LAST UPDATE | 11 Nov 2019
NIGEL FARAGE HAS announced that his Brexit Party will not run any candidates in constituencies where the Conservatives currently hold seats.
The u-turn will be seen as a major boost for Boris Johnson’s party, with Farage saying that he wanted to ensure that “Remainer parties” don’t have a majority in parliament to force a second referendum.
Farage had previously stated that his party would field over 600 candidates across the UK’s 650 constituencies.
Farage has been attempting to build a “Leave alliance” but said today that those efforts had “come to nought”.
“The Brexit party will not contest the 317 seats the Conservatives won at the last election,” Farage announced.
But what we will do is concentrate our total effort into all of the seats that are held by the Labour Party, who have completely broken their manifesto pledge in 2017 to respect the result of the referendum, and we will also take on the rest of the Remainer parties, we will stand up and we will fight them all.
Farage say that the choice to fight against Labour seats and not Conservative ones is because of Labour’s “complete portrayal of 5 million of their own voters”.
“So in a sense, we now have a Leave alliance. It’s just that we’ve got it unilaterally.
We’ve decided ourselves that we absolutely have to put country before party and take the fight to Labour, ” Farage said.
The Brexit Party MEP also said that polling conducted by his own party suggested that if the the party stood in Conservative areas it could split the Leave vote and lead to “quite a large number of Liberal Democrat gains”.
“The real concern about that is what would happen if the Remainer parties could get between 325 seats in parliament? Well, we know what would happen. There’d be a second referendum. And so that has been a very real concern for me,” he said.
Farage, who was opposed to Johnson’s Brexit deal, has now suggested that he supports passing the deal in parliament.
“I have to say that last night, for the first time I saw something, since that Brussels summit, that actually was optimistic. I saw Boris Johnson on a video saying: ‘We will not extend the transition period beyond the end of 2020′,” Farage said.
Despite saying he has issues of “trust” around Johnson’s delivery, Farage added:
“At least it was a clear, unequivocal statement from him that we’re not going on beyond the end of 2020.”
Reacting to the news on the campaign trail, Johnson welcomed Farage’s move but denied it was any kind of deal between the two parties.
“I’m glad that there’s a recognition that there’s only one way to get Brexit done and that’s to vote for the Conservatives,” Johnson told reporters.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that the move demonstrated that Johnson and Farage are in cahoots.
“One week ago Donald Trump told Nigel Farage to make a pact with Boris Johnson. Today, Trump got his wish. This Trump alliance is Thatcherism on steroids and could send £500 million a week from our NHS to big drugs companies. It must be stopped,” Corbyn tweeted.
Last week, Trump had gone on Farage’s radio show to say that Farage and Johnson working together would be “an unstoppable force.”
The NHS is a key election issue amid claims that US drug companies would have greater access to the UK health system as part of a post-Brexit trade deal.
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