A little background

UKIP has consistently opposed the creation of a whole new level of government, and twice Birmingham has been asked and voted against having a mayor.

However a group of councils and their leaders have recently accepted the government’s invitation to ignore most people’s wishes in our region and voted to participate.

Surveys show that the vast majority of West Midlands residents are still ‘blissfully unaware’, but the new Combined Authority is already up and running (at a ‘start up’ cost of several million pounds), and it is busily recruiting people on very attractive salaries, at tax payers’ expense.

Accordingly the West Midlands will be electing its first Metro Mayor (‘MM’) on May 4th 2017, who will of course also be eligible to receive an extremely large salary.

However if elected you may be assured that I will accept no more than £30,000 per year, roughly the average wage in the UK, the rest I will donate to charity.

I will be performing the role because I am passionate about the place I live, because I love the West Midlands and would consider it an honour to be able to play my part in ensuring that it achieves its maximum potential.

I believe that improving the lives of the people who live and work here should be its own reward, and a huge salary is not required.

So-called devolution is very far from ‘power to the people’, at least this version is.

In reality this is central government attempting to pass down responsibility for making continuing deep cuts to public services… to a new regional body, the West Midlands Combined Authority, aka ‘WMCA’.

And when these next cuts, as they inevitably will, begin to cause severe pain and distress to many people, our Westminster elite  will claim glibly ‘nothing to do with us’.

Members of the powerful new WMCA cabinet will not be directly elected on to it, and in reality they will have very little accountability. Some have been elected, in any capacity, and never will be.

The majority of cabinet members will be existing council leaders, who will take their place as a result of having been given the privilege by their party to be a candidate in a council ward where ‘anyone wearing the right colour rosette’ is guaranteed to be reelected as a councillor every four years.

Already lots of wild promises about what the WMCA will deliver are being made by Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and Green candidates… in an attempt to convince the West Midlands voting public that yet another layer of government will be, as Donald Trump would say ‘a beautiful thing’.

It is being touted that there will be a total of £8 billion, or £800 million per year for the WMCA and MM to use to improve our region over the next ten years. The truth is that almost certainly there will not be anything like this amount available. It’s ‘smoke and mirrors’, a deception.

Why is this? It’s because the vast majority of this supposed ‘funding bonanza’ for our region will NOT be coming from central government, which has committed to providing just £40m per year, each year. The other £760 million simply doesn’t yet exist, and may well never exist.

So, more than 90% of the frequently-quoted ‘£8 billion over the next ten years’ will actually need to be raised by increasing business rates, council taxes, or by the WMCA taking out huge loans on your behalf.

The WMCA is almost certain to start rapidly accumulating further huge debts, when most of the councils involved, if not all of them, have very large ones already. At least it will do if it doesn’t have a UKIP major to watch over and prevent it !

In order to enable it to survive, the council leaders who constitute the WMCA cabinet, LEP representatives and the new Metro Mayor (if a Labour, Tory, Green or Lib Dem) will almost certainly immediately be looking to take out long term loans from the EU, and in the process inevitably our region will become heavily dependent upon them, possibly for up to the next thirty years (assuming the EU is still around then, a rather big assumption).

“Brexit, what Brexit…?”

There are countless examples of how devious the ploys of those determined to ‘thwart the will of the people’ and keep us firmly tied to the European Union can be… this may well turn out to be yet another….

– remember all the other candidates in this year’s WMCA Metro Mayoral election campaigned to Remain in the EU, and presumably still believe that we should still remain inside it.

Only by electing me as your UKIP mayor can you be confident that the WMCA will promote and develop the West Midland region to the fullest, but at the same time keep all related costs to an absolute minimum, and not burden your children and their children with a further raft of huge debts.

‘Like it or not’, we now have an additional layer of government, consequently I believe it is imperative that it be kept ‘lean and mean’, open, honest and transparent, and that is exactly what I will do if elected.

The WMCA must not be allowed to ‘balloon out’ into another huge, unnecessary, unaccountable, unelected, constantly power grabbing, expansion obsessed, ultra-secretive body… sound familiar ?

– yes, there is a serious danger that the WMCA, with the cooperation of a Conservative or Labour mayor, could become our own, slightly smaller version of the European Union.

(Probably no great surprise, as there is a strong suspicion the EU has been behind the creation of the new regional government layer… for ‘EU’ think ‘WMCA’, for ‘nations’, just think ‘councils’… and the pieces start to fall into place)


I firmly believe that only by electing a UKIP Metro Mayor can you be assured that the new WMCA will not simply end up in exactly the same state as the EU,

–  eating up more and more money every year, overly bureaucratic, ineffective, unaccountable, and constantly mired in fraud and corruption allegations.

Don’t forget the new WMCA layer of government is 100% ‘in addition’ to existing councils, not in place of them.

Fundamentally I believe that your children, and their children, simply do not deserve to be, absolutely must not be burdened, with yet another raft of long term debts, but if you read the tab ‘Why am I standing?’ it will explain more.

(We currently have a national debt of £1.6 trillion, still rising rapidly.  Almost all our councils are already hugely in debt, certainly in the West Midlands. Many of our hospitals are also effectively massively in debt, and will be forfeiting 10% of their budgets each year in PFI repayments for the next 30 years. In addition there is the small matter of an estimated £1.8 trillion ‘hole’ in UK pension funds. Allowing the WMCA to rack up enormous additional debts on our behalf will be simply disastrous)

Bearing this in mind I have also posted my first set of priorities as the new West Midlands Metro Mayor under the tab ‘My Priorities as WMCA Metro Mayor’ on this site.

Unlike the other candidates’ claims, they are simple, realistic and achievable,

– and not ‘pie in the sky’ wild promises, based on funds which do not and will not exist, designed to get you to vote for them on May 4th, whilst knowing they have no realistic possibility of ever being realised

(we would all love to see the M6 Toll road opened up to the public to use free of charge, but is it really going to happen? Of course not, the money to purchase it does not exist, and is not going to exist in a sensible time frame, just one of many ’empty promises’ being touted for votes, please do not be fooled… )

 

Please take a few more moments to read further about why I am standing, and what my priorities would be if elected,

– and let me know what you think, however you prefer, using contact details below.

Much as the other parties would love it, UKIP is not going to disappear, in fact UKIP is needed now more than ever.

If you would like to help us ‘prove the doom mongers wrong’,  to work for a brighter, fairer, more prosperous United Kingdom, and in particular, to enable the West Midlands to reach its full potential, but without saddling itself with huge amounts of extra debt, and new thirty year ties to the slowly sinking European Union, get in touch…