Jonathan Arnott Slams Labour In The N.E. Journal!

Did Labour even bother to read the North East Manifesto?UKIP’s Jonathan Arnott MEP has hit out at the Labour Party over its comments on the North East Manifesto after they claimed that it’s close to the Labour Manifesto.  From the deficit to foreign aid, energy to the NHS, immigration to crime, the North East Manifesto goes against everything which Labour stands for – leading the local UKIP MEP to ask the question ‘Have they even bothered to read it?’

“All six of the headline local North East policies fit UKIP’s views like a glove, but the results of the remaining questions are startling – and diametrically opposed to everything that Labour stands for.  They should be treating this as a wake-up call, but bizarrely they’re claiming that it’s close to their position instead.”  Amongst the findings of the Journal and Chronicle’s survey for the North East Manifesto were:

• Immigration “should be controlled more strongly with a points-based system”
• The government’s top priority should be “immigration and Europe”
• Foreign aid “should be cut back while we rebuild our economy”
• We should “hire more police, build lots more prisons and deport foreign criminals” but also “Cut red tape for police and give criminals tougher sentences”
• To reduce the deficit we should “Leave the EU and vastly reduce foreign aid”
• Our GPs should be “freed from paperwork”
• Yes to shale gas exploration
• We should support “English votes for English laws”

This is in addition to headline policies like cutting local small business rates, dualling the A1, protecting our NHS and scrapping the bedroom tax.

Arnott continued: “I don’t think that the Labour Party can honestly claim they’ve done a complete U-turn on all of these issues.  I think it’s more likely that they only skim-read the headline policies and didn’t bother to read the full results to see what local people are actually saying.  How else could they make such a claim?  Fortunately though, there’s one Party which is truly standing up for the North East – and that Party is the UK Independence Party.”