Stephen Crowther, UKIP candidate for North Devon speaks to Adam Wilshaw from the North Devon Journal during the 2010 general election campaign...
IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:“We are not xenophobic. We have an objection to the political construct that is the EU”/ “we believe in doing is creating an enterprise culture”/ “numbers of jobs are created in the public sector which are effectively around nannying to do things or not do things”/ call to repeal Human Rights Act/ “The biggest problem that we have in multi-cultural ism, I suspect, is this constant nonsense about somebody might be offended”
Question: Can you tell me how and why you got involved in politics and why UKIP?
I’ve been interested in politics all my life. My family was involved in local politics. Aside from a brief dalliance with the Westminster South Conservatives in the early 1980s I was always too busy pursuing a career.
I had thought since 1978 that the logical conclusion of the EU was we would have to be as poor as each other. When I decided where I was going to put my energies UKIP seemed to be the really genuinely big, worthwhile cause.
Question: Why would we vote for a candidate whose party has no realistic chance of forming a Government?
I think that’s a reasonable question and one that people frequently ask. It is possible that even a small number of parties of a minority persuasion can make a difference in parliament. Secondly one of the lessons we have learnt is what happens is what happens when you don’t guard your democracy and you let things to take over and form their own pattern.
People should vote for what they believe in.There has been a consensus view over the last generation that the EU question was settled and it was a done deal. I think UKIP’s activity has made people understand that is not necessarily the case.
The more votes we get the bigger we will grow and the more people we will begin to realise we have a chance of being a catalyst.
Question: An accusation put at UKIP is that you are “little Englanders”, xenophobes. You are obsessed with this anti-Europe message. On your website are lots of negative stories about immigration. Is UKIP not more of a right wing pressure group than a serious political party?
I absolutely dispute all of that. I don’t know what a Little Englander is; I’ve never understood what it means. It’s a term of abuse we do get thrown at us.We are not xenophobic.
We have an objection to the political construct that is the EU.We are not a right wing pressure group. You will find at the end of this election we will have taken more votes from Labour than from Conservatives.The two UKIP MEPS in this region are an ex-Tory and a lifelong socialist (Trevor Colman).
Question: Looking at your policies. You want a flat tax for everyone of 31%. Will not have the effect of helping the wealthier to save money and making poorer people pay more?
We believe this will take four and half million people out of tax.
And we are putting that proposal alongside benefits proposals which are fairer.The point about flat tax is an interesting philosophical question.Does have somebody that earns £200,000 a year on 31% create an unfairness if you have somebody that’s on £20,000 a year?We do know that the Labour Party’s 50% tax proposals is going to lose money.
If you want to say that people who are extremely wealthy should pay vast amounts of tax, that is a philosophy one could take. I wouldn’t because I do believe economies are made up of people who earn all kinds of amounts.
Some people earn a lot and 31% of a lot is still a lot.The flat tax makes thinks a great deal easier to run.
Question: UKIP is citing the mantra of cutting waste and making efficiencies. The promises are always made before elections and it never seems to happen. Is it not an empty, easy thing to promise?
No. You’re right. I listen to the Conservative Party and Labour making fatuous promises about cutting out inefficiency.
The Labour Party one has to laugh out loud but the public sector didn’t get any smaller during Thatcher’s era.Undoubtedly we are now at a situation where simple economic reality means this country is going to have to go through a considerable restructuring.
We can't have a public sector as large as it is, 800,000 more public sector workers now than there were in 1997. It simply does work; you've got to have people paying tax, not spending it, or generating wealth and not spending it.
Question: If you cut the public sector to 1997 levels would that just not lead to an increase in unemployment and you would reduce your tax take?
No. In the pain the economy is going to have to go through there is undoubtedly going to be issues of unemployment coming up.
If you take out the public sector layers of management and compliance yes you will have a lot of people brought back into the labour market. What we believe in doing is creating an enterprise culture and in particular a manufacturing sector which has sunk too far down. We became too dependent on financial services which was to our cost.
Question: This idea for stimulating Britain's manufacturing base, which would chime with a lot of people, but the basis is making weapons, building nuclear power stations, railways, prisons and flood defences. They could almost sound like Government make-work schemes?
