Gerard Batten critiques the UK’s elite dismissal of Brexit and Trump voters, tracing Euroscepticism to Nigel Farage’s warnings about EU corruption and sovereignty erosion in 2009. UKIP’s 13% vote in 2015 failed to translate into power due to the first-past-the-post system, while Batten now fights institutional resistance—like the House of Lords—and voter apathy fueled by decades of anti-nationalist messaging. Housing shortages and Islam’s ideological clashes with Western values, including "rape gangs" ignored by mainstream media, force Batten to defend Tommy Robinson’s 13-month prison sentence as unfair, exposing deep-seated double standards in justice and identity politics. Levant’s public interview underscores how few dare challenge these systemic betrayals of democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a special full-length interview with the new leader of UKIP, the UK Independence Party.
It's May 31st, and you're watching The Ezra LeVant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government for why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
If the 2016 U.S. presidential election were an earthquake, well, the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom was a warning tremor.
In both cases, the forgotten people, the little people, didn't do what they were told by the political, media, and business elites.
In the U.S., Trump voters were called the deplorables by Hillary Clinton.
In the UK, they're just called the working class.
Well, victory went to them.
That was the result in the UK of a decades-long campaign by skeptics of the globalist scheme to integrate Great Britain with the European continent.
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 for economic prosperity and trade.
Those are good things, but with it came bad things.
You can give the EU the benefit of the doubt and call them unintended consequences, but look, it was inevitable.
The empire building by bureaucrats in Brussels, the corruption, the erosion of British sovereignty and democracy and the British rule of law, all of that was predicted by Eurosceptics and it all came true.
The European Union and its impenetrable bureaucracy took on a life of its own and Britons were no longer masters of their own house.
Add in the terror of radical Islam and Angela Merkel's open borders experiment and you had a perfect storm.
And the man of the hour was Nigel Farage, the charismatic, constantly smiling champion, the ultimate Brit, the happy warrior, 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.
Videos like this from his seat in the European Parliament inspired countless Brits to learn why the EU was a bad deal and to find the courage to vote to break free of it.
Here's a speech from nearly 10 years ago.
Just great stuff even today.
Let's run a few minutes of it.
Good morning, Mr. Van Rumpuy.
You've been in office for one year, and in that time, the whole edifice is beginning to crumble.
There's chaos.
The money's running out.
I should thank you.
You should perhaps be the pin-up boy of the Eurosceptic movement.
But just look around this chamber this morning.
Just look at these faces.
Look at the fear.
Look at the anger.
Poor old Barroso here looks like he's seen a ghost.
You know, they're beginning to understand that the game is up.
And yet, in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system.
And it's pretty clear that none of you have learned anything.
You know, when you yourself, Mr. Van Rompuy, say that the Euro has brought us stability, I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humor, but isn't this really just the bunker mentality?
You know, your fanaticism is out in the open.
You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation state could exist in a 21st century globalized world.
Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium, who haven't had a government for six months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this union, and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces, increasingly people are saying, we don't want that flag, we don't want the anthem, we don't want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.
So yeah, years of work by Nigel Farage, UKIP started rising in the polls, the UK Independence Party.
The ruling Conservatives thought they'd take the wins out of UKIP's sales by preemptively calling a referendum on the matter.
And to their shock and that of the rest of the fancy people, Brits voted for Brexit, the British exit.
Glorious.
Farage left the party.
His chief goal now accomplished left the leadership of the party.
He remains as a member of the European Parliament for UKIP.
And he now has other endeavors, including a popular radio show in the UK, regular TV appearances, and regular visits to America, including to visit his pal Donald Trump, who visited the UK on the eve of Brexit to support him.
Farage is no longer leader, and the UKIP party has had a series of leaders, none of whom have endured or found success.
The party has fallen in the polls and had financial difficulties, but maybe it has found its feet again with the leadership of Gerard Batten, a colleague of Farage, who has been in the UKIP trenches for more than 20 years and serves with Farage in the European Parliament as a UKIP MEP.
He's been in this leadership position since February.
And I didn't pay attention at first until I saw him consorting with our former reporter Tommy Robinson in the UK and publicly standing up for Tommy after his arrest.
That's more courage than you normally see in a politician, I thought.
So today we bring you a special show, a feature interview with Gerard Batten, the new leader of the UKIP party.
