Nigel Farage Says Conservatives Need to Apologise for Failures to Regain Credibility

Former Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage attends an election night watch part
OLIVIER TOURON/AFP via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Brexit leader Nigel Farage has suggested that if the Conservative Party wants to regain credibility with the public, it should apologise for over a decade of mismanagement that has left the public poorer with a lower quality of life.

Amid waves of strikes sweeping across the nation, including Border Force agents, nurses, paramedics, and railway workers as a result of the cost of living crisis, Brexit champ Nigel Farage called on the governing Tory Party of Rishi Sunak to apologise to the country for failing to implement policies that would have mitigated the dire economic situation the UK finds itself in.

“After twelve years of Conservative rule, not only do we have inflation, although that’s arrived in other parts of the Western world too, but your standard of living on average wages is now worse than it ever was,” Mr Farage said on GB News on Tuesday.

“Your quality of life is worse than it ever was. You can’t get a GP appointment. You can’t drive anywhere on a Friday and make an appointment on time. You can’t afford the holidays that you used to afford.”

The former Brexit Party leader said that if he was a Conservative Prime Minister “I would say I’m sorry,” adding that the party should acknowledge their mistakes.

Speaking as a theoretical PM, Farage suggested that he would say: “We will acknowledge that ever since the year 2000 under Blair, and ever since we’ve allowed the rich to get richer, whilst you have suffered more and more and more, we are going to raise the level at which people start paying tax to a level that will give the lowest paid the equivalent to an inflation-busting rise.”

Turning to the topic of the growing labour union strike movement, Farage said that the government needs to be practical, noting that if the pay demands are met during an inflationary period, it will only serve to make inflation worse. He said that the government should attempt to take a middle-ground approach of exempting the lowest earners from paying taxes while saying that those middle-income public service employees need to wait to see any pay increases.

“And is that a cost to the country? Yes, it is. But given that when we took power — I’m being a Tory PM here — the national debt was 750 million and now it’s 2.4 trillion. It doesn’t really matter.

“Take the lowest paid out of tax and just tell people straight that 10 per cent pay rises for people already earning 40-50,000 a year can’t be afforded.”

The cost of living crisis has been compounded by the Conservative Party’s move to open up the floodgates of mass migration after Brexit, with last year seeing a record in net migration as over half of a million more people arriving to the country than left it. This comes in direct contrast to the last three general election manifestos from the party, which promised the public that it would seek to lower immigration.

While the massive influx of migrants may see GDP numbers rise — tho only on a per capita basis — the average Briton has felt the true cost in terms of lower wages and soaring housing costs.

Migration has become a central political issue, with polls finding that nearly 90 per cent of the public believe that the government is handling the issue badly, while another survey found that six in ten Brexit voters would consider leaving the Conservative Party to another that made migration a key focus.

According to a poll this week from Savanta and Electoral Calculus found that the left-wing Labour Party is set to win a stonking 314-seat majority in the next election, with the Sir Keir Starmer-led party currently holding a 20-point lead in voting intention.

The poll found that the Tories are on pace to be completely wiped out in most of the north of England, home of the so-called ‘Red Wall’ voters who backed Boris Johnson to complete Brexit in 2019 after traditionally voting Labour, in large part on the hopes that the post-Brexit government would actually follow through on its promise of “taking back control” of the nation’s borders.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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