They could. We make weapons anyway, we simply make them in co-operation with other people and we would talking about making them ourselves.
Most of the things we are talking about are things which would be necessary for the country or which would stimulate the economy. Nuclear power stations, we have to do that anyway.We want to rebuild the railways.
The legacy of Dr Beeching has been terribly damaging not only to the economy but also to the environment. We're not talking about getting people out to build unnecessary projects and that New Deal, Keynesian idea.
A million jobs in manufacturing is one of our aims, not that difficult for a Government to do, if it puts its mind to it.
Question: The idea to take out middle management in the public sector but then to create these massive Government infrastructure projects. Are you not just shifting the people around?
I don't think so. I don't think we would be inclined to create large numbers of quangos. We would be looking at letting those projects out as much as possible to the specialists in the private sector.
Question: Your manifesto talks about "culling political correctness". How would you define political correctness and why is it bad?
It is swathe of legislation and regulation which attempts to control people's thoughts, attitudes and to prevent divergent or eccentric behaviour.
That's the issue.
Huge numbers of jobs are created in the public sector which are effectively around nannying to do things or not do things. The example is "street football co-ordinators"; those are the sorts of areas where the Government is intruding.
Question: Some people will say about political correctness that that sort of movement in culture has brought about anti-racism, empowering women, those sort of things, and say that's good. Presumably you'd say some of that movement is good...
Yes. I believe society changes itself. One of the things I find wrong about society organises itself is this constant obsession with change.
Things change anyway. As soon as you take responsibility for changing them faster you also have to take responsibility for where you end up.
Therefore people that want to force change have to be much righter than everybody else, have to be much cleverer and generally they're not so you end up with masses of unintended consequences.
Question: Do you believe the state has a role in reducing poverty and inequality or should that be left to the markets and individuals?
The state absolutely has a role in reducing poverty in as much a society such as ours needs to be able to look after people who find themselves in difficulty.
What the state needs to be able to do is provide people with ladders, escape routes. The danger is you over-manage the situation and you end up kicking the ladders away and entrenching inequality and poverty.
The way in which the welfare system has been developed over the past generations has been entrenching people in poverty; it pays people to remain poor; it pays people to remain unemployed; it pays people to remain in poor quality housing and in fractured relationships.Inequality is a different issue; there is a huge danger in the state trying to eliminate inequality.
I don't think it's possible. People are not all the same, and they're not all equal, and they don't even want to be. Some people want to work hard and some people don't and I respect that.
Question: UKIP wants to withdraw from the Human Rights Act and the Convention on Human Rights. Why?
One of the smart things about the EU is that it overlays itself onto existing structures and makes what was there before invisible.
I can remember before we had the HRA and human rights in the UK were extremely good. We have been developing our human rights through common law and charter for 1,000 years.This is where is goes wrong: because it is trying to re-codify law for a whole continent, it is trying to start again on everything.
The key problem is it now requires interpretation by our lawyers and it overrides common law. So new precedence is now being created.
So you get all of these anomalies, like people not being able to be deported if they have committed crimes because they can technically claim that they would be unsafe in their country of origin.
Question: UKIP wants to have elected police, education and health boards. Is the danger not that these people, like chief constables, will spend all their time politicking rather than running the organisations in question?
There is that element of elected chiefs and you always have that issue; the more you get democracy, the more you have to put up with the sideshows of democracy.However, our overall principle is its better to have people elected than appointed.
The driving force for us is the realisation that professional government is overtaking amateur government in this country. Amateur government doesn't necessarily work terribly efficiently but it does work to the benefit of the people.
Question: Your manifesto states that "life must mean life" in terms of prison. Does that mean staying in prison until death, and for which crimes?
I would say not because I'm a believer in rehabilitation.
If you are an irredeemably bad person, or found to be so by society, and if you're sentenced to life, then you shouldn't be let out in eight years.On the other hand if society is convinced you are reformed, the sinner repents, then we should not be arbitrarily banging you up forever.
Question: Do you agree with the death penalty?
No.
Question: UKIP says it's "opposed to multi-culturalism". What do you mean by "multi-culturalism" and why are you opposed to it?
It has been a belief that all minority cultures must be given special treatment when people come to this country. The flipside to that is: what is the British culture?
