All Episodes
Previous Next
May 14, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:00:25
Delingpod 20: Gerard Batten
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Thank you.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod, and my very special and exciting guest this week.
Is that me?
Gerard, it is.
I've come to Northampton, and it's a really grim day, and I've come to meet Gerard Batten, the leader of UKIP, on his purple campaign bus, and to talk to him about, well, obvious things like...
How are UKIP going to do in the Euro elections?
And what he thinks of his rivals, the Brexit party, and whether it's all over or whether he's going to go down fighting or whether he's going to be the surprise winner of the Euro elections.
Gerard, I have to say, sorry, Gerard Batten.
Did I introduce you before?
I did.
Yes, you just said it was me.
I really wouldn't want your job for all the tea in China.
I mean, not least because you've inherited...
How many UKIP leaders have there been before between you and Farad?
Well, let me think now.
There was Nigel, then there was Lady Jane Grey, otherwise known as Diane James.
The Queen of 17 Days or whatever it was.
Yeah.
Then we had Paul Nuttall.
Nine Day Queen, wasn't it?
Whatever it was.
Then we had Paul Nuttall, then we had Henry Bolton, and then we had me.
So I think there's been three since Nigel.
And you said that you wouldn't want my job.
Nobody else wanted my job a year ago.
Literally nobody else wanted it, which is why the reason I stood up to be the interim leader to save the party.
It was obvious you couldn't do that in three months.
So then I stood unopposed for a 12-month term in order to save the party, which we've done.
Me, with the help of the members, have saved it from oblivion.
We're now very strong.
Membership went down to about 17,000.
It's up now to £30,000 and rising, and we've got an income of about £1 million a year, which pays our running costs, plus we've been able to raise over £500,000 for this election.
So far, money's still coming in.
Before I forget, because the thought has suddenly occurred to me, and I don't want to forget it later on, even though it's a complete non-secretary, Your accent seems to be quite similar to Michael Caine's original accent.
Are you from the same part of the country?
Not many people knew that.
No, I come from East London.
I grew up on the Isle of Dogs, Mile End, lived in Stratford, still live in Forest Gate.
No, he's South London.
Is he?
Yes.
Has nobody else mentioned this to you before?
Some people do.
I don't see it myself.
I don't get it, but I can't hear it.
Yeah, well, anyway.
Although he's very pleased by the association.
Well, exactly.
We like Michael Caine.
I mean, he's one of the few celebrities who's really sound on Brexit, isn't he?
Yeah, I think there's more than one.
There was that chat from The Who as well recently, wasn't there?
There's a list.
There's a special list.
I think there's a lot more than you realise.
But of course, in the areas that they earn their living, they can't say so.
Unless you're so well long established, but you don't care.
But ordinary people, ordinary celebrities and stars and whatever, can't say what they think because it might affect their ability to earn their living.
Totally.
You've got to be pretty much Michael Caine, Roger Daltrey, or I suppose the American equivalent would be someone like Clint Eastwood.
Clint Eastwood can say what he likes because he's Clint, but everyone else is cowed by the system.
I used to have a girlfriend who was an actress, and I hung out with lovers, with acting folk at places like the RSC, and they're absolutely delightful people to hang out with.
But they are all politically the same.
They all have this identikit politics.
Well, A, they're actors, so they're probably not that bright, most of them.
But also because they can't diverge from the...
No.
And it's not only true of the lovey world.
Other people have their livelihoods threatened.
Now, this story was told to me earlier in the week, and I believe it.
One of the football lads who supported me over the last few months told me that five young chaps, and they're in their late teens, 20s, who turned up to the rallies that we've done, pro-Brexit rallies, actually had their photographs taken by Sky News.
The police then came to their house and said to their parents that if they carried on supporting this Football Lads Alliance and going to these kind of rallies, that their employers would be informed and that this would ruin their career prospects.
Three of those boys have now decided they can't have anything more to do with it.
Two of them are holding out.
Now, I can't prove that, but when somebody comes up to you and tells you a story that you have no reason to disbelieve, I find it perfectly believable in today's current climate that things like that can happen.
Yeah, tell me about the Football Lads Alliance, what it is that people can understand.
I mean, it's presumably not a...
Well, I'm sure if you work for the Guardian you'd call it far right, but everyone is far right if you work for the Guardian.
Exactly.
He's not a Guardian reader.
But the Football Lads Alliance is just...
What is it?
Well, I became aware of it at the back end of last year when they had a rally in London, which I only was aware of because of Twitter, when they got 30,000 people out on the streets marching against terrorism and extremism.
Because they were fed up with it, basically, and the fact that the state doesn't really want to do much about it.
And I thought, well, what are they?
You know, are they this far-right group or whatever?
So I spoke to a friend who had connections with them, who said, no, they're not like that at all, quite different.
They're made up of, first of all, it was veterans, army veterans, service veterans, and the football lads who'd organised this.
And in fact, me and Henry Bolton went and had a meeting with them in, I think it was early January.
It was just before he's...
It was on the same day of his revelation of his relationship with Joe Marnie.
He only stayed for about 15 minutes.
I stayed and talked to them for a couple of hours, then we went for a drink.
And it was obvious to me that they were not some kind of far-right group, that they were patriots, basically, who were concerned about what's happening to their country.
So I got involved with them thereafter.
And they have been at our rallies.
They helped to organise the rallies.
And they're just basically ordinary, working-class, patriotic people.
But anybody now that stands up against the mainstream media, the politically acceptable consensus, is labelled as far-right.
I mean, I get this and I listen to this stuff and I read it and I think, who are they talking about?
Me.
I'm supposed to be far-right.
I mean, it's just pure propaganda.
It's lies.
And I've reached a stage now, James, where I don't watch the mainstream media anymore.
I watch the headlines on the news to see where there's been some kind of natural disaster or whatever's happened.
Then I turn over.
I don't read a newspaper.
I haven't bought a newspaper in months and months.
Don't pick them up to read them.
I think they're full of lies and misrepresentation.
And I think that's a very sorry state.
I've been following news and current affairs since I was 10 years old.
That's 55 years ago.
Now I can't be bothered because I know that we've just been fed a diet of propaganda the whole time.
Yes.
Now, I'm totally with you.
