Brexit leader Nigel Farage said that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has “staked the house” on stopping illegal migrants crossing the English Channel and therefore will have to call for a general election in June or July to force voters to cast their ballots before his hallmark legislation has a chance to fail.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supposedly secured one of his first significant accomplishments since being installed in Downing Street in a 2022 globalist-backed Westminster coup which ousted short-term PM Liz Truss as the parliament finally passed through legislation intended to clear the way for illegal boat migrants to be removed to Rwanda rather than putting them up in British hotels while their asylum claims are processed.
The governing Conservative party has been arguing since Boris Johnson — who first introduced the idea — had argued that removing illegals from the country to a third-party host country is the only feasible way of deterring further illegal crossings of the English Channel from France.
Yet the scheme stalled before it could get off the ground with the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) stepping in with a last-minute order to halt the first migrant removal flight in July of 2022. Since then, the plan has been mired in legal challenges, with the Supreme Court ruling that Rwanda is not a safe country for migrants.
On Monday, after a lengthy battle with left-wing members of the upper house, the Safety of Rwanda act was finally made into law, ordering British judges to defy the Supreme Court and to overlook elements of the Human Rights Act 1998 if illegals appeal for injunctions against their removal to Kigali.
Brexit boss Nigel Farage predicted that this situation will likely be constitutionally untenable and that the scheme will once again be shut down in the courts, and therefore the government may seek to call an early election before the scale of the failures of the ‘stop the boats’ plan are made clear to the public.
“I suspect that when it comes to sending flights you will see the biggest most protracted legal battle in our lifetimes,” Mr Farage told GB News.
“I believe now — I didn’t yesterday morning — but I now believe the general election will come in late June or early July he has to have the election out of the way before this policy completely fails.”
“He has staked the house on stopping the boats, if he goes to the country saying ‘I’ve passed the law, we will do it’, he thinks they might just believe him. I sense after 14 years of failure on so many things, that actually, people aren’t listening anymore,” Farage said.
For his part, Mr Sunak refused to rule out the possibility of a summer election, but said: “All I’m going to say is the same thing I say every time, as I said in the first week of January, my working assumption is an election in the second half of the year.”
Although the next general election must be held before the 28th of January, 2025, the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 restored power to the prime minister to call for an early election, meaning that when voters next head to the polls will likely be at the discretion of Sunak.
While the Rwanda scheme may serve as something for the Conservatives to campaign upon, it would still be a steep uphill battle for Sunak to turn the tides of soured public opinion within the next couple of months.
According to the latest survey from the Ipsos polling firm, the Tories have tumbled to their lowest level of support in 45 years under Sunak’s technocratic and globalist governance. The survey found that the Conservatives currently only have 19 per cent support from the public, trailing the left-wing Labour Party of Sir Keir Starmer at 44 per cent.
Making matters worse, Sunak’s personal approval rating was found to be the lowest of any politician, save for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 and John Major in 1994, in the history of the polling firm.
On top of the inability of the former Goldman Sachs banker turned Tory politician to connect with the public on a personal, Sunak’s government has steadfastly refused to enact small-c conservative policies, choosing instead to impose the highest tax burden on the country since the Second World War, overseeing record levels of immigration, doubling down on the green agenda, and implementing nanny state-style regulations such as a proposed smoking ban for the next generation.
This has left many Conservative voters — who expressly rejected Sunak in favour of Truss in the leadership contest to replace Boris Johnson in 2022 — disaffected and searching for alternatives, such as the Nigel Farage-founded Reform UK party, which is closing in on the Tories, with around 13 per cent support.
Unlike the 2019 general election, when Mr Farage made an election pact with Boris Johnson to help deliver a strong enough majority to finally “get Brexit done”, the Reform party has vowed that it will not stand down to help save Sunak from falling to Labour. It is still unclear if Mr Farage will return to the political fray and stand as a candidate for Reform, however, he said that he will be making a “big decision” within the next few weeks.