Farage: Populist ‘Insurgency’ Against ‘Globalist Conservatives’ Has Begun, as Reform Party Surges in the Polls

LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 20: MEP and former leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel F
Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Brexit champion Nigel Farage has declared that the “insurgency” against the Conservative Party has begun as Reform UK has surged to its highest-ever polling result.

The right-wing populist Reform Party has hit its highest ever level of support this week, with a People’s Poll conducted for GB News finding that the re-branded Brexit Party has jumped by three points to 8 per cent in public support.

Pollster Matthew Godwin noted that the support the Richard Tice-led party now enjoys is enough to sink Prime Minister Sunak’s Conservatives in the next general election, with Reform now boasting nearly one in eight voters who backed Boris Johnson in 2019.

The poll went on to find that the left-wing Labour Party has fallen by five per cent from 47 to 42, while the Conservatives have held steady at a dismal 21 per cent. Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit Neo-liberal Lib Dems fell from 10 per cent to nine and the Green Party rose from seven per cent to nine.

The surge in support for the right-wing upstart party, which re-branded itself as Reform UK from the Brexit Party following the UK’s official departure from the European Union, comes as thousands of Conservative members are said to have fled the party after Liz Truss sidelined and Rishi Sunak installed by MPs as Prime Minister.

Commenting on the rise in the polls, former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said: “It’s happening. The next insurgency has begun. This one aims to replace the globalist, lying Conservative Party.”

“The Reform UK surge continues – rising to 8 per cent without even trying. It’s starting to look like they’re the only serious contender to hold the Tories to account,” former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney added.

Earlier this week, Reform leader Richard Tice claimed that 4,534 new members had joined the party following the ousting of Liz Truss as prime minster, in what some have described as a “globalist coup” to place World Economic Forum acolyte and China-tied Rishi Sunak in Downing Street despite the party membership expressly rejecting him during the summer leadership contest to replace Boris Johnson.

Mr Tice, who founded the pro-Brexit Leave.EU and Leave Means Leave campaign groups during the 2016 EU Referendum, claimed that one in three new members came from the traditional Tory strongholds of the southeast and southwest of England.

Speaking to Breitbart London, a spokesman for Reform said that while traditionally Red Wall voters would switch to Labour from the Tories, many would “prefer to vote for a party like Reform if it proves worthy of their support and we are doing all in our power to be worthy of their trust”.

The spokesman added that while they were hesitant to claim victory on the backs of a single poll, he said that the general trends have all shown a growth in the party over recent months. The Reform UK spokesman did say, however, that the 8 per cent figure — if sustainable — is that “tipping point” when it will become “very hard for the traditional media to pretend that we don’t exist,” particularly the BBC, which has a charter requirement to air all points of view.

“How can Politics Live not have someone on from Reform now? How can we not be asked into the debates, and not just on migration and Europe, but net-zero, education, and across the board. But we, as a party, have to step up and provide the people with the cohesive plan that may get us as a country out of this mess.”

While the party believes that the switch in support is a combination of the many ills befalling the country, such as Sunak’s insistence on increasing taxes during an economic crisis, a key point of inflection will likely be the migrant crisis. A poll this week from YouGov, for example, found that nearly nine in ten (87 per cent) Britons believe that the government has been performing badly in terms of immigration, with a majority citing the continued flow of people-smuggling boats as a key point of failure.

In a policy paper outlining its agenda, Reform UK has said that “illegal immigration is unacceptable and must not be granted asylum in the UK.” The populist party called for “very long prison sentences” for the people smugglers who operate the cross Channel flow of migrants, as well as demonstrating that anyone who arrives illegally in Britain must be removed.

“Cases must be determined in just a few weeks and people returned to where they came from. The cost to the taxpayer is already billions every year and the impact on local communities around the country is very significant.”

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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