Brexit boss Nigel Farage warned international corporatist elites at the World Economic Forum that Britain will no longer be bound by their diktats and will follow its “national interest” above all else.
Entering into the belly of the beast, which he likened to his time in Brussels, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said from the USA House stage in Davos on Wednesday that the days of bowing to globalist ideology are coming to an end in Britain as his party is widely tipped to take power at the next general election.
Mr Farage lambasted the bosses of the biggest companies in the world who frequent the annual Swiss alpine retreat for not “giving a damn” about the nation state and borders, and for having “encouraged us for decades” to open up to “unlimited immigration regardless of cultural consequences”.
The folly of the Davos ideology has also seen Western nations deindustrialise while pursuing the green agenda, opening up the door for India and China to dominate manufacturing, Farage said.
“The high regulatory model that these people pursued through the European Union made life impossible for small and medium-sized businesses to come through and challenge because of the barriers to entry of cost and regulation in the market,” he said.
Yet, this era is coming to a close, Mr Farage said, adding that his message to such elites at Davos will be: “My country has been craven to you for decades, that is about to end, it’s ended with America, it’s ended with Milei of Argentina.”
“So my message to those big businesses is, yes, we will work with you, yes, we will cooperate with you, but we will not be dictated to by you, we will not be told what policies we must have, and we will bring back something that is called the national interest,” he declared.
Despite Mr Farage’s origins as an advocate of Thatcherite radically free-market-oriented economics, the Reform leader has been moving away from these positions for years and argues that many classically conservative approaches to the globalised economy no longer apply.
Speaking to Breitbart News in 2024, he said, “Thatcherite is irrelevant. It’s half a century old…. What I do think has happened over the last few decades is that the power of the big corporate companies has got bigger and bigger.
“Capitalism is dead, it doesn’t exist, we’re living in corporatism. An unholy alliance of big business, big banks, and big government… I genuinely think we won’t get economic growth if the country is dominated by six giant multinationals, none of whom pay tax on-shore.”
One of the major elements of the Reform Party’s rise to the top of the polls in Britain has been the active pursuit of the working-class vote in traditionally Labour Party voting areas of the country, which have largely been abandoned by the governing leftist party as it has increasingly catered to its imported multicultural metropolitan voting blocs.
This has manifested in areas such as Reform backing the nationalisation of critical industries, such as steel production, to prevent foreign paymasters in China from dominating the sector. The party has also advocated for the state entering into mixed ownership of critical infrastructure, such as energy and water utilities, to prevent foreign control.
The party is also set to break with Davos on key issues, such as the commitment to net-zero carbon emissions, which both Westminster establishment parties have embraced.
Perhaps the most sacred cow of the internationalist elite in the sights of Farage and his Reform cohort has been the devotion to mass migration and multiculturalism. The poll-topping party has vowed to freeze all non-essential immigration, leave the deportation blocking European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), end the automatic residency granted to migrants after five years, and bar immigrants from claiming welfare.
Mr Farage has argued that the corporatist worship of GDP and the importation of millions of foreigners to supposedly grow the economy has actually had the opposite result and has made the lives of those already living in the country worse, saying last year that “mass migration is making us poorer as a country in every way.”
In contrast to the Reform leader’s tough talk at the World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer did not even appear this year, with speculation running that he wanted to avoid being scolded by U.S. President Donald Trump over his move to give away the strategically significant Chagos islands and to greenlight the controversial Chinese embassy in London.
Nevertheless, Mr Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has previously made his views well known on the WEF, openly declaring in 2023 that he prefers Davos to Westminster, which he claimed is “too constrained”.