Nigel Farage said he’s received a huge political boost from Prime Minister Andy Burnham going against his own word and moving to betray the Brexit referendum to take Britain back into the European Union.
The Reform UK party is on a general election campaign footing and anticipating a snap election, Nigel Farage said, as he warned the Labour government trying to re-join the European Union risks bitterly dividing the country, but it nevertheless being a challenge the Brexit leader believes he can win.
Speaking in heavily Leave-voting Doncaster, Farage dinged Prime Minister Burnham for having so grossly gone back on his word already, going from promising to respect the Brexit vote when trying to find himself a Parliamentary seat to make the coup against former leftist leader Sir Keir Starmer complete, to talking up European Union membership this week, just months later. Mr Farage told his rally:
I think [Burnham] assumes that he’s going to win the next election. Two years ago he said ‘I hope in my lifetime we re-join the European Union’. But on the 18th of May this year, as he put himself up as the candidate for Leave-voting Makerfield… he said ‘we will not be re-joining the Single Market, the Customs Union, or the European Union, trust me, I’m a career politician!’. Yet in the last 48 hours he said ‘we should consider all the options on the table’… it’s so contradictory.
He says he wants to unite the country! A second referendum will divide the country bitterly perhaps in a way perhaps we’ve never seen before. And he says he wants devolution! He wants power passed down as near as possible as everybody… Yet what he wants to do here is transmit all law-making power up to Brussels. If Andy Burnham, the King of the North, wants a fight in Doncaster and the Red Wall with me on re-joining the European Union then bring it on, I say.
The public realising just how punitive the European Union would make Britain re-joining — including a hefty annual bill for membership, open borders with Europe, and being forced to give up the Pound Sterling for the Euro — as well as the damage to the faith in legacy politics from Britain’s largest ever political mandate in the Brexit vote being traduced would put rocket boosters under Reform, Farage said. The Brexit leader went on to add: “He might have just given me the biggest boost in my career I’ve ever had. Thank you Andy, if you’re watching!”.
Farage has persistently predicted a 2027 snap election — “I’ve been predicting since September 2024 that it would come in 2027” — and as the year grows closer, such an outcome seems ever-more likely. But whether the vote comes “in November, December, Next Spring, 2028, 2029, the big message out of today is we will be ready”, he said, adding there was simply no time to waste. Mr Farage said:
Andy Burnham says he needs 10 years to turn the country around. We haven’t got ten years! We’re in rapid decline and we all know it. We’re in economic decline, we’re in social decline, and frankly we’re even in moral decline. We’ve forgotten who we are as a country, as a people, and all that underpins it… our country has to be turned down by 180 degrees. We are in inexorable decline, we are sinking to third world status.
His Reform UK party would be a radical departure from the left-right politics of the past century, Farage said, stating that political divides are now well past that old demarcation. He continued:
…and I want to say to the British people that we are a party that believes in Britain. We are a party that respects and is proud of British history, we are a party that stands up for our culture, understanding the Judaeo-Christian roots underpinning everything that we are as a nation and a civilisation. And we believe we can do it a damn sight better than the current lot.
And I will never, ever, bow down to foreign courts or do anything that is against our national interest. I will always put the national interest first and the interest of British citizens, first, second, third, and above absolutely everything else.
While the country’s migration crisis remains one of the key symbols of what critics call broken Britain, a nation under a government unable to even perform the basic duties of a state like enforcing a border, the Brexit leader turned that story on its head in his Doncaster speech, noting the country has an emigration crisis too.
While a small handful of ultra-high-net-worth Britons leaving the country to escape the government’s record-breaking tax burden and endless grabs, there is also a flood of middle-class Britons seeking out opportunity abroad as well. Mr Farage said:
We now have an emigration crisis. It isn’t just the 30 per cent of the richest that have left int he last two years. And by the way I want as many rich people in Breitain paying tax, spending money, investing in Britain, because if we get rid of the rich people, the average people will have to pay mor in taxes. That is just good, plain, common sense.
The emigration crisis is worse, we are now losing hundreds of thousands of 25 to 35 year-olds, many of our brightest and best are heading off to Australia, to America, to the Far East, all over the world. They don’t see a future in this country where they can word hard, take risks, try and make money, try and make their lives better… [under the forthcoming government budget] we will all finish up paying more tax. Is it any wonder that our brightest and best are leaving the country, and nobody even wants to talk about it.