Brexit campaign leader Nigel Farage has addressed hundreds of Leave supporters on the March for Brexit from Sunderland to London, reminding them that “we are the majority”.
The LBC host, Leave Means Leave vice chairman, former UKIP chief, and Brexit Party MEP addressed the marchers from the top of an open-topped double-decker bus outside the Horse and Groom pub in Linby, a village in Nottinghamshire, in the East Midlands.
“What a week it’s been. I was hoping to spend more time with you on the march this week but I’ve been in Brussels watching a British Prime Minister reducing our nation in the eyes of the world to the state of humiliation,” Farage told the assembled crowd, according to the George Osborne-led London Evening Standard.
“Worse than that, the gap that’s now opened up between the people and the politicians is such that, despite everything we were told in the referendum, everything we were told in general election manifestos, every promise that was made when 498 MPs voted for Article 50 which said we leave on March 29 with or without a deal, the Prime Minister signalled that we will not be leaving this Friday,” he continued.
“And that means this March to Leave could not be better timed.”
Farage’s speech in Linby comes on the same day as the so-called People’s Vote campaign to re-run the people’s vote to Leave the European Union in 2016 in the Remain-voting metropolitan capital city of London.
Organisers claim one million are in attendance, although their estimates for a previous rally appeared to be grossly inflated, with a Greater London Authority analysis putting attendance at around 250,000 people — far fewer than the claimed “over 700,000”.
The March for Brexit, by contrast, is a much leaner, more symbolic undertaking, seemingly modelled on the famous Jarrow Crusade in the 1930s, which saw around 200 working-class men “march for work” from the north-east England town to London.
Quizzed by the media on the relative headcounts of the People’s Vote and March for Brexit events, Farage quipped, “There are 17.4 million here, can’t you see them?”
“Whatever battles we face and have to fight, be confident because we are united. They are in the minority, we are in the majority,” he reminded supporters later.