Here's how our conversation went earlier today.
Welcome back.
Well, we have a very special guest now, someone who's of great interest to Brits, but I think that Canadians and Americans should pay attention too.
His name is Gerard Batten, and he's the new leader of the UKIP party, the UK Independence Party.
He joins me now via Skype from his office in London.
Nice to meet you, Mr. Batten.
Thanks for taking the time with us today.
You too, Ezra.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, it's a pleasure.
We follow Brexit.
We started to follow Brexit before it even got momentum.
And the idea that the UK could untangle itself from the EU was so unthinkable back then.
In my mind, it was like the idea of Canada removing itself from the United Nations.
It was an impossibility.
How did it go from impossible to having had happened?
How did that happen?
Well, I think it would be much easier to leave the United Nations than it is to leave the EU.
It's a lot more difficult.
How did it start?
Well, it started with people like me a long time ago.
You know, this whole thing has a very long history.
We joined the European Union, or the European Economic Community, as it was then back in 1972, 73.
And a lot of people weren't happy with that.
We had a referendum in 1975 on continued membership.
I voted against staying in.
And of course, nothing happened for a long time.
And then I joined a small political party in 93 called the Anti-Federalist League.
18 months later, we changed our name to the UK Independence Party.
And it took us 23 years to get to the point where we had the referendum and achieved the referendum.
And it was a very, very hard slog.
And it was done through taking votes at the ballot box.
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.
And it was becoming that electoral threat which forced David Cameron to promise the referendum.
And I think he seriously miscalculated because he thought they were going to win, that the Remain side would win.
And of course, we all know they lost.
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.
So we're still in the middle of a big battle.
Yeah.
It's incredible, the attempts to thwart democracy.
It's reminiscent of the excuses thrown up against Donald Trump to try to delegitimize his vote, except for in the UK, it actually seems to be working.
What is the status of things?
Does Theresa May believe in Brexit?
Do the decision makers in her cabinet on this file, do they believe in Brexit?
No, the problem that we have, Ezra, is that our political establishment, by a big majority, doesn't want to leave the European Union.
Theresa May was a remainer in the referendum campaign, as were most of her cabinet.
You have a few genuine levers 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.
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.
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.
Because, you know, 17.4 million people voted to leave.
I think that it would have been a bigger majority if we'd have had a fair referendum campaign.
It was a very slanted campaign, but we still won.
And if this isn't carried through, I think you will see complete permanent cynicism about politics and the political system.
So I think it's vital that it succeeds for a number of reasons.
First of all, to return democratic sovereignty to the UK, but also to restore any kind of faith in politics going forward.
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.
He is the executive.
The slow walking of the Brexit is an inside job.
The government that held the referendum clearly didn't want it.
As you say, they miscalculated.
Let me put a question to you.
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, nominally in a democratic way, but let's say if Donald Trump were impeached in a proceeding that seemed quite unfair, I think Americans wouldn't be docile or passive.
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.
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 against the tyrannical government that ignored them.
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, 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, who are disarmed not just in terms of firearms, but disarmed in terms of the media, disarmed in terms of the police, the press, the politicians, the professors.
They don't have anything left.
And all they have left is cynicism.
They're submissive.
Am I wrong about the character of the UK today?
I think that what we've had, well, you must remember, and you may have experienced something similar in the US and Canada.
We've had 40 to 50 years of people being told that they shouldn't be proud of their history, they shouldn't be proud of their institutions, they should be ashamed.
We have to be part of this supranational political organization called the EU.
And we are governed by an elite across not just politics, but our police, our education system, who are basically been infiltrated and taken over by left-wing, culturally Marxist, politically correct views.
It's through every institution.
The ordinary people at the bottom quite often don't agree and rebel, but they're very limited in how they can rebel against that.
Because now, if you say the wrong thing or if you tweet the wrong thing, you can find yourself out of a job or you won't be offered a job if people look at your history.
Because everything now is on the internet.
Very easy to see what people say, what their opinions are.
And we have people arrested now for ludicrous reasons.
We have had a man arrested on the street for reading the words of Winston Churchill out of a book published in 1898, I think it was, on Winston Churchill's views on Islam.
We had a lady arrested the other day for wishing somebody a gay day.
Well, she was an old lady, probably using it in the old-fashioned means of, you know, have a happy, carefree day.
But police came around and knocked her door down and arrested her.