I think on a previous recent podcast I discussed with my special guest...
I won't watch the BBC unless I'm effectively ordered to.
If I'm doing it for my TV review in The Spectator, then I can't really not.
But as a rule of thumb, the BBC is just so, so tainted.
Oh, not just them.
I mean, Channel 4, I couldn't work.
I mean, I've refused to go on it since 2014, after they insulted Nigel Farrow during the European elections.
I just refused to go on it anymore.
And I was on it with that Cathy Newman, and I was actually supporting a young girl who was being deported.
I think she was Indian.
And she was being deported.
porty she was just in the middle of doing her o levels and by a levels and by all accounts she was a very um intelligent um nice person and they were going to kick her out of the country and i went on there to defend her and say this is precisely the kind of person we shouldn't be kicking out but we should have controls against any free card trickster pickpocket
atm fraudster that cares to turn up from eastern europe and i got attacked by and even though i support him what you think would be the politically correct cause at the time i got attacked on air by her and i thought why am i bothering to do this what was her line Do you remember?
Oh, can you see where your immigration policies lead, Mr Batten?
And I said, well, yes, they'd lead to allowing somebody like this to stay.
Well, we would be far more selective of who we let in.
Let's let in people who contribute to our country rather than people who don't.
Yes.
You're never going to win.
No, that's true.
It's an interesting calculation.
Is it worth going on these shows to reach out to the two or three people who might be receptive to your message?
Or are you giving more material to the enemy to make you look bad?
I think it's counterproductive from their point of view because...
What I've found, for example, I don't know whether you listened to the Matt Fry interview I did on LBC. I wouldn't touch Matt Fry.
No, right.
Well, I went on there a Saturday morning to do an hour, half an hour interview I was on there.
He's particularly bad.
Well, he attacked me relentlessly.
He's awful.
I defended myself.
We got 500 new UKIP members that day.
People rang in over that weekend.
And when I get going round, because I say, I'm fed up with this, I don't want to do it anymore.
And everyone that I've spoken to on this tour says to me the same thing.
No, when you go on there and defend yourself, it actually works against them and it's working for you.
So my advice for my press officer, who has a very difficult job, is that I should go on and defend myself because this actually boosts support for what I'm saying.
It's quite difficult to do when you're sitting there being attacked relentlessly to think that it's actually doing some good.
But I try to think of the people who are listening who actually agree with what we're saying and want somebody to stand up and say it.
Can I be rude?
Earlier on, before we started the interview, you reminded me of my cat when it's angry.
When it's kind of swishing its tail, it's really pissed off.
And I worry slightly for you.
If I were your kind of image consultant, what I'd be saying with you, try and...
How can you dial back your...
Try not to show you're so pissed off all the time.
LAUGHTER Because you do seem continually pissed off.
I mean, it's true, you probably are continually pissed off, but do you think that's a fair criticism?
I get people tell me how I stay so calm when I'm being interviewed on these things and whatever, and I think, well, it may appear that on the outside, but it's not like that on the inside.
But I suppose there's a lot to be pissed off about, isn't there?
I mean, I can't change the way...
I am the way I am.
People are either going to vote for it or they're not.
You know, I really don't.
I'm not going to change my...
I'm not in the business of having an image consultant if people can take me or leave me as they like.
So that's my bid to be your image consultant.
Yeah, it didn't work, I'm afraid.
Rejected, just...
OK. All right.
No, I think I didn't...
I don't see myself that way.
I mean, you know...
I always say that I'm a pessimist because it saves unnecessary disappointment.
And then you get pleasant surprises when things go right.
Yeah, yeah.
I know that you hate the Tories because you told me it just before we started the interview.
Do you hate them because they have betrayed conservative principles?
Or do you hate them for other reasons?
I hate them because they've betrayed this country.
My entire adult life has been watching them do that.
Even Margaret Thatcher?
Yes, Margaret Thatcher.
Don't forget Margaret Thatcher.
Well, I mean, I'm not decrying everything she did.
She fought the Falklands War, which no other politician would have had the guts to do, and I'll give her full credit for that.
And she saw her off Arthur Scargill, which we needed doing.
Right.
But don't forget, she was fully in agreement with the European Union.
She campaigned in the referendum of 1975 for her remain.
She bulldozed through the 1986 Single European Act, which gave away our veto, and set the scene for everything that's come since.
So it's only at the last minute that suddenly she's supposed to have decided it was all a bad idea.
That's quite an interesting take on Margaret Thatcher.
I haven't heard that one before, that she was a Europhile, and she...
Well, look at the history.
She supported us joining before we joined.
She then campaigned to remain in the 1975 referendum.
She bulldozed through the 1986 Single European Act against the...
Well, not even advice.
Tony Benn and...
Well, Enoch Powell were both begging her not to do it in Parliament because of the consequences of what she was doing, which then will later claim that she didn't understand what she was doing.
Well, hang on a minute.
She's supposed to be the most super-intelligent, iron-willed person in politics, and she didn't understand what she was doing.
But do you not think...
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, and I believe this as well.
You can be too ruthless in your judgements on people.
We're all prisoners of the idiocies of our time.
It takes a really brave person.
You're one of those people.
I'm one of those people.
Margaret Thatcher, she was probably trying to decide who she was, where she was politically, where she was going.
And the clamour of the times was very much for Europe as a kind of good thing.
It probably took her a while to realise how rubbish it was.
Well, I don't want to have a go at her particularly.
She's dead.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead.
It's just a fact.
No, I think you should.
I think it's important to be able to talk about her legacy.
You asked me about the Conservative Party.
Now, the Conservative Party has got the word conserve in its name, and it has never, ever conserved anything that anyone can remember in its entire history, even in the Second World War.
Churchill was a kind of aristocratic liberal who ended up in the Conservative Party and they didn't want him anyway and he had a fight, he had a fat battle on his hands to actually make the Conservative Party.
Enter into the spirit of the war.
I mean, there were people in the Conservative Party who would happily have done a deal with Hitler and he had to see them off.
So the Conservative Party, I think, I hate because it's done everything it possibly can to undermine and betray the interests of these countries in the end of the Second World War, while all the time pretending that they are patriotic.
Labour, you know where you are, Labour.
