Thursday at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, explained how America is ready for the grassroots revolution he is seeing in the United Kingdom.
Partial transcript as follows:
I’m here today as the leader of an insurgent political force in the United Kingdom. A political force that has taken on the establishment and rocked them to the backs of their heels. Our party color is purple. And what happened in 2014 was a purple revolution, because we won the European elections back on May 22 last year.”
Speaking about his years working for American companies, Farage said, “What I saw was a Westminster political elite where the left and the right had effectively merged together in a new form of social democracy. And what they’d done is they’d transferred what I saw as my birthright. What I saw as the very thing that those that went before us fought to defend. Namely, our independence, our democracy, our pride, our self-respect. And they’ve handed it over to a set of institutions in Brussels run by a bunch of old men who nobody had ever voted for and nobody could ever remove. And I resolved that I was going to do something about it, that I wanted my country back. So in the end I got elected to the European parliament. And how lucky I was because I had the opportunity to actually, in close quarters, do combat with the very unelected old men that I’d worried about in the first place.
“We’ve begun to represent a group of people who have been completely left behind. Left behind by the European project. But actually, folks, left behind by something that I think I can identify in modern-day America as well. We have had the growth of corporatism. Big businesses, big banks, and big governments. Structures within which we finish up with our private sector industries massively over-regulated. A situation in which the small man and the small woman simply cannot compete with the big guys in this over-regulated structure. And what these people have found, certainly in Britain, is that there is nobody there to speak for them. What UKIP has become, we’ve become the party that stands for aspiration. I reckon the earlier people get up in the morning to go to work, the higher their propensity in British are likely to vote for UKIP. I’m talking about people for the last ten years. I mean they can earn enough money to get by, but they can’t earn enough money to get ahead. And corporatism and over-regulation and big global politics don’t work for them. So we’ve cut through. We’ve cut through, and we’ve got these people voting for us in Britain now in very large numbers. In fact, what UKIP has done is to cross the glass divide of British politics.”
Discussing the Republicans reaching out to the grassroots, Farage said, “And if I can say one thing about American politics, an observation, and I accept that I’m a foreigner, I accept that I’m a guest, and I don’t want to meddle. But let me say this. If the Republican party is going to win the next presidential election, I think the Republican party needs to get the kind of people voting for it that were voting for it 30 years ago. Do you remember the Reagan Democrats? These were people who worked hard. These were people who were patriotic. These were people who aspired and wanted to get on. And I don’t think at the moment the Republican party is actually attracting those kind of people. I would say to you you’ve got to reach out to those grassroots. You’ve got to try and get those voters voting for you.
Watch (Part II):
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