It has been reported that in the last days of the referendum campaign, Remain supporters will increasingly ask voters whether they want to live in ‘Nigel’s Britain’. In their minds Nigel Farage wants an isolationist, anti-immigrant and backward looking country.
Today, Mr. Farage has set out his own vision in the Daily Telegraph, an optimistic one which contradicts the caricature his “hopelessly pessimistic” political opponents spread.
The principle of self-government is more important to me than anything else. So many fought and died to preserve our democracy. It is precious. Yet our birthright has been handed away by the political establishment. Central to my vision of Britain after June 23 is that our Parliament is sovereign, empowered and able to make all of the big decisions, rather than leaving it to those unelected old men in Brussels.
By leaving the EU, we would once again be a proper democracy. We would once again have the ability to govern our own country. For example, when it comes to migration policy, it would be up to our elected MPs to debate and decide just what level of migration our country needs.
My vision for our post-Brexit migration system is really quite simple: an Australian-style system that allows those we need to come with work permits, but which brings down numbers significantly to sensible levels. The post-war average rate of net migration was between 30,000 to 50,000 per year. That to me seems a sensible level, rather than the hundreds of thousands every year that we’ve seen under Mr Cameron’s premiership.
By taking back control of our borders, our country can gain all the benefits of migration while ensuring that never again do our own people have their living standards pushed down. The suffering for millions of ordinary, decent British folk caused by EU open-door immigration may be a price worth paying for Mr Cameron and his friends so that they can attend fancy summits with the overpaid EU elite, but the social and financial cost of uncontrolled migration to British workers will never be acceptable to me.
So it is part of my vision that after a Leave vote, by controlling our borders and stopping a flood of unskilled migrant labour into the country, wages would rise for British workers. The minimum wage would no longer be the maximum wage for so many of our citizens. Our younger generation would have a proper chance of getting their foot in the door, with employers encouraged to train them, rather than simply relying on cheap migrant workers…
…The vision for Brexit Britain is a global one. The way that we have treated many of our traditional allies in the world by locking ourselves into the inwards-looking EU is a disgrace. After leaving the EU we would be able to treat all who wanted to come here on an equal basis, strengthening our proud ties to our kith and kin in the Commonwealth. It is shameful that we have discriminated against those countries in favour of the EU. That would end. We would no longer be acting as Little Europeans, but a Global Britain.
Being represented on the world stage by EU bureaucrats who think that they know what’s best for us – that would end too. My vision is a Britain engaging in global trade, forging ahead with new relationships and deals that would make Britain an engine room for job creation, rather than being constrained by the EU’s outdated customs union.
Read the rest of Mr. Farage’s piece here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.