April 16, 2016 9.29 am This story is over 95 months old

UKIP deputy leader visits Lincoln on first day of EU referendum campaign

UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall has claimed that momentum is swinging towards the Brexit campaign as more people find out how the European Union works on a visit to Lincoln. The deputy leader and MEP for the north-west gave a speech to UKIP activists and the public on the first official day of the referendum…
UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall with the party's Police and Crime Commissioner candidate for Lincolnshire, Victoria Ayling. Photo: Stefan Pidluznyj for The Lincolnite

UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall has claimed that momentum is swinging towards the Brexit campaign as more people find out how the European Union works on a visit to Lincoln.

The deputy leader and MEP for the north-west gave a speech to UKIP activists and the public on the first official day of the referendum campaign.

Those in attendance at the Lincoln Golf Centre on the evening of Friday, April 15, heard Nuttall take questions on a range of topics, as well as seeing him give his support to the party’s candidate for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections in Lincolnshire, Victoria Ayling.

He said: “I think the campaign has been good for the Leave side so far – if you look at the opinion polls they’ve not only tightened but we’ve actually been a couple of percentage points ahead and we seem to have momentum.

I think that’s because people are learning more about the European Union and the more they see, the less they like.

“They’re understanding that being members of this club means we cannot control our own borders, costs us a fortune, and means that the majority of our laws are made in Brussels by unelected European commissioners, not in London.”

Nuttall said that Lincolnshire and the English East Coast was particularly Eurosceptic due to the perceived high levels of immigration from Eastern Europe in the past decade.

He added: “The make-up of Lincolnshire is very rural which probably partly explains its Euroscepticism. But you’ve had an influx of Eastern European immigrants and relatively high youth unemployment.

“As more countries from the old Eastern Bloc come in, there’s less money in the pot and we lose out even more financially.

Freedom of movement makes no sense and it hasn’t made any sense since 2004 when we invited in the whole of the Communist East. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow morning and say ‘Do you know what, I want a better life and to earn some money for myself and to do better for my family, I’m off to Romania'”.

“But we’ve got to get the message out and ensure that everyone knows what remaining in the EU actually means.”