Murnaghan Interview with Steven Woolfe, MEP, UKIP, 29.05.16

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well it is a blistering attack on the Prime Minister’s record on immigration, not from his usual foes in UKIP and elsewhere but from within his own Cabinet.  Sir John Major has come to his defence, accusing the Leave campaign of raising fears about immigration and exaggerating its levels in the future.  Well Steven Woolfe is UKIP’s Migration and Financial Affairs spokesman and he is with me now, a very good morning to you Mr Woolfe.  Well let’s address some of the points that Sir John Major has been making, he is right isn’t he when he says migration from within the European Union especially for young people coming here to work could be temporary, it all depends on the ebbs and flows of economic growth.

STEVEN WOOLFE: Well it does but if you look at the figures that he talks about when they try to attack us on the economy, let’s look at the economy of Europe.  He is saying that there is some small growth out there and yet the ECB is pumping in 80 billion euros a month to try and shore up that economic growth, you have got youth unemployment across the continent, you’ve got 62% plus in terms of Greece, over 40% in countries like Italy and Croatia, even in Germany where they have youth unemployment at 8% and structural unemployment levels at 13% across the eurozone so if this man wants to be honest about the economics of Europe he has to be clear that that zone is not going to grow rapidly for a long period of time and that means this country will have net migration of 330,000 a year for many, many years to come.

DM: But what about this idea, and I think the public are getting heartily sick of it aren’t they, of people throwing numbers and claims around that are unsubstantiated and you’ve got this issue on the campaign of the £350 million a week that the UK gives to the European Union, now of course there is a lot of money flowing back the other way so why is it still on the side of those battle buses?

STEVEN WOOLFE: Well I am not part of Vote Leave so you’d have to ask them really why they really actually stick those up but what I am absolutely clear about is that the money that returns to our country is our money, it’s not European Union money but they do want to have …

DM: But it’s not that much, that is the point, is it?  

STEVEN WOOLFE: Well whether it is 55 million a day which is the figure that UKIP has always used in terms of the net contribution, it is still a huge amount of money that could be spent on our own hospitals, in terms of refurbishing our own roads, paying off our own national debt but one of the things that they all talk about, they talk about the risks of staying in or the risk of leaving for the Leave campaign but what about the risks of staying in?  Only this week I was at an ECOM committee where they actually suggested that we should have a European tax identification number, that all European citizens should list their assets then a German finance minister said there should be a European Treasury and that’s moving towards a real risk of a European tax because they need to bail out these countries by taking …

DM: A single currency perhaps.  This issue here, we’re talking part economy but mainly about migration, is that the way?  Do you accept that’s the way that the two broad campaigns have divided?  Remain are talking about the economy and bringing in a raft of experts and international bodies it must be said to support their case and now you have concentrated, and will continue to concentrate, on the issue of numbers of people who want to come to the UK?  

STEVEN WOOLFE: I think those are two important issues.  I obviously as Migration Spokesman have been concentrating on the levels of numbers here and the cost to our schools and our hospitals and infrastructure for the future, what’s our debt levels that we would need to have in terms of funding all of these things that we’d require for the large amount of people coming in?  But I would also say that we are actually just trying to get the economic argument out, I just state the fact about the eurozone for example but what I am concerned about, Dermot, is this issue that I am seeing now coming out.  It started off with the operation Vote Leave’s poster, then I heard [??] only in the last couple of days suggesting that European Union citizens would be kicked out of this country if we leave, then we had Miliband suggesting only yesterday that those who support staying in are extremist because they are trying to put the argument we’re going to be kicking people out and we have made it very firm that the government should step up to the mantel like us and say those European Union citizens who are here working legally should have the right to remain afterwards and we should put an end to that confusion for them.

DM: Okay, they have a right to remain but others can’t come?  

STEVEN WOOLFE: No, what we will then say is that we open an ethical migration policy which treats the rest of the world equally.  If you want to come and work here …

DM: But France is the rest of the world, the EU is the rest of the world.  

STEVEN WOOLFE: But so is India, so is China and what we have at the moment is a favouritism towards the 28 EU states because we’re in that particular union but I would like to see a global immigration policy that is more outwardly looking.

DM: And there is this key question which we hear different answers from and people asking about, so Britain outside the European Union is obviously going to have trade deals with this huge bloc that we will not be part of, what is it?  I’ve been reading UKIPs stuff and you more or less say and Mr Farage has said in the past we’d be like Norway, is that the kind of deal?  

STEVEN WOOLFE:  No, not necessarily but never really suggested, we said that there should be …

DM: Well Mr Farage has mentioned it in the past.   

STEVEN WOOLFE: We’ve mentioned it as options that are out there but we prefer the British solution and the British solution to us would be one that uses our historical trading links to trade with the rest of the world …

DM: But within the single market or not, this is the key issue then because you know then you’d have to accept strictures in whether you’re in the EU or not?  

STEVEN WOOLFE: Absolutely, the single market is three consistent elements, we’ve put that out.  There’s the market, I buy glasses, clothes, shirts, ties, furniture etc.   The second part is the tariff zone so from non-EU Iceland …

DM: So we are in it.

STEPHEN WOOLFE: But so are non-EU Iceland to non-EU Turkey in that free trade zone.  The third part and the only part we should be really arguing about is whether we will have an argument of actually influencing the regulations in that zone of which of course we won’t directly because we’re outside of the European Union so it’s nonsense to say that we won’t be in the market and nonsense to say we won’t be in the free tariff zone but it isn’t nonsense to argue about the regulations.  

DM: Is this something … I mean are you frustrated about the divisions in the Leave campaign, would you like to have more control on the direction and the message that’s being put across and how it’s expressed?

STEVEN WOOLFE: Well certainly in terms of immigration I think we are getting the message clearer now, Priti Patel was very firm this morning in the Telegraph. I’d like to see more in terms of the economic arguments being pushed out but I also wanted to see the concern about what would happen if we remain.  I am very concerned about pressures on TTIP, on our NHS, I am very concerned about the new taxation prospects of a single corporation tax, pressure of being in the euro and of course the expansionism with Turkey and other countries, those should be out there too.

DM: Mr Woolfe, good to see you, thank you very much, we’re out of time I’m afraid,  Steven Woolfe there from UKIP.