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Wildlife and UKIP

Questions from Suffolk Wildlife Trust

Question 1 How will UKIP support production and sustainable farming that delivers a countryside rich in wildlife?

Question 2 How will UKIP put nature at the heart of the way we use and manage our land?

Question 3 What is UKIP’s policy towards the marine environment, including the designation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)?

Prof says . . .

Question 1 Our most fundamental policy affecting food production and the care of the countryside is to withdraw Britain from the European Union and thereby regain control of our farming and wildlife policies.

Specifically we support an expansion of British food production in harmony with nature, encouraged financially by a combination of price support for products which can be sold in the market, plus environmental management payments, such that no farmer will receive less than they are getting under the present EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).  Replacement of the CAP would be accompanied by a massive simplification of the attendant claims form filling.

No one will be paid for set-aside, but if farmers choose to make parts of their land into a properly-designed wildlife reserve or re-establish hedgerows say, then where this was consistent with overall food production, it would qualify for an environmental management payment.

UKIP is opposed to the diversion of food growing acreage (principally sugarbeet) to supply the feedstock for biofuels.

UKIP will encourage the development of the Royal Agricultural College at Cheltenham in widening the scope of its training, particularly in rural sustainability and land management, and to encourage the flow of young people into farming.

Question 2 The financial and training systems we envisage (see answer to question 1) will automatically put nature at the heart of the way land is used.

However, UKIP does not support a centralised command approach to this question.  Besides farmers and organisations like the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, there are many agencies, public and private, who may be expected to play their part and be listened to.  This includes parish councils and gamekeepers for instance.

Thus we believe that Natural England’s remit is far too wide and we would certainly reassign its responsibilities for coasts and rivers to a specific Coasts and Rivers Agency managing a £30 billion 20 year programme for protecting our coasts and rivers from erosion and flooding, in conjunction with existing local agencies and initiatives.  The creation of lagoons for wildlife as well as for people’s recreation would fall within the Agency’s scope.

Question 3 As with land use, UKIP’s most fundamental policy with regard to the marine environment is to leave the European Union, and thus the Common Fisheries Policy which controls virtually everything we do on our own share of the Continental Shelf.  We will thus recover control over all our internationally designated sovereign waters as defined in the Continental Shelf Act 1964 – broadly the North Sea and the English Channel out to the median lines with Norway and the EU countries bordering these waters.

By this change we will be able to re-establish our fishing industry for now and for future generations in harmony with our own conservation objectives.  We will ban all forms of “industrial” trawling which will in itself be the single biggest act of conservation of both fished and unfished species that you can possibly have.  We will establish moveable “No Take Zones” (NTZs) allowing fish to spawn.  The Marine Protected Areas will be established as part of the overall plan of conservation for the whole of our Continental Shelf.  Unlike the present EU controlled fishing arrangements however, we will be free to design these and the NTZs to harmonize with our fishermen’s objectives to rebuild their industry.

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Why they wish Europe’s Union

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 9th July 1985.

Your leaders on June 27th and July 1st once again implicitly accept the fundamental differences between Britain and the two key EEC countries, France and West Germany, yet refuse to draw the obvious conclusion that we should withdraw from that organisation.

However much you may wish to believe that the Continental countries are not really serious about a European union, the fact is for different reasons they are.  For France, the EEC is seen as a vehicle to promote French concepts and projects – Ariane, Airbus and now Eureka; for Germany, the EEC is a stage on which to regain political pride.

Britain figures absolutely nowhere in their thinking except as a country to be alternately despised, exploited or envied.

France and Germany can, and will, advocate the abrogation of the veto, confident that no proposal will command majority support which will really damage their ambitions.  Britain, however, would look forward to a sequence of decisions which will damage us individually as people and collectively as a nation.  The GAP, the fishing and budget settlements and now the car vehicle emission standards agreement are all immensely damaging to our interests, and this is soon to be followed by pressure to remove immigration controls on arrivals from EEC locations.

The tragedy for Britain is that we endure all this for absolutely nothing.  The ritual incantation by politicians like Mr David Steel (June 27th) who have no practical industrial experience, about the benefits of the EEC’s 320 million common market, doubly miss the point; first all European countries whether in the EEC or not are already linkined within an industrial free trade are; second the benefits of such a market are unquantifiable and, in any case, overshadowed by other factors which lie entirely within the competence of individual natios.

West Germany’s economic success owes absolutely nothing to the EEC’s exisence and everything to having a resolute, technically competent managerial class backed by a trained disciplined work force and a banking system which sees its first duty to support its own manufacturing industry.  The extent to which the British economy has improved of late is the extent to which these three factors have become more widespread.

Again, the technological benefits of large units are vastly overstared by politicians eager for roles to play.  With the possible exception of a moon-shot and certain nuclear missile projects, there are probably no technological goals outside the competence of an industrial nation of 60 million people.

As a recent visitor to centres in the USA engaged in the Eureka technologies, I can say that Americans certainly do not regard their size as conferring any particular advantage.  On the contrary, in the vital computer field for instance, the world’s most powerful commercial computers and the best work stations are both supplied by relatively small firms staffed by gifted individuals.

Sooner or later the political establishment, which long ago lost faith in Britain, will have to allow the British people to confront a stark choice: cease being an independent nation, or let the EEC go its own way to union without Britain.  When the present British passport, which for millions of people is the symbol of our nationhood, is suppressed in about 18 months’ time, just before the next General Election, the present Government will find that in the interests of yet another damaging Euro-compromise it has grievously offended another large section of its natural support.

 

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