UKIP launches 'Brexit' campaign

UKIP leader Nigel Farage promised Friday to head "the biggest outreach campaign in the history of the euroskeptic movement" with 300 public meetings planned across Britain to promote the party's anti-EU platform.

"The genuine concern about why we are 'borderless Britain' will dominate this EU referendum," Farage, who is an elected member of the European Parliament, told reporters in London. "If we win this referendum we will then - and only then - be able to put in place a migration policy that doesn't discriminate in favor of people from the EU."

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership before holding a referendum by the end of 2017. Asylum policy is a major political issue in the UK.

Cameron has declined to give a full list of his demands but has vowed that "changes to welfare to cut EU migration will be an absolute requirement" in his negotiations with the leaders of other countries in the bloc.

Europe's unfolding migrant crisis - the worst since World War II - has prompted Farage to lambast European leaders for permitting hundreds of thousands of refugees to seek asylum in Europe.

Farage says he favors Australia's policy of processing applicants for asylum in third countries.

Taking aim at Merkel

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has encouraged refugees to attempt dangerous journeys to Europe by saying her country would accept asylum-seekers, Farage said.

"I genuinely think and believe that Chancellor Merkel, compounding the pull factors this week, is more likely to make us see more of those kind of photographs," Farage said, referring to images of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach. "It is a very dangerous thing, I think, that she has done."

And he warned there was a risk of more deaths because of Germany's apparent open borders.

"The question we need to ask ourselves is: how do we prevent more appalling photographs like that?" he said. "How do we prevent things like the 71 people who were found dead in the back of that truck in Austria the other day?"

Farage receives considerable media coverage in Britain, but recent opinion polls show more Britons support remaining within the EU than leaving.

UKIP gained 13 percent of the votes in a parliamentary election in May but won just one seat under Britain's constituency-based system.

Several other political groups are expected to run separate campaigns for a "no" vote in the referendum.

jar/cmk (dpa, Reuters)

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