We have all kinds of crazy things going on now because everything is now being infiltrated by these politically correct, cultural Marxist views.
Now, I don't believe in a, you know, I would never advocate any kind of violent reaction to what's going on.
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.
Because if you elect representatives and you elect enough of them, they can change the law and they can change the direction of a country.
And that's all we ask people to do.
And of course, the problem with our political system is that we have what's called a first-past-the-post system.
I think certainly they have the same thing in America.
Maybe you do in the States.
Sorry, in Canada.
So a representative can get elected on as little as 30, 35% of the vote.
65% of the votes are wasted.
On the continent, they have proportional representation systems, which means that if you're a party like mine, you can actually win seats, you can actually start to change things, as we're seeing in Italy, where these so-called populist parties have been elected.
Well, UKIP was very popular going back a little while in 2015 when we got 13% vote.
We got more votes than the Scottish National Party, the Liberal Democratic Party put together, and yet we got one seat, and I think they got about 62, 64 seats in Parliament because of the way that the first pass-the-post system works.
So it's very difficult to change things in our country, but we're not giving up.
I think people realize that they're being betrayed over the withdrawal of the European Union.
And my job, I have a very difficult, probably got the most difficult job in British politics, which is to rebuild UKIP's effectiveness and credibility as a fighting force and an electoral threat.
And that's what I'm going to be trying to do over the next 12 months.
Freedom Demonstration Rally00:06:17
Excellent.
I want to talk to you a little bit more about UKIP, and then I want to talk to you about Tommy Robinson, because that's on the mind of our viewers.
I just want to say I agree with everything you've just said.
My point about the American Second Amendment is that there's a spirit that the center of power resides with the people, not with the rulers.
And I suppose that's what I was alluding to.
By no way, by no means would I ever suggest a violent uprising, but there's a spirit of independence.
They call it Independence Day on their July 4th.
And I think there's also something getting to know Tommy Robinson over the last year when I would visit him, I also became aware of the class strata in the UK.
In Canada and the United States, we just don't have that.
Let me ask you a question about that, and then I want to talk a bit about you, KIPP, and a bit about Tommy.
And I respect you're a very busy man, so thank you for this time.
It seems to me that there's a lot of, I would call them forgotten people who are ignored by the elites you referred to.
And I think a lot of them, and this is just my one-year study, so you correct me if I'm wrong.
A lot of them historically have voted Labour and might be Laborites on economic matters, but when it comes to British sovereignty, borders, Islam, and the political correctness, especially surrounding these rape gangs, these traditionally working-class labor supporters are looking for someone to stand up for them, and the middle and upper-class elites aren't.
And that's what's so interesting to me about Tommy Robinson.
We'll talk about him in a minute.
He's a working-class football type, but I think people say, shut up, shut up, shut up for 20 years.
And so Brits have nowhere else to go.
They wanted to go to UKIP, they go to Tommy, they're desperate for someone to listen to them, and the elites are shutting them out.
Give me your reaction to that.
Well, you know, absolutely.
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.
But I grew up in a working-class area.
I come from that background.
I had a long career earning a living before I got elected to anything at the age of 50.
And I identify with those people.
They're at the bottom of the, very often the bottom of the economic scale.
They're very often the people who work the hardest, pay the most tax, and get very few benefits out of the system.
But they are the people who bear the brunt of the policies that our political elite visit on them.
Now, you can't vote for Tommy Robinson because he doesn't have a political party.
And when you do vote for something different, it's very difficult for that to make a difference, as I've just explained.
But UKIP did make a fantastic difference in bringing about the referendum.
That was an enormous political, sorry, you know, a historic achievement to do that and change the course of politics.
And the difficult job now we have is following it through and making sure that it happens.
Those people are forgotten by the elite.
You have elites now, not just in politics, but in education and the law and all the professions.
But it isn't even true to say that all of those are in favor of the European Union or the direction that we're heading in with political correctness and the failure to address the threat from literalist Islam.
I did a TV program.
I was on, there's a series of free out programs that I'm in last week, this week, and next week.
And when I came out, I was in the street the other day after the bunny's programmes have been broadcast, and the lady came up to me and congratulated me on it and said, you know, we've got to show everybody how awful the European Union is and we have to leave as quickly as possible.
There's enormous undercurrent there that actually does cut across these political classes as well.
