these things into writing
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I mean, this is not, you know, you'll hear anecdotal stories from people all the time
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about things that go on, but they're very reluctant to have their names published
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because this could have consequences for them, you know, later on.
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You know, that reminds me of a story of a dinner lady, what we would call a lunch lady,
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at a school in Northern England who was suspended because she went to a rally.
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You know, case after case after case, this kind of, and I hate to say the word police state
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because I don't want people to think I'm crazy calling the United Kingdom the mother of parliaments,
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the source of the Magna Carta and our ordered liberty.
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To call the UK a police state makes you sound crazy.
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But that little anecdote you just described has the hallmarks of a police state,
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You've been, we're going longer than we thought, but I want, but I'm just hanging on your every word.
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Let me ask you a little bit about Brexit, because here in North America,
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I think it snuck up on us as an issue, and we learned about it.
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And we learned about it through the charismatic personality of Nigel Farage,
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the former leader of UKIP, who I think his personal style and his energy,
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at least it looked that way from here, was quite a decisive factor.
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I think he's been on a well-deserved, I'm not going to call it a retirement tour,
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but he's certainly hanging out in North America a lot, hanging out with Donald Trump,
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Do you work with him closely at all, or is he sort of in a different circuit now?
00:22:03.660
Is he semi-retired and just sort of taking a well-deserved victory lap, or what's he up to?
00:22:13.660
We've worked together all of these years in the same party,
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Nigel was the front man, and excellent he was at being the front man,
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but there were thousands of people behind him doing the donkey work.
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None of us would be where we are if it wasn't for those ordinary members
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who just give up their own time, effort, and money freely.
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Nigel is actually the leader of a group in the European Parliament,
00:22:37.400
which puts him in the front row of the Parliament,
00:22:39.940
so that when there is a big debate, he is in the front row,
00:22:43.200
opposite the commissioner, Mr Juncker, et cetera, whoever's speaking.
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So that's very important, that he has that voice,
00:22:49.660
because nobody knew what the European Parliament was in this country
00:22:53.300
before they started seeing the YouTubes of Nigel making his speeches,
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and we even got broadcast on the mainstream news,
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which is something that I don't think had ever happened before.
00:23:01.920
It's such a boring, dull place, you know, to start with.
00:23:05.660
So I think Nigel is now concentrating on that aspect of his work,
00:23:09.940
leading the group in the Parliament, but also in his media work.
00:23:16.640
which is very important as well, because that gives him a public voice.
00:23:21.380
He's got his own show on LBC Radio, his phone-in show,
00:23:24.720
and I know that he does a lot of work in the US.
00:23:27.260
So I've got the unglamorous job as the not very charismatic leader of UKIP
00:23:32.860
to actually, you know, try and pull things around on the domestic political front,
00:23:36.960
but it's all important, you know, whatever we do.
00:23:39.500
I hope I'm not being personal or troublemaking.
00:23:45.240
Is he supportive of your efforts in the UK itself?
00:23:50.800
I think that, you know, we have been colleagues for a long time.
00:23:55.060
I wouldn't say that we are great personal friends, that wouldn't be true.
00:23:58.360
But, you know, you don't have to be friends with people in politics
00:24:05.260
and I think that he's appreciated of the fact that I've managed to make UKIP survive,
00:24:10.260
because we were on the edge of collapse when I took over in the middle of February.
00:24:18.500
Well, he went off after the – he decided to hand over the leadership after the referendum.
00:24:24.460
They came back briefly and then went away again.
00:24:27.260
And we were on the verge of financial collapse that we had about two to four weeks
00:24:33.200
and we would have become insolvent and the party would have disappeared.
00:24:36.180
So I was able to pull that round, mainly by an appeal to our ordinary members
00:24:41.820
who produced enough money for us to keep going to defunction.
00:24:47.820
And the challenge now is to find big money for fighting elections and to build the membership.
00:24:53.760
One of the problems in building the membership, Ezra,
00:24:56.160
goes back to what we were talking about before,
00:25:01.140
because they don't feel that what they do can make a difference
00:25:07.360
And the challenge is to rebuild that fighting spirit,
00:25:12.700
which is something actually that Tommy Robinson is quite good at.
00:25:17.760
And I saw Majid Nawaz, who's a progressive Muslim,
00:25:22.080
who has a radio show on the same station as Nigel Farage.
00:25:27.060
For our Canadian viewers, he's similar in his approach to Islam
00:25:31.420
to our Canadian Raheel Raza, but he has a different background, of course.
