Nigel Farage Ready to Lead Britain’s Right Wing With Collapse of Legacy Conservatives, He Says

Leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage smiles during a visit to Ashfield in north England, on Ju
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Oliver JJ Lane

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who appears to be at the inflection point of overtaking the centuries-old Conservative Party as the major party of the British right says he would even consider taking over the Tories and incorporating them into Reform.

Farage spoke to his former employer, the broadcaster LBC on Thursday morning as part of his ongoing media blitz promoting his candidacy to be elected to Britain’s parliament and looked forward to the likely fallout from July’s election. Per present polling the opposition leftwing Labour Party is on track to win an overwhelming victory and take control of the government.

As Farage has repeatedly said in the past week the question is not now who will form the next British government, but rather who will have the important job of opposing it, and who will challenge it for power at the next election in 2029, or before. In normal times of Britain’s legacy two-party system this would be the Conservatives who are presently in power, but they have upset their own voters so badly, there is a developing feeling the party deserves to win zero seats and to vanish for good.

That would leave Mr Farage as the leader of the opposition, he hopes. He told LBC: “We need a coherent voice of opposition in Parliament, and in the country. And do you know what… I believe I can do that better than the current Conservative Party”. Separately this week, he had said: “they’re done, they’re toast and they thoroughly deserve it in my opinion”.

He continued to LBC: “I think something new is going to emerge on the centre right. I don’t know what it’s going to be called. But do I think I’m capable of leading a national opposition to a Labour Party with a big majority where I can stand up and hold them to account on issues? Yes.”

Pressed on whether he would consider leading the Conservative Party itself by the host, Farage demurred but accepted he’d be willing to lead a merged Reform – Conservative party, an outcome not unlike the Canadian example where the legacy Conservatives were defeated by the Canadian Reform Party, before the two merged.

Farage said of such an outcome: “they may be dead. They may well be dead, this may well be the end of their journey. I would be prepared to lead the centre right in this country, a centre right that stands up for small business, a centre right that believes in border, a centre right that isn’t scared of standing up for the British people”.

In a discussion recorded on Monday shortly after Mr Farage launched the Reform UK party’s economic policy to grow the economy by cutting taxes but published today, the Brexit leader expressed his plan for the coming years, having voted to lead the party for at least five years. He told a Daily Telegraph podcast he believed the British people would suss out that Labour were not fit to govern pretty quickly after the election and, consequently, putting together a credible right-wing opposition quickly mattered.

He said: “There’s no reason for this to be more than a one-term Labour government, but the centre right has got to sort itself out. And if that means the extinction of the 190 year old Conservative Party, so be it. Or it might mean something else.” Having already taken a lot of votes from the Conservatives, Farage said it was time for the populist Reform to start taking votes from Labour next, remarking: “I think we can start to bite into the Labour vote and we’re going to need to, to win these seats where we’re in second place…  a lot of that Labour vote is very soft, it doesn’t believe in Starmer.”

Farage has always been eager to point out that his parties and political causes — like Brexit, UKIP, and now Reform — have pulled votes in from the left, as well as the right. And this reflects a growing trend around the world, like with Trump in the U.S. and populists in Europe, where new movements or new alliances have brought in working-class communities who traditionally voted left but now see controlling immigration as a major policy issue being ignored by legacy parties.

And one of the most blunt tools of the old establishment to maintain their power against rising populist sentiment is fast losing its potency, Farage claimed. On  the instinct to call any deviation from the approved norm ‘racism’ to discredit those involved, Farage told The Telegraph: “This has been the left’s technique, those who want to break down the idea of country, of borders, the old Trotskyite ideal that we’re all global citizens. What they do is to attack anyone who stands against it.

“And most of these problems [open borders, etc] are caused not by the left, but by Conservative cowardice. The sheer cowardice of those in the Conservative movement — your sort of David Cameron, George Osborne lot who want to be popular, invited to the right dinner parties in Notting Hill, that sort of thing.”

It used to be the case such attacks worked, Farage, said, but now: “it’s changing. I think there is a very, very big change. I used to hear [accusations of racism] ten years ago. There is an awakening, an understanding that debating these things is legitimate, so things have changed.”

Nevertheless, serious difficulty remains, if from nothing else then Britain’s electoral system, which rewards entrenched, long-established parties and presents near-insurmountable barriers to entry to newcomers, or those falling by the wayside like the Liberal Democrats. The Brexit leader said of Britain’s First Past the Post electoral system: “If I was leading a party like this in Italy, I’d be the Prime Minister. If I was in American politics through open primaries I could hijack the Conservative Party like my old friend did back in 2015-16. So I happen to find myself in the country that I love in the most difficult of all positions.”

 

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