It wouldn't be fair to say that, you know, it's a completely two different strata.
There's a lot of crossover, but a lot of people are afraid to voice their opinions in modern Britain because it can have consequences.
For example, I had an exam, if I can tell you a very quick story, we had a freedom demonstration and rally outside Downing Street in Whitehall about a month ago, which Tommy Robinson spoke, I spoke, a number of other people spoke on the subject of free speech.
A few days after that, I got a call from somebody.
A man had taken his children to this rally, and then they'd gone to school on the Monday morning.
A five-year-old child had told the teacher that they'd been to this rally where Tommy Robinson had been speaking.
And then the teacher said that she had informed the police because the child was in danger of radicalization.
And the father was called to the school to meet a police officer to discuss this.
Well, they rang me to ask me if I could help.
The advice was don't go to don't turn up, get legal advice and demand this in writing before you do anything.
And I wanted to put that in the newspapers.
But the problem is the family are reluctant to have their names in the newspapers because there could be other consequences.
So I think they're probably just glad that the thing has gone away because the school and the police officer didn't want to put these things into writing and demand that they turn up to a meeting.
But this is where you are.
I mean, this is not, you know, you'll hear anecdotal stories from people all the time about things that go on, but they're very reluctant to have their names published because this could have consequences for them, you know, later on.
You know, that reminds me of a story of a dinner lady, what we would call a lunch lady, at a school in Northern England who was suspended because she went to a rally.
Tommy Robinson engaged there.
You know, case after case after case, this kind of, and I hate to say the word police state because I don't want people to think I'm crazy calling the United Kingdom the mother of parliaments, the source of the Magna Carta and our ordered liberty.
To call the UK a police state makes you sound crazy.
But that little anecdote you just described has the hallmarks of a police state, and we have to talk about it.
Can't Live Under That Religion Anymore00:11:49
We're going longer than we thought, but I'm just hanging on your every word.
This is so interesting to me.
Let me ask you a little bit about Brexit, because here in North America, I think it snuck up on us as an issue, and we learned about it.
And we learned about it through the charismatic personality of Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, who I think his personal style and his energy, at least it looked that way from here, was quite a decisive factor.
I think he's been on a well-deserved, I'm not going to call it retirement tour, but he's certainly hanging out in North America a lot, hanging out with Donald Trump, and well-deserved is what I would say.
Has he disengaged from UKIP?
Do you work with him closely at all or is he sort of in a different circuit now?
Is he semi-retired and just sort of taking a well-deserved victory lap?
Or what's he up to?
I think his focus is different now, Ezra.
I mean, I've known Nigel since 1992.
It's an awful long time.
We've worked together all of these years in the same party, along with thousands of other people.
Nigel was the front man, and excellent he was at being the front man, but there were thousands of people behind him doing the donkey work.
None of us would be where we are if it wasn't for those ordinary members who, you know, just give up their own time, effort and money freely.
I think what Nigel's concentrating on now, Nigel is actually the leader of a group in the European Parliament, which puts him in the front row of the Parliament, so that when there is a big debate, he is in the front row opposite the Commissioner, Mr. Juncker, et cetera, whoever's speaking.
So that's very important that he has that voice because nobody knew what the European Parliament was in this country before they started seeing the YouTubes of Nigel making his speeches.
And we even got broadcast on the mainstream news, which is something that I don't think it ever happened before.
It's such a boring, dull place to start with.
So I think Nigel is now concentrating on that aspect of his work, leading the group in the Parliament, but also in his media work.
He has now built that media career, which is very important as well, because that gives him a public voice.
He's on the radio in the UK.
He's got his own show on LBC radio, a phone-in show.
And I know that he does a lot of work in the US.
So I've got the unglamorous job as the not very charismatic leader of UKIP to actually try and pull things around on the domestic political front.
But it's all important, you know, whatever we do.
I hope I'm not being personal or troublemaking.
Do you have a good rapport with Nigel?
Is he supportive of your efforts in the UK itself?
I think that we have been colleagues for a long time.
I wouldn't say that we are great personal friends.
That wouldn't be true.
But, you know, you don't have to be friends with people in politics in order to work with them.
I have an enormous respect for what he's done.
And I think that he's appreciative of the fact that I've managed to make UKIP survive because we were on the edge of collapse when I took over in the middle of February.
Nigel had gone off a year or so before that.
