Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has warned that the working class in Middle England, who lent their support to the Conservatives in the 2019 election, will lose faith in Boris Johnson if the prime minister fails on illegal migration and law and order.
Boris Johnson was able to win an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons in December 2019 due in large part to breaking through the Red Wall — the industrial, working-class regions of the North of England that typically vote Labour.
Working-class voters had become disenfranchised with the liberal elites who ran the Labour Party, with many senior left-wing MPs working to stop Brexit. In the December vote, some constituencies turned from Labour Red to Tory Blue for the first time. A study from June confirmed that the Conservatives are now the party of most working-class voters.
After winning the Conservatives’ biggest majority since the Margaret Thatcher era, Prime Minister Johnson addressed Red Wall voters, vowing to “never take your support for granted”.
However, Mr Farage warned that other issues matter to the working class besides Brexit, namely law and order and immigration, and if Johnson fails on those issues, he will lose Middle England again.
“The vast, vast majority of Conservative supporters and voters, particularly in that Red Wall that helped get Boris his majority, want to live in a country where the police are in control, where we have proper law and order,” Mr Farage told The Telegraph’s podcast Planet Normal.
“I think Boris is in danger of losing Middle England on these subjects. I really do,” Farage continued.
“His problem is that Middle England is beginning to lose hope with him on law and order, on immigration, and dare I mention it, the handling of the coronavirus crisis, which frankly has been a shambles,” he said.
Mr Farage predicted in June that amidst rising crime in the United Kingdom, law and order would be the issue that dominates public discourse this decade the way Britain’s relationship with the EU dominated the last.
In his third episode of Nigel Farage Investigates, the Brexit Party leader exposed the under-reported story of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 south Londoners who descended on a small Kent coastal town to hold an illegal beach rave, where they took drugs, brawled, and injured four police officers, ostensibly in aid of Jamaican Independence Day.
Farage warned that Britain was in danger of becoming “lawless”.
The British government is also currently failing to maintain control of its borders, as more than 4,000 illegal aliens on boats have landed on England’s shores this year alone.
The French have been widely criticised for failing to stop the Middle Eastern, African, and Asian migrants from leaving their shores despite the British paying Paris some £100 million since 2015 to stop them.
Home Secretary Priti Patel is reportedly set to shake up the asylum system to make it harder for illegals and bogus refugees to game Britain’s generous immigration system, changes which a source told The Times would “send the left into meltdown”.
Mr Farage implied, however, that Ms Patel will be hamstrung in her endeavours to stop the boats, primarily because Boris Johnson is, at heart, a metropolitan liberal.
“[Patel is] a conservative, which is a very rare thing in the present Cabinet, because they’re mostly a bunch of kids with rich daddies who play at politics,” he told Planet Normal.
“But of course, the real problem is that Boris isn’t really a conservative. Boris is a metro liberal. Boris, as mayor of London, more than once talked about having amnesties for all illegal immigrants who were in London.
“He does not seem to have the political will to deal with this. I feel a bit sorry for Priti Patel, actually, because I think she’s being left a bit high and dry.”
Where Labour has lost, they may regain, however. Brendan Chilton, a Brexit-backing figure in the Labour Party, wrote in The Telegraph this week that Labour, under its new leader Sir Keir Starmer, should “embrace” policies important to its once “core voters”, namely Brexit and controlling immigration, and if it does so, may return to power in 2024.