00:25:36.660
And he said on LBC, that's the radio station in the UK,
00:25:40.160
he said, whatever else you think of Tommy Robinson,
00:25:44.100
it's because the establishment ignored these largely Muslim rape gangs
00:25:53.060
And whatever else you think of what happened in Leeds on Friday,
00:25:57.560
it was the fact that the establishment did not solve a problem,
00:26:06.840
UKIP itself, Gerard, kept its distance from Tommy,
00:26:12.520
Tommy has some criminal convictions and he can be rough in his style.
00:26:23.540
And as you just mentioned, you spoke at Tommy's Day for Freedom a few weeks ago.
00:26:28.880
Tell me what decision you made to change the longstanding UKIP policy
00:26:35.700
What are your thoughts on Tommy and why are you doing what you're doing?
00:26:39.820
I haven't really changed that much because I think I started talking about this subject back in 2006
00:26:45.240
when we had the bombings in London, you know, the tube bombings and the bus bombings
00:26:50.300
when lots of people were killed, 50-odd people were killed.
00:26:53.860
And I was then the spokesman on security and defence.
00:26:58.440
And I thought, well, I'd better find out more about the motivations of people that allow them to do these things.
00:27:03.160
So I started researching Islam a lot more than I've done in the past.
00:27:07.260
And the more I learn about it, the more appalled I am by it over these years.
00:27:17.440
And regarding Tommy Robinson, of course, Tommy was set up the thing called the EDL,
00:27:22.540
the English Defence League, which wasn't really a political party.
00:27:29.020
And the BBC immediately announced that this was a far-right organisation.
00:27:33.020
And I thought, well, I'll have a look at it and see, is it really?
00:27:37.000
And, of course, it wasn't a far-right organisation.
00:27:39.540
It had been created as a reaction to these Muslim rape gangs,
00:27:46.040
But you would never know that through the mainstream media.
00:27:49.620
They've only recently started, you know, reporting on this.
00:27:53.100
Although, of course, they report the convictions of these gangs when the trials are finished.
00:27:57.720
And then we forget about it until the next one.
00:28:00.300
But I looked into this, and they were not extreme-right.
00:28:05.220
Everything in our media, you know, our mainstream media,
00:28:08.340
paints people as fascists or hard-right or Nazis if they are not left-wing.
00:28:13.040
What I say now is if you're not left-wing, then you must –
00:28:16.200
if you're not – sorry, if you're not extreme-left-wing,
00:28:22.320
And I've spent 25 years of my life in politics trying to restore our sovereignty
00:28:27.900
as an independent democratic nation, trying to make sure that our laws –
00:28:32.320
we're governed on their own laws, statute law and common law –
00:28:35.480
that we have a democratic government that we elect
00:28:37.480
and we can sack after the end of four or five years if we don't like them.
00:28:40.780
And that makes me hard-right in the eyes of some people.
00:28:44.100
Well, I regard myself as pretty kind of soft democrat, really.
00:28:46.980
But I think I'm astute enough to see when something is dangerous
00:28:52.620
And I think Islam is very dangerous for my society
00:28:59.920
And, in fact, I didn't meet Tommy Robinson fairly recently.
00:29:03.140
I think it was in – maybe it was about March, I think,
00:29:09.620
And I saw him on the telly some years ago, the television, being interviewed.
00:29:13.980
And I thought, well, actually, he doesn't sound like a far-right, you know, thug,
00:29:18.880
which is what they'd like to make me up to believe that he is.
00:29:23.560
And when I've met him, he's actually quite – he's very charming.
00:29:32.400
But, of course, that isn't the image that the mainstream media wants to go along with.
00:29:36.980
It doesn't want to talk about the underlying issues.
00:29:39.720
And what I've done throughout the years I've been talking about Islam
00:29:45.780
I have nothing against individuals and Muslims.
00:29:48.140
I think a lot of Muslims probably think it's a load of old claptrap as well.
00:29:51.540
But it's a cult that they live under and they're not allowed to speak out about it.
00:29:55.520
Or they personally will be in trouble with their own co-religionists.
00:29:59.260
But they probably think most of it's rubbish as well.
00:30:02.240
And, you know, but the people who hold sway are the extremists and the literalists.
00:30:08.920
In fact, I've met – I know I was at a conference a few weeks ago in London,
00:30:12.200
a small conference, about 50 people, who were ex-Muslims,
00:30:15.960
who decided that they were going to either convert to another religion
00:30:18.800
or were atheists, couldn't live under that religion anymore.
00:30:27.920
They're very often bullied and attacked in their own communities.
00:30:32.720
And this is never reported on in the British mainstream media.
00:30:36.260
They just don't want to talk about these issues.
