Douglas Carswell

UKIP Conference: My speech in full

Here is the full text of my speech in Doncaster last week:

"I stood on this spot exactly a year ago. I had just joined UKIP, and called a by-election.

Looking around, I see lots of familiar faces. People who came to help in that by-election. Activists who campaigned in the General Election.

So I wanted to start by saying "thank you." Thank you for all that you did – in the by-election and afterwards. I could not have done it without you.

It wasn't my victory. It was yours. It was UKIP's victory.

We could not have got a staggering four million votes at the last General Election without your hard work.

All that campaigning can be quite an experience. Knocking on all those doors, you get to see human nature in all its rich tapestry.

Let me tell you about this one day. I was out campaigning in one of the smarter parts of my constituency. Lots of large Victorian houses. Wide lawns. Long gravel drives.

I walked up one of those gravel drives to the door of this big house. The front door, I noticed, was slightly open. I could hear the sound of music inside.

I knocked and waited. I knocked again and waited.

Eventually this hear bobbed around. A young lad – in his teens – peering up at me from around the door.

He was wearing, I noticed, what appeared to be a smoking jacket – several sizes too big, the sleeves rolled up.

Between his little fingers I could see what looked like a small cigar. In his other hand, he held what looked to me suspiciously like a glass of brandy.

"Are mum and dad at home?" I asked.

"Does it ruddy look as if they're at home?" He replied.

"What's it like being UKIP's only MP?" I'm often asked.

I might be UKIP's only MP, but being an MP for UKIP is much more fun than it was being a Conservative.

For a start, meetings of the Parliamentary party are a lot shorter. There tends to be unanimity. Mostly.

But I wish more of us were there in the Chamber.

It can be immensely frustrating.

Sitting there on the green benches, I find myself surrounded by a sea of Scottish Nationalist MPs.

We got three times more votes than they got, yet there are fifty something of them, and only one UKIP MP. How can that be fair?

We got more votes than the Lib Dems, Plaid Cymru, the Ulster Unionists, and the Green Party combined.

I know how unfair our political system is in this country. I sit next to it every day.

Politics is a cartel. The rules have been rigged to remove the threat of choice and competition to insiders.

There is a mood of real restlessness out there amongst the voters. Almost four million voted for us. Tens of thousands of comrades voted to make Comrade Corbyn Labour leader.

Anger at the injustices of the corporatist economy are simmering away not far below the surface.

There is a mood of resentment directly towards the political cartel in Westminster.

Europhiles will smear and jeer. They claim that UKIP is a rejection of the modern world. No, we're not. Far from rejecting modernity, modernity has made the emergence of UKIP as the third force in British politics possible.

Instead of implying that there is something wrong with voters for feeling disaffected, the question is what is wrong with our political system.

Historically, the established parties in this country represented different sectional interests. Labour, as the name suggested, once represented the interests of organised labour. The Conservatives once represented the interests of business.

Today, the sectional interest those two parties most clearly represent is that of career politicians.

Far from ensuring voters get a choice, the cartel parties diminish voter choice.

They select the same kind of candidates, drawn from the same narrow background, with the same sort of outlook.

Too many trod the same path from special adviser to safe seat. From backbench toadying to front-bench blandness. MPs becoming MPs because they worked in the offices of MPs. It's a cosy club.

Of course, there are good people in all parties. I know lots of people on both sides of the House full of good intentions.

But if you only ever follow the whips through the voting lobbies, how can you know that you are doing the right thing?

Westminster encourages group think.

And it's group think that has run this country for too long... and run us into the ground.

It was group think about banking and credit before 2007 that helped cause the financial crisis.

We've only had more group think ever since.

The single biggest driver of income inequality in Britain today is a monetary system that has artificially driven up the value of assets. This has widened the wealth gap between haves and have nots. At the heart of the "capitalist" system, central bankers, not the market, fix the price of capital. That's not the free market. It's crony corporatism.

And both establishment parties are happy to go along with it.

Then there's the adoption scandal. Group think means more and more forced adoption, hidden from public view. More and more grandparents find their grandchildren taken off them by force. Secrecy in the family courts. Expert evidence unchallenged.

Both establishment parties are unwilling to change things. None of them is willing to end the blanket secrecy of the family courts.

It's group think that took us into what became the European Union all those years ago – and it's the group think of the Westminster tribe that keeps us there.

It's groupthink that led us into the Exchange Rate Mechanism in the 1990s.

It's group think that has tied us to the world's only declining trade block. Group think cannot see that our future prosperity means joining the 93% of people on the planet who don't live in the European Union. We need to leave the EU.

We need political reform to break the cartel, to end the group think that is holding us back.

That means a proper Right of Recall, allowing voters to trigger by-elections.

Too many MPs come from safe seats. They answer not to voters, but to party whips. We need a right of recall so that local people decide who represents them.

But we also need electoral reform to abolish the idea of a safe seat altogether.

I am so pleased to see Katie Ghose from the Electoral Reform Society here. I was a supporter of electoral reform while I was still a Conservative. I sponsored meetings of the Electoral Reform Society long before I joined UKIP.

Katie, it is a great honour to have you and the Electoral Reform Society here with us today. Thank you.

What kind of electoral reform system do we need? It's not up to me.

It'll be for you, our members, to decide.

But I would simply say this. The first-past-the-post system we have today is not a longstanding British tradition. Like so many things we think of as ancient integral pieces of how we're governed, it's a late Victorian invention.

Until the 1880s, we didn't have first-past-the-post. We had first-two-past-the-post. Most constituencies returned two MPs to Parliament. Having two MPs per constituency meant more choice and competition.

It was only in the 1880s, around about the time they gave the ordinary working man the vote, that they had to devise a monopolistic electoral system to try to control whom the working man might elect.

If UKIP is to win, we must be a force for change. And in order to carry a convincing message of change, we must radiate optimism. A belief that tomorrow can be better than today.

Optimism is infectious.

The world is getting better. Yes, there's plenty we don't like about the cartel politics and the corporatist economy. That's why our party wants change.

Most people in this country are living longer, happier, and healthier lives than ever before.

Infant mortality is not only falling in sub-Saharan Africa. It's down dramatically in this country too.

Yes, people are right to be concerned about crime. Knife crime in my Clacton constituency remains stubbornly high. But overall violence is in decline. There's less binge drinking amongst the young than a decade ago. Diseases that could only be managed a generation ago can today be cured.

Britain is a more tolerant and open society today than ever before. Let's never blame outsiders for the problems caused by political insiders.

Technology is giving us greater choice and opportunity than seemed imaginable just a couple of decades ago. Blockchains and other innovations are about to open up a whole new world of possibilities.

But there's one great, stonking reason – above all others – for UKIP to be cheerful. We are finally going to get that In/Out referendum. The thing we've all campaigned for, for so long, is going to happen.

We've all been involved in the struggle for this referendum. Many in this room deserve a medal.

David Cameron once flatly ruled it out. Not anymore. We won that argument, and it's down to many here now.

But it will all be worthless if we do not now win the referendum.

The only question that should really count is, "how can we win it?"

We need to put our country first. This is not about who wins democratic elections. It's about whether we remain a self-governing democracy at all.

We must be prepared to work with anyone – left or right, politician or undecided. All backgrounds, all faiths, all colours, all people.

There are good, honourable, patriotic members in all parties. We must work with them all.

It is not enough to win by offering opposition to Brussels. Our challenge is to show how Britain outside the EU can prosper.

It's an honour to have joined UKIP a year ago. I have made many friends and been warmly welcomed. Together we have the great referendum battle ahead. Let everything we do be about winning it. Let's do it."

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