UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage told Breitbart that the visit by President Obama, where he threatened to send Britain to the “back of the queue” if the public voted to leave the European Union (EU), backfired and caused a “Brexit Bounce”, swaying Britons to vote for Brexit.
Comparing the outcome to the American Independence Day, Mr. Farage said:
“You [Americans] have your Independence Day where in July you celebrate being your own country, governing yourself, having your own courts, controlling your own borders and that’s what happened to us yesterday.
“We have broken away from a political union where our power was being overruled, our courts were being overruled, and we had a complete open border for anybody from southern and eastern Europe, so this is a major historic step.”
On the EU post-Brexit, he said:
“We’ve not just changed British history. I’m sure that the EU project itself will now come tumbling down. I would like to think and hope that right across the globe what we’ve done is to prove that people power can beat the establishment.
“The European Union project has failed. It is dying before your very eyes. It is unwanted, it is unloved, and people across the country are saying what UKIP has been saying for years: ‘We want our country back, we want our democracy back, we want the closest possible relationship with our neighbours. We’re happy to have a NAFTA kind of agreement with free trade, but we don’t want political union’.”
Asked of any lessons drawn from his own experiences that could be applied during the American presidential elections, Mr. Farage advised:
“Threatening people insults their intelligence.
“Don’t threaten people repeatedly because if you do in the end they think you’re crying wolf and they won’t believe you. It’s Project Fear, or in the end when Obama came it was Project Threat.
Citing Mr. Obama’s visit to the UK at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron:
The lessons learnt from the Obama visit are fascinating. Here is the most powerful man in the world coming from a country that we have always had huge regard for. And people in Britain listening to Obama said: ‘how dare the American president come here and tell us what to do’ and it backfired.
And I think we got an Obama Brexit Bounce, because people do not want to be told how to think and how to vote.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.