Dear Sir, I read UKIP’s manifesto, as asked in last week’s Newton News. The first thing I noticed was that it contains a welter of ‘wants’ … but absolutely no ideas on how to achieve them.  The manifesto says that UKIP wants to protect heavy industry, to introduce a “world-renowned” education system, to upgrade the roads, railways, Tees Valley Airport and internet – all things we would all want – but it offers not a single strategy on how to do so.

CLUELESS Most amazingly of all – given that it is a key UKIP policy – the manifesto offers NO IDEAS AT ALL of how to control immigration.  Indeed, the only immigration strategy it proposes is to accept asylum seekers. And on the few occasions it does offer strategies, the suggestions it makes would be disastrous – for example:

• It proposes to rebuild the fishing industry … by letting foreign vessels pay to fish in our waters.

• It wants to block skilled foreign workers … apparently unaware that a major weakness of the north-east economy is the shortage of skilled workers.

• And despite the importance of renewable technologies to the north-east, it proposes to end government subsidies to renewables.

UKIP’s suggestions regarding local government show their ignorance even more starkly – for example, they only seem just to have noticed the government’s ‘disproportionate cuts’ (something I have been telling you about since 2010).  Laughably, they also offer to “fight” to replace the very EU subsidies which their Brexit success has cost.

MISLEADING Biggest lie of all? The front of the leaflet has the words ‘WORKERS’ RIGHTS’ boldly prominent.  But the manifesto does not once mention the word ‘rights’.  (Right-wing parties don’t much care about your ‘rights’.) What the manifesto does say is that UKIP will not raise the minimum wage, but will raise the tax threshold instead.  This fails to appreciate that the highest earners keep 40% of any increase in the threshold, in contrast to the poorest people, who do not thereby get any increase in income at all. And that about sums up the whole ill-informed, sleight-ofhand claptrap which MAKES NOT ONE ‘PROMISE’.

What UKIP touted last week as a comprehensive ‘vision’ is simply a blatant attempt to rebrand the ‘Party-whichrejects-foreigners’ as a ‘Partywhich-cares-about-your-jobs’. It is a manifesto perfectly matched to yet another of their ‘say-anything-to-get-votes’ campaigns. John D Clare