Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has taken a victory lap in the European Parliament by telling European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen the UK is “leaving this prison on nations”.
With the Conservatives having won an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons on Friday, the pro-Brexit government is set to fulfil its campaign pledge to take the UK out of the EU on January 31st, 2020.
Addressing the parliament on Wednesday morning, the Member of European Parliament said: “After three-and-a-half years of deception and dishonesty, we will be leaving this prison of nations at the end of January.”
Criticising Eurocrats’ diminishing reference to the UK as being a “third country” post-Brexit, Mr Farage continued: “We won’t become a third country, as I’ve been hearing this morning, no. We’re going to become an independent, self-governing nation.
“You can delude yourselves this morning inside this ‘cathedral’ that all is well. It isn’t. People do not want to be run and governed by faceless bureaucrats like Michel and von der Leyen. Did you hear them earlier? Dull as ditchwater. You’re being rejected.”
This was not the first time Mr Farage criticised European politicians being undemocratically elevated to the highest seats of power in Brussels. In the European Parliament in 2010, the then-UKIP leader said that then-President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy had “all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk”.
Mr Farage continued in the Strasbourg parliament — one of two “cathedrals” MEPs meet in, the other being in Brussels — on Wednesday: “Brexit is the beginning of the end of this project. We are giving leadership and we’ll take it to a Europe of sovereign states working together, being friends together, but not being run by the gang down in the middle there.”
Mr Farage has warned that under the leadership of Ms von der Leyen — who was ‘elected’ as Commission president by MEPs after appearing as the only candidate on the ballot — Brussels would “take control of every single aspect” of Europeans’ lives.
In July, he appealed to his European Parliament colleagues to vote against von der Leyen, saying: “She wants to build a centralised, undemocratic, updated form of Communism where nation-state parliaments will cease to have any relevance at all.”
The Brexit Party leader said of the former German defence minister: “She’s a fanatic for building a European army but she’s not alone. When it’s completed, NATO will cease to exist or have any relevance in Europe at all.”
“Be in no doubt, five years of these people the European Defence Union will be complete. And what is there for defence can also be used for attack. And you as a house will have no control over it,” he added.
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