NIGEL Farage’s landmark visit to Gloucestershire had both sides of the in-out Europe debate rattling their sabres. Before his speech last night at the GL1 Leisure Centre, reporter Jack Pitts caught up with him at the Fountain Inn in Gloucester to ask why his campaign should hold water with people in the Cotswolds.

 

He dragged Ukip from a marginal force in politics to a party backed by 3.9 million voters in this year's general election. Now he is the face – and the personality – of the campaign to extract Britain from the EU.

Standing with his ubiquitous pint as legions of photographers flashed away, he laid out why the Cotswolds should vote to leave the EU.

It doesn’t matter, he explained, that the Cotswolds is a rural area with relatively little immigration.

“I think our message has a relevance in the four corners of the UK,” he said. “In a sense the unique thing about Ukip is that we attract our vote from such a diverse range of people and such a wide geographical area.

“You find a strong vote in very rural areas just as you find a strong vote in inner cities.”

The Cotswolds is one of the most rural areas in Britain and many farmers rely heavily on subsidies from the EU.


“How did they exist before the EU?” Mr Farage asked. “Was this just rural desolation until some man in Brussels came along with a cheque book? Of course not. 


“We had rural deficiency payments from 1947 to 1973, and everybody knows that post-EU there’s going to have to be support for farmers. But there is a bias in what Ukip wants - we tend to favour the small and medium size landowners over the large scale agri-businesses.”
 

On May 7, Ukip's Cotswolds Constituency candidate Chris Harlow received 6,188 votes, compared to incumbent Conservative Geoffrey Clifton-Brown’s 32,045 and Lib Dem Paul Hodgkinson’s 10,568. Nationally, Ukip’s votes were spread so widely that their 3.9million votes translated to a single MP.

The unfairness was not lost on Mr Farage: “I watched the Cenotaph service yesterday and I saw Mr Cameron and Mr Corbyn, and quite rightly so, but I also saw three other party leaders who between them got fewer votes than Ukip.”

On whether he was expecting “big things” from the voters in Gloucestershire in the referendum he seemed uncharacteristically hesitant.

“If you look back over the last couple of years the area have done well in European elections,” he said.

“We’ve got the challenge of local elections coming up,” he added. “I’m not going to make any ridiculous wild predictions about what will happen but we will be in there trying.

“But we believe there’s real potential here for local elections next year.”

Asked if he considered himself the key figure in the debate on whether to leave the EU, he said: “Well there aren’t many people who dare to lift their head over the parapet. It’s been a lonely place for 20 years.

“We get other politicians saying maybe they won’t, maybe they will. Ukip’s position is clear and unequivocal.”

He finished in no uncertain terms: “Do I want senior Labour figures and senior Tory figures in this campaign, yeah of course I do. I have said before and I’ll say it again, Ukip are willing to work with anyone to get the results we want.

“Let me put it to you like this. Ukip cannot win this referendum on its own, but this referendum cannot be won without Ukip.”

A full report on last night's speech will be online later today.