Your Interview: Nigel Carter, chairman of Brighton and Hove UKIP

NIGEL CARTER (NC): First, I must deal with what I call the issue of mistaken identity. Our opponents, for reasons of their own, have tried to paint us as something we’re not.

And this outrageous mud-slinging is not only still going on, but has been ramped up online recently since our great advance at the Eastleigh by-election.

I always say, ‘Don’t believe what you hear about UKIP, unless it’s good. Oh no, you haven’t been listening to those expensesfiddlers again, have you?’

UKIP are the nice party of British politics, standing up for individuals everywhere, always, to see they get a fair deal, or a fair go as our Australian friends put it.

UKIP’s outlook can be described as Australian with added NHS. We believe each of us is born-free and government only exists to serve us, not the other way around as it so often seems nowadays.

All our policies spring from this fundamental motivation: personal freedom and responsibility and democratic control of those who govern for us.

You can find all our policies at www.ukip.org/policies, but be ready for a long read because our expert policy groups have been working hard for years on policies to serve our people.

Along with silly claims of racism, slurs and nasty comments suggesting UKIP doesn’t like women or gay people can all be swept aside in seconds by looking at the facts.

Ask Lisa Duffy, UKIP campaign director for the whole country, who keeps Nigel Farage in line, ask Diane James, ask Jane Collins if UKIP is sexist and they’ll soon tell you not to be so stupid.

You see in UKIP everybody matters, especially you. There’s no discrimination of any kind.

We don’t like labels that separate people into collective groups – we take each born-free individual as we find them.

We have gay people throughout the party right up to the elected by the full membership National Executive Committee. Being gay is mainstream now, it’s not special, get over it. In UKIP, gay is just one of us.

As for race, ask our British black and Asian candidates locally and nationally if we – as the party of the growing, powering-ahead Commonwealth that is bigger than the EU with so much growth potential ahead of it, that needs our revived industry to supply it, with whom we want a Free Trade deal – ask them if we’re racist and they’ll laugh, ‘Not that old nonsense again!’

We do know right from wrong. Innocent is OK with us. Guilty, choosing crime is definitely not. Nobody should be a victim of crime, or even fear the possibility.

Innocent people should be walking free and feeling safe in their houses. The guilty should be fearful or locked up.

Why should innocent people live in fear, trembling behind locked doors while criminals swagger about our streets?

UKIP will build more prisons where the guilty can lead a working, monastic life until their victim is fully recovered and compensated and the criminal is safe to release. Hard but fair, crime is a choice.

LIS TELCS, EMAIL: Your party has made its views on immigration very clear. My parents came to this country from Eastern Europe. Is this what you now seek to prevent and if elected will you pay for me to relocate to Hungary or the Czech Republic?

NC: We don’t like mass immigration because we don’t have anywhere to build a whole new city every year to accommodate them, equivalent to an extra million-strong city of Birmingham every four years.

We still haven’t caught up with the needs of the four million extra people Tony Blair invited here during the New Labour years.

We are standing up for the 1.8million people stuck on the housing waiting lists and all the others who cannot get a home for their family.

Then there are the million young people who are keen to work but blocked out of the labour market by cheap labour from the EU.

And the strain on the health service and the need for 250,000 more school places.

All this is fine for companies wanting to drive down their wages bill, but it is a disaster for the majority in our country. While we are in the EU we cannot control who comes here or how many.

MICHAEL VIRGO, PHONE: This week I have noticed that street drinkers from Europe have started arriving in London Road in Brighton. It really concerns me and I’m a bit troubled about where this is all going to lead. We have got so many problems of our own on our streets, we don’t want to be encouraging other vulnerable people coming over here to be part of it. What are your views?

NC: Criminals and people with problems, like the street-drinkers in London Road, come here too, setting off new crime waves we read about daily in our papers.

Call me cynical if you like, but I believe the three pro-EU parties in Westminster encouraged immigration to bring in as many new pro-EU voters as they could so that they would win any future referendums and elections in an attempt to keep us in their beloved EU, which suits their friends in the new EU political elite.

These are fanatics for the EU project that we pay £53 million pounds a day to belong to and costs us £120 billion a year to comply with all their rules, regulations and directives.

So one of the best things we could do to help the young unemployed apart from stopping mass immigration is to escape from the EU’s dead hand on our industry.

The EU has been holding us back and dragging us down for decades. Since 1976 we have had a trade deficit with the EU, and a trade surplus with the world.

We are the EU’s best customer and the world is ours. The EU needs us more than we need it! Fact.

PAUL ANDREW, EMAIL: Please would you explain whether UKIP’s policies would benefit young people, i.e. those at school, those in further education, and the young unemployed?

NC: Our policies of free education from toddler to job with access to benefits for those studying will appeal to you, but our motivation is to invest properly in each individual at the start of their lives so they will be able to look after themselves and their families and contribute to our society for the rest of their lives.

We don’t believe in class or any other kind of discrimination, so we will create a level playing field with equal opportunities for all, including bringing back grammar schools in every community for those that can make the most of the opportunity, and fully-funded vocational training in partnership with employers and research institutes for those with different aptitudes.

