The leading figure behind the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage, has declared that “Brexit Has Failed” with the governing Conservative Party having “breached” the trust put in it by the people to deliver on the promises of the referendum
The successive Tory governments that have led the country since the 2016 EU Referendum have proven just as inept and controlling as EU ever was, Nigel Farage has said, forcing him to concede that so far, Brexit has failed.
“What Brexit has proved is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were. We have mismanaged this totally and if you look at simple things such as takeovers, corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country. Arguably, now that we are back in control, we are regulating our businesses even more than they were as EU members,” the Brexit leader told BBC Newsnight on Monday.
“Brexit has failed… we’ve not delivered on borders, we’ve not delivered on Brexit, the Tories have let us down very, very badly,” Mr Farage added.
Despite many voters backing the Conservative Party of Boris Johnson in the 2019 general election to “get Brexit done” and finally “take back control” of the nation’s borders, the opposite, in fact, occurred. While Johnson promised an immigration system based on the strict Australian points-based model, the government’s post-Brexit immigration law crucially failed to enact any hard caps on numbers — as the Australians had done.
This new system, rather than decreasing the number of migrants coming into the country after Brexit actually allowed numbers to reach historic highs, with a record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners last year and net migration hitting a record half a million— which amazingly was nearly double the previous highs seen under the the open borders Labour government of Tony Blair.
“Be in no doubt, the only reason we won the referendum for the Leave side was because people believed that getting control of our borders would mean the numbers would be lower, that was implicit in what Boris went to the country with in 2019, this is a breach of trust,” Farage said.
“Voters expected the numbers to come down but more significantly, and this is what nobody will discuss, is the damage these numbers are doing to our quality of life. All we ever hear is what the Bank of England say, whether GDP could be a little bit better than was predicted. We bow to the god of GDP and we forget what this is doing to our communities.”
The backlash against the Tory party for its Brexit failures has already begun, with the Conservatives losing big ground in the local council elections earlier this month, dropping over 1,000 seats to the left-wing Labour Party and the anti-Brexit Lib Dems. The biggest swing away from the Tories were seen in the ‘Red Wall’ areas of England, which had largely voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 and Brexit in 2016, while traditionally supporting Labour beforehand.
The backlash is only likely to grow against the government, with estimates warning that net migration could hit a staggering one million people this year… a far cry from the long lost promises from the Tories to bring down immigration to the tens of thousands.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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