And where he went off after he decided to hand over the leadership after the referendum.
They came back briefly and then went away again.
And we were on the verge of financial collapse.
We had about two to four weeks and we would have become insolvent and the party would have disappeared.
So I was able to pull that round mainly by an appeal to our ordinary members who produced enough money for us to keep going to function.
I've now got it on an even keel.
And the challenge now is to find big money for fighting elections and to build the membership.
One of the problems in building the membership, Ezra, goes back to what we were talking about before, is people's kind of apathy now because they don't feel that what they do can make a difference and they're cowled and they are submissive.
And the challenge is to rebuild that fighting spirit, which is something actually Tommy Robinson is quite good at.
Well, it's interesting you mentioned that.
And I saw Majid Nawaz, who's a progressive Muslim who has a radio show on the same station as Nigel Farage.
For our Canadian viewers, he's similar in his approach to Islam to our Canadian, Rahil Raza, but he has a different background, of course.
And he said on LBC, that's the radio station in the UK, he said, whatever else you think of Tommy Robinson, it's because the establishment ignored these largely Muslim rape gangs that Tommy filled the void.
And whatever else you think of what happened in Leeds on Friday, it was the fact that the establishment did not solve a problem that Tommy was the solution.
I think he was very correct on that.
UKIP itself, Gerard, kept its distance from Tommy.
And I understand why.
Tommy has some criminal convictions and he can be rough in his style.
But you have changed that.
I saw an interview that Tommy did with you.
I thought it was very interesting.
And as you just mentioned, you spoke at Tommy's Day for Freedom a few weeks ago.
Tell me what decision you made to change the long-standing UKIP policy to have arm's length from Tommy.
What are your thoughts on Tommy and why are you doing what you're doing?
I haven't really changed that much because I think I started talking about this subject back in 2006 when we had the bombings in London, you know, the tube bombings and the bus bombings when lots of people were killed, 50-odd people were killed.
And I was then the spokesman on security and defense.
And I thought, well, I better find out more about the motivations of people that allow them to do these things.
So I started researching Islam a lot more than I've done in the past.
And the more I learn about it, the more appalled I am by it over these years.
And I have written about it.
I have spoken about it.
It didn't get a lot of high profile.
And regarding Tommy Robinson, of course, Tommy set up the thing called the EDL, sorry, the English Defence League, which wasn't really a political party.
It didn't run for elections.
It was kind of movement.
And the BBC immediately announced that this was a far-right organisation.
And I thought, well, I'll have a look at it and see, is it really?
because I don't trust the BBC.
And of course, it wasn't a far-right organization.
It had been created as a reaction to these Muslim rape gangs, which are prolific throughout our country.
But you would never know that through the mainstream media.
They've only recently started reporting on this.
Although, of course, they report the convictions of these gangs when the trials are finished, and then we forget about it until the next one.
But I looked into this and they were not extreme right.
They were not hard right.
Everything in our media, you know, our mainstream media paints people as fascists or hard right or Nazis if they are not left wing.
What I say now is if you're not left wing, then you must, if you're not, sorry, if you're not extreme left-wing, then they regard you as extreme right-wing.
I mean, they describe me as hard-right, and I've spent 25 years of my life in politics trying to restore our sovereignty as an independent democratic nation, trying to make sure that our laws, we're governed under our own laws, statute law and common law, that we have a democratic government that we elect and we can sack after the end of four or five years if we don't like them.
And that makes me hard right in the eyes of some people.
Well, I regard myself pretty kind of soft Democrat, really.
But I think I'm astute enough to see when something is dangerous and to want to address it.
And I think Islam is very dangerous for my society and in fact societies across Western Europe.
And in fact, I didn't meet Tommy Robinson fairly recently.
I think it was in maybe it was about March, I think I first met Tommy Robinson.
I've met him about three times.
And I saw him on the telly some years ago, the television, being interviewed.
And I thought, well, actually, he doesn't sound like a far-right thug, which is what they'd like to make me believe that he is.
Sounds quite intelligent, quite articulate.
And when I've met him, he's actually quite, he's very charming.
He's very intelligent.
He's self-educated like I am.
And he's not in the least bit racist.
But of course, that isn't the image that the mainstream media wants to go along with.
It doesn't want to talk about the underlying issues.
And what I've done throughout the years I've been talking about Islam is to say I'm talking about the ideology.