00:30:40.600
My view is that a literalist interpretation of Islam has no place in Western liberal society.
00:30:46.880
Look at every country in the world where you have Islam in control of the politics
00:30:52.300
and they are not places that a normal Western person, used to freedoms, freedom of speech,
00:30:58.720
freedom of all the other freedoms we enjoy, would actually want to go and live,
00:31:01.440
unless they're working there on a high salary, of course, for a limited period of time.
00:31:05.120
How big of a place in UKIP's policies and battles is Islam, rape gangs, creeping Sharia law, open borders?
00:31:20.680
I mean, UKIP, the traditional symbol of the party, is the pound symbol,
00:31:25.900
which was very interesting and it smacks of patriotism and sovereignty.
00:31:32.260
It didn't touch on Islam at all and open borders was, wasn't,
00:31:38.120
I don't even think it was a big issue in the era you mentioned, 1992, etc.
00:31:56.280
Is it a dominant thing for you or is it secondary?
00:31:58.600
It has to be one of the things we talk about because most people, as they are in every country,
00:32:05.100
are concerned about their prospects, their children's prospects, the economy,
00:32:09.580
what kind of life are they going to have, what kind of life have their children got to look forward to.
00:32:13.420
One of the big problems in the UK is the difficulty in finding somewhere to live.
00:32:17.500
House prices are astronomically high in many places.
00:32:20.520
It's very difficult to rent property at a reasonable price.
00:32:25.260
One of the reasons, one of the main reasons, is mass immigration into our country
00:32:29.140
and the effect that that's had on the supply of housing.
00:32:32.780
And I think it was the immigration issue that actually made people understand what the EU was about,
00:32:38.700
that we no longer govern ourselves because we can't control our immigration policy.
00:32:44.800
And this is a very large element of the problem.
00:32:51.720
Well, in terms of how big Islam is, it's not going to be the main primary policy.
00:32:55.800
It has to be one of the policies because I have to appeal and my party has to appeal across the board
00:33:02.680
And the things on most people's minds are the things I've just discussed.
00:33:16.040
It doesn't affect a lot of people because they live in nice places where they don't have the problems of rape gangs
00:33:20.940
or they don't notice them because it's not happening to them.
00:33:24.300
And therefore, it has to be one of a range of issues I talk about.
00:33:27.900
But, of course, the funny thing is, since I got this job and I go on the TV,
00:33:31.480
I've had various TV interviews where I've gone on there to talk about UKIP and its policies and what it wants to do.
00:33:38.260
And they constantly attack me on Islam because they think I can't defend myself.
00:33:42.700
So I've ended up spending more time talking about this than any other subject, not terribly,
00:33:48.120
but because they insist on raising the subject.
00:33:51.100
I have one last question, and it's been on my mind since Friday.
00:33:58.540
I feel some paternity for turning him into a citizen journalist, whatever credit or blame come to the rebel.
00:34:06.500
But he went independent from us earlier this spring, but we left on good terms and we support him morally.
00:34:12.660
We helped him out last year when he got into a spot of bother in Canterbury Court.
00:34:20.720
He had a suspended sentence from there for contempt of court.
00:34:24.420
We were not in a position to make the legal decisions for him this time because he doesn't work for us.
00:34:30.320
But we support him morally and we're concerned about things.
00:34:33.520
I'm concerned about a 13-month prison sentence because in a prison, if he's in an open wing of the prison,
00:34:44.560
And no one can do 13 months in solitary confinement.
00:34:47.700
I'm concerned about how quickly it was from arrest to hearing, to conviction, to sentencing.
00:34:57.520
He didn't have access to a lawyer who's expert in contempt of court matters.
00:35:01.240
My own layman's view, I don't have all the facts in front of me, but what I can read is,
00:35:07.420
what I can see is he didn't actually violate the integrity of the trial.
00:35:13.400
He did not stand on the precincts of the court.
00:35:21.440
He called them accused rapists, so he didn't prejudge things.
00:35:24.860
He didn't give any details from within the trial.
00:35:29.320
So there's about three or four things that make me think what happened to him procedurally was wrong.
00:35:35.580
The substantive outcome of the 13-month sentence was wrong.
00:35:39.480
The four-day press gag order on top of it was wrong.
00:35:44.000
And I'm deeply concerned about Tommy as a person, about the rule of law in the United Kingdom,
00:35:49.540
and about the warning, the chill this sends to anyone else, should they wish to follow in Tommy's footsteps.
00:35:57.160
Those are my views, and I made them clear to all our supporters.
