I am bored witless with people complaining about immigration. We do not have an immigration crisis in Britain. Mass immigration ended in the 1970s.
In 2002 Roger Knapman announced that UKIP should adopt a new hard-line on immigration, and I almost gave up on UKIP in response. It is obvious that by making a big fuss about this subject UKIP will (a) attract the sort of people whose true spiritual home is the National Front and (b) make it easy for the many enemies of British independence to portray our party as being part of the far right.
When people with only a passing interest in politics (ie the bulk of the population) contemplate voting for us, the first thing they come across is a barrage of deliberately dishonest and self-serving statements from Labour, LibDem and Tory politicos claiming that we are extremists. They may well do us the courtesy of taking these statements with a pinch of salt, but as soon as they turn to UKIP's literature and see statements like "Britain is Full!" or "We're Being Flooded!" they think "Oh, yes, that was right. These guys are plainly Nazis". NOT because there is anything inherently extreme about advocating this or that immigration policy, but simply because an obsession with immigration has been the hallmark of far right parties in Britain for over 30 years.
Therefore it is a fact of political life in this country that we can EITHER effectively oppose Britain's membership of the EU OR we can make a lot of noise about immigrants, but we can't do both.
UKIP's actual policy on immigration (a points based system with quotas) strikes me as perfectly reasonable. I have no problem with it. But I think the party needs to distance itself from some of the statements it made in the last election campaign and from the kind of hysteria generated by the 'moron press', such as the Daily Express.
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