They're international socialists.
They're Marxists.
You expect them to do what they do.
Liberal Dems, well, they're all dotty anyway, so why would you be surprised at anything they do?
They hate everything to do with this country.
We must surrender to a foreign power because we're so unworthy.
We can't run our own affairs.
Can't really take them seriously, can you?
So I don't get worked up and angry about them.
I get worked up about the Conservative Party because they've never actually done what they're supposed to do, which is conserve what's best about this country.
Okay, but is there any MP from any party that you think, yeah, they're a stand-up guy or girl, they're doing a good job and I like where they're coming from?
What currently you mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's a few in the Conservative Party, there's a few in Labour.
So go on, name me a few names.
Well, who can I name?
Jacob?
I used to think Rhys Mogg until he came out with this rubbish about supporting the deal, so he went off my chart.
But you know that he did that with his, you know, someone was trusting his arm behind his back.
I mean, he just thought...
But to me, this is such a fundamental thing.
This is not a policy about economics or something else where you could think, well, you know, I could be wrong here, so I'll go along with the party, because I'm not entirely 100% sure I'm right.
This to me is such a matter of fundamental principle.
Who governs your country?
Do you want to be a free independent country or not?
That there is no room for compromise on this.
Yes, but we're going to come on to this in a bit later on because I think this is going to be the key theme of our discussion.
The clash between pragmatism and ideological purity.
And I think that...
All MPs, all politicians are somewhere on that spectrum.
There are very few who are totally pragmatic, you know, prepared to do anything to advance their whatever the party wants.
And there are very few who are so pure they'll hold out to the last...
I don't think it's a question of purity.
I think it's a question of do you believe in something or not?
It's not about ideological purity.
And what could be more basic than who governs your country?
And, you know, these people have salami-sliced away our independence and our right to self-government over the last 46 years.
And there is no excuse for it.
Oh.
But, Joan...
Look, I'm on the same side as you.
I'm an absolute kind of zealot when it comes to...
I'm pure.
I'm really about as pure as you can get.
That's why I'm completely unsuited to politics.
So am I probably.
Well, I wondered that.
I wondered that.
Yeah, I'm really, really pure.
And I think Jacob made the wrong decision by voting reluctantly for that election.
That latest variant on the withdrawal agreement.
But I understand why he did it and I don't judge him so harshly because he is in this system which forces you to behave in that way.
And this is why I'm slightly more forgiving.
I'll tell you what the problem is.
It's because we have such a rigid electoral system, the first-past-the-post system, where he knows that if he doesn't go along with what his party wants, they could lose seats, they'd be out of power.
And so therefore it doesn't become about the issues and the principles.
It's about keeping the party in power.
If we had a proportional representation voting system, it could be more fluid so that people stand for certain things.
Okay, the public don't like it.
They vote for something else.
And then the people who are in the other party who didn't agree with what their party are doing, they could say, okay, well, I'll shift over to the other party because they're actually more representative of what I say.
It's because we don't have a dynamic or more fluid political system that we've ended up in this situation.
If there had been a PR voting system after the referendum, we had the 17th general election, then you might have had a situation where you've got quite a lot of UKIP MEPs who could have gone into coalition with the government, and I wouldn't care personally whether it was Labour or Tory, Gone into coalition or cooperated with the government to bring about the referendum result and to actually implement it.
Instead of that, you've got two parties in Parliament, predominantly, who don't want to do it, and there's no way of shifting them.
But when I hear the words proportional representation, PR, all I think about is I look across the continent and I think, right, so you've got the...
The governance of the country basically being decided by the bloody Greens.
It all seems to be the Greens who hold the balance of power because they can decide where they're going to move their block.
So what I'm saying is that you get the fringes with too much power.
Surely the ideal situation, what we should be aiming for, is a situation where a party representing the stuff that we believe in, the good shit, Is the dominant party in Parliament?
What you've got is a party in power who tells you they do that, the Conservative Party, and doesn't do it at all.
When I think of PR, I tell you what I'm thinking of now, Matteo Salvini in Italy, who a few years ago was an MEP sitting in the same group as me.
Because they have PR, he's now...
He's a foreign minister, isn't he, in Italy?
And he's been able to do something, and he's cut illegal immigration by about 90%.
So if you offer me a choice between what we've got and what we might get, Given where we are, I'd much rather take a chance on what we might get.
Gerald Batten says, we must be more like Italy.
We must learn from Italian politics.
I'm a big admirer of Italian culture, as a few people will know.
Well, I agree, Italian culture, but Italian politics...
No, Italian politics is a different matter altogether.
Did you know Matteo Salvini when you were...
Not well, not well.
I didn't know him well when he was there.
Yes, I think we can probably agree.
I'm sure we can agree, in fact, that the Conservatives are ripe for destruction.
There is that mood across the country.
Now the question is, who is going to benefit from that popular view?
And I think that popular view extends to Labour as well, who, after all, 60% of their voters are...
At least that.
At least that.
And yet here's Labour saying vote Labour to thwart Brexit, which is a crazy...
So both the main parties are screwed, I would say.
But...
A few months ago, one might have said, well, UKIP's going to clean up from this.
But now you've got Nigel Farage doing his thing.
He's going around the country at these incredible...
Farage, say what you like about him.
He's an incredible, charismatic character, isn't he?
He galvanises the crowd.
Oh, Nigel, people come up to him in the streets and so on.
Going around the country with this new Brexit party, which he's very cleverly, cunningly, I would say, in a kind of...
He's claiming that UKIP is racist because Tommy Robinson and because Sargon of Akkad.
He's playing that game and it seems to be working.
He seems to be turning people against you and hoovering up these votes and presenting himself as the bright Brexit future of Britain.
He might even win the Peterborough by-election.
I would actually put money on him doing so.
I think...
I think that...
He won't run himself, because he doesn't want to win another by-election.
He'll put some other mug up to do it for him.
Well, it might be a good mug.
It might not be a mug at all.
He might get his first Brexit Party MP in Parliament imminently.
We're way ahead of ourselves here.
Let's remember that UKIP is a party with a long history, and I believe it's got a future after these European elections, because...
We've been written off more times than Count Dracula, and we keep coming back.