00:35:59.940
Would you like to give me your views on the subject, and what, if anything, you think ought to be done now?
00:36:09.120
I think Tommy sailed too close to the wind on this issue of the contempt of court thing.
00:36:17.160
He was accused of potentially causing a breach of the peace.
00:36:21.940
And the judge made the decision that there could have been a potential breach of the peace
00:36:26.560
because of what he was doing outside, and therefore has revoked his suspended sentence.
00:36:32.140
It was a three-month suspended sentence, and he's been given another ten months on top of that.
00:36:38.080
I think that is out of proportion to the offence.
00:36:43.220
He was filming, and I believe he only read out names of people that had already been published
00:36:49.700
The judge made that decision, and in strict legal terms, he probably was within his rights
00:36:56.320
In fact, he was within his rights to do that, to actually then rescind Tommy's suspended sentence
00:37:03.340
But having said that, I think that Tommy Robinson has been sent to prison more for who he is
00:37:12.860
From what I'm told now, the prisons are very much under the sway of Muslim gangs, and we
00:37:18.740
have a phenomenon now in prisons called taking the mat, where non-Muslim prisoners convert
00:37:31.260
One of the things that my colleague did, Malcolm Lord Pearson, who's a member of the House of
00:37:35.980
Lords and a UKIP peer, is immediately said that if anything happens to Tommy, if he's murdered,
00:37:41.800
or if he is injured in any way, then he would take out a private prosecution against the
00:37:47.500
Home Secretary as an accessory after the act, and possibly for negligence in doing his duty
00:37:56.360
Now, that was the kind of threat that Pearson made, to know that we're on alert, that if
00:38:01.900
And I think that that will protect Tommy because of the amount, not just that, but the amount
00:38:06.480
of public awareness of him, they will now be prepared to protect him in prison, certainly
00:38:13.100
If people want to support him, I believe that there is a legal fund being set up.
00:38:16.980
I don't have, I can't tell you where to go on that.
00:38:21.760
But there is, even you may have started my answer, didn't you, for Tommy?
00:38:25.900
We had one to take on the publication ban, but that ended within one day.
00:38:34.760
Just for your own information, Gerard, I spoke with Tommy's wife, Jenna, and other family
00:38:40.600
members, and they asked us to hold off on any fundraising until they had proper instructions
00:38:46.540
So we have actually not done any fundraising for Tommy, other than that publication ban matter,
00:38:54.600
And I understand that any other crowdfunding websites are not authorized by Tommy.
00:39:01.880
So that's just a little bit of information for you.
00:39:05.960
Well, I'm waiting to hear to somebody who's been in contact with him, because as you may
00:39:09.740
be aware, he's only allowed two one-hour visits a month anyway.
00:39:13.240
So he's probably going to keep those for his lawyer and his family at the moment.
00:39:17.300
But I'm hoping to speak to somebody who's had a bit close contact with somebody who's
00:39:21.340
met him, so we can find out a bit more what it is that he actually wants to do and what
00:39:26.700
On the reporting restriction, just say a word on that, because it is appropriate sometimes
00:39:34.280
for a judge to impose reporting restrictions, because not having them might prejudice the
00:39:42.280
But what's happened with these rape gangs is they are interconnected.
00:39:45.840
So you'll have a trial of a group of men in one place, and they'll be convicted.
00:39:52.380
And you might find that one of those people convicted pops up in another trial in another
00:39:58.200
place, because these things are a network that work together.
00:40:02.060
Therefore, the judge will impose reporting restriction, because they're not allowed to
00:40:08.060
It might prejudice the jury, for example, and they don't want it reported on, at least.
00:40:13.060
But the danger here, of course, is this whole thing is being subdued and not talked about.
00:40:18.580
And the danger is that reporting restrictions may be imposed in order not to talk about it.
00:40:24.000
So I think this is something to be very wary of in case it's used as a tool by the establishment
00:40:32.400
Quite often now, you know, at the end of a news bulletin, you'll have, oh, another rape
00:40:38.400
You know, pictures of 10 or 20 men will be published.
00:40:42.760
It'll be in the paper the next day, and we'll forget all about it.
00:40:45.480
But this is a phenomenon that's been going on now for 30, 40 years.
00:40:51.760
And if you read the accounts of what's happened to some of these girls, and they are little
00:40:55.740
I mean, you know, they're 9-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds that have been subjected to this.
00:41:00.160
And it is horrific, some of the things that have gone on.
00:41:09.020
It's absolute sadism of what's happening to these little girls.
00:41:12.360
And our establishment is terrified of actually confronting the problem, because very often
00:41:18.260
the police have been negligent in doing their duty.