I have nothing against individuals and Muslims.
I think a lot of Muslims probably think it's a load of old claptrap as well, but it's a cult that they live under and they're not allowed to speak out about it.
Or they personally will be in trouble with their own co-religionists.
But they probably think most of it's rubbish as well.
But the people who hold sway are the extremists and the literalists.
In fact, I've met, I was at a conference a few weeks ago in London, small conference, about 50 people who were ex-Muslims, who decided that they were going to either convert to another religion or atheists, couldn't live under that religion anymore.
And these people have terrible lives.
They lose their families, they're ostracized, they're very often bullied and attacked in their own communities.
They have to move away.
And this is never reported on in the British mainstream media.
They just don't want to talk about these issues.
But they're very important issues.
My view is that a literalist interpretation of Islam has no place in Western liberal society.
Look at every country in the world where you have Islam in control of the politics.
And they are not places that a normal Western person used to freedoms, freedom of speech, all the other freedoms we enjoy would actually want to go and live, unless they're working there on a high salary, of course, for a limited period of time.
How big of a place in UKIP's policies and battles is Islam, rape gangs, creeping Sharia law, open borders.
I mean, UKIP, the traditional symbol of the party is the pound symbol, which was very interesting and it smacks of patriotism and sovereignty.
It didn't touch on Islam at all and open borders was wasn't, I don't even think it was a big issue in the era you mentioned, 1992, etc.
So let me just put a question.
Is Islam one of 10 things UKIP talks about?
Is it half the things UKIP talks about?
Because no one else is talking about it.
Is it a dominant thing for you or is it secondary?
It has to be one of the things we talk about because most people, as they are in every country, are concerned about their prospects, their children's prospects, the economy, what kind of life are they going to have, what kind of life have their children got to look forward to.
One of the big problems in the UK is the difficulty in finding somewhere to live.
House prices are astronomically high in many places.
It's very difficult to rent property at a reasonable price.
And this is due to the mass immigration.
One of the reasons, one of the main reasons, is mass immigration into our country and the effect that that's had on the supply of housing.
And I think it was the immigration issue that actually made people understand what the EU was about, that we no longer govern ourselves because we can't control our immigration policy.
We have open borders to the EU.
And this is a very large element of the problem.
Sorry, keep going, please.
Sorry.
Well, in terms of how big Islam is, it's not going to be the main primary policy.
It has to be one of the policies because I have to appeal and my party has to appeal across the board to as many people as possible.
Contempt of Court Controversy00:08:43
And the things on most people's minds are the things I've just discussed.
What's the economy like?
What are their job prospects like?
What are their children's prospects like?
And now the things I've got to address, that Islam is one of those things.
It doesn't affect a lot of people because they live in nice places where they don't have the problems of rape gangs or they don't notice them because it's not happening to them.
And therefore, it has to be one of a range of issues I talk about.
But of course, the funny thing is, since I got this job and I go on the TV, 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.
And they constantly attack me on Islam because they think I can't defend myself.
So I've ended up spending more time talking about this than any other subject.
Not terribly, but because they insist on raising the subject.
I have one last question, and it's been on my mind since Friday.
Tommy Robinson used to work for the Rebel.
I feel some paternity for turning him into a citizen journalist, whatever credit or blame come to the Rebel.
But he went independent from us earlier this spring, but we left on good terms and we support him morally.
We helped him out last year when he got into a spot of bother in Canterbury Court.
He had a suspended sentence from there for contempt of court.
We were not in a position to make the legal decisions for him this time because he doesn't work for us.
But we support him morally and we're concerned about things.
I'm concerned about a 13-month prison sentence because in a prison, if he's in an open wing of the prison, he's likely to be attacked.
He's been attacked before.
And no one can do 13 months in solitary confinement.
I'm concerned about how quickly it was from arrest to hearing to conviction to sentencing.
He didn't have access to his own lawyer.
He didn't have access to a lawyer who's expert in contempt of court matters.
My own layman's view, I don't have all the facts in front of me, but what I can read is, what I can see is he didn't actually violate the integrity of the trial.
He did not stand on the precincts of the court.
He did not call them rapists.
He called them accused rapists, so he didn't prejudge things.
He didn't give any details from within the trial.
He was just giving a general commentary.
So there's about three or four things that make me think what happened to him procedurally was wrong.
