Sputnik: What do you think of Mr. Bannon’s idea?
David Coburn: Number one we are a libertarian party, UKIP are a libertarian party. I don’t think Mr. Bannon’s right-wing, I think Mr. Bannon’s libertarian, as far as I am given to understand. We have not been approached as yet about this, but Mr. Bannon's a man I admire very much indeed, I think that it’s good that there is somebody who wants to stand up to Mr. Soros who seems to be funding the European Union and all its different campaigns. So it would be good to have somebody, on an international basis, who would stand up to that, the opposition to what I call liberty.
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Sputnik: How high are the chances that it will be successful and what experience can UKIP share?
I’ve been fighting it helping out the French, I know the Hungarians have serious issues with the European Union in terms of migration; I know that the Poles, I have many friends and colleagues in our group within the European Parliament, who [were] affected by the European Union when it tried to interfere with the judiciary of Poland; I feel that Poland should be able to express as it sees fit, as does my party. There’s a lot of people who are fed up to the back teeth with the European Union, and that goes right across Europe, and I must admit that UKIP, in its grouping in the European Parliament, has many international friends from various countries; we get on better than the Remainers do with their international friends in the European Union. We actually get on well and we work together because we want a Europe of free independent states that do their own thing and are not controlled by the European Union.
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Sputnik: You earlier mentioned that a lot of people are fed up with the European Union, but so far we’ve seen only Britain deciding to leave the block.
David Coburn: That’s not what I see and I’ve been speaking in France, I’ve been to many rallies by Florian‘s group, Les Patriotes, and they've got a lot of people who are very unhappy with the European Union. Every rally I’ve been to they’ve been waving their tricolors and cheering every time I get on stage because they want international support as well. There are a lot of people in France who are fed up with the European Union, but the trouble is that in France, the press, the TV, everything is controlled by the government more or less, and that way you only hear the government propaganda and the government — Mr. Macron he’s very much a Europhile of the worst sort and they helped him get in, I think, so he’s very much in favor of the European Union — and you only hear that side of the argument.
In France it’s very difficult to hear the other side of the argument, they really are crushed, oppressed, suppressed, they won’t give them air time. Much the same as the things we're seeing in the UK, Gerard Batten’s had problems getting on Twitter because they’ve been upsetting his ability to get through to people on Twitter. All sorts of things have been going on which, quite frankly, we need to oppose. If Mr. Bannon is setting it up, well good for him, we need a bit of a hero to do that. We obviously talk to him, I don’t know what his propositions are, but we haven’t spoken to him so far, but when we do I’m sure our leader will come to some arrangement if the party is in favor of it.
Sputnik: What other country may leave the bloc?
Sputnik: Do you expect right-wing parties to win more seats in the European Parliament after the next election?
David Coburn: Again it depends on what do you mean by right-wing parties. The ideas of left and right are gone, it is authoritarian versus libertarian. UKIP are a libertarian party and most of the parties or you are talking about are libertarian parties; they’re not right-wing parties, they’re not anti-democratic. This is rubbish that's coming out of Mr. Soros and out of the European Union. They are what they call popular parties, quite frankly, I’d rather be a popular party then an unpopular party.
If you look at what’s going on with Mr. Macron at the moment, there’s all sorts of things happening. People are not happy with the way things are going in that direction. I think we need to see the popular parties, I would call them a good thing; the popular parties are ordinary people wanting their voice and expressing it and I think [that’s] what’s going to become the future: the libertarian parties, the parties who want individual countries and ordinary people to be able to speak for themselves, they are the people of the future, and I think they’ll do extremely well in the next European Parliament elections. You’ll see them taking a huge chunk of it, and European Union are going to have serious trouble. It's not just Britain they are going to be up against, it’s going to be everybody else.
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