Viewpoint / Election: ‘A highly controlled bankrupt mess’
Orkney-based UKIP candidate Robert Smith is the next to set out his political vision should he be elected as the MP for the northern isles at the forthcoming general election on 7 May.
Have you ever wondered what life will be like in 20 years time and how things will be for your children in the future? I worry about this and it’s one of the main reasons I’m standing for UKIP.
In the last 18 years, we have gone from a free, prosperous country to a highly controlled bankrupt mess.
Sadly, the policies of all the other parties do nothing to reverse this situation and most of them put their foot firmly on the accelerator pedal to make things worse.
Since 1997 we have been on a downward trajectory caused by a political philosophy of tax, spend, borrow and regulate. We have totally unsustainable levels of debt that we cannot hope to escape while we are hamstrung by regulation and over-taxation.
UKIP will lower taxes, reduce spending, and therefore borrowing, and reduce regulation to the absolute minimum. Our opponents will shriek “what about the bankers!” and assert that lack of regulation caused the financial crash.
This simply isn’t true; the cause was bad regulation (by the last Labour government) not too little.
They will say “how will you reduce borrowing if you lower taxes?” despite the fact that every time taxation has been lowered and simplified, tax revenue has increased.
The government decisions of the last 18 years at every level have been almost pathologically perverse; it is like they want the country to fail.
It could be argued that this is absolutely the case when the only alternative is that our governing class and their highly educated advisors are just plain stupid.
Would clever people sign an act of parliament that forces us to more than double our cost of energy?
Is it the act of intelligent people to give 27 foreign countries the right to make most of our laws?
How would you describe someone who thought it a good idea to have more people employed in the non-productive part of our economy than the productive sector?
Is it clever to restrict building land through silly planning regulations and make houses even more expensive through excessively onerous building regulations so that people on average income cannot afford a house?
Isn’t someone who thinks it’s okay to spend more on debt interest than defence an idiot?
How dim do you have to be to force people to fit light bulbs that don’t emit light or buy hoovers that don’t suck?
UKIP are the only party that recognises the absurdity of the above and will do something about it.
Yet in Scotland, most people vote for parties that act in the way described above!
I’ve lived and worked in many places and have met and known many people and the vast majority have the same hopes and aspirations as me.
We want to work away and make things better for ourselves and our families, have a house, a car, the odd night out and an occasional holiday.
We want to have enough money to make this happen and some left over for a rainy day. We want to be happy.
Why do most of us vote for parties that do not share our values? Why do we vote for parties that want to tax us more and more and stamp on our freedoms with more and more petty laws and regulations?
I guess it’s because most people have the good sense to pay little heed to politics and economics and try to get on with their lives.
Unfortunately – in step with our political masters – most of the media trot out the political doctrine of the day without question, our educational establishments seem to be populated by those who agree with the mad ideas that have left us in this mess.
We only hear one side of the political argument … especially in Scotland. I suppose most people would scarcely believe that this narrative is misleading.
This would be unfortunate on its own, but we’ve now got to the situation where a party that questions this orthodoxy is demonised.
This is intolerable in a supposedly democratic country. It’s time to vote for a party that truly represents your hopes and aspirations. It’s time to vote UKIP.
Robert Smith
UKIP candidate for Orkney and Shetland
Robert Smith’s Facebook site can be found here. The other candidates are Donald Cameron (Conservatives), Alistair Carmichael (LibDems), Gerry McGarvey (Labour) and Danus Skene (SNP).
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