You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Sean Lay.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the programme, and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Sean Lay. Brexit, not just an event,

now a whole political movement. At the end of May, with its leader Nigel Farage at the helm,

the Brexit parties swept the board in the European Parliament elections, humiliating the UK's governing Conservative Party.

Five years ago, the same story. Triumph for Nigel Farage, albeit leading a party with a different name.

Richard Tice back then was a Conservative.

Now, he's chairman of Mr Farage's party and one of its European MPs,

with many experts predicting a costly bitter departure from the European Union is the triumph of

the Brexit Party, a humiliation for the United Kingdom and its politics. Richard Tice,

welcome to Hard Tool. Thank you very much. Great to be here. The elections are out of the way,

for now at least. Let's put the sloganeering to one side, if we may. People watch this program all over the world

hundreds of thousands of miles from Europe, many who've never even been to Europe or to the United Kingdom.

They don't necessarily understand the passion that Brexit has provoked. I mean, in your own case, personally, where does it come from

this conviction that the UK needs to get out of the European Union? I've been deeply Eurosceptic

for over 20 years, actually. I was very involved in the campaign not to join the euro, which would

have been an absolute disaster for this country, the single currency of Europe, which the UK

quite rightly stayed out of in the late 1990s.

No, the conviction comes from the belief that we are a proud, sovereign, independent nation.

And unfortunately, with the European Union, much of that sovereignty has been given away to Brussels.

Or shared, some would say, between the UK and the other members of the...

Well, it's not shared if actually they make all the decisions and you basically have to take

...