Delingpole: Farage Launches Anti-Lockdown Movement. About Time…

Nigel Farage has repurposed his Brexit Party as the Reform Party and will be using it to campaign against the lockdown.

Better late than never, Nige…

Some of us have been fighting lockdowns right from the very start. Nigel Farage most definitely has not. Indeed, for several maddening months, he was very much part of the problem.

Here, for example, is one of his tweets from March.

Then there was his ostentatious pot-banging for the NHS. I’m not sure how often he did this – perhaps it was just one occasion, as a photocall to show his solidarity with all those working-class Brexit supporters who unaccountably imagine that a sclerotic socialised health care system devised by crypto-communists in the 1940s is the only thing keeping them alive. But it’s certainly a worry, I’d say, for those of us who believe that one of the most terrifying consequences of 2020 is the way a cabal of zealots, led by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, have elevated the NHS into a state religion apparently beyond criticism and deserving of limitless resources. How are we ever to escape the tyranny of that bloated, greedy creature if the alternative to Labour and the Conservatives — who both think it’s great — is a party led by a man who thinks it’s great too?

I also have reservations about the Brexit Party/Reform party’s position on the environment (which concedes too much territory to eco-loons like Michael Gove); and about the way, among other things, Farage has thrown Tommy Robinson to the wolves in order to dissociate himself from what the MSM likes to call the ‘far-right’; and also at the way this latest move is clearly aimed in part at stealing the thunder from actor Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party — the kind of behaviour critics have long noted in Farage, who likes to be the only show in town and who is known ruthlessly to crush incumbent parties which threaten his status.

All that said, it is my view that the United Kingdom is in the midst of its greatest existential crisis since the Second World War. As indeed is Western Civilisation. In a narrow sense, the war was an easier problem to resolve — it just meant marshalling sufficient men and materiel to defeat Hitler and Hirohito — whereas this time the problem is an enemy within which can’t be destroyed militarily and which is so embedded in every level of society from the Prime Minister downwards that the battle may already be unwinnable. Unless Trump wins — as I’m betting he will — then I’d say it’s game over and the future will look very bleakly like the Great Reset.

In such dire times, we need all the allies we can get. And there’s no doubt that for his faults, Farage is a brilliant political operator with the energy and charisma and mailing list we are going to sorely need if there’s ever to be an effective resistance to the government’s (and the Labour opposition’s) lockdown policies.

Farage, it has become clear in the last few years, is not a staunch ideologue, not the solidly reliable sound-as-a-pound male reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher some of us might wish him to be, but a canny and ruthless political opportunist.

And the fact that such a canny and ruthless political opportunist is now embracing the anti-lockdown cause is itself a very encouraging sign. Farage would not be doing this if he hadn’t sensed which way the wind is blowing and decided that there’s an almighty gap in the market for any party prepared to oppose the lockdown, and stick up for liberty, the economy and all those people dying needlessly of lockdown-related problems like untreated cancer or suicide.

It’s not like more than a handful of Conservative MPs are putting up any resistance to their government’s policy.

I’d argue that if only Farage can rise to the occasion, not pull his punches, and not surrender to the Establishment as he effectively did when he withdrew his Brexit candidates against the Conservatives, this could be Farage’s golden opportunity.

Coronavirus, it’s becoming increasingly clear, is being used as the bitter, brutal revenge of the Remainer elite. Sure, some of the politicians most culpably responsible for the lockdown — Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings — are Brexiteers.

But I believe that, at the bottom, this is a Deep State coup by the very same people — the dodgy academics, the corrupt or blinkered scientists, the lefty civil servants and lawyers (not you, Lord Sumption!), the MSM — especially the BBC — who’ve always loathed British sovereignty and liberty and see Covid-19 as a beneficial crisis to steal them away forever in order to subsume the UK into their preferred globalist new order.

I do wish that Farage had spotted this earlier and acted sooner. But if Covid-19 is freedom’s Waterloo — and it is — then maybe he can be our Blücher…