The UK Independence Party was founded in 1993 to seek Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. We have attracted membership from Labour, Conservative and Liberal-Democrat backgrounds - principled men and women who want their country back. The UKIP has grown steadily as more people see through the European ‘project’. We are now the fourth political party - in 1999, we won three seats in the European Parliament, a platform we use to reveal the truth about the EU.

The UKIP is a non-racist, non-sectarian party. It includes British people of all backgrounds who value individual freedom, tolerance and our right to govern ourselves. The UKIP really believes in Britain and Britain’s future as an independent nation competing in the world. We are not ‘anti-European’, but we oppose British membership of an EU that stifles our initiative and threatens our freedom. We do not seek to abolish the EU, for we believe that each nation in Europe should decide its own future. Britain has no more right to control them than they have to impose their will on us.

The UKIP is the only political party contesting the General Election that will never abolish the pound for the euro and will never abandon British common law, the right to trial by jury or the presumption of innocence. Indeed we are the only party left that genuinely believes in freedom - freedom for the individual, freedom for businesses and local communities, freedom from patronising ‘political-correctness’ and from intolerance or injustice. We seek an independent, outward-looking Britain, not the offshore province of a centralised ‘Europe’, whose people are told what to do and what to think.

In 1975, the British people voted for the ‘Common Market’ in good faith. They were told it was going to be a genuine common market - an association of independent, freely trading nation states. Instead, we have the European Union: centralised, bureaucratic, unaccountable and corrupt, eroding our independence and dictating policies that we would never vote for in an election.

Not only is our currency under threat, but our entire legal system, our British nationality, our right to free speech and freedom of association, our police, our armed forces, our own agricultural policy, our right to trade freely and the parliamentary system that underpins British liberty.

The EU has shown itself to be one of the largest confidence tricks in human history. It claims to ‘give us rights’ while removing basic freedoms. It ‘gives us money’ while costing us billions of pounds per year. EU subsidies are like crumbs from the cake we have made. The UKIP rejects the absurd Alice-in-Euroland logic of rule from Brussels.

The other parties are not telling us the truth about the EU. Despite all experience, the Labour Party still boasts about taking the lead in the EU and helping to shape its future. The Liberal-Democrats claim to believe in individual freedom but would reduce us to powerlessness within the EU. The Greens claim to believe in ‘acting locally’ but want us to be ruled by the Strasbourg Parliament. The Tories pretend that we can be ‘in Europe but not run by Europe’. We say that ‘in the EU means ruined by the EU’.

The European Commission in Brussels intends that there shall be an EU ‘government’, an EU ‘army’ and an EU ‘constitution’. This proves to us that it is time to withdraw, rather than go on pretending that we can compromise.

The UKIP will repeal the European Communities Act (1972) that binds Britain into the European Union, and enter into trade agreements with our former ‘partners’. Whatever their claims, the leading members of the Tory, Labour and Liberal-Democrat parties all remain committed to continued EU membership. These professional politicians don’t want us to run our own country or control our own lives. The UKIP, by contrast, is a moderate, mainstream party which believes in the British people and can offer them a life outside the Euro-state.