Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage has revealed the details of his meeting with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM.
Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam asked Farage to recap his encounter with Barnier, who has hosted many Remainer and Opposition politicians since the Brexit negotiations began but was reluctant to meet the former UKIP supremo.
“I had a suspicion that the real views of 17.4 million people had never quite been put to him,” explained the veteran MEP, referring to the referendum voters who triggered Brexit by voting to Leave the European Union in June 2016.
“So, the first question I asked — and by the way, I went out to the public, and asked, ‘Please, send me your questions, and I’ll ask them’, and people duly obliged — the first question I asked him, was did he understand why Brexit had happened?
“And it was very interesting: he thinks it’s because people were lied to.
“It’s a very similar story, isn’t it? Either people were lied to, or it was all because of the Russians — I said, ‘Well, actually Mr. Barnier, the main reason was that people had had enough of open door immigration to nearly half a billion across the whole of Europe,’ and he looked at me with total and utter incomprehension.”
He continued: “The second thing I learned, was I asked, ‘Well, how are the British Government’s negotiations on the future of EU border control going?’ And he said: ‘They’re not.’
“So, on the key thing that we instructed the government to do, absolutely nothing is happening.”
Farage recalled that the May administration has already agreed to pay a huge sum of money and give away some control to the Court of Justice of the European Union in the first phase of the Brexit negotiations, and said he was given the strong impression that Brussels was unwilling to be any more conciliatory in the second phase — happy to agree to free trade in goods, where the balance of trade favours the EU, but not services, where Britain has the advantage.
“I think the calls for us to simply just leave, and get on with our lives, are going to grow,” he concluded.
Kassam asked Farage if he could see any parallels between the situation in the United Kingdom and the situation in the United States, with the British establishment seeking to chip away at the full, clean Brexit promised by both the governing Tory Party and the opposition Labour Party in the former, and the American establishment seeking to chip away at the MAGA agenda in the latter.
“Oh, absolutely,” answered Farage.
“We’ve got Tony Blair, we’ve got Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, we’ve got [Michael] Heseltine, another former deputy prime minister — so people from across all the different political parties doing their best to say that Brexit voters were idiots, they didn’t know what they voted for, this has all got to be reversed, and anyway, it’ll be a financial catastrophe if we go.
“And do you know what? We’ve finished the year with growth higher than anyone predicted, foreign direct investment running at record levels, the tourism industry booming.
“Britain is doing OK, and the parallels are, as you say, in America, everyone’s saying that Trump won because of Russian interference, the people were idiots, didn’t know what they were doing, that Trump’s incompetent, mentally not up to the job — and hey, you’ve got an economy that’s growing at well over 3 per cent.
“The parallels are the same on both sides: the political establishment on both sides are in denial.
“They can’t accept what happened in 2016; they think it’s a short-term aberration, and we’ll all return to normal … My feeling is, the global revolution in 2016 was just the beginning of something that’s going to be even bigger.”
Breitbart News Network Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, who was hosting the segment alongside Kassam, seemed to concur with Farage.
“He said when he looked [Barnier] in the eye, and said hey, this is about open borders and the immigration issue, and about destroying sovereignty, and about half a billion people that have moved through Europe and these other nations in the last ten or so years, the guy looks at him with total incomprehension,” he observed.
“They don’t even care, do they?”