Claire Perry’s chosen new UKIP opponent attacks her Westminster bubble of cloned career politicians

Voters are fed up with today’s career party politicians who live in the Westminster bubble unconcerned about their constituents’ problems while they climb the political tree, according to David Pollitt.

He is the 57-year-old business consultant and sole Wiltshire UKIP councillor who has been chosen to stand for UKIP against Tory MP Claire Perry at the next election in her Devizes constituency, which has only ever been Conservative since 1924.

“She’s a party apparatchik and a professional career politician now and is not concerned about her constituents any more,” he told Marlborough News Online.  “It’s the same with so many of them now.

“They are taking steps up the political ladder, which is something that doesn’t interest me.  I am here to serve the local UKIP membership and the local constituents which is why I was out for four hours in the rain yesterday (Thursday) knocking on doors and leafleting.

“People are fed up with this world of the professional politician and the cloning of whether you are Lib-Dem, Labour or Conservative who have done private school and then PPE at Oxbridge.  There’s no difference between any of them.

“They don’t represent the people.  And I don’t think they represent anybody else.  They are at Westminster living in their little bubble.

“I get to meet some of them in London and I can’t differentiate between any of them.  If they’re not wearing a red tie, a yellow tie or a blue one then I have now idea who they are.”

But Mr Pollitt is totally aware that he has a tough task ahead of him in over-turning 49-year-old Mrs Perry’s 13,005 majority at the last election – she took 55 per cent of the vote – despite UKIP coming second in the last six by-elections they have fought.

“I haven’t met Claire,” said Mr Pollitt, who lives in Bowerhill, Melksham.  “I don’t think she spends enough time in Devizes to meet her.  And yes, it’s going to be hard work and I realise it is not the easiest of constituencies to choose.

“But it’s local and it’s where I know the area and the people.  So I am not interested in being parachuted into an easier, winnable constituency.  This is where I am and I’ve got no illusions.

“This is going to be a tremendously difficult fight but we’re winning people over slowly.”

And he added:  “On the doorstep, the only reactions I have had are positive.  I don’t know if it is English reserve that people don’t like to be critical of others, but there were two of three people who came out in the rain and said ‘thumbs up, thank you very much, carry on with what you’re doing, wish you luck’, that sort of thing.

There were no negative comments at all when I was out in the rain yesterday.”

He believes too that government cuts to the armed forces – Wiltshire has five Army bases in the county – have resulted in the loss of the traditional Tory support that existed among many military and ex-military people in the area.

“They are completely and utterly disillusioned with the Tories,” he declared.  “I come from a  military family.  I have worked in the military myself and I can tell you that relying on the military base support for the Tories has completely gone now.

“We’ve got 4,000 more returning from Germany shortly.  We have an Action Day in Tidworth next month and I am sure we are going to be very well received over there.”

Fighting for a visa for his Vietnamese wife led David Pollitt to join UKIP While UKIP campaigns for greater EU immigration controls – the initial plank of its policies – some supporters will be surprised to know why David Pollitt, never involved in politics before, joined the party 18 months ago. It followed his own experience in obtaining visas for his Vietnamese wife, Khanh, and their now five-year-old daughter Ellie, to join him in the UK after he met and married Khanh while working in the Far East. “Racism was the issue – the racist attitudes of the Labour and Conservative governments who refused them a visa to come and live here in the UK,” he told Marlborough News Online. If you are a Westerner from Europe the doors are open and you can do what you like, but if you’re from Africa or Asia the don’t come.  It took us about two years and £5,000 in costs to get them over here eventually. “That happened in 2009.  And now we are a happy family.” And he added: “I had never been a member of ay other political party before UKIP came along.  That was because there wasn’t one in existence that I thought was sensible and democratic in its ideals.”