The substantive outcome of the 13-month sentence was wrong.
The four-day press gag order on top of it was wrong.
And I'm deeply concerned about Tommy as a person, about the rule of law in the United Kingdom, and about the warning, the chill this sends to anyone else should they wish to follow in Tommy's footsteps.
Those are my views and I've made them clear to all our supporters.
Would you like to give me your views on the subject and what, if anything, you think ought to be done now?
Let me try and be scrupulously fair on this.
I think Tommy sailed too close to the wind on this issue of the contempt of court thing.
He did have a suspended sentence.
He did go outside the court.
He was accused of potentially causing a breach of the peace.
He was arrested for that.
And the judge made the decision that there could have been a potential breach of the peace because of what he was doing outside and therefore has revoked his suspended sentence.
And he's now serving the sentence.
It was a three months suspended sentence.
And he's been given another 10 months on top of that.
I think that is out of proportion to the offence.
He was outside the court.
He was filming.
And I believe he only read out names of people that had already been published on the BBC website, for example.
The judge made that decision, and in strict legal terms, he probably was within his rights to do that.
In fact, he was within his rights to do that to actually then rescind Tommy's suspended sentence and enforce it.
But having said that, I think that Tommy Robinson has been sent to prison more for who he is and what he says than his actual offence.
And you're quite right.
From what I'm told now, the prisons are very much under the sway of Muslim gangs.
And we have a phenomenon now in prisons called taking the mat, where non-Muslim prisoners convert to Islam in order to protect themselves.
Tommy has been attacked in prison.
One of the things that my colleague did, Malcolm Lord Pearson, who's a member of the House of Lords and a UKIP peer, is immediately said that if anything happens to Tommy, if he's murdered or if he is injured in any way, then he would take out a private prosecution against the Home Secretary as an accessory after the act and possibly for negligence in doing his duty to protect prisoners.
Now, that was a kind of threat that Pearson made to know that we're on alert, that if anything happens, there will be a reaction.
And I think that that will protect Tommy because of the amount, not just that, but the amount of public awareness of him.
They will now be prepared to protect him in prison.
Certainly hope so.
If people want to support him, I believe that there is a legal fund being set up.
I don't have, I can't tell you where to go on that.
If you Google it in, you'll probably find it.
But there is, even you may have started one Esra, didn't you, for Tommy?
We had one to take on the publication ban, but that ended within one day.
So we are not currently fundraising.
Just for your own information, Gerard, I spoke with Tommy's wife, Jenna, and other family members, and they asked us to hold off on any fundraising until they had proper instructions from Tommy.
So we have actually not done any fundraising for Tommy other than that publication ban matter, which was only for one day.
And I understand that any other crowdfunding websites are not authorized by Tommy.
So that's just a little bit of information for you.
But please continue what you were saying.
Well, I'm waiting to hear to somebody who's been in contact with him because, as you may be aware, he's only allowed two one-hour visits a month anyway.
So he's probably going to keep those for his lawyer and his family at the moment.
But I'm hoping to speak to somebody who's had a bit closer contact with somebody who's met him so we can find out a bit more what it is that he actually wants to do and what his wishes are.
On the reporting restriction, just say a word on that, because this is, it is appropriate sometimes for a judge to impose reporting restrictions because not having them might prejudice the outcome of the case.
But what's happened with these rape gangs is they are interconnected.
So you'll have a trial of a group of men in one place and they'll be convicted.
And you might find that one of those people convicted pops up in another trial in another place because these things are a network that work together.
Therefore, the judge will impose a reporting restriction because they're not allowed to say that somebody already has a conviction.
It might prejudice the jury, for example, and they don't want it reported on at least.
But the danger here, of course, is this whole thing is being subdued and not talked about.
And the danger is that reporting restrictions may be imposed in order not to talk about it.
So I think this is something to be very wary of in case it's used as a tool by the establishment to mean that we're not properly discussing.
Quite often now, you know, at the end of a news bulletin, you'll have, oh, another rape trial in such and such a place.
You know, pictures of 10 or 20 men will be published.
That would be that.
It'll be in the paper the next day and we'll forget all about it.
But this is a phenomenon that's been going on now for 30, 40 years.
It's been growing and it's getting worse.
And if you read the accounts of what's happened to some of these girls, and they are little girls, I mean, you know, they're nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds that have been subjected to this.
