“I’m asking for your support so that we can take a really big first step,” Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage said on the final day of a last-ditch four-week campaign to gain a foothold in Britain’s parliament in Thursday’s general election.
Britain will choose its next parliament, and therefore its prime minister and government, in its first general election in five years on Thursday. Opinion polls have shown that Labour is almost certain to win a landslide majority in the House of Commons — perhaps the largest in modern British history — and this is taken as fact, with the only contest being the race for second place.
In peacetime, and for the last century, only two parties have alternated between power and opposition: Labour and the Conservatives. But the Conservatives have cynically betrayed their own voters in a way perhaps unprecedented in history. And in the internet age, when traditional media can no longer be relied upon to evade scrutiny, it’s even worse.
So the moral authority of a Conservative party that promised to reduce mass immigration to “tens of thousands” a year but then saw it rise to a million every 18 months, promised to deliver Brexit but then squandered it, promised tax cuts but then increased tax burdens to their highest level since the post-war period, appears to have completely collapsed.
Enter Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. There’s no doubt that this very short and unexpected campaign has damaged the Reform Party, just as Farage originally predicted. But it still regularly ranks neck and neck with the Conservatives, and has done so for weeks. It’s a remarkable achievement that a party that barely existed two months ago has become a threat to one of the oldest and most established political parties on the planet.
The vote is tomorrow, but remember that the British electoral system is good at shutting out outsider candidates, so while this is Nigel Farage’s eighth attempt to win a Westminster seat, it’s completely impossible to predict whether the Reform Party will win dozens of new MPs, or just enough for a game of bridge. The polling industry is so focused on figuring out the balance between the Conservatives and Labour that it did a terrible job trying to predict Brexit, and there’s a good chance they got the Reform Party wrong again in this election. We’ll see how it goes.
Mr Farage himself is due to make a final appeal to voters today, rallying in Clacton tonight.
…We are the only party that gives a voice to the silent majority. We are ready to tackle immigration. We are ready to get low-income people off the tax system. We are bold, and we have a vision for the future. Help us take that first big step. Vote with your heart.
Sun This morning the newspapers published a short call to action from the leaders in which Farage highlighted his plans for an ambitious takeover of the British government, which he spoke of during the election campaign. “This is just the beginning. Over the next five years I want to get serious about building a mass movement for real change,” he said.
“A vote for Reform UK is not a protest vote, it’s not a fantasy vote, it’s not a wasted vote – it’s a vote to change Britain for the better,” Mr Farage said. Rather than just an election, he said it had become a referendum on a “corrupt political system” and a “rotten two-party system”.