And now we've got Nigel Farrell trying to write us off as well.
This Brexit party didn't exist.
It was cobbled together by Catherine Blakelock, who then had to be sacked as leader because of alleged racist remarks.
She totally didn't deserve that.
No, of course she didn't.
She's a good woman.
She is not a racist, I know.
Well, she's married to somebody from Nepal, isn't she?
That's the first husband.
The second husband is a six-fourth black man who I've met.
Right.
And...
She isn't a racist, but Nigel dropped her.
Maybe she's a masochist.
Maybe she married a black man because she hates black people to punish herself.
I think it's a very nice, sincere marriage, and I'm not going to comment on it.
Nothing to do with me.
And Nigel's dropped her like hot shit at the minute that there's a problem with the media.
Yes.
It's all been started.
Suddenly, this party, from nowhere, we are supposed to believe rockets up to 27% in the opinion polls.
It's being promoted by the mainstream media on the TV, the radio, newspapers as being, oh, it's got all this fantastic success.
And, of course, Nigel's good at getting people out of meetings because he's a celebrity and people like to go and watch him talk.
I don't believe a word of it.
This has all been engineered by the mainstream media because what they want to do is kill UKIP off in these elections.
And what is the Brexit Party all about?
It's an alternative Tory party.
It's Tory-lite.
Where's its money coming from?
So I've heard it's coming from big Tory backers.
Look at its candidates.
They're rich businessmen or women.
They are ex-Tories like Anne Widdicombe.
And you've got a token Communist thrown in for good measure in order to give it a bit of diversity.
It's purpose.
He's like a Pied Piper that is leading the voters into a dead end.
Get them all to vote Brexit Party and the Tory party can come back for a revival later.
I think he's achieving a couple of ambitions with this.
Number one, he's always wanted an autocracy.
He's always wanted to be a one-man band.
He couldn't do that in UKIP. It was just too difficult because we had a structure and we had an NEC and we had branches and we had members with a vote.
He hasn't got any of that.
It's just him.
And I think what he also wanted to do as well was to kind of have a new Tory party so he could...
Well, he was always saying there was a branch of the Tory party that would break away and come and join UKIP, because that's his ideal, to reform the Tory party.
Now, I'm not in the slightest bit interested in that.
All the years I was in, you know, even when we set UKIP up in 93, 94, I said our natural constituency is what I would call, for want of a better term, the patriotic working class.
And I've always done, everything I've done in the party has been about trying to reach out to more working class voters, which I've succeeded in doing in the last 12 months.
But of course now I have this added problem of having to battle against the Brexit party, which I think is an entirely set-up, fixed arrangement in order to prevent us being successful.
Now, it's up to the voters how they vote.
I don't know what's going to happen on the 23rd of May, many more than anybody else does.
But...
I believe that we appeal to a much wider band of people than he does.
And he's also insulted people.
Look when I organised the 9th of December rally in Parliament Square.
And he called the people who turned up there bald tattoo thugs.
You've seen the video of Avi going out amongst the crowd talking to people.
Normal, ordinary, decent people.
And just, I believe, this week on Brexford's television he's called us vile.
He's called UKIP vile.
Well, hang on a minute.
There are about 17,000 people still in UKIP. We're good to go.
The number two in eastern region is Paul Oakley, who's still a friend of his as far as I know.
He's calling him vile.
So he's calling all these people vile.
Gerard, he's playing politics, isn't he?
He's found this point of difference, which he's turning up to the max.
He's saying, don't vote for UKIP because they are racist.
Because he doesn't have the guts to stand up and talk about...
The big issue, the big elephant in the room facing this country, which is Islamic ideology.
Having said that, he has said things worse than me.
He's said, for example, in talks in America, and he's on record, and it's been videoed, of saying that they want to come and kill us, inverted commas, that they are a fifth column in our country.
He said all things much stronger than I have, because I've always talked about the ideology.
The man's a hypocrite.
Right, okay.
Well...
I, look, I understand, totally understand your irritation.
At the same time, I wonder that Maybe there's a kind of lesson here.
And it's not a lesson I particularly like because it tells me about how shallow politics is.
But let's take some examples.
You chose as some of your UKIP candidates, Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, and Count Dankula, the Nazi pug man.
And you chose these people as your candidates.
I don't think Nigel Farage would ever have done so, because he wants a kind of Teflon party, whereas you...
What he'd like is a load of glove puppets that he can put back in the cupboard between elections and get them out and display them and put them back again.
He's not going to get that with a bunch of people he's got there, because although I'd prefer it if no Brexit candidates won, I'd love to be a fly on the wall when he has his MEP meeting with Anne Whittacombe.
My guess is that that relationship will last about five minutes once he gets back.
Right, okay.
But, no, I'm not going to disfow him, not least because I want to lure him onto the podcast at some stage.
He's quite...
Now his style has risen so high, he's harder to get, but I'm sure I'll get him in the end.
But, look, you have bravely stuck to your principles.
You say, look...
I believe in freedom of speech.
I think it's perfectly okay that my candidate, Kyle Benjamin, can exchange rude, insulting banter with...
Who's that MP? Jess Phillips.
I haven't quite said that, James.
But it's implied by the fact that you haven't sacked him.
Well, look, if you'll allow me to address that one.
The first remark that he made...
It wasn't a joke, it was a remark within a context of what he was making remarks.
She was claiming that, so he tells me the story...
That she was kind of laughing at the idea that there should be a committee in the House of Commons to consider male suicide, very big, especially amongst young men now.
Then she was claiming that she was getting lots of threats of rape, and Carl, I believe, so I'm told by Carl, she couldn't produce any evidence of this, and he made this remark that I wouldn't make and I don't condone, which is, well, I wouldn't rape you.
And he said he was doing that in order to provoke her into making a complaint, which she did.
The second joke that he made more recently, I totally do not defend.
I've rung him up.
I've given him a robust portion of my mind on that, about you don't make jokes about that.
It's totally unacceptable.
You know, if I was in charge...
I'd hang rapists, quite frankly, so I don't think we should make jokes about them.
And I've told him not to make stupid jokes.
Now, if anybody in public life, whether it be politics or journalism or the media, was then kind of prevented from continuing with their careers because they made a stupid joke or a stupid remark or said something that was indefensible, then there wouldn't be many was then kind of prevented from continuing with their careers because they made a No.