And it's horrific, some of the things that have gone on.
It isn't even run-of-the-mill paedophilia.
It's sadism.
It's absolute sadism of what's happening to these little girls.
And our establishment is terrified of actually confronting the problem because very often the police have been negligent in doing their duty.
The authorities in the local councils who have a duty to look after the children, because a lot of these girls actually were in children's homes because they already had problem lives anyway, and they haven't done their duty.
And the courts haven't done their duty either.
There should be exemplary sentences for these people.
We have a double standard here.
This is the problem with political correctness.
Double Standards Across Europe00:04:03
You have different rules for different people.
You've had Tommy Robinson break an order of the court.
He's in contempt of court and he gets 13 months.
We had a case last week of our mullah, sorry, an imam, a Muslim imam, who had been sexually assaulting girls in his class when he's supposed to be teaching them the Quran.
And the judge didn't send him to prison because he said he has six children and his wife doesn't speak English.
So therefore he can't go to prison because his wife would suffer too much.
So I don't know who you would think had committed the worst offense there.
I know what I think.
And yet someone is spared prison and someone else gets a very long sentence for a technical breach of order.
Well, this is terrifying.
Every time I visited the UK with Tommy, I would come back with horror stories like that.
Stories and things I would observe personally.
And I would always come back depressed that the United Kingdom of 2018 was not the ones that we learned about here in Canada.
The United Kingdom of Shakespeare and Churchill and freedom and rule of law and a man's home is his castle and all the things that the UK has given to the world.
I find it deeply depressing, but I'm glad you're where you are, Gerard.
A quick word on that, if you don't mind if I say, we were a country with a fighting spirit.
We've preserved our freedom throughout history through every time we were attacked by the Spanish, the French, the Germans.
We had a fighting spirit to protect ourselves.
But we were also a country, as you rightly said, that established parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, and we were a very tolerant country.
Many people have come into our country and been absorbed.
But what's happened over the last 30, 40, 50 years is that we, our identity as English and British has been suppressed.
It's something we're supposed to be ashamed of.
We're supposed to roll over and let anybody come and do whatever they like.
And if you say anything about it, you're accused of being far-right, Nazi, or racist.
That's absolute rubbish.
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, is to play a part in a process where British people start to get their self-respect and their pride back and restore those things that we were famous for.
Our rule of law, our tolerance, but also our fighting spirit.
Not literally fighting anybody, but fighting against those things that would destroy us.
And we must restore our country, otherwise, we're finished.
And you can see this across Europe.
And just sorry, I know I'm going on a bit.
I'd like to say something.
The term, have you seen this term, populist parties, is used as an insult now, a pejorative term across Europe.
Anybody that actually says, you know, we should actually look out for our own country and defend our own interests, it's called populist, as an insult.
Well, hang on a minute.
Aren't politicians supposed to be popular?
I thought that's how you got elected.
You had policies that were popular with the electorate and they voted for you.
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.
And therefore, if you want to do something that the people want, you are a populist, and there must be something wrong with you.
It's an inverted, you know, perverted system that we're now living under.
And I hope that I can play a small part in changing that.
Well, I hope so too.
I very much enjoyed our conversation today.
I had suggested only 10 minutes, but I couldn't stop asking questions and listening to your very thoughtful answers.
It's been a pleasure to meet you.
I feel like the UKIP party is in good hands with you, and I look forward to your successes.
And frankly, I'm proud of UKIP for taking the stand that it has on Tommy.
And I think you have a balanced view.
And I hope we can keep in touch in the months ahead.
Thanks a lot, Ezra.
Anytime, I'm happy to talk to you if you ask me.
That's great.
I'll take you up on that.
And we have some other Brits who are with the Rebel, too.
Stay Tuned for More00:01:09
Jack Buckby, Katie Hopkins.
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.
And hopefully, we can shed some light on these important issues.
Thanks so much for your time today.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
What a pleasure.
That's Gerard Batten.
He is the member of the European Parliament.
For London, he's the leader of the UK Independence Party, also called UKIP.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Well, that's our show for today.
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.
And I think we ought to send it around to our viewers in the United Kingdom, not just to show who Jared Batten is, but to show that there is some political support for Tommy Robinson, even though most politicians are hiding under their desks.
Well, that's it for today from Rebel World Headquarters here in Canada to you at home.