00:41:21.980
The authorities in the local councils who have a duty to look after the children, because
00:41:26.620
a lot of these girls actually were in children's homes, because they already had problem lives
00:41:34.520
And the courts, you know, haven't done their duty either.
00:41:38.200
There should be exemplary sentences for these people.
00:41:44.300
This is the problem with political correctness.
00:41:47.820
You've had Tommy Robinson break an order of the court.
00:41:53.640
He's in contempt of court, and he gets 13 months.
00:41:55.900
We had a case last week of a Muslim imam who had been sexually assaulting girls in his class
00:42:05.040
when he's supposed to be teaching them the Koran.
00:42:07.400
And the judge didn't send him to prison because he said he has six children and his wife doesn't
00:42:11.900
speak English, so therefore he can't go to prison because his wife would suffer too much.
00:42:16.180
So I don't know who you would think had committed the worst offence there.
00:42:22.240
And yet someone is spared prison, and someone else gets a very long sentence for a technical
00:42:32.320
Every time I visited the UK with Tommy, I would come back with horror stories like that,
00:42:39.140
And I would always come back depressed that the United Kingdom of 2018 was not the ones that
00:42:44.740
we learned about here in Canada, the United Kingdom of Shakespeare and Churchill and freedom
00:42:51.700
and rule of law and a man's home is his castle and all the things that the UK has given to the world.
00:42:59.740
I find it deeply depressing, but I'm glad you're where you are, Gerard.
00:43:03.700
Can I say a quick word on that, if you don't mind?
00:43:10.020
We've preserved our freedom throughout history.
00:43:12.660
Every time we were attacked by the Spanish, the French, the Germans, we had a fighting spirit to protect ourselves.
00:43:18.160
But we were also a country, as you rightly said, that established parliamentary democracy, the rule of law,
00:43:24.480
Many people have come into our country and been absorbed.
00:43:27.540
But what's happened over the last 30, 40, 50 years is that our identity as English and British has been suppressed.
00:43:36.800
It's something we're supposed to be ashamed of.
00:43:38.940
We're supposed to roll over and let anybody come and do whatever they like.
00:43:42.960
And if you say anything about it, you're accused of being far right, Nancy or racist.
00:43:48.300
What I would like to do, at least play a part in doing this going forward, in the same way I played a part in the referendum campaign in achieving that,
00:43:56.120
is to play a part in a process where British people start to get their self-respect and their pride back
00:44:01.820
and restore those things that we were famous for, our rule of law, our tolerance, but also our fighting spirit.
00:44:08.460
Not literally fighting anybody, but fighting against those things that would destroy us.
00:44:13.320
And we must restore our country, otherwise we're finished.
00:44:22.640
The term, have you seen this term populist parties is used as an insult now, a pejorative term across Europe.
00:44:29.320
Anybody that actually says, you know, we should actually look out for our own country and defend our own interest.
00:44:41.620
You had policies that were popular in the electorate and they voted for you.
00:44:44.500
But under our skewed upside down system now, the people who run our countries across Europe, the political elite, know that what they're doing is grossly unpopular.
00:44:55.100
And therefore, if you want to do something that the people want, you are a populist and there must be something wrong with you.
00:45:01.380
It's an inverted, you know, perverted system that we're now living under.
00:45:05.220
And I hope I can play a small part in changing that.
00:45:12.500
I had suggested only 10 minutes, but I couldn't stop asking questions and listening to your very thoughtful answers.
00:45:21.120
I feel like the UKIP party is in good hands with you and I look forward to your successes.
00:45:28.280
And frankly, I'm proud of you, Kip, for taking the stand that it has on Tommy.
00:45:34.700
And I think you have a balanced view and I hope we can keep in touch in the months ahead.
00:45:45.680
And we have some other Brits who are with the Rebel, too.
00:45:50.980
We've got more than one troublemaker on our team, but I think that you're a bit of a troublemaker in your own way, too, in a good way.
00:45:58.840
And hopefully we can shed some light on these important issues.
00:46:08.140
He is the member of the European Parliament for London.
00:46:11.940
He's the leader of the UK Independence Party, also called UKIP.
00:46:31.320
Normally, we keep these shows behind a paywall, but I think this one was special, and I want to put it on YouTube so everyone can see it, not just subscribers to The Ezra Levant Show.
00:46:41.140
And I think we've got to send it around to our viewers in the United Kingdom, not just to show who Gerard Batten is, but to show that there is some political support for Tommy Robinson, even though most politicians are hiding under their desks.
00:46:55.560
From Rebel World headquarters here in Canada to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.