We must build up our engineering capacity, so we propose to spend billions saved from the EU on creating Production Enterprise Centres to train up the skilled workforce for our global trading future.

ROBERT CLARK, EMAIL: The proposed EON wind farm off the Brighton and Hove coast will be a unsightly blight on the unspoilt beautiful seascape.

Surely E.ON and others should be looking at ways of harnessing the enormous and continuous energy produced in the seas around the UK?

If and when UKIP come to power, will they be addressing wave and hydro power and putting an end to these ridiculous, inefficient and expensive wild turbines?

NC: Our objection is mostly about the ridiculous levels of subsidies allocated to renewables, mostly ugly wind turbines, which have pushed up energy bills by around 15% a year, more than doubled over the last decade or so, when people are struggling to heat and eat with falling incomes and rising prices generally.

All this to comply with EU Climate Change objectives, forcing us to close perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations, when we are sitting on huge reserves of coal still in the ground.

And the Met Office confirms there has been no global warming for 17 years and there will not be for the next seven years at least.

We also hear recently that wind turbines are not surviving real conditions well, lasting up to half as long as expected.

DAN BALLANCE, EMAIL: I’d like to know if Nigel Carter supports UKIP’s 2010 manifesto pledge to introduce a flat rate of tax for everyone of 31% and who in society he thinks will benefit from it the most?

NC: Yes we believe in flat tax, with employee National Insurance (NI) payments included in it because it will boost business and enterprise and rewards for everybody in a simple, fair way.

In 2010 income tax and NI together came to 31%, but now we believe we need a flat tax of 25%, including NI, to stimulate economic growth even more.

UKIP would start income tax when you earn more than the minimum wage, so the first £13,000, around £250 a week, would be tax free.

And everybody would pay a quarter of their income above that in tax – keeping more of your own money.

Higher earners, especially the rich, would find no exceptions to wriggle out of paying their fair share.

Also, at the moment, higher earners have been able to put up to £250,000 a year, tax free, into their pension pot. UKIP will reduce that to £10,000 a year.

These two factors help to compensate for the abolition of the higher rate band.

Flat tax means you always know what you will need to pay – a great help for entrepreneurs and business, which is not true at the moment.

This reform when tried has always led to more growth and economic activity with simpler collection, far less evasion, and greater revenue.

Encouraging free enterprise is a key part of UKIP’s strategy for national well-being.

We all depend on it and taxes pay for everything, from jobs, incomes, pensions, benefits, and all government services and functions.

GEORGE SMITH, ONLINE: Is Germany too strong in the EU?

NC: In one way, yes: they have all the influence, and the rest of us none, especially the UK, who aren’t even listened to with respect and consideration.

But, in another way, no: their economy seems to be the only one doing well, but it is fatally dependent on sales to the other failing economies in the EU that Germany, via the European Central Bank (ECB), is having to support with bailouts.

In other words, Germany is providing money to its most important customers so that they can buy Germany’s products. You can see what a fragile merry-go-round that is!

And even Germany is running out of money to keep it going. The ECB stepped in last autumn to print lots of paper money to fill the ever larger hole.

Not good at all. Collapse averted for now, but at the price of hardship and decline across Europe into the future until unrest breaks the system, the Euro collapses or the Club Med countries get out and take up national currencies again and trade their way out of trouble like little Iceland has begun to do.

DEANAPRIOR, ONLINE: On Nigel Farage’s Wikipedia page he says he has claimed 2million euros in expenses as an MEP. Do you think this is money well spent?

NC: Nigel Farage’s EU office expenses, as handed to him by the EU, are spent on his party staff there. As with all MEPs, Dean.

UKIP is working with Eurosceptic parties across the EU, including Bulgaria, Finland and most other EU countries, even Germany now, to help them escape the totalitarian dead hand of the EU Big State.

And we are pleased to invite them to come and see our conferences and speak if they want to.

SOMETHINGSAREJUSTWRONG, ONLINE: Given the mess the Greens will leave behind when ousted shortly, are you confident that you can deal with this and put us back on course for a bright future?

NC: The Greens are red. They claim to be all touchy-feely, and in some ways they are, we love trees and plants, countryside, clean air and water, bio-diversity and conserving nature too.

But UKIP will not charge so much for parking that it makes whole areas of our city no-go areas and puts off the tourism that is the lifeblood of our city’s economy.

We will never tax you on your flight to go on holiday. The Greens are too bossy, but they don’t know how to look after enterprise and business upon which we all in the end depend.

ARRGGH, ONLINE: How much of UKIP’s funding comes from rich Americans?

NC: UKIP is under-funded because we raise almost all of our funds the hard way via our supporters. And our MEPs too.

There are no rich Americans involved, or broke ones either. We have one Canadian who’s been here twenty years, but he always claims to be skint anyway.

It would be illegal to accept donations from foreigners, I believe, too.

RODNEY HOPSON, PHONE: I am a great believer that we should break away from Europe, I would have voted UKIP in the past but feared it would be a wasted vote. Can you assure me it won’t be on this occasion?

NC: We have all had the LibLabCon experience and none of us liked it. It’s time that all of us did our patriotic duty to get our country back, our democracy back, our future back and took control of our own lives again by voting for the nice party, UKIP.