Brexit Party Leapfrogs Labour, Tories to No.1 Spot In Shock European Election Poll

Brexit Party
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Oliver JJ Lane

The Brexit Party, which only officially launched last weekend has already surged past the two main legacy parties in a new poll and is now rated as the lead party in voting intentions for the May European Union elections.

The new poll by major UK pollsters YouGov shows Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party surging by 12 points in a week, from 15 per cent to 27 per cent as of yesterday, the most recent figures available.

Coming in third place last week behind Labour and the Conservatives and just one point ahead of UKIP was no mean feat for a political party that had yet to launch, but the publicity generated by the party launch event in Coventry on Friday and the first rally — packing out the massive Hall One at the Birmingham International Conference Centre on Saturday — seems to have had a major impact.

Both the Conservative and Labour parties fell marginally by one and two points respectively over the polling period, but Nigel Farage’s old party was hit hardest, diving from 14 to 7 per cent in just days.

Polling monitoring group Europe Elects notes that if the findings were replicated in the European Elections in May, the outcome for the Conservative party would be their worst in history for a UK national election, going back to the foundation of the party in 1834.

Polls on British politics and particularly on the subject of Brexit must be taken with a pinch of salt — pollsters failed to predict the outcome of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, for instance — and the latest figures from YouGov represent a massive shift. Breitbart London reported this week on another recent poll from the weekend by Opinium which put the Brexit Party on 12 per cent.

The results nevertheless bear out predictions that the establishment parties are set to perform poorly in the European Elections if they do indeed go ahead. The elections come after two delays to the legal Brexit date, and that the nation is being asked to select European Parliament candidates almost three years after the Brexit referendum is likely to be taken as a clear sign that the political class has failed to deliver.

Breitbart London reported live from the Brexit party launch event, where Nigel Farage introduced Annunziata Rees-Mogg — sister of Tory Brexiteer Jacob — as a lead candidate for the forthcoming election. Brexit leader Farage told Breitbart’s James Delingpole that the Conservative party was facing deep problems over their failure to lead over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and that the battle to change British politics had only just begun.

Speaking last week before the party launch, Mr Farage said of his plans: “I said in 2013 that UKIP was going to cause an earthquake in British politics and I think we can safely say we did that. The ambition now is to cause a revolution in British politics – and to end the two-party structure as it is, it’s just not working.

“We hope to have a profound effect on the Conservative Party and to shift the centre of gravity once more.”

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