The answer is under the multi-cultural banner, we have been persuaded that whatever the British culture is, it isn't right and valuable and what's much more important is we respect the cultures of people who come to live here from elsewhere.I think that's wrong because the reason why they come here is because of our culture.
If we are trashing it, that is not a recipe for success.We believe in having the British culture as something that applies to everyone that lives here. We are not in any respect interested in this idea of "indigenous Anglo-Saxons"; let's face it, the Anglo-Saxons aren't indigenous anyway. We're interested in people sharing a culture of Britishness rather than being ghettoised and set against each other.
Question: Having that conversation about Britishness is one thing but in what sense is it relevant to politics, to policy?
That's a good point. Once you start doing the "what is Britishness" thing I suspect that what you keep coming up against is you keep bumping into aspects of political correctness, diversity, internationalism, and so on, that you can't get around.
The biggest problem that we have in multi-culturalism, I suspect, is this constant nonsense about somebody might be offended.
The idea that being offended is a passport to be able to stop something happening has become one of the silliest aspects about the way in which we have been making law.
There are laws now which are defined not by the perpetrator but by the victim and we've never had that in the past.
Question: UKIP wants to "ban the burka" in public places and some private buildings (e.g banks). Why?
It's not controversial if you cross out the word "burka" and put "crash helmet". That's all we're saying.
Question: To highlight that in your manifesto is that because it identifies a bigger problem for UKIP?
It crosses over into other areas such as we are concerned as a party that the cultural heritage of the country is to a certain extent at risk and one of the areas of risk is Islamification.
I would like to make perfectly clear I have nothing whatever against Muslims. We have Muslim candidates. The Wahabist sect is a threat because it says it is.
Question: UKIP wants boot camps for young offenders. What would they be like and what evidence is there they would be successful?
We do tend to say things in fairly straightforward terms.
It would be better to organise some form of disciplined training and rethinking for young people in trouble than to whack them into jails where they can learn how to be seriously bad people.
Question: This would be like a quasi-military camp?
I think it probably would. I don't want to over-design it. It's an alternative to chucking kids in jail.
Question: What are your views in climate change?
You'd have to be insane not to believe there was such a thing as climate change. There always has been. Do I know what is causing it? No, I don't.
Do I think mankind is causing it? I don't know. It would seem to me plausible that human activity may be playing some sort of role. However what really bothers me is there is a sort of religious fervour that has taken over the debate here and you get strange non sequiturs like our computer model has proved that human activity is likely to have a cause of climate change, therefore whatever it is we were doing, we must stop, and then everything will be fine.
Even if the consensual view about climate change is true, the degree to which we are affecting climate change is marginal.
That's not to say we should not be trying to get away from fossil fuels because they are scarce apart from anything else.I'd like to see some more rational and coherent evidence presented rather than everybody shouting "don't panic" and running around clutching their heads.
Question: I guess the scientists would come back and say we have collated vast amounts of data over many years around the world and shared that in peer-reviewed journals and put out a scientific piece of information which is that carbon dioxide is doing "this" and these are the readings, there is the information, it's up to governments to decide what we need to do.
The scientists have been saying for a long time the science is settled.
When you start to push back on that you find that isn't the case and there are scientists with whom it is not settled.
Question: How would you assess your opponents in this campaign?
Nick Harvey is a popular and successful MP. Seems like a nice man. I want him to lose his job which is nothing personal. I'm not sure it ought to be his job.
Also Nick is a fairly consistent Euro-sceptic but that's no use because he's in the Lib Dems, who are not.Philip Milton, again a nice man.
I tend to see him as a representative of the Conservative Party and while it is my natural home in the past is the problem for me in that it has been the prime mover in taking us into the EU since 1961.
I don't believe the votes I get will in a majority be coming from Philip Milton. I believe we will be getting votes equally.
Question: How would electing you and voting for UKIP improve the lives of people in North Devon?
If they elected me they would find there would be more going on the House of Commons connected with things that concern them than there is at the moment.
First EU membership would be being raised on a very regular basis.North Devonians we know are very Euro-sceptic; we came top here last year.
We would be speaking up for things dear to their hearts in terms of fishing, farming, rural economy, jobs, low-cost housing.
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