FORMER UKIP LEADER Nigel Farage has given a speech at the Brexit Party’s first campaign rally, after the party was officially launched yesterday.
“What happened on June 23 2016 should have been decisive,” he told those gathered in Birmingham this afternoon.
The crowd erupted into boos at the mention of a wide-range of figures including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, British Prime Minister Theresa May – and former US president Barack Obama, who had urged the UK to vote against Brexit during the referendum campaign.
Farage said of the crowd’s booing of Obama: “I have a friend in the White House who would agree with that”.
Former Tory MP Anna Soubry, Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, and French President Emmanuel Macron drew the biggest boos from the crowd. “This is better than polling,” Farage told the delegation.
Farage was a founder and leader of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party, aka Ukip. He resigned as leader of the party shortly after the vote.
“I genuinely thought and believed on that day, that we’d won,” he said.
“And I’ll admit that I perhaps did not spend as much of my life at the front line of politics, as I thought that I had achieved my goal of 25 years.”
“And yet I am here before you today because I could not comprehend the sheer deceit, dishonesty, verging on treachery” of the current British government, Farage said.
When Farage said that the mood in favour of Brexit was stronger than it’s ever been, it provoked a huge round of applause from the audience.
A YouGov poll released today indicates that the Brexit party holds 15% support in the context of the upcoming European elections, which the UK will most likely take part in.
The Labour Party is on 24% and the Conservatives are on 16%, according to the same poll.
After spending 20 years as an MEP, but having failed to get elected to the UK parliament, Farage is to contest the upcoming European elections as a Brexit Party MEP.
“I don’t want to see Britain humiliated on the world stage,” he said, drawing a comparison between Theresa May asking the EU for more time to Oliver Twist.
“Her dreadful treaty… it’s such a shameful document… it’s only something someone would have signed who had been defeated in war.”
If that grubby deal [gets passed] … the Brexit Party will literally explode and split the other parties in two.
He said the Brexit Party was “fresh, it is new, it is professional, it is patriotic, and we are fighting this with one simple objective: to win”.
He also said that he was not “anti-European”, but wanted a Europe “of nation states”, and criticised the idea of a European army.
It may seem to be impossible, it may seem too difficult, but if there ever there was a time for shakeup, if ever there was a time that Brexit was possible, it is now.
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