UKIP News review

Nationals

farage has spread himself about today, with a important story in the Daily Mail about the fact that if the UK authorities wish to ban this so called new drug, Mephendrone they cannot with first getting permission from the EU authorities due to an obscure piece of EU regulation.

The Prime Minister yesterday said the Government was 'determined to act to prevent this evil hurting the young people of this country', following a string of deaths linked to mephedrone, also known as meow meow.
But the UK Independence Party last night dealt a blow to Mr Brown's announcement with the unearthing of an EU directive which will significantly slow down the move.
Under the EU Technical Standards and Regulations Directive 98/34/EC, the Government has to give the EU at least three months' notification before it
can change British legislation.
UKIP spokesman Nigel Farage said: 'The Government is kidding the people but it simply can't act without an EU-enforced delay.
'This useless government needs to tell the EU to back off from controlling or delaying British legislation.'

This story is important for two reasons, firstly it highlights the impotence of the government and the ignorance of our governors about how much they already ceeded power to Brussels, and secondly on a purely UKIP party political note, it is the first time the rabidly Tory Mail has credited us with anything for ages.
The Youtube of Farage speaking about this is below.

The email that sent me this video was titled,

"Nigel on Mephedrone"

Now would be a funny sight.
He is in the Telegraph as well, talking about the latest harmonisation plan from the EU, harmonising European divorce laws.

Elsewhere
Bloom gets in to the York Press talking about prisons,

Though not strictly UKIP, indeed in part anti/UKIP, a letter from ever excellent Ronald Stewart Brown in the Telegraph spells out a cogent position.

In the extract from his new book Bad Laws (Comment, March 22), Philip Johnston rightly fears “the insidious accretion of power to a benign and democratic state, through the use of the legislative process to restrict what we do and shape who we are”.

We were warned of this before we joined the European Community. In his Reith Lectures in 1972, later published as Europe: Journey to an Unknown Destination, Andrew Shonfield described how Georges Vedel, the French European parliamentarian, had told him: “What you British will have to learn when you are in the Community is what it means to live inside a precisely defined legal system. The Community is in its very essence a system of laws. Once a particular responsibility has been transferred by law to an identified agency of the Community, that agency does not have the right to hand it over to anyone else.”

As 70 per cent of our laws come from Brussels, it is not unreasonable to see the EU as a major part of the problem. The question is what to do about it. We could not leave the EU without leaving the single market, which no new government could sensibly propose against the opinion of organs of the business establishment such as the Institute of Directors and the CBI.

The Ukip solution of a Swiss-style free- trade agreement with the EU would not work as it would mean losing free movement of goods, a vital feature of the single market for all benefiting from UK-EU trade. I base this view on interviews with some 120 leading businessmen and others with knowledge of the subject.

If a Conservative government eventually considers an alternative to full EU membership, the solution is likely to be negotiating a bilateral customs union agreement with the EU. It would preserve free movement of goods, albeit at the cost of staying in the EU tariff band for most merchandise trade, and could attract the happy label: “Staying in Europe for trade”.

We would argue that to create a customs union that he suggests we would first have to leave the EU. It would only then be possible to move to a more beneficial elationship.