Well, I agree with that.
I think that people should be judged on their intentions and on the generality of their being and their behaviour.
So one only needs to look at Carl Benjamin's extensive work as Sargon of Akkad.
He painstakingly takes apart leftist arguments in a clever, long-form way.
He's clearly not a racist.
He's clearly not a rapist.
I don't think he's an evil misogynist or anything else.
He just gets pissed off, and sometimes he pushes the boat out a bit too far.
Because it comes to a different environment as well, which is this online...
I don't exactly know how you call it since I don't watch it.
No, we can't call it, oh right, that's what the left would call it.
It's a different environment and I've said to him, you've got to realise now that you're not in that online environment, you're in politics now and you have to do things in a different way.
But if we're going to make anybody too fearful of saying anything, you end up with the vanilla politics that we've got.
Full of people who are politically correct, virtue signalers, who are frightened to actually say anything.
And do we want to be in that position?
I mean, I'm taking a big chance that the voters out there, the general public, actually understand the issues.
And while they may not like a stupid joke from someone, they're not going to take that as indicative of everything that that person is or represents.
And they'll be a bit more intelligent.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But I'm not going to play the establishment game.
The answer there will be...
It will prove your point about the mainstream media, won't it?
It depends on, are they still influential or not?
Because the mainstream media is very much of the view that...
That evil Sargon of Akkad is a sexist, racist, rapist, whatever, I don't know.
He's tainting your brand so badly.
But let's pick another example.
Tommy Robinson.
You have stood by Tommy Robinson when pretty much every...
Every MP in the business, every politician in the business dissociates themselves from Tommy Robinson.
He performs the function that the Daily Mail used to perform, didn't it?
That you can tell everyone how much you hate the Daily Mail, how much you hate Tommy Robinson, how much you disapprove of him, and this means you are a good person and you are not racist and you are not far right.
And so you see, he's particularly popular in that way with conservatives, isn't he?
Because he's the perfect tool by which they can show to the world, they can virtue signal.
Now, I admire your courage and your integrity, your ideological integrity in standing by Tommy Robinson.
But I wonder about your political chances as a result, because it seems to me that Farage has very successfully used this.
He's exploited this chink in your armour, and he's shoved his stiletto in the crack, and what can you do?
Well, I'm going to stick by what I've done all along.
I'll give you a brief synopsis of the history of this.
I wasn't aware of...
I mean, I was driving along in the car one day a good few years ago, and I heard BBC, EDL, Far Right, and I thought, if the BBC are telling me something's Far Right, I don't believe it.
I want to find out for myself.
Good rule of thumb, yep.
So I found out a little bit about it.
And then, of course, Tommy Robinson popped up on Newsnight being interviewed by Paxman, and I watched that.
In those days, I used to watch Newsnight.
I don't anymore.
And I watched it, and I thought, hang on, this man is talking some sense.
He doesn't sound like a far-right extremist to me.
Found out a bit more about him.
I didn't meet him until last year, when Malcolm Pearson was interviewed by him, because at this time he was doing his kind of media work.
Malcolm said, how about letting him interview you?
So I said, OK, let's do that.
So he came and interviewed me, got to know him, and then I subsequently read his book, I think he's broadly right.
He isn't a racist, right?
He isn't far right.
The EDL was set up as a spontaneous reaction to what was going on in Luton.
It was infiltrated by the far right and probably some of those people were working for the security services because that's how the security services destabilise any organisation that it doesn't want getting anywhere in the public scene.
Now he's had to live with all of that and then he gets tarred as far right and an extremist.
What he is, in my opinion, is an extremely brave man who is prepared to stand up And say where is a massive problem facing our country, which is Islamic ideology.
And again, like me, he doesn't talk about people, because he can mix with anybody of whatever race and ethnic background and get along fine.
I bet he's got more black friends than the lovies in the media who castigate him.
But he will talk about the ideology as I want to.
And for that, he's persecuted.
Now, am I going to do the cowardly thing and turn my back on him and say, oh, I can't support him anymore because so many people hate him?
When I see John Bercow stand up in Parliament, what did he call him?
I can't remember the exact words, but he castigated him in Parliament and insulted him.
I thought, who's the despicable person here?
Is it somebody who has whatever flaws they've got, has stood up and done the right thing, or you, you horrible, creeping piece of whatever you are, sitting in that office, that what should be a revered and honoured office with long history of people defending their right to free speech and freedom, and you sit there and castigate a man that what should be a revered and honoured office with long history of people defending their right to free speech and mate.
And the sooner we turf these people out of Parliament, the better.
We may never do it, in which case I can go off into retirement and forget all about them.
But while I can play a little part In trying to undermine those people, then I will.
Yeah.
Well, look, the seeker after truth and the ideologue in me is going, Bravo, fantastic speech, Gerard, and I totally agree with you.
And the politician that I've successfully destroyed is going, Oh, well, yes, I mean, that's...
That's bye-bye UKIP. We'll see.
I'm not interested in playing a game in politics.
To me it isn't about how can you fool people long enough to get enough votes to win something.
It's about...
Am I saying something which I believe to be true?
Are there enough people out there that agree with me?
Will they vote for us?
Because if that's not what they want, then okay, there's no point in doing it.
And what I've found out, especially I tell you going on this trip around the country, and I'm not just saying this because, you know, it is true.
I've had so many people come up to me who are UKIP activists, because I sit there when I'm in my office working on them.
Am I doing the right thing?
Are people supporting me?
Am I in a wrong tack?
And I have had nothing but support from the people who've come out.
You've seen a crowd of people today.
We're getting that everywhere we're going.
Coming out and supporting me and saying, you're doing the right thing.
Please continue.
And also ordinary voters that have come up to me.
Yesterday we were in Great Yarmouth and we were going around, people were coming up and there was one young man, 34 years old, who ran a little business there.
And somebody said, come and talk to him.
Went and talked to him and basically the message was, thank you for standing up and saying what we believe.
It makes it worthwhile.
Now, what the numbers games are, I don't know.
Are there enough people out there like that who support what I'm saying, or are there not?
Well, a good indicator will that will be on the 23rd of May and see whether they vote for us.
