Nigel Farage on sparkling form at Liberty Stadium Swansea

Nigel Farage was on sparkling form last Friday evening (23 October 2015) at the Liberty Stadium Swansea as part of the "Say No to EU Tour with Nigel Farage". You can see his case for leaving the EU outlined in the video here (no longer available).

I was unable to make the event, but the key points made by Nigel Farage in his speech, from the video, are summarised as follows (starts at 0:16:36):

• Nigel Farage has spent 20 years campaigning to have a referendum to decide whether the UK is part of political union with Europe or not.
• The EU is a good thing for large companies as they can import cheap foreign labour to the detriment of local British (Welsh) people.
• The EU part funded projects across is not European money, it is our money.
• The EU legislators are making it unaffordable for Small to Medium sized Enterprises to be comply with EU legislation e.g. e-cigarettes need to be subjected to tests more rigorous than the tobacco industry, costing £8,000 for a toxicology test for each of a Swansea company's 280 items. The result is that a Swansea firm that makes e-cigarettes, with 21 employees, may well close down because of this EU legislation.
• EU membership has been a disaster for heavy manufacturing in Wales such as large scale steel. Since 2007, there were 9 active large steel furnaces in Wales operating under Corus. Now there is only one large scale steel manufacturer in Wales. This has been driven by the EU's obsession with global warming and carbon dioxide emissions. Global temperatures have not risen for 20 years. Yet, the UK has taken the EU policy and applied it by developing expensive intermittent wind farm generated electricity, which has made the price of electricity in the UK the most expensive in Europe. This has had a knock on impact on the price of steel, resulting in closures in steel production in the UK, thousands of job losses, and displacement of production to countries with lower environmental standards.
• 80% by value of fish caught in UK territorial waters has been given over to the EU.
• EU membership is not good for Wales. We need to take control and govern our destiny by coming out of the EU.
• 70% our UK laws are made by EU.
• First two words of our passport says "European Union".
• UK people should decide who comes to work and settle in the UK - not open access to 500 million people from other EU member states. This has resulted in wage compression for over 10 years.
• The Prime Minister's renegotiation of EU membership will result in no significant concession at all. Cameron will not be able to change the free movement of people doctrine. Nigel Farage expects "Call me Dave" to do a Neville Chamberlain "Peace for our Time" paper waving exercise claiming significant concessions in future EU treaties in years to come and not to worry. We need a complete change in the relationship with this political European project.
• In the name of trade agreement the UK have given away our birth right to rule our own country and we want it back.
• In the EU election debates last year (2014) with Nick Clegg, Nigel Farage pointed out that Nick Clegg did not think we (UK) are good enough to negotiate our own trade agreements outside of the EU.  Nigle Farage thinks we are good enough to run our own country.
• We are not saying no to Europe, we love Europe... we want to get on with our European neighbours, but we don't want to go joint (bank) account with them. We will and want a free-trade agreement with Europe, do business and cooperate with Europe, but we want to be able to govern ourselves through the democratic process.
• We will open ourselves up to the rest of the world.... We should relink to the 54 countries of the Common Wealth, with their 2.2 billion people, where English is a common language, where there is a similar legal system and they like us and standby our side when we are in trouble.
• Remember the EU sell us far more than we sell them, so they will renegotiate a trade deal and they will still buy our widgets! (EU sell 800,000 cars more to the UK than the UK sells to the EU)
• The EU referendum is a once in a life time opportunity to break this link. If we lose the EU referendum the establishment will close the door to leave the EU for ever. We can win this referendum and beat the establishment.
• There will be no hardships for leaving the EU. Leaving the EU will enable us to develop policies to put our own people and businesses first.
• The referendum is expected to be held in autumn 2016, the earliest possible opportunity, or slip to spring 2017.
• The migrant crisis shows us how badly run the EU is. We in the UK know how to respect genuine refugees. In the 17th Century Nigel Farage's family were French Protestants and fled persecution of being burnt on the stake, to the UK.
• However, The EU sent out the insane message in April 2015 that anyone who steps foot on EU soil qualifies as an asylum seeker and can stay. The majority of people coming into the EU are economic migrants using this crisis as a way of bettering their lives. Mixed in amongst them are ISIS Jihadist who want to use this crisis to destroy our way of life. We have got to protect and defend our way of life.
• The EU have promised to give Turkey 3 Billion euro and 75 million Turks visa free access to the Schengen zone and to fast track their membership to the EU. This gives free open access to our health service, education and benefits system to people who are even poorer than the other recent Eastern European additions to the EU. This will mean opening ourselves up to a country that is becoming more Islamist and fundamentalist and 95% of it is not even in Europe, but Asia. It will mean opening ourselves up to a group of people whose culture is fundamentally different to ours.
• It is far riskier to stay in the EU which will open up its doors to the whole of Turkey.
• The EU's large combustion plant directive has caused us to close coal many large coal fired power stations and substitute them for wind generation. This flawed policy has made our electricity more expensive and reduced our excess capacity to just 2%, which put us at high risk of the lights going out and the potential for a huge negative impact on our digital economy.
• Germany however is building 24 huge new power stations that pass the new EU directive to maintain their energy security and lower energy costs.
• The political elite do not want us to leave the EU. The Electoral Commission have made sure the referendum question has been stated correctly. Purdah rules will apply to stop the government using their resources to influence the result.
• The danger is that we vote to leave and our conniving politicians do their best to try and renegotiate something and not make that happen. Even if we win a referendum we need a strong UKIP to make sure the British people vote the right way and fulfil their wishes.
• We can win the referendum, but we must not be stabbed in the back by those who do not respect the result.