UKIP’s John Whitby has shared his views on Brexit and the UK's general election.
Sputnik: Who will come out on top in the UK’s general election?
John Whitby: I think we could well be heading towards another hung parliament. I don’t think Labour is really an electable force and the Conservatives have also managed to shoot themselves in the foot over the last few months.
I’m hoping that we will get enough sensible people out there who voted to leave the EU; which was after all a very large number, who actually look sensibly at the candidates and say “if we want to leave; these are the people we need to vote for”.
Sputnik: Has Nigel Farage made a mistake by not striking a non-aggression pact with the Conservatives?
John Whitby: I think we could look at it the other way around. If you look at my area Peterborough; when we had a by-election not that long ago, the Brexit Party candidate came second by over two thousand votes above the Conservative, now logic would say to me that in that case the Brexit Party candidate should be the one that stands, and if anybody is going to step back it should be the Conservative.
There does seem to be this arrogance certainly between Labour and the Conservatives, that they are the two big parties and that everybody should give way to them, and I would actually like to see it go the other way around, and see the people choose who is actually the best candidate for Brexit, and support them.
Sputnik: Will the UK finally leave the EU in January 2020?
John Whitby: I would love to say that the UK will leave in January, but then again we should have left in June 2018, because we were promised faithfully by David Cameron, that if we were “stupid” enough to vote to leave; he would trigger Article Fifty and he stated that would give us two years to come up with a workable deal with the EU, and if we didn’t do that within two years we would leave two years later with no deal. That was a brazen statement, but like all the other promises, they haven’t been delivered.
I think it’s more than fair to call Boris Johnson’s new divorce bill Brexit in name only. It’s Theresa May’s deal with a tummy tuck and a bit of lipstick on, it’s actually quite appalling, and it doesn’t guarantee us that we will leave at all.
There is an argument that this would only go on for a transition period, but that may be extended, and we are putting ourselves completely at the mercy of the EU, it also continues the transition of our military to the nascent EU army and that is not a good thing, and we need to step away from that as rapidly as we possibly can.