Because if UKIP can't do well in the European parliamentary election, then probably we're not going to do well anywhere.
But that's what I said.
I took on this job when nobody else wanted it.
Literally nobody else would do it.
Been fairly successful, I think, in preserving the party as a party.
And I can only say what I believe.
I can't pretend...
I don't believe.
And Tommy Robinson, for all his faults, is a very very brave man who is sticking up for his country and his culture.
And when history looks back on it, It'll have more good things to say about Tommy Robinson than it will John Bercow.
Yeah, I think we can agree with that one.
Tell me a bit about your background.
You obviously weren't always UKIP leader.
What did you do before then?
I had a very boring, ordinary life.
I worked for 28 years for British Telecom.
I started at the bottom and worked up a very good sales job.
I was earning more money doing that when I gave it up to be a UKIP MEP. I had a family.
I've got two sons who are now 28 and 30.
I've been married to the same woman for 31 years.
And I got involved in this because back in 1992, when the Maestricht Treaty was going through Parliament, and as I said, I used to watch a lot of news and current affairs, and I'd voted to leave in the 1975 referendum.
And I thought, I cannot sit here and watch this without doing something.
And by chance, Dr Alan Sked popped up on the TV and the radio.
He'd set up something called the Anti-Federalist League.
He gave his number out on the radio, which got him barred forever.
So I rang him up.
They wouldn't have him back on any questions.
Why?
On the radio show.
Yeah, because he gave his telephone number out and said, if you want to help support us, ring me.
So I did the next day.
Thought I was going to help stuff envelopes in a room somewhere and help people and found out that there was a good organisation with about 12 people.
We're running it and about 200 people around the country and elevated, went straight to the top.
And that's my recipe for success in politics.
Go straight to the stop and stay there.
So you really were very early on in the UKIP's existence.
Yeah, it was anti-Federacy in 1992.
I said that's an appalling name.
We can't campaign under that.
Eventually, after about 18 months, got him to accept it and we changed the name to the UK Independence Party.
So when did Farage come in?
Same time.
I think we might have even been at the same LSE meeting in March 1992 when I went along and listened to SCED and joined up there.
And presumably there was a time when you did get on.
No, not really.
I mean, we're two different.
I mean, I think with him it's a class thing, to be perfectly honest.
Right.
We all work together.
You know, in politics you don't have to like people.
You have to be on the same cause.
And we were up until 2016.
Right.
And what changed?
With him, well, he walked away.
He decided he didn't want it, which I understood, actually.
I never held it against him when he said he wanted his life back and he wanted to stop being leader.
I thought, yeah, I can understand that.
He's an incredibly hard worker.
He's a very driven person.
And I thought, yeah, that's fair enough.
If you don't want to do it, then don't do it.
I understand that.
But then again, he interfered with who was going to be leader.
You know, he engineered Diane James.
Paul Nuttall, I think, is very sad that Paul...
I like Paul and Paul...
Paul made me his Brexit spokesman because he wanted to utilise my knowledge and ability on that, which he did, and I'm very grateful for that.
Whereas Nigel never really wanted anybody.
He wanted always to be a one-man band.
He didn't really even want spokesmen.
Do you know who appointed the first...
When I was back in 2004, it was...
The leader was...
I can't remember his name now.
I know it's just gone out of my head.
He appointed me as the security and defence spokesman.
And then, in the second term, Mark Croucher, who was the press officer, said, I'm getting fed up with the press ringing up and asking who our spokesmen are, because we haven't got any, so I'm appointing them.
Do you want to be the immigration spokesman?
I said, yes.
So that's how we came to have spokesmen in the second term.
Roger Knappmann was the first leader in the first term.
So Nigel would have been quite happy to have no spokespeople and just do it all himself.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
Just to get in the way, they're just an irritant as far as he's concerned.
I do have more confidence in Brexit Party's chances than you.
Well, I mean, that wouldn't be difficult, would it?
I'm not saying they won't do well.
I'm saying I hope they don't, because I think they're completely phony.
They're a Tory-like party.
They're a...
As I say, they're a pied piper meant to lead the voters into a cul-de-sac.
Okay, but I've looked at the UKIP manifesto, and I think it's a very good manifesto.
There's very little that I disagree with you on, it seems to me, about smaller government, more sensible spending.
It's about...
I mean, you haven't been brave enough, and who would be, to say, right, we need to dismantle this thing and start again.
But you have said that there are things like PFI we need to sort out.
I don't know whether it would be in your power to sort it out.
You seem sensible on energy, on the environment.
But it strikes me as a pretty...
It's the kind of manifesto that the Conservatives should have had.
So when you talk about Tory light, I'm not really sure what you mean.
Surely, Conservatism is what we should be aiming for.
That's what's best for the country.
The opposite is socialism, isn't it?
Well, we're the small C in terms of an outlook on life rather than a political party, yeah.
But when I call it Tory-like, what I mean is nothing's going to change.
If you vote for these people, they're just the old Tories who've let us all down in the first place.
So all you're going to get is the same thing.
I don't see how these MEPs are going to stay together afterwards.
I mean, I hope we're not there very long, to be quite frank.
I mean, I hope the sooner we leave, the better.
But they're not going to work together.
I just can't see it happening afterwards.
Don't forget that Nigel succeeded in losing 45% of the MEPs in the second term.
You know, he has a knack of actually falling out with people.
Right.
So if you vote for them, you're just getting something that's failed already, which is the Conservative Party.
Also, what's it saying?
It's saying leave means leave.
Well, yeah, we know that, because that's what we voted for in 2016.
These European elections are going to come down to two things.
First of all, they're going to be a rerun of the referendum.
Are you voting to remain, or are you voting to leave?
Now, if you're voting to remain, vote Liberal Democrat.
You know, that's your choice.
There's no point in voting Tory or Labour because they don't even know what they stand for, let alone the voters.
And the second choice is going to be, if you want to vote to leave, are you voting for UKIP or are you voting for the Brexit Party?
UKIP has a clear policy, which is that no second referendum, repeal the 1972 European Communities Act, tell the European Union how it's supposed to work, don't keep asking it.
But for that we need a patriotic government and parliament.
Now, I know we haven't got one.
