Farage: Europe Is Divided, and Brexit Is the Beginning of the End of the EU

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DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/Getty

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said that the UK’s final exit from the bloc is not the end of the EU’s woes. Rather, it signals the beginning of the end of the European Project.

When Prime Minister Johnson announced the agreement of a deal on Christmas Eve, he claimed in his closing remarks to the public from Downing Street: “I say again directly to our EU friends and partners: I think this deal means a new stability and a new certainty in what has sometimes been a fractious and difficult relationship. We will be your friend, your ally, your supporter, and indeed, never let it be forgotten, your number one market.

“Because although we have left the EU, this country will remain culturally, emotionally, historically, strategically, geologically attached to Europe, not least of course for the four million EU nationals who have requested to settle in the UK over the last fours years and who make an enormous contribution to our country and our lives.”

Asked on Sky News last night if he agreed that Britain was very close to Europe culturally and in other respects, Mr Farage said: “I don’t agree at all. I actually think we have a much closer cultural affinity with many parts of the English-speaking world than we do with continental Europe.

“That’s one of the reasons, in the end, we voted for Brexit.”

Mr Farage then noted that such a unified, homogenous ‘Europe’ as sold by the proponents of the European Project simply does not exist, but so much cultural and other divisions exist within it, threatening the superstate.

“The European Union itself is divided by north to south by a currency that doesn’t work for the south at all, divided between the east and west, culturally. We’re seeing the EU budget being vetoed and countries like Poland and Hungary very unhappy. I think in the broader picture, Brexit is the beginning of the end of the European Union. I’m pro-European. I’m pro-Europe of sovereign states trading and being friends — not being run from Brussels.”

Mr Farage went on to condemn “the undemocratic nature of the way this project is run” and how it hurts European small business owners, because it is inherently structured to benefit “big multinational businesses”.

However, he said that it was in Britain’s interest that Europe — as a collection of free nations — is “settled”, because “as history teaches us: when Europe is happy and settled, it makes our lives easier, too.

“What I can see, is conflict building up, north, south, east, west, within a European Union that just wants to build this modern-day empire with an absence of democracy.”

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