Brexit leader Nigel Farage announced on Monday that he will start making preparations for his Reform UK party to challenge in a general election as the collapse of the Starmer government appears to be imminent.
At a party event in Britain’s second city of Birmingham, Nigel Farage said that within the coming days, he will unveil plans to appoint a shadow cabinet in the coming days from his growing team, including recent Conservative defectors Robert Jenrick, Danny Kruger, Nadhim Zawahi, Nadine Dories, and Suella Braverman, who joined the likes of deputy leader Richard Tice, policy chief Zia Yusuf, and party whip Lee Anderson.
Mr Farage said that while he has long predicted that an early election would be held by 2027, the scandal enveloping the government over the prime minister’s decision to appoint the Epstein-tied Lord Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador means that an election could “come more quickly” than that.
“The political life of the most unpopular and most useless prime minister in living memory is drawing to a close. The Mandelson saga tells you all that you need to know. Its depth, the numbers of people it involves, the sheer level of corruption is probably the biggest political scandal we’ve seen for a hundred years,” he said.
Therefore, the Reform boss said that he has opened recruitment for candidates to run for parliament as he puts his Reform UK party on a “general election war footing”.
Mr Farage laid out two major fault lines that the election campaign will be fought upon, firstly the acknowledgement that Britain is “broken” and in need of reform, a stance which both Labour and the Tories reject.
“The Conservatives were a disaster, they broke Britain. And all that Starmer and Labour are doing is making the situation worse. The same comes for illegal immigration, how could it be in our interests to allow nearly 200,000 undocumented young males into our country? And that is what has happened under both the Conservatives and Labour. And now more people have arrived by boat under Starmer than did under any other prime minister. Our borders are broken. Our economy is broken. No one dares admit it,” he said.
“Our priorities are family, community, and country. And we care about those things. frankly to the exclusion of all else,” he said, adding: “We will act in the national interest and of its people at every given opportunity regardless of criticism.”
To that end, the Reform chief said that, unlike the rules-based order-obsessed Starmer, a Reform government would not acknowledge the diktats of globalist institutions such as the International Court of Justice at the United Nations, which pressured the former Conservative government and the current Labour government in handing over the Chagos Islands to the China-aligned nation of Maritius, despite the critical UK-U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia.
Mr Farage also highlighted the “insane net zero agenda” instituted by both legacy Westminster parties as directly opposing the national interest, arguing that Britain needs to use its oil and gas in the North Sea and to build nuclear reactors to secure its independence and to be economically competitive in the growing sectors of the 21st century including cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence.
The Brexit champ also firmly planted the Reform flag on the side of British farmers and for producing “as much food as we can” in Britain, saying that a Farage government would “not allow our farmers to be bought out by those biodiversity deserts of solar farms… let’s produce food and get rid of all the solar farms, simple as.”
Differentiating himself from other political leaders in the country, Mr Farage said that his public life demonstrated that his commitment to principles, which he noted have remained steady while others have changed with the wind.
“20 months ago, I took a very big and life-changing decision. Having retired from politics once we got Brexit over the line, I decided that I would come back into politics. And I did so because I believed that at that moment in time, I was the best person to lead the fight back against the shredding of all of the values and all of the good things that this country had stood for.
“I can’t be bought. I can’t be bullied. I’ve stood for the same principles for many, many decades. I’m not doing this for my health and there are many other things in life I could be doing. But 18 months on, I believe even more strongly that I am the right person at this moment in time to lead this vital and historic movement. And I won’t get everything right, but I will always lead with courage.”
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