But the point of these elections is it's for the voters to send a message to Westminster.
Now, if you're voting for the Brexit party, what are you voting for?
Leave means leave.
Yeah, what does that mean?
Tell us how it's going to work.
He won't want to get into that because he won't want to have to defend a policy.
No, and I wrote a piece yesterday for Breitbart in which I made the point that, look, you can't go on being the party that just stands for...
Particularly not if you're going to get an MP in Parliament in a by-election soon, which they might do with Peterborough.
What's going to happen when votes come up?
And is it just going to be left up to the MP to decide which way they swing?
Because it would depend on who they are.
There's that special forces guy who describes himself as an environmentalist.
Well, I'm sorry, but my hackles...
Erased by that idea that actually, by voting Brexit, you are putting a greenie in Parliament.
I mean, if that happened.
At the same time, I look at some of the other candidates.
I mean, you were quite rude about Claire Fox.
I mean, I think Claire Fox is fantastic.
I think she's a libertarian.
Even though she pretends to think she's a revolutionary Marxist, actually, she seems to me about freedom of speech, limited government.
Generally, I think those are good, desirable things.
What am I saying here?
I think your problem is, at the risk of being rude, that even though you've got Brexit, sorry, UKIP have got the grassroots, you've got a solid manifesto, you've got loads and loads of stuff going for you, but what you haven't got is this kind of...
Nigel Farage's Brexit party is Blitzkrieg, basically.
He's running through your Maginot line.
Well, he's always going round your Maginot line, actually.
What are you going to do?
What do you want me to do?
Do you think we should surrender?
No, I don't, Gerard.
Look, I totally respect the game you're talking.
You seem to be...
You haven't backed down.
You haven't said, well, actually, maybe I should have ditched Tommy Robinson, or maybe I should have ditched Sargon of Adichard.
You're going down with the ship.
I mean...
Oh, that looks a bit drastic.
I mean, we don't know...
That's going to happen until the 23rd of May.
You're painting a pretty black picture there.
I'm relying on the good sense of the voters.
And we have a rival in this election, which is unnecessary.
I mean, don't forget, Nigel could have stayed with us at any time in the last 14 months.
He could have said to me, he could have come up to me in the coffee bar in Strasbourg, which he's never done, and said, oh, look, I think there's going to be a European election.
Yeah, I know you do too.
Is there a way that we could work together?
And don't forget, I took this job on.
I've been working six or seven days a week for 14 months now in order to save the party and doing this because I believe in it.
If he'd have said to me halfway through that, six months in, well, you've done a good job of saving the party.
The money's coming in.
The membership's going up.
There's going to be this European election.
I think I'm the person best placed to win that election.
What do you think?
Would you stand down now and have a leadership election?
I'd have had to seriously think about that.
Yes.
And I would have done.
Because I know he's got this fabled charisma that I'm sure I don't have.
And that's going to be important amongst the general public.
But he never did that.
And if anyone imagines now at this stage of the game that I'm going to surrender and say, well, this new party with no structure, no constitution, no branches, no members, backed by big Tory money and full of Tory has-beens and celebrities and former revolutionary Marxists, I'm going to let them take the field.
Well, they've got another thing coming because I'm not.
Right, yes.
Do you think that if...
If push comes to shove, it will be better long-term to have a Corbyn, four or five years of Corbyn in government, in order to get the resolution that ultimately we want, that the system is broken.
Therefore, we need to break it even more before we rebuild it.
Sometimes I feel that maybe, you know, that might be the only option.
It has to get so bad that it has to get as worse as it can get in order to get better.
Because we...
I don't know, and as I said to you...
That's Lenin you though, worse is better.
Yeah, I'm well aware of that.
And in terms of the European Union, it works.
Because people used to say, oh no, if the European Union must be stopped from doing this and stopped from doing that.
And I said, well look, if they do it, it will just bring it home to people.
How bad it is and it has to end.
If it actually cleaned up its act and got better it lasts for 200 years and we don't want it to.
Isn't it the damage that Corbyn would do?
For example, his environmental and energy policy.
He would ruin what's left of the British countryside with wind turbines.
Economically, there would be a run on the power.
Maybe he's actually got a clever Marxist-Leninist plan here, which is if he became Prime Minister, he would say, oh, actually, I've just realised we can't do any of the things we want to do, like re-nationalise the railways.
Because the EU won't let us, so we have to leave the EU. I don't know whether it's that clever or whether that's behind it.
But who's to blame for this?
The Conservatives?
No, no.
It's people who vote Labour.
The voters have to assume their share of responsibility here because they go on voting Labour.
Now look what happened in the Stoke by-election.
Wasn't it the biggest Leave vote in the whole country, I think, or in that area?
Sunderland was quite big, wasn't it?
Stoke was a great big Leave area.
We then had the by-election in Stoke where Paul Nuttall rang.
And who did they elect?
A doctrinaire left-wing MP who's actually said far more worse things on Twitter than anything anybody in UKIP's ever said.
In fact, we nearly did a leaflet on it in the campaign.
We didn't quite get around.
And it was hilarious.
We were laughing our socks off at these things that he'd said on Twitter.
Were the mainstream media concerned about that?
No.
Did the voters vote for him?
Yes.
Why on earth, when you've just voted to leave the European Union, would you vote for someone like that to be a Labour MP? When they could have had Paul Nuttall, who, whatever his shortcomings may have been, would have been a much better choice.
Yeah, no, you're right.
There are people out there who would vote for a monkey in a red rosette.
In fact, a dog poo.
A lump of dog poo they would vote for in a red rosette.
And a blue one, don't forget.
It works both ways.
It's the same thing.
I don't think it's as bad, is it?
Oh, I do.
I do, yeah.
They're absolutely the same.
That's the first lesson I learned when I went out campaigning in politics was that the people in Tory areas may have posher accents, but they're no different from the people in Labour areas.
They will vote.
It's tribal.
They vote for the tribe that they think that they belong to.
And the only way you can break that, in my opinion, is to have a different voting system.
Because we've seen that in the European elections.
That was introduced first past...
Sorry, PR, I think, was first introduced in 1999.
UKIP got three MEPs.
Then in 2004, we got 12.
Then in 2014, we got 24.
