Six years to the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union the Brexit process is, at best, a work in progress and the risk remains of the UK drifting back into the EU’s orbit if action is not taken, Nigel Farage has warned.
Britain’s establishment has refused to let the people of the United Kingdom enjoy any possible benefits of Brexit and there are several steps that must be taken to truly realise Britain’s departure from the European Union, ‘Mr Brexit’ Nigel Farage said.
Identifying the “obstructionist… negative” permanent government — the Civil Service — as the Westminster swamp that is still to be drained and the tax-cutting moves the government could choose to make to ease the cost of living crisis now it is no longer bound by EU rules, the Brexit leader said the most important step now is to complete Brexit by withdrawing from the remaining pan-European bodies Britain remains inside.
Particularly in Mr Farage’s crosshairs as he spoke on the sixth anniversary of Britain’s vote to end its membership of the European Union is the Council of Europe, the parent body of the European Court of Human Rights.
While the Council could easily be mistaken for an EU body — it after all shares the same flag, anthem, goals, and has headquarters in the same ‘European Quarter’ campus in Strasbourg, it predates the EU and is technically separate. Britain remained a member of the Council after leaving the EU, and consequently remains subject to its Human Rights Court, which has been thwarting the government’s attempts to deliver its election promises — no matter how milquetoast — to its voters.
Warning that a left-wing coalition of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish Nationals in parliament after the next election could see Britain drift back into the EU’s orbit, Farage warned that the Tories had to do Brexit better not only to safeguard the country, but to signal to the British people that he was a capable leader.
“[People are] feeling really frustrated that Brexit is not complete, and we do need to complete Brexit”, Farage said, continuing: “if we don’t, that sense of disillusion will set in. You can see already, Kier Starmer, the Lib Dems, the SNP — if they form a coalition next time around we’ll be back in single market rules, we really will have Brexit in name only.”
While there are a large number of problems to deal with as Britain emerges from decades of taking laws by dictation from Brussels and rediscovers its own political agency post-Brexit — Farage name-checked the Northern Ireland border problems and fishing rights — there are three moves, he said, that need to be taken now to save Brexit.
First of those is defanging the “enemy within”, the deep-state Civil Service which this week was identified in a new report as being a key roadblock to the UK making progress. Farage said: “They’re obstructionist… declinism, the negative mentality that’s been around ever since the Suez Crisis that says we must manage decline rather than fighting back to become a great country. It’s why they fought against Mrs Thatcher so hard in the [1980s], because she tried to turn around that plan… drain the swamp in Westminster!”.
Next, the UK government needs to actually deliver some Brexit benefits to the British people. Since leaving the bloc, the UK is free to set its own tax rates without limit for the first time in decades, but has so far chosen not to. This, Farage says, is a real mistake:
…folk out there need to see some direct benefits from Brexit, and what could be clearer than the five per cent VAT on our fuel bills. Everybody on the Brexit side of the referendum said when we leave, we’ll get rid of it. For some reason, Rishi Sunak seems to be too busy putting up taxes and redistributing money — he’s forgotten what he’s there as chancellor [to do], why they’ve got a majority. Let’s [cut tax] as quick as we can, show every household a Brexit benefit, and while we’re at it lets cut the other VAT to zero as well, something we couldn’t do as members of the European Union.
Finally, Britain has to leave the European Court of Human Rights. Britons voting for Brexit and then for Boris Johnson in 2019 to get Brexit done believed they were voting for border control, Farage asserted, but the dream of the UK controlling its own borders for its own good remains elusive because the ECHR blocks effective or creative measures. That the Council of Europe stands in the way of the UK controlling its own borders is “the biggest insult to our sovereignty. The biggest offence to us being a self-governing nation I’ve ever seen”, he said.
But while the UK’s ‘Conservative’ government is introducing legislation to assert the primacy of UK courts over the ECHR — legislation Farage predicts simply won’t work, the only way to realise that end being to leave the court altogether — actual interest from Westminster to make the most of Brexit and improve Britain appears to be minimal.
Speaking on his nightly talk-television programme on GB News, Farage leant into this point, saying of Boris Johnson’s Tories: “I see a government that picked up Brexit for political opportunity without really properly believing in it… far from taking back control our borders, it looks like a complete farce. We still have the ECHR able to overrule decisions taken by the Home Secretary taken within this country.”
Ultimately, the Brexit boss told the government today to grasp Brexit to stay in power. He said: “If the Johnson government has the courage to grasp it — yes of course there will be an almighty fight against the establishment, they’ll say we’re becoming a third-world dictatorship — if they have the guts to do it, it would be rather like the Brexit fight all over again. Johnson would win a massive majority and we really would get a proper Brexit done… It’s a good opportunity on this independence day to still celebrate the fact we’ve beaten the global elites, but to say we’ve actually got to complete Brexit.”