We've gradually gone up through the years, increasing a share of the vote, getting more MEPs.
Now, why is that?
It's because the message was getting through to the voters that you actually get what you vote for.
And one of the big things that stops them in ordinary elections is the idea that, well, I can't vote Labour because I really hate...
You know, I've got to vote late because although I know they're useless, I hate the Tories more.
And the other argument, you know, in the Conservative constituency would be, well, I don't approve of anything the Conservatives are doing, but I have to vote for them because otherwise Labour will get in.
It's a fear of what...
It's not love for what you're voting for, it's fear and hatred of the other thing you don't want.
So, tell me, Gerard...
Outline to me your vision of, if you could wave your magic Gerard wand, what would Britain look like?
I would like to see a patriotic Prime Minister, Government and Parliament, that said, right, we're not going to have our affairs governed by the European Union, we're going to leave, we're going to completely restore our freedom of independence and democratic self-determination.
We're then going to start organising our country for the benefit of the people who live here, whatever their racial or ethnic origins, and that means strictly controlling immigration so that we only let in people who we actually think we need and are going to benefit our country.
We are not going to allow any more immigration from Islamic countries unless we are absolutely certain that the individuals coming Do not adhere to a literalist or fundamentalist interpretation of their scripture, because Islam is incompatible with Western civilization.
Right.
So that's, yeah, I can see that.
And a lot of other things as well.
Well, where would you be economically, for example?
Well, I think, you know, first of all, we get a lot of discussion in UKIP, Economic Advisers, about the free market.
And I say, okay, tell me how the free market works.
When we have to compete with China, which has got, is it 1.3 billion people?
It's probably a lot more now.
It's gone up.
So they've got an endless supply of cheap labour.
They've actually got slave labour if they need it.
So you tell me how we compete with people like that.
And if you have this fetish that, oh, it doesn't matter because all of our people currently working in factories or whatever they're doing can suddenly be re-educated as computer scientists and software designers, it isn't going to happen.
Now, I'm not a protectionist, but I think I am a realist.
You go anywhere now and you'll see people sleeping on the streets.
When I do the five-minute walk from the station to my office, I can pass three or four people sleeping rough.
And I go up and talk to them.
It's costing me quite a lot of money because I always give them a quid or a couple of quid.
And it's the same everywhere I go.
Now, are we saying that because of some fetish about free markets that we have to allow our own people to sleep in cardboard boxes in the rain?
Because first of all, oh well they haven't got a job because it's too bad because it's all gone to China or India or somewhere else.
Oh and we can't give them a council house because they're a single man and we've just had a family of five come from Romania and under EU rules they're entitled to go to the top of the list.
Let's start worrying about our own people for a change.
Right.
So you're quite, you sound like you're quite Trumpian in your approach to international trade and You don't want to be a protectionist and yet at the same time you kind of think that we need to...
If you're a politician and you've got the practical decision to make, am I going to adhere to an ideology of free trade and allow people to sleep rough in the streets and starve?
Or am I going to start worrying about my own people sleeping in the street and starving?
If you've got any decency you're going to start worrying about your own people.
Right.
Well, you've created that link between people starving in the street and free trade.
It's not necessarily so, is it?
I mean, there are other arguments which would say actually that completely free trade would ultimately benefit us and we'd become the kind of Hong Kong or Singapore of Europe, which I'd quite like.
I think we can be more like those places.
I'm not suggesting one ideological route or the other.
I'm saying we should make those decisions on a practical, pragmatic basis.
What's right now?
What do we think is going to be right in five years' time?
I think a lot of the problems with politics is that it's purely reactive about what do we do because of what's in the newspapers tomorrow.
And we can't worry about five years' time because we might not be here anyway.
Now, I'm not saying that's in the climate that all politicians operate in where you have to worry about the polls and the election figures and whether you get elected or not.
That's not an easy thing to do.
But I don't think that we do it at all.
I don't think our politicians give a damn about what the country's going to be like in five years' time or ten years' time.
They all live in their own little bubble.
Anyway, and they're all frightened to talk about it.
And of course, if somebody does have the nerve to actually stand up and say, I don't think this is a good idea, then they're demonised in order to prevent them speaking and having an opinion.
Yeah.
I have one last question.
Oh, yes, that's right, the key question.
If you don't perform in the European elections...
Is it all over for you, Kip?
I don't think it's over for you, Kip.
I think if it's a very bad result, then it wouldn't be possible for me to continue.
Right.
Because I couldn't...
Well, I would have proved that it doesn't work, wouldn't I? So, if I lost my seat in London, for example, which I'm not anticipating doing, by the way, but if that happened, then that's it.
I'd be gone straight away.
Yes, that is true.
Well, thank you for answering my questions with your characteristic frankness.
And thank you so much for asking me a question and allowing me to answer it.
It's a novelty I don't get used to.
I know.
I don't get on the mainstream media.
It must be quite weird, yeah.
Well, I'm just interested in finding out the truth and what people actually think rather than people being defensive.
So am I. I actually feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn sometimes, believe it or not, because I think that...
Well, he doesn't go on a lot of media, does he?
He doesn't.
He doesn't do a lot of them.
But then I can understand why, because he'd get the same treatment I did.
No one's interested in listening to what he says.
They just want to attack him.
Yeah, that's an interesting note to end on, your secret kinship with Germany.
I like his brother, Piers Corbyn.
Have you met him?
Yeah, no, Piers is great.
He came and spoke at a UKIP conference once on climate change, and of course he is now a climate denier, because he actually says it's probably got more to do with the activity and the sun than human beings.
And of course that is against...
We now live in a very ideological age, don't we?
It's like medieval Europe.
You cannot say something which is deemed to be heretical.
Oh, totally, totally.
The analogy I always use, it's like living in the time of Elizabeth I, who we think of as a rather good queen on the whole, and yet, even in those days, if you didn't go to church, you were imprisoned for it.
I think you'll be fined a few pennies or something and discourage you from being a repeat offender.
Well, okay, yeah.
And same with climate change now.
We're just heretics.
Anyway, thank you very much for appearing on the Dellingpod, Gerard Batten, leader of UKIP, at least for the next month or so.
You're listening to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpod.
▲
Export Selection